diff --git "a/yield/dev/dev-001.json" "b/yield/dev/dev-001.json" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/yield/dev/dev-001.json" @@ -0,0 +1,92122 @@ +[ + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00524", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SeddonMR/seddonmr.htm", + "original_file_name": "SeddonMR_5-9-11.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SeddonMR/SeddonMR_5-9-11.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Margaret Rhea Seddon", + "location_date": "Murfreesboro, Tennessee – 9 May 2011" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Rhea Seddon" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 9, 2011. This interview with Rhea Seddon is being conducted in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, for the JSC Oral History Project. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Rebecca Wright.\\n\\n Thanks again for making time to sit with us this afternoon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re very welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We certainly appreciate it. Last time we had talked about your first flight, but we didn’t talk about the Toys in Space experiment, and I thought you’d like to talk about the toys that you experimented with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had a lot of fun with that. Bo [Karol J. Bobko], wanted us each to choose a toy that we thought would be fun to use and demonstrate in space. Of course, Carolyn Sumners from the Houston Museum of Natural Science sponsored the experiment. She brought a bunch of different kids’ toys, so we all got to select one. I took the Slinky and jacks, because they were toys that I was familiar with from my childhood.\\n\\n So we had to demonstrate what they did on Earth, and they filmed that. Then we took them into space and played with them there. Of course, the Slinky didn’t slink. It wasn’t much fun at all, but Jeff [Jeffrey A.] Hoffman and I stretched it out, and it had some very interesting waveforms when you shook it. The waves reflected upon each other, so it was kind of fun to see a different way to play with a toy that obviously wouldn’t slink in space.\\n\\n The jacks were a lot of fun because I had played a lot of jacks as a young girl and had my rhythm down, how to throw the ball and collect the jacks. Of course the first time I released the jacks in the middeck when we were in space, they flew all over the place. Just that small amount of momentum from your hand and they went everywhere, so I had to go collect them all up again. Then I learned how to release them very slowly, and I got that part of it right so that they would stay in one general area.\\n\\n Then I was perplexed by the fact that the ball wasn’t doing what I expected. Usually in jacks you throw the ball up, then it falls down and bounces and you catch it as it comes back up. Well, I was standing in the middle of the middeck. I’d throw the ball up, and it took a long time for it to get up to the ceiling and then a long time for it to bounce back to the floor and come back up. I’d be standing there with a jack in my hand, and the ball was sort of drifting around. I tried just throwing it at the floor, but then my hand wasn’t quite positioned right.\\n\\n So what I ended up doing was just throwing it up to the ceiling, picking up a jack and catching it on the way down. Then, of course, I would release it and try to get two jacks, and then finally, after a little bit of practice, I managed to get all ten of the jacks in my hand at once. As soon as I’d let them go, they start drifting apart, so it was really hard to get all ten of them before the ball came back down.\\n\\n It was, again, illustrating gravity. You get so used to it and you get used to interacting with it in a certain way, and then you go into space and you have to learn how to react differently. But we had a lot of fun.\\n\\n I think Bo selected a spinning top and a gyroscope because he wanted to show gyroscopic motion. It was a nice demonstration, of course, of why our satellites would spin up. He would spin the gyro and then bump it to show that it stayed pointing in the same direction. He used that as a teaching moment about gyroscopes and why our satellites spin.\\n\\n Jeff Hoffman had some magnetic marbles that were fun. He would put one out and then throw another one near, and they would clump together. You know, a lot of kids aren’t sure whether magnets would work in space. Will magnets work in weightlessness? Well, of course. Adults would say, “Yes, of course, magnetism works without gravity.” But if you ask kids, they don’t really know. So this was a nice demonstration. Plus, he could get three or four of them in a string and then pass one nearby but not quite near enough to join up, but it would move the long string of marbles that he had. So that was a nice demonstration too.\\n\\n He also took a car and a circular track. He would start the car going on the inside of the track, and it was really using centrifugal force to hold it on the track. He could demonstrate that as long as the car was moving, it had enough centrifugal force to keep it in the track going around and around. Once the car slowed down, it would just drift slowly out of the track. So, a nice demonstration of centrifugal force.\\n\\n Dave [S. David] Griggs had a yo-yo, which was a lot of fun, and it took a good bit of practice for him to get it going at the right speed where it would come back. Originally he’d sling it out there and it would just drift around, but he got pretty good at it. He had a lot of fun with that.\\n\\n Jake [Edwin Jacob Garn] had a paper airplane that the Smithsonian gave him to fly, and, again, it took a little bit of practice to get the right kind of momentum to get the air going over the wings so that it had a normal trajectory. If you didn’t throw it hard enough, it just sort of floated.\\n\\n So they were all very nice demonstrations to kids, and I’ve used it in schools before and asked kids to predict what would happen. It’s very interesting to hear what children will postulate, because they don’t quite understand physics principles, but these were learning tools kids could relate to, and we had a lot of fun playing with them. It was a fun experiment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Some of the photos looked interesting, so I was curious about that. Was that used in Houston classrooms, or was that used in the museum primarily?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it’s been used widely. People could request it. They did, actually, a whole series. Our was the Toys in Space I, and I think they did several others, but I think that’s in the NASA educational armamentarium that schools could request. I think they did a narrated version and had a study guide that went with it, just one of those fun things that NASA did for education and continues to do for education that connect kids to space.\\n\\n Our flight ended up being very complex in many different ways, and we had a lot of things going on, and so the toys was kind of a respite from the stressful stuff. It was just the playing-around stuff, and we had a lot of fun doing it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned the complexity of the time period, and I don’t know if you recall this moment, but I was reading through an article that talked about how Dave [David C.] Hilmers, the CapCom [Capsule Communicator], congratulated you on your sewing ability. Apparently Sally [K.] Ride was there, and she jumped in and said, “Well, she didn’t get that sewing ability as a homemaker; she got those skills as a surgeon.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think the quote, or at least what I heard, because I obviously wasn’t there, Dave said something about, “You’re a good seamstress,” and Sally said, “No, she’s a good surgeon,” something along those lines, which I appreciated very much, but I would have taken the kudos as a seamstress, too, because I’ve done that in my lifetime. But that was very nicely put by Dr. Ride." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was just curious what you had thought of it at the time. I thought it was very interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn’t hear about it till I got back. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were too busy making the flyswatter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I told her I appreciated it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I thought I’d ask you about the Astronaut Science Support Group that you formed with Jeff Hoffman and Bonnie [J.] Dunbar and Jerry [L.] Ross, some of those folks after Challenger [STS-51L]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As we got into a more mature phase of the Shuttle Program, we came to realize that scientists who either wanted to propose experiments or had proposed experiments frequently designed both the hardware and the experiment itself before they ever had crew members that they could work with. We likened it to saying, well, they’ve designed this experiment to be a “flying brick.” In other words, the only switch on there is the on/off switch, and the only indicator on there is a light that comes on when it’s on. If you take it to space and you flip the switch and the light doesn’t come on, there’s nothing you can do. It’s sealed up. They didn’t design it to be repaired. There’s no way to understand what went wrong, no insight into the mechanisms. We felt that was unfortunate, because crewmembers are more than willing to learn everything there is to know about an experiment. They take the responsibility for it.\\n\\n For instance, scientists I knew were designing life sciences experiments, and they were told, “We can’t guarantee that you’ll have any physicians on the flight or anyone that knows anything about life sciences.” So again, they would dumb-down the experiment or they would worry about it or they wouldn’t propose it. Or they would do something that they ordinarily wouldn’t do, in order that any person could do it.\\n\\n So we wanted to go out and tell them the capabilities that people had. Even if you were an astronomer, you could learn to draw blood. Even if you didn’t understand a lot of the complexity of the payload that you were operating, you had the opportunity to talk to the ground. A lot of times you could do the mechanics of it and do it very well and understand how it could go awry without understanding how the telescope was built or what the internal workings were.\\n\\n So being a resource to scientists was something that we felt was useful for us to be doing. I think in the time after Challenger all of us were trying to look at not only how to recover from the mechanical problem that happened on Challenger, but how we could use this time to improve the product of our office. We could make ourselves available to scientists who didn’t understand, for instance, how to work in zero gravity.\\n\\n Scientists would say, “All this experiment requires is that you draw blood and that you collect urine.” We would remind them that we didn’t have a lab centrifuge on board, and we frequently didn’t have a lab refrigerator on board. So something that sounded pretty simple, would have been very simple here on the ground, like collecting urine was hard to do with the things that we had in the space environment. But we would let them know there are flights that you could stow the urine-monitoring system on board; they might want to group their experiment with some other people’s so that they could assure that that equipment could go on board to support several experiments.\\n\\n So it was that kind of interaction, and we all enjoyed it. Most of us that were working on the support group had flown, so we understood what weightlessness was like, what you could and couldn’t do, what equipment you had or could have. So it was earning our keep as good scientists to go and share some of what we had learned and what we knew about the Shuttle Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, I understand that you put together a film. Did you star in one of these films?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t even remember. I may have. You’ll have to tell me about it. There’s so many pieces and parts of work that I have done that every once in a while I think, “I wonder whatever happened to that?” I vaguely remembering doing something like that, or one of the crewmembers will ask, “Do you remember what we did about so-and-so?” And I have no memory of it. I had a question for Jeff Hoffman about something. “Did we roll that camera out or not?” And he said, “I have no idea. I don’t even remember that that was the problem,” or something like that. We each remember pieces and parts, and parts of it are gone, not in the memory bank anymore. If you tell me we did a film, I’ll believe you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know you all did a film. I don’t know if you starred in it or not, but I was curious about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m sure I didn’t, but I’m sure I contributed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any groups or universities that you worked with on experiments at this point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Can’t really recall, but, you know, all of the experiments were somebody else’s. Some of them were from JSC, but many of them were from other places and some of them were sort of good ideas that people wanted to talk to somebody about, and we were happy to either talk to them on the phone or send them pictures or descriptions of equipment or go there. They would invite us to come and talk about something to their graduate students and, in the meantime, come to their lab and help them figure out what was the best way to design the control interface with some experiment. I remember doing that quite a few times. It was just part of our work and something we certainly enjoyed.\\n\\n Back then, astronauts were kind of special people, so the investigators frequently liked to have the nice P.R. [Public Relations] parts of that. The local newspaper would come and take pictures, and we could talk about how wonderful their university was for proposing space experiments, so it was a win-win for everybody. There were grad students that were thinking about becoming astronauts, probably some that did become astronauts. Every once in a while, someone would say to me, “Oh, I remember when you came and talked to my school.” Now I see grownups that say, “I remember you talked to my first-grade class.” But, again, going out and helping and talking to people was part of the responsibility of the job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you tell us how the office changed as a result of Challenger, in terms of leadership, management, those sort of things?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course, Mr. [George W.S.] Abbey moved, I think, to Washington [DC, NASA Headquarters] after that, but we had different leaders. I think that things were a little bit—how shall I put it—more straightforward as far as crew assignments, as far as job assignments, as far as where everybody was going. We had a little bit better idea of where we stood and whether we had done a good job or not done a good job. The one thing I remember that changed significantly was the Family Support Plan, and I don’t remember whether we talked about that before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, I don’t think that we did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Pinky [George D.] Nelson was tasked with putting together what they called the Family Support Plan; I think they realized with Challenger that no one was really looking out for an astronaut’s family. We were all kind of on our own, getting family to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], finding a place to stay, figuring it all out if the launch slipped, changing your condo. The spouses could ride down on the NASA plane, but what did you do about your kids? There was concern about how expensive it was for a lot of people to go to Florida, having a flight delayed at the last moment, having to go back down again, flying the kids down several times, flying Grandma down so she could be with the kids. It was just very disorganized.\\n\\n And after the Challenger explosion, where are the families? Where are the kids? Because we need to round everybody up. We need to make sure that if the kids stayed at home, there’s somebody with the kids. It was just this sort of horrible realization that we always had family support people from our office, two people that were there to help, but suddenly, after Challenger, where were they all? Where were those spouses and families staying? How do we get into their hotel rooms to get their things so we can get back to Houston? It was a mess, and I think they realized that they needed to organize it. There needed to be more support for families. We needed to know where people were. We needed to have a plan if things went awry. We had to do a lot of different things. Pinky Nelson put together a terrific plan, put it together at the right time, and after that, it was just much different.\\n\\n Of course, I got to see both sides of that coin. I got to be the flyer, and I got to be the spouse. I can remember when I was the person flying, the concern I had for my husband, my children. I’d worry about how are they were going to manage. Of course, “Hoot” [Robert L. Gibson] could manage making hotel reservations and renting a car and getting himself where he needed to go, but there were a lot of wives for whom it was very difficult to figure all that out. They did it by word of mouth. They’d talk to somebody that had done it and found a good place to stay. Did the condo or hotel have anything available, will they have anything later, would they slip the reservation if the flight slipped?\\n\\n Afterwards, the plan was in place; everything was taken care of. They did some very practical things like helping people to make sure that they had a will. They instituted something that they called the CACO [Casualty Assistance Call Officer]. That wasn’t the family support who accompanied a family to the Cape; that was the crew member’s representative. If anything happened to you, they were the liaison between the family and NASA. They actually had those people for the Challenger families, but they were named after the fact. It was much nicer if you could go to your best friend and say, “Will you be my ASP [Astronaut Support Person]? Will you be my support person?” And find out whether they felt like they could do that or not. I don’t think anybody ever turned anyone down. I was a support person for people and had good friends that were support people for me. As a close friend you could ask the tough questions. Where’s the will? What do you want me to do about this? Have you thought about whether you want to be buried at Arlington [National Cemetery, Virginia] or in your local cemetery? Questions that are very difficult sometimes. I think they found with Challenger that not all of those questions had been discussed within families, so it was nice to have this other person that could walk you through some of the questions that needed to be asked and the things that needed to be settled. It made it a whole lot easier. All of that got taken care of well in advance, and you didn’t have to worry about it as much.\\n\\n So the Family Support Plan was part of what happened during the time after Challenger. We, again, were looking for how we could do things better, and to my way of thinking, that was one of the really fine things that NASA did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So NASA now rents the condos for the family? Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, they take care of that for you. It was financially very difficult for people to manage on their own. Of course, we were a two-income family, so we managed, but I don’t know how some of those families did it. When you went down for launch and spent a week waiting for it to go, have many days of delays and then fly home and have to go back down again, it was really costly.\\n\\n For Hoot’s second flight, [STS]-61C, we went down several times, and we stayed in Florida for several weeks waiting for that flight to get off the ground. It was very expensive, not to mention stressful. Of course, the families all try to take that worry off of the crew member, because they have other things that they need to be worrying about, so we were told, “Don’t worry your husband with all these things.”\\n\\n Again, it was much better after they had a formal plan. Your bags were packed when you went out for the launch, and the people knew where to collect your stuff. They knew where you were. You were asked, “Where’s the astronaut’s parents, and where are your parents? Where are your support people if you need them?” So it was just much more organized.\\n\\n I think later on, the Columbia accident [STS-107], I don’t know, but I would guess it was much more coordinated. They were ready. So that’s what NASA’s very good at—where are our failure modes, and how do we plug those holes so that that doesn’t happen again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You brought up a subject that I was going to ask you at the end of the interview, but since you brought it up—you, of course, flew as an astronaut and then Hoot flew five times. It’s my understanding that the spouses of the astronauts who are flying have to host parties and do a whole bunch of other events for the crew. Can you talk about that, being on both sides?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Of course, Hoot flew first, so I got to see the spouse side of it, and there were certain traditions. Of course, once you’re named to a crew that becomes your closest social circle. The spouses get together, the crew members get together, and then you all get together with spouses, kids, at somebody’s house and have dinner every now and then. So you really get close to the people that are flying with your spouse or flying with you.\\n\\n There is a tradition that a party is thrown for the spouses right before they go to the Cape, and it’s thrown by the next-crew-up’s spouses. So it’s sort of this rolling thing, and it started out to be kind of a ladies’ get-together. Then when there were male spouses—I guess Sally’s was the first [Steven A. Hawley]—it became a spouse party rather than the wives’ party, so that tradition changed a little bit, and it went from being a ladies’ party to being a Happy Hour or something. It was a little bit less feminine, I guess.\\n\\n The other thing that the spouses had to work on, usually spouses gave a reception down at the Cape the day before the launch. Because most of the venues were reasonably large, you would frequently pair up or triple up or something so that there would be two or three of you that would have a party together.\\n\\n For Hoot’s first flight, I think Ron [Ronald E.] McNair’s family and somebody else’s family, there were three of us that had something at the Officers’ Club. That all had to be planned out. You had to get invitations and send them to your guests that were going to be at the Cape and organize all of that.\\n\\n At the time, if you needed you could rent buses. NASA would give you, I think, one bus for your guests. If you invited more, you had to rent buses. I can remember for Hoot’s first flight, renting buses for extra guests. Then, of course, when you had family coming down, Grandma and Grandpa and everything, you had to direct them as to where you were going to stay or where was a good place for them to stay. So there was a lot of coordination of the social part of flight. And, of course, your spouse was gone most of the last couple of months. They just get really, really busy, and it’s up to you to plan all of that out. We printed up notecards with the crew patch on it to use for stationeries and thank-yous, and sometimes we printed invitations on them. There were a lot of sort of social things that were part of the tradition of flying. I’m not even sure I remember them all.\\n\\n I enjoyed that. I think it was a little more difficult in the Shuttle era because many of the wives worked. I think prior to that, a lot of the wives didn’t work, and so the social part of it was sort of their bailiwick and something they knew how to do. All of us were trying to work and raise kids and throw parties and plan events. But, luckily, all the spouses were good people. I think the only time that it was difficult was when on one of Hoot’s flights there were only three spouses. That was on Spacelab J." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "STS-47?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, because Curt [Curtis L.] Brown, the pilot, wasn’t married, and [N.] Jan [Davis] and Mark [C. Lee] were married to each other." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think it was Mae [C. Jemison]. She was single." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mae was single; Momoru [Mohri]’s wife [Akiko] had the Japanese delegation and Japanese things that were all kind of taken care of for her, not that we didn’t include her in all our things, but E.B. [Eleanor B.] Apt and I were sort of only two people to plan all the social stuff for people.\\n\\n But Jay [Apt] was great. Before the flight, you had to plan the post-flight party, and Jay said, “Oh, I’ll take care of that.” I thought, “How are you going to do that with all the stuff?” But he did. He planned it all out. After you do it a few times, you get pretty good at it. You know where you can throw the party and how you get the invitations out and who you have to invite." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find it complicated things having two astronauts in the household?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Definitely, but, you know, I guess we were lucky in that our flights went on different years. I don’t know what we would have done if we had had flights close to one another. We probably just wouldn’t have done some of the social stuff. We would have just had to say, “Too busy.” We did it one year after another, and Hoot’s pretty good. He’s not real good at party planning and how to find invitations and things like that, so I sometimes had to do some of the spouse stuff for my own flights. But he was pretty good about pulling a lot of it together, so that helped. So, yes, in some ways it was complicated and it got a little crazy at times, but we just worked it out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was just sort of curious about that. We just talked to Anna [L.] Fisher, and she talked to us about how she left the office for a time just to stay home with her children, because things had gotten so complicated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and I’m sure I have guilt feelings about the times when I didn’t have enough time to spend with my kids and I didn’t get to see some of things they were doing, or I wish I’d been there for some of those things, but it turned out just fine and they don’t remember those things anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I do want to ask you about the role you played in the NASA Aerospace Medical Advisory Committee. Can you tell us about that group?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, you have dug deep." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Try to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was assigned at one point to the Aerospace Advisory Committee. I wasn’t quite sure what my role was, but I felt like it was like being part of the Science Support Group. You bring a different perspective, and you understand what the issues are within NASA about flights.\\n\\n Advisory committees, I have learned, frequently are only told about things that someone wants them to know about, and while I felt that I was useful in many ways, I got a little frustrated by having sometimes a different perspective on what the burning issues were. I felt like an outside advisory committee could do a good job of discussing issues and providing some input as to what was the right thing to do scientifically, but frequently those were not the issues that were presented to them. That was a little frustrating to me, and eventually I got busy and I didn’t feel like I was making the right kinds of input or being very useful, and so I didn’t continue with it. It was an eye-opener for me, and it reminded me that later on when I was on different kinds of advisory committees, that probably whoever was briefing us sometimes had an agenda or sometimes only brought up the things that they wanted the advisory committee to talk about. I think there’re sometimes a limited role for advisory committees, or it’s sometimes the responsibility of an advisory committee to dig a little deeper." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you give an example or two?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After I left NASA, I was put on an Institute of Medicine Committee looking at astronaut health. I’m trying to remember some of the issues. There was a question about whether astronauts should have to be given informed consent before they were assigned to a flight that required them to participate in certain experiments. There were a number of scientists who felt like if you sign up for the astronaut program, you sign up to do those things. I had worked on some committees at NASA, and we basically said informed consent for scientific experiments is informed consent. You can’t tell someone they have to do anything that you later assign to them as part of their job. That’s not fair. It might something like, “Oh, it’s just drawing blood,” or, “Oh, it’s just giving them this radioactive substance,” or, “Oh, it’s just testing their eyes,” “Oh, it’s just putting an EKG [Electrocardiogram] monitor on them when they’re doing a spacewalk,” and if they could get irregular heart rhythm, then you don’t let them ever fly again.\\n\\n So astronauts have a very different perspective on what they’re willing to do, and that’s fair. That’s the scientific principle behind informed consent. Someone needs to agree, understanding what the side effects might be or the repercussions might be or the fallout might be. They need to agree to participate, and not just, “Yes, I agree to fly on that flight, and I’ll take whatever is on there.”\\n\\n So the Institute of Medicine Committee, they were leaning toward saying that astronauts should sign basically an unlimited informed consent when they signed on to be astronauts. There was someone who told them, “Well, the reason that we need to do that is that astronauts don’t agree to participate in experiments.” They’d had a detailed supplementary objectives program before Challenger that were NASA experiments that were assigned to flights. “Here’s a bunch of experiments. Which ones do you want to do?” And some of the scientists said, “We have trouble getting people to sign up for them.” That was sort of presented that, “We have trouble getting astronauts to volunteer.”\\n\\n And I said, “You know, that’s not what I remember.” That’s, again, where the difference in perspective and having someone in the Astronaut Office who can say, “Wait a minute. Now, the NASA people told you this, but let’s dig a little deeper here and look at how many of those experiments were completed. You had three on this flight and two on that flight and one on that flight. You didn’t get everybody from the same flight.” And when they looked at it, that was true. Astronauts were volunteering.\\n\\n There were a couple of things that were very difficult to do or people felt might compromise their career. I had someone tell me on one of my flights they didn’t want to do an eye test, how close up can you read, because this person was afraid that it might affect their assignment to flight, because they might need to wear bifocals or something.\\n\\n I found that on my later flights some people are willing to take a risk where you know whether or not there’s a side effect right away, and there are other people that don’t want their flight to get messed up because this experiment made them sick, but they’re willing to take the risk of a 1 percent increase in cancer risk over your lifetime. That’s okay with them, but they don’t want to do something that might make them sick on the third day of the flight. So everybody’s comfort level was different.\\n\\n Again, getting back to the advisory committee, I think it sometimes is helpful to have someone like that on the advisory committee. I think that there were people on other advisory committees who got frustrated. I won’t name names, but a friend of mine was on an advisory committee, and the advisory committee kept advising NASA in one direction, and NASA just didn’t take the advice. So that’s another kind of frustration. If you’re going to have an advisory committee, then you either need to do what they say or explain to them why that’s not going to work and how can you do something different. So I learned a lot about advisory committees by being on that one, and I think I was useful in many ways and perhaps I was a rabble-rouser in others." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did that committee focus solely on human spaceflight, or were you also looking at things like animals experiments?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As I recall, we were looking at life sciences overall, so it included the animals. I don’t remember whether we did plant stuff or not. I was particularly focused on the human part, but I think they had other groups that were more focused on the other parts of life sciences." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you had a chance to work with people over at Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] and some of the other Centers that were represented?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Probably a good thing for your other flights." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, definitely. Definitely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk about that first Spacelab Life Sciences flight. The Roundup says you were selected in ’84, and you didn’t end up flying until ’91." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So tell us about working on that flight, essentially for seven years. I’m guessing in between you were working on other things as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, I worked even longer on that flight. When I first got to NASA in 1978, I sort of noodled around to see what I was interested in. We were learning about all of this other stuff: flying airplanes and propulsion systems. I really felt like one of the reasons that I was there was because of my medical background. Even though I got my medical license and I practiced medicine on the weekends, I really wanted to figure out how I could be useful to NASA in the life sciences.\\n\\n One of my best mentors was Joe [Joseph P.] Kerwin, and I went and talked to him about what was going on. Even back then they were beginning to think about the Spacelab payloads, and Joe invited me along to a number of the meetings that he went to. We first went out and talked to scientific groups about proposing experiments, you know, “Here’s the Space Shuttle. Here are the people that have been selected to be astronauts. Here’s the platform. Here’s what Spacelab is supposed to look like,” and we just went out and met people and talked it up, you know, “You ought to propose experiments.”\\n\\n Then I guess the research announcement went out in probably—might have been ’80 or ’81, so people began to propose experiments. Joe sort of kept me up to date on where things were and what people had proposed, and he was following the life sciences payloads. At the time it was called Spacelab 4. So I got to meet people and learn about it and follow it along as much as I could, from a distance.\\n\\n It was supposed to fly in early ’86, and so it came close to time to name a crew. I think I probably didn’t go talk to John [W.] Young; I probably talked to George Abbey at a Happy Hour or something and told him that’s the flight I really had been interested in, that I really wanted to go on, and I was sorry that at that point in time I was already assigned to another flight. I was supposed to fly the summer of ‘84, and they were naming a crew, like, in April, and I told him that I was sorry that I was already on another crew.\\n\\n He said, “Well, Spacelab flights take a long time. That might not be a problem.”\\n\\n So I was named to that crew in, like, March, I think, of ’84. In early ’84, we were supposed to fly in August of ’84, and so we were getting close to that flight. So there wasn’t a lot I could do with the Spacelab crew. I did a few training items, met the other people, went on a couple of tours of scientists’ labs, but I really didn’t have any time to do any of that, but they were all taking care of it. We had four payload specialists, two of whom were going to fly with us, and we had the rest of the payload crew. We didn’t have a flight crew yet (commander, pilot, and flight engineer). So it was Jim [James P.] Bagian and me and then the four payload specialists who were working the flight.\\n\\n It became even more complex as my flight slipped from August of ‘84. It was supposed to be in February of ’85, and then it ended up being in April, a third different payload. So I did what I could, but it was all kind of a scramble, because I didn’t have much time to devote to it. So it was a most interesting flight. It turned out to be what we called oversubscribed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What does that mean?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was too much to do, too many things, too many experiments, too much crew time required. Neither Jim and I had flown before, so we didn’t know how to plan timelines. We didn’t know how to look at it and say, “The crew says, ‘This is not going to work.’” So it was mushing around out in there.\\n\\n Then after I got back from my flight in April and everything kind of settled down, by the summertime the flight had slipped, I believe, into ’87 so we had a little bit more time, but there was a lot of work to be done as we realized we needed to descope. What they ended up doing was dividing it into two missions. All the experiments were good, the scientists were on board, everybody was happy, but they broke it into two separate missions, which worked out well. We were glad we had extra time because the animal cages that were supposed to fly on missions had not performed very well on their first flight, so they kept being on the flight, off the flight, on the flight, off the flight, so that was an uncertainty.\\n\\n So at first we were training for everything that could have been on the one flight. We saw we didn’t have enough time, and we really didn’t have a timeline that we thought was doable. There were a lot of pieces of equipment that were new and different and weren’t performing well or had the potential to not work in flight, and just a lot of stuff going on. But that’s basically what I did the last half of ’85, plus getting Hoot ready to fly on his mission that was supposed to go in December.\\n\\n So it was a long journey getting to SLS [Spacelab Life Sciences]-1. Of course, I remember sitting with our crew members in a training session in January of ’86, saying, “We were supposed to fly in January of ’86.” Then we turned on the TV and watched the Challenger explode. Then everything became an unknown. What’s going to happen. The payload specialists all went back to their other jobs until things settled down, and then we watched our flight on the manifest getting later and later and later. There were other priorities, to get military missions completed, to get the TDRS [Tracking and Data Relay] Satellites up. There were just other things that were ahead of us in the manifest. The science all got shoved downstream, and it kept being later and later. We kept training more and more, and it got pretty frustrating.\\n\\n We tried, for a period of time, to get together once a month or every two months and do some sort of training and in the meantime look at the checklists or timelines, so I think we got smarter as we went along, but it was years, years in there. I think probably around ’89, when the Shuttle was up and flying again, the manifest had settled down and we decided it was time for us to get back together. I think we were supposed to fly in ’90. It was time for us to get back together and nail everything down: the timeline, the equipment, what we could do, what we could sign up to do. So we had worked together for a long, long time. One of our payload specialists dropped out early on, well before Challenger." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that Bob [Robert W.] Phillips?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I’ve forgotten his name. We didn’t train together very long. Bob Phillips stayed with us. Then Bob Phillips developed a medical problem that disqualified him for the flight, but he agreed to stay around as our backup. He really wasn’t a backup, but he trained with us, he knew everything we knew. He was going to work in the Payload Operations Center [Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama], the science people who monitored us during the flight, which we were very grateful for. We just thought the world of Bob, so we were pleased that he was going to stay on with us. He could have very easily have said, “Well, if I’m not qualified to fly, I’m going back to Colorado.” But we were kind of a team at that point in time, so we were happy that he stayed with us. Millie [Hughes-Fulford] took his place.\\n\\n So we trained in earnest. I think we were still a little concerned that it was a very ambitious timeline with lots of pieces of new equipment, things that had never flown before that had a high likelihood of having a glitch of some sort. And there were stresses that developed amongst the people. I think it’s just that anytime that you spend a whole lot of time with people, things that you could get along with in the short run can become very difficult, and so we had some stresses within the crew members and we worked hard on that.\\n\\n We got our flight crew, which helped. Bryan [D.] O’Connor became our commander, just one of the best. If you asked people, “Who’d you like to fly with?” Bryan was one of them, straight-laced, hardworking, knowledgeable, good fellow. So I think that helped, to have a leader. Sid [Sidney M.] Gutierrez and Tammy [Tamara E.] Jernigan were also named. They didn’t have payload commanders before that, so there was nobody in charge, and we were all in charge. That sometimes became part of the stress. So once we got the flight crew and we began training as a real crew, not just a science crew, things came together a little bit better.\\n\\n I’m trying to think back about all the things that happened and occurred. I had a baby along the way. Is that right? Yes, Dann was born in March of ’89. I went to Hoot’s flight in late ’88 six months pregnant, so I was dealing with pregnancy and all that kind of stuff in the meantime.\\n\\n One of the jobs that I had, I guess right before I got pregnant with Dann, I became the Bubba. You ever heard of the Bubba? I was the Bubba for a while. I was the first female Bubba that they had, and I got pregnant shortly after I became the Bubba, so I was a very female Bubba. So I was working on that while we were training, but that was good management experience.\\n\\n Eventually the flight got pulled together, and we got off the ground. I think we had some delays, glitches along the way getting off the ground, as usual. But it was a very interesting flight. It was stressful in that we had pieces of equipment that didn’t work very well that we had to worry about. The one that worried us the most was that the refrigerator/freezers kept shutting down, and we had all these specimens, blood and urine, I mean the whole metabolic panel of things was going to be lost if we lost those specimens. So Jim and Drew [F. Andrew Gaffney] did most of the work on the refrigerator/freezers. It had to do with the fact that they could only use a small amount of Freon in them. Something would glitch, and we would have to turn them off and then later we could turn them back on. Sort of serendipitously, we learned—turn it off, something happens, and when you turn it on, it’s okay for a while. They finally figured out that the failure mode was getting some frozen Freon in the line.\\n\\n We had the same problem with the gas analyzer. All our breathing stuff had to go through the gas analyzer, and it would shut off. We tried a variety of different things, and finally we found out that if you just hit it, it would work okay. What happened was, the gas got sucked through a small orifice to go into the analyzer part, and there was apparently a little dust in there. You don’t think about that on the ground at all. The dust is all down at the bottom of the box, and the tube that it goes through is up at the top. But apparently dust would float around in there in weightlessness and then when stuff got sucked into the analyzer, some of the dust would get up there. So again, you could beat on it and it would dislodge that dust for a while, and then it would work for a while.\\n\\n We had a number of things, just minor things, and everything worked out pretty well, and we got just about everything that we had hoped to get. We had a good time. I think we brought back some very important scientific data. It was the first time that a flight had been dedicated entirely to life sciences. They were looking at every system so that you could put it all together when you got back. Frequently they had done one experiment. They had done a blood experiment or they had done a heart experiment, but you didn’t know what was happening in the rest of the body. There are fluid shifts. Are the kidneys doing what they want to do? Does the chemistry in the blood change such that it changes this other system? So now they had more of a full picture, and they had it on men and women. Skylab data from the ‘70s was all men. So I think they were able to put the picture together about how all of the different systems worked in unison to create this picture of what human physiology is like in weightlessness.\\n\\n The animal cages worked well. We were pleased about that. One of the things we did, we got the ground to let us pull one of the cages out, take it over to the workbench, and take one of the animals out. We wanted to handle the animal, to see what the rats would do, because I knew on Spacelab Life Sciences 2 there would be experiments on the rats, but nobody had ever handled rats in space before. They didn’t know whether the rats would get fritzy or if they got away, whether they would be hard to get back into the cage or whatever, or what they really looked like when you pulled them out of the cage and what they did when they were free to float around.\\n\\n So we were able to talk the ground into letting us do that, and I think we learned a lot about animal handling that we put to use on SLS-2. So the animal part of it was a success, and, of course, they could compare the humans to the animals, and I think they got some really good data on the things that they could test the animals for when they got back. But, of course, the animals had all gone through landing. They were back in 1-G for a while, and by the time they got them out, got them back to the lab, they had been back in gravity for a while. There was this question about did the landing change their data. So we got some answers, but we got some more questions.\\n\\n Drew’s experiment, of course, had the concerns about the safety aspects of having a catheter threaded up your arm to near your heart. It had always been an issue that people worried about. We went through many Safety Panel reviews and had to prove different things and had to do different things to make it less risky. Of course, it became considerably riskier when they put on the orange suits. You know, it was designed to be flown under the regular flight suits that we had before Challenger, and then once you put it under a pressure suit where you can’t get to the catheter that’s threaded up at the crook of the elbow, you had to go through another round of safety assessments.\\n\\n The surprising thing was that it measured central venous pressure, the pressure of the blood going into the heart, and everyone had proposed that pressure would be elevated because if you look at astronauts when they get to space, the veins in their neck stand out. Jim Bagian with his bald forehead, you could see the veins in his forehead. Your face gets all puffy. So everybody felt like fluid had redistributed, there was more pressure in the upper part of the body. Drew got to space, turned on his little thing to look at his pressure, and it was zero. Of course, he thought he had an equipment failure, so he changed out the pieces of the equipment that he could change out, he flushed the catheter, it was still zero. Again, that was kind of an unknown, but a data point of one, you don’t know. That was one of those things that we got some data, but we weren’t sure what to make of it.\\n\\n Of course, there were only four subjects, and sometimes data points were not good. With only four subjects, you can’t get it into a peer-review journal because the n number isn’t enough, and sometimes, of the four of us, only three of the data takes for us were good. Anyway, it opened the door for SLS-2, and overall I think it was a very successful flight. It started a lot of the studies that we had hoped to accomplish on the Space Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have a sense of the background before the flight about the Skylab data? Was that something that you had looked at and got a sense of?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. I looked at that in 1978 when Joe Kerwin said, “Oh, you need to look at this.” A lot of that data had been published in a Skylab book, I think. Again, they were, “Here’s what we found.” But then if you looked a little deeper, you found that the pressure on Skylab was not sea-level pressure; the oxygen content had to be higher. I think on the first one it seems like they lost weight. There were confounding factors on a lot of that data, so it was, again, a question mark. Yes, we have some data but are not quite sure what it’s telling us. Scientists would argue, “Yes, but you know the oxygen content was X percent instead of Y percent, and the atmospheric pressure was lower and that would do all of that.” So it gave us some hints, but we weren’t sure exactly what that meant.\\n\\n Early on in the Shuttle design, the scientists said, “We want it to be at sea-level pressure, 14.7 psi [pounds per square inch], and we want the oxygen to be 20 percent, nitrogen 80 percent, a small amount of carbon dioxide,” and the life scientists really had those requirements. “We won’t be able to tell unless we can keep more of the variables the same as what you would have here on the ground.” So, yes, the scientists that proposed the experiments, some of them were repeats of the Skylab, so you could say, yes, that data is good or, no, there’s a difference." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I noticed that Carolyn [L.] Huntoon was one of the PIs [Principal Investigators] for some of the experiments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Metabolic experiments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know that you had contact with her, obviously, but had you worked with her on experiments before, or was this the first time you had worked with her in this sense?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m trying to remember. I think that was probably the first time that I had worked with her as an investigator. I mostly knew her as the director of the medical lab, and so our dealings were with that and more on a personal level. She was our den mother. But I think this was the first time that I had worked with her as one of the investigators." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was she studying, do you recall?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think she was doing part of the metabolic experiments, and I’m trying to remember, probably had to do with fluid balance, but I’m not exactly sure. They were looking at a number of the components of the blood, the hormones that regulated fluid balance. Again, faces got puffy, legs got skinny, fluid was redistributed. They felt like probably people got rid of some of that fluid the first few days of flight, but they had not quantified it. They didn’t know what your salt balance was doing; they didn’t know what hormones were involved in that, kidney hormones, pituitary hormones. I think that was what she was interested in. Again, the people doing the metabolic experiments had to coordinate, because certain of the tracers for one experiment would not be good for another experiment, or you couldn’t do the metabolic experiments right after you had done the lung functions because the gases would change. So it was this big coordination thing, but I know she was involved with the metabolic on both of my SLS flights." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I had watched your post-flight video that you had all put together for this mission, and someone had referred to the Spacelab area as the slave quarters. I know you had mentioned that it was a pretty hectic flight. Was that something that you recall, that it was just so hectic, you kind of felt like you were stuck back in that lab?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Again, we were oversubscribed. We didn’t know how to do a timeline very well when everything had to be coordinated. Jim and I, by the time we flew SLS-1, each had flown a flight, but the things that happened on those flights were pretty much standalone chunks of time. Deploy the satellite on this day. Film the toys on this day. Do this on that day. They didn’t interact. The things didn’t affect one another, really. And suddenly, on this one, I don’t think we completely understood how things could go awry if one piece of your equipment didn’t work and they had to re-plan the day. The ground wanted to re-plan it for you before you took off and did something else, so you had to wait until they could tell you, “Here’s what we want you to do.”\\n\\n We tried to make the most efficient use of our time, but we frequently worked late. When equipment failed, they would put it off till the end of the day, and so you’d end up staying up late to troubleshoot something that wasn’t working too well or some piece of something that you hadn’t finished because you were troubleshooting something else.\\n\\n You know, I think we joked about it being slave quarters, but we knew, even if everything had gone well, that we had a full day’s work in the lab. But we did take breaks to go eat lunch in the front, look out the window. Bryan would say, “There’s a good pass coming up. Is it time for you all to come have lunch?” And we would try to do that.\\n\\n I’m trying to remember whether we had a window. I think we had a window in the back of the lab. I remember that I made sure that we had a window in the back of the lab on SLS-2. They were going to take it out or it wasn’t in there on that lab module, or something. I said, “Psychological health! We need a window to look out to see whether it’s daytime or nighttime outside.” There were times that you could sort of relax, and I think we realized that we needed to do that from time to time, because it did get pretty hectic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, I read that some people slept in the Spacelab. Were you one of the people?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. It was nice and dark and quiet back there. We were doing single shifts, so the lab was essentially buttoned up for the night. It was dark and we could cool it down, and so we just hung our hammocks back there and could sleep wherever we felt like sleeping.\\n\\n We had the problem of noise. The refrigerators would come on and off. Seems like you could hear the mice. Because we were close to the tail of the Shuttle, we could hear the jets, the vernier jets “boom boom, boom boom,” keeping the Orbiter in the right orientation but you got used to that. But it was a lot quieter and more peaceful than the middeck or the flight deck." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things I had read, and I was telling Rebecca about this as we were driving down, you mentioned several times that you had to scrub your launch, and I had read that they had to take out the rodents and put in fresh rodents. Can you explain why they had to change them out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m trying to remember why, and I think it’s that some of the rats had been injected preflight with something, or it was that there was heat back there and they were stressed. I don’t remember what it was, but we knew that we had a forty-eight-hour window. We could launch today or tomorrow, but if it slipped to the next day, they had to change out rats.\\n\\n So I remember that happening, and we worried about it because they had to load rats with the Shuttle on its tail. So they had to lower somebody in a boson’s chair down there with these rat cages, and there was concern about the person being injured. There was concern about the rat cages getting dropped—you know going “thunk”—down to the back of the lab, and people worrying about damage to the lab. It was more than just, “I gotta go change out these cages.” Doing it in the vertical, that was a task.\\n\\n Of course, the lab itself had to stay powered so that the air in the cages was continued. So that was one of the big advantages of a lab was that it could stay powered. You know the Spacehab, it was unpowered. So that was one of the good things and one of things we worried about, that you had to make sure that the animals were okay because you didn’t want to lose your animals or mess up all the experiments that they were participating in. I’d forgotten that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have to take care of the animals when they were in space, or was there primarily some pellets that they had and water preloaded?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had to take care of the animals. The Animal Care and Use Committee is responsible for making sure that you do all the right things to take care of the animals, and we had to check on them every day, number one. I think we had to change out their food bars. I think we had to refill their water bottle. We had to look in there and look at them every day and make sure they were okay and not floating around dead.\\n\\n [interruption]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were talking about taking care of the rats, changing out their food and water and checking in on them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I think we had some tests of the cages themselves. There was great concern that the cages wouldn’t work and there had been millions of dollars spent on redesigning them after they had problems on the Spacelab-3 mission. So, yes, we spent some time watching what rats do in weightlessness.\\n\\n When we first looked in there, when we first got to orbit, the rats were sort of clinging to the sides of the cage, looking out at us like, “What’s going on?” Then they got more used to the fact that they weren’t falling or something, and we’d look in there and they were sort of floating around. It wasn’t big enough for them to do a whole lot of acrobatics, but they became much more relaxed.\\n\\n Then we took the one out, once we knew that the enclosed workbench worked. We took a cage out and took the rat over to the workbench, and really the rat was kind of like a human. He didn’t want to get stuck out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to hold onto. So once we got him in there, when we took him out of the cage, he would just hold onto your hand, and then once we got him sort of turned loose, we didn’t want to throw him or anything. We just wanted to sort of get him off our hand. He floated around until he could grab onto the cage and he grabbed onto the cage.\\n\\n The rat was very docile, didn’t really try to bite, didn’t try to get away, just was a little rat. One of the interesting things about it, he had a yellow streak down his back. We thought, “What is that?” What happens, I guess, when they’re in a colony, when they groom, they can groom themselves except down the middle of their back, and then their cagemates or something clean down their backs for them or something. They couldn’t reach the middle of their back, which was kind of interesting.\\n\\n They were obviously healthy; they were eating and they were getting water. The cages worked really well, so that was a nice thing. Plus we had done this sort of unplanned part where we handled them. When you carry them around in the lab, they put them in this plastic cone and then sort of close the back end so that none of the animal waste can get out. We tried putting them in there, and the animal didn’t want to go in there. So we knew that on the next flight you were going to have to really push them in there, because on the next flight we were going to have to take them out of the workbench and put them on the animal weighing device, the animal scale. They had to go in something so that they would be kind of closed up. So we got some experience with doing that.\\n\\n I was already hoping that I would be on SLS-2. It was interesting because we brought back the only video of rats in space, because after that, they decided that they didn’t want us to do any videos of rats. So if you go in the NASA archives, as far as I know, that one rat-handling thing that we did was the only time that you’d ever be able to see what rats do in space." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is that primarily because of PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] and the other animal-rights groups?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. There were probably people that objected to our taking the rats in space, so we had to be sensitive to how a lot of other people thought." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had mentioned, I think it was on STS-51B, they did have the problems with the animal enclosures." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you at all concerned, or you had spent enough time with the folks at Ames and were convinced that the enclosures would work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, the animal cages, like a lot of things that we do in space, there’s just no way to simulate all of that on the ground. You can take things up in the zero-G plane and get part of it, maybe, but, yes, we were concerned about the cages, and we knew that if they didn’t function well on this flight, that animals were not going to fly again. We knew that the problem had to be solved. But we had followed with great interest over this long period of time what they were doing to the cages. Early on there were people that said, “We’re not going to spend this amount of money. We’re not going to fly animals.” And we knew that a lot was resting on whether the cages did well, so we had a significant interest in the design. We looked at it, we looked at how it could go wrong and what we could do about it.\\n\\n We had some procedures if any of the animals got in trouble. That’s why we had the sock that we could pull the cage out into when we decided to take it over to the workbench. So we had some plans. All we could do was hope that all of the fixes that they had made were what was needed and that the animals would be safe and well fed and well watered, that there wasn’t going to be any waste floating around. I think we probably would have been very careful if anything had escaped from those cages, to make sure that it didn’t float up to the flight deck and bother the commander, as it had on STS-51B. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Didn’t sound very pleasant." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Marines don’t like animal poop. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a good quote. We’ll quote you on that. [Laughter]\\n\\n Tell us about some of the training that you participated in. I’m assuming you went to Ames and to Marshall. Where else did you train?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We trained in many of the scientists’ labs. The first thing we did was to go to meet the PI and look at the equipment that they had designed. They told us we were going to be their hands and eyes in space, and they really, really, really wanted us to be involved in the experiment, to care about it, to take responsibility for it, to know everything about it, to understand.\\n\\n As I mentioned earlier, they were told, “We cannot assure you that you will have a life scientist on board.” Well, they were delighted that they were given credible life scientists who obviously were already interested in the flight and were bona fide science people, and we understood what they were talking about. They didn’t have to lecture to astronomers. So they were delighted to have us come. Sometimes we spent several days in the lab learning, “Here’s what we’re trying to get from this experiment. Here’s what we think you will see when you do this experiment. Here’s what you can see. Here’s what we can see on the ground. Here’s how we can advise you, yes, this data looks good or there’s something interesting going on.”\\n\\n We needed to understand what might happen, not what was predicted to happen, but what might happen, so that we could watch for that. I can remember the pulmonary function study folks, John [B.] West and his folks in San Diego didn’t completely understand how the blood would redistribute in the lung in weightlessness. They said, “Here on the ground there’s more blood in the bottom part of your lung just because of gravity, and we think that when you go into space, it will just redistribute so that it’s more homogenous, but we don’t know that. Here’s what we predict it to look like. Here’s what it looks like on the ground. Here’s what you might see in space that we’ll look for and we want you to look for, because that’s very interesting and we need to verify on all of you that it happens.” So it was things like that when we went to the labs.\\n\\n Frequently the way they had planned the experiment, because Jim and I had some experience, or the other scientists, Drew, Millie, and Bob, could look at it and say, “You know, that may not be the way you want to do that,” or, “It would be very helpful if we could do this before this.” So there was a lot of back-and-forth discussion, and I think that the scientists appreciated our being there.\\n\\n When we first went to visit, a lot of the procedures were just sort of in the scientists’ lab book. “Here’s how we do it in the lab.” And they hadn’t completely thought about how they would do that in space. So we spent an inordinate amount of time developing procedures. “How do you want us to do this?” If you’re a scientist who’s done these experiments in your lab for years, you just sort of know how to do it. It’s like talking to old-timey cooks, where they tell you to put in enough milk that it gets to the right consistency. So we had to say, “Now, wait a minute. I don’t understand how you want me to do it.” We developed what we call long-form procedures, so we wrote down every little detail; you know, go here, do this, stand up, look at the screen. So there were these long-form procedures that weren’t really in checklist format.\\n\\n We did that first and sort of figured out how the equipment worked, how they wanted us to do the experiment, and then we had to pare it down into, “Now we’ve done it several times. We understand it. Let’s get it down into a checklist format.” So how we do abbreviate it so we have the right cues but, yes, we remember that we have to do this at this time. So we did that.\\n\\n Then we had to go back and say, “What are all the malfunctions that could happen? What might happen? What are the failure modes that you can envision in your equipment?” That raised a lot of issues about what kind of backup things we ought to have. Do you have a computer board that you can put in there that will fix that problem? Should you have an extra one of these? In that whole evolution there was a lot of, “Oh, we need some more storage, because we hadn’t thought about that. That’s a single-point failure, and we need to be able to replace that part,” or this, that, or the other. Going through all the failure modes that you could predict was another iteration that we had to go through. So maybe it was good that we had seven years to do this.\\n\\n We would get surprises when we began to do our baseline data collection. You have to look at people’s normal baseline physiology. Of course, scientists want eight data takes prior to the flight. “No, can’t have that many. We’ve got twenty-one experiments. We can’t give you all the time in the world.”\\n\\n We had to fit in the data takes. Once we began to do the data takes, we began to say, “Can we do that experiment right after that one?” Well, no, you can’t, because it messes things up.\\n\\n So we got into the timeline of how things could be done so that they didn’t interfere. Some of the experiments used the same hardware. We had a strip chart recorder, a gas analyzer, and different pieces of equipment that were used by several different experiments, so obviously you couldn’t do those at the same time. We had to spend a long time thinking about how can we do this. And because the people that were the subjects were also the operators, you had to timeline who’s where, who’s on first? Is the equipment available and does it interfere with something else? If we have to re-timeline, if we get behind, then how? It was kind of insane.\\n\\n Most of it we got pretty correct, and most of it we figured out as we got into space and flew with it. I learned a lot about coordinating between crew, scientists, engineers, and managers. A lot of times you had to get them all in the same room and get everybody to agree what was the best thing to do, because if you just talked to the investigator, they would say, “No, I’m not going to do that.” And the managers would say, “But you can’t do this or that.” And the engineers would say, “Well, that’s impossible to do so on and so on.”\\n\\n Sometimes it was only the crew that could see the big picture. Of course, we were the people that were going to be the subjects, and we were the people that were going to be the operators, so we had to know the hardware and the science and what these scientists really needed. They would write down that they wanted a whole lot done, but they really only needed a little bit, but you had to sort of persuade them that they had to be team players, that they didn’t have to be when doing science in their own lab. And they had to take care of their subjects because they didn’t have very many subjects. If they wore us out, the data wasn’t going to be good. If we didn’t have time for lunch, they might see something that they weren’t expecting on the metabolic stuff.\\n\\n So it was a really interesting mission to be on and I learned a tremendous amount from helping to manage all the pieces and parts of that flight, and I think that really helped me on SLS-2, really, really helped." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you talk with Bob [Robert A.R.] Parker, who was the chief scientist for Skylab, or Joe, who had flown on Skylab, about how to balance all of these things? Because you were doing something similar." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t remember specific things, but, yes, I talked to everybody that I could talk to about how did this work and how did that work and how did you manage this. But the Skylab flights had a lot more time. We had nine days. If you’re going to do three data takes during the flight on each of the experiments, on each of the people, it’s so tightly interwoven if you lose a data point on day one, you can’t exactly make it up on day three because the next data point’s on day four. So they wanted a smooth timeline, so it was a little bit different. But certainly talking to them about how they did certain things and how blood draws worked and whether they had any surprises about this, that, and the other. The experiments were very different and the equipment was very different, so it was helpful to chat with them. But I think ours was a couple orders of magnitude greater in complexity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I had read in a newspaper article that sometimes it took two or three people to do blood draws on this flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you explain why that was the case?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You can see the problem on our post-flight science video. We did one for a post-flight press conference, and then we put together a twenty-three-minute science." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think I saw the first one, just the post-flight video." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There’s a video sequence of a blood draw going on, and what you’ve got is my arm and you’ve got Jim Bagian putting the tubes on the catheter and collecting the blood and doing all that kind of stuff. Then he’s handing off things to Millie, who’s over here putting the right labels on and putting them in the right order in the trays. Some of them had to be centrifuged. Some of them didn’t have to be centrifuged; they had to be refrigerated right away. Some were for this. Some were for that.\\n\\n It wasn’t like you just drew a tube of blood and put in the refrigerator. It was, you have to do a finger stick and get a hematocrit. You have to draw blood for this and spin it and separate the serum from the blood. You have to put this one in the refrigerator right away. It was like you collect six or seven things for each draw, and then you’ve got four people, so you’ve got lots of different moving parts. So, yes, it would take three people to do a blood draw: the subject and two operators, one person to really be the operator, and one person to keep track of what you’d drawn, what’s the next tube that you’re going to hand them, what’s the label that goes on this tube and what do I do with it. So, yes, nothing was easy in space." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When I read that, I thought, wow, that’s really complicated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And if you’re not careful, the tube goes floating off and you can’t find it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did that happen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Frequently you’d say, “Okay, we’ve got to collect three purple-top and three red-top tubes and one of something else. Do a hematocrit. I have to do three hematocrit tubes.” So sometimes you would label them ahead of time, and then if you knew you were supposed to have three and you’ve only got two tubes, you’d think, “Where’s the other tube?’” So it was very interesting.\\n\\n Again, I learned from that flight. When I came back and the scientists said, “Oh, you need to do it this way,” and I could say, “No, you’ve got to have more than one person helping, and you just have to timeline that in. Sorry.” Or, “It really helps if you’ll label our tubes ahead of time and put them in certain places and know where they are. Practice doing it that way.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was the first flight to fly three women at one time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you talk about that and the gender balance of your crew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I can remember they asked Bryan O’Connor, “Are you afraid of having three women on the flight?”\\n\\n And he said, “No, I’m more worried about having three doctors on the flight.”\\n\\n It was nice to have the three of us. I can’t say that we developed a strong group. We weren’t the girls and didn’t do girls’ night out, but it was just kind of nice to not be all men, which is what I’d had on my first flight. I think we had a good relationship and laughed about things and laughed about men, but we were all very serious about doing what we needed to do and could support one another in that. If one person was going through a really rough time, you knew that you had a good support structure out there for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Bryan had also mentioned that you were one of the first crews to go through leadership and communications training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk about that and what benefit that had on the flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As I mentioned, we had some stress within the flight, just some frictions. Bryan recommended that we sit down and do the Myers-Briggs personality assessments, as I recall, and that we learn to work together a little bit better, and what approach works better with different personalities. I think that was very useful for us. I think everybody just assumed that everybody could get along. “Can’t we all get along?” Sometimes that’s hard to do, especially, as I say, when you’ve been training together in close quarters for a long time. And everybody has their own little quirks. I think it was helpful to sit down and take a deep breath and say, “What’s the best way for us to work together?” Most of us are not going to change our personality, but we can certainly change our approach to how we lead when it’s our turn to lead, how we follow, how we interact. I think that was very helpful. I enjoyed it, and I think the rest of the crew agreed that it was what we needed to do at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Earlier you had mentioned the change in suits. In the first flight you had gone out in the blue jumpsuit. This flight you were in the launch and entry suit. Can you talk about that and the fit and the challenges you might have faced?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I hated those things. I hated those things. I hated those things. And you can quote me three times. I called it suit wrestling whenever we had to do a training exercise, because when you’re small, proportionately the weight of those things and the size of those things and muscling those things around is just difficult the smaller you are. Basically, you have to have the same amount of stuff hanging off of you when you weigh 120 pounds as when you weight 180 pounds.\\n\\n They were uncomfortable. They were hot. We had to train in Florida, we had to train in California, and we had to train in Houston. All those places are hot places. The suits were heavy. They were bulky. You had to just muscle them. And there were certain things you had to do. I toughed that out and I could do them.\\n\\n In an emergency landing where you needed to get out the side hatch, the escape slide had to be lined up, taken loose, opened up and attached to the side hatch while wearing a suit. Drew wanted to help me, which was very nice of him, except that you couldn’t fit more than one person in that side hatch, and I understood that I was either going to have to say, “You do it. You climb around the back of my seat and you do it,” or I was going to have to say, “Leave me alone. Let me figure this out and let me figure out how to do it.” That’s what I did. I just felt like it was my responsibility because I was sitting over there near the door. Whatever it was, it was a very difficult thing to do.\\n\\n There were a couple of times when—I’m trying to remember which flight it was—I had trouble activating the oxygen bottle, because what you do is you grab a ball-type device under your arm and you pull it all the way out. It’s that last few inches that activates the thing. Well, my arms are short, and the suit even restricts your movements. I thought I had turned that thing on and we were running over in the Cape to the slide wires, and I realize I was not getting any air. I had to learn how to get the oxygen on with short arms.\\n\\n We had to be able to climb out the overhead hatch. “Oh, here, step up on the seat, step up on the back of a seat, and then put your fanny over the edge of the window.” That worked fine if you were five-eight. It didn’t work at all if you were five-two. So it was kind of like, “Okay, I have to pretend like I can do this, and if it takes somebody shoving me out the overhead in a real emergency, then that’s what we’ll have to do.”\\n\\n Even climbing from the flight deck to the middeck down the ladder was just incredibly difficult. It was kind of like, “Okay, we’re going to practice this and now when you get down to the ground, run over there.” I’m going, “Right. I’ll be lucky if I can shuffle over there.” I felt like we were probably going to hurt more people with that suit than we ever saved.\\n\\n The heat in Florida was awful, even the heat on launch for SLS-1. They had a fan that would just blow air into the suit. Well, your suit was sealed at the wrists, and so it would try to blow air in. You had to hold the neck ring open so that air could come out, and it was all this humid hot air. At the time I had to wear glasses, so I would pop that neck ring while we’re sitting there on the launch pad and it would fog up my glasses. I thought, “Well, okay, I’ll try to open the wrist rings.” I swear I almost had heat exhaustion when we finally launched. Maybe I’m just a sissy or something, but I hated those things. I truly, truly hated those things. And I was worried whether, with the adrenalin flowing, I could have done what I needed to do in them, but the practice almost killed me.\\n\\n Later people would ask me, “Do you think John [H.] Glenn is okay to fly in space?”\\n\\n I said, “If he can make it through the suit training, he’s perfectly good to fly in space,” because the suit training was one of the most difficult parts about it for me, a little person. So, no, I hated the suits." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And we’ll quote you on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Those suits were built to be worn by high-altitude pilots, regular-size guys. If they had problems, they ejected. They didn’t have to crawl out and run away. They didn’t have to rappel down the side of their vehicle. Even sitting on the flight deck, the seats were meant to be for people in little flight suits. Now you’ve got these big bulky things. Even sitting there, you were scrunched up. You couldn’t reach things. They had retrofitted a piece of equipment on there that made it difficult. Even the pilots trying to look up and reach the things overhead, they limited your ability to do that too. So I guess it was something that we needed to do, but it had its own downsides." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you think of the crew escape system that was put in after Challenger? Did you feel like that added some safety, or was that kind of the same thing with the new suit that you were wearing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, it was just made more complicated by the bulk of the suits. The pole, I guess that would have worked, and certainly it gave you some warm feeling that maybe you could get out if you needed to. Again, you got told if the Shuttle is out of control and you’re trying to get out, you may be pinned to the opposite wall, so you have to be able to chin yourself up on all these seats as you work your way over to the door, to the hatch. I’m thinking, you know, I’m going to have to practice chinning-up a lot more, because now I don’t weigh 120 pounds; I weigh over 200 pounds. So I don’t know that I’m going to be able to do that, nor was there any way to practice doing that.\\n\\n But, you know, there were a lot of sort of urban myths, I guess, for the Shuttle early on. There was this myth that you could land it in the water, and we had procedures. You could go and land the thing in the water. Well, what they didn’t tell you was that the payload, whatever you had in the back, as you hit the water, was going to come forward and smash you. None of us really believed that we were going to be able to do that, but you practice the procedure. “Now, line up with the waves and do this and now climb out the overhead hatch.” Kind of like, “Yeah, right.”\\n\\n I always kind of felt like a lot of the escape modes in flight with the suits on were urban myths. It gave us—what was it the pilots say—gave you something to do so you didn’t stress or you didn’t tighten up. It gave you things to do while you were diving at the ground. I don’t know. I’m glad we never had to use them, and whether or not they would have been any use to the Challenger crew, I don’t know, but it was one of those things that changed after Challenger, and we had to deal with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think that there was more interest in your mission because of the possibilities for a future Space Station and showing what was possible or feasible to do in space, with an actual lab?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess to a certain extent on my two life sciences flights, I think we did enough interesting things that it gave people more ideas about other things that were possible to do, and it also pointed out that it’s very inefficient to get all of this stuff together, to spend all of this time training people. They go and they do great science for a week, ten days, two weeks. Then they come back to Earth, and we take it all apart again. Then a couple years later, we put it all together again. It was just an inefficient way of doing science. Plus, it only gave you a very short window to gather data. SLS-1 was nine days and SLS-2 was fourteen, and, yes, you can see what happens over that period of time, and a lot of the systems sort of equilibrate over that time and you reach your new space normal. But there were a number of things that hadn’t equilibrated yet or that you thought might take longer to readapt after you got back if you’d been there longer.\\n\\n We didn’t have any control animals. You didn’t have a centrifuge for the animals in space to have 1-G controls, so what’s due to the space environment and what’s due to weightlessness? It said now we could do more sophisticated science, but we can’t do all the things that we want to do with this vehicle. I think everybody was excited about having Station and having additional capabilities and more time and a lab that was up there and usable most of the time.\\n\\n I think that, at least for us in ’89 and ’91, Space Station was still far away. We didn’t know what it was going to be like and how long it was going to stay up and what the capabilities were going to be and what equipment would be on board and what would be the focus. It was the next step, but beyond what we were doing at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, at the end of this mission, you guys spent about a week at Edwards [Air Force Base, California] doing some additional tests. Would you tell us about those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was very interesting. It drove some other things, let’s say. People ask, “Usually Shuttles go at 28 degrees inclination. How come yours went to 39?” Well, it was because, number one, we wanted to keep our sleep and wake cycles the same, because changing circadian rhythms can change your physiology. So we want to be able to go to bed and get up sort of at the same time every day.\\n\\n And when we looked at how much equipment we had to have for the post-flight testing, we really only had one set of equipment, so that said we needed to plan to go to the landing site that was the most predictable. And the answer was, yes, we need to go to Edwards. NASA had to bite the bullet on that, because it cost extra money to get the Orbiter back to Florida, but it’s more chancy to fly into the Cape. So they said, “Okay, we’ll land at Edwards, and we have to go at 39 degrees to keep your sleep/wake cycles the same, and land you early on landing day so that we can still have time for tests on landing day.” The early post-flight testing was very important. That very first day they had to land us so that they had enough hours at the end of that day to complete the day’s post-flight testing. So it was all again parts of this puzzle that had to be put together.\\n\\n We said, “Okay, we’re going to land at Edwards, and will we get to see our families?”\\n\\n “Well, yes, for a little while.”\\n\\n “Well, then what?”\\n\\n “Well, then you’re going to go over to the officers’ quarters and sleep and then we’ll have you back for more tests the next seven days.”\\n\\n We said, “How about you put us up in someplace nice, and our families can stay there, and we can see our families in the evenings.” When they looked at it, it made sense, and it didn’t cost a whole lot of money. So we went to a nice resort called the Silver Saddles, and our families got to be there. That was wonderful. I mean, that was just absolutely wonderful. We were relaxed. We could eat with our families. We could be with the kids, and we could talk about the flight. It took something that was going to be very onerous and made it something that was very nice. The investigators could come and stay there, and we could have a beer with them as long as we recorded it on our food log and we didn’t have any caffeine before the exercise testing. There were all these restrictions, but at least it was in a nice place and not in the rather sterile environment of Edwards Air Force Base.\\n\\n So, yes, we stayed for a week. We got really, really tired of doing those experiments over and over and over again. We began to look like drug addicts, because they kept drawing blood from us. We completed it. They got the data that they wanted, and they were happy. I think all of us were really invested in that flight. We had spent so much time planning it, working on it, fighting about it, trying to understand how to do it. You come back from a flight knowing we’ve got good in-flight data, and you realize that if you didn’t have the post-flight data, you’re going to be missing an important part. How do you readapt? We were willing to do it. The flight had been successful, so I think that made it a happy time too. Post-flight is always a good time when you come back and you’ve done what you meant to do.\\n\\n It was nice to have the investigators there, because they were all happy about the data, and as they were pummeling us with this data take or that, they would chat about, “I remember on this day when this happened.” We had a lot of fun and excitement, talking about what they did on the ground. They’d ask us, “How did you do this? How did that work?” So it was fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You and Jim Bagian actually received an award after this flight, the Melbourne Boynton Award." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Will you talk about that? And you had previously won it yourself in 1986." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Had I?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "According to the research we have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I think there was recognition that at least for the world of life sciences and aviation and space medicine, that this was an important flight, and it was nice to get the recognition that we had contributed to it.\\n\\n It’s strange when you do experiments in flight. It’s somebody else’s research, and you don’t get your name on the published papers. So you are subject two in that data. Here it all is, all of this work that you did and all of this suffering that you went through, and your name’s not on the paper. You are a subject number. It’s absolutely important that you are de-identified. In other words, they didn’t say, “This is Rhea’s data.” People needed to know that if they looked really strange physiologically, that it wasn’t going to impact anything or that people weren’t going to worry about being assigned to another flight or something.\\n\\n Some of the investigators were very nice. They put at the end, “Special thanks go to these people who were both subjects and operators. We really appreciate their help.” That was nice. But it was nice to get an award or two from eminent scientists and others that said, “We appreciated what you did, and what you did really was important to what we are interested in.” You got different kinds of awards for different things, but I think they were very much appreciated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things that I saw, looking through the research that we pulled, was that you had given some testimony after this flight. One of the committees that I thought was interesting was the Committee on Budget. You had testified in front of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. But that one just struck a chord with me. I thought that that was rather unusual for an astronaut. Is that the case?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It probably was. You know, we didn’t control that. We didn’t request it. We didn’t say, “I want to talk to these people.” NASA decided which committees and which people we talked to post-flight. We always did post-flight, what they called a Hill visit, and they frequently asked us to go and talk to our own congressional delegations. I’m from Tennessee; I went and talked to the Tennessee delegations. You took them a montage of pictures and told them how much their support meant, and I think they were pleased with that. They had something to hang on their wall that said they were space supporters. So that was a good thing for us to do.\\n\\n We were frequently, depending on what was going on at the time, were asked to go to speak to different congressional committees. We worked it out and spoke wherever we needed to at the time. Obviously, there was probably budgetary considerations going on at the time, probably for Space Station or for Shuttle funding or for science funding, and it was very helpful to go and bring the excitement of spaceflight to committee members and tell them what you had done and why it was important.\\n\\n Frequently, even when you went and talked to congressional people, they had their aide there that really followed NASA. The members of Congress didn’t know very much about space, and it was the aide that asked the questions and wanted to know certain things about what you did. So when we went and talked to a committee, we would tell them, “Here’s what we did, here’s what it means, and here’s what the future of that is.” So I think that was helpful. Again, we did that depending on what the issues were at the time and what NASA felt like we ought to go and talk about. We tried to make it understandable and exciting. Whether we changed people’s minds, I don’t know, but that was part of our responsibility." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything you don’t think we covered about this second flight? I’m trying to be pretty thorough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You covered more stuff than I ever remembered. I’m glad you did your homework. It was very helpful to remember those things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I think that was it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rhea Seddon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We thank you for your time today." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00072", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2019-033.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Slocum, Donna Stern (1978-1980): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2019-033", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2019-033", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Donna Stern Slocum served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras from June 1978 to June 1980 as a community health nurse. After training in Tegucigalpa, she was stationed on Roatan, one of the Bay Islands north of Honduras. She worked at a clinic in Coxen Hole. The local doctor departed after five months and Slocum was left to run the clinic by herself with one other nurse. She worked long days seeing patients, prescribing medicines, treating tropical diseases, and suturing. Slocum also had a health program on the local radio station, Radio Roatan. During her second year, due to burnout and loneliness, she took a short break to work at a yacht club. Interviewed and recorded by Barbara Kaare-Lopez, May 6, 2018. 2 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file). Please note: Due to a technical issue, the end of the interview is cut off.", + "dates_of_materials": "6 May 2018", + "extent": "2 digital files (audio; stereo; 72 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "039. Honduras.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Honduras. Slocum, Donna Stern (1978-1980): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Honduras", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2019-033", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2019-033-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/6p4ng63a7147rx51764437t6p6e12c6u.pdf?odc=20231115174156-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/aabbbcef-67f1-48e0-a97f-0e1958ba405f/612a8321-7474-4f68-bc3f-44c33a18cc83/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzJiZDdfZmUxNWRkZmZlNjI4NTQ1NTJjZDVkNDJhMWFhMTEwOGQ5NTlmYjc0OWYzNzY1ZTFmYWFjZDYxMTcxZGZhMGQ2NF8vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS9hYWJiYmNlZi02N2YxLTQ4ZTAtYTk3Zi0wZTE5NThiYTQwNWYvNjEyYTgzMjEtNzQ3NC00ZjY4LWJjM2YtNDRjMzNhMThjYzgzL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Hutto, Texas", + "length": "60 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed December 12, 2018, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Donna Stern Slocum Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Barbara Kaare-Lopez" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Donna Stern Slocum" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:06", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Good evening. Today is Sunday, May 6, 2018. We've got the recorder between us and I am in Hutto, Texas. That's H-U-T-T-O, Texas. My name is Barbara Kaare K-A-A-R-E hyphen Lopez, and I am interviewing Donna Stern Slocum, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras from June 1978 until I guess it was July 1980. No, yeah, July 1980. And she worked in the Ministry of Health as a nursing supervisor, etcetera, or as she has told me, as a doctor. Dr. Stern also. Okay. So how are you doing today, Donna?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:58", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I am fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:59", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Okay. We're going to start with the questions. And this like I said, this should be between us. And there's 13 questions that we use as a guideline. So some of them might be a little bit redundant, but we're ready to go, okay? So I would, if you could start with describing your present situation, your family, work, where you live, interests. We'll get to the Peace Corps stuff after that, okay? So what would you like to tell us about your family?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:01:33", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I am, I live in Hutto, Texas, and I'm married to Dennis Slocum now for 30 years. We have one daughter who's 28, and I have just recently retired. I worked for 43 years as a registered nurse in various different capacities. And my interests, such as hobbies, would be my, my primary interest is piano. I also play the organ. I was an organist for a little over 20 years for a church, played the pipe organ. I'd love to get better at the violin. I read a lot. Cook. Would love to start traveling again. Was interested, I was on the Historic Preservation Commission for over four years in the town that I was in. And, um, that kind of sums it up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:02:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Think back to the year before you joined the Peace Corps. That would be 1977. And what can you remember about your life then? You know, then they give other examples too about if you want to talk a little bit about your childhood, education. But, um, what were you doing the year before Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:02:51", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The year before I was in the Peace Corps, I lived in Austin, Texas, and I was a nurse at that time working on a surgical floor. And I had been thinking about doing this ever since I was very young so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:03:08", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like how young?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:03:10", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I remember when Kennedy was president and the Peace Corps was formed and seeing the advertisements for it on TV. I just said, I have to do that someday or something similar to it. So it was something I had longed to do for a long time, for many reasons. And so I felt that that was the right time to make a move. I had a cousin who was dying of cancer, so I quit my job and went to South Texas and helped take care of him for about three months. So it was a good time to do that because I had signed up for the Peace Corps and I had that break time before I was going to leave in June." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:03:44", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm. Okay. What do you want to tell us anything about your education?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:03:49", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went to the University of Texas at Austin and did my pre reqs there. I was actually going to go to their nursing program, but my family doctor talked me into going to a diploma school program that was a very good program in town at the time. So I went for a year and a half to do my pre reqs there and then I went to a diploma school in Austin." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:04:11", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the name was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:04:12", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was Brackenridge School of Nursing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:04:14", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you spell that for us?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:04:16", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "B-R-A-C-K-E-N-R-I-D-G-E." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:04:19", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Was it two years? Three years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:04:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Three." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:04:24", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Three years. Okay. What year did you graduate in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:04:28", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In '74." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:04:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "'74 from Brackenridge. Okay. Any other experiences you might want to share about why you became a Peace Corps volunteer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:04:37", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, for one thing, being a nurse, I just wanted to see in other countries, undeveloped countries, underdeveloped countries rather, um, how medicine operated, just how different it might be somewhere else. And I just, it sounded like a decent thing to do also. And I was brought up in the church and of course, we had visitors at times that were missionaries. And so that had an influence on me too, just seeing what they had done. And I mean, there's this big world out there, and that was one way to see it. Plus, I had traveled some and I thought, you know, you go on a trip for 1 to 2 weeks and it's just too fast and it's too artificial. You really need to live there. So I said, if I would go live somewhere else, why don't I do this? Because I always wanted to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:05:34", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Like I said, the second question is, why did you join the Peace Corps? You sort of touched on that. Was there anything else you might want to add about why you joined the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:05:46", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I, yeah, I think I probably answered that question. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:05:49", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. We'll go to the third question. How did you hear about the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:05:53", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I was a kid. TV." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:05:55", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "TV. Okay. And what made you decide to apply? Anything else you might want to add to that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:06:02", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I mean, I knew that when you're young and you're unencumbered and you're not married and you don't have children and bills, you have to do these things. You have to make that decision to do it. And, uh, I just felt like it would be a great adventure on top of everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:06:17", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. How did you apply? Meaning like, did you have to go somewhere to interview?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:06:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was an office in Austin, so I applied at the office and was interviewed there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:06:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. How long did it take you to be accepted?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:06:31", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember. It was, it was quick. I remember it was pretty quick because there were three groups that were going to be leaving just months after I decided to do it. I really wanted to go to Africa. That was my first choice, but there were no groups being formed for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:06:50", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. The other part of the question, did you have a specific country? And you just said Africa." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:06:57", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, just the continent of Africa. Probably just whatever would have been available and the. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:07:04", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have a specific project? I mean, you wanted to be a nurse, I'm assuming." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:07:08", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wanted to work in community health." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:07:12", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, community health. Yes. Okay. Good. The fourth question, what were your friends and your family's reactions when you were accepted?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:07:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The truth?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:07:25", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Well, I told the truth in mine. And then you can add along that, you know, was there any hesitation or reservation on your part, your family and friends' part? How do they react when you were accepted?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:07:39", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, some of my friends thought I was odd to want to do that. My father didn't understand why I wanted to volunteer two years of my life and not get paid really for it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:07:56", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:07:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He thought that was not a good choice of, um, of a way to spend your, your time. And what was the rest of the question?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:08:07", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, your, you talked about your. How about your mom? How did she react?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:08:12", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She was pretty noncommittal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:08:14", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:08:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:08:15", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about your brother and sisters?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:08:17", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They thought it was cool. They were little kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:08:19", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. How about your friends? How did they react?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:08:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some of my friends thought it was a great thing, especially my nurse friends, and other friends didn't understand. They, you know, they didn't understand. They thought there were, you know, safety issues, health issues. There were risks involved with it. And then some thought that it was just, you know, could be just a great adventure. So was it mixed, a lot of mixed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:08:43", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Do you remember any particular remark, you know, that pro or con, that has stuck with you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:08:50", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My father's, that I wouldn't get paid." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:08:54", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:08:54", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That it was just not a sound decision in that respect." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:08:58", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. We'll move on to the fifth question. What project were you invited to join? Oh, and, you know, I'm sort of interrupting because I kind of remember you went to Choluteca first. Okay. So we'll start with, Donna, am I correct, you had two different sites?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:09:15", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, I only lived in one site, but I was offered two sites." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:09:20", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let's talk about the first site you were offered, which you have told me in the past was Choluteca." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:09:28", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't remember the name, but now that you reminded me. Yeah, I believe that was it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:09:32", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think it was. Okay. What were you supposed to do when you went there? Well, not that it happened, but." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:09:41", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What they were looking for was literally just some more manpower, or woman power rather. They were looking for a night supervisor, a night shift supervisor in the hospital." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:09:55", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:09:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I did turn that down because I, for one thing, was not interested in working in a hospital, and I was not interested in working the night shift. And I felt that what I really wanted to do was teach work in an outpatient community. And I felt that that was going to probably have a bigger impact than. That there was other nurses that could fill that open slot for a nursing supervisor on the night shift." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:10:23", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So that's what you thought initially that you were going to be doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:10:29", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:10:29", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I know we'll talk later on about your, the site you really did go to. Okay. Let's go to the sixth question. Training, where did you train? And then you could add things like if you want to say about the faculty, if there was a syllabus, you know, technical studies, other factors. And then there is another part of it that talks about the language training. So tell us first about where you were trained. Where did you live?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:10:57", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was trained in Tegucigalpa at the training center, it was called, and I lived with a host family in the suburbs of Tegucigalpa. I was their first volunteer trainee that they'd ever had. And sadly, either they misunderstood their, um, their role, or I'm not sure what happened there, but I really never, I had very little contact with them. I ate by myself. They put the food on the table and I ate and then they ate later. They didn't interact with me. They didn't, I very rarely was invited into the living room with them to watch, they had a TV, and I was sad and disappointed about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:11:54", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:11:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because I didn't get to speak Spanish either. I lost that opportunity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:12:00", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. Okay. Tell us about your, the faculty at the training center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:12:04", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The faculty was lovely. They were, they were so nice. The women, they were mainly women that were teaching the courses, and they were very, very good teachers, very good educators. I thought that the training language course was so good. I really love the format of that. And I went to Honduras really with no, um, no grasp of the language at all. And I felt that I came out. I was, I was scored zero." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:12:34", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, in Spanish? Didn't they say los cero?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:12:36", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Los cero." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:12:38", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you study Spanish in Hutto?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:12:42", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did in high school. But that had been probably, what, six years prior to that? And it was a high school Spanish course. I learned how to say hola Paco que tal and that was about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:12:54", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, I've heard that before. I think I know Paco myself. Um, technical studies during training. What did you learn technically?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:13:06", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hmm. In as far as my job or my?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:13:13", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just because we were in the same group, remember we would go visit a hospital or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:13:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We observed, but we didn't get training. I mean, we weren't really training in anything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:13:23", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We did observation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:13:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, we just observed and we got to just tour the big maternelle infantile hospital." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:13:29", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:13:29", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And someone fainted there. I remember one of our colleagues." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:13:34", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. One did faint when." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:13:36", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Fainted when we saw some of the things that we saw there. But I don't recall having been given any training that would have had anything to do with skills or actual on the job tasks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:13:54", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. What I remember were the observations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:13:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:13:58", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. What did you think about the other people in your training group?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:14:01", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it's a great bunch of people. We had a great group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:14:05", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:14:05", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Made friends with some of them that I'm still friends with. Including you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:14:09", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, that's true. For the listener, Donna and I have known each other since 1978." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:14:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "40 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:14:17", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good Lord. Okay. Do you want to say anything else about the language training before we move on? You thought it was good?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:14:25", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought it was really good. I really did, because I've subsequently taken other language courses and nothing compares to as good as that was. I mean, I remember having a headache at the end of every single day, but the drills that they put you through and the fact that it was all oral." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:14:41", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:14:42", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All oral. You just sat there and talked and talked and talked. And you did get to see it written on the blackboard, but it was oral. It was a great, for me at least, the way I learn it was perfect for me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:14:52", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Okay. Selection. Well, I know you were selected, but were you surprised by anything with the selection process or disappointed? I don't know, that might. Yeah, I mean, we were all selected." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:15:08", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I was going to say no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:15:09", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. I think we'll skip that part. Um, hindsight. Did training prepare you? Was it useful to your Peace Corps service, the training that you had?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:15:20", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the language prep was really good. But as far as the individual aspects of each person, what they were going to end up doing, I didn't really have any training at all for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:15:35", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:15:36", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know if you want me to talk about that later. Do you want me to talk about that now?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:15:39", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you want to say anything, yeah, anything that, um, I mean, I do know like where you did end up. Um. Do you feel like you were prepared when you went to your site? Did the training prepare you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:15:55", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not for what I needed and what I ended up having to do there. I wasn't prepared at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:16:02", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. Okay. If you had gone to Choluteca and stayed there, do you think you might have been prepared?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:16:06", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, because I was, I had experience in hospitals. I was a hospital nurse. But what I ended up doing, I'll just go into it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:16:13", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:16:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Was I was in a clinic on the Bay Islands off the north coast of Honduras. When I arrived there, they did have a physician and a dentist, but the physician only stayed for about five months and she was never replaced. So for the rest of the." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:16:31", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Never?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:16:31", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, for the rest of the year and a half that I was there, I was, doctors thought I was the doctor. They called me doctora." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:16:37", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:16:38", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Even though I corrected them every time. I said, I'm sorry, I'm not a doctor, I'm a nurse. They'd say, that's okay doctora." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:16:45", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:16:46", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But so what I was left with was no physician to, no resource person, no physician to have as a backup. And tropical diseases that I was not familiar with at all. And there were some protocols in the clinic for malaria and dengue and things like that. But there were so many things that I was just so unfamiliar with. Fortunately, I received from two physicians that, early on when I was there, had come to the islands for a visit and they visited the clinic and they saw the situation that I was in. And when they got home, they sent me four books on tropical medicine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:17:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:17:29", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:17:29", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:17:29", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they also sent me information on treatments and drugs and disease recognition, and those books were so valuable to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:17:38", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:17:39", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was so tempted to take them back to the States with me, but I left them there because they were wonderful. And that was a real godsend." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:17:45", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:17:46", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I did things that, I mean, I functioned as a physician in so many respects. And I remember thinking, I'm going to get sued. But then I thought, well, I don't think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:17:55", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, right, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:17:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably not. But I delivered babies and I was taught by the dentist how to suture. I sutured a lot of wounds." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:18:02", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The dentist taught you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:18:04", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The dentist taught me how to suture." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:18:05", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the dentist's name?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:18:06", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:18:07", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:18:08", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was just, it's been, what? How long has it been since then, 39 years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:18:11", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:18:13", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember. I know what she looks like, but I don't remember her name. But she was great and she did help me how to suture. And I did a lot of machete wounds, especially in children. I took care of a lot of asthmatics, delivered babies, as I said, um, and of course, the usual. Malaria, dengue, parasites, amoebas, worms, you know, accidents, seizures." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:18:38", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:18:40", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I learned a lot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:18:41", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, you have, you have a wealth of stories that you could tell." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:18:45", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:18:47", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which we will continue with. Just thinking about, can you remember when you arrived in country? How did you feel? You know, like observing the people, listening, smelling even? I mean, how did you feel when you arrived in Honduras?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:19:03", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, being in a country, of course, I'd been in a foreign country before, but just being there for days, which turned into weeks, and not understanding the language, because I arrived with such little grasp of Spanish, that was something that I found to be very disconcerting. I knew it would get better, but that was hard. Um. Things were different, obviously, you're in another country. Things were different. I don't remember feeling lonely or feeling that I'd made the wrong decision. I was very excited about being there and just, you know, getting on with the whole experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:19:41", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Anything that you remember that you might want to share about the people when you arrived?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:19:47", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Hondurans?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:19:48", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The Hondurans." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:19:48", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Or the other Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:19:50", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The Hondurans." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:19:51", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, at that point honestly, we didn't have a lot of, you know, it was mainly walking in the street, going into shops. The only, the only real contact we had with Hondurans was mainly with the training center at that point. And then my host family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:20:09", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Who did not include you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:20:11", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Who, very sadly, yeah. Just kind of, you know. And my friend who's sitting right here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "00:20:16", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "00:20:17", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She had a lovely host family and I loved to go to her house because they all ate meals together and laughed and talked and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "00:20:24", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They included me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "00:20:25", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they included you on everything. And I was kind of sad that I had that. At the same time, I was just glad I had your house to go to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "00:20:33", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. We've already touched on your assignment, but let's see what else we might talk about with your assignment. So you never, you did make a visit to Choluteca I believe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "00:20:46", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "00:20:47", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did you know right from the get-go, this is not for me?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "00:20:51", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Immediately." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "00:20:52", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. How did Peace Corps react when you told them, I can't go there, or whatever words you used?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "00:20:58", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "00:20:59", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They were? Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "00:21:00", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, my, uh, the manager, the program manager was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "00:21:07", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ione." + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "00:21:07", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ione, Ione Adams, yeah. She was, she just said, okay, you know, we don't, if this isn't going to fit you. And she also, I don't know that she really understood that they wanted me to work the night shift." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "00:21:18", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "00:21:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that that really wasn't an understanding that they had had. And I said, if I work the night shift, I'll go back to the States where there's air conditioning. I can sleep during the day and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "00:21:29", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, and if I remember right, did she say something like was it the nurse supervisor that worked there, kind of operated vending machines?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "00:21:37", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, my gosh. Yeah. That the director of nursing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "00:21:40", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Director of nursing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "00:21:41", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Had in the courtyard of the hospital a little kiosk, and she sold sodas there and candy. And so that's kind of what she did during the day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "00:21:51", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did she direct the nursing department, as far as you know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "00:21:54", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't. I can't see how, but I don't know. I wasn't there long enough to find out. One thing I did feel a little sad about was after the fact, I did wonder if I could have impacted it at all, because, you know, I was concerned about things like maintaining sterility and understanding just basic concepts of, you know, modern day concepts of care. They had Foley catheters dripping urine into coffee cans on the side of the bed. There were dogs running in and out of the ward." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "00:22:23", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, there were? Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "00:22:24", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, the linens didn't look very clean. It was a very, very sad hospital. No, of course, no air conditioning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "00:22:31", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "00:22:32", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the patients." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "00:22:33", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very hot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "00:22:33", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, extremely hot. And no one ate unless family brought them food. Very, very sad. And I after I said I couldn't do it, I felt. I felt bad. I really did. To this day, when I think about it, I wonder did I make the right decision? However, where I did go, they didn't have a doctor, so they really kind of needed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "00:22:52", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "00:22:52", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They needed someone there. So. And the fact was they just needed a nurse to work the night shift, is what they needed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "00:23:02", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Okay, well, let's talk more specifically than about your life in Roatan, one of the Bay Islands. And, you know, you went back and told the program manager for health, Ione Adams, you couldn't go to Choluteca. She seemed fine with it. How did you end up in Roatan?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "00:23:22", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, she, when I went back to Tegucigalpa and I told Ione that I just felt that this, this was not the reason I came. She said, well, guess what, we've got something. We haven't had a volunteer in the Bay Islands in years, in many years, and something's coming up in the clinic there, in an outpatient clinic. And I said, that is exactly what I was hoping to have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "00:23:44", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I forgot you said you want community health." + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "00:23:46", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I really, really, really wanted community health. And so that is how I ended up there. So I made the visit, and the minute I was there, I said, this is exactly what I want. There was a physician there at the time, and so my role was going to be more of a teaching capacity, especially in perinatal, handwashing, hygiene, boiling water, that kind of thing. So, um, that's how it started. And then the doctor was gone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "00:24:14", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In five months." + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "00:24:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In five months." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "00:24:15", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And they never replaced the doctor?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "00:24:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They replaced the, they, we did get a physician for a very short amount of time, but he actually also had a karate studio. And so he spent a really large amount of his time in his karate studio." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "00:24:33", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don't remember that, but that's very interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "00:24:35", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "00:24:36", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Listener, I'm sorry I'm laughing, but okay, so we're talking about the doctor's karate studio." + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "00:24:43", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He also had a wife that was always at the clinic, Betty." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "00:24:49", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don't remember her." + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "00:24:51", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Remember me telling you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "00:24:52", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think, you could tell me more because actually it was quite an interesting story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "00:24:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She was kind of running the clinic and then even when he wasn't there, she was running the clinic when he was at the karate studio. And he also had some very dubious practices. He did a DNC in the clinic with unsterile equipment without the patient's permission. And I went to the Ministry of Health and along with the dentist, she went with me, and we talked to the head, the head, she was the manager or whatever they're called." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "00:25:32", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At the Ministry of Health." + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "00:25:33", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And, um, and I had kind of a laundry list of things that were, plus some equipment that was disappearing from the clinic. So he was removed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "00:25:43", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "00:25:43", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So he was removed and which was okay. But then we'd never got a physician again. So that's how I ended up pretty much for a year and a half not having a doctor there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "00:25:56", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. Okay. Can you explain a typical day, and maybe there wasn't a typical day, but what comes to your mind when I ask you that question? A typical day at that centro de salud, I'm guessing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "00:26:10", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, well, Monday through Friday I was there by 8:00. And of course, we shut down for, was it an hour or 2 hours? I can't remember. But so we shut down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "00:26:21", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At lunchtime, I'm guessing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "00:26:22", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For the mid time, for lunch. And then we were there till 5:00 or 6:00, and we just saw a slew of patients. And I did have what would be the equivalent of an American LVN nurse who helped me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "00:26:35", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And was is LVN, Donna, for the listener?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "00:26:37", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "An LVN is a licensed vocational nurse who doesn't have as much education as a registered nurse. And their role is very different. And she was a great nurse, so she was really good. She taught, she did teach me a lot. Thank goodness for her." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "00:26:52", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "She did, good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "00:26:53", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She did. And we would usually spend the end of each day washing gloves, turning them inside out, drying them, wrapping them in brown paper bags, and then sterilizing them the next morning in the pressure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "00:27:07", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the autoclave, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "00:27:08", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. The pressure cooker." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "00:27:09", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, pressure cooker? I thought you had an autoclave." + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "00:27:12", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We put it on the kerosene stove." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "00:27:13", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "00:27:15", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then we boiled the needles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "00:27:17", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "00:27:17", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We boiled the needles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "00:27:18", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And use them again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "00:27:20", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We'd use them until you could no longer see the markings on the side, so you were kind of guessing at the dosage. Dosing them out, as sad and as scary as that is, I mean, thank goodness we didn't have anything greater than a three CC syringe. So you could kind of, most of them were used for giving penicillin. So. And I didn't even have a magic marker to mark them on the sides. So you would just kind of guess from whatever other syringes you had. So we had to prepare a lot of equipment. And order supplies, do that kind of thing. But I also often had patients come to me in the evening and it was usually." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "00:28:00", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They knew where you lived." + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "00:28:00", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They knew where I lived and it was mainly kids that came and. But at the clinic, kids came without their parents. I mean, it was very unusual for kids to show up with their parents." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "00:28:12", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "With their parents." + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "00:28:13", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "With their parents. And often they came in for something like an injury, usually a machete injury, and I had to suture it, clean it up and suture it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "00:28:22", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "00:28:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, uh, but at my house, I had one little patient. His name was Tony. He was a doll. He had bad asthma. So I kept aminophylline at my house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "00:28:34", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because of him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "00:28:35", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because of him. So I had syringes and tourniquets and all the equipment that needed to give him aminophylline. And that was all I had, aminophylline, that was it. But it would usually, it would fix it. And then he would stay for a while. And I'd give him a peanut butter sandwich. And he liked to sing. So once he could breathe again, he would sit on my porch and sing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "00:28:55", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really? That's a lovely story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "00:28:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was so adorable. He was. I heard down the road that he died of an asthma attack. So. Yeah, but he was, he was such a doll." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "00:29:07", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I'm assuming that you could tell many, many stories about your time as Dr. Stern. Oh, excuse me, La Doctora Stern in Roatan. Now, what was the name of the town you lived in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "00:29:20", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Coxen Hole." + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "00:29:20", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you spell that for us?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "00:29:22", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "C-O-X-E-N." + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "00:29:26", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hole. H-O-L-E. And that was the town in Roatan, the island of Roatan, where you lived. And other stories may come to mind or anything else you might want to share about a typical day at your assignment in Coxen Hole?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "00:29:41", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, initially when we had a physician, my typical day was mainly doing classes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "00:29:46", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "00:29:46", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I would go to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "00:29:47", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Who did you teach for?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "00:29:48", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I started by trying to teach some prenatal classes, pregnant moms, and those were so interesting. I learned more than I taught." + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "00:29:58", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Oh, and I'm interrupting myself. What language did you speak in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "00:30:01", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, English. Everything, almost everything was in English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "00:30:04", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "00:30:04", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Unless someone from the Ministry of Health came. And then I had to find, I did find out that my regular English wasn't going to work because it was Caribbean English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "00:30:13", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yours, for what?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 237, + "timestamp": "00:30:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My English. For example, they didn't understand me, the way I spoke. For example, it was a Caribbean English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 238, + "timestamp": "00:30:22", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay, Caribbean, that they spoke?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 239, + "timestamp": "00:30:24", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That they spoke. For example, I remember the first time someone came in and said to me, I said, I said, what's going on? And they said, I got one open belly mon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 240, + "timestamp": "00:30:33", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, hold on. For the listener, I didn't get that. Can you repeat that once again, Donna?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 241, + "timestamp": "00:30:40", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I got one open belly mon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 242, + "timestamp": "00:30:42", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I got one open belly mon. Okay, could you tell us what that means?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 243, + "timestamp": "00:30:45", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That means I have diarrhea. I have an open belly, man." + }, + { + "turn_id": 244, + "timestamp": "00:30:50", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, I never would have guessed that one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 245, + "timestamp": "00:30:52", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In other words, your belly is open and everything's coming out. You have diarrhea." + }, + { + "turn_id": 246, + "timestamp": "00:30:57", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 247, + "timestamp": "00:30:58", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Or I remember one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 248, + "timestamp": "00:30:59", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you find that out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 249, + "timestamp": "00:31:00", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had to keep asking the question. But they, that's how they would describe diarrhea. And I remember one fellow that came in that was injured, and I said, what happened? He said, I fell off she moto. I fell off of her motorcycle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 250, + "timestamp": "00:31:16", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. That one kind of made sense. Okay. But did you say she moto?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 251, + "timestamp": "00:31:21", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She moto. Her motorcycle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 252, + "timestamp": "00:31:24", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh. Her." + }, + { + "turn_id": 253, + "timestamp": "00:31:25", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Her motorcycle. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 254, + "timestamp": "00:31:27", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really. Okay. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 255, + "timestamp": "00:31:30", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, yeah, so language was, um, my Spanish sadly did not improve a lot the two years that I was here because I spoke English. So then when people that did speak Spanish came in, which was not very often, I really struggled. I really struggled a lot. I did, I mean, I did learn some. I mean, there was enough spoken that I got to practice some and the LVN spoke Spanish only." + }, + { + "turn_id": 256, + "timestamp": "00:31:55", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 257, + "timestamp": "00:31:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But the rest of us. I had a couple of other helpers that helped in the, and they spoke, they spoke English, the Caribbean English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 258, + "timestamp": "00:32:04", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "She moto." + }, + { + "turn_id": 259, + "timestamp": "00:32:05", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She moto." + }, + { + "turn_id": 260, + "timestamp": "00:32:05", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 261, + "timestamp": "00:32:07", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, uh, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 262, + "timestamp": "00:32:09", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Tell us about your living conditions. Where did you live in Coxen Hole?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 263, + "timestamp": "00:32:16", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I lived in a wooden structure that was made out of plywood sheets on pier and beam." + }, + { + "turn_id": 264, + "timestamp": "00:32:25", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On what?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 265, + "timestamp": "00:32:25", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Pier and beam, just up off the ground." + }, + { + "turn_id": 266, + "timestamp": "00:32:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 267, + "timestamp": "00:32:28", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And there weren't any windows, there weren't any screens. There were just wooden shutters that opened and closed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 268, + "timestamp": "00:32:34", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So an opening, I mean." + }, + { + "turn_id": 269, + "timestamp": "00:32:35", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just an opening with a wooden shutter I could close. Yeah. And then the walls." + }, + { + "turn_id": 270, + "timestamp": "00:32:40", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any screens on your windows?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 271, + "timestamp": "00:32:41", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No screens. And the walls did not meet the roof. So there was about maybe a 4 to 5 inch opening. Which kind of was good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 272, + "timestamp": "00:32:51", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For ventilation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 273, + "timestamp": "00:32:52", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Air path. However, everything, every varmint in the world came in too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 274, + "timestamp": "00:32:56", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us the varmints that came in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 275, + "timestamp": "00:32:59", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, I had a terrible rat problem for a while, and I had to hire some guys that were coming through town that said they were exterminators to get rid of my rats. It was good timing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 276, + "timestamp": "00:33:10", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 277, + "timestamp": "00:33:10", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And when they came into the house to get rid of the rats, a bunch of snakes slithered out of the house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 278, + "timestamp": "00:33:17", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you know what kind of snakes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 279, + "timestamp": "00:33:19", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were black. And I'm not sure. I don't think they were poisonous. But I didn't even know I had the snakes. But I had a semblance of a kitchen. There were these, there was a little row of cabinets, and they were underneath these cabinets." + }, + { + "turn_id": 280, + "timestamp": "00:33:32", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The snakes were under the cabinets, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 281, + "timestamp": "00:33:34", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So there was a snake nest under there. So whatever poison they used got rid of the snakes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 282, + "timestamp": "00:33:39", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Also." + }, + { + "turn_id": 283, + "timestamp": "00:33:39", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And also some spiders came out too. And then that night the rats commenced to rattle around on the rafters. And I didn't have a ceiling, it was just rafters. And these rats were big and they were really, really bold. I remember playing a flashlight on them. You could see their red reflex in their eyes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 284, + "timestamp": "00:33:59", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 285, + "timestamp": "00:33:59", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they just stared at me. It was like, I dare you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 286, + "timestamp": "00:34:02", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you guess how long they might have been?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 287, + "timestamp": "00:34:04", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh my gosh, 12 inches? They were so huge." + }, + { + "turn_id": 288, + "timestamp": "00:34:08", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh my gosh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 289, + "timestamp": "00:34:08", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they would there was at least four, maybe five of them, that walked across the rafters. One night one fell. And I said, that's it. And so I got the exterminators." + }, + { + "turn_id": 290, + "timestamp": "00:34:17", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did it ever fall on you or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 291, + "timestamp": "00:34:19", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, thank God. I got the, I found the exterminators. They'd gone to the other end of the island. They came back and I told them, the rats are still in the house. And they were so hilarious. They said, you know, I think we need Kill Rat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 292, + "timestamp": "00:34:32", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is that like rat kill, would you say so?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 293, + "timestamp": "00:34:35", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's some kind of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 294, + "timestamp": "00:34:35", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Kill Rat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 295, + "timestamp": "00:34:36", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was called Kill Rat and it literally was in English and it said Kill Rat on it. So they ran out and bought Kill Rat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 296, + "timestamp": "00:34:42", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 297, + "timestamp": "00:34:44", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Put it in the house. But in the meantime, I had to sleep on my neighbor's porch and I remember hearing them rattling around and putting the flashlight over to my house at night and I'd see them walking around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 298, + "timestamp": "00:34:56", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, the rats?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 299, + "timestamp": "00:34:57", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, but they put the Kill Rat out and within about a week they were gone. And I got to go back to the house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 300, + "timestamp": "00:35:05", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh my goodness." + }, + { + "turn_id": 301, + "timestamp": "00:35:06", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 302, + "timestamp": "00:35:06", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Snakes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 303, + "timestamp": "00:35:07", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Snakes, spiders, rats." + }, + { + "turn_id": 304, + "timestamp": "00:35:09", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about bats?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 305, + "timestamp": "00:35:11", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Nope, no bats." + }, + { + "turn_id": 306, + "timestamp": "00:35:13", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No bats." + }, + { + "turn_id": 307, + "timestamp": "00:35:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No bats." + }, + { + "turn_id": 308, + "timestamp": "00:35:15", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Did you have a big mosquito problem?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 309, + "timestamp": "00:35:16", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 310, + "timestamp": "00:35:17", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Inside the house, I mean?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 311, + "timestamp": "00:35:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the house, out of the house. And initially, I didn't realize how bad the mosquitoes were on the island, and I was just eaten alive on my arms and lower legs. And I found out that I either had to wear repellent all the time or long sleeve everything, and it was too hot to wear long sleeves. So I did the repellent and I initially had infected mosquito bites on my arms. To this day, I'm scarred from it. They got so infected." + }, + { + "turn_id": 312, + "timestamp": "00:35:44", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 313, + "timestamp": "00:35:44", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it's fading. A little bit dramatic over that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 314, + "timestamp": "00:35:50", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you ever get malaria or dengue fever?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 315, + "timestamp": "00:35:54", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I didn't get dengue, but I, when I returned to the States, I had symptoms of malaria. I started having cyclic fevers. And of course, when I went to the doctor, they did the blood test. It was negative because you have to be febrile basically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 316, + "timestamp": "00:36:09", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 317, + "timestamp": "00:36:10", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it only, it only happened once and then it was over. And I don't know, I don't know if it was malaria or not. I really don't know. I did. There was a PhD student from Princeton who was there when I was there and he." + }, + { + "turn_id": 318, + "timestamp": "00:36:21", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In Roatan, in Coxen Hole?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 319, + "timestamp": "00:36:22", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, yeah, he was working on, um. There was a different language spoken on the other end of the island that he was writing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 320, + "timestamp": "00:36:30", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 321, + "timestamp": "00:36:31", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was Garifano [Garifuna]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 322, + "timestamp": "00:36:32", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. And for the, for the listener, would you spell Garifano?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 323, + "timestamp": "00:36:36", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I don't know that there is a spelling." + }, + { + "turn_id": 324, + "timestamp": "00:36:39", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 325, + "timestamp": "00:36:39", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "G-A-R. Garif?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 326, + "timestamp": "00:36:41", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I-F-U-N-A." + }, + { + "turn_id": 327, + "timestamp": "00:36:43", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I-N-O. Garifino?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 328, + "timestamp": "00:36:45", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh. Oh yeah. Okay. What is, what is Garifuna?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 329, + "timestamp": "00:36:50", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It is, uh, Garifuna. It was a language spoken by the inhabitants of the opposite end of the island that I was living on. And it was supposedly a combination of. I don't know if I'm remembering." + }, + { + "turn_id": 330, + "timestamp": "00:37:06", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "An African dialect, wasn't it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 331, + "timestamp": "00:37:08", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Because they were, um." + }, + { + "turn_id": 332, + "timestamp": "00:37:11", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Had been slaves I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 333, + "timestamp": "00:37:12", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They had been. They came from the Mosquitia and then they were also from, they were also Black." + }, + { + "turn_id": 334, + "timestamp": "00:37:19", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 335, + "timestamp": "00:37:20", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it was like an Indian and a Black combination and they had their own language. And so he was working on this. And the reason I'm bringing him up is he got a terrible case of dengue fever. Terrible. And he came to my house and we had some IVs and actually they sold IVs you could buy for your own use at the local pharmacy. So I went and got some IVs and I let him stay in my house and I gave him IV fluids and medication for the fever and whatever I had at the time. And he improved enough to go home, to get a plane and get home. So and he didn't come back for the duration that I was there. He wasn't finished. So I don't know if he ever came back. It was, he was pretty sick." + }, + { + "turn_id": 336, + "timestamp": "00:38:05", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 337, + "timestamp": "00:38:05", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And, you know, this was so long ago that I may not be remembering correctly. He may have been in a hospital on the mainland for a while. I would imagine, because he was really sick." + }, + { + "turn_id": 338, + "timestamp": "00:38:13", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 339, + "timestamp": "00:38:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, but I never got dengue." + }, + { + "turn_id": 340, + "timestamp": "00:38:17", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. How was your relation with the people of Coxen Hole?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 341, + "timestamp": "00:38:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was good. It was good, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 342, + "timestamp": "00:38:25", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you make friends?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 343, + "timestamp": "00:38:26", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. They were friendly and they were nice and being that we all spoke English, it was easier to get to know people and they were accustomed to, since it was an island, there was this, there was a resort on the other side of the island. So they were accustomed to seeing Americans and people from other countries come through off the little DC-3s that brought in the tourists." + }, + { + "turn_id": 344, + "timestamp": "00:38:48", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "DC-3s, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 345, + "timestamp": "00:38:49", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "DC-3s." + }, + { + "turn_id": 346, + "timestamp": "00:38:49", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Those are rather old aren't they?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 347, + "timestamp": "00:38:51", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We, the only thing that came to the island was DC-3s and they had a caliche landing strip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 348, + "timestamp": "00:38:58", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Say that again, they had a what?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 349, + "timestamp": "00:38:59", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Caliche. Caliche is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 350, + "timestamp": "00:39:01", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What is that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 351, + "timestamp": "00:39:01", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's like the thing that's used for pavement in countries, for country roads. It's kind of dusty, it's a compressed gravel, and there's probably a better explanation for what it is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 352, + "timestamp": "00:39:11", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you know how to spell caliche?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 353, + "timestamp": "00:39:12", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't. It's with a C, I think, caliche. But it was a short runway and I remember many times being on the plane, the DC-3, and I pretty much knew from the landmarks when we needed to get lifted and sometimes thinking, oh my God, but." + }, + { + "turn_id": 354, + "timestamp": "00:39:29", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Otherwise you'd be in the water." + }, + { + "turn_id": 355, + "timestamp": "00:39:31", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Otherwise you'd be in the water, but nothing ever happened. Those were amazing planes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 356, + "timestamp": "00:39:35", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So I was like a gravel like." + }, + { + "turn_id": 357, + "timestamp": "00:39:37", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. It was, it wasn't pavement, and it wasn't smooth because it was caliche so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 358, + "timestamp": "00:39:43", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, I never heard that word. Okay. Were there other Peace Corps volunteers in your town?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 359, + "timestamp": "00:39:48", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 360, + "timestamp": "00:39:48", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there other Peace Corps volunteers on the island of Roatan?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 361, + "timestamp": "00:39:51", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 362, + "timestamp": "00:39:52", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about Utila or Guanaja?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 363, + "timestamp": "00:39:55", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 364, + "timestamp": "00:39:55", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 365, + "timestamp": "00:39:55", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was it on the whole thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 366, + "timestamp": "00:39:57", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For the whole time you were there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 367, + "timestamp": "00:39:58", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The whole time, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 368, + "timestamp": "00:39:59", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Now this, I'm not sure why this is here. This is talk about the Peace Corps staff and this is assignment. Um. I'm going to skip that part. Tell us about your leisure time. What did you do when you weren't working at the clinic?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 369, + "timestamp": "00:40:16", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I play the piano and of course I couldn't bring a piano with me. I play the piano, but I couldn't take a piano with me. So I took my, I bought a guitar and took it down there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 370, + "timestamp": "00:40:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you know how to play the guitar?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 371, + "timestamp": "00:40:30", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, but I learned there because I knew I had to play something musical so, and I bought a chord book, so I learned how to play." + }, + { + "turn_id": 372, + "timestamp": "00:40:37", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You taught yourself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 373, + "timestamp": "00:40:38", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it's not that hard, the guitar. So with the chord book, I learned how to play the guitar." + }, + { + "turn_id": 374, + "timestamp": "00:40:44", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 375, + "timestamp": "00:40:44", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not that I play it now, but I did then. I played pretty well for about 20 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 376, + "timestamp": "00:40:49", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what else did you do with your leisure time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 377, + "timestamp": "00:40:50", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I read a lot. That was hard though, because I had to read around a candle or a kerosene lamp and it was really hot. And I usually didn't have time in the day to read. And then on the weekends, fortunately I did have a fair amount of visitors. I didn't know most of them. They came to see me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 378, + "timestamp": "00:41:12", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, who come to visit you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 379, + "timestamp": "00:41:13", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Peace Corps volunteers. And so because it was an island, you know, people wanted to come to the island, so they would come and I would always let anyone stay with me that was a Peace Corps volunteer. So I had." + }, + { + "turn_id": 380, + "timestamp": "00:41:25", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there people you really had no idea who they were?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 381, + "timestamp": "00:41:27", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. Yeah. I usually got a telegram though or. Now, some people showed up and I knew them. I knew who they were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 382, + "timestamp": "00:41:35", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 383, + "timestamp": "00:41:36", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And but there were some, or I would know one person in a group and I'd say, okay, you're going to sleep on the floor, but you can stay here. I've got some sheets. And I remember these two guys, oh my God. They were sleeping on the floor. I think I had ten people in the house that day, and I heard nothing but whining and complaining all night about not having a bed. And I'm like, I have one bed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 384, + "timestamp": "00:41:57", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 385, + "timestamp": "00:41:58", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it's a single. So that's all I've got." + }, + { + "turn_id": 386, + "timestamp": "00:42:00", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Huh. If I may ask, okay, is your house sounds very simple. Did you have a toilet or did you have to use an outhouse?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 387, + "timestamp": "00:42:10", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they. I lived next door to my landlord and my landlord, he was a sailor. He was gone most of the time. But he did have enough of the resources and funds to build a bathroom." + }, + { + "turn_id": 388, + "timestamp": "00:42:23", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Inside your house?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 389, + "timestamp": "00:42:25", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it was, it was attached to the house. So there was a toilet and there was a concrete shower, but there was no water in the house pumped in, but it was hooked to a septic. So what I did, I could use the toilet and I could stand there and take a bath or a shower with like cups. I paid children to go fetch water for me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 390, + "timestamp": "00:42:45", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And where did they go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 391, + "timestamp": "00:42:47", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There, you could go down the hill, down the road. And there were some faucets down there, and they would bring buckets of water to my house. And so I had this big tin that I'd bought, or I had the kids go get for me, and I kept it full of water. And with that, I could bathe every day. And I stood there and just bathed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 392, + "timestamp": "00:43:06", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 393, + "timestamp": "00:43:06", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I could do it with, like, a cereal bowl. I mean, I got so good at it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 394, + "timestamp": "00:43:10", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you mean like a?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 395, + "timestamp": "00:43:12", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A cereal bowl of water, yeah. Two cereal bowls." + }, + { + "turn_id": 396, + "timestamp": "00:43:15", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There was no cereal in there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 397, + "timestamp": "00:43:16", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not usually." + }, + { + "turn_id": 398, + "timestamp": "00:43:19", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 399, + "timestamp": "00:43:19", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But then I had to use a fair amount, of course, to flush the toilet. And honestly, thank gosh, it usually flushed. It really did. I was, I was lucky on the, in that respect. I didn't have electricity. I didn't have any running water. I didn't have a way to cook. I did buy a kerosene burner with the kerosene bottle. And that kind of blew up and smoked and almost burned. And I just said, to heck with that and kind of just lived on sandwiches. I'd go to a restaurant every now and then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 400, + "timestamp": "00:43:49", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Was there, I know some of us on the mainland would go eat, um. I mean, we would pay them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 401, + "timestamp": "00:43:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In homes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 402, + "timestamp": "00:43:56", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In homes. And they would call it a comedor, C-O-M-E-D- O-R, which was like a dining room. Did they have stuff like that in Coxen Hole?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 403, + "timestamp": "00:44:03", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had asked my landlady if she would be interested in letting me buy dinner every night or at least five nights a week. And she wasn't interested in that, for whatever reasons. I think, I don't know. She was busy and she just wasn't always home to cook. And we really on that island, we didn't have comedors, we had restaurants." + }, + { + "turn_id": 404, + "timestamp": "00:44:23", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 405, + "timestamp": "00:44:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And people just didn't really do that. They didn't really have people go to their house and eat. So I would just go to a restaurant or I'd make a sandwich. And one of my favorite things was smoked oysters and sardines. I just loved them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 406, + "timestamp": "00:44:34", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 407, + "timestamp": "00:44:35", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 408, + "timestamp": "00:44:35", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like you would buy them at the store?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 409, + "timestamp": "00:44:36", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would buy them at the store and I would eat them. And there was a man who was of the Baha'i faith who one night in a dream received this wonderful recipe from God for bread. And I'm not kidding. His bread was divine. And so I bought bread from the Baha'i guy every day and I made sandwiches with that. It was delicious bread. I think it just had coconut milk in it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 410, + "timestamp": "00:45:00", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wonder, yes, yeah. Cause I." + }, + { + "turn_id": 411, + "timestamp": "00:45:02", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it was really good. Yeah. So yeah, that's kind of how I ate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 412, + "timestamp": "00:45:07", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Since I know that you, living on the island, that people would go there to snorkel, scuba dive, swim, you know. Did you, were you able to do any of these activities on the weekends?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 413, + "timestamp": "00:45:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. I befriended some people who were in other ministries, agriculture, fisheries. And so I became friends with them. So we would snorkel together. I never scuba dived, but I did snorkel and we would swim. And sometimes, you know, other Peace Corps volunteers, of course, you know, go swimming with them. Most of that did not occur in Coxen Hole. That was not a good beach there. It really wasn't a beach as a matter of fact. It was filled with outhouses over the water. So you didn't do that there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 414, + "timestamp": "00:45:50", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 415, + "timestamp": "00:45:50", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I mean that was just." + }, + { + "turn_id": 416, + "timestamp": "00:45:52", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Outhouses over the water." + }, + { + "turn_id": 417, + "timestamp": "00:45:52", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Outhouses over the water for as far as you could see. So you did not get in the water there. So you had to go walk to a beach. Of course I had a bicycle, but, uh. Or you would take a busito to the other side of the island where there was a resort." + }, + { + "turn_id": 418, + "timestamp": "00:46:07", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A busito was a little bus?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 419, + "timestamp": "00:46:08", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's a little bus, yes. And hopefully it had brakes. I remember several times being on the bus and the fellow driving the bus kept downshifting when we went downhill. I remember one time I was sitting at the front. I said, why do you keep downshifting?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 420, + "timestamp": "00:46:22", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No brakes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 421, + "timestamp": "00:46:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And he said, no hay frenos." + }, + { + "turn_id": 422, + "timestamp": "00:46:24", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which, and tell us what no hay frenos means?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 423, + "timestamp": "00:46:27", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No brakes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 424, + "timestamp": "00:46:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No brakes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 425, + "timestamp": "00:46:29", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm like, oh well, dios mio. He's not going fast. We'll be fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 426, + "timestamp": "00:46:37", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How often do you think you would have Peace Corps volunteers just show up to stay with you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 427, + "timestamp": "00:46:42", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, around the holidays, I would have a number of them and then I could go for a couple of months without anyone coming." + }, + { + "turn_id": 428, + "timestamp": "00:46:48", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. It wasn't like every week?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 429, + "timestamp": "00:46:49", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no, no. It was a real hit and miss thing. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 430, + "timestamp": "00:46:54", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Did you, were there dances?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 431, + "timestamp": "00:46:57", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 432, + "timestamp": "00:46:59", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Movie theater?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 433, + "timestamp": "00:47:01", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 434, + "timestamp": "00:47:02", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 435, + "timestamp": "00:47:03", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sometimes. It was, it was, it. Pretty much when you went, the reels usually broke." + }, + { + "turn_id": 436, + "timestamp": "00:47:11", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 437, + "timestamp": "00:47:11", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it was still fun to go. And of course, there were dogs running in and out of the movie theater. There were ladies that were always selling sandwiches out front. You could buy beer inside. And if the movie wasn't good from the balcony, the beer bottles hit the screen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 438, + "timestamp": "00:47:24", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 439, + "timestamp": "00:47:25", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sometimes beer came over the side of the balcony." + }, + { + "turn_id": 440, + "timestamp": "00:47:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, okay. That's really interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 441, + "timestamp": "00:47:30", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it was. It was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 442, + "timestamp": "00:47:32", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Oh, how about, I know in some communities, church life is important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 443, + "timestamp": "00:47:37", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 444, + "timestamp": "00:47:38", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there a church, churches in your town? Did you go? What faiths were there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 445, + "timestamp": "00:47:44", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was a Baptist church and, um, I did go initially." + }, + { + "turn_id": 446, + "timestamp": "00:47:52", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To the Baptist church." + }, + { + "turn_id": 447, + "timestamp": "00:47:53", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To the Baptist Church, and they had a piano they let me play there. So they would let me go and play the piano." + }, + { + "turn_id": 448, + "timestamp": "00:47:59", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 449, + "timestamp": "00:48:00", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have to, I have to be honest and say as the two years marched on, I didn't go as often as I did initially. But I did get to know a lot of people in the community by doing that. And I did play for their choir at times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 450, + "timestamp": "00:48:12", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, did you? Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 451, + "timestamp": "00:48:13", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 452, + "timestamp": "00:48:13", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good, good. Did they have other denominations there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 453, + "timestamp": "00:48:19", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not in Coxen Hole. It was just the Baptist Church. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 454, + "timestamp": "00:48:23", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, well, let's go on to the ninth question. The end of your first year, can you think back and what notable events transpired? What were your reflections after a year? Then it's going to ask about health problems and stuff like that. So anything that you can think about. Can you remember how your life was after a year in Coxen Hole?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 455, + "timestamp": "00:48:47", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After a year in Coxen Hole, I was pretty happy. I mean, one thing I was, was I was busy. I was very busy. I mean, I worked every day, sometimes even on Sundays. Sometimes people came to my house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 456, + "timestamp": "00:49:00", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 457, + "timestamp": "00:49:01", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I was busy. I mean, they came to me in the middle of the night if they had an emergency. And which was not very often, I have to admit, that was not very often. But they did. The kids would come. I think the kids just liked peanut butter sandwiches." + }, + { + "turn_id": 458, + "timestamp": "00:49:15", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's possible. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 459, + "timestamp": "00:49:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They'd have an itch or they'd have a, they'd have a scratch or something. I had a little girl who lived with her sister and they were obviously so poor and she was so skinny. She had a terrible case of worms and I let her become my maid. And so she would come and sort of sweep the floor. She was so tiny and she wore these huge, huge, like evening gown sort of dresses that she had gotten. The boat would come with donated clothes and she loved beautiful net dresses or ballerina type dresses. And they were, of course, never fit her. She was so tiny. But she would come and clean my house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 460, + "timestamp": "00:49:55", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, sweet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 461, + "timestamp": "00:49:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then I would always give her a loaf of bread and maybe some sardines or something. She got some Baha'i bread. And so I was busy. I was really busy. I have to say, even though I was busy and I was friendly with many of the islanders, I was, it was, it was lonely because I was the only American there. I was the only one, you know, there was no one to really share that experience with me that I could directly relate to. So I do remember being, just getting really lonely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 462, + "timestamp": "00:50:29", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 463, + "timestamp": "00:50:30", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just getting really, really lonely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 464, + "timestamp": "00:50:31", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Okay. Which I think happens to many of us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 465, + "timestamp": "00:50:35", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 466, + "timestamp": "00:50:38", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any unexpected events or relationships that happened around that time, a year into your service?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 467, + "timestamp": "00:50:46", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, no. Later maybe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 468, + "timestamp": "00:50:49", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Later. Okay. Health problems?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 469, + "timestamp": "00:50:52", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was really healthy, unbelievably healthy. As a matter of fact, I used to get a lot of headaches in the two years I was down there. I had brought a huge bottle of aspirin because it's kind of all we had back then. I barely touched it the two years I was there, I was so healthy. I did get amoebas once, but that was easily fixed with some Flagyl." + }, + { + "turn_id": 470, + "timestamp": "00:51:09", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you do about drinking water?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 471, + "timestamp": "00:51:13", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was no potable water there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 472, + "timestamp": "00:51:15", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 473, + "timestamp": "00:51:15", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And you could boil it, but it still didn't look very good and there were no filters to filter it with. And it was usually pretty hazy and I just couldn't make myself drink it. And then of course, my stove blew up and I never bought another one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 474, + "timestamp": "00:51:26", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 475, + "timestamp": "00:51:28", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I drank rum and Coke or juice or Coke. Or beer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 476, + "timestamp": "00:51:33", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No water. So you really didn't drink water?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 477, + "timestamp": "00:51:34", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't. I, listen, I cannot tell you how much I love water from that experience. Oh my gosh. There's nothing like really good water." + }, + { + "turn_id": 478, + "timestamp": "00:51:43", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 479, + "timestamp": "00:51:44", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And just not ever having it. And we didn't have bottled water back then either." + }, + { + "turn_id": 480, + "timestamp": "00:51:47", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I know. Yeah. And any travel, did you travel anywhere?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 481, + "timestamp": "00:51:53", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was on the island quite a bit. Of course I would go periodically to the capital, Tegucigalpa. But in that year, you and I." + }, + { + "turn_id": 482, + "timestamp": "00:52:01", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 483, + "timestamp": "00:52:02", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My good friend Barbara here, we took a trip. We were a little over a month. We went through, uh, we went to, we went to the Mayan ruins in northern Honduras and we went through Guatemala. We hit all the hotspots in Guatemala." + }, + { + "turn_id": 484, + "timestamp": "00:52:13", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "By bus." + }, + { + "turn_id": 485, + "timestamp": "00:52:15", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "By bus, and sometimes foot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 486, + "timestamp": "00:52:17", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And sometimes foot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 487, + "timestamp": "00:52:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then we came back through El Salvador. And I'll never forget that because we were in this little cheap hotel at night and there was like a gunfight in the street right in front of the hotel. Do you remember that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 488, + "timestamp": "00:52:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, but I remember staying a night, I think it was the Hotel Bruno, if I remember right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 489, + "timestamp": "00:52:32", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You don't remember the gunfight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 490, + "timestamp": "00:52:33", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don't. I don't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 491, + "timestamp": "00:52:34", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'll never forget that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 492, + "timestamp": "00:52:36", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me. Sorry, we're laughing listener. Okay. I don't remember that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 493, + "timestamp": "00:52:45", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And then we got on the bus the next day. We went through the northern portion of Nicaragua. You remember that? All those Nicaraguan young students were on the bus with us and they were so articulate. They had read Mein Kampf, they'd read all these political, philosophical books, and I was just so amazed. And there was the, you know, there was a revolution going on then and the guerrilla warfare, and we weren't supposed to go to Nicaragua. We kind of went through just a little bit of it and then we went back up to Honduras. So that was fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 494, + "timestamp": "00:53:18", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I don't remember that part, but I remember being in El Salvador for a short time. The gunfight, no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 495, + "timestamp": "00:53:24", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You don't remember the kids on the bus? Talking to them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 496, + "timestamp": "00:53:26", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 497, + "timestamp": "00:53:26", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 498, + "timestamp": "00:53:27", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, I don't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 499, + "timestamp": "00:53:27", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were like older teenagers. They were young." + }, + { + "turn_id": 500, + "timestamp": "00:53:30", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 501, + "timestamp": "00:53:30", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And some of them had, their families had sent them away during all the fighting and they were coming back. So yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 502, + "timestamp": "00:53:38", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you know, we all remember different things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 503, + "timestamp": "00:53:40", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We do, don't we? We really do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 504, + "timestamp": "00:53:42", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now I know you've got many more stories you could tell. I don't want to finish the interview yet. Can you think of any other stories about your life and Coxen Hole? Because I've heard other stories I'm trying to think of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 505, + "timestamp": "00:53:58", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You mean just things that happened?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 506, + "timestamp": "00:53:59", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Okay, more stories about the clinic if we're doing okay with time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 507, + "timestamp": "00:54:04", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, we're fine. One night I was sleeping and some kids came and pounding on the door and they told me I had to go help a young lady who was having a baby. And I have to admit, I knew nothing about birthing babies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 508, + "timestamp": "00:54:19", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 509, + "timestamp": "00:54:20", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't. I was a med surg nurse, and I didn't have any perinatal experience. I mean, I could teach, but as far as skills for that. I had never delivered a baby in my life nor seen a lot of deliveries. But anyway, I grabbed a medication that I had in the house called Methergine, which helps to contract the uterus and stop bleeding after a birth, and some syringes and some other things. And I didn't have any IVs, I remember, but so I ran down to the house and when I got there there were a few candles on and a kerosene lamp, and there was a 14 year old girl on the floor under newspapers with a baby that was, um, just the legs had been delivered." + }, + { + "turn_id": 510, + "timestamp": "00:55:04", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 511, + "timestamp": "00:55:04", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And she was, I just, the thing, the main thing I remember about her was she was so stoic. Everyone else was hysterical in the house, but she was so stoic. She wasn't crying. She didn't talk. She was, she was probably petrified." + }, + { + "turn_id": 512, + "timestamp": "00:55:19", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 513, + "timestamp": "00:55:20", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But for a young teenage girl, I just, that just really struck me. I just remember how quiet she was. But I put gloves on and I couldn't get the baby out. I couldn't do it. And so I told the kids to go to, down the street. There was a man there who owned the pharmacy and he was known for being able to deliver babies. And I'm not sure why they didn't get him the first time instead of me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 514, + "timestamp": "00:55:47", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But he was a pharmacist?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 515, + "timestamp": "00:55:48", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was a pharmacist, but he also had delivered a lot of babies on the island, and they called him Doc Polo because of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 516, + "timestamp": "00:55:53", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Polo, P-O-L-O?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 517, + "timestamp": "00:55:56", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "P-O-L-O." + }, + { + "turn_id": 518, + "timestamp": "00:55:57", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 519, + "timestamp": "00:55:57", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And, um, he came and he twisted the baby around. And if I recall correctly, something cracked. And he got the baby out. Of course, it was dead." + }, + { + "turn_id": 520, + "timestamp": "00:56:09", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "By using a lot of force." + }, + { + "turn_id": 521, + "timestamp": "00:56:11", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, and he kind of had to. We didn't have a way except airplanes to get to the mainland, and they didn't fly at night." + }, + { + "turn_id": 522, + "timestamp": "00:56:18", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 523, + "timestamp": "00:56:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So he did get the baby out and he did force the placental delivery. He just pulled it out. I remember being petrified that she was going to hemorrhage, but she didn't. And I did give her some Methergine and stayed for a while, cleaned her up. And it was just so, it was just so sad. That's one of the biggest things I remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 524, + "timestamp": "00:56:40", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the baby died of course." + }, + { + "turn_id": 525, + "timestamp": "00:56:41", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The baby was dead, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 526, + "timestamp": "00:56:42", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how did the mother do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 527, + "timestamp": "00:56:44", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The mother was okay. I was so afraid that she was going to hemorrhage. I was just so afraid that she's going to hemorrhage or have a fever later or. And I told her to come to the clinic the next day and she didn't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 528, + "timestamp": "00:56:54", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 529, + "timestamp": "00:56:55", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I had heard that they did get her to the mainland later, is what I had heard. I hope they did, but, uh, anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 530, + "timestamp": "00:57:05", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You know, one thing I was going to ask, were there, was there a hospital on the island?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 531, + "timestamp": "00:57:09", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Just the clinic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 532, + "timestamp": "00:57:11", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. The one of, the Ministry of Health clinic?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 533, + "timestamp": "00:57:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 534, + "timestamp": "00:57:16", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any other stories that come to your mind?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 535, + "timestamp": "00:57:19", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, another one was, um, there was a. I was going to the clinic one day and a man walked up to me and his arm was wrapped in a towel and he said, can you fix this? I cut myself. And I opened the towel and he had almost cut his arm off. And I was like, well, no, I can't fix this. And what are we going to do? You know, and I, I actually, I was able to stop some people, and there was a physician who was on sabbatical from the United States." + }, + { + "turn_id": 536, + "timestamp": "00:57:48", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you know that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 537, + "timestamp": "00:57:49", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I knew him. On the other side of the island at the time. And he had brought supplies and he had things with him. And so, fortunately, I was able to get a truck and get him over to the physician and he was able to at least stabilize him until we got him on a plane and got him to the mainland. And that was so scary. And what was so amazing was how, again, very stoic this fellow was. I mean, I would have been hysterical." + }, + { + "turn_id": 538, + "timestamp": "00:58:12", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 539, + "timestamp": "00:58:13", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, he had, it was a machete wound. There were so many machete wounds. And yeah, that was a very bad one also." + }, + { + "turn_id": 540, + "timestamp": "00:58:22", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you said almost severed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 541, + "timestamp": "00:58:24", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, to me, yeah. I doubt it was because, you know, he really wasn't bleeding that badly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 542, + "timestamp": "00:58:31", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 543, + "timestamp": "00:58:33", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Otherwise, I would have had to have applied a tourniquet. He was not dripping blood. It was bad though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 544, + "timestamp": "00:58:37", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 545, + "timestamp": "00:58:37", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was more of the muscle that was so, that had been cut into. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 546, + "timestamp": "00:58:43", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like you learned a lot. Now, some of your counterparts. I know the doctor left after five months. Sounds like the LVN, the licensed vocational nurse, was a help. You had a good relationship." + }, + { + "turn_id": 547, + "timestamp": "00:58:55", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, she was good. She was good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 548, + "timestamp": "00:58:56", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The dentist also?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 549, + "timestamp": "00:58:57", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, the dentist helped me so much. So much. And she also provided some friendship too. She was a really, you know, she was a very nice, happy, bouncy person. And she was only there six months though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 550, + "timestamp": "00:59:08", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, she wasn't there the whole time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 551, + "timestamp": "00:59:10", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, she wasn't there the whole time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 552, + "timestamp": "00:59:11", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did a dentist come to replace her?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 553, + "timestamp": "00:59:13", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no, no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 554, + "timestamp": "00:59:15", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, you really were alone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 555, + "timestamp": "00:59:16", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Thank goodness for the LPN." + }, + { + "turn_id": 556, + "timestamp": "00:59:18", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 557, + "timestamp": "00:59:20", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 558, + "timestamp": "00:59:21", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was your clinics? This is something I just thought of. Was your clinic stocked with some medications for the folks?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 559, + "timestamp": "00:59:28", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We had penicillin because, um, gonorrhea and syphilis were big problems. And I knew if a man came to the clinic, I knew what he was there for because otherwise they didn't come in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 560, + "timestamp": "00:59:41", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 561, + "timestamp": "00:59:42", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And, um." + }, + { + "turn_id": 562, + "timestamp": "00:59:43", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And a vaccine of penicillin, I mean, a vaccine. A shot of penicillin." + }, + { + "turn_id": 563, + "timestamp": "00:59:49", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One in each hip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 564, + "timestamp": "00:59:49", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For one of those venereal diseases." + }, + { + "turn_id": 565, + "timestamp": "00:59:51", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, for those venereal diseases. And we had worm medicine and we had Flagyl for amoebas. And we had, um, we had some." + }, + { + "turn_id": 566, + "timestamp": "01:00:01", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Aralen for malaria?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 567, + "timestamp": "01:00:02", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes. Primaquine and chloroquine. We had them. Aralen. I don't think, I don't remember having Aralen. That was a preventative." + }, + { + "turn_id": 568, + "timestamp": "01:00:08", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 569, + "timestamp": "01:00:09", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But primaquine and chloroquine. And we had some other PO antibiotics. At this time, I don't remember what they were, but we didn't have a lot and we ran out at times too so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 570, + "timestamp": "01:00:23", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you mentioned that there was a pharmacist. I mean, he had his own private pharmacy. Doc Polo?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 571, + "timestamp": "01:00:29", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Doc Polo, yeah. But, but he was not affiliated with the clinic. And at his pharmacy you could buy syringes, antibiotics, IVs, and find someone that could give you a shot of whatever you thought you needed or to give you some IV fluids and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 572, + "timestamp": "01:00:45", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 573, + "timestamp": "01:00:46", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really didn't have people come to me for that. You know, there were other ladies that, there were houses that said, se inyecto aqui." + }, + { + "turn_id": 574, + "timestamp": "01:00:53", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us what that means, Donna." + }, + { + "turn_id": 575, + "timestamp": "01:00:55", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That means \"I give shots here.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 576, + "timestamp": "01:00:57", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Se inyecto aqui." + }, + { + "turn_id": 577, + "timestamp": "01:00:59", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So. Yeah. But I can't remember anyone even coming to me and asking me at my house. It was always in the clinic setting, to give them like a penicillin shot or." + }, + { + "turn_id": 578, + "timestamp": "01:01:11", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So the kids, the people who came to your house sometimes on Sundays, as you said, were often little kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 579, + "timestamp": "01:01:17", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were usually kids. They were usually kids. It usually wasn't adults. The adults would come to the clinic on clinic hours, but the kids would just kind of show up and it was kind of fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 580, + "timestamp": "01:01:26", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You know, I know that this is not part of the questions, but I remember you telling a story before. Didn't you even have a radio program? Did you? Sorry, listener for just, excuse us while we laugh a little bit. Wasn't there a radio program that you were on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 581, + "timestamp": "01:01:43", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I kind of forgot that. Now that you mention it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 582, + "timestamp": "01:01:46", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us about the radio program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 583, + "timestamp": "01:01:47", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, let me try to remember what that was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 584, + "timestamp": "01:01:51", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was a local station." + }, + { + "turn_id": 585, + "timestamp": "01:01:53", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was health tidbits and just some health teaching. Like I believe I was just doing like little things like this is how you boil water. This is why you do it. This is why you wash your cabbage. And this is, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 586, + "timestamp": "01:02:08", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you come up with the topics yourself or did they say, I want you to talk about drinking safe water?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 587, + "timestamp": "01:02:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't, I don't recall doing it that many times and I believe I came up with the topics." + }, + { + "turn_id": 588, + "timestamp": "01:02:19", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 589, + "timestamp": "01:02:20", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 590, + "timestamp": "01:02:20", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Do you remember the radio station?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 591, + "timestamp": "01:02:22", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Radio Roatan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 592, + "timestamp": "01:02:24", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. What does that mean in English?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 593, + "timestamp": "01:02:25", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Radio Roatan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 594, + "timestamp": "01:02:26", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Radio. I sorry listener, I can't roll my Rs. Radio Roatan. I kind of did that right now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 595, + "timestamp": "01:02:33", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You did great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 596, + "timestamp": "01:02:34", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Was there, were there other activities that you did, um, you participated in that come to your mind now in the clinic?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 597, + "timestamp": "01:02:44", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, in the clinic?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 598, + "timestamp": "01:02:45", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 599, + "timestamp": "01:02:45", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One thing I did that I really was happy to do. The inside of the clinic needed to be painted so badly. And they, there was no money for it. The, I had written to the ministry to see if they would get someone to paint it and they didn't. The outside and the inside needed it. There was mold on the walls and there was, I mean, it was, it was dirty. It was really dirty. But I was able to go around and collect enough contributions from some of the businesses to buy paint. And there was a son of one of the patients who always kind of needed work. So he came and painted the whole inside of the clinic. We didn't get the outside painted, we've got the inside, and most of it at least. And then myself and two of the young ladies that worked there, we painted a really cute mural in the, on the wall in the waiting room. Yeah, it was a picture of the island with coconut tree and a rainbow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 600, + "timestamp": "01:03:43", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Say that again?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 601, + "timestamp": "01:03:45", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was like, it was like a picture of the island beach, with the coconut trees and then a beautiful rainbow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 602, + "timestamp": "01:03:50", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 603, + "timestamp": "01:03:51", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. It was fun.\n\nBut as small as that sounds, it was a huge, huge deal, getting people to see the wisdom in making that place look clean. And we cleaned the floors and everything. And to get it painted, it just looked so much better." + }, + { + "turn_id": 604, + "timestamp": "01:04:10", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, right. You know, another question I just thought of too. When women were pregnant, who delivered their babies generally?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 605, + "timestamp": "01:04:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Midwives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 606, + "timestamp": "01:04:18", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, so they had midwives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 607, + "timestamp": "01:04:19", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were a lot of midwives on the island and they were very good. And then Doc Polo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 608, + "timestamp": "01:04:22", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were they trained?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 609, + "timestamp": "01:04:24", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were, they went to the mainland to get some training. They, they weren't nurses. They were just lay midwives, yeah. And then I'm not sure where Doc Polo got his training, but evidently he was pretty good and pretty, he delivered a lot of babies also." + }, + { + "turn_id": 610, + "timestamp": "01:04:42", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was he a man from Roatan?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 611, + "timestamp": "01:04:45", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 612, + "timestamp": "01:04:46", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 613, + "timestamp": "01:04:48", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And actually, I became really good friends with his daughter, who had married a Canadian, and they had children and they lived not too far from my house. We became really good friends and I hung out with them a whole lot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 614, + "timestamp": "01:04:58", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 615, + "timestamp": "01:04:59", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 616, + "timestamp": "01:05:00", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good. Let's see. Oh. Did you have any other jobs when you were in Roatan besides the clinic job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 617, + "timestamp": "01:05:10", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that was a really full time job. However, I have to say that after I'd been there about a year and a half, I was really, as I said, very lonely. And I was working really hard too. I mean, I really worked. And there was a little yacht club that opened up not far up the road where." + }, + { + "turn_id": 618, + "timestamp": "01:05:31", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A Honduran yacht club?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 619, + "timestamp": "01:05:33", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was Honduran owned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 620, + "timestamp": "01:05:34", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, it was Honduran owned, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 621, + "timestamp": "01:05:35", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But there were some, I think some other foreign investments in it too, but it was run by Hondurans. And so I knew a few of the fellows that were going to work there on the boats. And so I kind of went down there and hung out and I said, gosh, do you know what? I think I'm really sick of doing what I'm doing, so I'm going to have to quit the Peace Corps now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 622, + "timestamp": "01:05:57", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 623, + "timestamp": "01:05:58", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so they gave me a job at the yacht club." + }, + { + "turn_id": 624, + "timestamp": "01:06:00", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, what did you do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 625, + "timestamp": "01:06:01", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hostess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 626, + "timestamp": "01:06:03", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hostess, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 627, + "timestamp": "01:06:03", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was going to be the hostess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 628, + "timestamp": "01:06:04", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 629, + "timestamp": "01:06:04", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I sent the ministry of, I mean, I sent Ione, who was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 630, + "timestamp": "01:06:09", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Our program manager." + }, + { + "turn_id": 631, + "timestamp": "01:06:11", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Health program manager, a telegram. Everything was telegrams back then. And told her that I just couldn't continue in the Peace Corps. It was just, I was too lonely and I thought I would be less lonely working at the yacht club, I suppose. And so I sent her the telegram. I didn't hear back from her, and I started working at the yacht club. And as I was telling Barbara earlier." + }, + { + "turn_id": 632, + "timestamp": "01:06:34", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you didn't show up for work at the clinic then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 633, + "timestamp": "01:06:37", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I just, I think I gave them a week's notice or so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 634, + "timestamp": "01:06:40", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 635, + "timestamp": "01:06:41", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But actually the LVN took over." + }, + { + "turn_id": 636, + "timestamp": "01:06:45", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 637, + "timestamp": "01:06:46", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So now she didn't know how to suture, but she could do a lot of things. But so I was working in the yacht club and it just hit me like a ton of bricks that that probably wasn't my cup of tea." + }, + { + "turn_id": 638, + "timestamp": "01:06:57", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "May I ask why?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 639, + "timestamp": "01:06:57", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was, well, there were mainly Americans that were coming down to rent the yachts and sail. And I literally all I heard was complaining, like the lemons weren't fresh enough or they needed more limes or it was hot or the bed was uncomfortable. It was just, I just said, what am I doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 640, + "timestamp": "01:07:16", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 641, + "timestamp": "01:07:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I telegram Ione back within like a week and a half, two weeks, something like that. And I said, you know what, I'm not going to quit the Peace Corps. And she telegrammed me back and said, oh, I was just waiting for that. I knew that you would come around and you had your little vacation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 642, + "timestamp": "01:07:32", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "She did say that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 643, + "timestamp": "01:07:34", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. You had your vacation. And I said, yeah. I said, and I, and I think probably at that time I just needed a real vacation. I mean, we all do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 644, + "timestamp": "01:07:41", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 645, + "timestamp": "01:07:41", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We all need breaks, and the loneliness was the hardest part of being in the Peace Corps. Even though I was around people that spoke English, it was still. It's hard to explain, but it was just I wasn't around my peer group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 646, + "timestamp": "01:07:53", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 647, + "timestamp": "01:07:54", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I really missed that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 648, + "timestamp": "01:07:55", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. When you had the Peace Corps volunteers come to stay with you, was that a big boost?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 649, + "timestamp": "01:08:00", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It would help, but it would just only be for a day or two. And they were gone most of the time snorkeling while I was at the clinic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 650, + "timestamp": "01:08:07", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 651, + "timestamp": "01:08:08", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, and I was very fastidious about the fact that I had a job and I couldn't just not show up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 652, + "timestamp": "01:08:13", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 653, + "timestamp": "01:08:13", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because the clinic would be full of people with worms and amoebas and venereal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 654, + "timestamp": "01:08:22", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Venereal disease, yeah, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 655, + "timestamp": "01:08:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I probably didn't take as many breaks as I needed to. I felt just that they didn't have a doctor, so I needed to stay. And I remember Ione visited me and she said, you're taking this a little too seriously. You need more breaks, you need to take care of yourself too. And I knew, and I knew that, but I guess I needed someone to say the world is not going to fall apart if there's no one to take care of these patients this day, as long as it's not emergencies. And besides that, we didn't have a hospital. We didn't have an ER. You know, I just did the best I could so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 656, + "timestamp": "01:08:56", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think it's amazing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 657, + "timestamp": "01:08:57", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. So, yeah, I had a little, uh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 658, + "timestamp": "01:09:02", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Break." + }, + { + "turn_id": 659, + "timestamp": "01:09:02", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Detour. A little detour in the yacht club. I have to say, it was kind of fun sailing on the yachts because I could sail on the yachts as much as I wanted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 660, + "timestamp": "01:09:11", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Oh, you have a wonderful collection of stories. I'd encourage you to write a book about this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 661, + "timestamp": "01:09:18", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 662, + "timestamp": "01:09:19", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, just." + }, + { + "turn_id": 663, + "timestamp": "01:09:20", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'll get right on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 664, + "timestamp": "01:09:22", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 665, + "timestamp": "01:09:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Before I, you're going to have to really be the one to the impetus to help me remember these stories so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 666, + "timestamp": "01:09:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, um. I just have a few more questions, but if you, um, are you doing okay?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 667, + "timestamp": "01:09:35", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 668, + "timestamp": "01:09:35", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. The end of your tour, okay. You went home, you said July of 1980. So including training, you were there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 669, + "timestamp": "01:09:46", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Two years and a month, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 670, + "timestamp": "01:09:47", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 671, + "timestamp": "01:09:48", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because they had the option for leaving a couple of months early and still being given completion of service." + }, + { + "turn_id": 672, + "timestamp": "01:09:54", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Yeah. Why did you decide to leave maybe a little bit early?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 673, + "timestamp": "01:10:00", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Enough was enough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 674, + "timestamp": "01:10:01", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Enough was enough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 675, + "timestamp": "01:10:02", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Enough was enough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 676, + "timestamp": "01:10:02", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Yeah. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 677, + "timestamp": "01:10:03", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Two years, I was. Yeah. I was good. And I always wonder what it would have been like, though, to have been in a town or in a place where there were some other Peace Corps volunteers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 678, + "timestamp": "01:10:12", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 679, + "timestamp": "01:10:13", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I always wonder how I would have fared. I mean, I made it to two years, but it was, it was lonely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 680, + "timestamp": "01:10:19", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 681, + "timestamp": "01:10:19", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I was pretty emotionally drained after the end of that too. I mean, I really worked hard also." + }, + { + "turn_id": 682, + "timestamp": "01:10:24", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 683, + "timestamp": "01:10:25", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I loved what I did and I learned a lot. And I, and I will say this, I have never laughed as much in my life as I did the two years I was there. It was just, people just said exactly what they thought in a very funny way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 684, + "timestamp": "01:10:39", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 685, + "timestamp": "01:10:40", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "People did. There was nothing politically correct about anyone there. I mean, it was just. It was just, it was, it was a non-stop comedy really. We had, for example, the suicide dog, the village suicide dog. Evidently." + }, + { + "turn_id": 686, + "timestamp": "01:10:57", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don't. That sounds interesting. Can you tell us about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 687, + "timestamp": "01:11:00", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, he, it was a little doggie who had been hit by a car and was paralyzed from the waist down. So whenever he heard a car coming, he would drag himself into the road again. And so everyone said, he's trying to commit suicide or kill himself, whatever they said." + }, + { + "turn_id": 688, + "timestamp": "01:11:14", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Aww." + }, + { + "turn_id": 689, + "timestamp": "01:11:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was so sad. But everyone, you know, it was kind of funny in a way that they saw it that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 690, + "timestamp": "01:11:19", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 691, + "timestamp": "01:11:20", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not like, uh, it was odd." + }, + { + "turn_id": 692, + "timestamp": "01:11:23", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 693, + "timestamp": "01:11:23", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I'll never forget. And actually, I have a picture of you with me walking in a parade during one of the elections that we had down there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 694, + "timestamp": "01:11:33", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In Roatan?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 695, + "timestamp": "01:11:34", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I'm pretty, I'll have to show you the picture. But we had an election and I'll never forget it. You had to vote or you were to get arrested. Remember? It was mandatory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 696, + "timestamp": "01:11:45", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To vote, or otherwise you'd get arrested. I kind of forgot that myself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 697, + "timestamp": "01:11:49", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I'll never forget there were busses picking people up to vote. I remember I was downtown watching the busses pass by. So you'd see a bus go by with people on it that I knew, and they would give them chicken and beer and everything in the bus, and then they'd vote. And then a little bit later you'd see them on another bus voting again, going to vote again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 698, + "timestamp": "01:12:14", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 699, + "timestamp": "01:12:14", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Or trying to vote again, getting more chicken and beer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 700, + "timestamp": "01:12:17", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 701, + "timestamp": "01:12:17", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And we had a parade. And I remember Bruno, the town drunk, was in front of the parade." + }, + { + "turn_id": 702, + "timestamp": "01:12:24", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He was the leader." + }, + { + "turn_id": 703, + "timestamp": "01:12:25", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "With the banner of that party. I forget the name of the party." + }, + { + "turn_id": 704, + "timestamp": "01:12:28", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Liberales, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 705, + "timestamp": "01:12:30", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 706, + "timestamp": "01:12:31", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And I forgot the other one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 707, + "timestamp": "01:12:33", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 708, + "timestamp": "01:12:33", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nacionales? I'm not sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 709, + "timestamp": "01:12:35", + "speaker": "Donna Stern Slocum", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember. I'd have to look it up. But Bruno was leading the parade." + }, + { + "turn_id": 710, + "timestamp": "01:12:41", + "speaker": "Barbara Kaare-Lopez", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Okay." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00233", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HicksCR/hickscr.htm", + "original_file_name": "HicksCR_4-11-00.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HicksCR/HicksCR_4-11-00.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "location_date": "Alexandria, Virginia – 11 April 2000" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "Carol Butler" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "Frances Hicks" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is April 11, 2000. This interview with Clay Hicks is being conducted in his home in Alexandria, Virginia, for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Kevin Rusnak, assisted by Carol Butler.\\n\\n I'd like to thank you for having us in your home. If you could just start by telling us some about your background and how you came to work at NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Kevin, in 1953, in June, I graduated from Newport News High School. I was a candidate for the apprentice school at Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia], but because of most of the points in the veterans that were coming back from Korea and some of the other wars, they had point preference, so I didn't make the first round cut for the apprentice school at NASA. That's what I had applied for. I had no intention of going to college; I had no way to pay a way to college. I was raised by grandparents who were working class, and in those days we didn't have lots of scholarships, just weren't dropping in for students and things.\\n\\n But one of my friends mentioned to me, \"Well, what are you going to be doing?\" I said I was waiting for NASA, or NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] then, it was N.A.C.A., not NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration]—I'm sorry. He said, \"Well, VPI [Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia] is starting a co-op [cooperative education] program where you can work, alternate going to work and going to school, and it'll help pay your way.\" And he said, \"They're having exams over at the College of William and Mary [Williamsburg, Virginia] and VPI branch over in Norfolk at the end of June, and a bunch of us are going over there. Would you like to go?\"\\n\\n And I said, \"Sure, why not.\" So John Allen and a few of us others that had graduated from high school went over there, took the scores, and about a month later they called and said that I had made the grade and I had been accepted into the freshman class at Virginia Polytechnic as the first Virginia Tech quadrant of co-op students. They had already started a group in the summer, at the end of June, but this was the group they were screening to start in September of '58. So another group of about twenty students had already started in the previous quarter, by going to work at Langley, and we were going to be their replacements. Well, they started in September, excuse me. And we went in December at the winter quarter. So the group that was picked in June started out in September and then they were going to pick the second group and let us know by July or August, and then we could set it up, and we would start into school in the September period and go to work in December.\\n\\n So I was selected, and NACA agreed to it. It was another just a side point when I put on my application to VPI to enter into the engineering co-op, one of the things we had to specify is what engineering school and where would you might want to work. So I had already signed up for—wanted to be an apprentice at Langley because of the high-quality work and the advanced technologies and that kind of a thing, because I was interested in math and interested in chemistry and drafting in high school, but nobody had ever talked to us about engineering degrees or engineering activities or stuff until we got reviewed by Virginia Tech and the guy got me all pumped up for, you know, engineering. When they looked at the application, he said, \"What are you interested in?\"\\n\\n I said, \"Langley, aeronautical engineering,\" so that's how I became an aeronautical engineer, because Langley was there, and I wanted to co-op there and I checked off Langley to be the co-op place. And, of course, we had to get one semester under our belts before Langley would accept us. We had to prove that we could make the grade at college. So, off we went.\\n\\n If I'm taking too much time, let me know. But it's a neat story and I like it, because a lot of the other guys that ended up in the space program used this avenue. Glynn [S.] Lunney was a co-op student from the Lewis Research Center. He got his start. He couldn't have afforded to go to college. [C.] Howard Robins [Jr.], Bill Tolson [phonetic], George Young, George Weyer [phonetic], a whole bunch of the guys were at Langley that were a part of this group came out that way. And you notice out of that group I think only Howard and myself were the ones that went into the human space flight program, the guys with Max [Maxime A. Faget] and those guys.\\n\\n But anyway, I got selected, did good my first year, my first quarter I mean, at Tech. I think I got two As and three Bs or something like that, which astounded me. I didn't really think I could do it, but I decided I didn't want to stand on a corner. I didn't want to work in the Newport News Shipyard. So I said, \"Hey, this is my one shot. I've got to make this go.\" So my grandfather bought me a desk and fixed up my bedroom like a little study, and they wouldn't let anybody come around while I was doing homework and stuff. So they were protective. They said, \"That boy's going to work and go someplace.\" So I said, \"All right, Granddad, we're going to do it.\"\\n\\n So we made it. I went to Langley for the entrance. I reported for work out there on December—I think it was December 18, 1953. Now it's also interesting, because the five years that I was a co-op student, because I was working six months out of the year, those years counted toward my federal retirement, and I only had to put in six months to get that credit. At that time I had no idea at all what that would mean or whether it was any good. I was just happy to be doing something. But the key thing about the NASA, or the NACA Langley program was that we started during our freshman year.\\n\\n What they did is they rotated the co-op students for three quarters through the shops. They had the machine shop, wood shop, and the metal shop. And that gave the budding engineers—they wanted to humble us a little bit, because the workmen and the craftsmen, we got to meet with them. And it was always the craftsmen versus the engineers. The engineers would come in to tell the craftsmen what they wanted, and as soon as the engineers were gone, the craftsmen would get together and say, \"This is what we're going to do.\" And that's the way it worked. And they would tell the engineers, \"This is the way it's going to be designed, guys.\" A lot of times the engineers were right on, but a lot of times the craftsmen knew how to do it. And these were things like airfoils for the wind tunnels, models to fly over in Wallops [Island, Virginia], electronics to do testing and things. So it was very precision, very intense kind of machine work, woodwork, and metal shipment work.\\n\\n But the thing it did for us young guys, it got us to see how engineers came back and applied their trade, and it also got us exposed. Like I started meeting—I ran into Bill [William M.] Bland [Jr.] and some of those guys in my early career. And I got to go with my project—I was helping a craftsman build a model wing foil for him that he was going to be flying at Wallops Island. So I got to fly over to Wallops Island on the Goony Bird with one of the famous pilots now that was an old Langley guy—I don't know whether it was [Ray W.] Hooker, one of the guys. I'd have to go back. But they would fly an amphibian plane from Langley, and he would bank that sucker and land on a pond right behind these little scrubby buildings on Wallops Island where they would actually then launch some rockets and do flight tests with telemetry and things like that, which would come back later, because I think that that connection between Langley and Wallops was very instrumental, because the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division [PARD], where Max Faget and Bill Bland and Aleck [C.] Bond and those guys work, that was their job to fly pilotless aircraft models, and that's where Mercury was born. And that's where they did a lot of the ablation material work.\\n\\n I and some of the other co-ops, not just myself, but I got to actually work on some of those models. Must have been '56 or '57 when I had gone through the shops and then I went through the transonic wind tunnel where Dick [Richard T.] Whitcomb had just won the [National Aeronautic Association’s] Collier trophy for the Coke-bottle effect [area rule] in supersonics. And you talk about turning a young kid on. That's where I got turned on to supersonic and high-speed aerodynamics. And I was really in there, I really liked the math. I really liked the research, the whole thing about high-speed aerodynamics, which would later come into that's what space flight is all about. Getting out of the atmosphere and coming back is high-speed aerodynamics, that's what it's all about. You don't get but one shot at it. It's not like you stay there, you zip through it and you zip out, there's heat, there's all these interactions between the atmosphere and the body that you're trying to get to space.\\n\\n Once you get to space, like [Eugene F.] Kranz says, it's a very benign environment up there. So we always had this philosophy, later on when I was in mission ops [operations], it's always abort to orbit. Get to orbit then decide what's—you know. You don't want to abort during the launch or anything, because you have to make too many decisions. And it was always this “press to MECO” [main engine cutoff]. Get your butt to orbit and then set there and figure out what you gotta do.\\n\\n But, the co-op program, it must have been '56, but I went over with Jack [C.] Heberlig, and a guy, he was doing some work for Edison Fields, and they were testing some models with different ablation material. And I said, \"Well, how you going to do that?\" Well, he explained it all to me. We went over to the shops because I had worked there and I knew the guy that was working on it. So when I went over there, he already knew me. And that impressed Heberlig that here, you know, these young guys know what they're doing. And I explained to him, because the engineer was saying, \"Well, Clay can tell you why we can't do it that way.\" Because he was talking about trying to bond something on, and it was just not the way to do it. I knew the craftsmen, they knew what they were doing, and I said, \"Let's let those guys tell us how they should do it.\" And Jack was smart enough to agree to that. So that got those guys in. That was their trade, they knew how to do that.\\n\\n But anyway, they bonded, and Max had the guys looking at all kinds of different materials to see what might be a candidate ablative material, because that's the mechanism he had picked to reduce the heat transfer on a body coming back from space. He had figured that that was the cheapest, fastest, most technologically quick cut to doing this that was possible, by just coating the underbelly of a blunt body with some material and then have it ablate off, rather than having to work the dynamics of the heat going into the body and then having the inside systems try to reject that heat.\\n\\n So the entry heat and the max Gs were the big things that I found out even before I graduated. So I was going back to college, and the other guys, and we were actually coaxing our professors to do more work in high-speed entry, analysis, things like that. They wanted us to do airplane body stuff, but we were starting to get away from there, because we said, \"Hey, high-speed research is the coming thing. Space is coming. It's going to be here.\"\\n\\n But, anyway, Jack Heberlig and Bill Bland were flying four-stage rockets. Bill [Robert O.] Piland was the senior lead project engineer under Max Faget, and Bill later became the head of the Apollo program, after George [M.] Low and some of those others. He was in that range somewhere. I can't remember exactly where it was, but Piland was one of my heroes of the space program. He was a very quiet guy, unassuming, didn't want any medals or any of that stuff. He just believed in good competent work and then he really did it. I've never heard Bill really get all the credits and accolades he should have gotten from those days. He and Bill Bland were two super people.\\n\\n We went over there and we actually—they said what they do is \"We'll fly two stages of the rocket up, pick up speed almost straight up, and then as it uses gravity to come back down, then we'll fire the test samples into the atmosphere and get them up almost not quite to circular entry velocities, but very high,\" that they could get comparisons of the samples, how they ablated away and did those kinds of things.\\n\\n So here it was, and that's another thing that as we got into the Mercury Program and we did, you know, the earlier kinds of testing with Little Joes and Big Joes and those kinds of things, they took some of those kinds of concepts and just evolved them. So Max and the guys that were doing or setting the stage for this, had started many years ago. They had this dream that somehow or another to get a capsule and get a man into space and get him back, you had to protect him. And the heat and stuff.\\n\\n And it also so happened that I went to that aerodynamics conference after I'd graduated. You know, we'd graduated and started into, and it was the aerodynamics of space, and we got into that where all of these experts, H. Julian [Alfred J.] Eggers, and [H. Julian] Allen and those guys, had done a lot of the calculations and the equations for entering bodies, blunt bodies, how they do that. And we went and took their programs and things and brought them back, and incorporated them into our mission analysis trajectory programs to do the heat calculations. And then when the engineers came along and discovered what those operations [unclear] did, they took all that stuff to start doing their heat transfer calculations, and doing that working with the other guys. So it was always a team effort. Nobody claimed it as their own. It was just whoever got there and had something that they were doing.\\n\\n So anyway, back to '56, we were still going along. And [Yuri A.] Gagarin went up in fifty—where am I at—fifty—when did Gagarin go up, '57?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, I think it was '61." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, '61 is when Gagarin. But, oh, it was the other satellite that went up, just before we had graduated. It was Sputnik. Sputnik went up. So that again put the emphasis, in my last year and a half at Tech, here again, I had sort of forgot about some of the stuff that Max knows, and I was really concentrated on the high-speed aerodynamics and the tunnels, and the Dick Whitcombs, so I was ready to go back when I graduated into high-speed aerodynamic research in the tunnels and things.\\n\\n So that Christmas before I graduated in June, that Christmas before, I went back to Langley, and here were Max and all these guys looking at the ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles], the Atlas, the Redstone, the Thor, the Jupiter, all of those missiles, and they were coming up with nose-cone concepts to replace them with a capsule that could fly on those systems, because the military had those. That was something, they were high performance, but we were only going to be talking about a capsule that weighed about 2,000 pounds, to put a man up there for maybe three to four orbits, they were talking about.\\n\\n That's what the guys said, that we're getting ready to work there. \"We're getting ready to put a man in space.\" And I said, \"You guys are nuts.\" \"Well, you gotta come join us. We need you.\"\\n\\n So in June, when I got out, I went over there and I said, \"You guys still need somebody?\" So they said, \"Yep, come on.\" So the group was forming then. This was before N.A.S.A. NASA was formed from NACA in October. Like I was explaining a little bit ago, the Langley guys always had this strict discipline of reports and techniques, the research. Their careers were based on this discipline of reporting test research, having data, going through an analysis, having editorial boards come in and review your stuff, challenge it, do this, and it would take two years for a guy to get a report out.\\n\\n Well, they were trying to get promotions and things, and it would take a long time. So in June when Max and Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] was started, the flight research guys from the other side of the field, Chris and Chuck [Charles W.] Mathews and some of those people worked out at Dryden [Flight Research Center, Rosamond, California]. They would fly airplanes to do research, which was another way. And, of course, Langley was high-speed airplanes. But they were really looking at the high speed high-speed stuff, you know, the jets and the Bell X-1 and those kinds of things. So Langley had its fingers already in that kind of activity that was going on. It wasn't Dryden in those days; it was just Edwards Air Force Base [California]. But they were working with a lot of the Air Force guys.\\n\\n And that's where a lot of the contacts with the Mercury astronauts and some of the early astronauts—those bonds began to form from Sig [Sigurd A.] Sjoberg and Walt [Walter C.] Williams and some of those people working at Edwards Air Force Base, with those kinds of people doing flight test research, which was basically what we were going to be doing. NASA had never really been into the operations business, so we looked at Mercury as being really a flight test program, and just trying it out. And at that time we didn't really know where we were going with humans in space. We didn't even know whether it would work or not.\\n\\n So, first of all, the first thing we had to do is—we even were looking at instrumenting chimpanzees. And they started doing a lot of that work over at Wallops, because on the Little Joe project and some of those other—we were going to instrument up the chimpanzees and then later on fly them. The humane people never really got a hold of that, because I think they really lost a lot of chimpanzees, just trying to instrument these little suckers. It was a learning experience.\\n\\n So a lot of people say there's a lot of chimpanzee bones spread along the beaches over there, that the humane people never found out about, you know, because it was like Ham or one of the other guys, remember when they put him up there, the electronics failed, and he kept hitting the things to get his reward, and all it does was kept juicing him back, and that poor little guy almost bloodied himself to death trying to hit that. You know, he really—it was sad, but, you know, it was just one of things that happen.\\n\\n But so the chimps, the medical guys—so we were getting exposed to that. But in June they were started and Max decided to take of his group of people away from the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division and start moving some of the flight research people and the PARD people at Langley over to the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel, to get us all in a group, because he was seeing at that time they were starting to make approaches to NASA Headquarters [Washington, DC] about doing a human space project. But at the same time the Air Force had the MOL [Manned Orbiting Laboratory] program going. They were in the leader's seat. But [Robert R.] Gilruth and Charlie [Charles J.] Donlan and their strategy, and the guys at Headquarters was that, okay, what the Air Force was doing was a military program. What they were going to propose is the civilian program for space, get the military out of it, let the civilians run it.\\n\\n [Dwight D.] Eisenhower was in at that time, and they were making proposals at Headquarters which were then going to the White House, and Eisenhower liked that approach rather than letting the military run it, and the ramifications of all that that he might get into with treaties and with spying, and with all that other kind of stuff. They decided to go with NASA's approach, that these guys seemed to know what they were doing.\\n\\n Well, the Caldwell [C.] Johnsons and the Max Fagets and these clever guys were making up these charts on Thursday and Friday, going to Washington on Saturday and Sunday, briefing those guys, and coming back with, \"Here's what we need to do next,\" blip, blip, blip. And they were sort of carrying the ammunition in the small nucleus of what we call the Space Task Group that was formally formed, were working on these things, over on the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel on the second floor.\\n\\n We had these big offices with nothing really over there, just desks and a few computers, telephones. Everybody shared a telephone. You didn't even have a private telephone. And the computers, you had to go to the central computing to get work done. So a lot of it was what we called chartsmanship. And that's the idea that first came up that the way we would communicate is come up with charts and things. Even viewgraphs weren't back in those days, but it was handwritten charts and figures and things, because they'd use these plot boards, or these big artwork kinds of things. They were very pretty, but it would take time to produce those things.\\n\\n So Max and those guys said, \"We need some way to communicate that's fast and quick.\" So they came up with briefing charts. And that became—I think the space group were the guys that started all that. Of course, the rest of the Langley people looked down at their nose at this scrubby group of people because we were doing things that were not regimented, not disciplined along the lines of strict research, strict engineering, proper discipline, proper review, proper facts. A lot of the stuff everybody challenged, but that's what you wanted. You just wanted to throw out stuff, get people to think about it, and then we'd work the details later.\\n\\n So they were in that mode of turn around things quick, come up with concepts. Caldwell Johnson, he would draw the things up, come up with good ideas. Engineering, Max would be at that. And that's the way the space program was sold. That's how human space flight—those guys invented human space flight. And we think that that whole group, we helped invent the whole industry. It was very neat.\\n\\n One of my first jobs, when I came on as a—actually graduated in June with those guys, Bill Bland said, \"One of the things we want to do with this capsule is we want to put it into space, but we don't want it to stay up there. It's gotta come down. If anything goes wrong, we don't want people sitting down saying, 'Oh, my God, you know, here comes the dead guys.'\" He said, \"It's morbid, but we gotta think about that. But we also gotta put it up high enough in an orbit that it actually doesn't come down. So, why don't you, Clay, go away and figure out what we need to do.\"\\n\\n So that's they actually told me to do. That was sort of my project, to go from a GS-7 to a 9. He said \"You work that out and we'll take that as your project.\" Because that's what they did directing Langley guys to get a 7 to 9, had the work projects and go through a review board to get approved to go the next higher level, so that was the way we were going to do it.\\n\\n So that's when I started looking. The Cambridge Research Center had naval research labs. They were the guys responsible for all the density measurements, the altitude profiles. They actually had started cataloging and had equations and motions that, you know, equations that actually had the densities that you could put into a computer program.\\n\\n At the same time, over in the flight research in the electronics part of Langley, they had some guys over there working that used to work with telemetry. They were already working with the case mechanics, space mechanics, equations of motion, and they had some of the elementary—that was John [P.] Mayer and Bill [Howard W.] Tindall [Jr.]. You'll hear those names a lot later, and you've probably heard them. But they were over there in that separate group, working that kind of stuff, and they began to get sucked into the space group with their programs.\\n\\n I started and I found out with my research that they were the guys that had the computer programs at Langley. So I went over and started working with John Mayer, who was already working stuff with Max Faget and those guys. So John and I began became real close compadres. He liked what I was doing and said, \"Those are the things. Yeah, Bill Bland and those guys are right on. We need orbital mechanics. We need to work these.\"\\n\\n So we had the basic orbital mechanics, but we still had to do the ascent and the entry kind of stuff. That's why we needed the aerodynamics, the density profiles, the ablation stuff, the stuff on the Earth to figure out where these things were going to come down. Where were they going to fly over? Where would we put the tracking sites? All of those kinds of things. What inclination do we fly at, which was based on performance. And so we started, you know, those questions came on out and we just wrote them down because, first thing we wanted to find out, what orbit do we want to get this thing into, and start figuring out that.\\n\\n So I went out to a conference at Rand Systems in 1959, after we had actually—NASA had been formed in October. We had gotten the go-ahead. They were already starting to line up the astronauts to come on board. The guys that were working were already cranking away. They were moving out and doing things. So I went out to this conference and I got listed as Dr. Claiborne Hicks. I think I was some pipsqueak, and I looked at all these guys, Allen and all these people, and we went around the room one time, and I had enough naivete to stand up. People were introducing themselves, and I said, \"Well, I came from the NASA Langley Space Task Group, and we were going to put human beings into orbit and we wanted to do the aerodynamics of entry and ascent.\"\\n\\n And there was a lot of mumbling in the crowd and everything, and then there was a cheer. Everybody clapped. And I went back and I told the guys, \"I was really astounded.\" I said, \"People were coming up to me saying 'Great project. NASA needs to do this.'\" And I went back and told the guys, Sig Sjoberg and Walt Williams and those guys, and they said, \"Well, maybe this thing is going to go. Maybe we've got something.\" Because here were all these high-ranking people, if you see on that list that I gave you, that were very influential. And here we had exposed them to what we were doing. The project wasn't getting that much exposure. It was getting some, but the big deals hadn't come down yet.\\n\\n It was just another thing, like MOL. Nobody really paid any attention to that. But here were people that were interested, because they would be learning a lot and we contributed to their disciplines. It would just open up all kinds of new research and new things, and they were bright enough to realize that, that even though you're not doing humans—but Eggers, Allen, and all those guys at Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] that were doing all these fancy equations, they'd been thinking about these things. And they came up and I realized that they had—I'd been looking in the Langley library and already pulling out their reports and having our computer programs go back and take their stuff to put it into our programs. And before long we had a set of calculations. We'd gone to GD [General Dynamics]. We went to Martin, got their ascent, even though it was confidential. We all had to get cleared by the military. We had confidential—had to write that all over everything, which caused us much pain. It caused me getting all kinds of citations for leaving shit out on the desk and almost—Kraft would have had to come down, \"You guys have gotta put this stuff away,\" you know. And it wasn't exactly those terms. You know how Kraft talks. It was a little bit more colorful, a lot more colorful than that. \"Goddamn you guys, get that shit out of the way.\" You know, \"You're going to all cause me to lose my job.\" And he said, \"If you have to, don't put confidential on everything.\" But I shouldn't say that. [Laughter] That might get him in trouble.\\n\\n But, anyway, we got it. I came up with all kinds of charts of W-over-CDA, which is weight over the drag coefficients. And these were on charts. About four or five years later I did all the altitude things, and we picked the altitude. I put my little report together, and the guys gave me my 9 promotion. It was about four or five years later that I saw four or five papers published in AIAA [American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics] and other things, where guys were first starting to do that on their own. But we had done that and just gone on because we had gotten where we wanted.\\n\\n But John Mayer was working—I was then working very close with him and Bill Tindall, and other guys were starting to come on board. Charlie [C.] Allen came on board, Ted [H.] Skopinski came on board, Carl [R.] Huss came on board. So, starting in October '58, those next two years was growth. People were just coming on board, new people. So you had so many things. So a lot of those things we were talking about, the aborts, the ascent, a lot of the other problems with tracking stations, now we were getting other people to help. So they started getting into it.\\n\\n So John was using me to sort of lead up the Atlas Program, run the Atlas trajectories, which were going to be the ones for the orbital missions. Ted Skopinski took over the role of being the lead engineer for all the Redstone and the Mercury, the Mercury Redstone, you know the suborbital-type flights, and some of the Little Joes and those, where I would do a lot of the tracking. Because I'd been into the aerodynamics, I got into the orbital debris. I got into the range safety stuff. I was going to the Cape [Cape Canaveral, Florida] meeting with Air Force, all these highfalutin guys. Here I was a little pipsqueak engineer. I think I weighed about 110 pounds, and pimples all over my face and that kind of stuff, you know. And a big—what do they call those kinds of things—you know, pocket?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Protector?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Pocket protector, with all the pencils on it. Man, I was the perfect nerd-type little guy. And, I remember one time when Chris Kraft, when later on we were doing some stuff with the Apollo service module about coming back in and maybe doing damage to some of the cities or stuff, so he had had me doing the calculations to figure out what the probabilities, what the dispersion patterns would be coming through the atmosphere as it broke up, the orbital debris kinds of things that happen, where if we dropped a service module and did the entry at certain ports, would Florida be impacted, or how long, you know. And then figure out the reliability.\\n\\n I got into all kinds of statistics and probabilities, and I found out that our probability of hurting somebody with the service module in any kind of Apollo mission was like one in a million. You had about a fifteen—no, it was even more than that, it was about like a thousand more chance of getting hit by a lightning bolt, an individual, than you would be of hitting by—and I went through this rigorous thirty-minute thing at one of Kraft's staff meetings one time. My last chart had that ending line. In fact I said, \"In fact, your probability of being hit by an Apollo orbital debris piece was about like 2,000 your chances of getting hit by a lightning bolt.\"\\n\\n And Kraft sat there and he listened to that. And he says [applause], \"Out of the mouths of babes.\" He said, \"That last chart, Hicks, was all you needed. You didn't have to go through all that other crap.\" [Laughter] \"So you took thirty minutes to tell me about all that stuff.\" So I went away—and it was good, because what he had said was I'd—being an engineer, I was trying to go through my methods. The old Langley approach where they drummed it into you: present your case, build it, sell it so they believe it. But Kraft's point was we were moving—\"Give me the bottom line. Just tell me what it is, and if I don't agree with it, I'll come back and make you prove it to me.\" But he did say, \"A good job,\" so that pleased me.\\n\\n But we got into that. We got into the Mercury Program. There were other things going on. One of the things—we talked about the ablation material. And while I was still a co-op student—let me go back again. Because one of the other things Max had was going on over at Wallops, is they had what they called a high arc jet-type system, with a hot furnace, and what they were doing were putting samples, would come up into the airstream of this very hot flame, and they would sit there and measure how long it took for them to vaporize, until you could not longer see burning or stuff. And we had these samples which we were responsible for, which we went to the shops again, had the people work that up.\\n\\n So, as a co-op student, on one of my trips over there, what I did was fly with the samples—the engineer there at the thing was putting them into the stream—but my job was to lay on a bunker back behind the thing with a sandbag. I had some binoculars and a stopwatch. And they would put the sample up in the stream. It was my job to sit there and time it. And when it was gone, I would look at, see how many seconds it was, and record that. And then I would take that data and fly back, and I'd put it in a report and send it to the guys. But that was one of my co-op—and that's all I needed to do was visualize it, observe it, and record it. But those guys were using it.\\n\\n But what it did was it allowed me to talk to the guys. I learned as a co-op student, they used me because it was cheaper to send me over there for a week, in the desolate—you know, the married guys didn't want to go over there and live with the mosquitoes and the crawfish. At nighttime, all you could do was sit there and look at the stars, wasn't anything else to do but read books, you know. Cut out my dating life a lot, but I wasn't going anywhere at those times. I was too excited about just being there and talking to some of those old guys and doing that stuff.\\n\\n But that was just another example of the kinds of things at Langley did with its young engineers. They let them do things. They gave them jobs, and particularly the guys working the space stuff. They weren't the shoddy old stodgy engineers that went straight by the book and everything. They were cutting corners. They were looking at shortcuts. They were looking at ways to get there quicker, to beat their competition, which then wasn't the Russians, but it was the Army and the Air Force and the military side, to keep our hands in the human space flight.\\n\\n The other thing that Max and those guys were interested in was how would a human being adapt to the gravity and the G forces, the whole protection of a seat, the suit, all of that kind of stuff. Of course, they had lots of guys doing the suits and the pressure garments. But the thing that—my role got into it, because I would calculate the trajectories. We had an escape tower on top of the missile, and the capsule at that time had come far enough along. I'd calculated the rocket trajectories off of that, and it would get them up about 16 Gs. So we had the profiles of the G forces.\\n\\n Max said, \"What we want to do is—\" The Air Force had sled tests going on. Remember John [P.] Stapp, famous name from White Sands [Missile Range, New Mexico] where they would do sled tests, fire his ass, you know, down the thing and his eyes would almost blast out of his head and stuff like that? Well, we tried to get John Stapp to go to Johnsville, Pennsylvania. Well, Johnsville, Pennsylvania, has a centrifuge. They had some human test subjects, but I think they had only gotten a human test subject up to about 18 Gs—I mean 8 Gs—because that's as most as high-speed aircraft were getting into.\\n\\n So we went them a letter up there, told them that we would like to go up to at least 20 Gs. They sent it back and said, \"Ha, ha, ha.\" So the guys had to go work with John Stapp and those guys, and they got them. And we finally got a guy named Lieutenant Carter [C.] Collins. I remember him. He became the lead engineer from the Navy on this project at Johnsville. This was going on, wasn't any publicity. It was just me and Jack Heberlig, or it was Max and the guys who were designing the couch. They were looking at the leg angles, you know, the G forces, the eyes coming back in, eyeballs in, eyeballs out, how you would do this.\\n\\n So the first thing we had to do if we were going to put a guy in a centrifuge, we wanted to have a couch to protect him while we were even doing the tests, much less than when we had an abort or put it on a capsule or a real rocket. So we had to make sure that that thing was going to work. So what we did is we did the calculations and everything, and we set up a profile with several couches. We had about four or five models with different insulation materials and things to go up there.\\n\\n Carter Collins had volunteered. This was a volunteer program. He had volunteered to be the test subject. And I think Bill Bland came along with Jack Heberlig and myself and we stood out in the window as they set this thing up. They went up to 8 Gs first, and then they went to 10 Gs. And we had all these profiles leading up, because we didn't want to kill anybody, but we slowed—you know. We took an engineering approach. We would walk up to it, and if everything worked, all right, press on, not knowing what the residual effects might be to the guy, you know.\\n\\n But anyway, we got the guy up to 16—the first time a human being had every gone up to 16 Gs, and that was Carter Collins. And once we got that and the thing spun down, we had four more tests scheduled. And Carter Collins—we called him, and he said, \"Fine.\" He said, \"Nah, the suit worked fine. The seat was great.\" He said he was conscious the whole time. Everything was great. So Bill Bland called back to Max and the guys are saying, \"We've got four more tests that we're going to do over the next several days to see this.\"\\n\\n And Max said, \"Well, how did the tests go?\"\\n\\n And Bill said, \"Well, it worked. You know, everything was fine.\"\\n\\n And Max says, \"Get the hell out of there. Don't do any more. You might screw the guy up.\" [Laughter] \"Failure is not an option. Don't push it.\"\\n\\n So that was another mantra that the guys had in there. When you get the data and the answer you want, don't keep pushing it, you know, unless you really think something's there, but, you know. Because if you keep pushing it and playing around—engineers like to have lots of data. And those guys were starting to be engineering managers and program guys. They only had so much money to do certain things, so their mantra was, \"You've got the right answer. There wasn't any problem. Don't think about it. Let's stop. It's done. Let's put it into the design system and see what the people—\"\\n\\n By that time the McDAC [McDonnell Aircraft Corp.] people were coming on board to do the Mercury capsule design, so we would feed that information into their engineers and they would take it.\\n\\n What we were starting to do then, Kraft and they guys were starting to bring on what they called a flight control team. This was about the time that Gene Kranz showed up. I remember Gene showing up. The astronauts had showed up earlier, the Original Seven, and they were right down the hall from us and we'd gotten introduced to all of them. They were whizzing around and doing things, going to meetings and talking to us and doing those kinds of things. Then Kranz showed up and he was sitting over in the corner or something, and we got introduced. I didn't really know, but he had been a hot jockey, you know, a hot test pilot and a Korean air veteran, and had been out there. I was in a meeting with him one time, and he started asking questions. And I sort of said, \"Hmm, this guy knows what he's doing.\"\\n\\n Then I found out that they had him in line to be a flight director. What Donlan and Gilruth and those guys were starting to do was they had Walt Williams and Chris Kraft starting to look at \"If we're going to fly a guy, how are we flying? What do we do?\" They had a group of engineers then starting to look at different console positions, that what would be the protocol and how would we do this. We were already doing the tracking and the orbital analysis and all of these kinds of things, and the system was growing.\\n\\n The sequence of events might be getting out of here a little bit, but the Canadian guys showed up, so they were doing flight tests, the John [D.] Hodges, the Jack [John N.] Shoosmiths, and the Jack [N.] Cohens and [James A.] Chamberlins, and Rod [Rodney G.] Rose, John Hodge, who later became flight director number two. Because you remember Kraft was what we called flight director number one, and Hodge was number two, and Kranz was number three. They were our three Mercury flight directors. They were our team leaders and they were the guys we had to run everything through. If you couldn't convince those guys, you gave up and tried again.\\n\\n But it was really interesting, because that gave us another avenue of discipline and control, because the Retros [Retrofire Officers] and the FIDOs [flight dynamics officers] had responsibility for the mission and the trajectories and the boundaries, the aborts and all that. So they started working those guys. And Glynn Lunney, who had been with us working, and Carl Huss and Tec [Tecwyn] Roberts, who had been doing space mechanics, they picked Tec Roberts to be the FIDO, and Carl Huss went over to be the Retro.\\n\\n And, of course, they all had design—anybody who had a major console always wanted to be a flight director, because that was the ultimate. Like Kraft said, the best job in NASA in those days was to be a flight director, because you had, you know, more fun, more responsibility out there. You know, it was all on the line. But the guys that we were working with, that I was working with, were fantastic, you know. Tec Roberts was a Canadian. He came down with their group. He was very solid, very conservative, very sharp, and he would question you, you know, go through and check your credibility of the kinds of things. He never said \"I don't like that.\" He'd always come up and say, \"Well, why don't you look at this and look at this. I'd like to see how this plot or this plate would look.\" \"Yes, sir,\" and then you'd go back, and it makes sense. And nobody really cared. You'd get together and the team kind of concept really took hold.\\n\\n Kranz started bringing in another discipline. He would set up what he called ops reviews. He would have reviews of the operations guys, would set up how they were going to fly a mission, you know, like [Virgil I. \"Gus\"] Grissom's flight or a suborbital Mercury Redstone flight, and he would invite over engineers from the E&D [Engineering and Development Directorate] side of the house, the doctors, and a couple of Headquarters guys, and he'd call it an operational review. We'd have this two-day session where all these people would come in and review what guys were proposing to be done, and critique it.\\n\\n Kranz came up with mission rules and flight rules and flight data packages and all of this stuff. And then we got the guys that were working with the crew members of the flight plan. They thought they needed that. So they came up with the concept of a flight plan. Well, that needed the trajectory. We always felt like in my business then, which was MPAD [Mission Planning and Analysis Division] mission, the flight trajectory and the flight plan, or the mission trajectory plan, was a road map for everybody to build on. We had to have our act together before the flight planners, the simulators, the engineers and everybody else could do theirs. And ours better be right, because a lot of people were spending a lot of money.\\n\\n So we were very proud of that and we felt like that we were the guys that really knew the most about anything. We got really cocky, and John Mayer and Bill Tindall. It took the flight controllers and the doctors and people to knock us down every once in a while. But it was a friendly competition that we got into, and we'd work it.\\n\\n In the meantime, you know, Chris had Sig Sjoberg working, and Sig was what I'd call the ultimate gentleman. He and Kraft were a super team. They went together all the way through their careers, and Kraft ended up as the center director. Sig was the deputy, and he just recently passed away, just a fantastic gentleman, one of those unsung heroes.\\n\\n When I was on the staff of Kraft, doing the advanced programs back in '68, '69, I got to sit in at all the high-powered staff meetings that they would have. Chris, in his ways, he was always very \"blues-talky.\" You know, he would just really—the science guys were ones he didn't like. He didn't really—the science people were always putting constraints on everything. They wanted this and they wanted that. He invited them in to some of the staff meetings and they would really rip him up. And after they were all gone, he'd sit there and he'd look and, you know, Sig would have his head down and he would say, \"Sig, what do you think?\"\\n\\n And Sig said, \"You shouldn't have called those guys those names, Chris. You shouldn't have said all that.\" [Laughter]\\n\\n And Chris says, \"You think so? I was just trying to get their attention.\"\\n\\n He says, \"Yeah, but you know, those guys we've got to work with. They had some good points.\"\\n\\n And he would say, \"Well, what do you think I ought to do?\"\\n\\n And Sig says, \"I think you ought to call them and apologize.\"\\n\\n \"Shit, man.\" And he said, \"Okay,\" and he'd pick up the phone right then. It had only been about five or ten minutes. I think it was myself, Rod Rose and Sig and Chris, but that gave me an insight that Chris always depended on Sig to call him, haul him in or help him, tell him when he was screwing up. And Sig liked that.\\n\\n It came back a while later because I went out with the ops team to White Sands before we were going to do some of the Little Joe flights out there, and we were out there getting ready, and I think Walt Williams and all those guys—Sig was head of the ops team to get ready for the first simulation of one of the first flights we were going to do out there. We were using an old blockhouse that the Army had had, and we were sitting in that with our flight control team and all that with the guys to do that.\\n\\n So Walt Williams and the [unclear] and the Headquarters guys and all those people were coming in for an ops review to make sure everything was kosher and ready. The press would be coming in the next day, and we'd have a test firing. So we'd gone through the review and walked. I'd been walking around the building and I noticed there were Coke cans and papers. It was just a trashy outfit down there. We never had anybody around.\\n\\n So we were sitting in a meeting about ten o'clock that night, you know, and Sig was going over all the positions and everything, what they were going to tell these guys when they came around for the review, the briefing charts and everything. At the end, he sort of—he always opened it up—he says, \"Does anybody have anything that we've missed?\"\\n\\n So I was sitting there like a dungster, and I raised my hand. He says, \"Hicks, you got something?\"\\n\\n I said, \"Yes, sir,\" I said, \"I think this place looks like hell.\"\\n\\n He said, \"What's that got to do with anything?\"\\n\\n I said, \"Well, we're trying to be a professional organization. You want people to believe in your credibility. You want people to think you know what the hell you're doing. How can you go in there with cigarette butts and smells and trash and crap all over the place? I think that's very unprofessional.\"\\n\\n Cliff [Clifford C.] Charlesworth was a FDO in those days. He was sitting there. We were walking out of the meeting, Sjoberg says, \"Well, all right, anybody else got anything?\"\\n\\n So we were walking back to the motel, get in the car. I was riding with Cliff Charlesworth because I was working close with him because he was sort of the FIDO on that test flight. And he was laughing. He put his arm around me, and he says, \"Hicks, what the shit was that?\" He says, \"I'm going to call you 'Blockhouse' from now on. You're Blockhouse Hicks.\" [Laughter]\\n\\n But the next morning we went out there, that place was spic and span. It had been shaped up. Guys had worked all night. He had gotten the Army guys out there, cleaned that place up. It looked good. I called Charlesworth \"One Mile,\" because he was always trying to get within the impact point. I said, \"All right, One Mile Charlesworth, what do you think of Blockhouse now?\" So Sig had listened. But it was the same role that he had done, so I thought that. I said, \"Fantastic.\" At least he listened and went and did something, and it made a big difference. The credibility with the big team before we got to the Cape and did all the other, it sort of set a tone and set a pattern.\\n\\n That was about the time that Chris started everybody to wearing short-sleeved shirts and those thin ties. He says, \"We're going to look professional.\" I think Sjoberg probably got back to him and said, \"Rather than have guys with Hawaiian shirts and other guys dressed up and everything, our suit of armor is going to be white shirts, short-sleeved, and those thin ties.\" He said, \"I don't care what kind of pants or shoes you wear, but that's the way we're going to start doing it. We're not going to be like Langley or be like the others. We're going to be professional.\"\\n\\n And to this day, that's what the uniform—in fact, I think I went through NASA, until I retired I never really had a suit, did I? I had sport coats, because all I wore was white shirts and those skinny little ties all the time. It was interesting how the system evolves and the kinds of things that happen.\\n\\n So that's how I got involved. We did Gemini, and it was fun. They did the first flights, and then they were saying, \"Well, what kind of things should we do in Gemini?\" And the Russians hadn't done an EVA [extravehicular activity] yet. But a lot of us at a meeting with Chris, Kranz, and those guys, we said, \"We've got to do extravehicular. We've got to get guys outside to be able to do more things than just float around in that capsule.\"\\n\\n This was while we were still flying—I think we were still flying Mercury flights then. I think we were trying to do the last Mercury, [Gordon L.] Cooper's [Jr.] flight, where we were trying to get him for eighteen orbits up there. We were already in Houston [Texas] by then, so we were meeting in the Farnsworth Building. We were spread out all over the place, and having those meetings. But we were over in the—what was that building? We were in Office City, right next to—and the flight controllers were in the other building." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The Petroleum Building?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It might have been the Petroleum Building, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frances Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Have you all heard of the flights down there on that Martin 407?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The 404?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frances Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The 404. They furnished, for the employees here with the space center, to go to Houston to help you get acquainted with the area, pick out a home. You know, we went for like, what, a four- or five-day stay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The 404, that we used to go to the Cape on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frances Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We weren't married then, and we were trying to find an apartment for Clay. We looked at apartments all around the area, and I was all lined up to live with about four or five other girls there. And we decided, I think it was on that trip, to get married, wasn't it? We found an apartment. Well, all the families were availed of that privilege, to go on that four- or five-day trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To scout around and find places to live before we moved down there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frances Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And Houston was just opening a welcome mat. I mean, we'd get free club memberships in clubs around Houston. There was an old nightclub called the Shamrock, the Shamrock Hotel." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the Clover." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frances Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What was that one that we joined? We saw all these entertainers. I mean, Houston was so glad to see us, that they had all sorts of special offers, of furniture at stores, and all kinds of things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the astronauts were leading all of that. But they invited—there weren't that many of us, so they invited the rest of the guys to join along, so we went on that boony. Growing up in Newport News and Hampton, as to space, the people just weren't that thrilled about it, because they considered NACA engineers as weirdos, you know. Go in to buy a new car, they come in with their calipers and micrometers and measure everything under the car before they would buy one. But here, going to Houston, it was wide open and reaching for the stars, you know. It was just a whole other attitude. You go places and say, \"Well, I work for NASA.\" \"Oh, wow! Here, we'll give you 50 percent off on this, and 50 percent.\" We felt like we'd died and gone to heaven, you know. These people were really treating us so good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For someone who grew up in Virginia, how did you feel about moving to Houston?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were ready to go. My grandparents had raised me. My grandfather had passed away, and it was just the job, going to Houston, the Wild West and everything, but it was the job, still being with those people. Most of the whole group, everybody liked what they were doing. So we didn't know where we were going or what we were getting into, but we just decided that that's what we wanted to do. And so many people from outside were joining the team, that it was just—I didn't want to do anything else. That's all I really wanted to do, was do that job.\\n\\n And that's why, when I got to Langley and they were forming the Space Task Group, you still had to make a decision. \"Do you want to go off and be an operations guy, and a program guy rather than do research? And it didn't take me long, after going to Wallops as a co-op, seeing that side of it, versus sitting on an engineering stool and watching manometer tubes and things like that, and doing that kind of research versus what I saw coming. Once the Space Task Group took off and the astronauts showed up and, you know, there was all this hullabaloo and their stories and things, but you sort of didn't get caught up into that.\\n\\n The guys were so busy working the program, they didn't get caught up in all of what I like to call the history. I don't know whether it's been your experience, but if you talk to the guys, we didn't really realize how much history we were doing. We were so enthralled with our job, that when the guys were going down the tickertape parades, we would watch it, look at it, and then go back and work on the next thing.\\n\\n It's not till you become an old guy like we are that you really look back there and you say, \"Well, gee, really, look what we did.\" Because you look at what's happened and how hard it is to do those kinds of things now, and how revolutionary and how open, and how that that opportunity was there at that time. You know, I couldn't have had a more glorious career and a more fantastic life. You know, running into Frannie, and the three girls I've got, and all the fantastic friends I've made. It's just been outstanding.\\n\\n I don't think it will ever happen again. I hope it would, but I think it was just one of those things in time. All the elements just came together and this group of guys seized the day. The Gilruths and the Donlans and the Krafts and the Kranzs, and the Johnny Mayers and the Ted Skopinskis and the guys that have gone before are now gone. It's just fantastic. You know, those guys sacrificed a lot.\\n\\n And, like you said, to move to Houston, to give up lives and give up things here, and a lot of people did give up their families. We talked about that a little bit before. There was a lot of—the guys were so enthralled with their job and so tied to it, that it did break up marriage and it did cause family problems. There were a lot of problems there, and I saw those. When my family started coming, I made a decision to let my family come first, and I don't think it hurt me that bad. I still got good jobs at NASA. But, you know, sometimes it slows you down, because operations guys—there's a lot of work. There's a lot of traveling. They've got to go, you know, the crew. And that's always been.\\n\\n But Kraft and Kranz and all those guys, that's why they liked the—what do you call them—the chili cookoffs. They would have things where families could come. Now, what other center does those kinds of things? Maybe some of them have taken it up since [George W. S.] Abbey is in the leadership role and has gotten the guys to head up Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama] and to head up—KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida] has gotten its own people. So it's been coming a little bit more. But they really believed that the people working were a team, and their families, they wanted them involved. And we did things as families. We socialized together. But we enjoyed each other.\\n\\n When we went to Houston, it was just a matter of getting to know other people, and we liked the Houston people. The weather was dreadful and the places we had to live were dreadful, the mosquitoes and the bugs and the snakes and the floods and all that kind of crap, but here again, it was the spirit, that the people were just—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frances Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The NASA people, they were all in the same communities and churches and schools. I mean, you'd run into each other everywhere." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we sort of segregated in certain places. But we did start, you know, running into other people in the community. You started integrating yourself in with what was going on. People asked me, like you guys and other people, what was the greatest thing you remember? It was the people. It really was the friends we've made. We still have friends that are dear to us, that we've lived with their kids, and we've cried at the Challenger and we cried at Grissom and [Roger B.] Chaffee, [and Edward H. White II, all killed in Apollo 1 fire]. The night Frannie and I were coming back from a restaurant, and the guys were doing the test, and we heard about the Apollo fire. You know, we cried all the way home. You think about those things. Those guys were here. [Hicks cries.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frances Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The families who have been our community, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that's one of the things that Chris and Gilruth and those guys, you know, they're your friends. They're part of your family. And Abbey does that too, because Abbey has always been close to the astronauts, and Judy [Judith A.] Resnik and all those people. He'll do anything for their safety. I think he'd stand up and say \"No go\" for a flight if he believed that anybody was in danger. So as long as he's there, I don't worry about the Shuttle missions. I still worry about the other flights, which we talked a little bit about, the unmanned programs and the cheaper, faster, better stuff, and the de-emphasis of systems engineering and operations input and telemetry. Look at results and really make sure, you know.\\n\\n Failure is not an option. You can't fail. Every mission must succeed. And it's not possibility; it's based on probability. If there's a possibility of failure, the guy's got to have enough to guts to stand up and say, \"No go.\" And I think our project managers have lost a little bit of that, in NASA in general. I don't think the human space flight side has. I think they still have the tough guys to make those kind of calls. Until we get that kind of swagger back in our step and the engineers take back over the agency again, it's—and I think we're starting around, I think with Rothenberg [phonetic] and Bill [William F.] Readdy and the Mars reports, and the Gentry Leaves [phonetic] reports, and those kinds of things that I see passing my computers.\\n\\n I sit here doing nothing and looking at it, and I'm starting to get reawakened. I see a hope that we're going to turn this thing around. I think once we do, and we start being successful, I think the funding will come again. I think we bent over too far backwards to reduce cost and cut people off the rolls and get rid of things. We've thrown away a lot of talent. Plus we've caused a lot of talent to leave. It used to be everybody wanted to come to NASA, to do our jobs. Now guys are leaving to go to dot-coms [Internet] and things like that.\\n\\n We've got to compete with those people, and the only way you do it is to have exciting successful things to do. They talk about commercialization and all this stuff and turning it over, and I don't know. I've been outside NASA now for fifteen years. Even the last years when I was looking at early Space Station stuff, the commercialization, the probability and the jobs and the kinds of things to do that just aren't here yet, you know, or people would be jumping into it.\\n\\n So we've got to get off that kick, and until we get a station up there and figure out how to do things at it, it ought to just be a—there was another thing John [W.] O'Neill and I did back in nineteen—I'm wobbling around a lot, but back in '72, George Abbey had us—where was it back, maybe it was—it was Shuttle. I'm trying to think of the year now where we did that. John O'Neill was still doing flight planning stuff, and I was doing—it was right after Skylab. It must have been '75 or '76 just before Shuttle was starting up. But Abbey asked us to take a look at Station and what role we should play and where we should go, you know, where should operations and systems go. So John O'Neill and I spent about a week going through things, and we went over to give George our report.\\n\\n Basically what we came up with, we said, \"Well, Space Station is going to be an entity. It's going to be a happening. We need it for human space flight. That ought to be an outpost. That ought to be JSC [Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas] facility number two. We ought to name it George Low Engineering Laboratory or something like that,\" to become a funding item under the stream where it got funded as another NASA center, but under JSC or something like that, because to pay operationally or to pay commercially, that crap ain't going to happen anytime soon. And we're still trying to get it up there.\\n\\n But this was back then, and John and I felt like that. We said, \"Hey, the Station is where it's going to be, and NASA ain't going to let JSC run everything. So what we ought to do is take the transportation system to Shuttle, since that's an ongoing thing, move all that to KSC. Move the astronauts to KSC. Move the Shuttle to KSC. Let JSC become the on-orbit center and the Mars facility center and the moon facility center, to do all those things to keep anybody else from getting into that.\"\\n\\n Well, poor old John and I, he was taking the lead and doing the briefing, I don't think we got past the first chart with George. He saw thing transfer the astronauts, and he says, \"You guys have been eating loco seed or something.\" He says, \"This is the most ridiculous thing.\"\\n\\n And we said, \"Please, George, just let us get through to the end and show you what we were thinking about and why we took that approach, and if you don't think that's something you want to do, well, we'll back up. But you wanted our recommendation.\"\\n\\n And he said, \"All right, that' fair. I'll shut up. But I don't like it.\" [Laughter] Grrrrr. He doesn't say much. He was mumbling under his breath and all that stuff.\\n\\n So we walked on through and got to the thing. And you know, finally he says, \"Well, I agree with all that end part. Do something about the front part, because we're going to keep the astronauts,\" and all this stuff. \"We're going to leave that here.\" [Laughter] There wasn't any way George—I always tell people at Headquarters when I got up here that that sucking sound you hear from Houston is not [H. Ross] Perot, it's George.\" [Laughter] My Marshall friends, they don't like that, but, I said, \"Watch out for George. He's going to have Houston back on the map.\" And he sure has. Houston's world-famous and continues to be that.\\n\\n We've just got to get that Station stuff up there so we can start flying to it and get us guys and gals back up there in space and learning how to operate and do those kinds of things, and learn. I think the new wave of Clay Hickses and Glynn Lunneys and the John [S.] Llewellyns and all those guys will come out of the woodwork, because this nation just breeds the kind of explorers and the kind of people that are willing to take the risk.\\n\\n We didn't think we were taking risks, but I guess we were, with careers and things, of going that route. Everything could have fallen apart, and I don't know what we would have ended up, but we just didn't even think about that. All we saw was the next step. Like you said, Kraft says, \"You make that next mission work, and then the next mission will always be there.\" And once you start failing, though, that's when the seeds come in, and that's what's happened at NASA. We've let failure become an option.\\n\\n That's why Kranz's book is going to be good. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. Like I said, I always like to read those, because you always learn something. I learned so much, even though I was there and a part of a lot of that, it's hard to keep up with everything, that everything's doing.\\n\\n But the Apollo Program and going to the Moon, I don't think we saw that as an end; that was just a step. I think the guys doing the planning were really looking at the Apollo applications program to continue building that kind of hardware. And then we got caught up in this stuff of we only had so much money. And then, you know, do you pick the Shuttle or you pick the Station?\\n\\n But I think if we had gone with the Apollo hardware, continued the Saturn IBs, we'd have come up with a dumb Saturn IB or something like that, which all the guys were looking at, which would have been a lot cheaper. And we could have kept throwing lots of, you know, weight up there and gotten stuff and been able to continue, because the CSM [command and service module] is the kind of module you need to fly from low Earth orbit back to the Moon. I've been involved in studies for—jeez, how long have I been doing this stuff, forty-some years, and there's not a better system than the CSM, the command module, the service module and a lunar module kind of a system to go to the Moon and to go to the planets. It just makes sense.\\n\\n One of the things we had talked about when I was at Rockwell was having a common CSM, or a common command module, that would be a layout for a lunar part and other things. It would a module that could be used for tugs and other kinds of things, rather than just an end use, but be very usable, all that kind of stuff. And I think eventually you'll get there. I think you can do that with the Shuttle system. I think you can take like, you know, I've been involved with Rockwell, but I started with NASA. Max came up with the Shuttle system. It's expensive, but, by God, it works. You know, it has redundancy. Yes, we did have an accident, but, you know, we did that, and I think we made the corrections to take care of that, and we're flying. Of course, I get \"pucker-up-itis\" every time we fly, you know, until we get through max Q [maximum dynamic pressure] and get those solids [solid rocket boosters] off of there.\\n\\n I'd like to see those solids gone, you know, with the reusable. Because I was working out at Rockwell [International] trying to help NASA get that sold, but we had to keep fighting with these people who wanted to change out the Shuttle system. They want to throw it away and come up with something cheaper. And I don't see it. I don't see anything cheaper. VentureStar, you know, they've loaded that dang vehicle down with so many technologies and they gave them that, and you can't do it all at one time.\\n\\n The Russians haven't been able to do it. The Russians haven't been able to do the commercial stuff in space. Their problem with their Space Station program is they used it mostly for military, and I don't think their science and the other things they did, their culture and everything, didn't allow them to really use that system. So the argument that they've had a station, why haven't they done a lot of things, well, they couldn't do a lot of things. But I think a low Earth orbit facility was the right choice and I think it's the right way to go.\\n\\n We've got to learn how to have human beings up there and live and use them, and then go to the Moon and have a facility there, and then talk about Mars. I still feel the physiology and the radiation and those kinds of things, and the trip time for the Mars is still a problem. So we still need nuclear engines. We need things like that to speed up that trip time, to really do the Mars, do that. So that's why it's so important to have the precursor missions work. You've got to have the missions to Mars continue their work so you continue that impetus to build. And this crap we've gone through now about throwing missions down the tube, thinking it's cheaper, we can just can come back with another mission, it doesn't work that way. Systems engineering is great.\\n\\n Well, I've rambled on. Any other specific questions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess some about some of the different projects." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "How much time have you got?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think we've got a little bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned Gemini earlier in talking about some of the new things they were doing, and you mentioned EVA. I was wondering about some of the trajectory-oriented things, like doing rendezvous and docking and the attempts to do that, and what was involved from your end, actually, to make these types of things happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, as we were finishing up the Mercury missions and flying those, of course, I told you a little story about [M. Scott] Carpenter's 400-mile miss, and the fact that we did the—I had to do the analysis back, and we found out he was out in yaw, and how that all evolved. Sig Sjoberg was leading that review team, and we worked that out, and so that was a little sidelight. I'd been doing the post-flight stuff, and had always wondered, \"Why are we spending all this time doing this? Why don't we just take this flight, succeed going to the next one?\" And I guess that's why. You know, there we came pretty close, and it was imperative for us to go back and find out immediately why we did land long, and we did. The next day we knew, already had the answer, and we knew. The reasons were, we were prepared. We had set up to have that data. We had set up to look at those kinds of things that they did happen.\\n\\n We used to tell people that in the business I was in, in those days, 90 percent of what I did would never get used. It was never 10 percent of the nominal, because we didn't have those—but when they did happen, you were glad you had that 90 percent. Many a time we went over to Chris Kraft's meeting with orbital debris, range safety, the abort, the \"what if\" questions, and we'd say, \"All right, Chris. Here's what it cost us to do a lot of what your flight controllers ask us all the time, and what your simulators want us to look at. And we understand. We know why it's good.\" But everybody'd keep saying, \"Why do we keep doing this way? We only use 10 percent of it. Why do 90 percent? Here's what it cost us to do it, here's the other. What do you want us to give up?\"\\n\\n \"We ain't going to give up any of it.\" That was always the answer.\\n\\n And that was the problem when Gentry Lee, when I was telling you about with the Mars precursor missions, where always in the back of George Low—and this was after he came down, after Joe [Joseph F.] Shea had the problems, you know, with the fire and everything. George Low had taken over the Apollo Program. And, of course, Chris' destination was always Mars. You know, that's ultimately where he wanted to go. And, go on. Go to the Moon, yes, that's a step.\\n\\n In fact, Chris was one of the ones that called for stopping the missions to the Moon, for the exact reason, we've done them so many times, let's don't screw it up. Let's get onto that next step. But we got caught up in the budgets. We got caught up in all the crap, and we got trapped. But, yes, we might have screwed up Apollo, you know, if we keep flying the same missions. You just never know when a rock or whatever it is, or a piece of mortar or something, or a piece of solder is going to hang up in a—like my light switch. The other day I couldn't get it on. I finally took it apart and blew in it and put it back together, and the damn think worked. But a piece of dust or something had gotten in there. That's the first thing you do, rather than call an electrician, spend a lot money. You just pull it apart, kick it, blow on it.\\n\\n But in space you can't do that to that stuff, you know. The experiences we got on Apollo with lightning, and the things going through that vehicle, you know. That stuff didn't work by accident. A lot of guys thought about those things happening, and made the different alternate circuits, the different redundancies. The same thing, [James M.] Beggs, when I went to Headquarters, he would sit at the thing and bitch about the flight rules and bitch about JSC and bitch about the Shuttle being so expensive, and all these redundant systems. Well, heck, Apollo, we had redundant systems in the electronics and things that were required, and we had alternate paths. We had things, because we didn't want to abort during a—we knew there was a probability at some point, high atmospheric lightning and things like that are going to strike a vehicle. They strike airplanes all the time, and you have to protect for those kinds of things. It takes money to do those analyses. It takes effort, it takes engineers.\\n\\n And with the Shuttle, same kind of thing. And I think with any kind of system, you've still got to have that kind of discipline in that system's engineering to ask the questions. What if this happens? What if that? All within the realm of possibility, and more so in the realm of probabilities, because some things might be possible but they're still out of the realm of the probabilities, if you understand what I'm sort of saying. And the guys would take that and then—and I think that's where Kranz's \"Failure is not an option.\" And part of his was, \"We're just not going to let it fail.\"\\n\\n But how you make that happen is by working your ass off and looking at everything you could ever think of, in a simulation and in an analysis and in a discussion. If something does happen, you'd looked at enough avenues that they guys could sit there and boilerplate oxygen for Apollo 13, come up with new ways to scrub the carbon dioxide out of the system. Take what you've got on board and make something happen. And you go do it. You don't sit there and cry about it and say, \"Aw, I wished I had this.\" This is what you've got, now make it work. And you know the crew is up there. They can do things, they can take it and pull things apart and put it together, and that's what the guys did. That's what they got paid for and that's why you spend that kind of money.\\n\\n So all we did was get three guys back. We spent a lot to do that, but it didn't stop the program. We kept on. Made them heroes, they can write books. They get all kinds of things, their families grateful for it. You know, you got your friends back.\\n\\n I think Apollo 13 was the greatest moment in flight control. It really was the shining moment. Those guys, the teams really made do what we had thought about. I remember running the abort trajectories back early in '67, '68 when I was still doing that kind of work. That's what we'd done. We said, \"Well, suppose we can't fire her and we have to use the lunar module or something as an abort system, and stuff like that, if the service module is not working. How would we do it?\" We'd run those trajectories.\\n\\n Now, with Jerry [C.] Bostick and the guys that were the FIDOs and the things for Apollo 13, they kept noticing that each time they would track data back, the trajectories were off a little bit. They kept thinking about that, and finally they woke up and realized, well, yes, the service module was still there, because it was outgassing. It was putting in a vector component that they hadn't thought about. We'd just shut it down and that's what we'd done on our other calculations. But after a while when you looked at it—so they had to keep that thing back to make sure that when the command service module came back in, it hit that corridor. And it worked. And that's what we were working in the back room, the whole time.\\n\\n So a lot of the other stuff that was going on in Apollo 13 I never even knew about. We were so caught up, and I was at that time, even though I was on the staff of Kraft, I was still helping the trajectory guys, because I was one of the guys that helped organize the auxiliary control room, and we were running a lot of those cases off line to do that, because you couldn't do that with the real time system, because we were putting in different components of the outgassing to make it match the real—and once we did that, we knew then, from on, to make the predictions the next day. And that's what the guys worked out. So that they wouldn't be off, we wouldn't have an error in it, for the actual entry when they got ready to come in. And you just did it. It was part of what you were supposed to do.\\n\\n I think that's what Kranz always said, \"Just go do your job and make it work. Don't tell me—don't come back with excuses.\" That's what John Llewellyn was so fantastic, because he sort of jumped in there on Apollo 13 and worked with some of the teams, and he was just adamant enough and hellacious enough and scary enough to scare the hell out of everybody if they didn't do something the way he thought it should be done. And you force the system to do it. They forced them to come up with the right answer. John was a very valuable guy. He was Retro number two. It will always be a craw in his—[Laughter] that Carl Huss was number one. I said, \"John, you deserve to be number two.\" Carl was really number one. And Carl would have been a good flight director, but he had that heart attack and he never got a chance to—Kraft didn't want to—Kraft really liked Carl and trusted his judgment, and he didn't want to put him into that kind of stress situation. So Cliff Charlesworth and some of the other guys moved in there and did those kinds of things. But you had a group of people that were willing to do.\\n\\n I remember when Sjoberg called me over, I was working Charlie Holland and the guys on Skylab. We had just gone through that. I was working payloads for the Shuttle Program, and Sjoberg called me over. He was running Flight Ops at that time, and he says, \"I need your help.\"\\n\\n I said \"What do you want me to do?\" And that's what you did in those days. When Sig or Chris or George called you and said, \"I've got something I want you to do,\" you didn't say, \"Aw, I don't want to. I like what I'm doing.\" You said, \"Yes, sir. What do you want me to do?\" They called you over there.\\n\\n But Sig wanted me to go over and work in the Shuttle Program office, to take over for Shuttle mission to do the integration between E&D and FOD to work out all the problems that were going on, and about how long you going to keep the doors—they even opened the payload bay doors the first time out. Max didn't want to do that, but Kranz wanted to, because he wanted to stay on orbit. \"Let's get up there and get the doors open and see what we've got,\" without a criteria.\\n\\n Max just wanted to go up there, don't mess with anything. \"If we have to come back, just turn around and come back.\"\\n\\n Kranz said, \"No, no. If we go up there and something's wrong, it's probably going to affect us on the way down, too. So we want to stay there. To stay there, you've got to open the doors.\"\\n\\n Max was afraid to open the doors because of the sun and all the other—you know, the heating and the barbecuing and all the stuff, and the latches and everything. Suppose they don't work. Then you've got to do EVAs. Do you want to do all that on the first flight?\\n\\n But they finally demonstrated enough confidence in opening those payload bay doors, and it was part of my job working for Deke [Donald K.] Slayton and Don [Donald C.] Cheatham and those guys in the program office, under Bob [Robert F.] Thompson, to work out the mechanics, with E&D guys, of making sure that those doors could open, and doors could now close, and that's why we ended up with a successful first flight.\\n\\n But we had what we called mission project staff engineers. The young guy that was there working it wasn't really doing the kinds of things that Sig and George and Abbey and those guys felt like should be doing. Since my background—I'd been in mission analysis, I'd worked Skylab, over in flight control, I did a lot of the science stuff at that time when I moved back in from being on the advanced programs, so about '72 I went back into the line, went back into the Flight Control Division, rather than working in Mission Planning Analysis, because John Mayer says, \"You've done this. Don't come back over here. Go somewhere and have some more fun.\" And that's what Kranz says, \"Come on over here with us.\"\\n\\n So I went to work for Gene in flight control, working on Skylab. The big thing then was, how we going to work with a scientist? If you remember that mission, it was a headache until we got Bob [Robert A. R.] Parker, the astronaut, to be—we called him Dr. Science, but at least he was a Ph.D. astronomer, astrophysicist, whatever. The science guys would believe in him. And he sort of became the key guy to set up the planning and the workout, the resources between the earth resources guys, the sun, the ATM, the Apollo Telescope Mount, guys that wanted to look at the sun all the time. You had the guys that wanted to look at the Earth all the time. You can't do all of them. And then you had the guys doing the auxiliary experiments, the other kinds of things that go into the airlock and that kind of stuff.\\n\\n Bob Parker, bless his heart, was the guy that made Apollo successful. He was the guy that kept those scientists and worked out during the night, you know, the resources and with the heat shield problems and all the kinds of things. We got 100 percent of the EREP [Earth Resources Experimental Package]. We got 100 percent of the sun stuff, and we got 100 percent of the—we got more than that, probably 125 percent, kept all of the scientists happy. And that's what mission ops was supposed to be. That's what Skylab was all about. It wasn't just to get the thing up there. It was to see what you can really do in space. Can you do real things in space for a long period of time?\\n\\n Dr. Bob Parker made that successful, with an attitude, \"We're going to get everybody. You may not get it all at this time, but we'll get you something next time.\" And the scientists trusted him, that they would get their time. He worked it and made it happen.\\n\\n Skylab was more fun because we'd get to watch them. Did you ever see the movie clips, the downloaded TV clips of some of the stuff [Owen K.] Garriott and all those guys were doing? You talk about fun in the middle of the night, watching what had happened during the day. That was dessert on the job, you know. After you get through planning the next day, and I was one of the formal managers, worked with Neil [B.] Hutchinson's team on the last mission, and I worked with the other teams during the other three missions also.\\n\\n But I think the first time we flew I didn't get to fly because I got the mumps, that's what it was. I missed the launch because I got the mumps from my daughter. My dad told me I'd had mumps and I was going around—and man, I got sicker. I was so sick. But because the flight control teams are the way they are, they just moved me out and somebody else moved in. And I finally came back in after they'd—of course, they'd had the heat shield problems going up. And John Llewellyn got involved in all of that with the airlock. Because being a Retro, and he was into some of the science stuff then, he'd really been working on the airlock mechanics. And that's the way they had to put the shield and other stuff out through that thing, the makeup shield and all that stuff. And John took over that.\\n\\n So here again, when you're in a crisis and you look at who steps up, it's the guys who are going to get things done. And John Llewellyn did it again. He was one of the guys that was in there, running amok. You had to really collar him down, but he made things happen. He just made it happen, and did a good job. Another unsung hero." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Claiborne R. Hicks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But Chris and Kranz and all those guys, they loved the guy. They got his car tags back many a time for it. I told you about him drinking the Maalox—you know, the Pepto Bismal and putting it back in the tube. One time he got there late for a shift, and he got so mad because he didn't have a parking spot, that he pulled up on the curb, back at Building 30, it was just before you come into the back side, that little area. He pulled his little MG, one of those little two-seaters with a—pulled it right in there, just left it on the sidewalk, right up on the—and went in.\\n\\n And, of course, during the thing somebody called Kraft and said, \"This is unacceptable. Your guys are doing this.\"\\n\\n And Kraft goes walking down to Llewellyn and says, \"John, you've just lost your JSC pass for three more months.\" He says, \"I've got to take it away from you. Go out and get your damn car off of the sidewalk.\"\\n\\n And Llewellyn would say, \"Why'd he do that? I wasn't hurting anybody. Damn car. I had to be here. My job is more important than anybody else's.\" [Laughter] He felt like that.\\n\\n You know, but Chris would say, \"All right, John.\" But he would come back later and pat him on the back about something, so John would feel happy and wouldn't be worried about it. Interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It certainly sounds like it." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00947", + "metadata": { + "category": "NACA OHP National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics 2005 - 2015", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NACA/johnsons.htm", + "original_file_name": "JohnsonS_4-2-14.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NACA/JohnsonS_4-2-14.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Headquarters NACA Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "location_date": "Newport News, Virginia – 2 April 2014" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright", + "Sandra Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Sugenia M. Johnson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is April 2, 2014. This oral history session is being conducted with Sue Johnson at her home in Newport News, Virginia, as part of the NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] Oral History Project, sponsored by the NASA Headquarters History Office. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Sandra Johnson, and we thank you for letting us in your home and sharing your afternoon with us. We appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s a treat for me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It is for us as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The children have wanted me to write things down, and I don’t." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is going to be great for them as well, then. If you would Sue, could you start by sharing with us some background on how you became interested in working with the NACA, and how all that happened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That starts in high school then, because that’s where I met—my father was really brilliant in math, and my mother would say, “Don’t come to me with your math. You go to him.” I had a wonderful teacher sophomore year in high school, George Passage. He and his wife [Mary L. Passage] ended up here; they were friends of my family, actually. She ended up an educator here with a [middle] school named after her now, and George was a prime person with the newspaper. He was a verifying editorial writer, and right arm of the one that owned the paper. It was funny that they ended up here, but he was a wonderful teacher, and made math fascinating. It was fun.\\n\\n Then my senior year, I had a woman who was a wonderful teacher, but I couldn’t stand her. She had been educated by Dr. Barton [phonetic] at Woman’s College [of the] University of North Carolina [Greensboro], where I was headed. I didn’t know at that time that I was, but I was. She was a very good teacher. We had a good math department there.\\n\\n My father didn’t give me a choice; he told me I could go to the Woman’s College University of North Carolina for two years, then I could change to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill two years, if I wanted to after that length of time. He required me to go there. We had a wonderful math department, and Dr. Barton was a marvelous teacher. She showed just how good she was, because the year that we took calculus, she had shingles for six weeks. The teacher was nice that took over, and she had her doctorate too, she was an assistant in the department, but she just couldn’t teach. None of us had any inkling of lights turning on until Dr. Barton came back. That’s kind of getting ahead of myself, but I really was glad that I went to Woman’s College. I had a lot of nice friends there. There were 17 of us there, and they were all nice girls—one of which I ended up here with, but I’ll tell you about that.\\n\\n I guess I’d always liked math, because I liked to know whether I was right or wrong. I didn’t like shades of gray. It was fascinating to me, just working something out. I’d go to sleep and not know a problem, but I’d wake up in the middle of the night and know the answer, and get up. I had a really good roommate for three years, after the freshman year. There was a girl that said—we had become friends, and she was a biology major. She said, “Let’s room together.” It worked out fine, so we ended up three years. She was a nice person; she ended up marrying a doctor in Winston-Salem, and we’ve remained friends. The husband is dead now, but she’s in a retirement home in Winston. Betsy and I lived together for three years. I don’t know—there’s so many avenues I could go to, that I don’t know really where to aim, except that math was fascinating to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let me ask you, did you know this at an early age?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As you got older, it started?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think as I got older, I realized when I had George Passage for sophomore year that it was something I was interested in, because he showed the fun that was in it. I didn’t have any aim for leaving home, or the state of North Carolina, when I graduated. The people that were the representatives that came to talk to you about whether you would like to come to here or there. I remember there was Dahlgren [Laboratory, Virginia], and then there was NACA. I didn’t really talk to them; I wasn’t really interested.\\n\\n There were so many things that were happening at that time, but NACA was one of them. They liked the graduates from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, because we had a good math department. I understand, somebody told me recently, that they would take any graduates from [there], which now is a part of Carolina; it has men and women, but at that time we just had women. When we finished, there was so much activity, I didn’t have time to think about it. There was so much activity at graduation time.\\n\\n When I got home, I was perfectly happy to stay in Concord, North Carolina for the rest of my life. I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher, though. When I was a junior in college, the principal died, and the head of the math department had to step up. They asked me if I would take the summer students. Of course, summer students are people who flunked out.\\n\\n My father finally said, “Look, I didn’t send you to college for four years to sit around here and play bridge.” NACA kept sending telegrams. I just didn’t answer them. This happened to my friend, Mary. She was Mary Morris then; she’s the one that I’ve given you the name, Mary Houbolt. She called me from Winston-Salem. She said, “If you’ll go, I’ll go.” We decided we’d both come, because her father was doing the same thing. I guess the two towns were about two hours apart, Winston and Concord.\\n\\n My family started planning the way to get me up here, because it was at the end of the war. We had a different situation during the war, at school, than a lot did. I will say this, that my father—I did go to the University of North Carolina one summer school. I went to take one course—I can’t remember what it was—and they didn’t have enough people. It was only three. The teacher also taught geology, so I just signed in his class, and then I took contemporary literature because I was a glutton for books. You can imagine what you would learn in geology in a six-week course. I was miserable if I was not dating, and I was miserable if I was dating because I needed to be doing work. Then if I was dating—so I decided I didn’t want to go. I had a lot of friends at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. That decision was made, and I liked my roommate, we got along fine. We were very different people, but we got along fine.\\n\\n My parents started checking in to how to get me up here. They decided that I would go—now this is where the story is just—that I was going to go to Richmond [Virginia]. They didn’t want me to change trains in Richmond in the middle of the night, which was what you had to do to get to the peninsula. They found out how difficult it was to get to the peninsula at that time. They sent me by sleeper, which went up to Richmond, but you didn’t have to change. Then it came down to Portsmouth. It went over the ferry—the train did, to Norfolk from Portsmouth.\\n\\n They didn’t know all this; they didn’t know the location of things. Here I was with all this luggage, ended up in Norfolk, knowing that I had to get over here on this side. They had signed me up for government housing, which was a joke, because it was like a two-story chicken coop. That’s the only way I could explain it. It was rather large, and they had built it during the war for this reason. Singles could not get apartments then. The woman that was in charge of it looked like a madam, and then girls were coming in. I tell you, I would go in and I’d lock the door. I was really afraid, because I just didn’t know what the situation was. You didn’t have a telephone; they’d have to call you on the intercom, and you had this great big bathroom that had curtains in it.\\n\\n What happened is that Mary thought I signed up for the 15th of August. I thought she’d signed up for the 1st, so I ended up here two weeks before she did, by myself. It worked out fine, except I didn’t let Mary know about the situation. When she did come, she walked in our room, and it was about the size of this, and it had a bunk on either side, built in. It had a closet that was about as big as this, but it had a curtain over it. Each one of us had a closet. There was a desk about where the TV is. She walked in, and she said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”\\n\\n I said, “I knew if I told you, you wouldn’t come.”\\n\\n She said, “I wouldn’t have!”\\n\\n I know I’m jumping around. The trip from Norfolk to get over here was really—it was a miracle. God did look after me. You had to come down to get a ferry that went across to Old Point Comfort. You were way up here in Portsmouth and near Norfolk. I don’t remember how I got there, but I got—with all this luggage—to get on the ferry. I was sitting there with all this luggage, really enjoying the scenery coming across. This woman said to me—and she had a little girl—she said, “Where are you going?”\\n\\n I said, “I’m going to Annewith Hall [phonetic] over in Hampton.”\\n\\n She said, “I have a driver that’s coming to pick me up, and we’ll take you.” That was really nice; that was a miracle. And they did, they took me right to Annewith Hall. He unloaded the luggage, everything. It was a really nice limo kind of thing.\\n\\n Later I was in a restaurant that was up there. I was telling someone about this happening, and they said, “You know who that is?” They said, “She’s the girlfriend of the local bookie.” She was so good to me, was real nice, and had this little girl about four years old. It was so funny the way it worked out, that I found out who she was.\\n\\n When I got to the dormitory—I can’t remember how I got to Langley [Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory], which was some distance from Kecoughtan Road—they didn’t have any transportation any more. They used to have streetcars, but they had taken them out. I can’t remember how I got there, but my destination was the computers pool on the East side. It ended up that Barbara Weigel was head of this computers pool. They had all these girls in there, and I walked in, and that wasn’t very thrilling to me. Just being in a room, they just had desks there, with girls sitting there, really basically waiting on assignments.\\n\\n Barbara said to me right away—and this caused some problems because you’re supposed to stay in there until your turn is to go, to get out. It was like being released from prison. She said, “Sue, I wonder if you would take a job over on West side, because we have a call for a special job, and we think you would be good for it. Would you mind going to the West side? But there’s no transportation there.” She said, “I tell you what, I will arrange for you to be picked up by a group that ride together. It’s John Hobart’s car.”\\n\\n Of course, John Hobart’s the one that ended up putting us on the Moon. She said, “John will be driving, and then there are other men in the car.” I get in this car, green as I am, talking lickety-split. There were either three or four men. I was Joe this, and Pat this, and John this. John immediately asked me for a date. As it turned out, they were playing a trick on me, because Pat was driving. I said to the girl in the room with me, I said, “Lou, Pat asked me for a date. What is he like?”\\n\\n She said, “Sue, he’s married.” She went and found out the joke. It was funny because in the meantime, the first day that I rode over there with them—with Pat, John, and Joe—I was assigned to Ken Margolis. We were in a Jewish section, brilliant men, four engineers. I was assigned to Kenneth Margolis, who I loved. I loved working for him, and I loved Leonard Sternfield, who I was in the office with. Two of them, I couldn’t stand. In fact, they ended up trying to get rid of me, but they couldn’t. I was in this big office with only two mathematicians, what we really were, then Leonard Sternfield, and then there was a glass cage with the head of the section in it. I’ve forgotten his name. Then one of the ones I didn’t like was in my room too. Ken was over by himself in an office across the hall.\\n\\n It was in that building—it was 7 X 10 [Foot High-Speed Tunnel] was the building. They had a great big wind tunnel. Stability Analysis did not have anything to do with the wind tunnel. They did, and all the engineers were down there. They were at one end, and then the division office was at the other. That was the only place they could find to put them, so it was kind of funny we were mixed up, but we didn’t mix. Then they had a bunch from free flight that came over, and there was glass between their room and Ken’s. Of course they all went [making faces] when I was in there with Ken.\\n\\n It was just really fine. It was really one of the first two or three days I was in there, I looked out and there were three guys walking down the curved sidewalk down there. I looked up at this one, and it popped in my mind, “That’s the person you’re going to marry.” I said, “Hey, Lou”—Lou Bird, she was married to an engineer already—I said, “Who is that guy that’s in the middle out there?”\\n\\n She looked, and she said, “That’s Hal [Harold S.] Johnson.”\\n\\n I said, “Does he go with anybody? Is he married?”\\n\\n She said, “No.”\\n\\n I said, “Does he go with anybody specially?”\\n\\n She said, “He dates, but I don’t think there’s anything really special.”\\n\\n I told Lou what happened. I said, “Don’t tell anybody, but this is really funny. I’ve never had this happen before.”\\n\\n Hal went on a two-week trip with his father and sister across Canada. His mother had died the year before and she was buried in Wisconsin, so they were going to visit her grave. I didn’t see him anywhere for a long time. In the meantime, John Houbolt had asked me for a date, and we got that straight. He lived at Club 55. Lou told me, she said, “Hal’s in Club 55 too. There’s seven guys in that house, and they won’t date somebody else’s girlfriend.” She said, “If you’re interested in Hal, I would advise you not to date John.” I was so bored in this two-by-four room, I didn’t know anybody. I was leery of who maybe getting to know. I accepted it. Club 55 was a delightful place. It was one house off the water, on Chesapeake Boulevard. It had belonged to a doctor, and there were four bedrooms and a half-bedroom upstairs, and a bath. Then downstairs they had a sun room, living room, dining room, big kitchen, and a garage out back.\\n\\n I was there with John, and I would see Hal’s mail on the table there, waiting for him to come in. That just really thrilled me to see Hal’s mail. Getting ahead to Mary, when Mary came up, she was assigned to Structures—which is where this group that I was riding with worked. She came home the first day, and she said, “Sue, do you know who those people are that you are calling Pat, and Joe, by their first names?” They didn’t look like anything to me. She said, “That Joe is Dr. [J. N.] Kotanchik who’s Head of Structures.” She said, “John is high up there, and then Pat,” I forgot.\\n\\n I said, “Nobody told me.” They kind of fell in with the newness of me being wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to just answer any question that they gave me, which could be totally wrong. Like how many steer were born in the United States last year? Things like this. I showed my ignorance, but they got a kick out of me, and I did, then.\\n\\n Mary ended up—I said to her—John was going to get her a date, and we were going to double date. He was going to get a date with Pat’s brother, who was coming to see him. I said, “I’m not interested really in John, I’m interested in Hal Johnson.” She was like this, because she had seen John by that time, so she was interested in dating him. To make a long story short, they did start dating and I started dating Hal. The double date didn’t come off, because Mary had a friend come up from Winston-Salem, and she couldn’t go. What did Hal do but take another one of the engineers with us on the date.\\n\\n We got along just great. He liked dancing, I liked that. He was a good dancer; I was a good dancer. I said, “Why didn’t you ask me right away to dance?”\\n\\n He said, “Because I didn’t know if you were any good.” We hit it off, and the two of them were sailing that weekend—it was Labor Day weekend—over in Norfolk, in a sailboat race. They asked me if I’d like to go, and I said, “Sure.” They were going to pick me up the next morning. What we did, we would sail the boat over, and I was afraid of the water, and I was not able to swim. I had an ear problem young. I know I’m wondering for you, but it’s kind of—but it was funny how it all worked.\\n\\n They were the ones going to crew, and then they would take me along if it was heavy weather, which I was hoping that we wouldn’t have. We did have heavy weather on that Sunday, so I raced the first time in a raging storm. Coming back—we sailed back then, to save the ferry amount, so we take the car over and then sail back—I was so mad at the way they acted coming back, I got off the pier at Hampton Yacht Club. I came up, and I said, “Don’t call me anymore, because you’re different from what I thought you were. Don’t call me anymore.”\\n\\n They thought it was funny; I didn’t think it was funny, some of the things they were doing. It was just fun, it wasn’t anything really bad. That didn’t deter us, so we did start dating. I spent a lot of time in the garage helping him hold planks while he built this beautiful sailboat. We were racing another one that belonged to Don Talmage.\\n\\n Gloria [Champine] was one of the girls that was in the building, and she ended up dating—it is a long, involved story. I ended up taking a course in aeronautics at Hampton High School. Hal ended up taking an art course, Don Talmadge did too, and he got Gloria to pose for him. He was doing a portrait. Then because of that time of togetherness, they started dating, and they were in our wedding later on. I came up in ’46, and Hal and I were married in January of ’48. In the meantime, we’ll get back to what was being done at the office. You can just leave all this other out, if you’d like." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, it’s great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My father was thrilled, because he heard we were working on breaking the sound barrier. I didn’t work with the machine; I worked with a pencil and paper, that was it. Of course, I had all of these formulas right at my fingertips because I was fresh out of school, which now, I don’t even know what the formulas are. Ken would give us these long equations that I was supposed to bring down to the smallest common denominator. It would come down to a little thing like this, where it might be pages of equations. Each time you would do a substitution, you would have to insert numbers, too. Then I would do a machine, that would not be anything complicated. I really loved working for Ken; he was good.\\n\\n In the meantime, a lot of things were going on in the office that were sad things. It was when they gave out the loyalty pledges to sign, so this would be ’46, still. I know that two of men and then one Black computer who was a buddy of them. They were burning these loyalty forms and dropping them in the wastepaper basket. I didn’t have anything to do with it. The next thing I know, I’m being called over to East side, and it ended up it was a person—he and his wife ended up friends of ours—but he had been with the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and he was head of personnel at Langley. They wanted to know what was going on in the office about these loyalty pledges, because they had heard something about what was going on. I found out later that they had been following these two during the war, because they really had them pegged for Communists. It was during that time, too. I know when I went home one time, the doorbell rang and it was two FBI men. It scared my mother to death; she went upstairs and wouldn’t come down.\\n\\n As it turned out, these two engineers were involved with the [David and Ruth] Greenglass spy case, and they were convicted. One I know was fired from NACA; one was transferred to California somewhere. All that was going on, and in the meantime, since they found out that I had been called over to personnel, they tried to get rid of me. Those two tried to get rid of me, but they couldn’t do it. I stayed there, and Hal and I were married in January of ’48.\\n\\n We were married in the Presbyterian Church in Concord, North Carolina, in the worst snowstorm the south had ever had. Still, bless their hearts—it was a big church and three-quarters of it was filled. People in a small town go. His father was the only one that had chains in town; he had driven down from New Brunswick, New Jersey, because his father was comptroller-treasurer at Rutgers [University]. He was quite a person in New Jersey, so Hal had gone of course to Rutgers Prep [Preparatory School] and to Rutgers. He said he didn’t have a choice. They gave him a good education, and he was a very smart, talented person.\\n\\n We were married; we had not planned to have children for about two years. I guess it was about May or June of that year—we married in January—that I got pregnant. There were five of us that got pregnant at one time. We’d all go out walking together on Kecoughtan Road to get the exercise. It was so funny, the way it happened. My mother cried when she found out. I said, “What are you crying for? I came 13 months after y’all married.”\\n\\n She said, “Yes, but I wanted y’all to wait a little longer.” I had a good marriage. Before we moved—then I had a little boy, and that was four years after.\\n\\n Getting back to NACA, Ken Margolis kept telling me, he said, “Sue, you’re not leaving this place. If you have that baby on the property, you will have it on the property, but you’re not leaving until you finish this job.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They allowed you to work up until you had the baby?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I worked up until three weeks before she was born. When it got to that point, we called the computers over with the machines. There was a big computers office; two of them, in fact, in 7 X 10 [Building]. They called special ones to come over with their machines, so I didn’t do the final thing. By that time I knew that it was true, because I had tested everything coming down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was still working on the sound barrier?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As far as I knew." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you know a lot? Did they tell you a lot about what they were working on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, they didn’t." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They just gave you the equations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. You knew it was something because we had deadlines. It was an interesting place to work, because you were in-between people leaving after the war, and they were trying to get people to come. We were part of that; they were trying to get people to come. I only stayed about six weeks in the Annewith Hall. We found a couple that was going back to school to get their doctorate, I think it was. We sublet their apartment, because you couldn’t get one yourself. We had that, and that worked out well. Mary and John had their ups and downs, but they were going together. They were married about a year after we were. That kind of a gives a description of coming into the situation at the time that you were coming into.\\n\\n At lunchtime, we had a really good cafeteria that we would all go to. Then there were other activities that were nice on the field, and there were just a lot of nice people that I ran into, that ended up friends for a long time. It was interesting how you would meet people out there. Like Charlie [Charles F.] Barnett, he was head of personnel, and later his wife and I ended up in a bridge club, and we were all friends. John and Mary were our special friends, and we’ve been friends all through the years. He was sent on a special assignment to Switzerland. It was a special award that he could go and get his doctorate. He did that in a year and a half, can you believe? Not speaking the language, but as he said, “Math is the language.”\\n\\n When they came back, they had skied some over there, and they are the ones that started. Hal was a skier already, and they said, “Come on, let’s go skiing.” We started in Stowe, Vermont. For five years I skied, before I broke my legs. It was quite a busy time for everybody, having children and trying to get settled and really adjusting to a whole new environment. I’m telling you, it was really hard coming up here, because I would’ve never taken the route to Richmond, to Portsmouth, to Norfolk on the train ferry, then down to Old Point Comfort, and come across—and then come all the way back up. That was a hard thing, and how I managed it, I don’t know, because I’d never been anywhere." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have a question about your dad, the fact that he wanted you to go to college. Was that something that was unusual at that time period?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was an accepted thing. You expected to go to college, the people that we ran with. You did that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You said your dad was brilliant in math. Was he a teacher as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and he had gone to bookkeeping school. He could go down a whole line of numbers and give you the answer down at the bottom without—and what he would do, when he would help me with my math, he could skip steps. He’d say, “Now do you understand it?” At each step, I’d say, “Yes.” Then when he finished, I wanted to take the paper. He said, “No, you said you understood it.”\\n\\n I said, “I want to fill in the gaps.”\\n\\n He said, “You said you understood it.” He’d take the paper and tear it up. That made me do some work that I wouldn’t have done otherwise. I was going to go and find out how he did the skipping, because I couldn’t. I had a lot of education that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, a lot of problem solving in there, from him leaving you to those gaps. How long did you end up working at NACA? Did you go back after your daughter was born?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, let’s see, Clara was born in ’49, February of ’49. We were in the apartment until our second child was a year and a half. At that time, Hal went with Fort Eustis Aviation, because they wanted him to be head of preliminary design with the Army Aviation. We left NACA then. We had to think.\\n\\n One day we were out eating, and they said, “We heard you say something about NACA, what did that stand for?” It had been NASA so long, that we had to think about what is the abbreviation, being NACA. I can tell you this, Hampton [Virginia] and the area did not like the engineers. They were called “Nacas,” [“Naca Nuts”] because when they came—this was a small community, and when Langley was started, it was a small community. They were used to doing things a certain way. The engineers, when they’d go to the hardware store to order something and they didn’t have it, then that’s what they wanted, they didn’t settle for something else. This was a smart bunch of people that were coming into this peninsula.\\n\\n It changed things, and they would say to us, “You’re not like other Nacas.” That was how you’d find out that they didn’t like invasion of Langley, really. It was a part of their economy that has made Hampton. I didn’t want to come; I had never heard of Hampton, Virginia, and did not want to leave North Carolina or my town of Concord, because I loved it. I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher, and there wasn’t anything else to do and I wasn’t trained to be a secretary. I didn’t want that, so that’s how I ended up here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk about some of the tools? You mentioned a pencil and paper, and then is that about pretty much what you used? And your mind?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it’s just like you’re working a math problem, because you’d have this long equation and you’d see something that would substitute for that whole bracket. Then each time, you would get it smaller. You had to bring it down to its lowest common denominator." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did it take you days to do this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it did. I enjoyed it, though. It was a challenge, and it was a lot of fun being at NACA, two 7 X 10 buildings. For a long time I could show the children the sidewalk where I first saw their father. They had a lot of nice people in that building, and the ones that ended up [famous] names too. It’s nice that Mary and I, through the years—because he got involved with space. He did not work for space, but John felt that Moon orbit was the way to go and not Earth orbit, which was [Wernher] von Braun, which would take 10 years longer. He personally went to Congress, had a committee meeting. We sat outside one, didn’t know what we were doing. We had packed to go skiing, but had stopped there. Then he had to convince a committee, and NASA did not like John. He got a lot of bad backlash because it was not their people. A lot of our friends went to Houston, but there again, they were space, and they were not NACA. John was still NACA.\\n\\n When all of this culminated, John left NACA and went to Princeton [University, New Jersey] for about four years, because—Cole [Coleman] Donaldson, Cole Dupont Donaldson—had started an engineering firm up there. He wanted John as his vice-president, so they went there, which broke my heart. We visited back and forth, and he came back down here for retirement purposes, because you would retire at the salary you stopped on. That was really why they came back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s kind of an interesting time. When you were describing it, I’m visualizing that room, because there was so much going on in the room. Was there a time that, when you were working those equations, did you need help? If so, who did you go to to get help, or this was entirely your responsibility?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, that was entirely yours. When the engineer that you worked for gave it to you, that was yours." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was a lot of work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You knew those equations. I felt sorry for one older woman that was in there, because she would ask me things. She was real nice, but she—I had forgotten about her—but she didn’t have the equations at her fingertips the way, when you first come out of college, you were really fresh. I had a good college education too, plus I’d had three years of physics, even physics problems. Those physics problems did help me too, with that background." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you went to work there, did you have plans to stay for awhile, until you met Hal?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I came because it was a job, and I didn’t want to go to Dahlgren. I’d heard about that; a friend of mine went to Dahlgren. I guess there were about 15 or 20 math majors. There were only two others I was friends of; one went to Dahlgren and the other was Mary Houbolt. It was a strange mixture of us. Some of them came up here too, and we were never friends, even up here. I could speak to them, but they weren’t the same type. It was a really wonderful background to come in on, because they had prepared you for facing almost anything that could be thrown at you. Let’s see, what are some more questions on here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have some more, Sandra ?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s interesting, because it was an interesting time when you started working there. As you said, it was after the war, but it was also a time when a lot of women, when they went into the workforce, if they got married, or if they had children, they weren’t allowed to work anymore." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s what I wanted to tell you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, I’m glad I thought of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I took a professional rating exam, and I’d been probably working a year and a half. You had to take it at certain times when it was offered. It took awhile to get the grade back. They called me over to personnel again. I had passed it, but they asked me to not take the appointment because it would take the place of a man. That was in 1948. It was ’47 or ’48. By that time, I was making more than I would’ve gotten if I had taken my professional rating. Hal and I were married by that time; we were either married or engaged, or I knew we were going to get married. I just really was very surprised at that happening, though.\\n\\n The children said, “Don’t forget to tell them that!” Our granddaughter, who’s a lawyer, and she and her husband live in Salt Lake [City, Utah]. She’s with a Denver [Colorado] firm but they opened another firm over there. I told her that the other day, and she said, “I don’t believe that! What year was that?” That’s when they were doing that kind of thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, they needed jobs for men." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It would take a job from a man, and a man was head of the household. Hal and I were married, by the way, for 64 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s amazing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was, because he was—in three more months it would’ve been 64 years when he died. In three more months, he would’ve been 90. The years passed, and we had good years. There’s some tough times you go through sometimes, but there again we had a good life. And this was a wonderful area to raise children in, because it was so safe, and it was so protected. They could ride their bike up to the country club. There was swimming, and the Riverside school was here and it was one of the best. Then after sixth grade we sent them to private school, because they told us there that we didn’t have a choice with our daughter. She was so smart; she really needed to go there. She was accepted immediately by Middlebury [College, Vermont], and then also by Virginia College too. She met her husband at Middlebury, so that was her destiny." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you work after you left NACA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. I was so busy with trying to keep the house together while he was building around us. All these cabinets, everything—the beams, all. He did, and he was about 6’1”, but he was wiry, and he was strong. He would lift things like that, but his mathematical sense was absolutely unbelievable. It got to be, in later years, that he would say to me, “You were a math major?” It was just funny, because when you get out, it doesn’t take long for it to leave you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned it’s a language, and it’s like learning a language, and you’re away from it, you forget it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, you do. Are there other things? Let’s see, Pearl Harbor had happened when I was in high school. I remember that, so all this had happened. What are some of the things here? I’m sorry; I’ve been so jumping around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, you gave great information." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There are so many things intertwined with each other that it was hard to separate them out.\\n\\n It was a good place to come to work, and my father was just thrilled." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you get to see them much once you came up here? Did you get to go home?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, because you didn’t travel as much. There again, I could—after Hal and I were married, he’d take us down and we’d maybe stay for a couple of weeks. Then they would come up here sometimes. You didn’t travel and talk on the phone then like you do now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, being so connected." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "During the war, I would have to ride the bus home from Greensboro. Had to go to Concord because of gas rationing. I was lucky to run into Hal, because that was a strange thing—I’d never had anything like that happen. It happened right away; I clicked with him too. But when I tell the story, he’d say, “See? I didn’t have a chance?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mathematically figured it out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I already had it all figured out, had him roped in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was thinking when the sound barrier finally was broken; you must’ve felt some pride knowing you had something to do with that. Even way back when." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. Of course, Gloria’s husband was the top test pilot [Robert A. Champine]. We didn’t like test pilots, and you know what? When the astronauts came and we had them here, we thought they were all crazy. I had astronauts in my living room and never got a signature or anything. We didn’t have any idea that they were going to the Moon. The children say—David’s the young one, the youngest one—and he said, “You mean I sat on John Glenn’s lap and you didn’t get a picture?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A picture or anything?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "See, we were friends of the couple that were kind of in charge of them. They would have parties. Then all of a sudden, everybody was whisked off because of the President at that time, whisked off to Texas. Good friends left, and in fact some of our best friends ended up down there. It was David’s godparents, and it’s hard to keep up. And by that time, Hal was not with NACA so we didn’t go to the parties and things. In fact, now when they have the reunions we didn’t go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was curious about your interest in sailing. Did your husband sail much or do much with Bob [Robert R.] Gilruth?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, in fact, in the summer time, his family would go to Bar Harbor [Maine] and spend the summer. They had rented a farmhouse up there, had a hundred-year lease on a farmhouse. He should’ve written a book, on the activities and escapades those children had. There were four children, and he was a twin. Then Mr. Johnson would take them up, and he’d stay for a week or two. Then he’d go back to New Brunswick, and then he’d come up at the end of the summer. They would go with the maid, and the cats, the trays, and everything, and just had the most wonderful time on Bar Harbor. I said, “What did your mother do while you were all jumping off cliffs and into the water and all that?” I said, “Doing needlepoint?” They were a nice family. I was sorry I didn’t get to know her, because she was really a talented person.\\n\\n During the war, and this is what I hear, they had a continual party going. When one shift would get off, they would go to the party. Then it would just keep going, so they had 24 hours around. I understand that was—one girl I knew—Anne Timberlake—she had danced on the table. Just things that you would hear after the fact. They really kept things going in a very active way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were there working—because you mentioned about the loyalty pledges and the communistic aura—do you feel like the work that you were doing was very secret? Could you talk about things when you left out of there, or did you have to keep your work quiet?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To tell you the truth, I didn’t know enough about it that I would’ve been a danger. It was that I was doing the math part of it, and they understood why they are giving you all those equations and why you were getting them down. I didn’t have any idea when I got them down to the final thing, what it was. That’s why I took aeronautics, trying to learn something. No, it was not discussed, and Ken Margolis would have if there had been a reason. They’d come and give you the sheets.\\n\\n But we were mathematicians, is what we were. We felt like we were a cut above those that did nothing but work the machines. That sounds kind of—but that’s what we felt. They didn’t understand that we just used pencil and paper, and that was all that I did. There was an adding machine there, that you could add things up, but not one of the computer machines. In fact, we were really before the computing machine came, the big ones came in. As they say now, it took the place of it. It’s really funny that when I’d see Barbara Weigel later, I’d say, “See, Barbara, you’re responsible for all this.” She’s the one who started me by giving me the ride with John Houbolt and getting me over on the West side." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s right; the special assignment became very special, didn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I would run into her, she was quite a nice Christian, too. I would run into her at different meetings and things. Gloria was telling me that she was trying to find out where she was. I got the telephone book and tried to see too, and it said Charles Street. She said,”No, she’s not there.” Evidently she had fallen or something and was in a retirement home. I don’t know where Barbara is, but she would be older than I, and I’ll be 89 in June. Mary’s a year younger than I am, because she started school a year early." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had mentioned the parties—the 24-hour parties during the war. Once you got there, were there a lot of NACA-sponsored activities, or clubs, or anything like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We would have things like at Halloween, or a dance. Somebody that Hal used to date, I know we went to a dance, and she threw her shoes up in the net in the activity building and wanted Hal to get her shoes. That didn’t set well with me. I know we went to dances out there, and then I remember going to a Halloween party, because I remember being dressed up. There were a lot of nice people that were fun, that we enjoyed.\\n\\n We had a sailing group that we enjoyed, a really great group. The ones that sailed Hampton One Designs and Norfolk, and Hampton. That was a great sailboat. In fact, the man that had designed it lived here, Mr. Serio [phonetic]. It was a beautiful boat that Hal built, and that was really his love. We ended up with that, and when the children got older we got the Mobjack [sailboat], which you automatically took a crew of two, besides the skipper. That would enable him to take the children with him, and then you could take three. Then when we stopped racing, then got a 28 foot, just a cruising-type boat that we enjoyed.\\n\\n I look back, and I don’t know how in the world we did all that we did, because we were social too. He built all this, and we raised children. I look back, and I said, I don’t know how it happened, but we did.” I can remember the first Christmas that we moved up here. I was in the living room on a card table writing Christmas cards. He was in the dining room with a buzz saw and sawdust was going around. I was sitting in the living room crying, and writing the cards, and crying.\\n\\n My mother had said to me, “Sue, don’t you ever let Hal move you into an unfinished house.”\\n\\n I said, “Mom, I don’t have any idea of Hal moving me.” We didn’t even have the lot at that time, when she died. We might’ve had the lot. I said, “I have no idea of moving into an unfinished house.” There were those prophetic words.\\n\\n But this was a good place to come, and a good neighborhood. When he started at Fort Eustis, there was one stop light. Now there about 25, I think. I’ve forgotten counting of how many there are between here and Fort Eustis." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, it’s changed. Give us your thoughts when you first went out to Langley, because the wind tunnels were there. It had to be such a unique place, something you’d never even seen around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It really was, and they had the—in 7 X 10 they had the wind tunnel girls that would read the figures that come as a result of the airplanes, what was happening with them, and the models in the wind tunnels. When that thing started up, it’s a roar. You really can hear it, but those wind tunnels are gone now, from what I understand they’re tearing them down. It was an interesting time.\\n\\n Then at lunchtime—and I know this was before and after we were married, too—the engineers would build these little racing—you know carve out of balsa—these little racing cars, and so they’d have contests in the hall. They’d have the cartridge that would shoot off. They’d have contests in the hall, shooting all of this, because it was one big long hall all the way up at lunchtime. I can remember being at our apartment, and they’d be over there carving. You’d want to go to bed, and they’re carving models. They were always challenging something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, minds were always thinking, weren’t they?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At Club 55, there was Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, University of Illinois, and I’ve forgotten the other one. One that I couldn’t stand who was from Princeton, he was really rude to Mary and me. He didn’t like us either, and he’d go to Hal like—he had a big walrus face, I don’t know. He ended up head of McDonnell-Douglas [Corporation]. He liked Hal, and so when he’d go up to make a speech, then Charlie [Charles M.] Forsyth would come get a chair in the front row, right in the middle, and sit there. These guys were smart; they were placed all around in very important jobs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Brilliant minds, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were two to a room, and then that would be six. Then there were six in the three bedrooms, and then John had the single room because he kind of ran the place. And they had a maid, cook, and laundress. Hal asked my father if he could marry me. I heard my daddy laughing, and he’d been chasing Daddy around all day. My mother said, “Look, you stay put. You know what that young man’s trying to do.” Then I hear my father just dying laughing. He was a good-looking man and he had a good sense of humor.\\n\\n I said later, “What were you laughing so about?”\\n\\n He said, “Well, I told him I don’t know why he wanted to marry you. You didn’t know how to cook, you didn’t know how to sew, you didn’t know how to do anything.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He was going to go down in his standards. It sounds like he made a good decision." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "North met south, north married south. That was a smart group; that was a nice group. Just one house; in fact, they were the first house facing Cherokee Road and there was just one house between them and the water. That house faced Chesapeake Boulevard. It was a good location, too. I got my ring overlooking Hampton Roads. It was an exciting time, and it was a fun time. How in the world we worked it all in, I don’t know. Mary Paulson—who you have her name—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I believe so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She’s over at Chesapeake. In fact, I gave it to Gloria. She was in the editorial office; she just turned 90, and I just saw her Sunday at church because her son and daughter-in-law went over and got her. She’s very crippled, but she swims each day. Mary lived—all of us lived on Regents Street, it seemed. Then when we got married, we all lived on Elizabeth Road. We all had apartments over there, and it was just really funny how we stayed connected, even after we were married. I see her son, and he’ll come over, and I go to St. Stephen’s [Episcopal Church] and he’ll come over during the passing the peace and give me a great big hug. John now is a grandfather, and I remember him when he was in the little stroller with the little bare feet, and they were cute children. It’s just so funny to think back, of the years that have passed.\\n\\n Everybody—and Eloise, you have her name. She was a secretary, and she came one or two years before I did. She’s so nice, and she’s good looking too. She had a roommate—she was as good-looking a brunette as she was a blonde. I have a picture of the three of us in our furs up here, at the bridge with the lions. One of the single guys had taken us driving one Sunday, and I have that picture. We are still friends. It’s nice to have the ones that have stayed, that you really liked. Mary moved in—when we gave up our apartment, three months before, she had a chance to move in with four girls. There were four girls in our apartment. They had bunk beds and they were all cute girls, and good dressers and all too. How in the world they managed, I don’t know, but they did. We all kept up with each other, and it was nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like a great memory, and a great time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a busy time, but I’m sorry—I had it worked out more in my mind, but when you start telling it—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, I think it’s there. Then when you get the transcript, if there are things that you think of, you can pencil it in and we can always add." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know one time I saw Ken Margolis out in the yard, so I stopped. I was so glad to see him. I said, “I want to tell you Ken,” I said, “My daughter married a Jewish husband. He’s a doctor,” and I said, “I just love him. He is wonderful.”\\n\\n He said, “My son married a Gentile girl, and I can’t stand her.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s funny how life all works out, doesn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it is, but that whole section of stability analysis was Jewish. They were smart guys. Leonard Sternfield was just the sweetest guy, and nice-looking guy. He had a child who ended up a very outstanding pianist, I understand. He would start shaving on Friday early, because he always left before sundown. He kept up with the time. He would have that already prepared and ready to leave, and that was something that you’d admire him for, because he was just a really genuinely nice person. These other two were just crude." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s amazing how many things you learn about people by just working with them, and being with them every day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sugenia M. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were smart, but there again, they weren’t like Ken and Leonard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We can stop for now, and then if you’d like, as we go back through the transcript, or we visit a little bit more, if you think of something else then we can add that." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00909", + "metadata": { + "category": "Earth System Science at 20", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/ESS/TilfordSG/tilfordsg.htm", + "original_file_name": "TilfordSG_6-24-09.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/ESS/TilfordSG/TilfordSG_6-24-09.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "Earth System Science at 20 Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "location_date": "Washington, D.C. – June 24, 2009" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Shelby G. Tilford" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Take us back to the late 1980s when plans are moving along and you’ve got them going, and then tell us how they progressed with the systems and the committees to the next step." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In that time frame, we had put together the agencies with various elements of the US GCRP [Global Change Research Program]. We had, at that time, I think established the International CEOS [Committee on Earth Observing Satellites], which included essentially every country that was involved in space systems related to observations of Earth. Some country representatives didn’t attend very much, but we had a very large attendance at almost every meeting, and we tried to meet two to three times a year rotating the location of the meetings.\\n\\n We had a lot of cooperative efforts going. There was a very big interest in almost all the countries to be a participant in this effort. I would have to say that Japan, France, England, and Germany were the big players, but we also had a number of individuals from Brazil, plus representatives from several smaller countries, who were extremely interested in CEOS because they wanted to get involved in the space program. At the same time they wanted to make sure that the remote sensing information that NASA, ESA [European Space Agency], or Japan or any of the individual, single country, space organizations in Europe were available to them. If someone did an assessment of Brazil’s forests, or whatever, they wanted to make sure they were part of it, so that number one, they would understand it, and I think too, that they didn’t trust the other countries, including us, to do an unbiased job.\\n\\n We overcame that by including them on everything that we did. We shared data and made sure that the PIs [Principal Investigator] that were involved in forest analyses, from either Landsat [Land Remote-Sensing Satellite] or one of the other satellites with lower resolution, got involved. We made sure that there was an exchange of information and exchange of people. They would let us come down and visit on many numerous instances and perform in situ ground truth observations/verifications, which was at first extremely important because we weren’t really sure how our different satellites with different resolutions could resolve reality in terms of forest cover. As you can imagine, if you’ve got a small road and see it with Landsat, that’s easy. But if you have a small road and look at it with a lower resolution instrument like AVHRR [Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer] or some other instrument, you probably wouldn’t detect or see it.\\n\\n We cooperated very well. I think in a few years, with the cooperation of several universities, Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland], and a lot of industry people, with members of the Brazilian Space Agency, and their University investigators, they were comfortable, we were comfortable. That turned out to be one of the earliest products of the international cooperation from that point of view.\\n\\n We had similar agreements with France in terms of oceans. I think I mentioned before, they were jointly involved in the topography [TOPEX-Poseidon] mission to precisely measure ocean height, which had never been done before. I think we mentioned why, but there were a number of these cooperative efforts. The English had instruments on UARS [Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite], joint data sharing agreements, participation in several instrument teams for other satellites, and there were other joint efforts. Germany had several instruments they flew on Shuttle, including their X-band synthetic aperture radar. So the international program, from the Earth Science point of view, was working well.\\n\\n There were similar agreements in astronomy, astrophysics, and space plasma physics. We had many joint programs with Japan, the flight of the NSCAT scatterometers on the Japanese ADEOS [Advanced Earth Observing Satellite] spacecraft, the joint Japan-US TRMM [Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission] mission, which was the first measurements of global rainfall and rainfall over the ocean, experiments on the Shuttle, etc. There was a lot of data sharing.\\n\\n In the late 1980s things were moving extremely well. We obtained a new start in 1990 for the Earth Observing System [EOS], which was a lot larger at that time than it is now. I also mentioned that we had planned for three sets of satellites, and there were still two when I left. That was cut back to a single set of satellites after I retired.\\n\\n In that period of time it was also the beginning of the GCRP [Global Change Research Program] from an integrated point of view within the US government. We had all the agencies on board, thank goodness. This is at the same time that the international people started meeting in terms of not at agency level but at a national level. The international ozone assessments were taking place on a regular basis and in a few years CO2 [carbon dioxide] and climate assessments began on regular basis. In 1988 the first international IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] was established by the WMO [World Meteorological Organization] and the UNEP [United Nations Environment Programme]. In 1990 the IPCC published its first assessment; I think it was originally biannually. These reports addressed the state of the world climate, evaluated the risk of climate change caused by human activity, evaluated assessments and impacts of the production and role of CO2.\\n\\n When it became elevated to that point, of course, in both cases, it had to be the heads of the government or designated representatives of heads of the government, because we’re talking about international policy-making now. With ozone, we went through similar evaluations, which resulted in international policy agreements. In the first decade of the international discussions, in both the international ozone and climate discussions, [Robert T.] Bob Watson from our program office, was the primary US scientific spokesman, and played a significant role in the scientific assessments [of climate] until he was replaced by the administration because the policy heads were not in agreement with the scientific conclusions.\\n\\n I don’t think there were any proposed policy agreements with respect to CO2 until later. Then for all practical purposes, I think it became more political than scientific, especially when it got down to—as I’m sure you’ll remember, and which I wasn’t really a part of at this time—but when it came down to regulations on CO2, as you know, the United States would not sign the UN’s proposed agreement. This wasn’t an ideal agreement, I would agree, but at least it could have been reworded slightly, from my point of view, to have been much more amenable. But it wasn’t, and it still isn’t, but it may be next year.\\n\\n We evolved from a NASA program to a US program on trying to understand Earth as a system. Then it evolved along with the international program to become an integrated International Earth Observation Program, with a few exceptions, of course. I forgot to mention the Soviets, but they were an important player, and the fact that we talked to each other I thought was a good step for breaking down the Cold War. It really did put some trust in both sides of the system that things could be done together, and I thought that was a very worthwhile effort." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about your work with the United Nations [UN]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We very early got to know the leaders of the UN environmental group, Dr. Peter Thatcher and his group stationed in Nairobi [Kenya]. They were interested in much broader things than NASA was at the time. Specifically, issues for them were food, habitat, forest, and species preservation or destruction, whichever way you want to look at it. Peter Thatcher happened to be a US citizen, and his deputy was a citizen of the UK [United Kingdom], and so we brought them onboard right quick. When we would have discussions at CEOS, we would invite them along. Since that time, there have been a number of US individuals who have temporarily served in that office for periods of one to three years. We still have an unofficial working relationship between some of our people and some of theirs.\\n\\n We cooperated and offered them the same data rights for non-commercial uses, any country with a need at that time, if they wanted the data, just like we’d offer any scientists the data. So it took up a little bit of time, but I think overall it was probably worth it, but I’m not sure how much they utilized the data. They need to utilize the data a lot more in the UN, but it may be way down on their list. They still have some serious problems in the developing countries, and it is hard for us to even realize what those are until you visit some place like Kenya, and that’s one of the more developed ones.\\n\\n We tried, we did, and I don’t think there was ever very much contention except when it was elevated to the political level, and that’s a whole different set of arguments. We really didn’t want to repeat the errors that we experienced when we went to that original UNEP meeting in 1982. We wanted to get them involved and at least be part of the process in name, if not in spirit. It was in spirit, but I don’t think there were many contributions. Let’s say it that way. They were going to be receivers, not providers. But we did, and I think still do, through the international office especially, have relations with UNEP. Of course now, you’ve got to remember, I’ve been gone for 15 years which is a long, long time in this business." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s interesting for us to listen to all of the steps that you put into place, and then you changed gears. You went to the commercial side, where you attempted to do some things with Orbital Sciences Corporation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well at the time I quote, “retired,” Orbital was very interested in the commercialization of satellites. We had been through the Landsat issue, which never worked and probably never would. On the other hand, at the same time, we had put up an ocean color measuring instrument, and it had been extremely successful and well-received, especially by the fisheries and industries that wanted to use data for commercial purposes. We wanted to put another one up too, but there was a lot of reluctance to do that. So Orbital Sciences made a proposal that if we put up part of the money to buy data up front, that they would launch and provide commercial data with a certain amount of free data to the scientific community. That wasn’t completed when I left NASA; in fact, it was Stan Wilson’s organization and [William] Bill Townsend, who worked under me, who had negotiated these agreements.\\n\\n At that time I really was not interested in going back to work for a while. However, [Robert] Bob Lovell had been a fellow Division Director for NASA’s communications programs in the same office [Office of Applications] as the Earth Science Division before leaving to work with Orbital Sciences Corporation; he immediately began trying to get me to join Orbital Sciences. I explained several times that I was not ready to go back to work, but after about three months and numerous discussions, we finally agreed that I would work part time only (~ 50% based upon Company activities), at Orbital with the Title of Chief Scientist. Orbital thought since I was involved in the Earth Science Program, maybe we could do some other similar things commercially.\\n\\n I could not work on the ocean color satellite program because of potential conflict of interest, but then we started looking at other things that Orbital might do.\\n\\n The one thing that weather people, both forecasters and researchers, want more than anything else which we’ve never been able to provide, is global tropospheric wind measurements, because temperature measurements are great, but the temperature profiles have to be inverted—mathematically converted to calculated winds. There are a number of inversion processes, but none of them are very precise in the terms of just how fast the wind is moving and what direction at what altitude.\\n\\n What you’re trying to do is take a series of temperature profiles using one method or another. One way to measure temperature profiles in the atmosphere is to use rawinsonde weather balloons. These balloons are released from a number of global locations and are tracked by radar techniques to obtain height, location, temperature, and sometimes humidity. Currently there are about 100 locations where the balloons are launched supported by the US, and perhaps a total of 800 at all locations around the globe. These observations are measured twice a day from most of these locations.\\n\\n Another technique is used on aircraft to measure the same parameters. Global measurements are obtained from satellites. Usually some infrared CO2 temperature profile measurements are utilized, because the way you do that, you have a series of individual rotational lines in the CO2 molecules in the infrared, and you precisely measure these series of lines to determine altitude and temperature. Then you try to invert that temperature profile into a wind profile, and it is very difficult. In other words, with any of these techniques, the global wind profiles are not very accurate. If you have a wind LIDAR [Light Detection and Ranging Instrument], essentially what you do is let this instrument rotate around in different directions and altitudes, measure the laser backscatter, essentially measuring the Doppler backscatter in different directions. You automatically have an accurate wind direction and wind speed, as a function of altitude at high spatial resolution on a global basis and on a more frequent basis which is pretty nice to have.\\n\\n We spent much of my five years trying to develop a commercial or semi-commercial satellite tropospheric wind measuring system. Because of the lack of the technology development after three plus years, we just said, “We can’t do this yet.” There was not a laser available of the correct wavelength that was powerful enough or stable enough or had a sufficiently long lifetime. We tried all kinds of concepts. We even went to a Gatlin gun [rotating] laser, where we were going to put several lasers around the optics, and use one until it burned out, and then another, then another. But the lasers just weren’t available in 1996–1998 time frame, and they’re still not available today.\\n\\n That did lead to some interesting research by some of the people who were involved. Actually, as I mentioned earlier, one of the scientists that was involved was a principal investigator who had flown on the Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite. The major winds in the upper atmosphere are a whole lot easier to measure than in lower atmosphere; this is because of the concentration of molecules are a lot less. He used an etalon interferometer where you have an oxygen spectral line that is a real sharp line in the red part of the spectrum, and by measuring the Doppler shift of that line with respect to the satellite and subtracting out the satellite’s motion, you can measure the wind speed and direction. He did that on UARS, and measured global stratospheric winds. It was really a neat experiment and the data were extremely useful for better understanding global stratospheric circulation. Never has been repeated, unfortunately.\\n\\n Now he has developed a very much smaller instrument, but one that can utilize small and very low power lasers that can be mounted on various platforms that need instantaneous wind information, i.e., airplanes, helicopters, wind turbines, etc.\\n\\n But we wanted to measure winds in the troposphere on a global scale, that’s where the weather is that affects the surface. In the stratosphere there’s ozone and temperature and various other species, but the winds up there are quite different. The tropopause is an interesting media. As you move up in the troposphere, the temperature starts decreasing until you reach the tropopause. At that point the temperature begins to increase again. This is where the stratosphere begins. All the photo-chemistry takes place in this region, because ultraviolet sunlight is not completely filtered out at this altitude. You excite a lot of different molecules and species that do not occur in the troposphere because the UV [ultraviolet] sunlight is filtered out as at the lower altitudes. The tropopause occurs when the temperature quits decreasing and starts increasing.\\n\\n The temperature increases in the stratosphere up to a point where there are fewer and fewer oxygen molecules to be converted to ozone, then it starts to decrease again. You then get up to another layer called the mesosphere, and above the mesopause, it starts heating up again. But now, this heating is due to electrons bombarding the atoms and molecules, creating a partially ionized layer. The mesosphere is a transition region, and above that is the ionosphere where you have ionized atomic species rather than neutral atomic and molecular species. I thought you’d like to know the difference." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s very interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was involved in several other projects in which Orbital was successful in winning, building, and launching satellite experiments. One was a new satellite to measure the UV solar spectral and the solar constant, SORCE [Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment], developed for the University of Colorado, which has now produced solar variability for about eight years in the UV spectrum and for the total solar output.\\n\\n At this time Orbital was very involved in the two different programs. One was taking over a land-looking instrument for commercial purposes, which unfortunately when they launched it, after I left, the rocket didn’t work, so that was quite a blow for their organization. The other major project at that time was a series of—I think it was 28 low-orbiting communications satellites – the ORBCOMM satellite program, which would provide telephone and location communications over the entire globe. I don't know whether you remember all the things that went on with respect to global telephone communications, but after a few years this component was sold to an independent organization. I think it’s still going on, because Orbital has received orders for additional satellites. Since I wasn’t in the communication area, I really didn’t have very much to do with that. I only worked part-time there the whole five years. At this time Orbital did not have the resources to continue many of their desired objectives in Earth Sciences, so we agreed that I could now go do what I tried to do five years earlier." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Since you’re here in Washington, DC, for this symposium to celebrate and to recognize the accomplishments of Earth Systems Science during the last 20 years, as you look back and look at the accomplishments, do you see a missed opportunity? Do you have some thoughts that you could go back and do things different or to make things better than they are now?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’ve thought about that, and I think that I could have, but not with the people who were in charge of NASA at that time. We lost at several levels in the last two years that I was at NASA. To be honest, if we’d completed the program as laid out, it would have been a fantastic transition from research into operational observational and data systems. We could have had a much more robust and useful EOS data system. Data archiving, retrieval, and distribution are some of the biggest problems that any environmental agency has right now, which I think is demonstrated with NOAA’s [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] inability to put enough money into their [National] Climatic Data [Center] as it exists today in Asheville [North Carolina]. Hopefully that will improve shortly. They did get a significant increase, but with that, they also received an increase in responsibilities in terms of the new Climate Program, which is not well defined.\\n\\n I think in terms of measurements, what has been demonstrated in the last few days is that the Earth Observing System has accomplished much and in a very robust manner. I’m pleased and amazed—a lot of good new measurements, improved models and understanding of what has been happening, and in many cases, why many physical changes are occurring." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We were at the event last night [National Academy of Sciences] where a picture of all of the satellites was displayed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and that’s a sad picture when you go to the second slide, isn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Would you like to talk about that for a moment? As you’re going back through the list, because you had your hands in so many, is there a favorite one?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really. Originally I was really enthused about UARS because it was an integrated satellite, and it was going to measure a lot of things and really contribute to the ozone issue to hopefully define it to the point that there would be no doubt that there was an ozone reduction. We got to that point, and then we verified it. That was a lot of satisfaction because really this is the second thing I’d ever done with satellites. The first one was the solar constant measurement on Solar Max [Solar Maximum Satellite] mission. Of the ten solar constants instruments, that have flown since SMM [Solar Maximum Mission], I may have been the selection official on most of them. [I wasn’t the selection official on the first one, but it was my recommendation]. So just measuring a solar constant to a precision of one tenth of a percent, over this period of time, that’s pretty neat too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s pretty amazing, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Over 20-something years. It was from ’76. Yes, that is a long time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was a good investment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was. Still is. Without that one nothing else matters. If the solar output starts changing in any direction, we need to know it. However, if it changes very much in either direction we can’t do much of anything about it. It has had bumps in it before, as some of the data showed today. Dr. Judith Lean from NRL [US Naval Research Laboratory] gave an excellent summary on the measurements, and interpretational developments regarding the solar output measurements at this meeting. On the other hand we have only 30 years of measurements on something that been operating for at least 100 million years to about 4.5 billion years. [That’s 30 years in 100,000,000 years or 4,500,000,000 years, not a lot of information on any absolute scale, but with the understanding that the most recent data is probably the most relevant.].\\n\\n Most recent variations have been explained in terms of solar phenomena such as sunspots, faculae, plages, etc. Sunspots reduce the energy output of the sun. Faculae enhance the sun’s energy output. In each case it’s less than ~5 watts/m2, compared to a total output of about 1361 or 1365 watts/m2 (calibration differences, we think). If you average it out over a few months, the two phenomena just about balance each other out. We’ve never seen a major long term variation between the two which we cannot identify or rationalize, which makes it pretty good for us here on the surface.\\n\\n But no, EOS has to be the one that counted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s pretty amazing, the amount of data. Are you surprised that there is so much data now that they’re having some challenges to use it all?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Well they do have some challenges, part of which might could have been much smaller because we didn’t have the resources in the EOSDIS [Data Information System] to do what we set out to do, and it was reduced and it was reduced and it was reduced.\\n\\n We had several contractors that simply couldn’t meet the specifications they had signed up for. We changed contractors, or NASA changed contractors, two or three times. It doesn’t look exactly as we designed it in terms of specifics, but it’s come a long way in doing much of what we wanted it to in terms of being a distributed data system. The PIs have become much more involved in it than I expected them to, which is almost a necessity at the early stages until you start being able to reduce data on a routine basis that the community as a whole will accept.\\n\\n I think today in the civilian world, it is probably, the most complicated and useful environmental data system that exists. If I look at some of the other programs, I wish we could expand it into what they do. I really would like to see that happen, between NOAA, USGS [United States Geological Survey], and NASA. It has made progress. I think it will eventually merge, but it’s going to take political pressure more than anything else. It just won’t work otherwise.\\n\\n But NOAA data, USGS data, and NASA’s ocean data, and atmospheric data should all be accessible through the Internet in an integrated manner where you can not Google [search engine] it, but do something equivalent to Google to go find what you’re looking for, and pull it out and use it just like we use Google information today. But it’s a lot more complicated in terms of the number of bits. We’re talking about millions and millions of terabytes, petabytes. I don't have any idea when we’ll get there, or if we ever will." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like everything you had your hand in was a bit complicated. Was there anything simple?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. We tried to make a step forward in everything we did. I don’t think on EOS we flew anything that did not require several technology developments in terms of resolution, in terms of sensitivity, in terms of stability, in terms of calibration. Every one of them that I can think of was a state-of-the-art development effort. We may have flown—no, I think we even changed technology on the UV and the solar constant and many of the other measurements. Yes, I think we changed that, the calibration capability. So no, I cannot think of anything simple—nothing was simple, very few things were even routine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At any point did you consider technology your best friend or your biggest enemy?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Both. Yes. It is. We made such strides in the last twenty years in technology. Well, look what we have done in our lifetimes. We had automobiles and airplanes, barely, and look where we are today. We didn’t really believe we would ever see a man on the moon, or communicate the way we do today on the Internet, or that most dictionaries (books) would become obsolete. This has been a great time to be here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What would you like to see happen with Earth System Science in the next five years or 20 years? What do you think is an important issue?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Really, what I would like to see is something equivalent to EOS become operational, in an operational agency, not a research agency. But I think NASA is the only agency where that might happen, unfortunately, although this sounds like an oxymoron.\\n\\n On the other hand, NASA has to keep making technology developments with the participation of all the university scientists who have ideas and who are capable.\\n\\n NASA has a lot of good scientists, but we’ve got to go where people have ideas other than those ingrained at NASA. What I have seen is that—and since I’ve left, especially—there’s been a tremendous interchange of scientists. Part of it I hope we initiated, because I kept rotating people from Centers into NASA Headquarters [Washington, DC] and keeping them for two years or so and letting someone else come in.\\n\\n From all the Centers, I had deputies from Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] and JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California], Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama], Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia]. Everyone was participating in the Earth Science Program. I tried to get them involved and come and spend time. We also had a lot of university people who rotated through the program office.\\n\\n What I’ve seen, since I’ve been here this week is that there are a lot of people who used to be at NASA who are now at universities, and there are several people at universities who have come to NASA. I think that is just fantastic from my point of view. The only thing missing is continuity with respect to how the agency and the government operate. That’s a hard lesson to learn. I know. So from that point of view, I think things are progressing.\\n\\n I’m mostly worried about the ability to have continuity in data. That’s the largest issue! I don't know how it can be fixed. It takes more budget, it takes more people, and it takes a lot of people that I’m not sure exists in terms of building the instruments and developing the technology. So from that point of view, that’s really my biggest concern.\\n\\n But now, what I’d like to see is EOS into an operational capability and somewhere that it would be supported for as long as it’s needed, and I don't know how long that is. As we develop new instrumentation with higher resolution and more sensitivity, then it should be transitioned into the operational phase. That was sort of the mode we used with the first polar orbiting satellites. It was called TIROS [Television Infrared Observation Satellite] here and it was called NPOESS [National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System] there. That’s been a difficult job in the last decade.\\n\\n NPOESS, that’s the advanced instruments for climate sensing that were supposed to be put on NOAA’s polar orbiting platform. I know that there was a huge overrun, and the budgets didn’t quite fit, and as a result many of these new instruments were removed, or eliminated, and they were in limbo for some time. I think what has happened is that NASA has said, “Okay, we’ll fly the first system of the Climate Observing System as a prototype,” but that doesn’t include very many measurements. That’s where the hard part is, a lot of measurements/observations are just going to die, and there’s no replacement. As you saw the measurement satellites blacked out during last evening’s presentation, that’s what’s happening. Some of the very important instruments like the altimeter and scatterometer, they are just not going to be there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All but one of the satellites is on borrowed time? Is that what they were referring to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, within a five-year lifetime. I hope like all the other instruments, those last few that faded out, the current instruments continue to last longer. But on a five-year lifetime prediction, they will all disappear; they’re all gone except one. That’s scary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Are there any more that you helped conceive being developed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There are a number of new things that were proposed with respect to the decadal survey, which the NRC completed three years ago, which I’ve had nothing to do with.\\n\\n I might add that the decadal survey, from my point of view is a massive step backwards for NASA, and for the US. You might say it is what NASA was doing before 1980, technology demonstrations of new, or enhanced technologies. I’m really sorry that the National Academy Sciences [NAS] did not step up to recommending an Earth Sciences Program that would provide much more information as environmental issues require more understanding, as the problems of water availability decreases, as energy requirements grow, etc., as the population continues to expand on an exponential basis. We are behind the eight ball and I believe it will continue to deteriorate.\\n\\n Regarding the instruments recommended by the NAS committee, many of those are just enhancements in concept to some of the things that are being flown on EOS or that have been flown on other missions. There are a few new things in there, so I think between the Europeans, the Japanese and the joint efforts there, that’ll be helpful. I would not be a bit surprised in five years that we have fewer US observations than Japan and Europe do, and Russia perhaps, and most likely China also. China’s very aggressive in this area, and they probably won’t share their data." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was actually leading into my question that you shared with us yesterday. That was such a monumental decision to have the data shared with all partners, and then learning that the capabilities within the US are beginning to decrease. But it also seems that the care to learn more about climate change is increasing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes!!!!." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We don’t know how much yet in the United States, but from what you’re saying, it’s increasing throughout the world. How is that going to change when these other countries start taking the lead in putting up these satellites?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s going to make the United States look very bad, I think. In fact I expect it to have very large negative impacts upon our economy, and our lifestyle. We really need more information to better predict and evaluate droughts, floods, weather events, hurricanes, improved long-term impact analyses on crop production, energy production, water availability, etc., etc.\\n\\n We probably will still have a polar platform for weather and a geostationary platform for weather. Those are NOAA-funded instruments. We’ll have a few research instrument satellites. The rate things are going, and the cost overruns that have been experienced in recent years, there are fifteen satellites proposed in the decadal survey. Now a decadal survey means to me ten years. Well, my estimate is that based on the funds that are available and the complexity of the missions, we’ll be lucky to fly four in the next ten years. Maybe five, but I think four." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Will it be difficult to pick which four?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They have already supposedly picked which four, but they’re not necessarily the same first four that I would pick if I were doing it. I would have lobbied very hard to do something different than what the decadal survey is, because my idea of Earth Science is making enough measurements at once so that you can understand what you’re doing, rather than flying one instrument at a time every three to five years to demonstrate it will make a measurement, which is the approach that I think the decadal survey has proposed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I liked your statement yesterday to us in the end, when you said that it was important to go measure and then try to learn from what those measurements were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well that’s true, because frequently we know what we want to measure, but we frequently find out what we want to measure is not quite what we wanted in order to understand or predict the phenomena that we’re interested in, and what we get is maybe sometimes a lot better than what we set out to do, and sometimes its worse." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have an interest to become very involved with the next 10 years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m probably not going to live for the next 10 years. You’ve got to remember, I am over 70 now, so I’m lucky I’m still moving. But no, I just don’t think I would have the energy to do what I did 15 years ago. It took a lot of long days and a lot of trips, a lot of meetings, and a lot of being away from home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think is the greatest accomplishment that you were able to achieve while you were in your field?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "EOS and EOSDIS, and providing the opportunity for hundreds of young scientists to become seriously involved in trying to better understand how the Earth System behaves.\\n\\n It’s been fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Even the hard days, I guess, were fun?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Some of them weren’t as much fun as others. But no, EOS has turned out to be not as good as I wanted it to be, but it’s turned out a lot more information than I ever thought would come to pass in my lifetime. It worked. It’s the nearest thing we’ve ever had to having an integrated observing system for a good portion of Earth. Not all of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know that you now, in your spare time, work with students at schools. Do you have an opportunity to share with them some of what they can’t see up in the sky?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I occasionally give a seminar, not too frequently. Most of my work has been actually refurbishing computers for elementary school children, and I think that’s fun, too. I volunteer one day a week with the Salem [South Carolina] Lions Club’s “Computer for Kids” program in Oconee County, South Carolina. There are about a dozen of us, all except a couple are retired from various and quite different professions. In the past 5½ years we have provided about 1,900 refurbished computers to individual (primarily underprivileged) elementary children for their own use. The county school system makes the selection as to which children receive the computers,\\n\\n All these older computers have been donated by individuals or numerous industries within about a 50 mile radius. We have been able to get approximately 75 – 80 percent of the donated units repaired or reprogrammed and ready to be put in back use by the young recipents. We’re also delaying dumping all of these older units into the landfill, and we remove all recyclable components and send them for recycling. There’s nothing like seeing a kindergartener or a first, second grader come in and get a computer, and look up at his older brother or sister and point a finger at them and say, “This is my computer, and you’re not going to use it.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’ve created a power, haven’t you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well you know what’s going to happen when they get home, but right now the little one is in control because they’ve got the computer. So it’s fascinating. I’m just amazed every year, first-graders come in, and we’ll start telling them how you hook it up, and they’ll turn around and look up and say, “I know how to hook it up.” They know more than their mother and dad about what to do, how to do it, what it does, and I just can’t believe that first-graders can pick up this ability and understanding this fast." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They know so much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We also have given ~ 400+ computers to the elementary schools to set up computer laboratories so that they can teach 20 - 25 children at a time the fundamentals of computers. There was one picture, these 20 little second-graders all there sitting in front of the computers with great big smiles on their faces. That’s neat, too. Different.\\n\\n They’re now part of the system. There are a number of children who do have resources to get computers, and almost all parents who are not on welfare or having very, very low paying jobs—most every family of any means has a computer. But we have a large number of unemployed people in our county. We also have a large number of South American immigrants." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They all want to learn, all those children." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shelby G. Tilford", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All of them need to learn. All of them." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00110", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2019-114.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Wiley, Stephen (1970-1971): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2019-114", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2019-114", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Stephen (Steve) Wiley served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji from 1970 to 1971 as an elementary school teacher. His decision to join was influenced by his desire to pursue a career in teaching and to avoid the draft. He applied and was invited to Fiji, but then realized that he wanted to get married first. He and his new wife Sally applied together and were selected for the next Fiji training group. Training was conducted in Hilo, Hawaii, and covered Fijian language and culture as well as teacher training. Wiley taught at an elementary school in the rural village of Laselevu, where he and his wife were the only non-Fijian teachers, and he spent a great deal of time preparing lesson plans. In retrospect he regrets not socializing more with the men of the village to gain a better understanding of their lives and viewpoints. After completing their two years of Peace Corps service, the Wileys stayed in Fiji for an additional year while Steve continued as a teacher and Sally served as headmistress of the Fiji School for the Intellectually Handicapped. The interview includes discussion of living conditions in the village and visits to other parts of Fiji. Interviewed and recorded by Julius (Jay) Sztuk, June 30, 2019. 2 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).", + "dates_of_materials": "30 June 2019", + "extent": "2 digital files (audio; stereo; 106 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "032. Fiji.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Fiji. Wiley, Stephen (1970-1971): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Fiji", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2019-114", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2019-114-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/y21j51e5noj4odvxk0xmpw164yax686x.pdf?odc=20231115173729-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/9d03626a-efd4-4ec7-aae3-f18c86843ba2/2e05fd11-77ec-49cd-93f3-3f84fca19ecb/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzM0NTBfNWZkMDRmODRhMGVlYjNmN2QyMjQ2OTBjNTMwMzEyZjZhOTMzYzg0Y2U3ZGJkOGE2NTIxNzEzZWQwMjZiYjJlZV8vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS85ZDAzNjI2YS1lZmQ0LTRlYzctYWFlMy1mMThjODY4NDNiYTIvMmUwNWZkMTEtNzdlYy00OWNkLTkzZjMtM2Y4NGZjYTE5ZWNiL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Bethesda, Maryland", + "length": "52 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed August 21, 2019, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Stephen Wiley Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Julius Sztuk" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Stephen Wiley" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:02", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is June 30th, 2019. My name is Jay Sztuk. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji from 1974 through 1976. Today I'm going to interview Stephen Wiley, who was also a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji from 1970 to 1971 and worked in elementary education. Steve, tell us a little bit about your background. Where are you from?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:34", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, currently I live in Minneapolis. Many years ago, I'm 73 and I was born, I was born there. But basically when I was growing up, we moved around every 2 to 3 and a half years. My dad was riding the wave of IBM's expansion in the post World War II era, so they kept offering him places to go. And he kept saying yes, because that's what you did. And we were pretty comfortable. He had grown up and put himself through college during the Depression. My mom had grown up under more comfortable circumstances than he did. And they met in the Navy in World War II in the Philadelphia supply operation. She had come from California because she wanted to join the war effort. She was a WAVE. He was, I think when he started out, he was an ensign. But anyway, um.\n\nSo anyway, that's how my parents met. And my dad had decided he was going to go to this little adding machine company with the presumptuous name of International Business Machines after he graduated from college in 1938, and he did. Turned out to be the correct choice for him. But all that is by way of saying that we had post-World War II middle class upwardly mobile expectations. And the idea that if you worked hard and did the right thing, good things would come your way. And that generally happened for us. You know, white privilege and all that, which I was totally blind to until more recently than I care to admit, but. It was also something informed my way of interacting with my environment because I was very often the new kid in class." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:02:46", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:02:47", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so the consistent things were getting the teacher's approval and by doing well in class and getting my parents approval for having done that. So it was a pretty small world that I lived in and it was comfortable, it was predictable. And I did that. But the other thing that was kind of seeping in on a much less, or an even less conscious level I'll say, was adapting each time we moved. To different people, to different places, to slightly different, you know, geographic environments, slightly different social environments. I was completely unaware of at the time as a kid just, you know, a new place and here you are, let's go do this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:03:38", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:03:38", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so the predictable part of it was school. To some extent, kids were predictable, but they were always new kids to me until I got used to them. And then very soon afterward, we moved again. And so that's part of how it works. The first time my eyes were opened to things being different in post-World War suburban America was when my dad had a choice. My dad and my mom, because they made the choice together, had the choice whether to stay in the United States and go into management, or go into kind of a mixture of sales and management by working for, working as a liaison between IBM World Trade in Europe and domestic IBM. Now these days, you just do it in a few keystrokes or by Skype or something, but no such thing then. And the computers weren't thought of as personal back then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:04:36", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:04:36", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My dad once showed me around one of the places that he worked and was just huge air-conditioned rooms with spools of tape going, you know, 24/7." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:04:49", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So which did they choose?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:04:51", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they chose to go to Europe. And where are we going to live in Europe? Well, it should be centrally located. OK, how about Switzerland? Switzerland would be good. France would be nice, but France was too expensive. And so that was the choice that was made. The next choice was, and I didn't even see him making this choice because I was presented with the choice. I was ten." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:05:15", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:05:16", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Public schools or American schools? Well, you might as well go to the public schools, the Swiss have very good schools. And the kid, the boys can learn the language. So we did that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:05:26", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:05:27", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And so I took 25 Berlitz lessons during our month or so of transition before the house was ready for us to move into, which my dad had found because mom was staying with us, you know? So, you know, I thought I was all ready because I didn't know anything about foreign languages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:05:52", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. With your 25 lessons." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:05:54", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "25 lessons, Berlitz lessons, mind you, not just any, the really old outmoded. Well, at the time they were, you know, they were top of the line. And so then we moved into the house, which was really nice. It was kind of like, it was at the end of the road out in one of the farm suburbs in the hills above Zurich. And it's just a beautiful place. We had a, well, I don't want to describe the property too much but it was a very nicely done property. And we had thick oak beams above a big fireplace and the cathedral ceiling. And the cathedral, is what it's called, the high ceiling?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:06:39", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:06:39", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The cathedral ceiling in the main living room. And it was just, it was a nice place. And at school, I found out very quickly that I'd better pay attention and work hard because German was harder than I thought it was going to be after those Berlitz lessons. And I buckled down and I did OK. And it got reinforced in several very interesting ways, which I won't go into now, on the playground and walking to school with my neighbor kids and walking home from school afterwards with them, you know, playing things and talking together. But the important thing was that in school, and I had started out their school year began, I think, I can't remember, April? Yeah, sounds about right I think, after Easter. They had more frequent and shorter vacations, like summer was five weeks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:07:39", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:07:40", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so the result was I entered fourth grade when it was already, so this would have been September, October, it was already kind of halfway done. I was blessed in having Miss Kliner as a teacher. She was terrific. And I, you know, I didn't process it that way, but I knew it, you know, at a gut level. She'd go out of her way and her English was pretty good. You know, she go out of the way to, but she didn't teach me. I was part of the class and you're going to learn stuff in German, here you go, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:08:11", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:08:11", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I had this constant supportive environment that was also challenging, and I learned German pretty well, and I learned Swiss German pretty well. At one point, I think during our second or maybe our last year there, my mom was really sick and couldn't go shopping. So I went along with my dad and he did the shopping, but he needed an interpreter because he didn't speak German. And so we're in the, we're at the butcher shop and the butcher's slicing the meat and he says, hey, kid, where did you learn to speak English like that? So that was pretty satisfying." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:08:43", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:08:44", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I said, Ich bin ein Amerikaner, you know. So anyway, that's how that went." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:08:51", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This would have been in the mid fifties then, '54 or '55?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:08:57", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "'56 to 50, uh. October. Now what? September, October '56 to I think May of '59. So yeah. And then when I came back, boy, it was a different world, you know, what are all these people doing, you had to have chinos, you had to have penny loafers, and the whole nine yards. I was 13, I had just turned 13 when we got back. And, you know, faced once again, the new environment, new kids, new things to adjust to, in particular now clothes. Big deal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:09:34", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, right. For a teenager." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:09:35", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And girls are beginning to be kind of interesting in a way that I hadn't known before. Didn't quite get it for, well, you can, that's an interesting discussion, how long did it take to get girls? I'm still learning. But now we had different teachers for different subjects. Mr. Mahone For English. Dave Johnson from Minnesota, it turns out. This is in New York now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:10:07", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:10:09", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, well. Where were we? Uh. Chappaqua in Westchester County. Before it became really hoity toity. And you know, once again, predictably, I knew how to play the schoolboy game by now, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:10:36", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:10:36", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it wasn't really a game. I took it pretty seriously. But, you know, I knew what I had to do and what I didn't have to do. And so I did OK. And by the time I got there, so I went into eighth grade. Skipped most of seventh grade, it turns out, because they start school in Switzerland a year behind. But it turns out that they pack in more. And so I was pretty OK in eighth grade. That finished without incident pretty much. And I went on to high school and did the college prep business and did pretty well in everything. And took French as my language and got that under my belt. My French teachers, there are a lot of really good teachers there. But he had us reading Emile Zola in the original French in fourth year in high school, which was pretty fancy. So, prompt me. What more? So what else do you need?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:11:44", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So when did you first hear about Peace Corps? And how did you come to decide that that was a route for you to take?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:11:52", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, then it was the sixties, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:11:53", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:11:54", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because I graduated from high school in '64." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:11:58", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:11:59", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And by then, we had had actually Josh White, the folk singer, came and did a performance in our high school gym, which was kind of a big deal at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:12:10", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:12:11", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And things were beginning to fray a bit around the edges. The post-World War II consensus was beginning to fray, and I was maturing into that ferment as it was going on. Civil rights. We had, our cleaning lady was pretty predictably always a black woman after we got back. And my mother was very sympathetic to the civil rights movement. I don't, I'm pretty sure she didn't march or protest. That wasn't her style. She born in 1920, so what do you expect. But it was a big deal. Not something that had a direct effect on my life. I just kind of heard about it and followed it along in this kind of separate strand of my consciousness, it was becoming more conscious." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:13:13", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Become more socially conscious." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:13:14", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think so. And once I got to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, there were young black men there who wanted an African, an Afro-American studies department. And they sat in at the president's office. Now, this is a college at the time, it was all men. It got gender integrated in the year after I graduated. But [coughs], excuse me. But it was just, I hadn't. I hadn't had any direct interaction with anybody other than white people when I was in high school, except for Gary Kaneshiro, who was Hawaiian. Japanese Hawaiian, of course." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:14:08", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:14:08", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And God help me, like everybody else, I called him pineapple. You know, yellow from the tropics, I guess. And it didn't even occur to me that it could possibly be offensive. It's just what people call them. And he was very good natured about it. I don't, and I don't know what happened to him. There was another kid in our class, Ernie Chu, who was Chinese American, but I think his folks had been born here. But my exposure to people, anybody other than European American, was virtually nil." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:14:47", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:14:48", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Until I got to college. And it was like, wow. Not only are they from all over the place, but they're from all different kinds of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, all different kinds. We didn't have Somalis, you know, and we didn't have, um, I don't think we had Koreans. But there was a smattering of people from around the world, and that made things a little more interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:15:10", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did that kind of make you get interested more in other countries than Europe and America?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:15:26", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I already had that interest, but not. Not as one of the guiding principles for my academic life. So, I mean, my life was in two parts in college, as it often is with people, academics and partying. Sometimes the partying won out. Sometimes the academics won out. And then when you throw in, beginning in 1966, just after I turned 20, when you throw in marijuana, then things all of a sudden get really interesting. And so, you know, the hand in front of your face becomes interesting and your perspective kind of gets foreshortened a little bit occasionally. So, you know, that's fine. It also gets extended and bent occasionally. So all those things are part of it. But no, I wouldn't say so. Then, of course, as I moved closer to graduation, I'd registered for the draft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:16:28", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:16:28", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And so I think we're covering most of, some of the stuff in the earlier questions anyway. But as the draft loomed, I had already decided, partly because of the campus culture, partly because of the generational thing, that the Vietnam War was just, it was hypocritical, it was immoral, and maybe illegal. And I wasn't going to have any part of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:16:50", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:16:51", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And my father, who believed in doing your duty to God and country as well as your family, you know, he wasn't a two-dimensional person, but he was very upset with me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:17:03", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because you wouldn't enlist or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:17:06", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, no, I registered for the draft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:17:10", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:17:10", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I didn't want to go and I didn't register for the draft until I lost my 2-S deferment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:17:17", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:17:18", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Which I don't, I don't know if they have that anymore, but that meant if you were a college kid, you got a deferment until you're done with college. And of course, that favored white kids, which is where that expression comes from, or part of the demographic reason and cultural reason, that the expression is that the Vietnam War was a white man's war against yellow people fought by black people. And as the decades have passed, I see more and more how that was just exactly true." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:17:49", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So did you, uh, was Peace Corps a way out of the draft for you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:17:58", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I figured out, well, I don't know what I can do. Maybe I could teach. And it occurred to me, yeah, I probably could teach. And so I thought I'd give that a try and I didn't know where to start. I had no idea about job search. I'd never had to do one, being a privileged kid. And I tried, and I can't remember what it was. It was a, it was a government program for teaching on Native American reservations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:18:27", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:18:28", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I applied for that and I never heard anything, nothing, for like two or three months. And I thought, OK, well, other people have been talking about the Peace Corps, I'm going to check that out. And I checked it out. My reaction was kind of a series of wows. You know, you work overseas two years. OK, that's fine. I've done that. I mean, I've lived overseas for longer than that. Technically, not much. But, you know, I'm grown up now, so I could probably do that. 22 years old, you know, you think you're growing up, and in some ways you are. And I thought, OK, I'll see if they, if I can, if they'll offer me a job in education, because at that time that's what they were doing. They would offer you a job and they would offer you a place. And I think, if I recall correctly, on the application at that time. So this would have been 1968 thereabouts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:19:33", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. Yeah. Your service started in 1970." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:19:41", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, yeah. So but I was applying. I was applying in '68 because I got accepted in '68 and I think it was for Fiji III, because Fiji II would have started in January of '69 and I would have missed that boat already. So and I can't remember if it was Ag extension, which, you know, my grandfather had a farm, so I thought I could do that. I thought I could do everything, still do.\n\nBut in the meantime, I had met Sally Brown. And curiously, this was, I think it was December 18th, 1968. And the reason I remember that, I don't know why I remember that, but I think, I know it was in December. She and her best friend from high school, my cousin Christine Brown, had known each other in high school. And Chris was living in New York City at the time, doing some sort of a job at a publishing house, I think, something like that. And Sally was at Columbia Teachers College working on an education degree, a masters. And so they both lived in New York. And Chris invited Sally and she invited me and a bunch of other people. I think there were three of them sharing a one or maybe two bedroom apartment, but it was the right part of town as far as my Aunt Yula was concerned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:21:09", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:21:09", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's Chris's mom. So we met at this party, and the party was, eh, the party was OK, but wow, that Sally Brown. She just caught my eye, you know? And I apparently caught hers. And so we began an intense romance and decided we loved each other. And in the meantime, staging had started, or I think, I don't know, staging or pre-staging. No, I think it was staging. I think I went to the initial staging in San Francisco for Fiji III." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:21:46", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:21:47", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the guy. Went to the screening interview. It became very quickly evident to both of us at the screening interview that I wasn't ready to go, and I wanted to go, if I did at all, with Sally, which necessitated getting married and her applying. So long story short, we did that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:22:05", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:22:05", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And then we left. We left our honeymoon early after having gotten married in late September in Syracuse. We left our honeymoon. So this is 1969 now, right? We left our honeymoon early to go to our, not our honeymoon, our reception, our wedding reception early, to catch the train across Canada to go to Banff and Jasper before we flew down to staging in San Francisco." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:22:32", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. So Peace Corps was very accommodating." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:22:34", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. They said, well, look, you really want to. They found out. The other thing they found out was that I was interested in teaching. Said, look, Fiji IV is a teaching group. It's going to be, it's being put together as a teaching, what they call them, group or whatever, and it is being designed for couples." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:22:54", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:22:56", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because there have been some blowback about single people not being able to stick it out in the more remote parts of Fiji. And that did happen in the place that we wound up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:23:05", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. So there were quite a few couples in your group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:23:10", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, God, yes. Yeah. It wasn't only couples. There were lots of single people too. There was, you know, I suppose if you went and, if you went like Jim Kalowski was in our group, whom I saw last night and sat with. He's from the next town over, it turns out. And we had known each other from high school football having been on rival teams. Um. But, uh, what was the thread?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:23:48", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Couples in your group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:23:49", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Couples, right. Yeah. If you wanted to see exactly how many there were, and this is beyond, probably beyond your job description. It's all volunteer anyway, right? But." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:24:04", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I've got your mug book." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:24:06", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "OK, right. Well, then you can figure that out. Yeah. And I don't know, I would guess probably about half of us. Middle. A little more, a little less than half. Probably married couples." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:24:18", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, was Fiji a preference? When you applied did you state a preference?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:24:23", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. You got to state a preference. Are there any, and I think it was by country or by geographic area. And so I don't know if I said Fiji or if I said South Pacific or what I said, but they gave me. When they offered me Fiji IV, they had already offered me Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:24:41", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:24:41", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For the community development, ag, whatever it was that I turned down. So that was, so I had made that preference known already. And Sally was much taken with my idealism. Things don't always last, but. So she said, sure, let's do it. That's cool. I'm down with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:25:03", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did you know anything about Fiji before that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:25:06", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really. I figured we'd learned something about it in training. And we did. But there's nothing like direct experience. And that was, that was amazing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:25:20", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, you guys didn't train in country, did you? Where did you do your training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:25:25", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, all of our training. Well, yeah, I would say all of our training, all three months of it, were in Hawaii and we were in Hilo on the Big Island. And it was a beautiful place. First time I had ever seen a banyan tree. And there was, it had been an old hospital converted to a training center for the Peace Corps. And so it had kind of dormitories that previously probably had been sick wing, but whatever. And it had this nice garden or grounds outside, this humongous banyan tree. And I'd never seen one before. And I just, I was taken with it. Plus I was taken with the program, the fact that I was going to do something, that the government was investing in me. You hearing this? That the government was investing in me to go forth and not exactly bring enlightenment to the heathen, but an idealistic, more open-minded approach to the same thing.\n\nSo, I mean, parenthetically I have to say, I think a lot of what we did was enlightened colonialism. And that's, and you can argue both ways on that. Yes, we did, but we were giving them real life skills and all that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:26:43", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:26:44", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we'll get to that eventually I suppose. But and then beyond the banyan tree, you took a little pass and it went to some pools above a waterfall and you could just, you could dunk in the pools and cool off on the rocks. And it was just, it was a fabulous. We didn't do a whole lot of that because we had a very full day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:27:05", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:27:06", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very full day. But I think we started our morning language classes, and it was very heavily language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:27:13", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So did they bring over the language instructors from Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:27:17", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Native Fijians. Upito Lasaysay. Samisoni. I can't remember his second name. Levi. Levi Wanga. Yeah, I still remember, I mean, I remember these people because they were just, they were the first actual Fijians that we'd met and they were teaching us. So that seemed appropriate, you know, on a number of levels. Not just because they were native speakers, but because they were culturally Fijian. And they looked and talked and acted and had the expectations and mannerisms of the Fijian people that we were going to be serving. Yeah. They were wonderful people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:27:57", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you did intensive language training there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:28:00", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, 6:30 to, I think we broke at 8:00 for breakfast and then go back to your rooms and shower and brush your teeth, whatever you're going to do. And then I think there was more language in the later morning. And then we had another break and then we had. Anyway, we had probably 5 hours on average a day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:28:19", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:28:20", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, it was full tilt." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:28:22", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did they think that the Hawaii being an island location would be similar to Fiji and would kind of prepare you for Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:28:39", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. But what I, but the contrast of course is that Fiji is Fijian even though it's a British crown colony. And so the British were basically, they took it over reluctantly and, well, you know the story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:28:54", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:28:55", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "1874. Do we want another colony? No, but we'll take it anyway, because maybe we can justify it strategically in terms of where it's located in the Pacific. And plus, we can get rid of all of our starving people from India and have them go there and grow sugar cane for us and maybe make some money out of it. I mean, I think they were pretty cynical about the whole thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:29:13", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Maybe. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:29:16", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But, you know, I mean, you worked with the Indians. You know, you go someplace, you try to make the best life you can. And, you know, it was, it can't have been easy for the for the. Because before the starvation happened in the late 1800s in India, the constitution of Fiji had said, look, you know, this land is the property of Fijian landowners, traditional landowners, in perpetuity. Well, so the Indians show up a couple of decades later and after a while they want to buy land. They had to rent it in perpetuity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:29:51", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:29:51", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that's why there were such go getters. And part of the reason for the ongoing, I think still to the present day, I mean, it flares and it subsides, but friction, I guess I'd call it, between the two groups." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:30:04", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. OK. So then you finish training in Hawaii and you head off to Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:30:13", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, off to Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:30:14", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many people were in your group, do you remember about how big a group it was? And did all of them make it through training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:30:22", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have a vague memory and, no, all of them didn't. I'm going to say, and again, you've got the face book so or the mug book so you can do the counting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:30:31", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We should say a mug book is kind of like a yearbook for your group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:30:34", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah, yeah, right. It wasn't, you know, profile left, profile right. I do remember, though, I had a thing about authority. And as I look at my life, I've always had a thing about authority. I maybe was rebelling against my father. I don't know. But they wanted us, when they took those pictures for the mug book, to hold up our name placards like, you know, like this, or just out of sight or over here. And they had last name, comma, first name. I said, this is totally unnecessary. So I crossed mine out and I wrote Stephen Wiley. Or Steve Wiley. And, boy, did that set them off." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:31:21", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No kidding." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:31:22", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. Well, anyway. And but so there was that. And I think the director of training even talked to me about it. You don't want to do this because it just upsets the apple cart unnecessarily. So the training finished. Oh, and well so there was, OK. We had language training pretty intensively. We had teacher training in which we put in, I think it was at least a month pretty much full time, at local elementary schools in and around Hilo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:32:00", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you did student teaching?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:32:01", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. Full tilt. And Irene Greenhouse was, I think Japanese Hawaiian, and Greenhouse is a haole name. So her husband must have been a haole. But she knew what she was doing and she was very good with the kids. She was very low key and patient." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:32:24", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "She was a trainer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:32:25", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, she was the teacher. I, we worked as assistants in the classroom to the kids, to teach the kids. And but, you know, that was just for. They knew it was only for a few weeks that they had to put up with this. I didn't have any idea we were being put up with, you know, I thought it was a good deal. But knowing now what I know, if I had known it then, I would have realized that they were being gracious and patient. And helping us learn things, how to teach. So I had a rough idea of how to teach when I was done with that. I would say the language training was superb. The teacher training was, it was OK, B or maybe a high C. The culture training was very strange." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:33:14", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why is that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:33:14", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I don't think Peace Corps knew how to look for people. Or at least in our case, they didn't find. Joe and Linda Berglund were OK and they were interesting and funny. They had us, I'm sure you've read this, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:33:32", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, actually." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:33:33", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The classic essay by, I forget his name now. Oh, Horace Miner, M-I-N-E-R. It's called The Nacirema [Body Ritual Among the Nacirema]. Never read it?\n\nNo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:33:45", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You can probably find it online. N-A-C-I-R-E-M-A. And they're located somewhere south of the Cree and north of the Yaqui. And if you know anything about where Native American tribes are, that's the United States. And Nacirema is American spelled backwards. And so the whole essay is a very, very deftly done spoof of fifties American mainstream culture. They have holy head men. They have holy mouth men. They have people, when people are really sick, they go to the Latipso, which is hospital backwards without the H. But they don't want to go there because they know they're going to die, and they get poked and prodded and tortured a little bit. And there are vestal maidens who wait on them before the medicine. Before and after the medicine men come and make their pronouncements." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:34:48", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's just, it's funnier than hell. It's a satire of anthropology as a clueless discipline, and it's also a satire of fifties American culture. And I didn't get it. I had no, most people didn't get it. Some of them had read it already, and they were told to shut up and just let the rest of us deal with it. And then it was revealed. But and so we had some fun around that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:35:08", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So this was part of your cultural training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:35:10", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Part of our cultural training, yeah. Oh, would some power give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us, as the poet Robert Burns once said. But it didn't happen. And Joe and Linda had done their work in Rajasthan. And I don't know what relevance that had to the Peace Corps program in Fiji. I don't think a lot of the people. I mean, you learned Hindi, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:35:35", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:35:35", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And even that didn't work for all the volunteers, I'm sure. There must have been some Urdu speakers that were served by. You know what I mean?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:35:43", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:35:46", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Anyhow, so. We were down to that. I mean, it was entertaining and provocative, but it wasn't very conclusive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:36:00", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It didn't teach you anything about the Fijian people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:36:03", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, not as such. You know, we got some do's and don'ts which were useful in their own way, but, you know, no flashes of insight. But I think the reason for that is that if you really want to flashes of insight, you've got to put in your time and be patient and observe and ask yourself what's going on and verify your answers with people who know. And some of them probably won't be wanting to tell you whether your answers are right or wrong. Some will. But it was, uh. So the cultural training was, I would give that a C maybe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:36:42", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:36:44", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But then we got to Fiji, we got, as you were asking before. We got off the plane at Nadi, and yeah, it was hot but it wasn't. I mean, we had had some acclimation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:36:56", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had been in Hawaii where." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:36:58", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We'd been in Hawaii where it was winter. But Hawaii is what, 17, 20 degrees north of the equator?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:37:04", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:37:04", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "About the same distance as Fiji is south." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:37:06", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:37:06", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it was hotter in Fiji and stickier. But, you know, we were young and healthy and the weather wasn't much of a bother really. And they kept us pretty busy at Nasinu Teachers College." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:37:23", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:37:23", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And we had a kind of a barracks like set up there in the dorms that were vacated because it was Christmas break, or coming to the end of Christmas break. And those student teachers would be back shortly after we vacated. I think we were there for a week or maybe not even quite. And then it was time to go off to our various sites." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:37:45", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you had about a week of transition in Fiji before you started your jobs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:37:51", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, and it was, and you know, that was fine as far as we were concerned. And I'm still two minds about it. I think maybe some sort of hybrid training model would work best. The idea that in-country, see, I think the weakness to in-country training might be, and it probably varies enormously from program to program, that, well, they'll pick it up because you're going to be in-country. Well, maybe you will, maybe you won't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "00:38:18", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Language or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "00:38:20", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, everything. Language, culture, you know. Certainly not the, certainly not the technical or professional or vocational stuff. That needs to be done. And if it can be done by. Now, see, if we had had teacher training by Fijian teachers, that would have been enormously helpful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "00:38:40", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To understand how their schools work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "00:38:43", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, not just how their schools work. But, yeah, how to teach. How Fijians teach Fijian kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "00:38:50", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where were you assigned?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "00:38:52", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A village called Laselevu, L-A-S-E-L-E-V-U." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "00:38:56", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the interior?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "00:38:58", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the interior, you bet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "00:39:01", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So I know a little bit about Laselevu. Tell me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "00:39:06", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When were you there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "00:39:07", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wasn't there, but I know a little bit. Tell me what it took." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "00:39:12", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'll ask you afterwards, go ahead." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "00:39:12", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did it take to get to Laselevu?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "00:39:14", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It took a bus ride to the end of the road in, I think the town was called Nasinu. The road just kind of ended there. It was the Wainimala River that ran through there and on into the, on down into the river delta. But then from there, you had to take a boat or walk. Those were really the only options, I think, upriver until you got to where you were going. And we didn't walk because we had all of our stuff. We had had. I will say this, we had had minute and extensive directions about what to buy, which is part of what we did when we were in Nasinu, what to buy to take with us. A kerosene lamp, a hurricane lamp. So we had the Coleman lamps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "00:40:06", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "00:40:07", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Lamps that that work really well. And then also one of those things is just like a kind of a glorified candle. So we had one of each of those. We had a two burner Coleman stove, or the equivalent of two burner Coleman stove, and all different kinds of supplies, right? Because we were going to furnish, not entirely furnish our house. One of the things that the Peace Corps volunteer, and this is why this was a couples, or some of the postings were designed for couples, partly because they were remote.\n\nSo we were in Laselevu. There were some other people who lived up the Sigatoka Valley. There were some who lived around the northeast coast. Betty and John were on the island of Gau." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "00:41:01", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "00:41:01", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, you know, we were sprinkled at, we weren't close to anything particularly convenient necessarily. And the idea was that we would have each other as company. Uh. But our village had, and this had gone up the chain. So it's a good thing that the various, well, Ministry of Education in this case, listened. Our village had specifically said, look, you know, these two guys you sent us left after a year, each of them. We thought we were getting somebody for two years. So, you know, give us a couple. And when we got there, as you may know, the furnishings, such as we would consider them, in a Fijian house were very sparse. There was one desk." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "00:41:54", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "00:41:55", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One chair to sit at the desk with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "00:41:57", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "00:41:58", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So you could prepare your lesson plans. And there was a bed, a double bed with a foam mattress on it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "00:42:11", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A foam mattress?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "00:42:12", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I mean, the school committee, this is a very poor village, you know? I mean, their idea of some extra money is taking the bananas that they grew, some of the bananas that they grew by often. They even though they had a marketing cooperative, it was more something in name than an operational substance. Down the river by bamboo raft, you took your bananas, excess bananas, and then they went off to New Zealand. Well, by the time they got to New Zealand, my God, you know, who wants those, right? But they kept doing it and they earned a little cash for it up front." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "00:42:56", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "00:42:56", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that supplied. The school didn't supply anything. The villagers had to buy school uniforms, they had to buy pencils, they had to buy notebooks, the whole deal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "00:43:08", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "00:43:09", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it was a major outlay for them, but they still did it anyway. And part of the reason they did it, I think the prime mover was a man named Malachi Moramambito. And he had had the idea that, well, you know, look, our kids need education. They need good education. I don't know. He had been in on. There was somebody from Fiji I up there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "00:43:36", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "00:43:37", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know? Is that how you know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "00:43:40", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "00:43:41", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "OK. And I don't know if it was Mark Schultheis who was the big rugby star or another guy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "00:43:49", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was, um, his name is Dan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "00:43:53", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Well, I think maybe it was Dan and I don't, I may have my signals crossed. There was a guy who drank too much and got crazy and didn't show up for school sometimes. And so I heard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "00:44:10", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "00:44:11", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That wasn't Dan?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "00:44:12", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don't think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "00:44:12", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "OK. Might not have been, but that happened to a lot of single guys." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "00:44:16", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "00:44:17", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so, you know, predictably, the village wanted something a little more predictable and productive. So that's what they got with us. And Sally had been in, you know, she was going to go into education one way or another anyway. And I, this is my first chosen career. And as it turns out, it became my career for my whole life in one form or another of various levels. So we were both earnest about it and we did our very best. And I don't know if you ever saw the lesson plan books? When they opened, they were about that wide and they were probably 18 inches down the middle, top to bottom." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "00:45:06", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "00:45:06", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they all, it's all little lines going all the way across. And you had to use a ruler and pencils and pens. And I don't think we were supposed to use colored pens or colored pencils, but so. And you plan Monday through Friday, and you had the entire week blocked out. Every day, every lesson, every timeslot. This day we're going to do this. On this day we're going to this, on this day we're going to do this. And it seemed to work out, which is the amazing thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "00:45:39", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So it was very structured." + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "00:45:40", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, God, yes. In fact, the visiting teachers that we had, I think we were visited maybe twice a year. I'm not sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "00:45:51", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "00:45:52", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because you're pretty remote." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "00:45:53", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, it's hard to get to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "00:45:53", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And we had to put the guy up. And I think all of them or, or all but one of them, were Indian." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "00:46:08", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "00:46:08", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they just, this was, they didn't want to be there, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "00:46:13", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "00:46:14", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so they'd come and do some observation in the classroom and check our lesson plans and, you know, very kind of bureaucratically highfalutin, you know, you're just teachers, even though you are Peace Corps. And here we are. We tried to be as accommodating as we could. And about the only thing we could do is would be to serve daal, which we did, with rice. And we didn't have any ghee. I don't know if we had any butter at the time. And I think he ate it because he was hungry, but he wasn't, they weren't warm, fuzzy people. Well, you know, they're basically the cops for the Ministry of Education." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "00:47:00", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. Sure. And being in an interior village like that would have been." + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "00:47:04", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "00:47:04", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Equivalent to going to a foreign country probably." + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "00:47:07", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes, absolutely. In fact, one of the things that I saw on the one cot, what was called the hospital, I guess you could call it a clinic, that was run by the dissolute hereditary chief for one of the big clans from Rewa province. But he had basically washed out and he was a doctor. And so this was his, he was secommed to Laselevu, as they would have said. One of the things they had to keep was a chart of the population in the village. So it was, I think it said 140 Fijians, zero Indians, two others. And those two others, that was us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "00:47:55", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "00:47:57", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so that was it. And he basically most of the time had nothing to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "00:48:02", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So describe this, the village, you mean, what? What was it like and what did most of the people do there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "00:48:10", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Most of the people in the village just did their daily activities. Economically, it was subsistence horticulture, gardening, you know, with a little surplus sometimes. Occasionally, there weren't really any fish in the river. I mean, I think I caught one three inches long at one point, which was kind of a disappointment. I did have my fishing gear with me. But occasionally there was a man in the village and he might have been a clan head. But there was a man in the village who had dogs, and he had somehow trained them to hunt, and they would go hunt wild pig out in the forest, maybe a couple of times every three months, not very often. But we always got a chunk of pork. It must have been a pound and a half, two pounds. Just the two of us. And I remember trying not to think how much privilege that showed that we had. But, you know, I mean, the whole village, because you had to share." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "00:49:24", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "00:49:24", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What you got, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "00:49:25", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "00:49:26", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I can imagine these families, especially the ones that were putting up relatives, putting up, putting up their relatives' kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "00:49:36", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To go to school there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "00:49:37", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To come to school there. You know, I mean, how much, how much were they getting? You know, I never thought of it much. But we managed to figure out a marinade that included oil and a lot of vinegar and soften it up so it was pretty good. Yeah. Fijians thought that soft meat was terrible, because if you eat soft meat, you become a soft person." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "00:49:57", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, different tastes. And what type of house did you live in? Was it a traditional house?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "00:50:04", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A traditional bure, yeah. Yeah. And we actually, our roof began to leak at one point pretty, pretty badly. And so we said, we went to Molokai and said, hey, our roof's leaking. And he said. He didn't, well, he did speak English, actually, but he tried not to speak English with us because he wanted to encourage us to speak Fijian. And I think the fact that we did that was something that was a small feather in his cap. I mean, it wasn't entirely altruistic on his part, but he was a pretty good guy. And so he said, no problem, I'll get it fixed. Or the equivalent, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "00:50:46", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "00:50:47", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so these guys show up. I'd say probably half a dozen, maybe eight or ten. Some of the older men in the village, not real old, but, you know, older at that point from me, you know, forties, fifties, parents of, you know, fathers and uncles of the kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "00:51:07", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "00:51:08", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they went right to work and they put together bundles of river reeds, which they folded over. And they, and so this is pole and thatch construction, or pole and post construction, and they basically, they repaired the house and it was good as new." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "00:51:30", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Replaced the roof." + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "00:51:31", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's like putting new shingles on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "00:51:33", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "00:51:34", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But much more organic. And I don't think there were any nails involved. They did a lot of the tying with, I think it was coconut fiber rope, which is kind of a. We had like two or three coconut trees in our village. I think the soil maybe wasn't. I know, weird, right? I don't think the soil was sandy enough. I'm not sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "00:51:57", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it was a, it was a higher altitude." + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "00:51:59", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, not that much higher, you know, maybe 500 feet above sea level. But it wasn't, that wasn't it. Altitude was not the reason. So, you know, but anyway, we got to see that happen. And they did it for us and they got it done in I think three days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "00:52:29", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "00:52:30", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I made the mistake of thinking, oh, that's cool. And so they didn't take. I didn't give them any yagona, I didn't thank them in the way that I should have thanked them traditionally." + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "00:52:44", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "00:52:44", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so nobody gave me a bad time about it. But I spent way too much time with my new wife, from Fijian point of view now, with my new wife and preparing lesson plans and reading up and trying to be a good teacher. And I just kind of neglected the whole social side of everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "00:53:07", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "00:53:08", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, that was. And that was a serious mistake." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "00:53:10", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned yagona. Tell us tell us what that is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "00:53:13", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yagona is the Fijian word for kava. And I spent some time in the village drinking socially with the men, but that was kind of the ante, the social ante that you had to, that you had to give was, your time with other people, other men, because it was men who drank it. Women sometimes prepared it. Adolescent men sometimes prepared it and served it if it was a less formal setting. They'd have the kids in the house serve it. But it was, uh, it was a serious kind of ceremonial time to relax. And it sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, but it wasn't really. And I, you know, I wish that I had spent more time out in the village just hanging out with the men." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "00:54:08", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So. But being the only foreigners in the village, the only Americans there, you had no other Americans to socialize with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "00:54:21", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "00:54:22", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you must have had quite a bit of interaction with the village there, didn't you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "00:54:28", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as I said, not much, between making dinner and still being newlyweds and the schoolwork. It was the first time I'd ever taught, you know, and I wanted to be on top of my lessons, and the textbooks we had were helpful. But I had to figure out how to transliterate what was on the page into how I was going to teach it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "00:54:56", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "00:54:57", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that was a big job for me. It didn't come to me very naturally. I didn't feel comfortable really, or begin to feel comfortable teaching, until partway into my second year. But and so the funny thing is, I saw these things as equivalent. My facility, relative facility, with Fijian. And doing my job, right? And I figured if I could handle the language, if I could do the schoolwork, that was enough. And I just thought I'd just let the social thing slide. So." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "00:55:42", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how about the students at school? How did you find them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 237, + "timestamp": "00:55:47", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The students were enthusiastic, eager, funny. They were capable of being very serious. They were easy to work with. Mostly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 238, + "timestamp": "00:56:02", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 239, + "timestamp": "00:56:03", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Except when they didn't get something and I didn't know how to help them get it. You know, and then it became a kind of, I wish you could tell me how to do this, you know? I wish I could too. Sort of thing. Not spoken, you understand, but just interpersonally. But some of those, some of those kids. [speaks Fijian] Little. A little girl. Small, physically. And just smarter than a whip. And then there was another girl who was bigger, who was, I guess you could say, developmentally precocious. And, uh, who was also very smart. And they had sweet dispositions, you know, all of them.\n\nThere was one boy who I think who would, and he was developing pretty quickly too. I mean, in sixth grade, his voice was beginning to change and, you know, uh. And he was. He had an older brother who worked in Vatukoula. And I think, I think he probably heard stories of abusive white mine bosses. And so maybe that Ponty was a little less inclined. And I don't know if that's why, but I'm pretty sure that he did have a brother who worked at Vatukoula. I think Ponty was less inclined to take me at face value. I think he was a little more skeptical." + }, + { + "turn_id": 240, + "timestamp": "00:57:45", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was he suspicious of you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 241, + "timestamp": "00:57:46", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, not suspicious exactly, but just kind of like. Kind of like, you know, why should I? You know, this all, it's all a line of nonsense. And maybe it's because his brother told him, look, you know, I went through school and here I am, I'm a miner." + }, + { + "turn_id": 242, + "timestamp": "00:58:01", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 243, + "timestamp": "00:58:03", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm envisioning something like that. I never asked him because it never occurred to me to ask him. You know, um. And then Peta Naroso and Apenisa Seru. And there are some other kids who are smart, too. But Peta and Apenisa, which is to say Peter and Ebenezer, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 244, + "timestamp": "00:58:30", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 245, + "timestamp": "00:58:30", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were both from up the much less developed much more mountainous river that came to Laselevu kind of from the northern end. Not the northern end, from the northern side of the central mountains on the big island. And the terrain was much more rugged. Those people were the ones who were considered true Appalachians by other, by the other Fijians. And Sally and I went up there and visited and it was something else. It really was. I mean, there was an elementary school in [inaudible]. And I'm pretty sure there was another one much further in, although I'm not absolutely certain. Now, it turns out that Seru's older brother, I think maybe it was Seru's older brother who was the headmaster at the school in [inaudible], a one through six. But, you know, a lot of the kids decided they were going to go down to the Laselevu anyway, because now Laselevu had Peace Corps volunteers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 246, + "timestamp": "00:59:43", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 247, + "timestamp": "00:59:44", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Or the kids didn't decide, their folks did. And some decided they wanted them to stick around. And so they did that. But the people were uniformly accommodating, friendly and very tolerant of our blindness. Well, you know, you can only get, you can only get to know people in that culture so well in the span of, I don't know. name a span, right? A year. You know, you know the ropes. You know who the personalities are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 248, + "timestamp": "01:00:20", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 249, + "timestamp": "01:00:21", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But the subtexts that are going on all the time, you have no connection with. I mean, why is person A interacting with person B in a certain way? Part of the explanation for that has nothing to do with personality. Some of it does. But a lot of it has to do with kinship and clan membership and the histories of the family, the nuclear families and the families of origin that everybody is part of. And what loyalties and strategic interests those groups of people have, and they're very often at loggerheads. So the fact that a couple of boys won't speak to each other in fifth grade, why? Well, because, you know, so-and-so's father, even though they're the same clan, he talked the clan head in the village into letting him have the better land for gardening the next season. And so the guy who lost out told his kids, don't go to talk to your uncle, you know? And that's why." + }, + { + "turn_id": 250, + "timestamp": "01:01:29", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, OK. Things you wouldn't be in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 251, + "timestamp": "01:01:31", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. And that, I became very acutely aware of that once I realized that even though I had started occasionally dreaming in Fijian and I was pretty good at keeping up in a conversation. I found last night that I've lost that entirely. I can produce Fijian, but as far as hearing it, processing it, and responding in the same, you know, in the same rhythmic flow, I don't have it anymore. Which is not surprising. It's been a while. Still, I wish I had it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 252, + "timestamp": "01:02:04", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you guys do in your spare time or your time off? Like there were school breaks? Did you stay in the village or did you go somewhere else?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 253, + "timestamp": "01:02:13", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "School breaks we looked forward to in the beginning and we'd take the whole time, you know, week, week and a half. And we'd stock up on supplies that we didn't have in the village." + }, + { + "turn_id": 254, + "timestamp": "01:02:28", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you'd go to town?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 255, + "timestamp": "01:02:29", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We'd fantasize about bread and butter. And eggs because, you know, the chickens in the village were for eating. They weren't for eggs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 256, + "timestamp": "01:02:38", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 257, + "timestamp": "01:02:39", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. So, yeah, we'd go to town. We'd hire a boat, or hire a boat, and then. We'd hire the boat and then the guy who owned the boat would say, OK. There were two of them in the village and they were both pretty good. And he would say, well, you know, the word would get around somehow really quickly that somebody was going down the river in the boat. And so the guy who owned the boat would collect the additional fares, which is fine, you know? I mean, it was nothing.\n\nYeah, we'd stock up and we'd occasionally go into the Peace Corps office or, you know, buy something we were out of. But increasingly that became unnecessary because I think, well, I think, I know in some ways we just simplified our wants and found that our needs were pretty adequately met by what was available in the village. Not all of it, but a lot of it. And so, why go? And it was at that point that we began to, instead of going into Suva and meeting other Peace Corps volunteers the way a lot of people do, which is fine. We'd say, well, how about? You think? How about if we get Nikko, who was a little impish little kid in my class, fun and smart. How about if we have Nikko take us across to Lautucoma? This is across, up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 258, + "timestamp": "01:04:22", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You'd go through the jungle?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 259, + "timestamp": "01:04:23", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, exactly. Up through and, you know, jungle tracks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 260, + "timestamp": "01:04:28", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 261, + "timestamp": "01:04:28", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And mud up to your knees some of the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 262, + "timestamp": "01:04:33", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 263, + "timestamp": "01:04:34", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so Sally and I did that. We did that one time. Another time, I can't remember how we got there, but we basically hiked from the headwaters of the Sigatoka. We hiked to the headwaters of the Sigatoka and then took the bus down. And that was an amazing trip. I mean, it was kind of like open grasslands." + }, + { + "turn_id": 264, + "timestamp": "01:05:03", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That would have been essentially on the opposite side of the?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 265, + "timestamp": "01:05:06", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the opposite and a half, you know, or half opposite. I mean, the Sigatoka still runs out into the ocean. If you're looking at Viti Levu like this. And so, let's see, Suva's here, the way you're looking at it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 266, + "timestamp": "01:05:21", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 267, + "timestamp": "01:05:21", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Laselevu was here. Tomanivi, the mountain, the highest point is here. Vatukoula's here. The Sigatoka River starts up here, but it runs down this way. And so it's still. The Sigatoka is interesting because it's mostly grassland. It's kind of open." + }, + { + "turn_id": 268, + "timestamp": "01:05:44", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 269, + "timestamp": "01:05:44", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Much more so than, it's not the wet side. We got 250 inches a year of rain, on average. Which was amazing, you know? So." + }, + { + "turn_id": 270, + "timestamp": "01:05:55", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A lot of rain." + }, + { + "turn_id": 271, + "timestamp": "01:05:56", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A lot of rain. Yeah. In fact, during the rainy season, you could set your clock by it, you know? As soon as you got back in the classroom at 1:00 and we did go by the clock. Although the first sound you heard in the morning after the roosters was the lali that woke people up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 272, + "timestamp": "01:06:18", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. And lali, for the audience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 273, + "timestamp": "01:06:21", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, the old-fashioned British term is slit gong. It's actually a hollowed-out section of log, which is a drum. And I don't know, I'd say the diameter probably varies, of the opening on the inside, probably varies anywhere between four or five inches to bigger ones were probably closer to nine or ten. But it's very resonant. The sound carries. And somehow that's something that the Fijians had obviously long before the Brits showed up and said school began promptly at 9:00 in the morning. But it did, 9:00 to 12:00 and 1:00 to 3:00, I think, were the hours. And as I was saying, during the rainy season, you could pretty much set your clock. As soon as you got back into the classroom at 1:00, the skies would open. It would pour for five, ten, maybe sometimes 15 minutes. And that was it. And you could start teaching because the rain on the roof was so loud, you couldn't hear anybody." + }, + { + "turn_id": 274, + "timestamp": "01:07:30", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So it was a tin roof then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 275, + "timestamp": "01:07:35", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. School buildings had tin roofs. The teacher's houses were all traditional bures." + }, + { + "turn_id": 276, + "timestamp": "01:07:39", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So any episodes at school there that really stick out in your memory?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 277, + "timestamp": "01:07:53", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Pleasant and unpleasant. Pleasant first. Tuway tutu at the end of the year where everybody, which means stand according to your rank. The kids would stand at the end of the year in their, in rank order of their, I guess, grades. For a kind of a graduation ceremony. It was a bigger deal for the kids who were in sixth grade because they were either going to stay or they were going to go off to secondary school, or they were going to stay and they were going to go on to seventh and eighth grade. That became much easier after, well, after the Peace Corps was hired, because that's what Peace Corps was hired for, this business of grafting on seventh and eighth grades to strategically located elementary schools like ours." + }, + { + "turn_id": 278, + "timestamp": "01:08:51", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 279, + "timestamp": "01:08:54", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was part of the reason Fiji I went in the first place because that was an education group. And all of a sudden, lo and behold, the Ministry of Education had an acute shortage of teachers, because now there were some schools where they needed teachers to teach an additional two grades." + }, + { + "turn_id": 280, + "timestamp": "01:09:10", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 281, + "timestamp": "01:09:11", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so that's how Peace Corps, I guess, got started in Fiji. And then. And the idea was A, they learn more, which the Ministry of Education and the Fijian people themselves were seriously interested in. They didn't necessarily understand why, but they understood that it was a good thing. And some of them did understand perfectly well why. I mean, they weren't a bunch. They weren't. They were. They weren't stupid." + }, + { + "turn_id": 282, + "timestamp": "01:09:43", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 283, + "timestamp": "01:09:44", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were simply, some of them, a little uneducated. And so and they were, they lived in tribal villages. They knew what was what. Um. Prompt me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 284, + "timestamp": "01:10:03", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So this was a memorable episode, something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 285, + "timestamp": "01:10:05", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a memorable episode simply because everybody got dressed up and they, well, actually, I don't know if they ran up the Fiji flag every morning or not. I think maybe they did. Another memorable episode was our village, because it was centrally located, became one of the official places where independence was celebrated. And so there are some wonderful graphic images of that time. At sundown on October 9th, 1970, the Union Jack was lowered in the schoolyard for the last time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 286, + "timestamp": "01:10:49", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is when Fiji gained its independence?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 287, + "timestamp": "01:10:52", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Because on October 10th, 1874, it had become a crown colony." + }, + { + "turn_id": 288, + "timestamp": "01:10:57", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 289, + "timestamp": "01:10:58", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So they were now making the transition from crown colony to dominion. And that's kind of like we're run our own show and you can run our foreign affairs, but they're not doing anything anyway, much. And so there were, there were all of these older men in the village who had, who had, kept their formal jackets somewhere. I don't know where they kept them because I'd never seen them in their formal jackets." + }, + { + "turn_id": 290, + "timestamp": "01:11:32", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Everybody got dressed up for this event." + }, + { + "turn_id": 291, + "timestamp": "01:11:33", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "With their medals from World War II and from the Malaysia campaign, where they went to put down Commies for the Brits. And that was pretty much it. But there they are, saluting the Union Jack as it comes down, in their old zoot suit jackets, straight out of mothballs with the medals on them. Not all had medals, but some of them did. Crying. These stoic Fijian men. It was a powerful image. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 292, + "timestamp": "01:12:05", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 293, + "timestamp": "01:12:07", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then the next day, instead of somber, well, they were grieving maybe? Yeah. Not too much to call it that I think for some of them, at least the men, because they had been warriors for the queen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 294, + "timestamp": "01:12:22", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 295, + "timestamp": "01:12:23", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that was a big deal for them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 296, + "timestamp": "01:12:25", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, it was a strong alliance." + }, + { + "turn_id": 297, + "timestamp": "01:12:26", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. Well, not just a strong alliance, but something, you know what I mean, Fijians didn't. The place where being a warrior was a really big deal was around the coast where people fought over more resources and where they had 80 foot, I don't think 80 foot, but big, big double hulled canoes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 298, + "timestamp": "01:12:45", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 299, + "timestamp": "01:12:46", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Back in the, back in the old days. But, you know, there was warfare traditionally between villages, which doesn't make sense to us because, you know, we like to think in binary terms, but tribal people very often think in terms of alliance or opposition. And sometimes an alliance can be a strong alliance. Sometimes an opposition can be a weak opposition. But it can go the other way too. So, you know, and this is difficult. It's made much more complicated by the fact that you don't just marry within the village. And it's not because everybody knows that's bad for the gene pool. You marry outside the village because it's a good place to get allies from. And the marriages were patrilocal, so the women would move in with their, into their husbands' villages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 300, + "timestamp": "01:13:45", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 301, + "timestamp": "01:13:47", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, then you've got brothers-in-law in this other village, if you're a man, and you've got sisters-in-law too by marriage. And so a man and a woman would have alliances not just within the village on a day to day basis, because the village is pretty much self-reliant that way. But, you know, if they were going to be long term relationships and visiting and somebody had something you really wanted or just to have a wider network of people, it's a good thing to do. And that's how they operated. I didn't understand any of this until I started in with my anthropology and long after I came back. But that's that whole other level of discourse that I talked about earlier, which when I was explaining why a boy wasn't supposed to talk to his uncle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 302, + "timestamp": "01:14:36", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 303, + "timestamp": "01:14:39", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that just went right over me because we didn't have that kind of training in cultural training. It would have been really great to have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 304, + "timestamp": "01:14:46", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah, sure would. So you're out there and you decided that you're pretty comfortable out at your site and you don't need to travel into town much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 305, + "timestamp": "01:14:54", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, not much, you know, I mean every so often still. But, you know, it would be for three or four days and then we'd use the rest of the vacation to go do something else. We never went to New Zealand or Australia. A lot of people did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 306, + "timestamp": "01:15:07", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have much communication with the Peace Corps office in all the time you were out there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 307, + "timestamp": "01:15:12", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I mean, they came out I think once a year just to sort of see, or they tried to, depending on transportation conditions, how low or high the river was, you know, to see us and, um." + }, + { + "turn_id": 308, + "timestamp": "01:15:28", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were pretty much on your own." + }, + { + "turn_id": 309, + "timestamp": "01:15:29", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were pretty much on our own, and they could see that we were doing OK as far as they were concerned and as far as we were concerned, so no problems, you know. When we got done towards the end of our service, they said, well, just come in for a physical. They took stool samples. And of course, having eventually figured out the best way to, who needs flip flops anyway, right? We had intestinal parasites. And so they gave us medicine for those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 310, + "timestamp": "01:15:54", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 311, + "timestamp": "01:15:55", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that eventually worked itself out. And so we were good to go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 312, + "timestamp": "01:16:00", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 313, + "timestamp": "01:16:01", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was fine. Um, I think. Oh! But Fiji did not have, um, how to say this. I don't know. Didn't have ambient antisepsis. That is, the entire environment had not been controlled enough against disease vectors for people generally not to get infected." + }, + { + "turn_id": 314, + "timestamp": "01:16:33", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 315, + "timestamp": "01:16:34", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Generally people did get infected and the ones who didn't were the ones who survived childhood. Sally got herself a mosquito bite on her instep, and it didn't go away. And so we put a little of this medicine on it and it didn't go away and it didn't go away. And so eventually it turned into a nasty abscess boil that had to be lanced by the doctor. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 316, + "timestamp": "01:17:02", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 317, + "timestamp": "01:17:03", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that would have never happened in the United States, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 318, + "timestamp": "01:17:07", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, it's hot and humid climate. Walking barefoot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 319, + "timestamp": "01:17:10", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. That and the fact that there is no such thing as kids getting all their shots, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 320, + "timestamp": "01:17:15", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 321, + "timestamp": "01:17:17", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Or what are those kind of deal. So yeah, it was different in that way. The kids, all the kids, most of the kids, a lot of the kids had ringworm. And, you know, they didn't think it was a big deal. And I guess it wasn't, I don't think it gets very serious. I'm not sure. But they lived with it without too much trouble and eventually it'd go away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 322, + "timestamp": "01:17:45", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So it sounds like you adapted very well to the village." + }, + { + "turn_id": 323, + "timestamp": "01:17:51", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think I did. I did tell you there were some unpleasant memories, and one in particular. The headmaster had been off. It was a school vacation. The headmaster had taken it upon himself, this is our second year, to have the doctor circumcise all of the boys who were resident at the seventh and eighth grade dorms. The ones from other villages. And he considers, he considered himself a progressive. A, it's very expensive to do this because you have to have a feast for it. These people can't afford feasts. B, it's going to be a lot more sanitary than it would if it were being done with a piece of glass out in the village. And C, they'll all have it done. They'll have time to recuperate over the school break. And when things start up again, we'll be fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 324, + "timestamp": "01:18:54", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 325, + "timestamp": "01:18:56", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sounded like a plan. He didn't explain it to me. He said, just said, Mr. Wiley, I want you to keep an eye on the kids while I'm gone. That was it. OK. I knew they'd been circumcised. I had no idea what it meant. I mean, you know, I'd been circumcised when I was born, but I don't have a vivid memory of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 326, + "timestamp": "01:19:15", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 327, + "timestamp": "01:19:15", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, you know, after. So meanwhile, the girls were doing all the work and the boys were lying around talking and seemingly having a good old time. I didn't realize that they were also being stoic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 328, + "timestamp": "01:19:34", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 329, + "timestamp": "01:19:35", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Until I thought about it later. What else happens to you when you're male and 13, 14 years old? The thing develops a mind of its own, and that happening with scar tissue has got to be a very, very powerful reminder that something is going on that you better get a handle on. Literally and figuratively. So but that, you know, that went right over my head. All I knew was, well, you know, they're kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 330, + "timestamp": "01:20:03", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 331, + "timestamp": "01:20:04", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And meanwhile, the grass is getting long. And traditionally, in terms of the gender division of labor, it's the boys who cut the grass." + }, + { + "turn_id": 332, + "timestamp": "01:20:11", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Boys cut the grass?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 333, + "timestamp": "01:20:11", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "With machetes, which start out like this and end up looking like a paring knife because they get, well, they get sharpened away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 334, + "timestamp": "01:20:20", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is audio. So it starts out as a big knife and then gets." + }, + { + "turn_id": 335, + "timestamp": "01:20:23", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it starts looking like a sharp, I don't know what." + }, + { + "turn_id": 336, + "timestamp": "01:20:26", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then it gets smaller and smaller." + }, + { + "turn_id": 337, + "timestamp": "01:20:26", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A foot and a half long blade, with a kind of, with kind of like a scimitar arc on one side and a handle on it. And then, yeah. And eventually it winds up, well, not the size of a paring knife, but maybe six inches and it's a little narrow triangle. And they use it until it's done and they get a new one. But traditionally it was a boy's job to cut the grass and the grass is getting longer and longer and longer. And the girls, it looked to me like they were working, I mean, they just nonstop. And I thought, well, I'm going to ask them if they're ready. And what I should have known by then really, if I had been paying attention to the subtleties of language, was when a superior asks an inferior something, they're asking for cooperation and consent. It's not really a question at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 338, + "timestamp": "01:21:24", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 339, + "timestamp": "01:21:24", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So when I asked them, guys, do you think, how are you feeling? Do you think you might be able to cut some grass? They took it as a command, which in traditional Fijian discourse it would have been. And they knew that I spoke Fijian, so they understood very logically that I must understand what the words meant, right? But no, this is me still working in a second language. And so the day after I had them do that, they did it without complaining, but I did hear some additional moans and groans I think that night. And the next day the head teacher came back and he found out what had happened. Somebody told him, rightly so. And I was up. I was, for once, I was up in the village, sitting around drinking yagona with some of the men. And he came and found me and said, Mr. Wiley, go to your house now. He grounded me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 340, + "timestamp": "01:22:26", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He did?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 341, + "timestamp": "01:22:26", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. He was furious. He damn near boxed my ears. I mean, metaphorically speaking, he wouldn't have lifted a hand against me. If he had, it would have been trouble for me, because he was a very, he was a very fit man, as they used to say, even more fit than I was, and I was pretty fit back then. But he was furious. Now, the reasons for this are complicated and interesting. You know, number one, I had made him look bad because I had exposed the vulnerability and the arrogance, really, of his decision in overriding tradition. You know, these were not his sons, except in a metaphorical and in loco parentis way. They were their family's sons. And the families ought to have been given a choice. They weren't given a choice in where their sons were going to get circumcised. And so he just did it and that was that.\n\nI don't know how the communication about that went. Because traditionally those boys would have gone home during school break, and they stuck around. So I don't know if word got back to the villages that the headmaster was keeping the boys, if he gave, and if he did that, got the word out. I don't know whether he gave them a reason, because I'm circumcising them. Because, and my guess is, maybe not. There was a lot of deference to him as the head teacher in the village because he was, because the education was special and school is special and people were invested in it and there was definitely hierarchical thinking going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 342, + "timestamp": "01:24:08", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 343, + "timestamp": "01:24:09", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it's interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 344, + "timestamp": "01:24:10", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So then your two years is coming to an end there. How did you feel about leaving the village?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 345, + "timestamp": "01:24:16", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was ready to go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 346, + "timestamp": "01:24:18", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 347, + "timestamp": "01:24:18", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I said, they wanted us for two years. I think I've done what I can." + }, + { + "turn_id": 348, + "timestamp": "01:24:25", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You didn't have any thoughts about extending." + }, + { + "turn_id": 349, + "timestamp": "01:24:27", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sally did. She wanted to stay in the village for a third year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 350, + "timestamp": "01:24:29", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 351, + "timestamp": "01:24:31", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. She said, I don't want to go. I love this. And I, no, I want to get out of here, you know? So we got out. And the compromise we made was, we did, but see, we couldn't have done it anyway as Peace Corps volunteers. Whether the Ministry of Education would have hired us as regular teachers, I don't know. But they were very explicit. No more Peace Corps volunteers in elementary education." + }, + { + "turn_id": 352, + "timestamp": "01:25:06", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 353, + "timestamp": "01:25:07", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Beginning with 1972. So. But what happened was I got a job at Ratu Sukuna Memorial School out in Nabua, which is, as prestige goes, a pretty prestigious. It wasn't the, it wasn't the jewel in the crown, but it was a pretty well-respected secondary school for Fijian kids. And so I got to teach senior high English, including Shakespeare. Go figure, right? Because it's English, that's why." + }, + { + "turn_id": 354, + "timestamp": "01:25:40", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you stayed in Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 355, + "timestamp": "01:25:41", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah, we stayed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 356, + "timestamp": "01:25:43", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And this is not a volunteer position." + }, + { + "turn_id": 357, + "timestamp": "01:25:45", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. All of a sudden, we were rolling in dough because you're being paid like white folks. And no, seriously, the ratio is about 2 to 1." + }, + { + "turn_id": 358, + "timestamp": "01:25:53", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 359, + "timestamp": "01:25:54", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "White folks got paid about twice as much for exactly the same teaching job as local people, whether they were Indian Fijian or Fijian Fijian or whatever they were. Sally had, I guess, on one of the school breaks somehow befriended or gotten to know Merle Angus, whose husband was doing a UN job in Fiji. And part of that circle included the president and his wife of the University of the South Pacific. They had a kid who was developmentally delayed and so she was looking for something for her kid." + }, + { + "turn_id": 360, + "timestamp": "01:26:39", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 361, + "timestamp": "01:26:40", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And lo and behold, things happened. The Ministry of Education agreed to set up a school, the Fiji School for the Intellectually Handicapped. Sally became the headmistress and she had two people working for her. She had a great time. She loved that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 362, + "timestamp": "01:26:58", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was in Suva?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 363, + "timestamp": "01:26:59", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In Suva, yeah. Yeah. And we had been able, through another connection that we'd gotten to know, I think, over a longer Christmas break a year earlier. We had a connection to a rent-controlled apartment, which was like 50 bucks a month. And so we stepped into that and we were already living there when the guy decided that we had, that we'd pulled a fast one on him. And so we just kept paying him 50 bucks a month. He was madder than hell, but he couldn't move us out. And so people came and visited us in Suva and that was kind of nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 364, + "timestamp": "01:27:34", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how long did you stay in Suva?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 365, + "timestamp": "01:27:35", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 366, + "timestamp": "01:27:36", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 367, + "timestamp": "01:27:36", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And by then, Sally had to get back to finish up her master's program, because she had finished the first year and then, um, or maybe the first year and a half. But she had, I think maybe the first year, I'm not sure. But then, you know, you get a certain number of years to finish it or they kick you out. And so it's December of '72. School's over. We're done working. You saved all, saved up this money as, you know, filthy capitalist teachers. And plus, we had some money saved up from our transition allowance to come back home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 368, + "timestamp": "01:28:18", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 369, + "timestamp": "01:28:19", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because we never used it. You know, we just. The Peace Corps flew us home and back, which I think they weren't supposed to do because we didn't extend in the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 370, + "timestamp": "01:28:28", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 371, + "timestamp": "01:28:29", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But, you know, that's fine. That was fine with us. We didn't ask too many questions. And I think the Peace Corps had the discretion at that point to do that. Things were a little looser back then. So we flew to Palo Alto and hung out with my family for a while. Dad was working for Stanford, the IBM contract for Stanford at that point. And then we flew to Syracuse because that was our. That was our home address." + }, + { + "turn_id": 372, + "timestamp": "01:29:02", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 373, + "timestamp": "01:29:03", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because it was Sally's. It was where we got married and so on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 374, + "timestamp": "01:29:05", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 375, + "timestamp": "01:29:06", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we got to see our folks briefly and then we went back to Fiji and did our third year, and we had a bunch of money saved up. And we had like eight months to get from Fiji to Montreal. Because my family, my family who. At that time had my dad had retired, I think, well no, not really. But they were spending the summers at his ancestral farm in upstate New York, just across the border from Canada." + }, + { + "turn_id": 376, + "timestamp": "01:29:41", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 377, + "timestamp": "01:29:41", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "On Lake Champlain. And so we decided we're going to do that. Well, we go to the Pan Am ticket office and we explained to the ticket agent what we wanted to do. We had this all figured out too, a complete itinerary that we had done through the mail from Laselevu. Yeah. During our last year. What do you want to do when we leave? I don't know. Let's travel around the world. Well, let's see what there is, you know. And so we figured out where we wanted to go and roughly how long we wanted to be there. But Pan Am at that point was writing tickets for, you know, you want to go here and here and here with, and I don't think there was a time limit on them. We had our own time limit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 378, + "timestamp": "01:30:27", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 379, + "timestamp": "01:30:28", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And we made some reservations. But we basically, we went from. I think. Can't remember how it started exactly, but I think we went from Fiji to New Zealand to American Samoa to Western Samoa to New Caledonia to the New Hebrides to the Solomons. Did I miss anything? I went to every one of the polities in Melanesia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 380, + "timestamp": "01:31:03", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 381, + "timestamp": "01:31:03", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then Papua New Guinea, too. And we spent 2 hours making a plane connection in Darwin, Australia, because we figured, you know, Darwin's, you know, Australia's is too big, it's going to take us too much time, it's too much like the United States." + }, + { + "turn_id": 382, + "timestamp": "01:31:17", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not interested." + }, + { + "turn_id": 383, + "timestamp": "01:31:18", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we were looking for what was different. And so that's what we did after we left. And we wound up hitting, oh well, so many fantastic things I could tell you that don't have to do with the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 384, + "timestamp": "01:31:35", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, um, then how do you think Peace Corps, your Peace Corps experience shaped the rest of your life or influenced the rest of your life?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 385, + "timestamp": "01:31:47", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I should tell you a little bit more about how cut off we were up there, although you may have inferred some of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 386, + "timestamp": "01:31:54", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 387, + "timestamp": "01:31:55", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were no Peace Corps staff around. We talked about that. No electricity, no phone, no radio, no coworkers. So that was that. Very shortly before we arrived, they had installed a gravity fed water system, pipe system, which started up near somebody's garden." + }, + { + "turn_id": 388, + "timestamp": "01:32:23", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 389, + "timestamp": "01:32:24", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And there was a kind of a collection pond." + }, + { + "turn_id": 390, + "timestamp": "01:32:25", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A pond." + }, + { + "turn_id": 391, + "timestamp": "01:32:26", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the water would come down, it was just gravity. So there was a tap in the upper village. And a second tap, I think, in the upper village. The upper village, so the three divisions of the village, there are two up on the hill and one down in the plain. The plain they called it. It wasn't really a plain. It's a floodplain." + }, + { + "turn_id": 392, + "timestamp": "01:32:51", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 393, + "timestamp": "01:32:53", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not often flooded, but the river. And so this beautiful village. The river ran in an arc right around the village. And in the plain included a very, I think, two or maybe three bures, which were one clan segment. But that guy's, that guy's name was Thao, which meant the owner. And he basically owned the village traditionally, not as private property or anything like that. And then Malachi was in one of the, one of the clan neighborhoods up on the hill. And the other, and somewhat larger and more spread-out clan neighborhood was also up on the hill. So two up the hill and one down. Um. Where was I going?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 394, + "timestamp": "01:33:52", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, you were talking about the water supply." + }, + { + "turn_id": 395, + "timestamp": "01:33:54", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. So there was. So each of the three different clan neighborhoods had one tap, I think. And the school had. I don't know if each of the teachers' houses had one. I know we did. I know the headmaster did. I think the others did too. Or there was, maybe there were. There was a total of four teachers’ bures." + }, + { + "turn_id": 396, + "timestamp": "01:34:30", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 397, + "timestamp": "01:34:30", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There might have been one for the headmaster, one for us, and another one in between for those two, those two teachers’ bures." + }, + { + "turn_id": 398, + "timestamp": "01:34:36", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 399, + "timestamp": "01:34:39", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I think that was it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 400, + "timestamp": "01:34:40", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And this pipe was outside, it was on a standpipe?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 401, + "timestamp": "01:34:43", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely. Yeah. And so, but we had a. How the hell we got a shower, I don't know. But they put it in and we were able to shower." + }, + { + "turn_id": 402, + "timestamp": "01:34:52", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Outdoors or indoors?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 403, + "timestamp": "01:34:53", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. Oh, no, outdoors. Yeah. But, you know, I think we were enclosed on three sides and the other side faced our house and our water was the last one in the line. So it was like we could shower nude if you wanted to. I don't know. I think we did sometimes when it was dark enough. But, you know, and not together, you know, you don't want to violate people's sense of propriety." + }, + { + "turn_id": 404, + "timestamp": "01:35:20", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 405, + "timestamp": "01:35:23", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it was nice because at night you would hear occasionally somebody strumming a guitar and some people singing along. Sometimes just talk, sometimes just the mosquitoes, but always the river murmuring around the village. It was. It was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 406, + "timestamp": "01:35:48", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah, it sounds very nice. So how did you feel about leaving Fiji? It must have, uh, I'm sure even though you haven't, you said you didn't interact much, you must have made some good friends." + }, + { + "turn_id": 407, + "timestamp": "01:35:59", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we were eager to get off to the next thing, you know, we were in our mid twenties, early to mid twenties, I think. And yeah, and we had this whole adventure trip planned, so we were ready to go, you know.\n\nThe way we started it actually was to go see the rest of Fiji, quotation marks. We took a boat, a copra boat, which did basically everything else, mail supplies, you know, called the Ululakemba. It was a famous boat which several years later went down in a storm, but it had stopped offshore. And occasionally we'd just catch a ride with whoever had come out to pick up supplies, go into shore, look and see what people were doing, and then come back out. One of the islands we stopped at was Namuka, which had, not the only one, certainly one of them, that it was one of them. And that was one of the places they made masi, also known as tapa cloth. And we actually got to see the women making it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 408, + "timestamp": "01:37:16", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They didn't make it in your village?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 409, + "timestamp": "01:37:18", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no, it's only done, I think, basically on the islands that are Polynesian or Polynesian influenced. And I don't know if they could have done it in our village because the inner bark of a mulberry tree and maybe 250 inches a year is too much rain for a mulberry tree. I don't know. It's a good question, though. But anyway, they didn't make it. But there are some places they did make it in Papua New Guinea, which has some pretty heavy rain too. So they might have been able to, if they'd been into it, if they'd been into it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 410, + "timestamp": "01:38:00", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So then you get back home. What'd you do when you got back home? And did Peace Corps have anything to do with the direction you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 411, + "timestamp": "01:38:08", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it shaped the rest of my life. Oh yeah. Very, very deeply. I mean, even to this day. I advocate for indigenous people. Now that people have finally come around to beginning to put together the idea that one of the ways that we could actually survive and correct climate change would be to take some practices and principles from indigenous tradition. Because what they all had in common was they didn't overuse what they had." + }, + { + "turn_id": 412, + "timestamp": "01:38:42", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 413, + "timestamp": "01:38:42", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And we all have in common is we do, and we throw it away. What's left, thrown out. I saw the downside of this when somebody got a nasty cut on their foot in Laselevu. What's that from? One of those tin cans." + }, + { + "turn_id": 414, + "timestamp": "01:39:00", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 415, + "timestamp": "01:39:00", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because what do they do with garbage? I literally heard a woman in the village say this once, throw it far. Because, you know, traditionally it's all biodegradable." + }, + { + "turn_id": 416, + "timestamp": "01:39:11", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The jungle will eat it up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 417, + "timestamp": "01:39:12", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, exactly. So. So, yeah, in terms of influence on me, I think it influenced Sally too, but you'd have to ask her. Have you interviewed her?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 418, + "timestamp": "01:39:27", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 419, + "timestamp": "01:39:27", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "OK. Anyway. So how it influenced me. I remember what happened and how I decided what I was going to do. I became very curious about what it meant to be an American, because when I was in Fiji I was told I was American. And I kind of had a sense of what that was, but it was kind of like the white sense of being white, you know, not this, not that, not the other thing, right? And so I thought it'd be interesting to do that. And I looked into graduate programs in American Studies, and I found one that included folklore at Indiana University, where John and Betty were, before we went there. And so we went out and looked at, stayed with John and Betty, and looked at Bloomington, Indiana, which basically was a university surrounded by cornfields at the time.\n\nAnd I had also been, I had also been accepted. I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'll go back. I'd also been accepted at the University of Minnesota, located in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. OK, back up. I taught ESL while Sally finished up her education degrees. She got two of them in two years, it was a combined program, and it was an MA and an MA Ed or some kind of thing in special ed. And so she was well qualified and we went out in the spring of '64 and looked at the two places. And after I had spent the year teaching English as a second language to people from all over the world at the American Language Institute at New York University in Greenwich Village, which was a real trip, just wonderful. I had a blast. And people loved me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 420, + "timestamp": "01:41:34", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 421, + "timestamp": "01:41:34", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because I was good at it. And I had enough arrogance not to see that, see where the ice was thin. I just kind of glided over it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 422, + "timestamp": "01:41:41", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And do you think you would have done that if you hadn't been?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 423, + "timestamp": "01:41:43", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I don't know. It was, no, I was more ambitious than that. And I don't know in retrospect if that was such a wise thing, but that's how it was. But no, I did definitely want to go to grad school and it wasn't an ESL. I had this curiosity about what it meant to be American. So I got into the graduate program in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, did very well. And then as I got on after a couple of years, because I finished up the master's degree and then I wanted to go for the PhD, I realized that really they kept talking about American culture, but they never defined culture in the American Studies Program, and they never defined American culture. It was just kind of like a little bit of history, a little bit social studies, a little bit of the arts, you know, put together. It was very individually made. I mean, you could put it up.\n\nThey had categories of courses. So you had to take some literature, you had to take some philosophy and religion, you had to take some fine arts, you had to take some history and social studies and like that, you know, and you added them up. And then that was that. It was an individually made program, which was great, but they didn't have any courses on American culture or culture as such. Well, let's see, who teaches about culture? Oh, anthropology does. So I also got a master's degree in anthropology. Some of the courses transferred. It wasn't, I didn't start afresh. And that became then a tool really for understanding how cultures weave themselves together continuously.\n\nAnd it was at that point when I started looking for teaching, in teaching cultural anthropology, when I started looking for little handy dandy monographs on individual traditional cultures. That's when the stuff from Fiji started coming back to me and I realized that I had lived in a situation where I could have done an extended study of a of a tribal village." + }, + { + "turn_id": 424, + "timestamp": "01:43:56", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 425, + "timestamp": "01:43:57", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And just totally missed the opportunity. I should have spent more time drinking yagona in the village. That's my take." + }, + { + "turn_id": 426, + "timestamp": "01:44:05", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So that's your big regret?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 427, + "timestamp": "01:44:06", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's my big takeaway, yeah. Well, it sounds kind of frivolous, but it's not really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 428, + "timestamp": "01:44:13", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Anything you want to say though?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 429, + "timestamp": "01:44:16", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know. I guess we." + }, + { + "turn_id": 430, + "timestamp": "01:44:17", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wrap things up, or did we skip over anything?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 431, + "timestamp": "01:44:19", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good God, I hope not. I don't think we skipped anything. Some of the formalities, but just, you know, that's superficial stuff, not what's important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 432, + "timestamp": "01:44:31", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So if you, um, you've probably spoken to other people over the years about, who have been interested in Peace Corps and might want to join." + }, + { + "turn_id": 433, + "timestamp": "01:44:39", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 434, + "timestamp": "01:44:40", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what do you tell somebody that's thinking about joining Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 435, + "timestamp": "01:44:43", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Check it out. Do it if you can. Because it will. It will feed you and deepen you in ways that you can't possibly imagine. Or maybe I should say no, because you can imagine almost anything. You can't possibly know how it's going to affect you and it'll all be with good, I think. You know, Peace Corps is one of the most fantastic things that Jack Kennedy ever did. And I don't think even he fully knew what he was doing. That's all right. Sometimes we have a vision and we have to follow it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 436, + "timestamp": "01:45:24", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And your advice would be to spend more time drinking yagona with them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 437, + "timestamp": "01:45:27", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right. Or the equivalent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 438, + "timestamp": "01:45:30", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right, Steve. Well, I appreciate you taking the time today. It's been a great interview." + }, + { + "turn_id": 439, + "timestamp": "01:45:34", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 440, + "timestamp": "01:45:36", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And this concludes our time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 441, + "timestamp": "01:45:38", + "speaker": "Stephen Wiley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I appreciate it. OK." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00026", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/BennettFV/bennettfv.htm", + "original_file_name": "BennettFV_10-22-03.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/BennettFV/BennettFV_10-22-03.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 22 October 2003" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "Rebecca Wright", + "Sandra Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Floyd V. Bennett" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is October 22nd, 2003. This oral history with Floyd Bennett is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is the interviewer, and she is assisted by Sandra Johnson and Rebecca Wright. Thank you for joining us this morning. We really appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’d like to begin by asking you what your interest was in engineering as you were growing up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, when I was growing up, I didn’t know what an engineer was. I had uncle that drove a train, but I had no idea of going to college when I was in high school. But when I got out, I said, “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” And I loved math, but in those days you didn’t have computers and mathematician [jobs were primarily in the teaching profession. I didn’t think I would be a very good teacher.]\\n\\n But anyway, I grew up in World War II as a kid, and rockets came along, and I was convinced that man was going to go to the Moon in my lifetime, and I figured it would take pilots. So I went down to join the—I don’t know if it was the Army Air Corps at that time or the regular Air Force, but they said, “Young man, you need two years of college to be a pilot.”\\n\\n And I said, “Why’s that? I have a high school degree. I’m sure I know all there is to know at this point in my life.”\\n\\n So anyway, some friend of mine said, “Come take engineering with us.”\\n\\n And that’s when I said, “What does an engineer do?” And I said, “Does it have any math in it?”\\n\\n “Yeah, we think so.” So anyway, I flunked Introduction to Engineering. But after that, I made very good grades. And I wasn’t prepared for it in the end of my high school. I didn’t have the right—although I loved math, I didn’t have solid geometry and that sort of thing. But I took it over and passed it very well. I never told any of the astronauts that I flunked Introduction to Engineering, I don’t believe.\\n\\n So anyway, I wound up getting married in college, and I never did join the Air Force and become a pilot, but I did enjoy my engineering and went to work at the NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] in Langley [Aeronautical Laboratory, Hampton, Virginia], taking aeronautical engineering." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When did you officially join NACA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was 1954, and I stayed there in research in the Dynamic Loads Division of Langley. And we did a lot of the first analysis to study an airplane of a flexible body going through gusts and turbulence, and our research helped redesign some of the fixes on the Lockheed Electra, for example, because it was designed as a rigid body and it really wasn’t. And we started work on the flexible-wing airplane, the swept-wing airplanes like the B-47, and that thing really did flex a lot, quite a few feet, and it was very interesting.\\n\\n And then I worked on the—they started the Echo. When satellites came along, they started the Echo Project. It was a balloon where we bounced [communication] signals off of it, and I worked on that and studied how many satellites [would be needed to have continuous communications between two points on Earth]. We couldn’t put them up in geo sync [geosynchronous orbit] in those days, and so you put them at low altitude and in randomly spaced [orbits]. So I did a probability analysis on how many it would take to maintain communication between Europe and the United States. So it was very interesting work.\\n\\n And then they announced the lunar program, and I said, “That’s what I always wanted to work on, so I’m going with that.” And didn’t know where we were going, Florida, Massachusetts, or Texas, or what, but we came here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And when did you become affiliated with the Space Task Group?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was in ’61, and we worked about six months there before we came down here in February of 1962. I wasn’t one of the original members of the task group. They were already under way, and when I joined them, we had just started working on the lunar rendezvous concept for Apollo, where you orbit the Moon and come back and rendezvous. And I worked on that from the beginning with the task group and then for the next ten years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you take a look-and-see trip out to Houston?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I did not. Some other people did, and they brought movies back and showed us the ravages of Hurricane Carla and we said, “What are we doing?” [Laughs]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you decided to move out here anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes. My wife [Carolyn] didn’t want to come at first, but she learned to love it after a while. We came as a group, and so it was—everybody was family, so to speak. They said they had the Husband of the Week because we traveled so much. Whosever husband was home was in charge of repairs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you initially think of Houston when you arrived?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hot and humid. But when I was thinking about coming down here, some Virginians told me that, “You don’t want to go there. It’s too hot and too humid.” I said, “It may be hotter than here, but it can’t be more humid.” I was wrong. But thank goodness for air-conditioning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’ve heard that from a number of people, actually. How did your job change when you moved from Virginia down here to Houston?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, in Virginia, it was more of a research atmosphere and time wasn’t critical until I started working for the task group. And then, like I say, we started traveling a lot, and we had to go get ourselves educated more on orbital mechanics and other aspects of space operations. And with all the various contractors around the country, we had to go to Rockwell [formerly North American Aviation Corporation], to Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corporation] in New York, and that sort of thing. And you had to do your homework, and we worked awful long hours. You didn’t get paid the extra hours, but we lived and breathed it. It was a dream to work on something like that, and I think everybody was totally dedicated to it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned just a few minutes ago that you worked on the lunar rendezvous concept. Can you talk to us about a paper that you wrote on a study of Earth orbit simulation of lunar orbit rendezvous?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was a long time ago. I’d almost forgotten that one. But what we did, we looked at—rendezvous was checked out during the Gemini Program around Earth. And to make the lunar landing a successful mission, we had to rendezvous the LM [Lunar Module] back to the command module after the landing. And so we were very nervous about that, and although we checked it out here, what happens if he can’t come back, if something happened to propulsion?\\n\\n So we looked at a concept of what we call an equal period [or equi-period] transfer. If you’re in one orbit and you fire at a certain angle, you can change the orbit to come down to a lower altitude or come up to higher altitude, and the period around will be the same so it will come back and intercept with that orbit [in one revolution at the same point that you left]. But it turned out to be too expensive from a propulsion standpoint to do that, so we opted for what they call the Hohmann Transfer. That was named after a fellow by the name of [Walter] Hohmann, and he—you fire parallel to the velocity vector or against the velocity vector and just reduce your altitude. And it changes the period of the orbit, so you wind up going faster, but it was the cheapest way to do it. So that’s why we wound up doing that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How were you able to create this simulation when the lunar module and the command and service module weren’t actually finished at this point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We didn’t have many simulations. As far as the rendezvous, it was mostly mathematical, and then they did the simulators. They had visuals of everything, and you had the cockpit layouts and you had the same plans of the lunar module and the command module, so you worked it from that standpoint with computers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were also heavily involved in the trajectory analysis planning for the lunar landings themselves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can we talk about that a little bit?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk about your role in planning the mission trajectories for the Apollo Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. And I don’t know if you’ve got this report or not. [Bennett hands Ross-Nazzal a report.] This is one that we wrote right after Apollo 11, and it goes into details on the planning of it. But basically, like I said, we did a Hohmann Transfer to come out of an orbit, but I think we finally wound up at 50 miles or 60 miles and would come down to 50,000 feet, I think it was. And then you started a power descent maneuver.\\n\\n It probably doesn’t seem as complicated today in what we do, but in those days it was very complicated to us that you had to plan the trajectory with the limitations of the rocket that’s on the descent engine. You had a landing radar there to measure how far you were above the surface and how fast you were going, to update the guidance system. You had to have the guidance equations to command what thrust level you wanted out of the engine and what attitude you wanted to be at to fire it.\\n\\n We started out with what we called a fuel optimum descent. Based on the mathematics of that, you had an optimization equation and basically would fire against the velocity vector just to slow down the velocity. So it didn’t have much respect for the lunar surface in those equations, and the most optimum way was to get gravity to aid you. And we’d come down and fly through the surface and come back to the site. Well, that was not quite acceptable. So at about fifteen, ten or fifteen thousand feet, we stopped the fuel optimum guidance and went to a constant attitude and pitched the vehicle up so the crew could look out the window and see where they were going, because otherwise, [in the fuel optimum phase], they were just looking back along the [velocity] vector there. [Actually perpendicular to velocity rector.]\\n\\n And then as you got down to about 600 feet, you wanted to pitch up further and allow the conditions to be such that the crew could take over the automatic system, because none of the crew wanted to land with an automatic system. And then you had a vertical descent option there. So you had all the constraints of—you didn’t have a whole lot of excess fuel, so you had to be very efficient with it. And on Apollo 11, I think we all heard the call out of thirty seconds, we were just about out of fuel.\\n\\n So then in what we call the approach phase, where you had a fixed attitude and would look out the window, you had a grid on the window itself called the landing point designator. It was the inner and outer markings on the window, and Apollo [commander] could line up. It was like a range finder. He could line his eye up with that, and the computer would tell him what angle to look at to see where he was going, to see the landing site. And if he didn’t like where he was going, he could take his stick and change it left, right, or forward. It couldn’t go backwards very easily, but you could go forward. You could come back a little bit, but it was very inefficient to do that.\\n\\n And on Apollo 11, we wound up five miles off target because of the navigation errors coming around the Moon, and we didn’t mathematically model the Moon all that well. And there was some—we’ve assumed it to be homogenous gravity, and it wasn’t. It had what they call mass concentration, or mass cons. So that caused us to be off when we started in the descent, and subsequently we were; we were off at the landing.\\n\\n And I think there’s a little picture in there. I don’t know if it will show up all that well, [flips through report] but—it’s not going to show up that well. But we had a 3-[sigma dispersion ellipse for landing accuracy]. We called it [3-sigma] landing dispersions. With all of our uncertainties, we figured we’d be like this. [Points to a picture of an ellipse.] Well, he was all the way down at the end of that [forward end of dispersion ellipse], and he wound up over a boulder field. We’d picked the landing site to be as smooth an area as possible, no unusual features and all. But he was over a boulder field, and that’s why he almost ran out of fuel, because he kept going down, down range and trying to get a place to land.\\n\\n And this is a picture here of his angle of pitch, and he was going, and he was [continually changing attitude and altitude rates—speeding up and slowing down]. At the experimental test pilots’ meeting in Los Angeles after they came back, I asked him about that, and he said, “Well, I was just absolutely adamant about my God-given right to be wishy-washy about where I was going to land.” Now, I was allowed to put that in this AIAA [American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics] paper, but when I did a NASA paper on it, they wouldn’t let me. They said that wasn’t technical enough.\\n\\n I said, “Well, that’s what he felt.” [Laughs]\\n\\n So then after that, we went to Apollo 12, and I mentioned we had a navigational error. And we had a technique that the navigation folks said, “We can give you a better vector of the position after we get into the power descent based on the burn and everything if you can update your guidance system to do that.” So we had to do various simulations to see how much, if it was five miles, could we do that much without disrupting the guidance too much and everything like that. So we were able to do that.\\n\\n And we picked a landing site that a Surveyor spacecraft had landed at before. In here, the Apollo 12 site had a crater pattern like this [shows image], and it looked like a snowman. So we called it the snowman. This was the belly of the snowman and the head. And in the belly of the snowman, the Surveyor landing craft was right there. So he had been practicing to try to land in here and actually moved in here. And you can see where he changed his landing site with the landing point designator. And this picture here shows how close he landed. [Bennett shows a different image.] This is after they landed, and he’s over at the Surveyor, and the lunar module was up here.\\n\\n Now, we did get a lot of dust kicked up because he was on the edge of that crater, but even before Apollo 11, a lot of scientists had told us that we were going to land in 100 feet of dust. How they came up with that number, I don’t know. But anyway, we said the Surveyor didn’t do that, [get buried]. So anyway, they had their theories, and then we had some concerns. The thing about Apollo 11, there was just so many unknowns—you couldn’t really simulate these type of maneuvers [with total realism. However, the “flying bedstead” was close—an experimental hovercraft with simulation 1/6 gravity field.]\\n\\n When they did Apollo 10 and they sent the lunar module down to a lower altitude and came back, I asked Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft, I said, “Why don’t we do an unmanned landing, because we can check out all these interactions of everything like that.”\\n\\n And his answer was, “No, we don’t want to do that, Floyd, because some of the politicians will then say we’ve got to do an unmanned landing before we can do a manned landing,” and he was probably right. But it would have been a good test flight. So we did[n’t do it]. We were able to land on target with that one, [Apollo 12].\\n\\n The scientists then wanted us to go to more interesting places, and Apollo 13 was supposed to go into a science area where the terrain wasn’t too bad. Apollo 14 did land near what they called, I think it was the Cone Crater they wanted to go investigate. [Alan B.] Shepard and them never did find the Cone Crater, though. The vision was limited on the surface there. You couldn’t see over the hill, [lip of crater], but we had a camera in the lunar module during the descent, and it showed Cone Crater. And so I said, “Well, see, you went right by it.” But they came close to it. They just couldn’t get up to the top [edge] to see it.\\n\\n Then on Apollo 15, the scientists found this particular site here [shows image], and these are some of the highest mountains on the Moon, 12,000 feet, the Hadley-Appenines. And they’d previously wanted to land further down here, and I said, “No, we’ve got to come over these mountains, and we can’t get down that close.” This is a wider area [further distance from mountains to landing site] here where the radar would get adjusted and everything, so we actually flew—we moved the landing site up here, and you flew over these 12,000-foot mountains [in front of landing sites]. And this was a gorge about 1,200 foot deep [in front of the landing site]. That’s pretty deep. And there was a crater here. There’s pictures of them on the side here and walking over here, and had the Lunar Rover on that flight and go back a ways.\\n\\n We had a real rudimentary computer program in those days to draw—I told you about the picture out the window, and that you could see out the window. And we simulated drawings of that and modeled this terrain in there so that would give him an idea of what he was going to be able to see coming down.\\n\\n This mountain here, which is about 4,000 feet high, it’s about ten miles from the landing site. And when they came in like this, when you pitched up, it was right dead center of where you were going, so it gave them a good clue of if they were off track left or right. Dave [David R.] Scott got them to model that on the simulator down at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] and named it Bennett Hill, so I was very pleased with that. It’s not official astronomically; it’s just a NASA landmark.\\n\\n But it was a very challenging mission, and we had to change our trajectories again to go over these mountains, and we steepened up the approach quite a bit. But it turned out they liked that approach better. We had been at a lower approach before. It was probably a little more fuel-efficient, but the pilots, in the landing approach phase, we modeled [the lower approach] pretty much after the way they came in with airplane [landing approaches]. And, in fact, early on, they said they wanted to fly 360 degrees around the landing site.\\n\\n I said, “Why?”\\n\\n And they said, “Well, we always do that when coming into an unknown field to see what’s what.”\\n\\n And I said, “Well, that’s nice, but you don’t have the fuel to do it.” So they had to learn it was a one-shot thing.\\n\\n And again, you had to model the trajectories. Again, another constraint I didn’t mention was you had the ascent stage there that if the descent engine quit, the ascent stage would fire and separate the descent stage and lift you off. And so you had to keep the altitude rates above the capability for the engine to take you up, otherwise you would hit the surface before you take off. So that was another constraint that they had." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let me go back and ask you a few questions. You’ve brought in these wonderful pictures that have been signed. What sort of contact did you have with the astronauts or the flight crews themselves?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Basically, the commanders and the lunar landing pilots, I didn’t have much work with the command module pilots, but with Neil [A. Armstrong] and [Edwin E.] Buzz [Aldrin] and Pete [Charles] Conrad and—Shepard didn’t pay much attention to [us], and he found a glitch in the guidance logic, too. It wasn’t a major thing, but he did in his simulation and everything. But he was quite a guy. And John [W.] Young, I worked with him, and with Apollo 17, [Eugene A.] Cernan, yes. [And I worked quite a lot with Dave Scott on landing site selection for Apollo 15 and the steep approach and trajectory.]\\n\\n We would give them briefings before the mission, then go down and monitor their training down there [at Kennedy Space Center, Florida], so we were the background teachers, I guess, for them to understand why we did what we did. And, “We’d like to do so-and-so,” and we’d have to say, “Okay, that’s good to do,” or, “No, we can’t do that.” So we had a very good working relationship." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how long did these briefings last?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, they were usually a couple hours when we’d go down for training sessions and all, and we were always in various meetings together proposing changes and everything. So we worked on and off with them throughout their training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you participate in any of the lunar landing simulations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I got in the simulator and rode it down on automatic. They said, “That’s not flying.” I said, “I’ve got to see if my system works,” and it did. I said, “No, I don’t have the confidence to go take this thing over manually. That would waste everybody’s time.” But it was very interesting.\\n\\n They did a good job with those simulations, too. The video was very good the way they had the view out the window." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about Grumman? Did you have any contact with them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we were planning the concept before the lunar module was ever built. In fact, we worked on the team to evaluate the lunar module contractors, and which Grumman won. They had a very good concept. So we had to have tradeoffs between their system design capabilities and what we were doing in the trajectory. One of the first things was that the descent engine was supposed to be able to throttle from maximum thrust for the initial braking phase where you needed all that thrust, to down to 10 percent of that when the guy was just hovering around over the surface. [This throttle range] was beyond the state of the art. They can give us the maximum thrust, but they couldn’t throttle it from maximum thrust down to about 60 percent, [but] then they could throttle it continuously from 60 percent down to 10 percent. So that meant we had to change our trajectory a little bit.\\n\\n And the guidance, it was commanding a throttle position to go to, so what we had to wind up doing was command the throttle above what it could give us and just control with attitude. So you didn’t have complete—what’s the word—you weren’t getting what you really wanted. The guidance equation wasn’t getting what it wanted, but it would eventually command less and less thrust and get down to that 60 percent level, and then we’d switch targets and go to the approach phase where he could throttle the rest of the way down. The landing radar, we had influences on that, too. They had to locate its beams on two separate orientations, one when he’s back on his back coming in, and then later on when he [is] pitched up. So there was give and take on the system design as well, which we’d call systems integration today, [that’s] what you would call it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you spend much time out in New York?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we went there a few times on critical design reviews and that sort of thing. Ken [Kenneth J.] Cox and I were driving from the airport there, going out to Bethpage on Long Island. It was about dusk. And we were trying to decide whether we wanted to go into the city before we went out to the island that night or go out and check in and come back. We thought we’d take in the Playboy Club. So, anyway, we decided to go to the hotel first, and as it gets a little bit dark, the lights don’t come on. And I said, “Boy, they roll the sidewalks up early around here.” The traffic lights [were]n’t working, and I heard on the radio it was a blackout. That was the first blackout in the sixties, somewhere in the sixties, ’65 or ‘6[6], somewhere like that.\\n\\n So I’m glad we went to Bethpage first. We got there, it was candle lights and that was it, because a lot of people were in the dark there [in the city], trapped in buildings and everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your relationship like with Grumman?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Fine. We got along very well. They respected us and we respect[ed] them, and no problems. Like I say, everybody was dedicated to doing that. It was really great. They had some very, very smart people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that some changes had to be made to the trajectories as a result of changes to the LM. Can you talk to us about how the maneuvers changed over time as a result of mission requirements or different changes that NASA would require?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. The major change was when we went to—well, there were more subtle changes, I guess, like the thing that the engine wouldn’t throttle from 100 percent down. That changed things. But it was mostly in the fuel-efficient phase, so you really never saw much difference there. It just meant you had to maybe thrust a little bit longer in that phase.\\n\\n The biggest one was when we went to the landing sites over in the mountainous terrains and everything where you got the steep-[approach] trajectories, and it gave them [a better view of the landing site].\\n\\n Before, we were on a more shallow approach, and at 10,000 feet when you pitched up, you were much further away from the landing site so you couldn’t see it as well. This one, you were closer in, and, like I say, they liked that better because they could see the landing site better.\\n\\n And then that let us on Apollo 17—that was a very mountainous [area around the] landing site, too. It had mountains to the left, to the right, and up range; it was the only thing [open] was out in front of you. So without the change in accuracy of navigation and without the change in the trajectory, we wouldn’t have been able to land in those sites. They even had us looking at landing in the crater Tycho one time, and I said, “Hey, get real.” [Laughs]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Speaking of landing sites, I understand that you also chose some of the landing locations on the Moon. Can we talk about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s what we did on Apollo 15. That’s when we worked with the scientists to find the site that they wanted to be along here somewhere. And, like I say, they had one further down. And we went to [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, D.C.] and Dr. [Rocco A.] Petrone was chairing the meeting there, and he said he would not lock the doors, but nobody was leaving the room till we got a landing site.\\n\\n There were so many different disciplines, and I think scientists tend to work more on their own than engineers. Engineers need to work [as] a team more. And I’m not being negative to the scientists; I’m just saying that’s the way they’re trained. But bless their hearts, I’m in this discipline and he’s in that discipline, and I want to land at this place because it’s got the best for me, and they want to land over there. And I told them one day, I said, “You guys remind me of a kid in a candy store and you’ve got a quarter. And there’s ten pieces of candy and they all cost a quarter and you [still] want one of each.” And [Dr.] Noel [W.] Hinners was there, the head fellow of the scientists’ group, and he did a terrific job of pulling those egos together. He really did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were some of the primary characteristics that you looked for in terms of the landing site, from your perspective?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From our perspective, it was to be as free of any mountains or anything like that as possible. And, like I say, on Apollo 11 and even 12, although we landed near craters, there were flat areas, no high mountains around, or anything like that. We had to model the terrain into guidance logic when we went to like to this site [points to picture of Apollo 15], because when he flies over a 12,000-foot mountain and the radar says it thought that was the landing site height and said, “Hey, you’re only at 4,000-feet elevation,” so that would throw the guidance all crazy. So you had to model it in and say, “No, it’s 12,000 feet above the landing site,” and so that worked out good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What sort of interaction did you have with people from USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] or Bellcom [Inc.]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "USGS was some of the scientist groups and everything and, like I said, they had their strong opinions about where they wanted to go and everything. But you were saying what, from my standpoint, like I say, we could tolerate—once we’d got the accuracy down, we could tolerate these things if we modeled the terrain in and all like that and you didn’t have a big cliff to go over, a big mountain to go over, on your way up or anything.\\n\\n The Bellcom folks were sort of like a check and balance, and they would look over our shoulder and they offered other concepts and everything else, too, and I got along very well with them. I think some people worried about that, [looking over our shoulder], and I said, “Hey, if they’ve got to look at this and they find something, that’s great, because it’s got to be done right.”\\n\\n The night before we were landing on the Moon, my wife said to me, says, “What if they die?”\\n\\n And I said, “Honey, we’ve done the best we can do,” and that’s all you can say, and we had.\\n\\n Now, today, I don’t think we—our risk [on Apollo] would be much greater than what we’re willing to fly with today, but it’s a risky business, and it was a dream for them to go.\\n\\n I did climb up on top of the Saturn one time. I didn’t climb up it; we went up, in other words, in the VAB [Vehicle Assembly Building]. And we got up there and looked down, and people looked like little ants. And I said, “This is like the Humble Building in downtown Houston, and you’re going to light the fire on this thing? I’ll go to the Moon on paper.” [Laughs] And so they were gutsy people and brave people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They certainly were. Were there any sites that the scientists picked that from an engineering perspective you thought were too dangerous to get to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, like the Tycho crater. It was too unforgiving. I mean, it was a large crater and everything, but we could probably have done it later, but it was considered too risky. And other things like that when they—I said, “You look like you want us to land between a rock and a hard place here, and that’s not good.” So, yes. So they had to compromise on the sites they got, and they got good sites out of Apollo 15, [at] the place we did land." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Once a landing site was decided upon, how long did it take you to come up with the trajectory analysis?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We already had the trajectories, but we would have candidate landing sites, and five or six and that sort of thing. So we’d see what kind of trajectories we needed to go into each one, and sometimes it wasn’t any difference. So we had to do that before the sites were selected and take that information to the meetings if there was any reason [for not going to that site].\\n\\n I told Dr. Petrone that we were looking at four or five different sites for Apollo 17, and so I compared this one and this one and this one, and I said, “We can do all of these,” I said, “But this is like a piece of cake compared to going to Tycho.” And he said, “Floyd, there’s no lunar landing that’s a piece of cake.” So I used the wrong phrase. I said, “Well.” He said, “I know what you mean.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many individuals did you work with on designing these analyses?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had about—oh, well, let’s see, one other picture here. This is the names of the people that were in our Landing Analysis Branch. [Bennett shows another image.] I adopted this cartoon for our branch logo. [A cowboy going over a steep cliff on his horse.] And the guy was saying, “Whoa, you SOB! Whoa!” And I took the “SOB” out, but I told the astronauts—and Neil Armstrong signed this—I said, “This is the fuel optimum descent, guys.” [Laughs]\\n\\n So you can see there was about twenty of us in there, but that was just in our branch. You had to work with the navigation branches. They got very conservative on me when we picked Apollo 17 with, like I said, they had the mountains all around.\\n\\n So they gave me their dispersion equation, ellipse, and I looked at it and I said, “This is bigger than anything they’ve ever given me.” And I said, “You guys, your conservatism is going to cost us in other areas here. You’ve got to get real.”\\n\\n And so I went down to their branch and took their sign down and put up “Lost In Space Branch.” They got a little ticked at me, but anyway, I said, “I can’t hit the Moon with this set of dispersions, much less the landing site.”\\n\\n So then they took out some of their fudge factors, and we were able to do it. But that’s something in the lessons learned that we said, not just them, but any designer of the propulsion system or anything else, if they get overly conservative in theirs and make somebody else absorb their uncertainties, the system won’t work. So you’ve got to be honest and say it like it is, and you’ve got to stand behind what you come up with. Got to do the best you can, as they say." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I also understand that you actually worked in some of the staff support rooms during the missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we had three or four of our fellows on the console, Willis [M.] Bolt, Dan [Joe D.] Payne, and Jim [James V.] West and [I’ve left someone out], Jim [James H.] Alphin. And they were in communication with the FIDO, Flight Dynamics Officer, for what’s going on and everything. And the guidance guys were also in that room, MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts] and Jack [John R.] Garman’s group. And they were the ones that called that—I don’t know if you recall. They had an error display, an error out of the guidance system during the landing. They had actually simulated that in one of the simulations, and that’s what made them aware that this thing could happen.\\n\\n The computer, I think it was like 64,000 words, which is you’ve got more in your pocket calculator now. But if you started getting updates from the landing radar or something else, and your computer has this duty cycle of going and doing things.\\n\\n And, I think, in this case, the rendezvous radar signal, I believe it was, somehow got into the flow there and started things getting real busy, and so it created an alarm. It says, “Hey, I’m not doing all these other functions. I’m just going to do the guidance right now.”\\n\\n And so they were able to say, “Hey, it’s still okay to go.” And so we were in there.\\n\\n And, yes, I was more there as advising and monitoring our guys, and they all did a good job. We were in Building 30 getting ready to go over to the control center from our administrative wing, and Jim Alphin and I got in the elevator. And he had all his books and everything like that.\\n\\n And I said, “Are you ready?”\\n\\n He said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, you’ve got to punch the button, or we ain’t going anywhere.” So it was just a little nervous time, because he hadn’t even punched the button to go down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us a little bit about the organization of the support rooms themselves, from what you remember?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You had various displays. Somebody was watching trajectory parameters. Somebody was watching the attitude and the guidance parameters, like if they were looking for various alarms and everything. So you just the TV monitors there and you could call up other displays.\\n\\n The most disturbing thing to me was, not being a flight controller, everybody talking on those loops together. They could recognize each other’s voice and not have to say, “Okay, who was that?” But, yes, [that] was a very good system.\\n\\n And Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz came by and said, “Is everybody all right in here?” before we went down there.\\n\\n We said, “Yes, just another sim [simulation],” but this one’s going to be nominal, because some of the simulations you had put in a lot of errors and things, like you put in a low thrust. In fact, Jay [F.] Honeycutt was SimSup [Simulation Supervisor] in those days, and I was concerned about—I mentioned to you we couldn’t throttle the engine up in the first phase of the flight where it’s efficient. And so if the thrust was getting low, if the engine wasn’t putting out as much thrust as it needed to put out, if it was beyond its three-sigma dispersions, the guidance equation would keep saying, “I need more thrust and I’m not getting it,” and it would start pitching the vehicle [and] it would go into a loop and you would crash.\\n\\n I mentioned that to Bill [Howard W.] Tindall. He was our [Deputy] Division Chief there. And so I talked to Honeycutt, and we put a simulation in where that happened, [very low thrust], and it did exactly that. That got Bill’s attention and everybody else’s attention that that was a damned good display to have.\\n\\n I had to insist on that display earlier before we did that, because when I came down here, [to Flight Operations Directorate (FOD)] I was in the Engineering Directorate, and there was some, like—what’s the right word—some competition, if you want to, between the designers and the flight operations people. And so “You designers don’t know how to operate,” and, “You guys operating it don’t know [how] to design,” that sort of thing. But eventually everybody got the message and worked together, but there was some competition there.\\n\\n I came over from Engineering Directorate, and we’ve got to decide on what displays you want to have in the MOCR [Mission Operations Control Room]. So we said the normal thing, you need the attitude and this sort of thing and what the thrust is. And I said, “I also need the thrust command that the guidance system’s asking for,” because of this problem I was telling you about.\\n\\n “No, we want to have—.” You were limited in what you could have, so they wanted what we called V\\Gamma, velocity and flight path angle.\\n\\n And I said, “Well, wait a minute. That’s good for orbital parameters. You’ve got to know your velocity and your flight path angle to know what kind of orbit you’re on, but you’ve already fired the engine and you’re already suborbital. You’re going to hit the Moon at this point, so why do you still need V\\Gamma?”\\n\\n And so they couldn’t come up with anything else, so they said, “It’s traditional.”\\n\\n I said, “Okay, I’m not going to argue with tradition, and you do need it for ascent, I agree with that, but I want this other one, too.” So we were able to both get what we wanted. So that was very interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were working in the staff support room, what were you thinking about the Apollo 11 landing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, everything was fine. All systems were—everything was nominal and all like that. And then when it got down and took over and we kept watching his forward velocity and his altitude rate and, like I said, he was going around like this [gestures], but his forward velocity was still going forty feet per second forward or something, and you can’t land at those speeds. And I said, “What is he doing?” We didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t have time to tell us it was a rock field out there.\\n\\n The call came up to thirty seconds to go on fuel, and I thought he was going to have to abort, I really did. And all of a sudden, he stopped and he found what he was looking for and he went down, so he was cognizant of it, too. But there again, the systems guys had put a little more pad in there. They had a little more fuel than they would say they would have. Now, you can be conserving a little bit. You don’t want to have a hard line there. But the guy’s got to know what he’s got to work with. Yes, it was touch-and-go there at the end." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When Pete Conrad finally made that pinpoint landing on Apollo 12, what was your reaction?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, that was great. That was great. I had to go over to the other [Lunar Surface Scientist’s] staff support room and tell them where he was. When we did the simulations, like I was telling you, the snowman crater pattern, that big crater is what you could see, mostly. And he would plan to land just upstream of that in what we called Conrad’s Parking Lot. And it turned out he was little further along, and so he moved around and he landed up near the head crater.\\n\\n And so we were aware of that during all the simulations we did for the landings, but the scientists didn’t sit in on those simulations. They started their simulations after he was on the surface and that sort of thing. And so, “What’s the parking lot?” And so I went down and showed them a map where he was, and then they put up a sign on their door that unauthorized personnel shouldn’t be in there. They were a little embarrassed. But anyway, it all ended well, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you receive any commendation for the Apollo 12 pinpoint landing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I got the Exceptional Service Medal for that. That was neat. John [W.] Aaron and I flew up to Washington with the crew in the NASA plane to get our medals from Dr. [George M.] Low. That was very rewarding, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any involvement with the Apollo 13 mission?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I went out there [to the control center] for a little bit. I’d gone home, was taking a shower or something, I think, and it came on the TV. And I came out to see if I could help with anything about using the LM systems, but I wasn’t a LM systems expert, so the best thing I could do was get out of their way. They did quite a job on that. They really did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that the Apollo 15 landing was pretty complicated. What were you thinking as they were landing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I was glad that we had modeled that terrain and heard them say, “There’s Bennett Hill.” [Laughs] Yes, that was great. We were sweating that one a little bit from going over those mountains and all, but we kept thinking positive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand in ’72 you became the Manager of the Apollo Program Office within the MPAD [Mission Planning and Analysis] Division." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, their mission office, yes, and that’s when I was doing the site selection on 17." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any other duties or responsibilities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we were coordinating all of the trajectory planning at that time, and instead of just looking at the descent part, I worked with all the other branches for the navigation and the abort logic for translunar [trajectories] and that sort of thing. So I pulled together some of those, coordinated the effort there to get all those briefing packages together, and we did those for upper management and also did them for the press. That’s when I met Jim Hartz with NBC. He wound up on The Today Show later on. I guess it was after Apollo 13 when I met [him].\\n\\n Apollo 12 got very little news coverage, and then Apollo 13 woke up the press, “Oh, there can be problems,” and this sort of thing. So they came out by the bunches for the next mission. They wanted to know what’s going on and all this, so we started briefing them on all of this. I wasn’t familiar with some of the other aspects of it as I would have been if I was working on them, so I would get the right technical expert in that field to brief them. And we were typical engineers using our jargon, and I said, “Hey, you’ve got to talk English here.” And I said, “When you say this, do you mean so-and-so?”\\n\\n “Well, no, I mean this.”\\n\\n I said, “Okay.” So we kept going that way, and I said, “Wait a minute. Let me ask you this.”\\n\\n So we got through, and I turned to Jim Hartz and I said, “You got anymore questions?”\\n\\n He said, “No, do you? You’re doing great.” [Laughter]\\n\\n But we’ve got to speak English when we talk to people, because it’s very important for them to know what’s going on.\\n\\n Now, Jules Bergman, you couldn’t be as—what? Jules had his own agenda, and he was kind of difficult to work with sometimes. They gave him—“they,” the news media—they had what they called—they called themselves aerospace scribes. AeroSpace Scribes, ASS. So they gave him the [“Big ASS”] award for looking for the story behind the story and missing the story, and he wasn’t too happy with that. But anyway, he was always wanting to get in the simulators and all like this, and I think later on they did allow him to get in. But Jules did his homework, he sure did. He just was kind of hard to get along with sometimes. I’m sorry about—I think he died with a brain tumor, actually, so maybe he was having some difficult times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How much time did you spend working with PAO [Public Affairs Office] on this material that you gave to the press?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s what we did there and then went with those guys. We’d set up briefings with PAO, through PAO, and every mission we would do that. And then we were on call if they had technical questions from the news media. They would say, “I know you’re busy, but do you mind doing this?” And no, we didn’t, because we wanted them to know as much—well, I hope they didn’t know as much as we did, but I wanted them to know as much as they needed to know, so they could do the right story. It’s very important that the press do that.\\n\\n I thought Miles O’Brien did a good job on the [Columbia] accident [earlier this] year, and he came on like that and he had done his homework and he knew what was going on. So it’s very important that we talk to the press so everybody’s on the same sheet of music." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What type of questions did the press generally ask you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, sometimes we chided them about the questions they asked. They didn’t always ask the pertinent questions, I guess, but sometimes they did. And that was the thing you’d have to say is, “Okay, I don’t really know the answer to that one, but it’s not important because of this, this, and this. If you really want to know the answer, we’ll try to get it for you,” and try to keep them back on track of what the right questions should be.\\n\\n But many times they asked intelligent questions, too, but you can’t just go and answer every question out there, or you’d be there forever if it’s not a pertinent question. So that’s what we were trying to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I also understand that you were Chief of the Mission Integration Branch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. That was when we were doing Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project] and Skylab. And there we combined our office with their office, and there weren’t the long trajectory burns on those, but it was similar work to what the folks had been doing there. And they were trying to show—get the right constraints for all their science that they were doing and that sort of thing on orbit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your basic duties as chief?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just coordinate all the guys together and be sure we had the right people on the right jobs there. I wasn’t the technical expert in those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything else you think we should know about your involvement with the Apollo Program or Skylab Program, that we haven’t covered?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think so at the moment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. I’d like to move on to the Shuttle Program, if you don’t mind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand that you were working in the Systems Integration Office for the Space Shuttle Program Office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I went over to System Integration Office with Dick [Richard H.] Kohrs and Owen [G.] Morris. He was the chief of it then. I guess the Shuttle Program had already started by the time I transferred over, and, in fact, I think they had already let the contract for the main engines and all. But we were trying to get a handle on the performance of the launch, and you had millions of pounds of weight there. And how did we know that we had weight control on everything?\\n\\n So we had to write an appendix to our requirements to say, “External tank, you’re limited to this type of weight.” I forget what their weight was then. And the main engines, the solid rocket boosters, and the Orbiter. And if you start exceeding that weight, then you’ve got to come forward to the program. You have your actual weight and here’s your control weight, and you’ve got to report what margin you’ve got, and you’ve got to come report any changes like this so the program office can know if you change your weight, you may be affecting somebody else, affecting the thrust capability.\\n\\n And so we did what we call a weight and control and performance control and established all the requirements for that, and worked the interfaces between all the elements like when you mate, you’ve got to have a certain structural attachment and certain loads and that sort of thing. So we managed those requirements, too, and, “If you can’t meet it, you’ve got to let us know. That’s why we have the Program [Requirements] Change Control Board so that if you can’t make it, we’ve got to see if it’s affecting the other person, or you’ve got to stop and go fix it, one way or the other.” So there was that type of work.\\n\\n You got a bigger picture of the program, but at the same time, I had been used to being a designer in Engineering, and then in operations over in Flight Ops [Operations], and now I was in Integration, which I was trying to teach everybody to play in perfect harmony, I guess, as the song goes. But you weren’t designing anything, you weren’t operating, but you have to make everybody play together. So it was an interesting job. In fact, I’m still doing some of that with USA [United Space Alliance] today in Systems Integration." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk to us about your work with the various contractors during the Shuttle Program, during the early Shuttle Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it wasn’t so much the contractors as it was the project offices of the NASA people there. One fellow over at Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama]—Marshall and JSC engineers were highly competitive, too. I’d never dealt with Marshall before when I worked on the lunar module. I didn’t need to. But there was one fellow there when I needed to know what their weight was for the external tank. And we were going to a meeting and there was a change coming up, and I said, “I’ve got to have something here.”\\n\\n And he said, “Well, I’ve got to get this approved by my top management.”\\n\\n I said, “Fine, but we need them by so-and-so.” And he couldn’t get it approved, and I said, “Well, stamp it preliminary and give it to me, it’s better than me having to make up something.”\\n\\n So okay, so he did, and I presented it. It was preliminary, and everybody got the message and it was fine. So he called me after the meeting and he says, “I’m not giving you anything else.”\\n\\n I said, “What are you talking about?”\\n\\n He said, “You used it.”\\n\\n I said, “Well, that was the idea. I told them it was preliminary.” But he got very nervous about it. So it depends on who your managers are, maybe, but overall, I think we worked quite well with them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any other difficulties that you encountered while working in this position?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was kind of hard to get information out of Orbiter for some reason, because the Orbiter Project was reporting to JSC Center Director as well as the Program Manager, and so they wanted everything, maybe like the fellow from Marshall, cleared and everything like that before they would talk to us about some of the things. But it all worked out. But you had to treat them a little differently, I guess, is the word." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I also understand that you worked on computer systems integration for the Space Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that was in Systems Integration, and what we were doing was, it wasn’t any flight computers or anything like that; it was pulling together a bunch of databases for all the measurements you had onboard the Shuttle. You had a lot of development flight instrumentation on the first few flights, and [by the way] we’re going back to putting more [instrumentation] on now [for return to flight next year]. And so it was a massive amount of data in each project.\\n\\n So each project had their own database for their sets of instrumentation, and you had to pull them together into one database so that everybody could work with it. And that was our job, and that was a little difficult, because there again, some of them were already in existence and the people didn’t want to change and everything like that. Rockwell [International Corporation] had built the Orbiter data[base] and they were also the integration contractor, so we wound up using their system, but it was kind of difficult there for a while to do that. And unfortunately, I didn’t have any budget to control them with, so anyway, but we finally got it together. It could have been run a lot more efficiently, though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand you were the Chairman of the Computer Systems Hardware and Software Integration." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was that same role, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The same thing, okay.\\n\\n What sort of interaction did you have with IBM [International Business Machines Corporation]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I went to San Jose [California] and took one of their management courses out there in [computer] systems, and that helped me an awful lot. They were involved in developing these databases as well. Very good, very good people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any contact with Rockwell?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. In those days, too, yes, Rockwell wound up building [the] database." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What are your memories of STS-1?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess I remember seeing the bird fly over here, [JSC], with all that tile missing before it ever flew and everything. The tile was really a nervous—well, I guess it was a very hard design and everything, and people really worked hard at doing that. And they came up with a good material and everything, but it was a worry, even on STS-1. I’m sure we had some missing pieces when we got back.\\n\\n But I guess the main thing was the launch. The launch and entry are your most difficult dynamic phases of flight, and if something goes wrong, you’ve got [very] little time to react. I think even today we’re all still nervous about aborts during the ascent to return to flight, because that’s a very difficult maneuver, and you can only simulate it. We all think it’ll work, but you never know. Things have got to go so quickly and just right.\\n\\n So you sweat out the launch and then you sweat out the entry, and when you’re on orbit, everything is sort of in standby and you’ve got time to do something usually there. I had worked with John Young on Apollo 16 before, so I knew him quite well. And Bob [Robert L.] Crippen, I met him during my Computer System days. We used to go to [flight] software meetings out at Rockwell all the time. Everybody was saying, “Who are they going to pick to fly? We know John’s going to fly.”\\n\\n And so when I heard Crippen [was selected], I said, “Well, John wanted somebody who had that [on-board] computer background,” and he did. “Crip” did a good job in learning all that stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us a little bit about those software meetings that you went to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, they were long, very long. Arnie [Arnold D.] Aldrich chaired those, and it was a lot of various subjects to cover from one system to the other. Bob [Robert A.] Minor, Bob Minor was a software engineer out there at Rockwell in those days before he came here to Houston. He came in with a briefing one day and was about a couple inches thick. I said, “Bob, by definition, a briefing is supposed to be brief.” So anyway, he did a good job, and I told him afterwards, I said, “You know, that was really a good job you did, and if you’d have been selling tickets on the Titanic, I still think I would have bought one even knowing the ship was going to go down.” I don’t know if he took it as a compliment or not, but I meant it that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Once the first flight had flown, what were your major duties?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wasn’t in operations then. I was planning for the next mission, I guess you’d say, but I had no real-time responsibilities during Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk to us about planning for the next few missions? What was your involvement?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, again, it was to be sure that the performance, the weight and performance and all, was adequate and we had the right margins. One time Bob [Robert F.] Thompson was the Shuttle Program Manager and I said, “You’re overweight in this particular area.”\\n\\n And he says, “No, we’re not overweight. We have negative margin. We’ll work it out.” [Laughs] So that’s when I learned the term negative margin." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand that you retired from NASA in 1982." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us why you decided to retire at that point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was fifty years old then, and I said, well, the Shuttle Program didn’t leave me [any design or operational options]. I wasn’t operating anything or designing anything, like I said, and so I said, “I think I want to go look around, and I’ll be more marketable at age fifty than I will at fifty-five or a normal retirement age.” So I went over to Personnel, and I said, “Is the early-out option still available?” Because they were getting ready to make me an inline manager, and prior to that I’d been an Assistant to [the manager].\\n\\n And they said, “Yeah.”\\n\\n And I said, “For how long?”\\n\\n They said, “Oh, about another week.”\\n\\n I said, “Well, thanks for letting me know.” So anyway, I decided I didn’t want to be locked in, and so I retired.\\n\\n But there wasn’t much going on in the aerospace business in ’82 around here, and I wound up seeing an ad. Oh, that reminds me of another—Ed [Edward I.] Fendell. I’ve got to give you an Ed Fendell story in a little bit. Everybody knows Ed. But anyway, he found this ad. He was from Connecticut originally, and Perkin-Elmer [Corporation in Connecticut] was advertising for a mission manager to manage a telescope that was going to fly on the Shuttle. It was a sun optical telescope. Perkin-Elmer was already building the Hubble [Space] Telescope at that time, and so they were looking for a mission manager to do that. And I wound up going up there with them for five years.\\n\\n But after I got to Perkin-Elmer, I said, “Well, how’s things going on the Hubble?”\\n\\n And they said, “Well, now that you’re one of us, we’re over budget and behind schedule,” and I think with all the problems they had with that program, the government never did [give] them the solar optical telescope, so I wound up coming back here to Houston with Rockwell [in 1987].\\n\\n But the people at Perkin-Elmer were very extremely intelligent people and [made] a good product. It was a shame the Hubble had the [initial] problem, because they had evidence that there was a problem with it, but they couldn’t believe they had made that kind of mistake. They did and were able to correct it and everything.\\n\\n They would always—I mean, you had a set of minimum requirements, but they never [design] to the minimum requirements. They’d maximize. They would give you more than what you wanted, and sometimes that cost you more money. You can’t buy a Cadillac for the price of a Ford, with the requirements of a Ford.\\n\\n But I mentioned Ed Fendell, and this was also on Apollo 15, if you don’t mind me going back a minute." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was the first flight where we had the Rover, and they had the TV camera there to take the picture of the ascent. Ed was controlling this camera on the Rover from the control center, and so he wanted us to calculate what angle and rate he had to go to track this thing as it went up, so we ran the trajectory and where he was parked and that sort of thing, and gave him the data. “Oh, it can’t go that fast.” I said, “Ed, the result is done by the same folks that did the lunar descent trajectories and everything, and I have great confidence in them that they know what they’re doing.” I said, “If you don’t want to use it, don’t use it.” I mean, it wasn’t affecting my ascent. So he didn’t. So he cut the rates in about half, and this sequence of pictures taken off the camera [shows image] shows before the engine started, six-tenths of a second—two seconds. I lost this one. Anyway, at less than 3.7 seconds the ascent stage is gone, and he’s still looking at the descent stage.\\n\\n So on Apollo 16, he came around and wanted to know if we’d calculate it for him again, and I said, “Yeah, Ed. Are you going to use it?” [Laughter] And he did, and [he] tracked it beautifully." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He’s a character." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, he is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that you returned back to Houston and started working for Rockwell." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you start doing for them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was systems integration work again on the Shuttle, but this time I worked with the Shuttle main engine, concentrating on that, and learned an awful lot about that machinery. That is a fantastic engine, the Shuttle main—Rocketdyne’s [Propulsion and Power of the Boeing Company] engine. And there’s no one person that seems to have designed it; it just evolved. “We’ve got to change this. We’ve got to change that,” and it really is something else. And that was a very interesting system to learn about. We tracked the requirements on them. If they changed the weight or if they had some kind of a problem that would interface, would cause the Orbiter a problem, because the fuel system had to come from the tank through the Orbiter to the engine, so you had to worry about all those interfaces and work with them to keep track of those and say, “Yeah, you can do this. You can’t do that. Or if you want to do that, you’ve got to come forward to the board and see who else you’re affecting.” So it’s an interesting job, systems integration, really is.\\n\\n For the last few years I’ve been doing that, but I’ve also done work on what we call interface control documents. These, again, are the interfaces, electrical, mechanical, whatever environments, between the various systems. Whenever somebody builds something new or you go to an upgrade, do I have to change this and that? And one of the biggest problems, I guess—I don’t know if you’d call it a real problem, but, well, it’s caused us to have a lot of waivers, is the platforms down at the Cape.\\n\\n [These are] massive platforms where the workers get on to work on the Shuttle, and you don’t want a large gap there [or] the guy could fall or something or he’d have to wear a safety harness and everything. So we have a general requirement of you can’t be any closer than six inches because you could damage the vehicle. In fact, we’ve pulled the vehicle out and hit a door sometimes and that sort of thing. And we’ve had a lot of waiver conditions where there’s so many platforms and everything that the guys [say], “We’re at three inches. We can’t get six inches. We can’t cut this thing back any more.” And so we’d have to get a waiver for that while they go study it to see what else they can do or come back and say, “Okay, if you do these extra procedures, you can continue on that way.”\\n\\n But we then have to send it to the loads analysis people because the vehicle again is flexible. It moves, and particularly out on the pad, you’ve got wind loads and everything. So can you tolerate three inches at this point without hitting it? So you have to do those kind of analyses. But again, it’s very complicated down there [at KSC], and they want to get their job done and not hold things up, but I think they were down to a quarter of an inch of the engine bell one time, and I said, “That’s not a clearance. You’re just touching at that point.” So it’s something you have to stay on top of, and they’re working hard to change all the platforms and all to get the right stuff. But that’s what I’m doing today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. Good to hear you’re still doing it. I just have a couple more questions for you today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think has been your most challenging milestone in your career with NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it’s definitely the lunar Apollo Program, yes. Like I say, with so many unknowns, and it’s something mankind had dreamed about all their lives and even us as kids, and we’re able to do that, yes, to be a part of that team was really great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m sure it must have been exciting for you, having that interest." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think was your most significant accomplishment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Again, it would be the designing of the descent trajectory, because I was in a unique position of working on it when it was a future mission and then working in the design and development of the hardware that went on it to make my trajectories work right, and then to go over and to be in a part of operations and see it operating right. And I think I contributed that way. because the operations people had been doing rendezvous in Gemini and this sort of thing, and they didn’t have a lot of expertise at that time in the powered flight maneuvers. They learned quickly, I’ll say that, but I felt like I was sort of a tutor to them as well as the astronauts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Before we close out today, I’d like to ask Sandra and Rebecca if they have any questions for you, if that’s okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay, great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I had one for you. When you were talking about your Landing Analysis Branch and you showed us your picture, you had twenty of you working together. Can you share with us a few more details—how twenty of you worked together, so many missions were going on at the same time, and planning, and how that was all coordinated and everyone had their own duties?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes, you had some people that were going to be in the backup rooms and others doing dispersion analysis, some doing the guidance logic, and—let’s see. What else was in there? They also combined us with the Entry Branch. Jon [C.] Harpold and Claude [A.] Graves. Claude Graves was my Assistant Branch Chief, and Jon was [section chief] over that. So you had a lot of them working the entry part of it, which I didn’t. I did a hands-off on that. They were the experts on that, but there was probably about ten of us on the other side of it. We just worked the various disciplines, and I had some people doing only ascent trajectories. Like I said, we would have to have changes, and somebody wanted to change something. And I said, “Well, Jim, run the trajectory on that with this [change] in it.”\\n\\n “That’s not going to make any difference,” [he said].\\n\\n Well, I still had my slide rule in those days, and I was able—I said, “No, it should change by a little bit.” I said, “I know I’m not [as] accurate,” but as the computers were coming along and they were getting stuff out to ten decimal places, and sometimes we got wrapped up in believing it. I said, “Your input is not that good.”\\n\\n And that’s what Chris Kraft said to them, “I don’t care what that ‘GD’ computer says. You tell me what it’s supposed to do.”\\n\\n So we had to do that one time, and so he ran it off on the computer and came back, and, [said] “See? It didn’t make any difference at all.” I said, “Come on. It had to make some difference. Show me what you did.”\\n\\n So he says, “Oh.”\\n\\n I said, “What?”\\n\\n He said, “I didn’t change the input.” So you can’t always trust the computer, but the computer can get you a lot more than we can think through, but you’ve got to have the right input to it and be able to analyze the answer that comes out of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that you had, of course, all those years where you were planning for those landing sites and the twenty of you that worked. Did you have a lot of turnover with all of the long hours and so much work to do in such a short amount of time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. And in the early days, it wasn’t the twenty of us. I was in E&D, Engineering [and Development], GN&C, Guidance, Navigation, and Control, and so you had navigation people and guidance people, and I had to interface with them to be sure that we could handle all the constraint that they had in their trajectories. But, no, we didn’t have much turnover. In fact, we didn’t do a lot of hiring either until I guess I got some new guys in in ’66 when I went over to MPAD.\\n\\n One of them, Gil [Gilbert L.] Carman, he’s the one that developed that little rudimentary computer program for the window view, and he called me a few years back and said he had twenty-five years of service. And I said, “Man, I hired you.” And now I think he’s retired. I don’t know if he’s retired or not, but he’s got about thirty years out there now.\\n\\n But, no, there wasn’t a lot of turnover. We did have our first RIF in those days, a reduction in force. This is just a little side story. I didn’t know the fellow [engineer]. But anyway, they had difficulty; some people could bump somebody else and this sort of thing. And this one fellow, he got RIF’d and he hadn’t been one of the stars of the program, I guess. So he took the test as a secretary and got a job as a secretary, and he made a damned good secretary. He was filing great and everything else. They couldn’t believe that—maybe found a better job for him. But that was about the only time we lost people, was a reduction of force." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was just wondering, in 1962 when you came here, obviously the area has changed quite a bit since that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was wondering about the neighborhood that you moved into with your family, if you’re still in that neighborhood, how it has changed over time, and how you think that NASA has affected the communities around this area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we got here in ’62. Well, this area wasn’t developed much at all. I’d lived in the country in Virginia, and I was enamored with the big city of Houston, so I wanted to get a little closer to town. We wound up, some new houses being built up by [William P.] Hobby Airport [Houston, Texas], and a large contingent of us moved in there. It was a very nice neighborhood, new homes and everything like that. I think they were about $20,000 or something in those days, and a very nice neighborhood. It’s still a fairly nice neighborhood, but, unfortunately, it’s surrounded and people have to go to burglar bars and that sort of thing.\\n\\n But I lived there until ’77, I think it was, and then moved to Sagemont Townhouses on Sabo. I liked that, and I was there when I retired from NASA.\\n\\n When I came back [from Connecticut], well, my wife had started working. With kids gone and everything, she went back to work [before we went to Connecticut]. I don’t know if I told you I got married in college. She put me through my last year of college. … [In Houston], she wound up as an office manager for a company in software, and they were five minutes away up near Gulfgate at the time, but then they gradually moved across town, out eventually to Dairy Ashford and I-10. That was a long hard drive for her, so when we came back from Connecticut, I said, “Do you want to go back to work?” She wound up working at Perkin-Elmer also, because the winters were so cold up there and [you could] get cabin fever up there in the wintertime.\\n\\n She said, no, she was going to quit working.\\n\\n I said, “Because if we are, I’m going to move halfway over to where you are, otherwise I’m going to move out to [the NASA] area.” And we did and moved into El Lago [Texas] for a while, and that was nice. And now I’m still here in this area, [Clear Lake City, Texas].\\n\\n But it has changed quite a bit. When we came back from Connecticut, having been gone only five years, I couldn’t believe the growth and everything. The freeways were never empty. It used to be they were only full during the rush hours and everything.\\n\\n But, yes, NASA was the only game in town out here for a long time. I don’t think it is anymore. I think it would hurt if it left, but I think it’s had a very positive effect on the area and the school systems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We thank you so much for coming out here today and sharing these lovely photographs and your stories with us. We’ve very much enjoyed them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’ve helped me bring back things. And if you all want this to give to the place over there—[hands Ross-Nazzal some reports]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, that would be fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Floyd V. Bennett", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All right. Thank you all." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00561", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/StewartTM/stewarttm.htm", + "original_file_name": "StewartTM_9-21-98.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/StewartTM/StewartTM_9-21-98.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Troy M. Stewart", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 21 September 1998" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Carol Butler", + "Summer Chick Bergen" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Troy M. Stewart" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is September 21, 1998. This oral history with Troy Stewart is being conducted in the offices of the Signal Corporation of Houston, Texas, for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. [The interview was conducted by Carol Butler who was assisted by Summer Chick Bergen and Franklin Tarazona.]\\n\\n Thank you for joining us today. We appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's my pleasure. Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To start off with, if it's all right with you, let's talk a little bit about your early history with the Air Force and what your experiences there were and your different roles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. I originally was an altitude chamber technician in the Air Force. That was what I was trained to do, and part of that training that I received and a part of that mission was pressure suits. When I started in 1958, it was partial-pressure suits. There were some full-pressure suits being developed, but we weren't operational with them yet. I was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, and we had, oh, gosh, every kind of aircraft that the Air Force was flying at that time came through our base because it was a test base, and some of the aircraft required that people fly with pressure suits. So we had the responsibility for taking care of the suits in our activity there, and we would go out and at that time what we called integrate the crew member with the aircraft. We call it \"crew insertion\" at NASA, but in the military it's crew integration.\\n\\n This is where I got mostly the pressure suit background, and then I also got into hyperbarics after I moved from Eglin over to Brooks Air Force Base in 1964. I was on the hyperbaric training team for the Air Force then, and we got involved in hyperbarics because of the exposure of our students in the altitude chambers to [high] altitude and the possibility of bends and some of the other evolved gas [problems]… But anyway, the Air Force had about six or eight of these chambers installed throughout the world, and we were a mobile training team [that] went out and did that.\\n\\n I did that until the end of 1968, when I was transferred from Brooks Air Force Base and assigned to the Air Force Manned Orbiting Lab [MOL] Program, subsequently being assigned to NASA for training, for crew insertion duties. I came here in 1969 as a military detailee on what supposedly was a nine-month training tour and we ended up staying here six and a half years due to circumstances that came up as we were going along.\\n\\n After that, I moved from NASA into Air Force recruiting so that I could stay in this area of the country, because my ultimate goal was to get one of these NASA crew insertion jobs that I'd been doing as a military detailee. Another reason, my family wanted to stay in the area. So I volunteered for recruiting duty and finished my career as a recruiter in the Texas City area. In 1978, I retired and went to work for ILC [International Latex Corporation], worked for them for two years, and then in 1980 went to work for NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. That's a wonderful overview. You mentioned the MOL Program, and then you transferred from that into NASA. Was that when the program was canceled? Can you tell us a little bit about what work you did do in the MOL Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The only actual work that I did in the MOL Program was what I did here at NASA, because I never went to Vandenberg [California] as a member of MOL. I was assigned down here in January of '69, and I was supposed to stay for nine months and then transfer to Vandenberg, where they were already forming the team and setting up the facilities and things of that nature. But if you recall, as history will recall, in July of '69 the MOL Program was canceled in the early part of July. As a matter of fact, we were at KSC [Kennedy Space Center] training for Apollo 11, and at noontime going to lunch, we heard on the car radio that the MOL Program had been canceled. That's the first we heard of it. We were about two or three weeks, I think, away from launch of Apollo 11, which was our primary concern then. That's how we found out about that deal.\\n\\n Like I say, I never did really go to Vandenberg. As a matter of fact, they moved—\"they\" being the military and NASA—moved all of the personnel from Vandenberg and from Los Angeles Air Force Station, which was our headquarters, to Johnson Space Center, kind of a holding pattern. They put us on a three-year military detailee tour, astronauts included. Bob [Robert L.] Crippen and Dick [Richard H.] Truly and all those guys were originally MOL people.\\n\\n We stayed for that three-year tour, and evidently either NASA wanted to keep us or nobody knew what to do with us, so we actually stayed around six, six and a half years. I left here in October of '74 to do my recruiting tour, and we had some people who stayed, then, and worked the ASTP [Apollo-Soyuz Test Project] program. I think they left in '75 or '76, somewhere along in there, Frank Hernandez and Byron Smith and those guys." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That must have been quite a surprise, hearing it on the radio." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was. You know, you're going along fat, dumb, and happy, having a great time and looking forward to in two or three months you're going to be one of the two prime MOL insertion technicians, you know, and you're going to go out there and do your thing and get all the glory and teach all the other guys how to do all this stuff, and you're coming up on Cloud Nine, and all of a sudden somebody sticks a little pin in your balloon, and what are you going to do now? So that's kind of the feeling you get when that happens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's understandable. I guess it worked out pretty well, though, with working on the Apollo missions. That must have been quite interesting and quite rewarding." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was different from what I'd been exposed to. I'd spent several years training pilots and crew members and other technicians in hazards of high-altitude flight and in the hyperbarics and then came over here, and NASA did things a little differently than we did in the military. It wasn't that hard to transition, because a lot of military people were running this outfit at that time. So we just came over with our eyes wide open, as we were told to do, and just take it all in and use what you can and kind of move the rest out. That's what we tried to do.\\n\\n But it was kind of a crash program for us. We were assigned—I say \"we.\" There were two of us who came here to do that, a guy named Barry Lewis and myself, and we were to be the prime insertion guys for MOL. We were assigned pretty quickly to a mission. He was assigned to Apollo 10, I was assigned to Apollo 11, and we started working then with the teams who were already working that mission. So we just picked up, well, not in the middle, but at the first part of that. They had already assigned the teams and somewhere along the line made the decision to assign Barry to Apollo 10 and me to Apollo 11. I have no idea why that came about, and Joe [Joseph] Schmitt might know the answer, because he, I think, made most of the decisions, even though he would tell you that he didn't make those decisions. He had a lot to say about what went on because he was our senior suit technician." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you did come in in 1969, then, and jumped in at the beginning of—for you it was Apollo 11, was it just on-the-job training? Were there any specific training exercises that you went through before you began working with the crew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Most of the things that we did were hands-on, on-the-job training. We had all had ten or twelve, thirteen years of background in life support systems and protective equipment such as pressure suits and parachutes, things of that nature. So we didn't have to have any basic training. The only thing we had to have was familiarization with the specific equipment that we were going to be working with, and basically a pressure suit is a pressure suit. Once you get to the full-pressure suit, the principle of operation is basically the same for all of them. The only difference is maybe a little bit of the ventilation system and what the closures are like and the cover layers and what the operating pressures are. There are differences in those, but other than that, you jumped right in and did it.\\n\\n When we first got here, they put us to work disassembling the suits completely. They had some that had to be inspected, so a good way to learn all of the components of that particular system is to tear it down and look at it and clean it and lubricate it and put it back together, and that's what they started us doing, and it was a good background training for us to do that. The suits, of course, at that time were being built and were under the control of ILC, and we shared a lab. I say \"we,\" the NASA people and Air Force, shared a lab with ILC, and we got a lot of training from their technicians, in addition to Joe and Al [Alan M.] Rochford and all those guys that we worked with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Apollo 11, that morning, as you're helping the astronauts into their suits and then out into the launch pad and inserting them into the vehicle, can you do a walk-through of that morning, what the atmosphere was like? Was there any realization of what was going on and how important this mission was going to be?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I don't know. I think I was still totally in awe of the whole deal at that time. I can walk you through my part, which was not that significant, because at that particular mission I didn't do the crew insertion, I didn't go to the pad, since I was in training, more or less, and hadn't been there very long. Joe Schmitt was the senior technician on that mission, and he did the crew insertion. The guy that went to the pad with him was Ronnie Woods, who at the time worked for ILC. They were using a NASA technician and then sometimes two, and I was the second NASA technician, I guess you'd call it, on there, because [I was] a government person, and then they were using an ILC technician. Ronnie was very dedicated and very good at what he did, and since Ronnie had the background, I'm sure that's why Joe decided that Ronnie would go to the pad with him. That was a good decision. I had no problem with that. But as kind of like my reward for doing such a good job and everything on the mission, I was assigned to Neil [A.] Armstrong. So that was my claim to fame, I guess you'd call it, is the fact that I worked with him through that mission as his suit tech, and I suited him up for the Apollo 11, and then, of course, after they left the suit room, I had no other things to do except clean up and wait for the launch. If the launch went, then we came home, and if it didn't go, then we turned around and got ready for the next attempt.\\n\\n That particular day, of course, the whole world, I guess, was really anticipating this thing, and we had had all these elaborate plans and everything to make sure that all of us got to the suit room on time through the crowds. We stayed in town, in Cocoa Beach. We didn't stay on site at that time and still don't, or the guys that work there now still don't. So you had to make your way from Cocoa Beach out to KSC, to the suit room, and they had plans, if the traffic got too bad, to transport the suit technicians by helicopter from Cocoa Beach to KSC. They didn't have any facilities for us to stay out there overnight, and the crew quarters was very limited, and they had the quarantines and all that. Of course, we were all primary contacts, so we didn't have to worry about that part. They just had no place for us to stay. Anyway, that was part of the contingency plan in case the traffic was too bad. Another part was Joe liked to be very punctual, so I think we went out there about six or seven hours before we really had to, but it was okay. Everybody was pumped up anyway, and we had the suit room and the recliners and things. If we needed to take a little break, we could.\\n\\n I remember I have one picture that somebody took with a Polaroid, and we put a little note on the back that says, \"At 4:30 in the morning on—\" I think it was July 11, 1969, and I had a part of the suit in my hand, looking at it. I had my little white hat on and all of that stuff that we wore in this clean room in there. But we just went through our normal routine of getting things ready, but it was kind of eerie. It was really quiet, and nobody was really cutting up or too loose. Of course, when the crew got there, you know, everything was real formal and everything. Armstrong was kind of a quiet person anyway. He didn't have too much to say to anybody, as far as I know. I went through a lot of training exercises with him, and he seemed to be thinking about what he was doing more than any fun and frivolity. So we didn't have a whole lot of that fun and frivolity stuff on Apollo 11. It was pretty serious.\\n\\n We went through our normal routine. The crew came, we suited them, did the testing that we had to do prior to them going to the pad and made sure everything was the way it was supposed to be, and sent them on their way, as far as I was concerned, and then, of course, Joe and those guys took over and strapped them in and everything. But it was kind of awesome. It was a thrill to be there, and I still, at that time, couldn't believe I was really doing that, but I was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Then when they landed on the moon, where were you at that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, man, let me tell you that story. After the launch, we normally, like I said, we'd pack up the training gear, because what happened during Apollo, the crew would move to KSC for training, and the suit technicians would move as a team with all the training equipment—the flight equipment was already at KSC—but we would move down there about six weeks before the launch, and we would go through all the training that they had to go through, and we maintained the equipment down there and maintained a temporary residence down there. So we would get done, then, right after the launch, and we would have to get all the gear, training gear, that we were responsible for, anything else that someone else needed us to take care of, suit-related or life support-related, and get that ready to come back home. So we did.\\n\\n I think I left the day after the launch, flew back down here. Of course, my family was living here, but they had gone to my wife's mother’s [home] in Oklahoma, western Oklahoma, way out there. So I flew in here. I got here about two o'clock, three o'clock in the afternoon, somewhere like that, picked up my mail, which had been accumulating for two or three weeks, went through that, got my car, and took off for Oklahoma that afternoon. So I ended up staying the night somewhere else, because it had been a pretty long day anyway. I got there to my wife's parents' house the day after that, then. So that was a couple of days after. They live way out in a little town in western Oklahoma called Arnette, and they had no TV stations. The closest TV station, I think, was Oklahoma City, which is about 150 miles away. They had a television, but the antenna was kind of goofed up.\\n\\n Well, my primary concern when I got there after getting back with my family, my two boys and my wife and everything, was to get some kind of TV reception so we could watch this deal. So we worked on TV antennas and television sets for several hours in order to get this done, my father-in-law and I. It was a black and white TV. I remember that. It was pretty snowy, but we got it done, and I stayed up whatever the time was to watch that. So did the rest of the family. Some of them weren't as interested as I was. I just kept saying to myself, \"Now, you know these guys, and you just helped suit this guy up, and you had your hands on this suit, and you helped train these fellows, and this is history, and you're a little part of it,\" even though my little part was so tiny. I was still kind of awestruck about the whole deal and a little bit emotional, too, when they landed, of course, being a little bit worried when they had the little glitch and then after they landed and got out there and got to doing what they were doing.\\n\\n My sons were there. They were small, and they didn't know what was going on, but we tried to explain to them. It was just kind of a great experience, and it lasted until that mission was over, and then you went on to the next one. It was totally awesome, but things move along. We moved to the next one. My next one was Apollo 13. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, my." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had three positions on the flight, like I say. We had the lead guy, and then we had the backup, who's the guy that went to the pad with the crew, and he would do the insertion in case the inserter guy was [unable to perform for some reason]—then we had what we called a third tech, and that was the guy that suited up the third person, that didn't go to the pad, so I was third on Apollo 11, and Apollo 13 I moved to backup.\\n\\n We worked that mission, and my duties were a little bit different. In addition to doing my crewman on that particular mission, I was also being trained to do the crew insertion. So I had a little bit more to do on that particular one, a little bit more to learn because of the drills that we went through at KSC.\\n\\n The assignments for those flights, that were back in Apollo, were normally the lead technician would suit the commander, and then the backup would suit the lunar module pilot, which is the guy that rode the right seat in the Apollo module, and then the third person would suit the command module pilot. Of course, on Apollo 11, Joe turned that all around so that we could all get our glory, I guess. So I had Fred [W.] Haise [Jr.] on Apollo 13, and he and I, we got along pretty well. I had him on a couple or three flights. As a matter of fact, he was backup on some and prime on others. He was a pleasure to work with. He's always full of fun and stuff. That was nice. But I got to go to the pad on Apollo 13.\\n\\n Then my next mission was Apollo 16, and I was the lead technician then on Apollo 16. So I worked my way up pretty fast. That's because I was so good at what I did. No, I'm only kidding. I did try, and I did my best, and evidently they thought it was good enough, so they made me a lead tech. On that mission, I had replaced a veteran suit tech who had been around for a long time. Instead of my lead, he was my backup. So I took the Joe Schmitt approach, and we decided that the best thing to do on that deal as far as suiting people up was to kind of turn it around. So he did the commander, and I did the lunar module pilot, even though I was the lead technician. Then our third guy did our command module pilot.\\n\\n So we all shared everything because it was—oh, I don't know if it was a blow [to his ego, but]…it wasn't meant to be on anybody's part as far as I was concerned, but for a guy to have been a NASA lead technician and then to move back and have somebody move in front might have been a little blow to his ego. So we did that, and it worked out okay. The mission got off and we got it done and got back, so I guess it was all right.\\n\\n Then, after that, I moved rapidly from lead tech on Apollo 16 back to third tech on Apollo 17. So you can see how we kind of moved around and everything. Al Rochford, then, was the lead on 17 and I worked as the third tech with him on there. I had been working with Joe Schmitt, and then I worked with Clyde Teague. He was my lead on 13, and then he was my back up on 16, he and I worked together. And our third guy, I think, on 16 was Walt Salyer, Sr. [phonetic]. He was a veteran, had been there quite a while. Then Frank Hernandez worked with us. I don't know if you guys have talked to Frank or not, but you need to. He just recently retired and moved to Mesa, Arizona. Anyway, I went back to third tech on 17, and that was, of course, the last Apollo mission.\\n\\n Then we all started working the Skylab Program. Everybody worked all of those missions as far as the training part of it went. Then, of course, they had an insertion team for each one of those. I was the lead on the last manned Skylab. You call it Skylab 3 or Skylab 4, whatever your preference is. Anyway, we had three manned ones, and I was the lead on the third manned Skylab, did that crew insertion and led that team. That was my last one, because right after that we slowed down.\\n\\n The next mission after that was the ASTP, and I didn't work that. I was gone. I went off to Air Force recruiting school and learned how to be enthusiastic and went on and did that the last three and a half years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking back at some of these Apollo missions, was there any difference in the procedures that you followed for each one or differences in the suits? Did they change over time as you went from Apollo up to Skylab, since I guess they used similar suits?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the suits were similar in that they were all full-pressure suits. A full-pressure suit, you just simply inflate the suit to a certain pressure, and whatever is inside it is at that pressure, no matter what the pressure is outside. We trained in Apollo 11 with some A5L and A6L suits, which were early Apollo suits. We flew an A7L suit, which was a full-pressure suit with the zipper going up the back. It terminated here in kind of the lower abdomen area, and then you unzipped it, and it went all the way back up the back between the shoulder blades.\\n\\n It had a beta cloth cover layer on it, a white beta cloth cover layer, and this beta cloth, of course, was the best fireproof stuff they had at the time, and that was the reason for that particular cover layer, but the darned thing, if you had any allergic reactions at all to fiberglass, because that's basically what it was, then you had a little problem, and I did. What we did when we carried the suits, we'd pick them up and support them with both hands across our arms, and that doggoned stuff would irritate my skin on my arms. I noticed it break out, and I said, \"Oh, gosh. What's going on?\" So we finally determined that that's what it was. So when I took a suit from then on, I put something over my arms, and it stopped.\\n\\n But anyway, the later flights, I think Apollo 15, I believe, is when we started doing the A7L-B suit, and that one kind of opened at the waist and bent—you kind of bent it in half. It had a little different closure, and the donning techniques were slightly different, but basically it was the same. You put your legs in, and then you ducked down through an opening, and you put your arms through the arms and your head through the neck ring. So the basic donning procedures was the same, as it is today with the suits that are flying in the Shuttle Program. You just put your feet in, and then you put your head and arms in and go to it.\\n\\n I believe when we went to the A7LB suit, we went from the liquid-cooled garment which we had in the A7L suit, to a liquid-cooled ventilation garment, or LCVG, which was hooked up in such a way that it would circulate air from the lower extremities of feet and down into the arms and hands, in addition to circulating water. It just had a little plenum and a spider-looking affair going down the arms and the legs to distribute the air. Actually what it did was pull the air from those areas and recirculated it then back into the suit and would pull out the bad and put in the good. That was basically the same technique that we used for ventilating the suit and getting the oxygen to the crew members, you know, the pumps and the portable life support systems, and the O2 system in the spacecraft would pull out the bad air and put in the new stuff. I think that was the big basic differences.\\n\\n The set-up on the front of the suit was basically the same. You had the blue connectors and the red connectors, and the blues go in and the red was coming out. So as long as you kept those straight, everything was cool.\\n\\n Probably the gloves were the biggest difference, I think. I guess ever since we started trying to do work with our hands in a pressurized glove, there have been problems with working with those gloves, and there are still problems with working with those gloves. The gloves improved from what we had during the Apollo and up through, then, the second phase, which was the A7LB, I believe we got different gloves, a little bit easier to work and maybe the fingertips allowed a little more dexterity.\\n\\n Then worked right on up to what they're using today, which is a whole lot better glove than what we had back then. You can do better work with it, and I'm sure they're going to have to improve in order to get the Space Station built, because the gloves are still hard to work with. Anytime you pressurize something to 4 or 5 psi and try to get a person to put nuts on bolts, just basically, it's hard to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Have you done that yourself, personally, worn the pressurized suits and done tasks?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. A part of learning the equipment, a very important part of learning the equipment and training crews, is to be exposed yourself, because you can't tell somebody how it is to be there and do that if you haven't been there and done that. So a very early part of anybody's training has been, and hopefully will continue to be, you get in there and do the work and find out what it's like to do it. I did that. Of course, it was interesting then, when I first started doing it, it was really a kick to get in the suit and be in there and do things that had to be done. All my career I've done that. I've been a suit subject many, many times for a lot of different evaluations of the pressure suits in development and procedures development with already established suits. Just about any time they needed somebody to do that, at the level I was working, I would do that.\\n\\n Between the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n and the restart of the Shuttle Program, we went back to pressure suits. The suit technicians didn't have a whole lot to do as far as launch entry suits and things of that nature, putting crews in the spacecraft, because we didn't have any missions to support. So among other things we did, we worked on the 8 psi Suit Program, and I was a subject for that lots and lots of times. I spent a lot of time in that suit and got my pictures in all kinds of magazines and everything. You can't really tell who it is, but I know who it is. I worked with that and some of the development on the different gloves and bearings and things that they were trying out, the hard suit, and this and that.\\n\\n So, yes, you've got to get in there and do it before you can tell somebody, \"Yes, you can do this,\" or, \"No, you can't do this,\" or, \"This is difficult,\" \"That's easy.\" You spend a lot of time in there. I don't know how many hours, but a lot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were spending all those hours in the suits, did you also do training in the suit in the WET-F [Weightless Environment Training Facility] or the NBL [Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory]? Did you ever do any of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I never did that. I wasn't certified for work under the water in a suit. I did all my stuff at the surface level, just a natural sea-level environment, and when it got to the more sophisticated stuff, the altitude flights and things like that in the chambers, they had people specifically assigned as suit subjects to do those kind of things and in the WET-F also. And in addition to that, by the time they got to that point, a lot of astronauts were getting involved at that time in the work. Jerry Ross has done a lot of work in pressure suits, and Jim Bajian [phonetic] did some when he was here.\\n\\n For our launch entry suits for Shuttle Program, Steve Nagle and I did a lot of evaluations for that in those early models. It was us who determined the fact that we weren't going to train people in the suit helmet. I don't know if you ever noticed the training that the crews go through in the water tank over there now, but when they roll out of the hatch to do their simulated bail-out, they don't wear the pressure suit helmet, they wear the old launch entry helmet that we used. After we quit doing pressure suits for those many, many flights, they just flew coveralls and then wore the launch entry helmet. What we found out, Steve and I did a little bail-out exercise in Building 9, and when we rolled out of the side of the orbiter onto the mat, the necks rings of the suit hit us in the mouth and in the nose, and it kind of bruised it up just a little bit. So for that reason it was determined that they can get the same benefits of training but use that other helmet and we wouldn't be banging somebody's teeth and things like that. I went around with a bruise here and so did Steve for a few days after we did that particular run." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No good getting bruised up when you're trying to figure out how to bail out and save yourself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, no. No need hurting anybody if you don't have to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. All the little tricks of the trade you have to figure out on the way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. You know, somebody's got to be first. Fortunately, I got a chance to be first sometimes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talking about the suits and the suit-up procedures, and it is pretty standard, but what is it step by step? Can you walk through those steps? What do you put on first? When do you do this, when do you do that for Apollo or space shuttle?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let's do both scenarios, okay?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Back in the Apollo—if I get this wrong, I'm sure one of these other guys, Al or somebody's going to give you the right scoop. Basically, you start at the bottom and you go to the top. In Apollo, we had a requirement to pre-breathe 100 percent oxygen for X amount of time, I think it was three hours, prior to flight, and you could not break this 100 percent oxygen purge. This is to eliminate as much nitrogen as possible from the bloodstream so that the chances of getting bends or one of the other evolved gas problems in case of a cabin decompression where the suit just pressurizes you partially down, you know, and you're in a vacuum and it'll hold you at 3 psi or 4 psi, whatever the operating pressure of the suit is.\\n\\n In that operation, we don the suit fully, and the crew member stayed suited until they go on orbit. So they were in the suits for sometimes, five, six hours, something like that, seven hours, completely closed up. What we did, you had what we called the—get all this \"NASAnyms\" I call them. The world has acronyms and NASA has NASAnyms. FCS, which is a Fecal Containment Subsystem—that was a panty-boxer short-type affair that had extra absorbent padding in it, and it was primarily designed for use on a lunar surface. Some people wore it for the launch; some people didn't. But you would put on a set of underwear of some sort and then a UCTA, which was a Urine Collection Transfer Assembly, which was a little bladder affair which had an elastic band that went around the waist to hold it up in place.\\n\\n Then there what they called a roll-on cuff, which Al calls it a \"Vatican-approved condom.\" It's open on both ends. One end of it would fit a flange which went to the UCTA, and then, of course, the other end was rolled up onto the person, all of them being males at that time. We didn't have to worry at that time about a female urine collection system. Okay, that article was put on.\\n\\n Then, if they were wearing the LCG [Liquid Cooling Garment] , which at launch time they normally didn't launch with the LCG. They launched with a set of white cotton underwear and put the underwear on, the UCTA. If they wore that other thing, which most of them didn't, they put that thing on. Then after that, you got into the suit, you donned the suit, and then they put the helmet on, and then you put the gloves on.\\n\\n After that, they were completely enclosed, and you did several checks of the suit system on—I don't know if you've ever seen the picture of these big white consoles that these guys were hooked to, but we use those consoles for testing the suits unmanned, and we also did a certain amount of manned testing at suit-up, to make sure, first of all, that the suit didn't leak. There were certain parameters it had to meet leakage-wise.\\n\\n Then there was also another test, which was a differential pressure test, or delta P test, that we did to make sure that the ventilation systems and everything were working properly. After that, they got back in the recliners, and we purged 100 percent oxygen through the suit on a low flow, and they took a nap or read or whatever they wanted to do until it was time to go to the pad. In that operation, you know, we had these portable ventilators that we used to keep them cool. In Apollo, they served two purposes. They were filled with liquid oxygen at that time. Now we use liquid air, but at that time it was liquid oxygen to maintain this oxygen purge on the suit. So you had a certain procedure that you had to go through making the connections to the suit in order not to break this oxygen purge. So you had to end up at the spacecraft with two connectors open to get the spacecraft oxygen system hooked to. That was when we had four connectors. If you'll remember, at one time we only two, and our command module pilot only had two connectors, one red and one blue. So a different procedure for them.\\n\\n Anyway, you had these certain procedures that you had to go through, and you had to develop when you were going to put what connector into where. It was kind of a scramble, so that procedure had to be worked out.\\n\\n We would remove the crew member from the chair. We would attached the ventilator to the proper connectors, and we would begin the purge with the ventilator, make sure that we had a good purge on the ventilator, then we would turn the console off, disconnect those connectors, and that left two blank ones, so when we got about half way to the pad, we changed the ventilators because they wouldn't last long enough to go from suit room all the way to the pad and all the way up and hold the guy. So we had to do a ventilator change in the transfer van. We did that, and then you would end up with blank connectors where you needed them, except for the command module pilot, and that situation with just two connectors was pretty simple to do. You just disconnected the ventilator from the outlet, and you would plug in the outlet for the spacecraft and let the ventilator purge just for a minute, purge that hose, and then you would go to the inlet connector in that spacecraft. Anyway, that procedure was used for Apollo and Skylab.\\n\\n Then the first four shuttle missions—and I'm jumping because I didn't work the ASTP deal—the first four shuttle missions, we used borrowed Air Force suits from the SR-71 Program, which basically were the same thing. They were a full-pressure suit. They had connectors that supplied oxygen to the suit. They were different than the Apollo ones, but it did the same thing. We had a seat kit which was attached to the seat, it was attached to the crew member and was attached, then, to the orbiter, but we used their seat kit—\"theirs\" being the military—the seat kit and the escape system. Remember, we had ejection seats in our first missions for the Shuttle because we didn't know exactly what was going on. That was the escape system.\\n\\n The procedures for that, since we didn't have to have a de-nitrogenation, we would put the crew members in the suit, and you still do the suit integrity tests in the suit room to make sure everything's working properly, but the difference now as opposed to then is that after you do the suit integrity test, the crew member takes the gloves and helmet off, and they go to the pad without gloves and helmet on, and then when you get out to the pad and do the crew insertion, you put the helmet and the gloves on. That's still the way we do it today. That's the way we did it then.\\n\\n We would get the two crew members that we had, and the suit tech would be up in there. We had to have a work platform because the ejection seats were so high. You'd do the crew insertion on those two guys, and that was about it. Basically the suit-donning was the same. You put on the undergarments, whatever they happened to be. At that time we had no liquid cooling for the launch entry suit, so it was all air ventilators. So they'd put on the urine collection system, whatever that happens to be—we have several different ones—then the underwear, then put the suit on, put the gloves on, put the helmet on, and the boots, and you're there.\\n\\n With the Shuttle Program, of course, we have the harness, which is normally put on at the pad, and that attaches to a parachute which is in the seat of the orbiter already for each crew member, and that was pretty well the case in the first four flights.\\n\\n The first three flights, I worked landings for shuttle. I didn't even go down to—well, I had been down there, of course, but I didn't go there for the suit-ups or anything, because, if you remember and even if you don't, this is the way it was. Everywhere that there was a possibility that the shuttle would land, no matter—you know, overseas and at White Sands [New Mexico] and at Edwards [Air Force Base, California] and at KSC—of course, the team that did the insertion stayed at KSC—we had a suit technician assigned to each of those areas. So my assignment during that time was White Sands. So I went out there and stood by. The primary landing site, of course, at that time, was Edwards, and we had other people out there. So that was the first three.\\n\\n Then I did the crew insertion on the fourth mission with [Charles G.] Fullerton and [Jack R.] Lousma, and then we landed that one at White Sands. Well, what happened on that one is that Ronnie Woods went to White Sands to cover the launch-day landing opportunities. Soon as I got done with the crew insertion at KSC, I jumped on a plane that afternoon and flew to White Sands, and then Ronnie Woods and I worked the landing at White Sands for that mission. So I got both ends of that one, which was kind of a kick. You send them off, and then you're right there to meet them.\\n\\n We still do that today. Whoever the team leader is for the launch meets the crew wherever they happen to land, as long as it's KSC. They normally go to the prime landing site, which is now KSC. It was at one time—it could be either Edwards or KSC. Whichever the prime landing site happens to be, that's where the lead technician goes, and now they just go back to KSC. They don't stay there the whole time. There's no need leaving somebody there with nothing to do for a week or ten or fifteen or whatever days.\\n\\n [Tape recorder turned off.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We were just talking about the space shuttle suits and the early missions and your work out at STS-4, going from the launch to White Sands. What was your next mission, then, on the shuttle?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, my goodness. Well, when we stopped flying with the pressure suits and started flying with just the coveralls and the helmets and then what we called the PEAP. That was another one of our responsibilities, is the Personal Egress Air Pack, I think they called it, that hooked on the side of the seat, two bottles of air for use in an emergency situation, which—well, when they had to be used, it was far-fetched from what they had to be used for, so they didn't do much good. Air doesn't do you that much good at that altitude.\\n\\n Anyway, the NASA personnel all worked together on a whole lot of those missions, and they all kind of run together, if you want to know the truth, in my memory. There were some significant things that happened during that time that still stick in my mind, and one of those was on one mission that I was the lead on, and I think it was—I don't know the designation to it—anyway, [Ellison S.] Onizuka was on that mission and I forget who else it was, because the significant thing is the fact that we had to change out a visor at the last minute on a helmet, and it was because during the preparations for suit-up, there weren't a whole lot during that because you didn't have a lot of things. The only life support equipment we had, actually, was a helmet. We had a harness which had a life preserver on it, it had no parachute, and that was just about it. The PEAP was already at the orbiter on the side of the seat so we didn't have to worry about that.\\n\\n Anyway, the helmet had to have anti-fog applied to the inside of the surface of the helmet. Anti-fog for us is a mixture of detergent and vacuum pump oil, vacuum pump oil which is oxygen-compatible and a detergent which would be oxygen-compatible. They mix these together and make up a compound which will help to keep the visor from fogging because of the exhaled breath. Anyway, you have to apply that stuff X amount of time before you use [the helmet]. In doing this, you know, you've got to be real careful with everything. Anyhow, we scratched the outside of one of the visors in applying the anti-fog, and the scratch was in such a place on the visor that it couldn't fly that way.\\n\\n The helmet that Onizuka wore had to be specially modified so that it would fit him around in the neck area and ear area. I don't know if you remember those clamshell helmets, but they squeeze together, and his would pinch him, but we made a modification to it. We didn't have another helmet that was modified for him, so the only other thing we had was a visor. So we changed out. On flight morning we changed out a visor and ran a test on the helmet to make sure it was okay. That was kind of a scramble deal, and it was fun in that it was a challenge, because, you know, after a while, things, if they can get routine, get routine. You do the same operation many, many times over and over again, never to the point that they get boring, but it gets to be a routine. Well, that broke the routine.\\n\\n Another thing during that program that was a kick to me, and I know it would be other people, is my oldest son was on the team with me. He was assigned. He went to work for ILC, and then he went to work for Boeing later on. Anyway, he got assigned as a member of the crew insertion team. On this particular mission, he and I and another guy, Max Candler [phonetic], who you should talk to also—he's been around forever and worked for every contractor that ever had a job on this [site] as far as life support goes, and he still works over in Building 7.\\n\\n Anyhow, he, my son Troy, Jr., and Max and I had this particular mission, and we travel quite a bit together and did the suit-up and the crew insertion. There wasn't much suit-up. You lay out the stuff in the crew quarters, they get into their clothes, and then you meet them at the pad, basically, or meet them at the transfer van. Anyway, we worked that mission all the way through together. I don't know, but that was kind of a kick. We worked some other ones while he was still there with us. It was nice to have your son working with you, alongside you, and he still works at Ellington over there for Dynecorps [phonetic]. He's the life support technician there, and he's also a life support technician in the Texas Air National Guard, which all runs hand in hand. [Laughter] But that was one thing that was interesting and was fun, and I'll always remember that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's pretty special, to have him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was. It was great. It sure was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Followed right along in your footsteps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I don't know if that's good or not. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Since the crews were now wearing the flight suits rather than pressure suits, what did you job entail overall?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were responsible for—and the lead still is, to an extent, responsible for that—everything that those people wore, from the underwear, the socks, the boots, which were special boots, the coveralls, pens, pencils, and other items of what we call crew preference items that they were allowed to carry on board, anything that was on this crew option list that this crew member wanted. It was our responsibility to make sure that it was tested, prepared, ready, and where it was supposed to be when it was supposed to be there. That included, like I say, all of the clothing, the pens, pencils, knee boards—with twelve cards on them, by the way; that was an Al Rochford requirement. [Laughter] The helmet, the harness—which those two things were individually fitted for the crew member—and, like I say, everything that they wore. It was our job to make sure that that was at every training exercise, ready to go, and it was also at the launch site and ready to go for the launch.\\n\\n We also provided a clean set of clothing at the landing site. So each crew member was issued, I think, three of those flight suits. They would launch in one and then we would take one, whoever was going to be covering the landing site would take one for each crew member along with any other clothing that they wanted us to take out for them at landing, we'd take that out there. Most of the time, what you did was you took the one that they'd been training with—I remember when I went to White Sands—take their clothing from them, and then you'd take it out, and most of the time it had to be laundered because they'd been training with it right up to launch time.\\n\\n So the first thing we did after we got either to Edwards or White Sands, to Los Cruces, is where we stayed, get it in the laundry and get it cleaned. It had to be dry-cleaned because it was cotton and had been treated with a fireproofing chemical, so you couldn't wash it, first of all, because it would wash the chemical out; secondly, because it would shrink the cotton and it wouldn't fit them anymore. So they were dry-cleaned. So you had to get them to the cleaners, get them dry-cleaned, and normally you got there like at one o'clock in the afternoon, and you'd ask the people to have them out either that afternoon or the next morning for you. In case the shuttle landed due to some emergency, you'd have the clothing for them.\\n\\n So we did that, made sure everything was where it was supposed to be when it was supposed to be there. We were responsible for the set-up of the transfer van, and still are, that takes the crew members from the quarters or suit-up area out to the pad. It's our responsibility to make sure that the ventilators are there, that they're functional, in place in the van, and any other equipment that is required on the van for the crew member. That was basically it.\\n\\n Anything that had anything to do with either life support or crew comfort, it was the suit technicians' responsibility to make sure that it was there. So that's what we did during that particular time.\\n\\n That's when we almost got fired, as a matter of fact. We didn't really get fired, but they almost did away with the requirement for NASA suit technicians during that period of time. There wasn't really any pressure suit work going on as far as launches and entry and stuff like that, and we had one person who, I think, made the statement that \"Anybody can take panties and bras to KSC for the crew members.\" By that time, of course, a lot of females were flying, and that's where that little statement came from. But anyway, anybody could haul crew clothing to KSC, but there was still life support equipment involved, which required expertise in oxygen systems and life support systems. So that got all hashed back and forth between one division and another division and the Astronaut Office, and finally Mr. [George W. S.] Abbey put out a letter and said, \"Look, we're going to have an astronaut and we're going to have a NASA suit technician on the crew insertion team at KSC, period. There is a requirement for that.\" That was when he was in charge of flight crew operations, I believe it was at that time.\\n\\n So that settled that again for a while, and that's the way it remained until, well, January. Just before that, we were notified that they were going to phase our jobs out over a period of time. As we retired, they weren't going to replace us. It was, \"You're not going to get kicked out, you're just not going to be replaced,\" because of what I call \"the contractor in the sky,\" USA [United Space Alliance] taking over all normal shuttle operations. So what they were going to do is just kind of phase us out, and that's happening at the present time. Al retired, and I retired, and they're not replacing us. They're phasing in—we had some Lockheed folks that were working with us as our backups. They're still using them, and then they're phasing in people from what was Boeing FEPC, now USA, to take over those crew insertions jobs eventually. So there's only one NASA suit technician left in the whole world, and that's Jean Alexander." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Pretty special job, then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we thought it was. At first, when we first came in '69, there were about five NASA suit technicians. Let's see if I can name them. There was Joe Schmitt, he was the lead guy, senior, and he would always tell you he wasn't the lead, but what Joe said went, so he was our lead guy. Then Walt Salyer, Sr., and he was a retired military guy from the Navy. Clyde Teague, he was a retired Air Force guy. Dick Sandridge [phonetic], he got caught in a reduction in force, as did Clyde, when they had one right after Apollo, I think. And Al Rochford, of course. There were five of those guys when I got there. Then they moved in two military, and then when they transferred all of the MOL people, moved in two more suit techs also from the military, Frank being one of those, Frank Hernandez, and a guy named Byron Smith, who has been retired from the Air Force for quite a while, but he's still around, not here, but up in New Boston, Texas, he lives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just a handful of you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Then, like I say, a couple of those guys got caught in a reduction in force, when they had a reduction in force, and then Walt Salyer, Sr., retired, and that left only Joe and Al as the NASA technicians. Then that banged along that way, with Joe and Al and the military guys and then supplemented by the contractor who had the suit contract, whoever it happened to be at the time. Most of the time it was ILC or Hamilton/ILC and then Boeing and right on along." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On the shuttle, the flight suits were being worn up until\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n , and then after that, the decision was made to go back to pressure suits. Would those pressure suits have made any difference on\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n ? And what were the changes in those pressure suits from the earlier ones or were they pretty much the same?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The question as to whether they would have made any difference is purely academic at this point, but the suit would have given the people a chance to move about whatever was left of the cabin and attempt to get to the hatch to get out of there. So if you can think in the most positive of thoughts, yes, possibly somebody might have gotten out of that thing if they had had pressure suits. Whether that's reality, we don't know, but with a pressure suit and parachute it's possible that they would have been able to get out of there and survive that thing. Again, we don't really know what the integrity of what was left of the cabin was at that time, but had they been able to sustain consciousness, which they couldn't with just the breathing air, the possibility of somebody getting out of there is still there. So, yes, maybe they would have.\\n\\n As far as the differences in the suits, the suits that we used for the first four missions were full-pressure suits, and, as I say, you encapsulate a person in an envelope and you pressurize that envelope, and that person just works that envelope as best they can at that pressure.\\n\\n The suits that we ended up with for the first part of the shuttle program after return to flight were partial-pressure suits. As a matter of fact, they're still using some of those, but over the past couple of years they've been phasing those out, too, and going back to full-pressure suits for launch entry suits. Those partial-pressure suits utilize a system where you only pressurize certain portions of the body, critical portions of the body, and the way that you do this is you inflate a bladder which pushes against a restraint layer on the suit and also exerts pressure at the same time on certain areas of the body such as the calves and the thighs and the upper body in here and also, of course, the head. You maintain pressure in these bladders, which gives you the counterpressure that you need to be able to get the oxygen down into the lungs where you need it. Of course, the pressure around the body also would keep the gases from coming out of solution in the bloodstream, which is the evolved gas problems that you have, bends and such as that.\\n\\n The full-pressure suit, of course, puts them right back into a fully encapsulated environment that protects the entire body and is, in my opinion, a lot easier to work with. It's a lot easier to work in the full-pressure suit, it's not as restrictive, and it gives better protection.\\n\\n This is one thing that rubs me really bad about the way that things were done between the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n and the return to flight. The NASA suit technicians, Al Rochford and Jeanie and I, were just almost totally excluded from the process of getting these return-to-flight suits done. There was a guy that we worked for who was assigned the responsibility for the project to get the things going, and then there was another manager who was assigned to make sure that the job got done. Anyway, they moved those folks completely out of our division and moved them over into another division to get this program going, and basically what they said was, \"We don't need your help. Thanks but no thanks, and we'll let you know when we need you again.\"\\n\\n Then it rocked along and rocked along. Finally they came up with a suit, and one day they called us over and said, \"Okay. Come pick up your suits. This is what you've got to work with.\" This kind of, to me, wasn't the right way to do these things. Of course, I didn't have a whole lot of say, at my position, as to how things were done. I realize that there were people under the gun to get a program going, but I still never will understand why they didn't take advantage of some of the expertise that was available to them to get this job done. So that'll always be a little thorn in my side, no matter what. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bitter, and never have been, but that one thing right there just kind of irritates, and if you get an honest answer out of Al and Jean [Alexander], they'll tell you the same thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's understandable. It would make sense to consult the experts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It should." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you do during the interim between\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n and the return to flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Basically we refurbished a lot of equipment within our division that needed some work done to it, and because of our expertise in those areas and the fact that we had time to do that, we did that, such as the MMU, if you remember, the [Manned] Maneuvering Unit, we had some of those that were display models, and Al and I reworked one of those things. That's one thing we did. Some pressure suits from the old program, we reworked some of those and did some work on the hard suit, the 8 psi suit, I did some of that.\\n\\n Basically things that had to do with life support. We supported some EVA [Extravehicular Activity] work and a lot of research and development work in suits and other things. It was going on at that same time, which didn't have anything to do with flying the shuttle or actually with launching the shuttle, but was being done, such as the hard suit, 8 psi stuff. Like I say, I did a lot of that and supported quite a few tests as a suit technician and then as a suit subject also on that particular program.\\n\\n Then something I'm kind of proud of, during that interim time there was a team formed. They called it the—let's see if I can remember. Emergency Egress Working Group, I think, or Emergency Egress Rescue Working Group. EARWIG was the NASAnym for it. This was a team of people from KSC and JSC, and the primary mission for that team was to look into the safety of the operation for the crews and develop procedures and equipment changes and things like that, that would help to make launch a safer operation. I was chosen as the suit technician representative for that particular team.\\n\\n So we did a lot of pressure suit work in that program. We had some old training suits left over from the first four flights, so we utilized those when we needed suits for a particular thing such as driving the armored personnel carrier or tank that the crew members drive now. Everybody used to be trained in that. We needed to make sure that what we were doing there was the best thing that we could do, so we ran tests with astronaut personnel and the people at KSC and the suit techs from JSC.\\n\\n We also kind of refurbished the white room up there at the 195-foot level. We had a lot of input into how that thing should be set up as far as accommodating the crew equipment for the crew when they got up there and some of the emergency equipment that was involved. My primary expertise, of course, was in the crew equipment, so I got more say as to where the shelves were, what kind of shelves we needed and where they were going to be, and things of that nature. So I had a little bit to do with redesigning that and then a lot of the procedures that were used for rescuing the crew, got our word in on that.\\n\\n Like I say, I was the rep from the suit tech world, but Al and Jean and the other folks that worked with us, I got input from them which I passed along to the team. But that was a fun-type thing, and at that time I was looking for something productive to do, and it came right at the right time, because I'll go back to anybody can refurbish a mock-up, but getting in on the development of the new procedures and working a lot with people at KSC that you hadn't worked with before, such as the fire rescue personnel, the close-out crew members down there, the volunteer close-out crew members, who are actually mechanical technicians that work on the shuttle except at launch time and then they become close-out crew people, the NASA quality people that KSC would never—you'd just see one every once in a while, and then, of course, a lot of the astronauts that were on the support team. We got to know them a little bit better and worked a lot closer with them to understand a little bit more about each other, and they, of course, us. So that was fun, and it was productive work, and you can still see the results from that. I'm quite proud of having been a part of that, also." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's definitely a very important thing to have been a part of. You mentioned developing procedures or modifying procedures for crew rescue. Can you expand upon that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, what we did, we took a look at what we were doing as far as rescuing the crew from the crew module, and went through those procedures as best we could, of course, without actually going in. We have mock-ups that we can go into and pull people out. So we ran those procedures. Then we took a look at what we were doing and said, \"Well, could we do it better?\" And the answer is always yes. You can always do something a little bit better. So then we developed procedures which we thought—\"we\" being the entire team in the world that does this—were better and safer and would give us a better chance of getting people out of there without them getting hurt or some other disaster happening.\\n\\n So we refined, mostly. The procedures were in place as far as that part, but we just refined them to suit the more modern needs of the equipment that we had as we knew it, because, if you remember, we were launching with coveralls, we didn't have anything as far as breathing apparatus for those folks except that PEAP, which was air, breathing air. Well, for the Shuttle Program, the suited Shuttle Program, we have now integrated into the parachute harness an emergency oxygen system. So that emergency oxygen system, combined with the harness itself, which includes the life preserver, makes it more difficult to get a person from the seat down between the seats, in some cases, down onto the slide board and out the hatch, because you have several more hang-up points. So we had to develop procedures for that.\\n\\n In the design of that equipment, they had to take some of these things into consideration. Were we going to be able to get the crew member out? How much problem was it going to be? How big could it be? How long? All of that. So the stuff we have today is a result of the things that the EARWIG worked on in conjunction with the engineers at KSC and JSC. We just took what we had and refined it and adapted it to what we knew we were going to have, and today we have a pretty good operation.\\n\\n As a result of that and some other things that happened, we have a very good training program now for the close-out crew people. We used to go to KSC and train on an old beat-up wooden mock-up that kept falling apart down there, and it wasn't very realistic at all. The seat belts didn't work, and it had no actual real connections to work with to take a crew member out, so we had an opportunity to voice our opinion, which I guess I never had any problem with doing so.\\n\\n As a result of an incident that happened at KSC when we went for training one time, it was determined that, yes, in fact, close-out crews needed to train together, they needed to train on high-fidelity equipment. Subsequently we're bringing our close-out crews here to the hi-fi mock-ups in Building Nine, taking the suit technicians and astronauts from JSC, bringing in the close-out crews from KSC and training as a team, together, here on high-fidelity equipment. We've been doing that for about a year and half now, and it's worked out real well. I'm confident that if the need arose, that those people would be able to do it a lot better now than they have in the past.\\n\\n The same thing happened with the fire rescue personnel. They were trying to train those guys on that old stuff down there, and it didn't work. So we finally talked them into bringing them here. The only reason that it was a big hang-up was money, travel money, and getting those folks off from their regular job to come and do that, because that's actually not a part of the regular job for close-out crew members down there. They are volunteers, and they just do that on launch day. They may be working third shift or second shift. Well, when close-out crew time comes, if they're a member of the close-out crew, they come off of that shift and go on with the close-out crew. After the launch is over, they go back to their regular shift. In our particular situation it's a part of our job, so we're into it all the time.\\n\\n But as a result of all of that, I believe, last I heard, they were getting a new, refurbished, more up-to-date, more in configuration mock-up at KSC to do their training with, but I think they're still going to be coming here to do the integrative training with everybody. That's another result of the EARWIG stuff.\\n\\n The slide-wire situation down there, we ran a test. No one had ever actually ridden that slide wire before. They'd always just run down with the sandbags in it. So during this time of reevaluation, we ran a manned operation with the slide wire. Charlie [Charles F.] Bolden [Jr.] was the astronaut in a pressure suit. I was there to support that test. One of the firemen, a rescue team leader named George Haggart [phonetic], and then the senior close-out crew guy—his name was Junior Bumgardner [phonetic]—they all three were in the basket and rode the basket down, first manned run of the basket down to the landing area and then into the bunker. We had the fire and rescue people doing what they were supposed to do, get these guys in there and everything.\\n\\n During that same time we worked on equipment for the bunker to make things better there. We established a communication system so that the crew members could go to the bunker after they disconnected from the orbiter. We had a quick disconnect on a helmet cord [which] we adapted [to] the bunker telephone system so that the crew member could just go there, plug in their helmet cord to the telephone and be able to talk to the LCC [Launch Control Complex]. That was one significant improvement there.\\n\\n There were some others. We got ventilation air down there to the bunker so that while they were still in a suit they could hook up to that ventilation air and at least cool down their bodies a little bit, because it is work to get out of the seat, out of the orbiter, across the swing arm, into the basket, down to the bunker, and into the bunker, especially in Florida in the summer. So that was another thing we got, a system so that each crew member could immediately plug into the air.\\n\\n Of course, there are other pieces of emergency equipment there in the bunker that were developed as a result of the EARWIG stuff. There still is an emergency egress working group, and they meet regularly and come up with things. As a matter of fact, if it hadn't been for that group there, this training that we're doing at KSC wouldn't have been pushed as much. So it's a good thing to have. Now Jean Alexander is our representative on that group right now, since she's the only suit tech left." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very important group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, you bet. I think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hopefully we'll never have to put much of that to test." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, hopefully the equipment that we work with—\"we worked with\"—I still talk as if I was still in the program, but, you know, I still know everybody and know what's going on. But anyway, and this is [something]…you try and impress on the new folks coming along, the equipment that we work on and that we use has to be able to immediately do what it's supposed to do, but you hope that it never has to be used for that purpose. It's kind of a funny feeling, but you don't want to ever know if it's going to fail. At least I don't. I don't want to know whether it worked or not. So let's keep it the way it is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's right. Better to be prepared for whatever can happen and not have to find out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not have to use it. That's right. [Tape recorder turned off.]\\n\\n [" + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During this interim time you also worked on the 8 psi hard suit. What were some of your duties in that regard?]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there was a certain amount of just routine maintenance on that suit. The suit itself is made up of components which are interchangeable, such as rings, bearing rings and sizing rings, and things of that nature which you can replace to adjust the size of the suit for a particular person. So that has to be maintained. So we did that, kept the thing clean and lubed and sized for people who were going to be doing the manned tests. As I said, I did some of the manned testing inside the suit myself in the early, early development stages. In other words, if they get a new bearing in, which we've got several of, and they needed somebody to run a series of cycle tests or something like that on this new bearing to measure torque or to get objective and subjective data from it, then I would do tests like that. And a new glove, to evaluate that glove in the glove chamber or something like that, I did that, and then I actually supported a lot of the manned runs with people other than myself as a subject. I was the suit technician. We'd take the equipment over there to wherever it had to be, suit the person up, monitor them while they were doing the test, and, of course, take them out of the suit and take it back to the lab, clean it up, and get it ready for the next test. I did real suit tech work there in addition to some of the testing itself, but wasn't involved too much in development of the pieces of equipment like the gloves and things of that nature. They were already involved in that.\\n\\n A guy named Joe Cosmo [phonetic] was the project engineer on that, and still is, working with the people that he worked with, you know, that bring in—say, \"Okay. We've got a new bearing coming,\" and we would take a look at it and do what we had to do, but basically the job of a technician as far as keeping the equipment ready to go and making sure it was where it was supposed to be when it was supposed to be there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What is the difference, benefits, disadvantages, etc., between the hard suit and a soft suit?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There are two, in my opinion. Of course, Joe Cosmo may be able to give you a lot more detailed information about this. But basically there are two advantages to the hard suit. First of all, the hard suit can be pressurized to a higher pressure than the soft suit—let's say 8 psi. It's easier to take a hard suit and safer, pressurize it to 8 psi, than it is a suit with soft goods, with soft goods put together the way soft goods are put together, sewn and glued and things of that nature.\\n\\n The second advantage is that with the hard suit and the way that you can do the bearings in the gloves, the bearings in the shoulders and the waist and wrists and elbows and knees things where they need to be, the hard suit concept makes it easier to work these bearings at the higher pressures. You have to have the higher pressure, so the hard suit is the best way to go there, plus you have to be able to work in a suit that is at that higher pressure. So, those two things, I think, are probably what's important about having a hard suit design as opposed to a soft suit. You can't bend that soft suit as easy as you can move the bearings the way they're arranged in a hard suit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned Joe Cosmo's still working on that. Is that something that you see for the future manned missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. I think so. I believe so. It's easier to change out the parts. Now, please keep in mind that I haven't worked with this suit in several years, but from what I remember of it, it's easier to change the components in the hard suit. It's easier to use one set of hardware for more people in future missions, like you're going to be going to Mars and back to the moon, supposedly, and also on Space Station missions you're not going to have suit technicians up there to take care of the equipment. You're going to have to have something that can be used, a minimum of suits and equipment for the maximum amount of people. I think the way that they're going now with this hard upper torso and things, the interchangeable components with the quick—well, use of piano wire, actually, to hold the pieces together, that makes it easier for people who are not trained suit technicians to change out the parts. In other words, the astronauts that are there are going to have to change the parts out to fit the next person that's going to use that suit, because everybody cannot have their own suit pre-fitted on Earth and taken to wherever they're going to have to take it. They're going to have to change out the parts where they are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely. Well, I guess we'll have to watch and see what happens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess we will. Hopefully it'll happen in our lifetime—well, it will in yours, but it won't in mine, probably, but that's okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don't know. I think you've still got quite a few years ahead of you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I hope so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking at suits and differences, you also worked, when you were working with the Shuttle Program, on some of the Shuttle-Mir flights. Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I worked on some of those, not very many. Most of those, my rotation just didn't put me on them. I think I worked maybe two of those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the course of any of that work, did you get exposed at all to any of the Russian suits or differences, or maybe by working with some of the international members, having them compare some differences?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "*I didn't get very involved with that at all. I saw the suit that Shannon [W.] Lucid had, and I saw another suit that one of the other—I think it was Jerry [M.] Linenger, his suit that he had. I saw the EV suit that they wear and was able to take a look at it, then I saw primarily the escape suits that they had for Shannon and for Jerry and for those folks. They're basically a full-pressure suit. Their entrance and closure is a little bit different than ours, but basically it's the same stuff. They've got gloves. They've got a suit. They've got a helmet. It all works basically the same. You get in it, you close it up, you pressurize it. That's about it. There are a lot of similarities, as I'm sure everybody would understand, people taking trade secrets from other people. It happens. It happened then. They copied a lot of our stuff. We may have gotten some ideas from them and put them into effect on ours. I don't know that for a fact, but I'm sure it probably happened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking at the Shuttle-Mir Program, but also tying in a little bit with Apollo-Soyuz, even though you didn't work it, your background was with the Air Force, and you had been trained that Russia's the enemy, basically. How was the feeling when you began to work with them? Was it something you were surprised about, that it happened?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was surprised that it happened. Let me put it this way. I wasn't very pleasantly surprised, and I'm still not. I don't particularly agree with everything that's going on with that particular program. As far as the people themselves, the folks, astronauts, and that's primarily who I've been exposed to, the cosmonauts, they're great. They're absolutely great people to work with. They're just like you and me and everybody else. They have a job to do and they're there to do it and they're going to do it the best they can, and we're going to do the best we can. Since we have a job—based on my military background, the mission is given to me and I will support it. I don't always have to agree with everything that's going on, but that support is there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Moving into just general topics now, looking back over your whole career—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's a long time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—are any of the people that you worked with, either astronauts or fellow suit technicians or contractors or anyone like that, are there any particular people you'd like to say anything about or mention any stories about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I won't go telling tales on anybody, but, yes, there's a couple of people that I think influenced me. The first one was Joe Schmitt, who was the lead suit technician for many, many years. He was the original suit technician for NASA. He came from Langley when they first started the program and went all the way through into the Shuttle Program, and then he finally retired. He was my mentor, and I learned basically what to do and how to do it, or tried to copy as much as I could from Joe, because I was impressed with the way that he worked with people and, of course, his knowledge of the hardware and everything.\\n\\n I didn't have the knowledge of the hardware in detail that a lot of the folks had, but I'm a people person. If I had to categorize myself one of two ways, either a people person or a hardware person, I'm a people person, and I learned from him how to deal with the people, or at least I think that's where I learned it. I was totally impressed that we would walk around the campus, and of course everybody knew Joe, but Joe knew everyone by first name. It wasn't, \"Hey, how are you doing?\" and you ask him who is it, \"Oh, I don't know, but I know I know him.\" It was always Joe knew this person by first name, and they knew Joe by first name, and he knew everything about them. That impressed me. I took that and tried to put that into operation.\\n\\n Of course, I learned a lot about work habits, what it took to get done, what we had to do. It's a pretty demanding operation, particularly back in Apollo, and it's not that much better right now. You're under the gun all the time to get something done and get it done within a certain amount of time. Of course, you still have to put out a top-quality product. So he, in the NASA Program, was probably the person that impressed me the most as far as a person I was working with. I've enjoyed working with Al and Walt and all of those other guys, but, I don't know, Joe was my guy. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We'll be sure to tell him that you think so highly of him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Have you talked to Joe yet?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We have talked with him about setting up an interview, but we haven't had one yet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'll tell you what, you're in for an hour or two of pleasure when you start talking to that man." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's great. Looking back again over the course of your career, would you ever have imagined where it would end up and where it would lead you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Early in my career I had no idea that I would be doing today what I'm doing, but in the late sixties and early seventies, I knew that what I was doing before I retired is what I wanted to do, so I worked toward that goal. That's the reason I went to work for ILC when I retired. That's one of the reasons that I went to recruiting school and recruited people for the Air Force for two and a half years. That wasn't the most enjoyable experience I ever had, by the way, but I knew that that's what I wanted to do. But as far as way back in my early Air Force career, I had no idea that that would ever happen.\\n\\n From '70 on, I knew that if I had anything to do with it, I was going to be a NASA suit technician, and that's the way it ended up. Whether that's a lofty goal or just one down here somewhere, that was it, and we made it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think that's great. You mentioned ILC, and I think I missed that earlier. You worked with them briefly before you did come on as a NASA suit technician." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. There were no NASA slots available at the time that I retired, so I applied to ILC. I knew the basic corps of people that I'd worked with while I was here in the military were still there. A lot of them had gone, of course. They had had a big downsizing, but basically I knew them and they knew me, and evidently I did a good enough job when I was here as a military person to warrant them hiring me at that time. So I went to work for them, still, you know, hoping to get a government slot, even though there were none open, but I could do the job because they had the contract.\\n\\n Part of their contract was to supply the technicians that worked with the NASA guys on the crew insertion. So I could work my way through ILC and get into one of those jobs. When I first came on board with them, I didn't work in that particular area, but I later one got involved in that, probably the last nine months, year, that I was with them.\\n\\n When I came back from the Air Force after that three and-a-half-year recruiting tour, the first thing that they assigned me to do when I came back to work for ILC, they had a bunch of pressure suits from Apollo and Skylab, A7Ls, A7LBs, that the shelf life had run out on, and they had to be disassembled, inspected, documented, and reassembled. So I did basically the same thing when I came back to ILC as I did in 1969 when I first came here. Joe had us tearing suits down in '69 to learn them, and then when I came back, those guys—Ronnie Woods, as a matter of fact, was my lead. He still worked for ILC at that time. He was my lead tech, and they put me back to work. I had ten or fifteen or something like that of those suits, and they put me in there by myself, said, \"Okay. Go to it, Bud. Tear them down, check them out, document it, and then if they're worth putting back together, we'll put them back together.\" So that was my indoctrination the first couple or three months I was at ILC. I eventually became a lead tech for ILC also, and we worked a couple of shifts, and I became the second shift lead tech, and then I went to the crew insertion group. I was still working with Joe and Jim Slusher [phonetic] and Al Rochford and those guys.\\n\\n Then in 1980, they had lost five NASA technician slots, and so it was decided that they would replace those five with two. Ronnie Woods and I applied for those jobs and got those jobs, based on whatever the criteria was at the time. We'd like to think it's because of our experience and the way we did our job when we were doing that, but we also, if you realistically look at it, we were in the right place at the right time and probably had a lot of friends in places that were able to influence who got hired. So if that's the case, then that's okay. I don't really care how it happened. It happened, I'm glad, and we got that experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you've been able to do quite a bit for the program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I hope so. I hope I made some kind of little dent in the program somewhere along the line." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What's on the books for now?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Man, I've been working so hard since I retired. I retired in January, and I've been remodeling my house and now I'm remodeling my garage. I'm about half through with it. After that, I'm not sure. I'm going to try to not have to work for somebody. I'm just going to try to just do what I want to do. If it works out that I need to go to work for somebody, I'm sure I still have enough friends here and there that know how I work and what I do that I could probably get back into aerospace if I wanted to. I have no immediate plans to return to work. I'm going to enjoy my retirement and do my family projects and home projects and help raise my grandchildren, and that's it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That sounds like a good deal to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Pursue my hobbies. I fish and I play a little bit of golf and work on little projects. I have little garden, vegetable garden, things like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds great to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A little community service. I have one committee that I'm on. I live in Webster, and I'm on the Parks, Recreation, and Beautification Board there. So I get to say a little bit about what happens in town there, and I may do some more volunteer work. I've always wanted to build at least one house in this Habitat for Humanity program, so I may get involved in at least one of those, because I've developed some skills recently that can be used there in doing that project at the house. You know, things like that. Other than that, I'm going to enjoy the rest of what I've got left." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Seems like a good plan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it's a plan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Summer Chick Bergen", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking back at Apollo and Skylab, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about some of the differences between the training you did with the astronauts in Apollo and what you did in Skylab." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As far as the launching, the crew insertion and everything for both those programs was basically the same because we used the same spacecraft and we used the same pressure suits. So that part of the training was the same. The simulator training that they did, as far as I was concerned, was basically the same. I know the procedures were different for them inside, but what we did was exactly the same stuff. We got the suits ready, we took them over, we suited them up, we put them in, we waited until they got out, we took them out of the suits, we took the suits back and got them ready for the next time.\\n\\n The basic differences were, in Apollo we were training for lunar surface activities, and we did a lot of work outdoors, out here on the rock pile, at NASA, JSC, and then on that lunar surface training area that they had at KSC. Suit technicians' work was not all glory and fun; it was work when we worked down there. At one time, in order to keep those guys cool, we had ice water in little pumps that we had to supply ice water through that liquid-cooled garment. Well, it had to be portable, and the way to make it portable was to put the thing on the suit technician's back and have them follow these guys around.\\n\\n So that's what we did, we carried these little icepacks of ice water with a little pump, and we circulated the cool water through, and we stayed as close as we had to, yet as far away as we could so that we didn't interfere with these guys. They were hooked up with the liquid-cooled garment in the suit.\\n\\n Then we also had to supply breathing air to those guys, and when we first started, we didn't have a portable airpack that they could wear that was functional, that would give them freedom of movement. So we had a little manifold in a mock-up of a backpack, but it had an air hose attached to it, and that air hose was attached to a great big—you've seen these trailers that they have for breathing air and stuff. There are a lot of them around on site. We had the breathing air in those trailers. We had 150 or 200 feet of black rubber hose that trailed around behind these guys. Well, somebody's got to be there to man that hose. It's kind of like a fire hose. After a while, it gets heavy. So you have two technicians, and one would carry the air pack and the other would back him up, and you handled that hose while you were carrying the air pack. So that made it a lot different.\\n\\n Also, for Apollo, we did the training at KSC, basically. You moved there two months before launch, and you stayed there with the equipment. We got a break. After three weeks, we'd come back for about four or five days, and then we'd go back to the launch. Of course, the crews flew back and forth. They didn't stay there all the time. But the support people just stayed. We stayed right there.\\n\\n During Skylab we did all the training here, and the only training devices that we used for Skylab were the command module simulators and mock-ups and then that mock-up that they had of the Skylab, which we didn't get involved too much in that particular portion because most of the training they did there was stuff that they were going to do after they got on orbit. So they didn't use the suits too much. Every once in a while we'd have to go there when they would practice taking the suits off and storing them away, simulating after they got on orbit.\\n\\n Another exercise was putting the suits back on for the return. So we would take the stuff over and monitor that particular operation. Those were the differences. Basically, the Apollo was a little harder than the Skylab, if you want to know the truth. It was better for us, and, of course, we were younger then. We were in our early thirties, and we could handle all that situation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Summer Chick Bergen", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also mentioned that between\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n and the return to flight, that you felt like the suit techs didn't have much input into the decision-making process. Do you feel that in earlier programs you had had more input?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Well, we've always had this input: we take the comments from the crew members and take them back to the engineering personnel. But,no, as far as having a say in how things were going to be, we never had that. They would take your suggestions. If you had a suggestion, somebody would take it and look at it, and in some cases, I guess, they got implemented and some they didn't. Between\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n and return to flight, we just didn't have any input at all as to the way things were going to be. These guys were probably under a lot of pressure to get things done and to get them done quickly, and the equipment, the suit that they bought, that partial-pressure launch entry suit, I think the only reason we came up with it is because that was what was available at the time. We couldn't get enough, or we couldn't get back into the SR-71 suits. Basically, right now, the new launch entry suit is basically the same thing as the SR-71 suit was, a little different cover layer, just a little different, but not much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Summer Chick Bergen", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was wondering if there were any changes in your job when women became part of the astronaut corps. Did that have any impact on what you did?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It had no impact on the basic operation, and for the most part it had no impact on the way we operated. We would take the equipment to a suit room and lay out the equipment for all the crew members. When we first started, back when like Sally Ride and Anna Fisher and those guys, basically Sally Ride, I guess, started training with us, we only had one suit room. We didn't have two separate facilities at that time. We had one. So what would have to happen is that, most of the time, the female on the crew would just use a facility, either the female rest room or a facility separate to get into the basic undergarments, and then rejoin the rest of the crew for the suiting. That's the way it still works today. They have a separate suiting room at most of the facilities now for the females, but as far as our basic job, it didn't change. Some of the equipment changed, naturally, because women wear different things than guys wear. We did things the same way for everybody else. The females have to use the same equipment as everybody else uses.\\n\\n I mean, the stuff is designed for a male individual sitting in an airplane seat. When it pressurizes—I don't know if you've ever notice, you lay a pressure suit up on this table and you pressurize it, and it goes to a sitting position. It doesn't stretch out into a walking position. So the patterns are cut that way.\\n\\n But anyway, all the stuff is sized. This, now, creates some problems in fitting females, because the suits, again, are designed for males from fifth to ninety-fifth percentile male. We had some problems after we started flying a lot of females in that they didn't fit the fifth to ninety-fifth percentile male equipment. So some modifications have been made, but the equipment is basically the same for everybody." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything that we haven't covered that you wanted to talk about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Man, I hope not. [Laughter] I think I've probably spouted off enough about that. Again, the only thing that makes me real proud about the whole situation is that I had a goal when I came to—well, actually when I left NASA, I had the goal to come back. That goal was realized. I mean, I realized that, and I think that I have done some significant things to help the manned space flight program. I like to think that. I'm quite proud of what I did. That's probably basically about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think you've got a lot of be proud of, and I think you did have quite a significant contribution." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was a good run." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you for sharing with us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Troy M. Stewart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's been my pleasure." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00099", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2019-090.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Haynes, Kelli (2010-2012): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2019-090", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2019-090", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Kelli Haynes served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana from April 2010 to June 2012 on a health project. She completed her training in the village of Molepolol before being assigned to the nearby village of Thamaga for her work as an HIV educator and secondary school guidance counselor. In the interview she describes her work rolling out life skills curriculum, adventures with bees, and her host family and neighbors that gave her the Setswana name Tumisang and helped shape her Peace Corps experience. Interviewed and recorded by Sally Waley, May 5, 2019. 1 digital audio file.", + "dates_of_materials": "5 May 2019", + "extent": "1 digital file (audio; stereo; 88 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "011. Botswana.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Botswana. Haynes, Kelli (2010-2012): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Botswana", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2019-090", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2019-090-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/qh21c8uu2n2b47lvg268wt4wfaomo12t.pdf?odc=20231115173745-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/93f7f51f-a4b5-475a-9593-d0d80c135e74/3188ac70-2302-4cf8-9348-b046774c7c28/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzJmMzBfZDEyNzNkOTRhOWE2NzIwYTVkZDk5YmM1OGFiMTUyNDZiYzk2NDRlMGNjNDNmOTg4YmI5MjQwMGU3NGM3Yjg0N18vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS85M2Y3ZjUxZi1hNGI1LTQ3NWEtOTU5My1kMGQ4MGMxMzVlNzQvMzE4OGFjNzAtMjMwMi00Y2Y4LTkzNDgtYjA0Njc3NGM3YzI4L21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Austin, Texas", + "length": "34 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed July 17, 2019, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Kelli Haynes Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Sally Waley" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Kelli Haynes" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:00", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "May 5th, 2019. This is Sally Waley, I'm interviewing Kelli Haynes, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:13", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "From?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From April 2010 to June of 2012." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:00:20", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, and what project or sector did you work in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:00:24", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was a health volunteer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:00:26", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. So Kelli, to start off with, why did you join the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:00:35", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had this moment, my freshman year of college, where I just desperately needed to decide that day what I was going to do for the rest of my life. And it was actually Super Bowl Sunday. And I didn't know that because I don't care about sports. So I was just online like Googling nonspecific job opportunities. And I had just dropped my second major, which was social work, because I didn't think I thought it would be too heartbreaking. So I knew I wanted to help people and I knew I wanted to live somewhere that was not the U.S. for at least some time in my life.\n\nSo I Googled something like jobs, helping people, other countries. And that took me to the Peace Corps website. And I spent maybe four or five minutes on the website. I never knew any returned volunteers. I didn't know a lot about the Peace Corps. And I was like, that's what I'm doing. And I called my mom during the Super Bowl. My parents are sports fans, so they were watching the football game. And I said, I'm going to join the Peace Corps when I graduate from college. And she said something like, that's, no, that's too far away. Don't do that. And then she said, actually, can we talk about this later, after the game? And I was like, oh, is there a football game today? And she's like, it's the Super Bowl. And I was like, oh yeah, no. We’ve got a couple of years to talk about it. Just thought I'd give you a heads up. And then I just kind of stuck with it and applied and joined the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:02:16", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How long did it take you from? Did you apply right then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:02:20", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I applied after my junior year. It was from the time that I hit apply on the application on the website until I got on a plane, it was a year and nine months. That was back when the applications took a little longer and you couldn't, like, apply to a specific country or job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:02:45", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What year was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:02:47", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was, I left in 2010." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:02:50", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And what college did you graduate from?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:02:54", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went to Abilene Christian University. Mostly I just wanted to buy myself time after college to figure out what I was going to do with my life. And it worked, I figured it out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:03:11", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your upbringing like? Did you see things in your life before Peace Corps that shaped that decision or that shaped your shaped your service? Did you travel much?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:03:25", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had never traveled. When I was in college in preparation for joining the Peace Corps, I did like a lot of work to kind of pad my resume, to make them want me more. I studied abroad in England and in Ireland. That was the first time I left the country. So growing up, I grew up in East Texas, in a city called Tyler, Texas, and, I had a really cool family and it was really nice, but I always wanted to live in another country. I was just always really interested in that. And even as a kid, I would always tell my parents that I was emigrating. I was just going to go somewhere else. And especially in the winter, it was east Texas. The winters were not bad. I just have a low tolerance for it. I would say I'm moving to the equator. And actually I did Peace Corps Response too, and I impulse applied to a Peace Corps Response one cold February day. I’m moving to the equator! And then I did move to the equator. Yeah, I just always wanted to do, I always wanted to live in another country and the career path I'd been on. Well, as an adult and also all the things that interested me as a kid, were like helping professions, so it was inevitable." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:05:01", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you know where you were going when you applied or when you were three months before you left even?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:05:11", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ok, so I applied. At that time, you could tell them like three parts of the world that you wanted to, like that were your preference, your top three, but you couldn't give them like a country or anything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:05:26", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So do you remember what your top three were?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:05:29", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I do. I said South and Central America, the Caribbean or the South Pacific. And I went to none of those places. My recruiter told me in my interview that I was not fluent in Spanish, so it was unlikely that I would go to anywhere in Central and South America because there are so many people who already speak Spanish who get in there. And then he said there are just very few volunteers in the islands at all. He's like, you're probably going to Africa because that's where most of our volunteers are. And I said, listen, send me wherever you need me, but no place cold. I really can't deal with the cold. And he was like, I mean, I'll see what I can do. And then, yeah, I got my invitation in I want to say January or February. And I left in April.\n\nAnd they called me. I had actually I had given up hope that I would ever hear back and I was just applying for permanent jobs in my college town. And I had finally gotten an interview at a place that would be okay and I scheduled the interview Thursday afternoon and then Friday afternoon at like 4:45, someone from Peace Corps called and they said, we're sending your invitation. I can't tell you where or what, but I can tell you it is either Eastern Europe, Central Asia or Africa, which is just all the places that I did not say that I wanted to go. And I was just I was like, OK. So first I called the place that I had an interview for at five o'clock and left a message and I said, I won't be coming to the interview on Monday morning. My situation has changed. If you have any questions, you can call me back. And then I got on YouTube and I started just looking for videos of volunteers in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. And they were all just walking around in blizzards.\n\nAnd I still distinctly remember this one video. And they were like, it's a beautiful day, we decided to have a picnic. But it was snowing so hard! It was loud and I had never lived anywhere where there's snow at all, so loud snow was really blowing my mind. And they were trying to like have foot races, but they kept just sinking down into the snow. It was terrible, and I was like, I can do, I can do it. And then I think it was the following Thursday or Friday, I got my invitation and it was for Botswana and I ran to look up to one on a map. And I was like, oh thank goodness, it's in Africa. I think it'll be warm. And it was, mostly. There was like eight weeks of winter and there was no snow. I'll put it that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:08:38", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mean, it sounds like there was some ambiguity in the application process. How did you find your recruiter and did they help with the process along the way?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:08:51", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, after I applied. He contacted me and started sending me emails and letting me know what was next in the process, and at the time you still had to mail everything in and get it back by mail. It's a lot more streamlined now. But, yeah, he contacted me and we did my interview in his office. He was in Dallas and I was in Abilene, so I had to drive like three hours to Dallas and I stayed with my brother the night before the interview. And the office was in this big government building in downtown Dallas and I was like 21 at the time. And my brother offered just to take the day off and drive me to the interview. He was like, I don't want you to have to drive in downtown Dallas, having never lived here, and then going into an interview. I'll just drive you. And he did. It was very sweet. And then he took me to breakfast after because I was too nervous to eat. Yeah. But I hear they do interviews like over the phone now. Which sounds really nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:10:08", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What kind of questions did the interviewer ask you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:10:12", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The interviewer asked. It was mostly just have you considered all of these things, have you considered living really far away from your family? And what are you going to do when, uh, you don't know many people and all that? Yeah, just wanted to make sure that I really thought it through. And I answered that, like, you answer any of your questions for your first job out of college. I just told him yes to everything. Yeah, no, totally, it'll be fine. And, and then he asked me about my relationship status and if I needed a relationship worksheet and I was super single, so it was fine. Yeah, he just wanted to know if I had considered everything. And I definitely thought that I had. So I told him, yeah, totally, I know everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:11:14", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how long was it from your interview to when you got your invitation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:11:21", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was, I want to say, like a little more than a year, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's a long time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I got, oh, I got something else before that though. Oh, my nomination came like maybe a month later. Which did not include a country or a job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:11:47", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:11:51", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, there was that. I was preparing for most of my college career since I knew I wanted to do the Peace Corps, for a good job in the Peace Corps. I looked through all the Peace Corps jobs. And community development sounded really interesting to me, so I took a couple of jobs in community development and neighborhood relations and I minored in community development for a second and then dropped it. Um, but then I ended up being nominated to education, which I didn't have experience in, and then ended up being a health volunteer in a school. So I was a guidance and counseling teacher, which in Botswana, guidance and counseling is a subject in school.\n\nIt's really cool. You don't get any grades or have any homework. You just have an adult you can talk to you about stuff, and you talk about things you need to know for life, like a life skills class. And that also included sex ed, which is why it fell under health, because everyone in Botswana, all the Peace Corps volunteers in Botswana, I think from the early 2000s, were health volunteers. We'd been there since they got their independence and then in the late ‘90s, they were doing really well. They have a really strong economy. They're really proud of their not being corrupt. And they're like, you know what, use your resources other places, we're doing fine. But the HIV pandemic hit really hard in Botswana and so they invited us back. And everyone was just health sector and in different working in different capacities, but all in health. When I was there, it was somewhere around 25 percent of the population, one in four, had HIV. When I checked most recently, it was down to like 21 to 23, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:14:26", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One in 22 or 23?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:14:28", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. 22 or 23 percent. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:14:31", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So that's closer to one in five." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:14:34", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. They're working so hard and I'm just really proud of all the work that they're doing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:14:43", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you got your assignment, did you have any idea what was your title and did you have any idea what it meant, how that was going to actually apply to your life for the next two years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:14:52", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. No, I didn't. My title was Life Skills Curriculum Rollout Volunteer. Which didn't mean anything to me at the time. They had developed a life skills curriculum for all ages in school. And it was all kinds of life skills, but it was largely focused on HIV prevention and they were doing a rollout trial in the part of the country near the capital. So my sector was, oh, what was it? Oh, life skills, we were life skills volunteers and we were all just in the same part of the country, whereas people in other sectors were all over the country. And our job was to teach teachers how to teach, like teach teachers how to integrate the life skills curriculum into their own. Both of my counterparts ended up being just incredibly educated and really experienced teachers. They both had higher degrees in education and close to 20 years experience teaching. And I had no experience teaching. So I thought my time could be better used in other areas. So I took some classes, or taught some classes, and then I had an after school club called PACT, Peer Approach to Counseling for Teens. And that was probably my favorite project that I did.\n\nWe had a question box set up at the front desk of the school and it was anonymous, you could put whatever question you had in there and we would pull them out in our after-school club. We met on Mondays and Wednesdays and we would talk about the answers to those questions and the kids would pull it out. And it would be like, talk about teen dating relationships or talk about how to have confidence and still be in middle school at the same time. And they would just have their own discussion about it, and if any of the facts got a little skewed, like about how safe sex works or how HIV works, I would kind of guide the conversation. But mostly they were just doing it on their own. And Monday we would have the conversations and we would pick a good question and then Wednesday someone would volunteer to speak at the Friday assembly about it, and we would spend that day going over what they should include in their speech.\n\nAnd then Friday morning, we had an all school assembly every week. And everyone in the school showed up and they stood in lines and we sang some songs and the principal addressed everyone. And then one of my PACT kids would get up and answer a question. And it was really, it was really incredible watching those kids speak. It was my favorite thing. There was one, if I know you're not supposed to have favorites, but one of my favorite students, Solafela, she stood up. She was so scared of public speaking and she volunteered all the time and she volunteered the week we talked about confidence. And she got up and gave this whole speech about how to be confident and she said, do you think someone could stand up in front of all of you if they didn't have confidence?\n\nAnd the thing is, she commanded a room. Kids would just look at her and lean forward and be completely intrigued by everything that she said. And she would ask a question and they would just nod along like she was talking to them personally. And it was incredible to watch. And then she gave that speech and she came off and came over and talked to me after the assembly and she said, hey, I need to talk to you just as a guidance counselor. And I was like, yeah, what's going on? And she said, kids are making fun of me, what do I do? I was like, Solafela, you are so brave and you are so strong. And you just gave a whole speech about having confidence and not caring what people think. Take your own advice, rise above. And she's like, I don't know, I guess. I’m like, you're so strong and amazing. I don't know why you don't see this. But they were very wonderful, wonderful kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:20:02", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can we go back to when you first got into the Peace Corps, how did arrive in Botswana? Were you with a big group of people? What language did you speak? How was your training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:20:13", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, gosh. Yeah. So there were, I want to say 57 of us and we all went to a staging. We all met together in Philadelphia for two days where we just did some getting-to-know-you type things and all had our last dinner in the U.S. I think we got some cheese steaks or something. And then we all flew together, well, we drove on a bus from Philadelphia to JFK Airport like three o'clock in the morning. And our flight wasn’t until the afternoon. They just really wanted to make sure that we got there on time and we couldn't even check in for a couple of hours or we’re just like hanging out. And then we took I want to say it's like a 14-and-a-half-hour flight from New York to Johannesburg, South Africa. And then we had to wait over there for like five hours to take a one-hour flight to Botswana. And then we got there and we stayed. They let us stay in a lodge the first night there because we got in late and don't want to bother our host families. But it was really nice. And we were just like finally arrived and our dreams were coming true. And all of us had been in this process for so long and we were finally there. It was beautiful.\n\nAnd then we had a match ceremony with our host families. And that, I think, was the moment that it really hit me. I hadn't really actually taken the time to think about what it would be like living in a new culture until that day. And we had the ceremony and when we walked in it, it was kind of like a school gym, I think, is where we were. And we walked in and all the host families were there and they were all cheering, but I didn't know that cheering is cultural. In different cultures cheering sounded like different things and that for some reason was just so weird to me and I felt so displaced because in Botswana, when they cheer, they do something called the ululating." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:22:48", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you demonstrate?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:22:56", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "O-o-o! It’s a lot of tongue waggling. You stick your tongue out of your mouth and go back and forth and make a loud noise. That's what the women do. And the men do this like low grunting. O-o-o. And then when they're really excited, women will get up and dance and they kind of come over and dance around you. And it's really fun and it's really cool. And it was my favorite thing for the years that I lived there. But the abrupt introduction to that when I was feeling culture shock for the very first time and just realizing I had left the country was, it was a lot. And I was like, I don't know what to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:23:38", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was this in the morning after you arrived?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:23:40", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, this is a few days later. We had a couple of days just to wake up to adjust to that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, acclimate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:23:51", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think it was in the evening and I got matched with my family and my host mom was young. She was maybe like nine or 10 years older than I was at the time. She was in her early thirties and she had three kids who were such sweethearts. And she was really nice. And my host dad was really nice. And they're a great family. And I think it was just my host mom who came to the ceremony and she was so sweet. And the thing I really love about Botswana, one, is that they're a very affectionate culture and I'm a really affectionate person. So she grabbed my hand and walked me back to my seat and sat down like put her hands on my legs. And she was just talking to me and then leaning over me to talk to her friends. And it was just really casual and easy. And she told me what my Setswana name was, which that whole day I had to keep asking her what my name was. It was Tumisang, which means to proclaim." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:24:57", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you get that name?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:24:59", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She picked it before she met me. Yeah, they just told them to pick a name for their volunteer, like before they were introduced." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:25:07", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What language was she speaking to you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:25:11", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "English. Their official language is English. So everybody knows English. And that's like the business language of, everybody learned English in school. And as a teacher, I was required to teach in English. But their national language is Setswana. So that's everybody's first language and that's how everybody talks to their family and their friends and like when they're out in public. But usually when they saw me, they would switch to English because they just assume. I mean, they were right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:25:41", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you learn any Setswana?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:25:43", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I tried. I learned a little bit of Setswana. I can make small talk and Setswana and ask for directions and order lunch and tell the classroom to be quiet and pay attention. But I had English as such a crutch that I didn't learn it very well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:26:04", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did Peace Corps teach you any Setswana or was it all?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:26:07", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, they taught us so much Setswana. Our trainings, so to go back to how we arrived. So usually Peace Corps training is three months, but ours was only two months, and we had four hours of Setswana classes in the morning. Sometimes six, usually four. And then four hours in the afternoon of HIV education and sometimes more specific to what field we were in. Like I was in high school, so they were teaching us life skills stuff. But, yeah, it's a Bantu language, which I didn't know that was even a kind of language. I feel like, I don't know, French or Spanish or whatever, I have at least heard some of those words before. But with Setswana, I had never heard anyone speak, so I didn't know it was a language, I didn't know was a language class, which is embarrassing. So, so many people speak Bantu languages in the world. But yeah, it's not. Like in the scope of languages, it's not a terribly difficult language to learn. But because they had absolutely no context and I don't know any other languages, I don't know about like how to learn languages. I did a terrible job with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:27:38", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is the alphabet the same?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:27:41", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Um, there's some different noises that we don't have, which took me a long time. There's one that's kind of guttural, like a grr, which I didn't learn until I got a cold and I was like, this helps. But there's the TL noise. And that took me, there's a TL and a THL and I would say it with some just some kids in my neighborhood. Kids are really wonderful language teachers, and they'd be like, tl, thl, and they sound the same. And they're like, they're different. And I'm like, they sound the same! And they'd be like, no, listen. And I'm like, no, that sounds the same." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:28:27", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A slight variation on click." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:28:29", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:28:31", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what you said there were 57 people in your group. Were there different sectors that was it broken into, two or three or how many different sectors was the group broken into?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:28:41", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were four. So let’s see if I can remember them. This is a funny thing, there was a community outreach one, which was what I was prepared for, and they were at like clinics and they were doing social work with nurses and social workers. And then there was the DAC office, what did that stand for? District AIDS Council, I think. So they were like in a government position and they worked with like funding HIV and AIDS projects. And then the fourth one was NGO. They worked with nonprofits." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:29:24", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But it was all under the health sector?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:29:26", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were all health volunteers because like I said, Botswana is doing really well as a country, but they just need a lot of help with AIDS." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:29:35", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The AIDS crisis. And what did you learn in your technical training? You spent the morning in language and then you spent the afternoon in technical training. What was that like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:29:47", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We just learned about HIV. I hadn't had any experience with HIV. And they asked me to get some volunteer experience with HIV and I went and volunteered at an AIDS resource center. But that was like packing up condom packets to hand out and then like volunteering in the food pantry. So I didn't actually learn a lot about the." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:30:11", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Interacting with patients or the community?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:30:14", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Or learn anything about HIV. So it was a lot learning about the disease, learning about how it spread, learning to teach people how to keep themselves safe. And then we also just learned a lot about the culture and how to talk about a taboo topic in a culture. They didn't have words in Setswana for a lot of the sex things that we were talking about, they only spoke about them in English. Like I think they did not say sex at all, they said sharing blankets. And they didn't have a word for condom, they just use the word for sock. So a lot of what we did was just getting people comfortable talking about it, because that's what you have to do with HIV education, is that you first have to be comfortable talking about HIV. And I have worked in HIV education since in the U.S. and my Response tour was in Guyana, and that is true everywhere, that it's just really hard to get people to talk. And a lot of your job in HIV education is getting people comfortable with talking about it before you can have genuine conversations about it. I was really lucky. I had teenagers, so they were young and open-minded and I would ask them what adults they could talk to. And they said, we cannot talk to adults about this. It's not OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:31:57", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And your training helped you handle those situations, know what to do in those situations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:32:04", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, they taught us some, well, my training was for education. So they taught us like ways to teach this to kids and like games that you can play. And even with adults that I mean. People like fun, interactive education, so we learned like games to play, to make people comfortable touching condoms and talking about condoms and then just doing condom demonstrations and how to, like, use that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:32:38", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you give an example of one of the games or interaction that you played?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:32:45", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think one was like blowing up a condom as big as it would go. I think one was like getting as many objects into a condom as you could. And then there was one, oh, this one I really like. That was a line up. And I use this since like in the U.S., where you just print out each step of using a condom on a different sheet of paper and then have everyone hold one step and then they're not allowed to speak, but they have to put themselves in order of how it goes. And it's like get consent. I have opened the condom. All these different things until they're in order and they all have to switch and not talk to each other." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:33:26", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Who taught your training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:33:29", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we had language teachers who were. They're really fun. I feel like, if you think about pre-service training like summer camp, which is a really easy parallel, I feel like the language teachers are like the cool counselors." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were they local?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:33:56", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, they were local. Um, they were are a lot of fun. And they did this all the time and yeah, they're really easy to get along with. And the technical training was taught by either currently serving Peace Corps volunteers would come in every once in a while and teach a session on things that they found work really well. And I did that in my later years, too. And sometimes there were staff members, sometimes they had outside professionals come in and teach us things. They had a former minister of health come in. Her name was Sheila Tlou, and she was, I think, my favorite speaker ever. And she just gave us some context on, like the history of Botswana. She had been the minister of health, so she knew some things about it. But, yeah, all kinds of people came in and taught." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:34:56", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you how long had Peace Corps been in that country, was that training fairly well developed by the time you got there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:35:02", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, they had been there since ‘63 when Botswana got their independence from England. I think they left in ‘97 and then started again in 2003, maybe. Don’t quote me on that. So, yeah, they've been around for a minute." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:35:26", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was your staff, the Peace Corps staff, were they familiar with the country, were they experienced or new? Or good? Did they interact with the volunteers at all?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:35:37", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, they're really good. They're mixture of Americans and host country nationals. And the Americans were returned Peace Corps volunteers themselves, so they got it. They understood all the. They were just really good. They were really good at calming us down. I feel like because they can go a lot of pre-service training. This is I really love the whole pre-service training model because you're together for two months and you're living in a host family’s house, but you also see other people in your same situation every single day. So we would come in and sometimes we would just be like, I feel like we are such a pain to work with because we are all just adjusting to a new culture and we didn't have control over anything. So we are just like kind of a pain about other things, like, my language class didn't get tea and donuts today! And they just had to put up with that. But they did a really great job. They were like, yeah, it seems like everybody is a little stressed, so why don't we talk about that? How are you feeling? And I really appreciated that. And they had a lot of like safety and security rules to keep us safe and to make sure that they could let us know if anything was going on where we were. And we were just like kind of annoyed with those rules, even though they were being really great to us. So I yeah, big props to them for putting up with our nonsense." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:37:18", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was your training near the capital? I assume the Peace Corps staff was in the capital." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:37:25", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, the Peace Corps staff is in the capital, Gaborone. And then our training was in a village Molepolole, which is one of the maybe the biggest village, which is, I want to say, like an hour from the capital. I think the staff commuted in, which is brutal, but. Yeah, that's where our training was, and then I was placed in a village called Thamaga, which was like halfway between Molepolole and Gaborone. So I just kind of stayed on this one little, lived in this one little region. But I got to travel all over the country and it's a beautiful country." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:38:17", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I would love to hear more about the country. Did you travel during training at all, or were you just kind of seeing that one area?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:38:27", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So our training was really cool in that we got to, I think maybe the third week, fourth week of training, we get to spend a whole week shadowing another volunteer. So they just sent us to a currently serving volunteer’s house. And we stayed in their house and we ate all our meals with them and we went to work with them and we just saw what life was like as a volunteer. And that was really great because I had no idea what to expect at all. And even if you just ask any currently serving volunteer what to expect, they'll all tell you, don't have expectations. It's all so different. And it's, I mean, it's in all places all over the world. So it's all going to be really different and even village to village and job to job. So that was one place that I got to travel. And that was also just like 45 minutes from our training site. And then our sixth or seventh week, we got to go to our actual site that we would be at for the next two years and just like go see our job, meet our coworkers, stay in our house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How big is Botswana?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's about the size of Texas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:40:02", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so everybody traveled out from the training village. That must have taken a long time for some people to get to their site." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:40:11", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, for me, it was like 30 minutes, wasn’t long at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:40:15", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the name of your village?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:40:18", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thamaga. Yeah, but some people had to, like, stay overnight somewhere because there's not roads everywhere. Some people were going all the way to the opposite side of the country. And so they have like less days of actual shadowing just because it took them so long to get that back. For me, it was like I got there before work started." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:40:46", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you feel when you got your assignment and realized it was so close to where you'd been doing your training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:40:53", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was actually really excited because we had driven through that village on our way to visit like a historical site or something like that, and it is such a beautiful place. Like, where we were staying, a large majority of the country is in the Kalahari Desert, so it's mostly just flat. But my village had all these beautiful rock formations and we had stopped in at that village because they had a famous pottery shop, Botsewelo Pottery. And we like stopped in and some people got some pottery and we like walked around like, oh it’s cool. And then I found out that my house was actually on the compound of that pottery shop, so I actually visited basically my front yard before I left. It was just like, it was still pretty big. It was like twenty thousand people. It's a really beautiful geographically, just like kind of a sleepy little village. I really liked it. I'm not going to say at first, I wasn't a little disappointed that I wasn’t like all the way up north in that river delta where it's gorgeous and there's like elephants in your backyard. But I did really love my assignment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:42:29", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what was your what was your host family like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:42:33", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My host family was really sweet. I had a 14 year old little brother named Poncho and an eight year old little sister, Mompon. And I think she like one or two year old little sister named Mickey. And they are great. My little brother was like, he was just so sweet and just such a good kid. And he cooked dinner for us every night. And I walked in one night and he was like, I asked what he was making for dinner. And he said, I'm making liver. And I was like, oh, good. And they had hosted volunteers for years. And he's like, it's okay, I know Americans don't like liver, I'm cooking you something else. And I was like, Poncho, you're my hero. And I was like, what are you making me? And he said, intestines. And I was like, okay, well thanks buddy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Get over it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:43:42", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your living situation like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:43:45", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we were supposed to have, like in our home stay families, we were supposed to have our own room and that was a stipulation. So all five of them slept in one room. And then I had my own room. They all slept in one room in the same bed. And I can't imagine, like trying to sleep with that many people, but they did it every night and they seemed fine with it. We had one bathroom, we had running water and electricity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:44:21", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was your house made out of, what was your house made out of?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:44:24", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Cinder block and a tin roof, my home stay family. My house, my actual house that I lived in was so, so much nicer than I was expecting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:44:38", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So your home stay family?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:44:41", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Was just during training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:44:42", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just during training. So when you left training and went to your village, you had your own?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:44:47", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My own whole house on the compound of the pottery shop. And there was just like a rock formation to one side and a church on the other side and a pottery shop and then a road. So I didn't actually have any neighbors, which is has its pros and cons. But it was this big two bedroom house. It was pink, which was fine. And then I had a just like a bare concrete floor. It had a lot of cracks and the ants would come up through and I would have to sweep the ants out of my house like two or three times a day because there were just so many of them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did they bite?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:45:31", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Nope, just kind of took over. It was just during the winter that they would be around. But most of the time it was fine. And then the two bedrooms had a thatched roof, which keeps it really cool and the house really nice. And then I had two bathrooms. One had just the toilet in it and the other one had the shower and the sink in it and a shower. That one, with the shower and the sink, had a window in it to another room that was the storeroom for the pottery shop. And that room, like it was one of the rooms in my house, but I couldn't get to it. And it just had like a door from the outside. It was also connected to my bedroom. So I would hear them in there like working during the day, like talking and gossiping. And I only took showers after business hours because of that. But when I would go in there to wash my hands or something, they'd be like, good morning Tumisang! And I was like, hey how’s it going? And I had a kitchen with a sink and a stove and an oven." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:46:46", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What does Tumisang mean?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:46:48", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To proclaim." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:46:49", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's your name." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:46:50", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My name. Yeah, or they would call me Tumi. That's the nickname. Or when you're calling someone like to have them come over to you, you put ‘way’ at the end. So instead of knocking, people would just stand on my front porch and yell my name. They’d go, Tumi! Tumisang! Tumiway! Tumi! Until I came to the door. I was like, you can just knock, it’s fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:47:19", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So did you pay rent to the people who owned the pottery shop then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:47:24", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did, yeah. My landlady was also the manager of the pottery shop. She was fierce, she was on top of anything that I ever needed help with, which, that wasn't the situation with all of the other volunteers, that people like the landlords with take care of things, but." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:47:45", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did everybody live in their own house or have their own house?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:47:53", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Everybody had their own house. Trying to make sure that was true. Some people had apartments and married couples shared a house, but yeah, everybody had their own place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:48:06", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the rest of your group like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:48:09", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The rest of my group was a lot of fun. There were so many of us that, like after training, everybody went to their own parts of the country and it was kind of hard to get to. So whenever we had like an in-service training or mid-service training, it was just a big party because we were so excited to see everybody. And sometimes I think there is a part of the country that was easier for me to get to, it was only like five and a half hours on a bus, so I’d go up and visit them sometimes. But when we wanted to get together, because we all had our own houses, we would just like to have a party and invite everybody. And people would come in on Saturday and then just like spend the night on Saturday night and then go back on Sunday. But it was really fun. It was like, it was like an adult slumber party. People just put their sleeping bags on the floor and we'd hang out and cook a really fancy dinner. Yeah, my group was great. I'm still friends with some of them and they were wonderful. One of the older volunteers sends me an email every year on my birthday. It's really sweet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:49:20", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How close was the closest volunteer to you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:49:24", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So there were two really close volunteers. One was like 20 minutes in one direction and the other was like 30 minutes in the other direction. One of my friends lived, my closest friend, like she was my best friend there, lived in Molepolole which was like 30 minutes away. And then another very close volunteer, geographically and emotionally, was like 20 minutes away. And yeah, it's really easy to get to both of them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:49:58", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you, what transportation did you use?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:50:01", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We took. So there's like just a regular bus or something. We called it a kombi. It has different names. It's like a 16 passenger van, like I don't know, if you had a really big family, what you would drive. But it was like some of the seats would flip up and you could get to the back and then put the seat back down and there would just be like a lot of maybe more people than it sat in there. And sometimes there would be some poultry or a stranger's baby you were holding." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:50:41", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So how did you find those vans?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:50:44", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They drove by, you just flag them down. I was also very lucky in that I lived on a major road that went through my village. So like a lot of people would have to walk 30 minutes to get to a bus stop. But I could see the bus stop from my window, So I’d see the bus coming and just run outside." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:51:03", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you get to your place of work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:51:08", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I walked. It's like a 30 minute walk, over some rock formations, and through some deep sand, and passing some donkeys and goats." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:51:18", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And were there roads?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:51:21", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were roads. But not in the direction that I was going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:51:30", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your village layout like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:51:37", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, I’m trying to decide how to answer that. So there's a big road that went like north and south through the middle of town. And then my house was just to the east of that road, right next to it, and then right behind my house was Thamaga Hill, just a gigantic, beautiful rock formation. And it was the tallest point in Thamaga, which really helped. So any time I wandered too far from my house, I could just, like, turn around and look for that and then walk towards it. And then that's also where the pottery shop was. There's a church out there. There is like the police station was just across the street. And the one carry-out place was right there. And all the government entities were right there. So like, if I had a problem with my water bill or something else, like a five minute walk to go talk to them. And then my school, like I said, it was like a 30 minute walk east of that road. And then west of that road wasn't anything really pertinent to my life. So I just went running over there. But otherwise I didn't really know a lot about that side of town. And then I actually I had a grocery store like a full-blown grocery store in my village, and it was like a mile south of my house. It's just like a quick 15 minute walk there and back. And it had like all the produce meat and canned goods and whatever you need." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:53:32", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When did you cook? What did you eat while you were there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:53:36", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I’d also just graduated from college, and that was the first time I ever lived alone. And aside from my Response service, the only time I've lived alone still. So I'm still trying to figure out how to be an adult. But Peace Corps gave us a cookbook and it wasn't about local food. It was just about food that you can eat. So it's just, you know, trying to figure it out. Pasta, sandwiches, I don't know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:54:13", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have a refrigerator?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:54:14", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had a refrigerator and a freezer, I had ice cubes. This is not something I usually tell to other returned Peace Corps volunteers, that I have electricity and a shower and hot water and a refrigerator because they accuse me of being in the Posh Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:54:33", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have like a fan, was it hot?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:54:37", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was so hot. And I did not get a fan until I'd been there like a year and a half. And even my other volunteers were like, just get a fan, what are you doing. And I was like, no, it's fine. I'm just having the experience, you know, like this is just stuff. And I was like, I'm not a millionaire. I'm not going to buy a fan, it’s like five dollars for a fan. But I had a friend come and visit me, which was a huge deal because it is not cheap to get to Botswana. And we actually just stayed in my village for one night and then we traveled all over the country and up to Zambia. But she was like, Kelli, I'm not staying in this house without a fan. She got there in the summer in a heat wave. She’s like, I am not staying in this house without a fan. And I was like, well, I don't own a fan. She’s like, listen, I will buy you a fan and you can have it as long as I get to sleep with it tonight. So we walked just across the street to the store and she bought like a tall, nice oscillating fan. And it changed my life. The last six months were so much better because I had a fan. I was just like taking a cold bath and then running to sleep before I dried off too much. And then, like, halfway through the night, I would be completely dry and then have to go take another cold bath so that I could get back to sleep. It was so ridiculous." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:56:12", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the local food like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:56:16", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Really starchy. It was just like some kind of mountain of starch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:56:21", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like potatoes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:56:23", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, no, like rice or something called phaletšhe, which everybody was really into and even other volunteers and I just never could get into. It's like some kind of cornstarch and water. And you just boil it until it's like a playdoh consistency. And they just like, put that lump on your plate and then you pick up your other food with it. And there's just so much, it's just so many carbs. And I'm like, don't get me wrong. I love carbs, but it's a lot. So there is that. And there is like, uh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Vegetables, fruits?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:57:08", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So the thing about vegetables is, that weren’t a lot of vegetables because it's a desert. But then occasionally my host family would be like, we're having salad tonight and I would be so excited. And sometimes salad means fresh vegetables, but sometimes salad also just means something covered in mayonnaise." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:57:30", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like chicken salad?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:57:31", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, like chicken salad or like a coleslaw or beet salad. It's just shredded beets and mayonnaise. And I'm like, I don't know. I was really sick halfway through my pre-service training. And our Peace Corps medical officer was like, does your family wash vegetables before they serve them to you when you eat raw vegetables? And I was like, I don't think I've had a raw vegetable since I got here. And he’s like, eat some vegetables, easy fix. So I started just like sneaking off to the grocery store and eating some raw vegetables. I was just like craving a good salad. The vegetable kind, not the mayonnaise kind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:58:16", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it expensive to buy food there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:58:19", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was pretty cheap. And oh, they also, so I grew up in Texas and they said that Botswana was the Texas of Africa. Like, what does that even mean? They had a really big cattle industry. They also had, this is just really interesting. They had a, have still, a metal cowboy music scene. So it's like a subculture and there are people who dress in like full leather cowboy outfits. Which, it's a hundred degrees, it's so terrible to wear leather. The first leather cowboy that I saw was on like a five-hour bus ride. Nobody opened the windows because that's how you catch the flu. As the health volunteer, I contested that a lot. But, yeah. And he was just fine, I guess. I don't know. But yeah, they were really into metal music. And they have a metal cowboy festival every year in the middle of the desert." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:59:29", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's crazy. How did that happen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:59:31", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "How did that happen? Hard to say. What were we talking about before I got caught up on the metal cowboys?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:59:37", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Food, I think. Oh, cost of living." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:59:41", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Beef. Yes, they have a big cattle industry. Also, there were a lot of parallels. I was living in West Texas right before I left, and I was like, this is, you know, not so different. Like everything closes really early, small town, everybody's in your business. The plant life was really similar. I had been living in a desert before. I lived in the desert now. And my mom sent me. She would send me magazines sometimes just so I could keep up. But she sent me one magazine called Texas Highways magazine, which is just like pictures of Texas and this was the West Texas edition. And I had two neighbor girls. They were like my best friends in service. They were 13 years old when I left. And they came over and they're asking about where I was from. And I was like, oh, they're like you. Oh, I think they were studying, um, they were doing science and they are learning about the types of soil. And they said, do you have soil in the U.S.? And I said, of course, what did you think that we had? I think she was 11 at the time. And she said, snow? And I was like, no, there’s not snow where I come from. Where I come from is a lot like Botswana. She's like, I don't believe you, show me a picture. So I went and got the Texas Highways magazine and I showed her and she flipped through it and she was like, this is Botswana. Where are you from? I was like, that's where I'm from. I've been telling you, they're very similar. So, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "01:01:30", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s too funny. So your job, you said your place of work was a school. Did Peace Corps set up that that work environment for you, that work relationship for you? And then you also had mentioned that you were set up with a couple of counterparts that you ended up feeling that you weren't adding value to until you started doing your own things. How, you know, what was it like when you first got there and your assignment? And then how did you evolve that into what you ended up spending most of your time doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "01:02:00", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, um, yeah, my assignment was at the school and my counterpart was like, OK, you have these two classes and I think we're supposed to teach together. And then she talked to me about her experience and I was like, you know, we can teach together for a while so I can learn from you because you're brilliant. But then if you have other things you need to be doing, I can just take those classes. So that's what happened with that. PACT club had been, that's like a thing all over Botswana. And the previous volunteer had been doing that. So I just took it up. And then. So I had two classes that I taught a week. So I was teaching for maybe an hour and a half every week. And then with class prep, that was maybe like five hours and I had a couple hours of the after- school program, but that wasn't like a full 40 hours a week. And I had just come from college where I was like taking a full course load and I had a couple of jobs and I was applying for the Peace Corps, which is like a job in itself. And so I was just like, I’ve got to do more things. I hadn't quite adjusted to the pace of life yet. So every once in a while I would just tell my counterpart, I'm going to go find some other things to do, and I would go out into the community. So the first place I went was a clinic really close to my school. I just started walking around and I was like, I'm sure I'll bump into someone who needs something. It was very idealistic.\n\nBut I found a clinic and I walked in and introduced myself and I told them I was there. They were really busy also, I was like totally inappropriate. But I was like, yeah, I'm a health volunteer. I can do whatever you need. Just wanted to introduce myself. And they were giving H1N1 flu shots at the time. And they're like, oh, great, yeah, come on in. And you can give these people shots. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not a health professional. Just a teacher, can't give shots and they’re like, you can still give shots. And I was like, I'm not giving shots. And they're like, all right, you can record who we’ve given shots to. And I was like, that I can do. I feel comfortable with that. And then I feel like the hazing of all Peace Corps volunteers is weighing babies at clinics. Like a lot of health volunteers I've talked to around the world have done that, even non health volunteers.\n\nSo in clinics every once a month until the kids are five, people bring their babies in, and toddlers, small children, to be weighed to make sure that they're still thriving, like they're gaining weight and they're growing. And it was it was another one of those weird culture shock moments where it was like, this is totally normal, but it's very new and different for me. The way that they did it was they would take off all the baby's clothes and diaper and everything, and then they brought their own bag. It was like a baby bag, like it had, like, holes cut in it and they just put it on the baby like a diaper. But it also had handles and they take the handles and hang it on a hook. And then the hook would weigh the baby." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "01:05:37", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And each family had their own baby bag?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "01:05:40", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. They like made their own baby bag. They have their own notebook where the nurses recorded their weight and then we recorded it in the clinic's book. And there's like a chart of how much you should weigh and what the healthy range is. And I didn't weigh the babies. The mothers weighed the babies also as they got older, they were like four or five. Sometimes the kids are just like grab on to the hook and hang off of it. But it was just such a, I thought it was so hilarious. I never got over it. But it was like just a really normal. This is how you weigh your babies type of situation. Yeah. So I would record their weight and look at the chart and make sure that they were doing OK. And if they weren't thriving, we would give them some food supplements to help their kids gain weight.\n\nSo I did that for a while and then I went and talked with the social workers. And we talked about some projects they were working on and then my friend from the village nearby, the one that was only 20 minutes away, she had done a lot of team building work. She had worked at a camp before. And so we started doing team building with prefects at the schools, because it's on the British school system. They're like a combination between student council and hall monitors. So we just traveled around to schools where their volunteers were and worked with their prefects and team building activities. And that was so fun. It's like being a camp counselor.\n\nAnd then I had a, actually the week that I had two volunteers shadowing with me. They were in training. I met an individual who just came up to me. He was like, hey, I heard you're a Peace Corps volunteer. Can you help me with this project? And I was like yeah totally. And he was actually working on, um. He was working with people who are recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, and he was doing some prevention work in schools, but also talking with people who are in recovery and trying to figure out the best ways to build community. And one of the volunteers who was shadowing with me, coincidentally, was a recovery coach, and she worked in a rehab and she was like, did you know that about me? No, I didn't. But we're going to go meet with this guy. And she's like, oh my gosh. And they actually that ended up being a project of theirs because I was on my way out in like a month and they got to know him really well. And they ended up having to leave early, but they're still in contact with him and they still send him resources all the time. And they went to visit Botswana and they went to visit him. And that was a really cool thing. I guess it wasn't really one of my projects as much as theirs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "01:09:05", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Facilitated. You talked about kind of your students, your peer club, and some of the students that you worked with, it did really well. What was that your favorite project?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "01:09:17", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was my favorite project. I actually I follow some news sources in Botswana on Facebook. And one of my other favorite students popped up. There is a video about HIV and it was a documentary and it followed a bunch of different people and they were all talking about why it's important to stay adherent to your medication and communicate with your partners and have safe sex and all this stuff. And then as I was watching, my student popped up and he was like, listen, whether you're positive or negative, we all have a responsibility. This is something that's really affecting our country. And here's what you can do if you're positive, here's what you can do if you're negative. And he just spoke so beautifully and eloquently, he was so passionate about it. It's like I'm not crying, I’m not crying, this is fine. But, yeah, that was definitely my favorite project. And I just saw so many wonderful young people grow into amazing, amazing little snowflakes that they are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "01:10:32", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like you were really well received in your community from the walking around and volunteering yourself for things. Were people are really receptive to what you were doing, or did you have to explain to people who you were and why you were there? It sounds like there was volunteer before you also." + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "01:10:47", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There had been volunteers there for a while, and also because there had been volunteers there since 1963, like most older adults, had a teacher who was a Peace Corps volunteer at some point or like knew a Peace Corps volunteer. So it wasn't, yeah, people knew who Peace Corps volunteers were. And we just every step of our journey was on national television or like national radio. They videotaped our swearing in and at our swearing in, we were just like goofing off and singing songs. But we're singing songs and Setswana and they videotaped it. And then that was on national news. And when I met my coworkers, they were like, oh, yeah, I saw you dancing. And I was like, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Yeah. So everybody was like, very aware of who Peace Corps was. And I stood out a lot in my community because I'm just so obviously the only American there.\n\nAnd I walked everywhere because I didn't have a car, so they saw me all the time and people would meet me and they'd be like, yeah, I see you at the pottery shop and I see you at the school. And I'm like, yep, that's where I live and that's where I work. And they’re like, sometimes I see you over in the west part of town. And I'm like, yep, that's where I go running, you know my schedule, you got it. And a couple of times people like that, the person working with people in recovery, he just walked up to me and he was like, I know you're the Peace Corps volunteer. And another woman who worked at a nonprofit just pulled her car over while I was driving and hopped out of the car. And she's like, listen, I need your help. You get the Peace Corps volunteer, right? OK, here's what we're going to do. So that was nice that people knew, like." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "01:12:39", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, your mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "01:12:40", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Where to find me and what I was doing. You know, I didn't have to explain to anyone what the Peace Corps was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "01:12:45", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do most people have cars?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "01:12:48", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, well, a lot of people had cars. I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question. They expected me to have a car because they assumed that I had money. I didn't. That was hard to explain to people that I didn't have money. Also just came out of college. So I like literally, I didn't have any savings at all. So whatever my food allowance was for that month." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "01:13:17", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How much was your allowance?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "01:13:20", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember. It's been too long. It was enough. I never went hungry. They covered my rent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "01:13:30", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So did you go on vacations or take time off and travel?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "01:13:36", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. I feel like Peace Corps is really generous with the amount of vacation days that you get. So I traveled well, like on weekends, sometimes I would go see my buddies in other villages, but I traveled to Namibia when I'd been there for a year. We took a week vacation to Namibia. It was awesome. The country was so great. And then I went to Zambia a couple of times because I loved it so much. And by the end of my service, I had like three weeks of vacation left over, like I wasn't never taking vacation, but I just had so much of it. And two of my buddies also had three weeks of vacation. So we took the last three weeks before our close of service conference, which is the last time you can take any vacation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "01:14:37", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which is, what, a couple of months before you actually leave service?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "01:14:40", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it was like three months before we left service. I mean, we're just going to take almost the whole month before that, go on vacation. So we took a bus. We all lived in southern Botswana. So we took a bus from southern Botswana all the way through northern Botswana into Zambia, to the capital of Zambia. That was a 21-hour bus ride and that was just the first leg. And then we went all the way across Zambia and then we got a ride with some American doctors or med students, I guess, across the border, because like public transportation didn’t cross that border, I guess. And then we went from southern Malawi all the way to northern Malawi. And then we went hiking in this park, Nyika National Park up there, and came back down and we stayed on Lake Malawi for a little while. That's gorgeous. And we saw some people with an American accent and they were like, hey! And I was like, are you a Peace Corps volunteer? Just because I heard their American accent and pretty much the Americans that I saw were missionaries or Peace Corps volunteers. And they're like, how did you know that? I was like, lucky guess. So we hung out with them for a little bit. And then we went back to Zambia and stayed, saw Victoria Falls for a couple of days. This is my favorite vacation. That's what I'm talking about it so much. And then we took our time traveling back down south and stayed with our friends along the way. And got to close of service and saw everybody. Gosh, it was such a great vacation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "01:16:25", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you had it must have been fairly inexpensive to travel?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "01:16:29", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Bus tickets are cheap. I mean, we’d just like make sandwiches. Yeah, but oh gosh. I have to say the meals that I bought through the windows of busses were like the best meals that I had. At bus stops, people would be selling like fried chicken and french fries or like bananas. They're something called magwinya. Or in English they called them fat cakes. It's just like donuts, but without the sugar on it, just fried bread. And I was like, I know I shouldn't love bus station food this much, but it's my favorite. I think was just the fact that I didn't cook it for myself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "01:17:18", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That helps. What do you think were your main, I think you already talked about your students, which was a huge benefit of your service and something that you can see helped. What do you think your main accomplishments are?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "01:17:41", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ok, I have a story about this. Before I left for Peace Corps. I had just graduated from college and I was moving out of my college town, so I went and bought a diploma frame for my diploma at the campus bookstore. And most people where I was from didn't know a lot about the Peace Corps. So when I told them that I was joining the Peace Corps, they said something like, oh, that's still around? Or they thought I was joining the military or something like that. But when I went to check out, the person checking me out was an international student from Madagascar. So Peace Corps is in Madagascar and she was really familiar with Peace Corps volunteers and she was checking me out. She was like, so now that you've graduated, what are you doing? I was like, I'm joining the Peace Corps. And she’s like, oh my gosh, that's so great! We had a Peace Corps volunteer in my village. She's like, you know, we just sat on her porch and played cards all the time. She wasn't actually my teacher. She was a teacher. But she taught me that education is really important. And she instilled in me and now I'm getting my master's degree and she's like, what you do is so important. And that's awesome that you're doing that.\n\nAnd I'm so glad that I ran into her and she said that to me because I want to say six or seven months into my Peace Corps service there was a strike of all the government workers, which is like clinics, social workers, teachers, all the people I was working with in my village. And because you're not supposed to be involved in politics when you're a Peace Corps volunteer, they're like, don't get involved, which for me meant like just not going to work. I was like, I don't know what to do. Oh, so it's just kind of sitting around for a couple of months. And I was like, this was so dumb. I came here to make a difference and now I can't even go to work and I don't know what I'm doing. But my neighbor kids came over and played Uno on my front porch and they taught me some Setswana and I taught them some English and they had questions and I would answer it. And we talked about how I had soil and not snow. And it was just a small thing like that. And I thought back to that woman at my university telling me that, like, actually, playing cards on the front porch isn't a waste of your time. Which I'm so glad that I had that story, because otherwise I would have just thought that I was wasting my time. Did that answer the question?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "01:20:34", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. A different perspective on what is accomplishing things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "01:20:38", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Cultural exchange. Yeah. It's something more experienced volunteers told me a lot. They were like, you know, two of the three goals are cultural exchange. So even if you don't feel like you're accomplishing your goals at site, if you're talking to people and you're sharing things, you learn something about their country, they learn something about your country, then you're doing most of what you're here for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "01:21:03", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Those are goals two and three." + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "01:21:05", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "01:21:07", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about hard things? Are there big lessons that you learned or a project that you started that didn't work or regrets or anything you want to talk about for that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "01:21:21", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh gosh. A really hard thing for me was living alone. Like I said, that's not something I usually do and I wasn't used to it, and it was a big learning curve. But I think that was probably the best thing for me at that time in my life, even though it was really hard after I had lived alone for a few months. I kind of fell into a pattern of it and it gave me a lot of self- reflection time. And I think being outside of your own culture teaches you a lot about yourself and what is you and what is your culture and what your values are, and I think, yeah. That was a really hard thing. Especially just learning a new culture is really hard. So all of those and then, I mean, being a young woman in a developing country, like women all over the world have it really hard. So that was tough, just trying to learn how to navigate those situations and, in turn, teaching my students, teaching my male students how to respect women and teaching my female students that they deserve to be respected. That was really tough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "01:22:57", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like you had a lot of impact on the people that you worked with, especially your students. How did Peace Corps impact you and the choices you've made about your post Peace Corps life?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "01:23:08", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, in every way. Like I said, I didn't know what I wanted to do. At all. But they put me in a job teaching and speaking in front of people and doing HIV education, and I loved all of it. It was so interesting to me and I feel like it pulled on all of my strengths and all of my interests. And when I got back, I taught teenagers and I taught sex ed and I talked in front of people and I joined the Peace Corps again, I did Peace Corps Response. And I came back and taught people about HIV. And I am still a public speaker and I'm still teaching people and talking in front of people. Yeah, my whole career was shaped by where Peace Corps put me. And I say it that way because I didn't, at that time, it was just kind of like, here's a job, here's your country, get to work. But I feel like everything that I learned in the Peace Corps and everything that they put me into was exactly what I needed at the perfect time in life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "01:24:28", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And now that you're back in the States, you're still engaged in Peace Corps third goal, which is spreading kind of your lessons you learned in Peace Corps with Americans. You want to talk a little bit about that work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "01:24:41", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. Doing that a couple of different ways. I am registered, we have speakers match, which is where people can call you and say, we'd like you to come and speak about your experience. So I do that sometimes. Sometimes I talk to college kids at the University of Texas campus who are thinking of applying. We also have a local chapter, the Heart of Texas Peace Corps Association, and I'm the communications chair so I talk to people, um. Yeah, and that's really great. The returned Peace Corps volunteer community is really important to me and a lot of my closest friends are returned Peace Corps volunteers, whether I served with them or I met them later. But yeah, the Peace Corps, even though I haven't served in a while, is still a big part of my identity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "01:25:47", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything else that you want to say to summarize your service in Peace Corps or impacts or lessons learned or best parts?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "01:26:05", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Gosh. I think very often people ask you how your Peace Corps service was, which is the question I always hate because it was several years of my life and it's hard to summarize several years of your life, but I feel like I definitely was challenged in my Peace Corps service. And I grew a lot as a person and I learned a lot of things about the world. I learned that it is both much larger and much smaller than I knew and I learned a lot about myself and how to work with people and to work with compassion. Yeah, taught me a lot of important life lessons." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "01:27:09", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What advice might you give to somebody who's considering the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "01:27:19", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's a good question. I would tell them not to do it unless they are really sure it's what they wanted to do and because it's hard. And I would tell them to keep an open mind, which is the infuriating advice all returned Peace Corps volunteers give you, is that you shouldn't have any expectations, which is just impossible to do. But it's true, don't have any expectations. And probably to remember that two of the three goals are just hanging out with people, get to know some people and you're doing your job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "01:28:09", + "speaker": "Sally Waley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, thank you, Kelli." + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "01:28:10", + "speaker": "Kelli Haynes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00919", + "metadata": { + "category": "NASA at 50 OHP 2007 - 2008", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/NAF/WhitlowW/whitloww.htm", + "original_file_name": "WhitlowW_5-9-07.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/NAF/WhitlowW/WhitlowW_5-9-07.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA at 50 Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "location_date": "Cleveland, Ohio – 9 May 2007" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Woodrow Whitlow" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 9th, 2007. We are at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, to speak with Center Director Dr. Woodrow Whitlow, Jr., for the NASA at 50 Oral History Project. The interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal. Also attending today is Linda Dukes-Campbell, Chief of the Glenn Community and Media Relations Office. In preparation for the space agency’s fiftieth anniversary, the NASA Headquarters History Office commissioned this oral history project to gather thoughts, experiences, and reflections from NASA’s top managers. The information recorded today will be transcribed and sent to the History Archives in Washington, D.C., where it can be accessed for future projects.\\n\\n Are there any questions that I can answer before we start?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, let’s get going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Well, thank you again for providing us time. We’d like for you to begin by telling us briefly about your background and how you came to your current position here as Center Director." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit [Michigan] in the city of Inkster, and I was one of those who was inspired by the space program when we first started in the sixties. I was born in 1952, so in the sixties I was at a very impressionable young age. I decided then I wanted to grow up and work for NASA and be an astronaut, so when I got to college, I actually tailored my programs toward that, so I have three degrees in aeronautics and astronautics.\\n\\n Then I went to work for NASA, NASA Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia], in 1979 as a researcher in unsteady aerodynamics and aeroelasticity, and eventually became a first-line supervisor. Immediately before that I actually spent a year at NASA Headquarters as part of what is now the Leadership Development Program (the Professional Development Program), and then I came back and became an Assistant Branch Head and later a Branch Head. Then I went back to NASA Headquarters as a Division Director, which is my first SES [Senior Executive Service] job, and then returned to Langley in a program management role, and then as a second-level supervisor, as a Division Chief\\n\\n After serving in that position for a while, I came to what is now the Glenn Research Center as Director of Research and Technology, which is a third-level supervisory position. After five years I was assigned to [NASA] Kennedy Space Center [Cape Canaveral, Florida] as Deputy Director for two and a half years, and I find myself as Director of Glenn Research Center, so I think I hit every level of management, branch, division, directorate, Deputy Center Director, then Director." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us how NASA has changed over the time that you began at Langley to the where you are right now, just some of your general impressions of how things have changed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, if I were to look at my field, unsteady aerodynamics and aeroelasticity, when I first came to NASA we were still doing in aerodynamics a lot of what we call approximate methods or things like panel methods or doublet lattice methods for aerodynamics, for aeroelasticity. We were just starting to do computational methods, and there was no such thing as a computer on every desk. I can remember we had four terminals in a common area, and you had to sign up to be able to use those terminals. Of course, now in those areas the computing power has changed drastically, has increased drastically. We also had a wind tunnel associated with the branch, and now we use the computer and computer simulations a lot more than we used to. We still rely on the test data, but that’s one of the changes.\\n\\n [interruption]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When we stopped we were talking about how NASA has changed over the time that you’ve been part of the NASA community, and you were talking about the computer power, basically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the automation has changed a lot. I remember our first word processor we received in the branch, and I can remember days when if I wanted to fax something, I had to get approval from the Division Chief before I could take the materials to a central location at the Langley Research Center to be faxed. She’s shocked by these things. [Laughter] You had to get approval to send a fax. Just the whole information technology, the computer capability, the automation that’s occurred.\\n\\n The workforce, the nature of the workforce has changed a lot. We still have some improvements we could make, but the diversity of the workforce has changed tremendously. I can remember talking to some of the more senior people at Langley when I got there, and there were African American women who, in some cases, didn’t have bathrooms in the buildings they could use. So that whole arena has changed a lot, even to the point where I’m in this position.\\n\\n When we look at the technical programs, we used to be an agency where we did space, we did the aeronautics, and we still do that significantly in both areas, but we’re now more—I think we’re more focused on development than we have been in the past, and that’s because of the nature of the vision that the national leadership has laid out for us. We now have a focus. When I came into the agency in 1979, our big focus was Space Shuttle. I wouldn’t say that Space Shuttle is a vision; Space Shuttle is a tool that we use to carry out and accomplish a vision. So we now have something that we’re all aimed at again, and so for me that’s been a big change." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, tell us in your current position as Center Director how you will take this Center and help it become part of that vision and help to accomplish the goals for this new vision of exploration." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, one of the things this Center has is—we’re viewed widely as an aeronautics research Center—but we have a very rich history in space flight systems development, from Space Station power to its entire rocket upper stages to in-space propulsion, where the whole concept of the ion engine was developed at the Glenn Research Center. Over the years our research and development resulted in it being demonstrated as a primary propulsion system on the Deep Space 1 spacecraft. We’ve done over 130 microgravity experiments that have flown in space, including many that were human-rated. So we have a very rich history in space flight systems development, but we are thought of as solely an aeronautics research center.\\n\\n With the way the agency is headed now with a Vision for Space Exploration that we have to implement, it was necessary for me to make some significant changes at this Center, and that included our senior leadership, and that included restructuring, and that included some retraining of the workforce. I will include myself, I think there is like thirteen or fourteen new senior-level managers at the Center, and of course, we have a new organizational structure.\\n\\n The Center has goals in prioritized order that we’re aimed at. That’s to be known for excellence in space flight systems development, to be recognized as a leader in program and project management, to excel in aeronautics and space research. Then I like to say one of my pets is to be more of an integral part of the northeast Ohio, and the Ohio national community, to have people know our capabilities, to have people know what we do, know what benefit that NASA and NASA Glenn provides for the taxpayer dollars that we receive.\\n\\n So those are just some of the things that I’ve managed to do in less than eighteen months." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What type of challenges do you foresee that you might encounter as you’re on your way to accomplishing these goals?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would think they’re the same as other Centers, but one of my challenges is having the right workforce, one with the right skills. Right now, the work we have, sometimes we don’t have enough people to put on all the projects, and that’s because things have changed so quickly, and they changed faster than we were able to change the people. That doesn’t mean get rid of a lot of people. What that means is retraining. I have a three-prong retraining effort that we’ve put in place, one aimed at enhancing systems engineering skills, aimed at enhancing our project management capability, and enhancing our safety and mission assurance capability. So having the right workforce and enough workforce is one challenge.\\n\\n Making sure we have the right infrastructure. We were established on January 23rd, 1941, so we have some facilities here that are a little older than maybe they ought to be, and maybe not in as good a shape as I would like for them to be. So getting the support and the resources to make sure we have appropriate facilities and appropriate infrastructure is a big challenge.\\n\\n Making sure that we’re working well internally, that we’re all on the same page, and that everybody is thinking—first of all, everybody’s thinking what’s good for NASA, and not what’s good for Glenn. What’s good for NASA, and then what’s good for Glenn, and then what’s good for my organization. Sometimes that thinking gets inverted, what’s good for me and then what’s good for the Center and then what’s good for NASA.\\n\\n So those are a couple of challenges. Then I would say one other is we have a large research population, and sometimes in research, if you don’t get it done this year, you can get it done next year. But doing more development, then we have to be cognizant of the tempo at which we have to work and the tempo at which we have to deliver products. So those are a few of my challenges." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One underlying challenge that seems to affect everybody is budget. If you had an unlimited budget or you could ask for budget increase, would there be some new programs or some new aspects that you would like to see the Center get involved in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as the Center Director, in our governance model, we have this separation. I’m charge of institution. We have this separation of the institution and programs. I would love to see the agency, say, get an unlimited budget, and then maybe we could close some of the gaps that we have in capabilities. The agency and the nation are going to have some gaps, say, in access to space when the Space Shuttle stops flying in 2010, and it will, and we can’t bring CEV [Crew Exploration Vehicle] online until 2015. That’s five years when you’ve got this asset, Space Station, up there that you’ve got to count on somebody else to get you there.\\n\\n So from a programmatic standpoint, I would love to see the agency get enough money so we can do all the things that we know we can do, and we can do a lot of good things, good things in science. There’s a lot more in aeronautics that we can do. Of course, there’s a lot more in space exploration that we can do, particularly in accelerating some of the programs, but we don’t have enough money.\\n\\n Now, if I were given a new, let’s say, unlimited institutional budget, I have a plan for the Center. I would like to see this Center get new buildings, and I’ve got a location picked out down the street where I’d like to have a new central campus. I would like to develop the property across the street in Fairview Park with new buildings and new places for the public to come and learn about what we do. I would like space research facilities in what we call our west area, which is down the hill over here.\\n\\n I would upgrade some of the facilities at Plum Brook [Station] to make it more accessible to people to bring in their test articles, and that could include a runway, a runway right on the property, to make it accessible. There are lots of things I can do institutionally that I’d like to do to improve the quality of life for the people who have to spend more waking hours here than they do anywhere else. Those are just some of the things I’d do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You talked a few minutes ago about the rich history here at the Center, and before we were talking some about what it was like to grow up, those formative years with the first days of NASA. What do you believe to be NASA’s impact on society as now and even in the future?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I’ll go back; I believe I’ll go back to the past before I start talking about now. NASA, when we were formed—and I’m talking about NASA, and I can go all the way back to NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics], NASA’s predecessor and the impacts we had on the war efforts, but I’ll just talk about NASA. The reason we were formed was in response to—at least partly in response to—Sputnik [Russian satellite], and we had to beat the Russians. So NASA has always been an intense source of national pride, and I’d say that’s the case even today. Back during the Cold War when we were trying to beat the Russians, NASA could do no wrong.\\n\\n So we provided this national focus. We were, and we are, about discovery, and we discovered a lot of new things. We learned a lot of new things as we were racing the Soviet Union to the Moon, resulting in a lot of I would say new products, probably new industries, and exceptional economic development. When you look at what we were trying to do and the resources we needed to do it, one of the big things we needed were people. So it provided inspiration for people to go into fields that would lead to innovation and discovery.\\n\\n As I said, the reason I decided I’d have to be an aeronautical and astronautical engineer was so I could work for NASA, so that I could be an astronaut. And you get people who had that goal, so even if they didn’t become an astronaut, maybe they became this scientist or a medical researcher. Maybe this person is going to be the one that discovers a cure for cancer or a cure for heart disease.\\n\\n So I would think just the inspiration that NASA provided, because people want to be a part of what we do because nobody goes out to try to do something else and say, “Well, I wanted to be x, but I ended up at NASA.” You don’t end up at NASA. You have to work hard to get here. So those are just some of my thoughts. The economic development and discovery and advances in science and technology, the spin-offs, those tremendous impacts. Then just the national pride that we inspire.\\n\\n Before I close this question, when you think of what happened with the Hubble Space Telescope, a decision was made, that we weren’t going to service Hubble and when it died, it simply would be dead. When before have you heard of people in the heartland of America or just the common person rising up and saying you can’t let a telescope go away. So that’s unique, and just so many things that the Hubble Space Telescope has done is a source of pride for everybody." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As kind of a follow-on to that same thought, what do you feel like NASA’s role is? NASA’s been around for fifty years next year, but what do you think its role is for the future, for the next fifty years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think NASA’s role is to, again, be that catalyst for—not be a catalyst, but lead in discovery and exploration, and figure out how to get us off the planet; how to get us to other destinations. To get us to Mars is going to take maybe thirty, thirty-five, forty years from today, so that takes up 80 percent of it, 60 to 80 percent of it right there. NASA will have to be the world’s leading agency in human space exploration. It’s more appropriate to say the world’s leader in exploration—period!! We already have spacecraft that have left the solar system. We don’t have any humans that have done that, but particularly human exploration, but exploration in general.\\n\\n I think NASA will have a major role in advancing the aeronautical sciences. There’s so much we can do within the atmosphere, and when you think of the economic impact of the whole aerospace industry, and that includes aviation. We have to lead in the mastery of aeronautical research. We’ve been stuck in this rut for decades with the aviation system. Nearly every airplane is a metal tube with wings sticking out the side. The system is overcrowded and inefficient. How can we make it better? And that’s just, say, major-airport-to-major-airport transportation, but what I’d count is the entire trip. How long does it take for me to get from my house to the other person’s house, no matter where it is? How can we revolutionize our whole aviation system? I think NASA has a role to play in that; how to make safe, efficient air transportation available and convenient for everybody." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It has its roots in aeronautics, but why do you think NASA should continue—with so much out there to discover—why do you think it should continue with the aeronautics as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we have the knowledge. We have the expertise to provide that technology development, though we have to be careful, at least right now, about not subsidizing industries. But, as a U.S. government agency, we still have lots to offer that private industry cannot or will not do. So there’s a lot of people depending on things that we can do that can advance the aviation or the aeronautics industry. So I would think we ought to remain in a major role in aeronautics research.\\n\\n But if I were to look at that piece, the aeronautics piece, and then I go back to the space piece, I think I’ve said that one of the things that NASA could do in aeronautics and in the space exploration is again to inspire our young people, provide something that’s visible, something we see every day that makes people say “I could do that.” Not only “I can do that,” but “I want to do that. I want to be a part of that,” something that’s exciting, and there’s just all kinds of intangible benefits that I can’t even begin to imagine or describe that comes from that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Constellation Program is going to take lots of technology and there is already a lot of discussion about human and robotic being mixed and blended. What are your thoughts about the importance of using both those technologies to accomplish the goals for the Vision for Exploration?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, one of the things we have to make sure we do is not lose sight of the fact that I’d say the number one priority is to do exploration safely with minimal or no loss of human life. That’s where, until we develop systems that are qualified for humans to fly one or to go to certain destinations, we could use robots or robotic spacecraft to go to learn things.\\n\\n We have spacecraft going to Mercury, spacecraft at Saturn, spacecraft at Mars, and learning things, so that about—or even send spacecraft to the Moon to learn all we can or as much as we think we need to know about these destinations where we’re going to send humans before we send humans, so that when they get there we maximize the opportunity for mission success. To land a person on Mars would be great. To land a person on Mars and have the capability to bring them back safely, that would be mission success.\\n\\n There’s some places right now where maybe it’s not appropriate or safe to send people. Say if we wanted, for example, a probe that goes down through the atmosphere of Jupiter; it’s not a safe thing for humans to be doing. We don’t know how to do that yet, but we can try it with robotic spacecraft. Or maybe it’s something where you traverse the rings of Saturn. There’s a lot of debris there, and you could collide with something and have catastrophic damage to a spacecraft. With robotic spacecraft you can learn a lot. I don’t know; we haven’t collided with anything, but if it happened with humans on board, that would be a catastrophe. If it happens to a robotic spacecraft, we’ve learned a lot before we’ve lost the mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, speaking of learning, you spent not quite three decades of your life with NASA in a number of positions on a number of Centers. Share with us some of the lessons that you’ve learned that you’re now applying while you’re sitting in this leadership position." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, I would say that I’ve spent more than three decades with NASA. I had four years supported by NASA as a graduate student, so add them up, that’s thirty-two. But, yes, I have been at Langley three times; I’ve been at Headquarters twice; Glenn twice; and Kennedy once.\\n\\n So I’ve learned, one, I’ve learned that in terms of advancement that the ability to be flexible opens up a lot of opportunities. So when I talk to people, counsel them about career development, career opportunities, career advancement, that’s one of the things that I tell people. If you want to only stay in one location, the opportunities are fewer than if you were willing to look at the nine locations.\\n\\n So when I set the strategy for Glenn, having been a lot of places, I now personally know a lot of people, and that has helped me a lot in recruiting and developing my leadership team, because I’ve been able to use some personal contacts with people in places that I would not have had those contacts if I had not been several places. So that has helped a lot.\\n\\n In terms of developing my strategy and my vision for the Center, I’ve been helped by seeing what goes on at Kennedy Space Center, what happens at Langley, or interactions I have with people at [NASA] Johnson [Space Center, Houston, Texas] and [NASA] Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama]. One of the things that I learned as Deputy Director of Kennedy was the importance of partnerships, partnerships with other Centers and particularly partnerships with your stakeholders in your local communities, and that’s why I set a goal here for this Center as an entity to be more engaged with the local and the national community.\\n\\n I learned a lot about communication, particularly in working with Jim [James W.] Kennedy at the Kennedy Space Center, the importance and the value of timely and open communications. I actually have received quite a few comments or compliments about receiving timely information or people being surprised at some of the things that I share with the workforce and the timeliness with which I share information. I think that’s probably the most important element of leadership is communications, because if you don’t communicate with folks, they’ll make up their own story, and it’s usually a lot worse than the one that it actually is. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After [Space Shuttle] Columbia [STS-107 accident] especially, there were a lot of discussions about the culture of NASA and possible changes or ways to enhance it. What are your feelings and what are your thoughts, basically your perception about what NASA culture is and what it is especially here at Glenn?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The NASA culture is certainly one that values—it values knowledge. The NASA culture—while the people respect positions—they value and respect the people in those positions more if those people are viewed as experts or as knowledgeable in their chosen fields. NASA respects knowledge and capability, and that’s good. I think that’s good, in a way, where people will respect position, but they really will value and they will follow the person that has the knowledge.\\n\\n Let’s see. Maybe I’ve forgot the question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We were talking about just your perception of the state of NASA’s culture and even at Glenn." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, at Glenn, which we’ve been a research center, and so in a research world, you advance on—at least in the old culture—you advanced on what we call personal impact, which means “what did I do?” Whereas now, and you see it in the space flight world, it’s more “what did the team accomplish and how did I contribute?” It’s more the team and not personal impact. So changing the culture at Glenn from that less focus on personal impact, because people will do what they get rewarded for, to put more emphasis on team and team contributions, that’s one change. And that’s the way we’re going, and I think other parts of the agency, particularly the human space flight part, is ahead of us in that respect.\\n\\n Now, if I were to say, well, one of the things that came out in Columbia was an issue of communication or a reluctance to communicate, which is one of the things, for fear of reprisal. Now, I think at Glenn we are far ahead in that area, is that our workforce is certainly not reluctant to share their opinions with management, and that’s a good thing when people feel like they can be open and they can be honest. They can tell you if they think what you’re doing doesn’t hold water, and not have any fear of reprisal. So I think that our communication—and it’s nothing that I’ve done, but the people of Glenn have always been willing to tell you what you should do or their opinions of how they think you ought to do things. So I think that is a part of our culture that’s, rightly or wrongly, I think it’s beneficial." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the last questions I’d like to ask you today before our time is up is that you talked earlier about how inspired you were as a young person to want to work at NASA. What would you tell someone today? Why would you encourage someone to consider NASA as a career choice?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would tell any person, not a young person, old person, I’d just tell any person, that the opportunities to do things at NASA are unlike any other place. There’s no other place you can go to work where you can say, “My company has put people on the Moon.”\\n\\n Or when I wake up in the morning and people ask me, “What are you doing?”\\n\\n “Well, I’m going to work to figure out how to put people on Mars.”\\n\\n Nobody else can say that, and the work is exciting, is cutting-edge. You get to do things that nobody else gets to do, and you get to do things that you can’t do anywhere else.\\n\\n I also tell people that, if I’m out recruiting, that I’m not just looking for anybody. I’m looking for a special person, that person that’s driven and committed to aeronautics and space research or space exploration. You ought to come to work for NASA if and only if you have that same drive, that same passion, if you want to do new things, if you want to do innovative things and not get stuck in a rut, and always have a challenge every day. So if that’s what you want to do, then come work for NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, why don’t we stop for now, and then I just wanted to ask if there were any more thoughts or any more pieces of information that you’d like to share with us for this project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I would just like to say that, from the Lewis/Glenn Research Center standpoint, that I would like to just briefly say a little bit about our history. We were established here in 1941 and we were actually support for the war efforts in helping to make improved aircraft engines. We were here as an engine laboratory doing engine research, and our work did improve the performance of warplanes, so I would like to say we had a significant hand in our safety and security of the nation.\\n\\n We pioneered the use of liquid hydrogen as a fuel for rocket propulsion, and, of course, I would like to think that that enabled us to get people to the Moon. Of course, we now use liquid hydrogen for Shuttle propulsion.\\n\\n Neil [A.] Armstrong started his career here as a test pilot, and I’m sure at the time we didn’t know all the things that he was going to go on to do.\\n\\n Again, we have lots of experience in space flight as well that I covered earlier, so a rich history in aeronautics research, space flight systems development. You might have to look this up, but we have won an Emmy for our communications technology, and I think it’s the agency’s only Emmy for a technical contribution, and we’re proud of that, too.\\n\\n I think that’s it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, thank you, and I’m sure that there will be many, many more years of rich history that the Center’s going to contribute. We thank you for spending time talking about it, and we wish you the best of luck." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Woodrow Whitlow", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thanks for coming." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00205", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/GordonRF/gordonrf.htm", + "original_file_name": "GordonRF_6-16-99.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/GordonRF/GordonRF_6-16-99.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Richard F. Gordon", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 16 June 1999" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Catherine Harwood" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Richard F. Gordon" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. It’s June 16th, 1999. We’re at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. I’m Catherine Harwood, and we’re interviewing astronaut Dick Gordon. I want to first thank you very much for agreeing to do this interview and to share your stories. I kind of want to start at the beginning of you becoming an astronaut—really before—and talk about the selection process and how—I take it that your good friend Pete [Charles C.] Conrad [Jr.] encouraged you to apply? Or—take us back and walk us through that process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I was trying to take his place. Actually, it all started really back with the Mercury selection in ’59. I was a test pilot at Patuxent River, Maryland, Test Pilot School. Or it’s center—I was through school—and I was not part of the group for the Mercury selection. And then when they decided to have the second selection in ’62, I was part of that selection process—as was—same with Pete, and we were both in the same squadron. So, we were in that routine and group of people. He was selected. I wasn’t. And I had some very strong emotions about that, you know.\\n\\n That’s a sign. You’re not selected. This, that, and the other thing. So, I was bitterly disappointed about that and almost resigned from the Navy at that time and went into something else. Chose not to. Calmed down after a little bit of time and then deployed with the squadron as a—to the Far East on the Ranger in ’62 and ’63; and then was assigned to post-graduate school in Monterey, California, in mid ’63. And there was this third selection process going on; and I was selected that time in October of 1963." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you mention your bitter disappointment. Was it—from what I’ve read, though, you weren’t one of these guys who grew up dreaming of being an astronaut or even a pilot really. It was something you—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, of course not. And probably most of the guys didn’t at—you know, in the early days. When I was growing up, “astronaut” wasn’t even in our vocabulary. Nor was “cosmonaut.” Nobody even thought about that. Ironically, when I graduated from college in 1951, the Korean War was going on and I was—had a military service obligation. Decided to go in the Navy and learn how to fly, which I did in Pensacola. Took my—went to Pensacola, Florida, in that Fall of 1951. And ironically enough, at the time I was going through preflight school I hadn’t even met an airplane yet! This—some gentleman came by and was going to give a presentation in the auditorium. And they marched little cadets over there; and this guy was talking about space and hotels and orbiting objects and this sort of thing. And we all thought he was a little bit off his rocker; a little bit kooky. His name was Wernher von Braun. Yeah. Funny how that—what goes around comes around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you—I assume that you got to know him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, eventually, sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was during the program, when I was here. But I never had any inkling that this was going to be a career. I fell in love with airplanes, and—after I met him, and chose to make that my career as opposed to going back to school and getting advanced degrees. So, that’s how that all came about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was your bitter disappointment the first time when you weren’t selected in that second group more of the competitive nature of—I mean it was just you hated to lose?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so. I—knowing most of the guys. Knowing the people that were involved in the Mercury Program. It was one of disappointment. I think when you’re in those kinds of processes, you evaluate yourself in looking around at who the other individuals are. And you know, there are test pilots and there are test pilots. And that sort of thing. And you place your skill. You try to figure out where you are within that group; and if you devalue yourself, then you’re not doing yourself a very big favor." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, you were selected in ’63." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. October of ’63." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now because I don’t know—okay. So, you were selected basically, you know, a month before Kennedy’s assassination, right? But you were selected and you were aware of—obviously you weren’t at his speech that he had given at Rice University declaring, “We’re going to go to the Moon.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. As a matter of fact, I believe Gene [Eugene A.] Cernan and I were in post-graduate school together. We flew to Houston after the selection. We were looking for real estate, where we were going to move our families. It was at that time, I may have been the very day that President Kennedy was killed. What? November 22nd?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have to go back and look at my flight log to make sure that it was that time. But it was right at that time that we were flying here to Houston to buy some real estate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Even though you weren’t an astronaut at the time that he made the speech, though, saying “We’re going to go to the Moon,” was it something that you remember following in the news? Did you have a reaction to it of this challenge?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I thought there was another crazy guy like Wernher von Braun that—Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.] flew in May 5th, 1961. Twenty days later, we hadn’t even been in orbit yet, and here’s a young, vigorous President challenging the American people to go to the Moon before the decade was over! You know, how do you do that? We hadn’t even been in orbit! We didn’t know if men could survive for that length of time. We had a pretty good idea that we would, but there were those in the medical profession that kept throwing up straw men. We had to prove that we could do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you, when you were selected, did you realize, like, “I think I might be one of the people to help us go to the Moon?” I mean, was that what you thought was the goal?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I—well, yeah. Obviously that was it. At that time, they had not started the Gemini Program. Mercury was just winding down. And that was the whole purpose. That was why we were selected to participate in that program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now others have talked about the climate at the time, which it’s very hard for us to imagine now just what that Cold War environment was like and the fear and the—I’m sure you find it hard to believe that we’re now friends and teamed up with Russia. I’m sure you never thought you’d see us working with them in space." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, no, I think probably not at that time, because it was a Cold War and it was a race. In the ’50s, at the heights of the Cold War, when Hungary and those things were going on—the Suez Canal—I was on the Coral Sea, an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, observing a lot of those happening and it was in fact a war. Philosophically, politically, economically, any other way you want to claim it. And this is one of the difficult aspects of today, is trying to relate that atmosphere that existed in those days. People don’t even believe it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But did you feel like you were a warrior in a war, even as an astronaut? That you were fighting a war to get to the Moon?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In a sense, sure. We were—the space race was real. We were in a race to go to the Moon. We wanted to be better than the Communist country, the Soviet Union at that time. And one of the ways that we could show we were a better society was to challenge them and do the things that we did. You bet!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now when you were first became an astronaut, I understand that you were on before even Gemini, you were on this Apollo design group. And helping design the spacecraft, I take it: command module and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. And the lunar module." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—and the lunar module. What? From an astronaut’s perspective?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We—when we first came, we had ground school-type activity. We were in lectures and learning the phraseology and the business of space, I guess you might say. And then after a short period of time, when the second group had actually been assigned to flights in Gemini, we picked up the things that they were doing. And what they were doing, what that was, that we then took a particular portion of the program—boosters, communications, whatever. I had cockpit controls and displays. So, I had a overall view of things that were going on and what we needed to control particular systems in the vehicle. If we had to—we had the right information and the right switches where we could do that. That was my task, and it was an interim between first becoming acclimated to the community of space and before we became assigned to a flight crew." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And as part of that, my understanding is from what I read of the—your previous interview, that there were kind of three stages that you have your Preliminary Design Review, Critical Design Review, and then it would get manufactured. Take us through each of those steps and what was critical about each step, and what was your involvement in them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was working directly with the contractor; you know, working directly with the systems engineers here at NASA. Each system had an engineer or a group of engineers assigned to it. And they—NASA would work very, very closely with the contractor to design those particular systems. And then the Preliminary Design Review was just a paper kind of thing that had mockups and this type of thing. But you reviewed the process that was occurring at that time, whether it was a—the design was being manufactured—was going to be manufactured in the manner in which it was designed. And then the next step, of course, was the Critical Design Review where you actually had hardware to look at, and actually had the way the spacecraft was going to be built. And the next step beyond that was actually working with the actual spacecraft itself, going through altitude chamber tests, all the tests with the individual systems, and then the integrated systems test. Then the real vehicle itself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you remember any specific inputs or suggestions that you made things? And be real specific. I mean, you don’t have to give me all of them. Just remember one that might stand out of something that you think you played a role in helping change. Maybe something that you looked at it as— in the design review." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well—I think there are probably several things. Moving the secondary attitude reference system from the right-hand side to the commander side, so he had two reference systems that he could refer to. But he was the only one with any controls. It wasn’t like a pilot/copilot type thing, even though there was some sense that maybe that was the way it was going to be. Gemini was very much like that. But, the command module and—more than the lunar module evolved that the person in the right-hand seat wasn’t really a copilot. So, all the controls took a—even for the booster in the spacecraft were on the left-hand seat where the commander sat. So, let’s give him all the tools that he needed.\\n\\n More specifically, ironically enough, we had two separate designs for the command module. One was called Block I and one was called Block II. Early on in the design review of the Block I, one of the things that we complained very bitterly about was the hatch. It was very difficult to open. It was dogged down from the inside. Took a long time to get it open. And it was not like Gemini hatch, which opened outward very rapidly and very, very quickly. So, that was one of the complaints we had.\\n\\n Ironically enough, Gus [Virgil I. Grissom] was involved with that original design and when they had the fire, Apollo 1 at the Cape [Cape Canveral, Florida], that was one of those things that—one of the problems that they couldn’t get out of the spacecraft in time. So, the Block II reversed that situation and designed a hatch that was opening outward. It could be done in a few seconds and very, very rapidly. So, that was a—one of the basic inputs that we made. And it was, as it turned out, it was a tragic event that caused that change to be made; but it was made for the better." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find that folks listened to the astronauts’ input and didn’t just treat you like monkeys along for the ride? Or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, there was some of that probably. I think we had a—we were in a very unique position where we had an audience. And I think there was probably some attitudes that were portrayed, that people listened to what we had to say, and I think there was some resentment regarding that. A lot of it depends on personalities. You can rub people the wrong way sometime, but you can be effective in your own personality to get things done without ruffling a lot of feathers. So—but there was some animosity about the input that we were able to make above and beyond what maybe an engineer might be able to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, and you mentioned the personalities. You know, I’ve heard you and Pete Conrad kind of described as, you know, “the cockiest.” I mean like a badge of honor, you know, that you wore this proudly, of being—what do you think that they—the historians mean when they write that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know. But I’d probably plead guilty to it. Self-confidence, I think is what it really probably portrayed. It—we were better than anybody else? Sure we were!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you weren’t afraid to say it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we didn’t say it. We didn’t have to say it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned with the hatch design being something that obviously during the fire played a role, do you remember where you were when you got news of the fire and what your reaction was? If you could—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I do. I was at the White House. Several of us had been invited by President [Lyndon B.] Johnson to be there and participate in the signing of the [United Nations Outer] Space Treaty with the Soviet Union. And I think Jim [James A.] Lovell, [L.] Gordon Cooper, possibly Neil [A.] Armstrong—I’m not quite sure; I don’t remember precisely that—and I was invited back because Neil and I had gotten to know President Johnson simply because he had sent us on a South American goodwill tour after my flight in—on Gemini XI. So, we were known to him on a personal—as was other people, I don’t mean to say that other people weren’t. But that probably led to my being there; and we were in the White House, at a reception after the signing of the Space Treaty when the word came in that there had been an accident at the Cape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you know right away that it was a fatal accident?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think we did. I believe that we did. I think I recall leaving there, and I think we got—made some calls when we got back and found out that it was. When somebody comes in and says, “There’s been a tragedy at the Cape” or an accident, yeah, I think you kind of possibly suspect the worst. But we may not have known immediately. We found out very shortly thereafter. It was a very long evening." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you think, “This is going to end the program.” “This is—we’ll recover.” What did you think right—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We didn’t give that too much thought on a personal basis. In our business, we lose friends all the time. Aviation—military aviation—is a risky business, and you go in those things with your eyes wide open. You know that there are risks involved. You lose a lot of friends along the way. My first four years in the Fleet, with two deployments in the Mediterranean we lost ten pilots in a squadron of 17. So, those are things—are acceptable. Or they go with the territory, you might say.\\n\\n So, those events you accept and you press on. And I don’t think any of us thought that the program was going to end at that time. We were still in a very significant race with the Soviet Union. And the Administrator at that time was James [E.] Webb, who did a tremendous job of carrying the ball along the way and making sure that the program would continue." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you see a change in the way the advice of astronauts was received by contractors and even NASA after the fire as opposed to before?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think our inputs were the same. I—and I don’t mean to imply that everything we said was correct and everybody did what we wanted to do. Probably a lot of cases, they didn’t or couldn’t for a lot of reasons. One of them would be schedule. Cost. All of those things would have to be evaluated. And NASA had set up a very strict Change Control Board that made those evaluations, and a lot of our ideas were probably rejected. But no, I think most of the guys conducted themselves in a manner in which the suggestions they made were taken at face value." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now I guess your work on the Apollo command module and lunar module was kind of interrupted by your assignment to a crew, which I guess your first assignment was a backup on Gemini VIII, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s correct." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so, that interrupted—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The best thing that ever happened to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, you know, you’re training for that mission. What was the training like? I mean, what was your first reaction to going from this other job that you had to this active training? You’ve got a crewmate, etc.?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, first of all, your goal is to be assigned to a flight crew. Once you weren’t going to fly, the first step was to get assigned to a crew, a backup crew or whatever the case may be. So, I was actually elated to do that. Very pleased that I’d be working with Pete again as we were both the backup crew on Gemini VIII, backing up Neil Armstrong and Dave [David R.] Scott. It was my first involvement with the actual hardware, the Gemini vehicle and the things that we needed to train on to get ready for flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you in terms of Gemini VIII, when they had the problem during flight and the spacecraft, you know, started this uncontrolled spin, you—I take it you were in Mission Control." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your reaction to that? I mean, what role did you play?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was very little because most of it was done outside of any information that NASA had. I think the first thing we probably heard was they got into trouble. But Neil activated and Dave activated the reentry control system without knowledge of Houston. They did that on their own to control the spacecraft. Once they did that, they were coming home. There wasn’t any question. There wasn’t any argument about it. It was part of the Mission Rules that once the reentry control system was activated, the mission was essentially over." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember the climate in Mission Control? I mean, was it fear? Was it—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I—there was a lot of the things went on without Mission Control’s knowledge because they were out of radio contact. And we heard—we knew that they had a problem. And the next thing we kind of discovered that they had to activate the reentry control system to recover." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, you didn’t really know what they were going through until they came back and told—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s correct." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think—I mean, you know, when you read it—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At least I should say that’s my recollection." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. It sounds like a harrowing experience for them. I mean, in that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably was. The roll rates were becoming very, very excessive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And from what I’ve read, it could cause blackout. And the fact—do you think the fact that Neil Armstrong was able to handle that emergency, I mean, just your opinion, played any role in him winding up being on Apollo 11?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "None whatsoever. That whole decision was arbitrary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was not a conscious decision that they were, in fact, going to be the first crew. That was the way the way the dice were rolled, and the crew assignments were made. And Deke [Donald K. Slayton] had a system where you essentially rotated every three flights. And that’s the way the cookie crumbled." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And when you say “rotated,” you mean you were the backup crew and then three flights later—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The prime, backup, prime if you stayed on that crew. And in my case, that’s exactly the way it happened. Backup on [Gemini] VIII, prime on Gemini XI, backup on Apollo 9, prime on [Apollo] 12. Backup on Apollo 15." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had no Apollo 18." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’re going to get to that. I’m saving that. I know you have some feelings about that. So, you go to prime. You go from backup on VIII to being prime on XI. And you’re training for this EVA [extravehicular activity], and people had already had problems with EVA. Take—you know, forget about what happened on your EVA because we’re going to talk about that. But I don’t want you to have that perspective. I don’t want you to think about the problems when you talk about the training. And what was your training like in terms of factoring in previous astronauts’ experience, and, you know, how did you prepare?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Number one: I don’t think we did a very good job of previous astronaut experiences with EVA. I didn’t learn about some of their problem until well after books were written—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—to be perfectly frank about it. And I guess there’s probably a logical reason for that. We didn’t have enough time really to assimilate the information or we didn’t grasp the significance of the information that was being brought back. Now, remember: we were on 2-month launch centers. It was almost like just passing each other to and from the pad. And there wasn’t a great deal of opportunity to assimilate the information from previous flights. So, I don’t think we did a very good job of transmitting to each other the things that were happening. And in the training for XI, I certainly didn’t anticipate any problems with the EVA. As a matter of fact, the training we did was basically in a zero-g airplane." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You don’t remember any discussion about handholds, footholds, any—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Nope. We didn’t have any." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If there had been discussions about that, we would have probably thought about it and said, “Hey, maybe we should supply some of these things.” As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until I read Gene Cernan’s book that I realized the problems he had handling an umbilical and free-floating outside the vehicle. I was totally aware of the problems he had of his face plate fogging over and everything in the night side pass when he was in fact back in the adapter section. And I didn’t realize Mike [Michael Collins] had all the difficulties he had on Gemini X, when he was free-floating over to the Agena spacecraft from VIII to get an emulsion package off of it. I didn’t realize at the time, if I knew it, it didn’t—I mean, it didn’t sink in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it didn’t lead to changes in your training as a result of things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. No, it sure didn’t." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm. Very interesting. There wasn’t any even discussion about, like, tethering yourself to, like, tie you down a little bit more to the spacecraft? Nothing like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. No. If we had tethers and had handrails and handholds, the task would’ve been easier. Except I had a problem with my EVA before I ever got out of the spacecraft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I take it that when you and Pete Conrad were training for Gemini XI, you spent a lot of time at the Cape and Cocoa Beach [Florida]. I just want you to kind of give us a sense of what that was like, I mean, in terms of the extracurricular activities and the—just what that area was like in terms of being at this place where everyone has this purpose of—you know, it’s basically a place created with this one space goal. And it kind of, you know, has this reputation; it’s like a wild, wild west town or something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was going to say it was a frontier town, wasn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like, in a way, it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In a way, yes, it was. It was a concentration. It was a very, very—two attitudes. It was a very tense environment, because of the work and the pressures of work. And it was a relaxing place to be as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it a party town?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, you might say that if you wanted to. There was parties you could participate in. We made a lot of friends at the Cape, and we still have a lot of friends there that we still communicate. They’d have us to their homes and they’d throw parties. We were normal human beings, and we played hard and worked hard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there this sense of just what it was that you guys were going to do? I mean, at the time you are really putting your lives on the line in a way. I mean, you know, you look at the early rocket launches and, you know, primarily before Mercury and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You mean, when things were blowing up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes! I mean, was there that sense of, you know, “Wow! These guys are, you know, really something special.” Or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think we felt that way. You know, I mentioned before that that was a risk of our occupation. We were involved in those kind of things. And we had so much confidence in ourselves and each other and the people that were involved in the program that, you know, we wouldn’t have gone if we thought we weren’t going to come back. I mean, that’s idiocy! And I think, those—what people thought outside the program, I have no idea really what they thought about. But yeah, we were in a very unique position in those kind of terms." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The—your first launch, you know, just describe what it was like to finally, like, launch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we had made several attempts to launch in Gemini XI. I think it may have been the third one, and our backup crew—Neil Armstrong and Bill [William A.] Anders—said this was our last chance. They were going to go next! And I think we were on, this was the third attempt that we had a launch on XI. I guess the real reality of those things, you’ve been trained for so long and so well that you’re really anxious to go. I mean, you know, “Let’s get the show on the road!”\\n\\n And in reality, when the show does hit the road it’s a lot easier than the training cycle, as far as those missions are. So, it’s kind of a release that you’re finally going to get to go. The adrenaline’s flowing. Sure you’re excited. It’s a great adventure, one that you’ve not experienced before. Other people have and they try to relate that to you a little bit, so you have a sense of what’s going to happen. But it’s all brand new!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was it like to have that experience of being the first one to try to dock with the Agena after just one orbit?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was very interesting. It was a lot of—there was a lot of controversy about M=1, which meant the first orbit. It was designed basically because we knew, in the Apollo Program, we were going to have to dock in a very rapid manner because of the lifetime of the ascent stage. I forget what the exact numbers were, but I recall something like nine hours. And it takes two hours to orbit the Moon; so with some cushion there, it tells you that you should rendezvous as rapidly as you possibly can in a feasible manner. The early rendezvous in Gemini were very slow, very methodical, very, very, staged. Fuel conscious. All of those things. And we had to learn. I mean, it was just a learning experience to go through that.\\n\\n The M=1 was exciting. We made one burn after—a short time after we got into orbit, which was a TPI [terminal phase initiation] combining all of the other previous burns that were made in rendezvous. We caught up to the Agena by the time we got to Hawaii. We had docked with it by the time we got to the West Coast. And we came over Cape Kennedy after one orbit, docked to the Agena rocket." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then I take it that you undocked and docked a few times. And that Pete even let you have a try at it, which—were you expecting to get a try? I’m not clear whether it was planned that you’d get to really fly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If he hadn’t let me do that, I’d have thrown him out of the spacecraft!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, you knew he was going to let you. Or was it on that mission manifest?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t even recall whether it was or wasn’t. But I—in reflection, I fully anticipated I was going to get to do that. And I think—well, I practiced it. So, it must’ve been somewhere along in there—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—but I—he did several dockings, and I did a couple. More than one for sure. And just my first sense of flying a vehicle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find that the experience of docking—I mean, obviously docking with the Agena, as you said, it was kind of a pathfinder for Apollo, for docking the command module with the LM [lunar module]. But did you find when you actually did that as a command module pilot in Apollo that there was a sense of familiarity? I mean, did it really help train you for what was to come?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh sure. I think it gives you a sense that there’s no perturbation. It’s very smooth. It’s very easily controlled. You make small inputs. It’s a very precise maneuver. Not difficult at all. And I think you have those sense and—well, you align the vehicles, even though they were different way to do that; we had a docking target in Apollo. We didn’t have that in Gemini, and we had docked with the Agena barely in a visual reference. But you get the nose of the Gemini about that far away [gestures] from the Agena and you can stop and just sit there and look at it. There’s no wind or no perturbations; nothing’s moving the spacecraft around. When it moves, you made it move." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, you’re docked with this and you’re doing your experiments. And then it comes time for your spacewalk. Walk us through the—you know, the spacewalk experience and when you started realizing you were having trouble and what it was like. What that—what do we mean by trouble?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s a good question. I’m not sure I really sensed the trouble until well into it. We were so anxious to get into that particular aspect of it and were so well trained and prepared to do it, actually, we got ourselves in trouble by pressurizing and being in a pressurized suit inside the vehicle about an orbit or so before we were taught—before the timeline said we would proceed with it. So, we were sitting in the vehicle with pressurized suits, a pressurized Gemini, and waiting to—in a particular portion of the checklist, just sitting there waiting to proceed.\\n\\n Once we started to do that, the last thing I had to do, and I was in a pressurized suit, was take that gold visor and attach it to the helmet and—which was the outer visor outside of the Gemini helmet itself. And I couldn’t get the bloody thing on! I had looked at that in training and looked at the flight article, and fit-checked it to my helmet, and I just simply couldn’t hardly get my arms up because of the pressurized suit to position that correctly. And I—it got messed up. I think I got one side in and couldn’t get the other side in. And I was getting frustrated because of that, and it was very difficult. I was becoming exhausted right before even depressurized the vehicle. Even got to the point where I tried to lean over and put my head in front of Pete to let him put the bloody thing on, and finally we got it on. I finally, just from exertion alone, got the gold visor on. And then we were ready to proceed.\\n\\n And once the hatch popped open, I kind of floated out almost immediately with the rest of the debris that goes from a spacecraft when you first depressurize it and then proceeded to carry out the timeline for the EVA itself: proceeded to the nose of the Gemini vehicle and attached the tether to the docking bar. I floated—I tried to direct myself and push off from the hatch and float out towards the nose of the Gemini, which is only, what? 8 ft away or something like that. And floated—actually went above the docking bar. And Pete pulled me back to the spacecraft, and I directed myself one more time and aimed a little bit lower this time, and was able to grab the docking bar. And in the zero-g airplane, I’d always been able to wedge myself between the docking cone on the Agena and the nose of the Gemini itself. And you may have seen that picture. It was—the picture was actually the way I had trained to keep myself in position while I was using my hands to do the task.\\n\\n Well, using large muscles in the legs to hold myself in position, I became oxygen deprived. Respiration rate went very high. Heart rate went very high as well. And I was just to the point virtually of exhaustion when I went out there. And I’ve described the task later on as, “Somebody wants to know how it felt. Just tie your shoelace with one hand.” And that’s the kind of effort. Because I needed both hands to put the tether on. When I let go of the docking bar to do that sort of thing, my hands became free and all of a sudden I was floating away and had to grab the docking bar again.\\n\\n So, I got behind the power curve on that. And that essentially ended the EVA. I had other tasks to do and other things that—I’m kind of glad we never really got to them, because we weren’t prepared as it was to use maneuvering devices, backpacks, and float around free in space and that. If any of us had done that—Dave Scott on Gemini VIII, Gene Cernan on Gemini IX—we probably would have had a lot of problems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just because of the exhaustion?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Because we weren’t ready for that kind of activity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You didn’t have the foot restraints and the handholds." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not only the foot restraints. But we weren’t—you know, it wasn’t until Bruce McCandless finally went in the Shuttle Program, many, many years later, that we were successful in doing that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you—did you know—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think we might’ve been in serious trouble if we had have gotten the backpacks on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really. But it—just the equipment wouldn’t have worked?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it probably worked. It would just—the manner in which zero-g and the laws of physics operate in space just as they do everywhere else in the universe. I think we could’ve had some real problems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now— [Recorder turned off.]\n\nOkay. We were talking about the spacewalk and how we got into, to put it mildly, trouble. I’m curious. I mean, I’ve read and I’m sure you know, since you’re such good friends with Pete Conrad, that he has said that it was the scariest experience he ever had. And I mean, you know, we’re going to talk about Apollo 12 later. You all had a scare on Apollo 12. So, for him to say that his concern for you and your condition during that spacewalk was the scariest thing. And you know Pete. I don’t think you all scare easily. And I mean, what do you think about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I hadn’t thought about it really. I’ve heard him make that comment; I heard that comment being made. And I think he knew the extremis, the situation that I was in, because he could hear the frustration, the voice, the breathing. If you go back and listen to those tapes, it scares me just to hear them! And I don’t know. I appreciate his concern. I think his concern if something happened to any of us on an EVA, if we had died or expired, we were an object in—we were a satellite in space, because he was coming back without us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He was going to have to cut you loose." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely. And we knew that going in. It was accepted, and I think he was—he probably was starting to have that concern. But once I got back to the hatch and stood there and rested a while—I just wanted to stop and catch my breath, which I did—I wanted to continue the EVA. But smarter people prevailed, and we ended the EVA right about that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, who made the decision? In—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The ground." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The ground made the decision. I mean, you agreed with it? Do—you and Pete didn’t argue?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was not in any position to argue about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was the EVA only, what? about half an hour long or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was 45 minutes. Something. I forget what." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How long did it seem to you? Longer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "10 minutes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really? So, it seemed—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. It went very fast. It went very fast." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it frustrating to you? I mean, do you remember what—I mean, you’ve said you’re somebody who—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was at the time. It was frustrating because it was a failure and we don’t like those things, even though our failures are our best teachers. And I think, you know, we learn more from failures and taking risks and saying, “Okay, you’re going to fail if you take risks.” And we learn from those. We learn how to overcome them. If we were successful all the time, we haven’t learned very much because it implies that we already knew how to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, and really if you had found a way to make that work, you know, like wedging yourself in things that aren’t even designed to be footholds, in a way you could’ve just perpetuated what you admit was a pretty dangerous situation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Could have been, yes. And you’re right. If we had taken a step back and provided the tools, which we do today, and we later learned how to do it, and actually that failure in XI and the failures from IX and X and XI or the difficulties, let me put it that way, I don’t want to say “I can fail,” but I don’t want to say anybody else failed. But if we had taken those experiences and learned from them, we’d have gone into the water facility sooner.\\n\\n It was after Gemini XI that Bob [Dr. Robert R.] Gilruth came up with, you know, “We’re not getting the picture on this EVA. Timelines and everything else.” So, he came up with the idea of utilizing the WIF [Water Immersion Facility] to practice those timelines. And if you don’t swim against the water because of it’s viscosity you can replicate pretty well the feeling of zero g. It’s not precise, but it’s the closest thing we have on Earth that can give us that experience. So, after XI they started doing that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you, you know, spacewalk—I mean, the watching from the ground. You know, we had that image of, you know, that Ed [Edward H.] White [II] image; and it just—you think, “Oh, to be in his position!” You know. “To be out there. To be this human satellite, and have the chance to look around and—” Did you miss out on that? I mean, did you have any sense of awe?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh I had a chance—oh no. I looked around. I had a chance to do that. It would’ve been great just to be on a short tether and float around out there with nothing to do. But, you know, you try to utilize these environments to do work. And I look at those pictures, too, and I say, “Man, I wish I had that opportunity to do that!”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But, you know, you do what you’re supposed to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have, though, any sense of enjoyment? Or did you—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh sure. Once you open that hatch and you have this great panorama of the Earth, you’re outside the vehicle. You’re looking through your faceplate, instead of a little small window in Gemini, and you have a totally different perspective. You have a real panorama out there in front of you. And it’s—the word today I guess would be “awesome.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had your second EVA, which I take it was, you know, going to be positioned at getting the spacecraft into these positions to do this gravity gradient experiment and to simulate gravity. I mean, what was the goal of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was later on. That’s where—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, I don’t mean during your EVA. That was—you all were just doing that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, well. The second EVA was a real pleasure actually." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you were just taking, quote, “pictures.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "UV [ultraviolet] pictures of what they call “empty space” or “black voids.” Trying to figure out if they’re black holes or stars there. And Karl Henize, actually, who later became an astronaut, was the principal investigator on that experiment. And this was a very relaxing EVA. We finally sorted out our problem, and we were just being tethered very closely to the spacecraft, standing in the hatch. Immediate—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, you just opened the hatch and stand—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Stand in the seat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You stand in a seat—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh-hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—and just, what? point—how much of you is out of the hatch?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, from the waist up. From the thighs up maybe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I’ve read that you fell asleep. Is that a true story?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "True story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How do you fall asleep during a—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you get comfortable and you get that warm, fuzzy feeling, and you fall asleep. The activities of that experiment, the UV had to be done, ultraviolet experiments, the camera had to be done at nighttime during darkness. So, we were setting up and I was trying to tell Pete where to point the spacecraft. His window was bad. And so, we were trying to coordinate where we’d point the spacecraft so the camera, which was fixed in a bracket outside the spacecraft, would be pointed in the right direction. And when the night side pass was over, we had nothing to do.\\n\\n So, I was leaning up on the spacecraft, kind of put my head down on the vehicle, and I got warm and comfortable, dozed off. And surprisingly enough, when we came across the Cape and somebody started to talk to us we both went “Hunh?” He had fallen asleep inside at the same time I’d fallen asleep hanging outside the spacecraft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s amazing. So, your second EVA—uneventful. You achieved the—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. And Bob Gilruth came back and asked a question later, if it was an acclimation problem that was the first EVA. It may very well have been. At the time, I didn’t think so; but if I’d have had the opportunity to start fresh again—without the problem with the helmet, without getting behind the power curve—we might’ve had a little more success with the EVA and been able to accomplish a little more. But I don’t think it, in reality, it made a great deal of difference. There would’ve been an acclimation by doing the stand-up EVA first and then doing the rest of it, attaching the tether so we—the follow-on experiment could be made. But that’s the way it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, then you had this experiment to do after the EVAs were over, this gravity gradient experiment. And I guess it was like kind of rotating them around the center of mass and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The purpose of those—Catherine, you’re probably right in using those terms. The purpose of that experiment was to see if we couldn’t stationkeep with another vehicle without using any fuel. So, Dr. Gilruth, one—there were two methods that were to be looked at for that kind of activity. One was a gravity gradient experiment, which we were attempting to do. And that’s simply: if you take the center of the Earth and draw a radius vector, that’s the gradient in which you’re trying to align the vehicles.\\n\\n So, here we had an Agena and a Gemini spacecraft, and we were trying to align with this—with one of the radius vectors, stabilize it, and let the system go in orbit. And what it would do, it would stay in that radius vector, we’d stay in that same orientation all the way around the Earth. Well, to get started to do that is a matter of time and where you are and which radius vector you’re looking at. Because as you orbit the Earth, it moves with you. That radius vector keeps right—moving right with you. So, we had to align that certain attitude and get there at a certain time.\\n\\n Well, we had trouble with the tether, extending it, between the Agena and the Gemini. We would get near the end of it, and it’d start doing like a skip rope kind of activities. So, we’d kind of slack off and calm down; and it took several attempts to finally get to the end, to stretch the tether out all the way. By the time we got there, we had missed the time and the attitude we needed to be at for the gravity gradient experiment. So, that was gone.\\n\\n Went to—time is—my impression of space is that time is the most important factor in it. It’s elusive. And if you don’t do it on time, with time, the experiment is gone forever. So, that one was gone. So, the next—the backup to that experiment, another way to stationkeep is to rotate the system. And this is what we—this is what we started to do with the vehicle. We started the whole system rotating." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’ll let you get a drink of water. What was that like, to—I mean, did you have the sense that you were actually creating artificial gravity?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We knew it. There was no question about it. We rotated very slowly at first; and then Dr. Gilruth wanted us to increase the rate of rotation, which we did for the second orbit. But we knew we could feel the gravity. It was very, very low. But you could feel it. You could sense it. And you could observe it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Put a pencil in front of you and let go of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it would—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Instead of staying right there, it would float right back to us. So, you knew right then and there that you were creating artificial gravity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now were these experiments that you were doing to learn something for the future? I mean, give us a sense of what it was that you think that these things were designed to do. And, you know, they still do tether experiments with the Space Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know. And that’s basically what that whole thing is all about. They do tether experiments with the Orbiter—with the Shuttle—and that’s the basis for doing these things is to learn. But we haven’t been successful with the tether yet! But it’ll work. And it’s—Space Station will probably involve itself with some of those things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you—when you came back and if there was any kind of debriefing, do you have a sense of what it was that was learned from the experiments that you were all were able to do? Even if it’s just, “This didn’t work for this reason” or “This worked, but here’s how we can make it work better.” I mean, did you get a sense—was there a follow up to let you know that, you know, sitting there today, “Here’s what they learned from what we did.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, there were reports written about the experiments and the things we did. Whether or not we paid any attention to them or whether I paid any attention to them was probably lost in moving beyond Gemini and moving right into Apollo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, let’s talk about Apollo. That’s a good segue. I guess you’re training first as a backup on Apollo 9 and your crewmates are Pete Conrad and C. C. [Clifton C.] Williams [Jr.]. How soon after you’re named to this crew does C. C. Williams die in a plane crash?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very soon. I don’t recall the exact dates about that, but it was very, very shortly after we were assigned as a crew. I don’t recall the opportunity to work together for any length of time. Pete may have done more with C. C., because he, C. C., was a lunar module pilot, than I may have at the time as a command module pilot. But I don’t remember any training that we conducted as a crew. Now we may have. I just don’t recall." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So then, was there any thought of just you moving over to lunar module pilot? Or, I mean, you know, when—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don’t know that you all get to pick what positions you have. But how do you wind up the command module—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, we don’t get to pick what positions we want!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, Deke Slayton tells you, “You’re on this crew as command module pilot.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You got it. You’re absolutely right. And what his rationale at that time was that two people are going to go down to the Moon; there was going to be one person left in the command module. His criteria at that time, till we gained more experienced, was that person that was left behind in the command module by himself must have flown in space." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was the ground rules at the time. So, there was no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I was the command module pilot and that was it. The same occurred with Apollo 9, 10, 11, 12. All those command module pilots had previous flight experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But after that, that wasn’t necessarily a requirement." + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s correct. As a matter of fact, on 13 we showed, I guess, that it was not as difficult as anticipated! That rookies could do it!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They got to really prove that. You’re training and then C. C. Williams is killed, and then this substitute comes in, Alan [L.] Bean; and what was your first—you know, I don’t know if there was—you know, you knew Pete so well. How well did you know Alan Bean? And what was your first impression? And—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not—I did not know Al that well. We were at Patuxent River Test Center at the same time. I was in Class 18. Pete was in Class 20. I don’t recall which class Alan was in, but Pete was Alan’s instructor at Test Pilot School before they got into one of the Divisions. I did not know him. We were together in the second selection, so I got to know Al a little bit at that time. But, hey look, he was a naval aviator. He was acceptable!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not one of those Air Force guys." + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn’t say that. You did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know. So, you’re on a backup to Apollo 9 and there’s this decision made, you know. George Low has this brilliant idea to send Apollo 8 to the Moon. And the person that you’re backing up has this opportunity to fly that flight, Jim it was—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "McDivitt." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—McDivitt. And passes it up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Is that a true story?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I’ve read it now enough times that he was actually offered it and passed it up to stay with the lunar module." + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’ve never got Jim to admit that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really. Well, it’s—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In fact, I’ve heard—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Andy Chaikin must’ve gotten him to admit it because he put it in his book." + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, he could have. I’ve heard that as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you know at the time—like, did you know that he passed it up? Did you know that—I mean, when—I’ve read that you were a little bit angry about that took you—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. No, no. I didn’t—I don’t know that it was offered to him at the time. It could very well have been. But Jim’s decision—I don’t know what his decision was based on. I assumed that his decision was based on the fact that he had been training so long to fly the first lunar module flight that, even though it was late in flight, it should’ve been, I mean, flown long before we did it on Apollo 9, that he chose to stay with the flight of the lunar module and fly that on a Apollo 9 mission in Earth orbit. I believe that that was his motivation. Now other people may have different thoughts. The stories may be different. But as it turned out, we never knew 11 was going to be the first one to land on the Moon! If I had known that 11 was going to be the first one on the Moon and McDivitt had the chance to fly 8, and we would’ve rotated to 11, there would’ve been hell to pay if he turned it down!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, you didn’t know till later. But when you found out later, I mean, I get the sense from reading things that when you did find out later, there was almost—that you—there was this sense of, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but regret or—that you did convey some disappointment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That may be a rumor. Vicious rumor. But, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think at the time we knew it. In reflecting about it later, why, I’ve always kidded Jim about it, “If you’d have made a right decision, Apollo 12 would’ve been the crew for 11.” But, no, I don’t think at the time there was not that sense, because nobody knew who was going to be the first to land on the Moon. People that think that, that’s foolishness." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did—you’re in your training. I mean, 9 happens, and then you move over and now you’re prime for 12. What—how do you start training for the real thing? I mean, what’s different about being the backup crew? And how does it start, where you guys know you’re really going?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The difference is, I guess, the launches. The way you fly the spacecraft. The command module and lunar module are the same whether you’re in Earth orbit or whether you’re going to go to the Moon. So, all that training just follows right along. The only thing different in operating spacecraft is the actual landing on the lunar surface itself. So, it—we had enough information from Ranger and Surveyor and mapping and photographs of the lunar surface itself that we could accurately simulate those operations in lunar vicinity—near lunar vicinity—to the point we could even simulate the landing well, and utilizing features on the lunar surface to give us a roadmap to where we were going and what to do. The LLTV [Lunar Lander Training Vehicle] is a training device. It gave us that learning ability, with how the lunar module was going to react in 1/6g. So, all of these things, you take pieces of it and you just add them all together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, were you training for Apollo 12. Like, does that start, like, before Apollo 11 goes to the Moon? I mean, is that an active thing or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They overlap?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They do. And the overlap really occurs in training. The flight that’s up to bat gets the facilities at the Cape. I mean, they’re prime. Their primary objective is to get as much training as they possibly can. But they essentially move to the Cape, and they had all the simulators at the Cape. We had, as a next flight at that time all the simulators and the facilities here at JSC. Once they’ve got out of the Cape and got out of the way, then you just moved right in behind them. And then the simulators at the Cape become your primary training joys." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, you’re training. What kind of input, I mean, that—did you have into training in terms of saying, “This is working well,” “That’s not working well,” and then actually helping plan the mission. I mean, did you have any input on experiments?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. Very much so. Because you’re—if you can’t perform the timeline the way it’s being portrayed to you or given to you, then you have to make changes. And as you train, as you simulate things, you’re modifying the flight plan as you go along. So, you’re training, you take the flight plan, you try to accomplish those things that are listed there in the timeline which they’re listed. And if you can’t perform them, if there’s some problem with it, then you modify the flight plan and make those changes that allow you to perform the mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about even any actual hardware changes. Does anything come to mind that was changed because of input during training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Can’t recall any of that. There may’ve been some devices that would allow us to handle cameras or those kinds of things that we may’ve suggested. But that’s an evolutionary process that it—the whole program follows along that line. And we had enough sense along—at that time and really it is to learn from the previous flights. As a matter of fact, we were on two-month launch centers in Apollo until 11 landed, then we took a breather and extended for two more months.\\n\\n So, it was four months between 11 and 12. So, it allowed us to—a little time to assimilate more things. And they kept adding experiments. The scientific community wanted us to accomplish, you know, probably more than we could. So, they added cameras and they had different lenses for different purposes and functions, and those modifications are made in an evolutionary sense." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there a discussion of experiments that you would do while you were up in the command module orbiting?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yep." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what was your input to those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The one that I recall most vividly—and I had to go to George Low and then convince him of it—we had a set of four—we had a frame that went in the hatch window to photograph geological features on the lunar surface. There were slots for four Hasselblad cameras, a black-and-white, infrared, something else, and the experiment called for three cameras. And I went to him and I wanted a fourth camera in there, with true colors. The others were for experimental purposes, and I wanted to—I wanted a “gee whiz!” camera to be onboard. So, we—and George agreed, and we added the fourth camera.\\n\\n And those pictures were taken without much concern for aim, just other than positioning the spacecraft properly and letting it go at—in an orbital rate. And the inner velomiter was the one that took the pictures. So, that was one that I do vividly recall. We had a 500mm lens onboard that could not be handheld. We had to have a frame and utilize it as—so, there were a lot of little, tiny modifications that we had in that sense." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was the sense that, “Why do you need a color camera? What color’s on the Moon?” Or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It changes with Sun angle. And I just thought it would be kind of a nice thing to have along as opposed to the normal scientific aspects of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let—you finished your Apollo 12 training and you know you’re really going to go. Take us through the countdown. I mean, I assume you knew you were going to go, even though the weather was just horrible! I mean, did you I mean, what’s it like to go out there? You know, we see the images of, you know, here’s these three guys and you’re walking. You know, you’re carrying your little packs, and you’re walking up—high up on this platform. I mean, what is that like on launch day to—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Fun?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exciting. Sure. I got to sit outside while those two guys were getting strapped in. I got to stand up there and look at the weather and look at the coast of Florida and watch the black clouds come in and say, “Hey, this is real. That beast below us, that Saturn V, is a living, breathing object. It’s venting vapors and ice is falling off of it. And it’s a creature that’s just about to come alive.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The weather was bad. Did you think you were really going to go that day?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wasn’t sure; I was not sure. We didn’t want a delay, because a delay would’ve meant that we had another month of agony." + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why a month?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The lunar cycles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That 28-day cycle exists, and your landing site is fixed and chosen. And as the Sun angle changes 13 degrees a day, we had to land at a very low Sun angle to provide shadow for depth perception. So, if we missed a launch time, you had another month to wait so that the Moon came around to the same position as before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, as they’re loading you guys in, you know, we did talk with Guenter Wendt and he has all these stories about, you know, the antics and shenanigans out at the pad. Do you recall any from your—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, he always had something. It’s to relieve the tension a little bit, you know. Have a few yucks and laugh and take away the tension that may or may not exist in the situation. But he was great to work with. He’s became a very good friend of all the crews; and he was great to be around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You felt safe in his care?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh I don’t know if that’s—that may be a misnomer. I’m not sure you’re ever safe with Guenter! Because he always had some practical joke to play." + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess President [Richard M.] Nixon was also at your launch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "First time a President was at a launch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 237, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He got wet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 238, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. You know, some have speculated, like, maybe you just launched because he was there and they didn’t want to disappoint the President. Do you—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 239, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 240, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You don’t buy that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 241, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Nope." + }, + { + "turn_id": 242, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They do launch. And describe—before we get to the lightning that struck your spacecraft—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 243, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we were concerned that they weren’t going. We wanted to go. And we were concerned because of the weather that it was going to be a delay and a hold, and we would not get to go. But we were probably not part of that decision-making process, with the exception that we probably conveyed that we were ready. And if they chose to go, go ahead and launch us. We never anticipated what was going to happen 36 seconds after liftoff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 244, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I’ve read—just to go back before liftoff just a minute. I’ve read that, like, a minute before liftoff that you and Pete Conrad and Alan Bean actually grasped hands and—describe that moment when you’re that close to launch and you know—I mean, what was that gesture to convey really? The sense that you guys were going on this grand adventure? Or—and did that really happen? I mean, I’ve read that you all grasped hands—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 245, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think we probably did, wishing each other well. Good luck. Do a good job. Don’t mess anything up that I’ve got to correct! You know, it’s just kind of camaraderie that existed in that crew. It was just a gesture of wellbeing and bon voyage!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 246, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then what is liftoff like? I mean, it’s not the Shuttle. It’s—I mean what is it like to ride a Saturn V?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 247, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s slow. Very slow. It shakes, rattles, and rolls, is actually what it does. Those engines gimbal and the four that gimbal on the Saturn V of the five engines, the four of them that move to position the spacecraft in the right attitude and point it in the right direction, you feel that all the way back up the stack, 320 ft away from them. It makes a lot of noise, and it’s been described as a freight train going straight up. And I guess that’s as apt a description as you can give. It’s a Saturn V going straight up, is what it is. But there’s a lot of dynamics involved with the liftoff. And it doesn’t smooth out until further down the road." + }, + { + "turn_id": 248, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well—and as you mentioned, 36 seconds into flight you’re struck by lightning. Did you know it? Did any—I read that Pete Conrad saw the flash but was the only one who really saw the flash." + }, + { + "turn_id": 249, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The only one that had a window." + }, + { + "turn_id": 250, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 251, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The boost protective cover was still on, and that’s the only available window until the launch escape tower is jettisoned. He said he saw that flash, and the rest of us saw, as well as he did, all the warning lights come on the instrument panels." + }, + { + "turn_id": 252, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you feel anything?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 253, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I did not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 254, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just see a bunch of—what was your thought when all those lights come on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 255, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Kind of startled. We never anticipated anything like that. It was not part of the training syllabus! Simulations didn’t even come close to it. I always tell an anecdotal story about that. Whether it’s true or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s my story, so I usually tell it. And—\\n\\n You always get in a very competitive situation in training, like you want to be the first to discover how to solve a problem and you compete with each other, and you compete with the ground as well. Well, I was always all over the command module. That was my responsibility and my job, and I was always attempting to be the one that first came up with all the solutions. And I would not let Al—you know, I’d take care of everything. When those lights came on, I kind of looked up at the lights, I looked over at Al, and I looked back again, and I said, “Okay, Al. It’s all yours!” And went back to take care of the attitude with Pete. And whether that’s true or not, I always tell it that way because that’s the way I felt! Because I didn’t know what the hell to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 256, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And if you didn’t know, that was saying something, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 257, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so. And I was more concerned at the time that things were moving along, and I was more concerned because we also lost our attitude control system, our reference system. And I was more concerned that you—telling Pete or helping Pete with the attitude. We felt the booster was going in the right direction. We weren’t tumbling. Nothing was happening.\\n\\n And Al was over there, kind of looking at these things and very cautiously getting the fuel cells back on the line, because that’s what happened. When the lightning struck, the reverse current relays worked and they just tripped all the fuel cells off the line. Fortunately, the batteries were still there. And later on, Al asked me why I didn’t help him. I told him the truth. I said, “Al, I didn’t help because I didn’t know what the hell to do!”\\n\\n The controls were on his side, and in his—and he got the fuel cells back on the line during the boost phase. Once we got in orbit, we only had one other task to perform, and that was realigning the reference system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 258, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The—I guess John Aaron on the ground made this call, which some people say was really heroic because you had even a lot of confused people on the ground who didn’t know what to do. And he calmly made the call and knew that you needed to flip this obscure signal condition equipment, which—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 259, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "SCE." + }, + { + "turn_id": 260, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—which I take it some people didn’t even know what it was? But did Pete Conrad know what SCE was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 261, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I claim that I did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 262, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 263, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 264, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so you all knew—you knew what this—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 265, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That may have been a controversy. I had not had that experience with that before or John’s experience before that happened. But the SCE had a primary and an auxiliary, a secondary position. I think the call was, “Switch SCE to AUX.” Which was done right away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 266, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 267, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There’s some confusion whether I did it or Al Bean did it, because it was right here in front of me. I can see it today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 268, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember if—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 269, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it doesn’t matter. It got done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 270, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—do you remember the reaction when it worked? When that made a difference?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 271, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there wasn’t much the ground could do, but it gave them the information they needed. They then were able to monitor systems once again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 272, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And realized you were still on the right trajectory and that, apparently, you were hit by lightning a second time at 52 seconds. Did you even know that at the time? I mean—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 273, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we did. Because the only thing that—I didn’t know that we got hit. But the attitude reference system started to tumble, what we call “tumble.” Normally it’s very stationary and very stable and it shows you the attitude that you’re in roll, pitch, and yaw. And it started doing this, just—and the GDC, the gyro display coupler, was right next to it. This was one of those changes that were made early in the program to take it from the copilot’s side and put it back over on the commander’s side so he’d have two reference systems. Well, it was working fine. It was doing what it was supposed to do while this other crazy thing was just flopping all over the place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 274, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The—I mean, I don’t know. I’m curious when you learned of the—that there was even a debate on the ground about what to do. Okay, this has happened. Has it—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 275, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Years later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 276, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really? Has anything been damaged? And what I—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 277, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was years later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 278, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—what I—you didn’t know till years later that there was even discussion about just bringing you home right away?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 279, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. We thought they might. We—but once we got into orbit and realigned the platform, there wasn’t any doubt in our mind that we should go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 280, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you know that there—that part of the debate was, well, if what could have been damaged, which I guess was the pyrotechnic—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 281, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The recovery system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 282, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—system on the parachutes, did you know that there was discussion. “Well, if they’re going to crash into the ocean, they could do it now or they could go to the Moon, have that experience, and then crash into the ocean and die.” I mean, did you know it was that blatant?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 283, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 284, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No? And if that really had been—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 285, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If it had, we’d have gone to the Moon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 286, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You would have—yeah. You liked the decision that was made." + }, + { + "turn_id": 287, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely. It was the right decision." + }, + { + "turn_id": 288, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you know—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 289, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We weren’t conscious that that debate was going on at the time. Now that’s my recollection. Pete now may think differently, but I don’t think so. I—because we were concerned that they were going to bring us back home. Pure and simply. And we were afraid we were going to lose the mission. But once we found that we didn’t lose anything in the spacecraft, something very minor we did, but everything checked out and everything worked in the spacecraft that we were confident that we were going. We were concerned that there maybe had been some fear or caution in some of the decision makers that would counter that, but we thought we were going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 290, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you know of any procedures or equipment that was changed on later flights because of your all’s experience of being hit by lightning?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 291, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. “Don’t be stupid enough to launch in a thunderstorm!”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 292, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, it was a procedure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 293, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was a change that was made." + }, + { + "turn_id": 294, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really. Well, you know what? They still have launched some unmanned rockets during thunderstorms." + }, + { + "turn_id": 295, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, and what happened to them? They end up on the beach." + }, + { + "turn_id": 296, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. In your training, and you may have addressed this but I want to be clear about it, had you practiced resetting the entire navigation platform in such a short period of time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 297, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um-hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 298, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had practiced that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 299, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, there were two programs called P-51, which was an initial alignment, and P-52, which was a program in the computers that did the final alignment and adjusting it. Yes, we worked both of those programs. P-52 is easy because it already had a reference system to go to, and it would find the stars on its own." + }, + { + "turn_id": 300, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it Al Bean who was realigning that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 301, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I did that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 302, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, you did that. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 303, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wouldn’t let Al do anything in the command module." + }, + { + "turn_id": 304, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talk about your relationship a little bit with Pete Conrad and Al Bean. I mean, I take it you and Pete Conrad go back to even have been roommates on an aircraft carrier. But talk about just the personal relationship that developed between the three of you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 305, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m not quite sure I know how to describe the relationship. It probably, over time, I guess these kind of relationships can develop. Pete and I could communicate without talking. We trusted each other. We thought alike. The same—we had—we reacted to the same stimuli the same. It was just—the thing that developed over the time we had complete trust in each other; and Al was brought along in that sense, too, over a period of time. But Pete and I had that going in.\\n\\n And we brought Al—Pete knew Al, of course, because he was a student of his when Pete was an instructor. So, that relationship may have been started. At the time, as a matter of fact, Al got on our crew because Pete went to Deke after C. C. was killed and asked for him. But—and it worked out great, because we three became very, very close, very good friends, which we still are today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 306, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think that—Deke—Okay. They need to switch us to a new tape. [Recorder turned off.]\n\nWe were talking about your friendship with Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, that you all spent so much time together in your training. And I’m curious whether you think Deke Slayton knew about that friendship and whether it played any role in—give me a sense of what you think played a role in Deke Slayton matching people up and how he assigned them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 307, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really don’t know. If anybody does, I’ve never heard the stories of what criteria he used, other than the fact that I’ve heard him say that in a group, you went through a selection process and you were selected to do these kinds of things. You were selected because you were qualified and you were professional. And he felt that because of those parameters that existed that we could work with anybody. And as it turned out, that’s probably true. But we would put aside personal differences, professional jealousies, whatever those negative parameters might be and do the job. And I think he was right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 308, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it a mystery how he matched people up in some ways?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 309, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I never knew how. I was just glad that we, the three of us, ended up the way we did. We were friends. If we weren’t, we became very good friends. And we are to this day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 310, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You know, that friendship and that closeness that you talked about, obviously it plays a role when you’re going through things like lightning striking your spacecraft. And as you said, you just innately know how to react and what each other would do. Let’s pick back up after, you know, you’re on your way to the Moon. What’s the three-day trip to get there like? I mean, is it anticipation? Is there—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 311, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. A good word. That’s precisely what it is. It’s three days of not doing a great deal, but the mission is all still in front of you. You’ve got that lunar module sitting out there on your nose, and I’m looking at that nuclear canister sitting out there that’s going to provide power to the ALSEP [Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package] packages and whatnot. And it’s full of anticipation. The Earth’s getting smaller, and the Moon’s getting bigger. And there’s not a lot of activities to do. You’re checking out the spacecraft and the guys had a chance to get in the lunar module and check it all out before we got there. But it’s a three-day period of the mission basically is all in front of you. And it’s anticipation really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 312, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are you going through a mental checklist of what it is you’re going to have to do later that’s so critical? I mean, are you—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 313, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 314, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 315, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. You live in the present. You follow the flight plan. And you flip the page to see what you’re supposed to do next. And we have checklists for everything we did, even how to go to the bathroom there’s a checklist!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 316, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 317, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 318, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Some people have described that not being very fun. That particular—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 319, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we’re human beings and we have to do those things. And there is a checklist to how to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 320, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s amazing. Talk a little bit about the feeling of being the command module pilot, closing that hatch, and being the one who flips the switch to send your two good friends on the way to the Moon. I mean, what’s that like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 321, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A release. If you knew those two guys, you’d be glad to get rid of them for 42 hours! I was all alone. It’s envy maybe, a little bit. The name of the game as far as I was concerned was to walk on the Moon. And at that time, I was relegated not to do that. And I had a job and a function to perform. And you—people, human beings have a great ability to rationalize their own importance I guess. And that’s the kinds of things you do. And I was happy for them, that they were going to go get to do that. Al Bean has subsequently made a painting, it’s called The Fantasy; and in his painting he says he could do whatever he wants to do with his paintings. And he’s got one of all three of us standing on the lunar surface." + }, + { + "turn_id": 322, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, how nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 323, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought that’s pretty neat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 324, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He’s a great painter. Do you—I’m going to go ahead and ask you about that issue of not going to the Moon, since it might come up later. And then I’m going to backtrack a little bit. But since you brought it up: how do you ever get over that disappointment? Or is it disappointment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 325, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, there wasn’t. At the time, it wasn’t a disappointment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 326, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because you thought you would go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 327, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You had—within this three-flight rotation, I wanted to stay in Apollo and have the opportunity to go back again. Pete and Al chose, because they had walked on the Moon, they’d go off and do different things. I still had 60 miles to go. And when I became the backup commander on 15, fully anticipating that I would rotate once again and be the commander on 18, well, we all know the story that 17 was the last one. At that time, we had—did not know that. If I had known at that time that I would not have the opportunity to fly again, I may have chosen what Al and Pete chose to do, to fly in Skylab. Because I wanted to fly again obviously. Well, you could tell: when there were no more flights, I left. But that’s the way I looked at that on Apollo 12, that I would have the opportunity to go a second time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 328, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you—I’ve read that you teased Gene Cernan about stealing your crewmate was Harrison [H.] Schmitt, Jack—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 329, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, we still play that game." + }, + { + "turn_id": 330, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, Jack Schmitt, the only geologist astronaut, you know, sometimes you read “the only scientist astronaut,” I’m sure you don’t like that when people say, “The only scientist in the—”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 331, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t bother me at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 332, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You all became scientists, I take it. But the only geologist—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 333, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, he was the only one with a Ph.D. at that time in geology. And—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 334, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you aware of the politics in terms of the finagling to get him on that last-minute flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 335, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh I—sure. Sure. When I discovered that 17 was going to be the last one, I wanted to keep the crew together obviously, because we had trained. And Gene and I have always had a lot of fun. After he crashed his helicopter, I knew he wasn’t going to get to fly it. But I wanted to keep the crew together, and I had an audience with Deke and Al Shepard and told them that I thought the right decision was to keep the crew together and let us fly 17. It lasted maybe a minute or two. They politely listened to what I had to say and the three-flight rotation held. With the exception that Jack took Joe [H.] Engle’s place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 336, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you know why, though, that there—I mean, you know, they bumped Joe Engle and let Jack Schmitt go. But do you, to this day, know why they wouldn’t bump Gene Cernan—as you said, especially considering he had had a helicopter crash in Florida—and not give you the chance to fly?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 337, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, he was the backup on 14. It was his turn to fly 17. And his book described—I think he in his book addresses that aspect of it very, very well in that particular section. And I only complained to Gene that he made one mistake. He said that we were equal at that time, and there was no way that we were equal!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 338, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because you had flown more." + }, + { + "turn_id": 339, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Aw, gee whiz. I was the backup commander on 15, in the lunar rover, the extended EVAs. Hell, give me a break!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 340, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your reaction at the time? I mean at the time—you know, you have 30 years to look back and some of the bitterness might be gone. But at the time, you had to be pretty angry." + }, + { + "turn_id": 341, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really angry. I respected what Al and Deke did. I felt sorry that Joe Engle had gotten bumped. I think in retrospect Gene even thinks today that the better decision may have been to keep the crew together. I don’t know. But I was disappointed, certainly. But I don’t think there was any anger there involved that, you know, or we’re adults. And we accept decisions like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 342, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, let’s go back to Apollo 12 for a little bit. And you’ve sent them off to the Moon. And Pete’s going to attempt this first pinpoint landing, because we all know that Neil’s landing was, you know, it was—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 343, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Somewhere." + }, + { + "turn_id": 344, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—it was somewhere. It was high drama, is what it was. And they didn’t want to do that again. They wanted to perfect this technique of the pinpoint landing. Could you see them land? Or did you see them after the fact? I mean, you’ve said it was partially your good eyesight. But you literally could tell where they landed at some point when—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 345, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I didn’t see them land at all. The way that came about is kind of unique in that we were very, very positive that we were going to do the right thing and be at the right place. And there was a reason for this pinpoint landing. If you look at the geological features later on in the Apollo Program, 13,000-ft mountains, Mount Hadley, rills, high plateaus, valleys, that that kind of accuracy must be attained to be able to land in those particular places. So, the Surveyor 3 spacecraft that had been there almost two years ahead of our landing was our target.\\n\\n And we were so confident that the procedures that had been generated to allow us to do that were going to work. And when I was able to track certain landmarks with a certain amount of precision and make our ephemeris—our orbital parameters—precisely known, and the fact that when I heard Pete call out that, you know, he had the Surveyor 3 crater. We had a crater there in the form of a snowman that we called that they were going to land very, very close to where they intended to land. Well, the next pass as we came over, I could sort of see the Surveyor 3 space—crater. Not the spacecraft at that time. But I could see the crater. I could see in the optics, in a section in the telescope, I could see the snowman, I could readily recognize the Surveyor 3 crater.\\n\\n And as I came over, there was this very bright spot—reflected light on the edge of that crater and a long shadow beyond it. The only thing that I could figure out that do that would be the lunar module. So, I said I had the lunar module. And it was that bright source of light and being in the approximate place that it was supposed to be, in this long shadow, that I didn’t recognize from anything else. And as I came over it, I looked down into the Surveyor 3 crater at the same time, I saw this reflected spot of light in the shadow of the crater. I assumed that had to be the Surveyor 3 spacecraft. I said so. Fortunately, I was correct!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 346, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there this—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 347, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If they hadn’t been there and I’d have been wrong, it would’ve been an embarrassing situation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 348, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there this sense of excitement, to be the one to report the pinpoint landing was a success? That you could tell that visually when you spotted it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 349, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I don’t think that I sensed that that was part of it. I just wanted to relay to the ground, before it ever got out, that we were successful in landing there. And the EVAs had been planned would be able to be carried out in a manner in which they were planned to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 350, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now they’re down on the Moon for 38 hours and you’re up there. And you can hear this Mission Control relay of the audio, so you can hear what they’re doing and hear—and I take it, sometimes you hear Pete Conrad humming. I guess he had this habit of humming while he worked?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 351, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Only when he was scared." + }, + { + "turn_id": 352, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really! Did you make that up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 353, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I sure did!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 354, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, that’ll go in the history book. “He was humming on the Moon because he was scared, according to Dick Gordon.” So, okay, you were joking. But you’re hearing them down there. What’s going through your mind? I mean, what are you doing up there? You know, I know you had things to do. But I just mean from an emotional standpoint, when you’re hearing them down there, what is the thought process that you have orbiting 60 miles up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 355, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Gee, I’m not sure I can recall that. I think that if I had a reaction to that other than being concerned about what I had to do, was the fact that we were going to have a very successful mission and things were going according to plan. You know, when he would say certain things with the ALSEP, and I heard the problem that Al was trying to get it out of the cask and this sort of thing, that I had a sense that their activities on the Moon were going to be successful and as planned. That was probably the only thing that I felt about it. You know, Pete emotes very well and you react to that. You get to know what he is thinking and doing at the time that those things are going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 356, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you also have the distinction, though, of being one of six men who get to be the only people, you know, who orbited the Moon alone. You know, that you’re completely by yourself. And what’s it like to be just completely alone in that vast void?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 357, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Wonderful. You don’t have to worry about anybody else. You don’t have to communicate. You don’t have to worry about pleasing anyone beside yourself. And there’s a lot of things that you have to do and accomplish. And it’s a moment of solitude. I look at it that we as fighter pilots, which most of us were, working in isolation in a lot of sense. I mean, we fly together and we do things like that. But we were alone. And I think that attitude, there may be a certain amount of comfort in isolation. But I enjoyed it.\\n\\n Never—never bothered me a bit. As a matter of fact, probably never even thought about being out of communications with anybody on Earth. Because when the Sun shines on the Moon, which it does half of it all the time, there are features that you can look at and see that you hadn’t seen before. You are busy doing those things. And not much time for reflection. I think you do most of the reflection later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 358, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, when you reflected later on thing—like the magnitude of the fact that this was really the first time that they set up a scientific station, because, you know, Neil and Buzz didn’t do that, and Pete and Al set up this—the first scientific station really on another world. I mean, did you reflect on that later—the significance of what you all did?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 359, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I think the significance of that, placing those experiments out there, I think, the real significance of it was those ALSEP packages were designed to last maybe a couple of years. And the stack 27, the nuclear device that provided the energy, lasted many, many years longer than that. Finally NASA just had to shut them down. Couldn’t afford, couldn’t take the time, and the data that was coming back, although it may be new, was probably very repetitive. I’m sure there’s data that ALSEP packages have sent back that have never been looked at. Been archived and never, ever been looked at!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 360, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s amazing it would have that long of a legacy, you’re right, when it was planned for two years. There’s some things about your all’s mission that to me, and maybe it’s being a woman, I don’t know, say a little bit about the culture of the time. And I had read about, you know, the little checklists that, like, Pete Conrad had on his cuff; and it had little Snoopy cartoons and little miniature Playboy pinups that reminded him to describe “the protuberances of the Moon.” And I’m really struck by how that just is such a sign that—such a thing then. And I mean, did you all have any sense of, “Boy, this is really a good old boys’ club and what a fun thing.” And that you could even do that. You know, political correctness has taken some of the fun out of things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 361, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I hate that word." + }, + { + "turn_id": 362, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 363, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There is no such thing as political correctness. That’s rubbish!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 364, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 365, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Keep that in. I think those things were done by the backup crew to have a little moment of levity, a little lightness in a tense situation, if you will, that got a little chuckle, a little reminder of, “Hey, life isn’t all that serious. Let’s have a little fun while we’re doing some of these things.” And I enjoyed it. The flight plan was full of it. We had Snoopy cartoons and everything; [Charles] Schultz did this, decorated our—the backup crew did all this. We never bothered with it. We were too busy doing other things, and they took the time to remind us of the “humanality” of the whole situation, if that’s a correct word." + }, + { + "turn_id": 366, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, I mean, it is. And did it have that effect of saying, “Don’t take everything so seriously.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 367, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it let you have a little chuckle every now and then. You know, that we’re doing something, you know, that’s serious, but there’s also a little time to lighten up and get a life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 368, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now since you all—you were the second Moon landing mission, you know, you knew—you didn’t have, I take it that tension of, you know, “Will the LM really work and blast off?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 369, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes, you do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 370, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you still have it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 371, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes, you do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 372, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, what was it like when they’re, you know, blasting off to—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 373, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Every flight’s a new ballgame. You can’t go back and reuse Apollo 11’s hardware. You know it worked, but you can’t use it. You’ve got your own to deal with. But being second is a very unique position. Nobody remembers who was second. I tell that to Buzz [Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr.] all the time. But it’s the truth. We were second in this, that, and the other thing. And—but that’s okay. I mean, that goes with that territory as well. I kid Gene Cernan a lot about this. He’s talking about being the last man on the Moon. I said, “Gene, you’ll not always be the last man on the Moon, but Neil will always be the first man in the Moon.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 374, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s hope we go back someday." + }, + { + "turn_id": 375, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We will." + }, + { + "turn_id": 376, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, they’re coming up to rendezvous with you. And what do you have to do to make that process happen, as the command module pilot? Walk us through the steps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 377, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s a reverse process that they’re going through. They’re the active vehicle when they come up off of liftoff and rendezvous. There’s all kinds of things that can happen. The command module has the ability to rescue the lunar module—provided that they get into what we call a clear lunar orbit, which meant ten miles. If they could get into orbit at least ten miles above the surface, we had the capability to go down and get them and pick them up. So, what you’re doing is, while they’re the active vehicle in a rendezvous and doing their ranging and range rates and figuring out all the procedures for rendezvous, you’re doing the same thing in reverse.\\n\\n You’re looking at them. You’re tracking them. You’re using the computer to calculate range and range rates and let the computer tell you what the thrust changes. The velocity changes at each particular step along the way, so—and it’s just a reverse sign. If theirs is a plus, yours is a minus, and those kind of things. So, in absolute terms, you compare the numbers with each other. Of course, the ground has an input as well. And that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re watching them approach and trying to solve the same rendezvous equations that they are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 378, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And are they flying into you? Or are you capturing them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 379, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, they’re flying. They’re coming up to my altitude and my velocity, and they’re matching my orbit at 60 miles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 380, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then when you do the actual capture—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 381, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The docking itself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 382, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The docking itself, who’s active for—I mean, who’s grabbing who?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 383, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The command module is. They come up and stationkeep at ten feet away or so. And there’s a docking target on the lunar module. I don’t know if we can find one around, but there is a cross, T-cross on the lunar module that the command module pilot, looking straight ahead out his window, aligns with and does—is the active participant in the docking itself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 384, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then you grab them, first try. No problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 385, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, the lug probe goes into a drogue and latches on. And that—when it latches on, you throw a switch and pull the lunar module right into the capture latches of the command module. You have what they call a hard dock." + }, + { + "turn_id": 386, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there—do you—could you feel that docking? You knew you had them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 387, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You could see it, and you could feel it. They’re not as—it happens very, very slow. It’s a slow maneuver, so you’re going maybe—probably less than a tenth of a foot a second. But you can feel a slight—you go—but you can look out and see the vehicle the whole time, and kind of go—as soon as it docks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 388, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How long after that docking is it before you, you know, open up and let them in? And I’ve read that you didn’t let them in right away because they were so dirty filthy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 389, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "True story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 390, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So—but how long of a delay? How—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 391, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it’s right—virtually right away. Once the docking takes place, you pressurize the tunnel between the two vehicles, and then you equalize that pressure between the command module and the tunnel. And at the same time as equalizing between a LM, so that all three sections are virtually at the same pressure, take the hatch out of the command module, stow it, and check the docking latches. Make sure that all the latches are connected. Make an electrical connection. And clear out the probe and all that, because the tunnel is completely open, and then when they open their hatch to transfer the lunar materials and whatever they need to bring back in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 392, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, you really wouldn’t let them in right away?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 393, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Nope. They were too dirty." + }, + { + "turn_id": 394, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us that story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 395, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s very simple. I had a clean command module, and I looked out in there and I couldn’t even see them! There was a big, black cloud. I thought Joe BFSTPLK had been along for the ride. But I said, “You know, this—you guys are going to just get all that dust and dirt inside the command module. You can’t come in until you take off all your clothes and put them in these bags.” And that’s what they did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 396, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, you made them strip naked?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 397, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were buck naked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 398, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 399, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first space streakers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 400, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the—did any dust come in with them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 401, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A little, probably. It’s—you know, in zero-g things tend to float around, and there’s circulation with the air. But they actually bagged up their suits, put them in bags, and handed them over. And I stowed them in the command module, and I flew them back home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 402, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, now the big event’s over. What’s that ride home like where, you know, it’s not anticipation anymore? It’s—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 403, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Different. Totally different than going out, you’re right. Three days of not much activity coming back, except for the barbican maneuver. And there’s certain navigational things to perform. But it’s not much going on. And—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 404, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is it a letdown?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 405, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Somewhat maybe. You still have a reentry to go through and everything. But it’s a lack of activity. I had a sense of, “Well, gee, it’s kind of boring.” Except, my job was better than theirs because I had some things to do on the way home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 406, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Al Bean really slept the whole way back?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 407, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think he did. I never saw him on the way back. He was in his sleeping bag under the couch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 408, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He was just tired." + }, + { + "turn_id": 409, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Must’ve been. Must’ve been." + }, + { + "turn_id": 410, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The—what’s reentry like? I mean, we don’t hear much about that. The focus is always on the glory of going to the Moon—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 411, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yeah. We had an event that—on the way back in, just before reentry, when we had the Sun go behind the Earth and it gave us a very awesome view of what we call a solar eclipse by the Earth. And somebody said, “Well, isn’t night that all the time?” And I said, “Well, yeah, it is.” But this was a spectacular sight when the Sun went behind the Earth and it—well, in reverse of a solar orbit by the Moon. But there was this flash of light and the atmosphere was totally illuminated for a crescent portion of the Earth, which we were able to obtain several photographs that. We actually ran out of the good Hasselblad film, so we used every remaining piece of film that we could find to capture that event. And we knew this was going to happen, so we anticipated that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 412, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What’s it like to look back at the Earth from so far away? What do—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 413, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good question. It’s quite, quite—it’s something to really reflect on. I think when you look at—let me put it this way. We have been asked a lot what we discovered when we went to the Moon. I think universally, collectively I should say, we probably—the correct answer and we’d probably say that, “We discovered the Earth.” And I think when you look at the Earth from a perspective of 240,000 miles away, we have a different perspective of the Earth. We have one, and, you know, you can change the scene with which you’re looking back. But from 240,000 miles away, it’s very beautiful.\\n\\n It portrays this great amount of fragility. A very delicate planet sitting out there in the blackest—it’s the blackest black you’ll ever see! It’s just devoid of any color whatsoever. And it’s been described like a Christmas tree ornament hanging out there. You can’t see how it’s suspended or anything. It’s—philosophically you could emote about it, I’m sure, for quite some time. But it is a startling picture to look at the Earth coming back from being around the Moon, as it comes back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 414, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is it a life-changing event to have even done what you did?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 415, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think so. It may be for some people. But I think, by and large, I look at it this way. I came back with the same stuff I left with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 416, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Reentry. The process of going as—becoming this fireball, to crash through the Earth’s atmosphere, and then say, “And then we’ll just hit the ocean.” What is that like? I mean, do you sense that you’re a fireball? Do—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 417, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yeah. Very much so. There’re various phases of flight that are dynamic, and there’s a lot of it, even in Earth orbit, that’s not dynamic. But the launches, the burns, the engine burns, changes in orbit, those are moments of dynamic activity that takes place. Certainly the reentry from lunar distances, at those velocities, is an extremely dynamic time. It’s over in a very short period of time, some, what? eight, eight and a half minutes to reenter. But the interesting thing, when you start, you want to make sure you’re at the right angle. And you’re navigating all the way back to make sure that you intersect this horizon at a depressed angle of six and a half degrees. The consequences of being more than a half degree off in either direction are not very wholesome. Talk about structural failures and skipping back out. So, those decisions are made and you’re very confident that the corrections have been made and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 418, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And are you making those? Or is Pete Conrad—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 419, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The ground is actually doing the navigating and giving you attitude or velocity changes to perform midcourse corrections." + }, + { + "turn_id": 420, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you’re performing them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 421, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But they’re keeping track all the way along. And if something perturbates your trajectory or you have to alter the landing point—say, there’s a big storm or something down there; you have to modify that—than they will navigate for you and give you those corrections to apply in a velocity vector. But once you start intersecting the atmosphere, you’re trading all this kinetic energy, this 25,000 mile an hour velocity, into heat that—into an ablative material that takes this kinetic energy and gets rid of it.\\n\\n So, it’s a slowing-down process; and it’s very dynamic. It’s very colorful. You know that things are happening very rapidly because you look back to where you’ve been. You can’t see where you’re going, but you can look back out the windows and see where you’ve been. And this corkscrew of green and reds and yellows and all this material burning off, you know something is happening." + }, + { + "turn_id": 422, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Does it—it doesn’t—does the temperature rise at all inside?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 423, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some. We prepared the spacecraft before reentry by cold-soaking it. Maybe got it down to, oh, I don’t know, maybe 60 degrees, something like that. And by the time we got on the lunar [?] surface, it may have soaked back through to 90 degrees, maybe. It’s not uncomfortable at all. You don’t notice it—thank God, you don’t notice it—during reentry!. But once that—once you get sub-circular, when you come back at 36,000 fps, that’s higher than orbital velocity. So, the spacecraft is pulling into the atmosphere as it’s coming in. And once you get sub-circular, which is something like 25, 26,000 fps, you know you’re captured.\\n\\n Now you start maneuvering the spacecraft to utilize the lift vector that it has to navigate to the precise landing point. So, now you’re watching the computer roll the vehicle to either correct for cross-range or downrange errors so that you can land and you’re sitting there monitoring it. It indicates—the computer will indicate the direction it’s supposed to go and you’ll watch the spacecraft perform that maneuver and go there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 424, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The, I know that you weren’t aware of the concerns that the lightning may have damaged, you know, your landing parachutes. But now that you know that that was a concern, did you notice any extra cheer going up when they deployed and it was clear you were going to splash down safely? You don’t remember any—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 425, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As far as we were concerned, it was just a normal recovery from normal distances." + }, + { + "turn_id": 426, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mission—you felt Mission Control reacted the same way they had when Neil and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 427, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn’t know how they reacted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 428, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 429, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was told, you know, maybe later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 430, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you hear them at all when you’re—or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 431, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I—no, I—they’re pretty quiet at that time because you’re talking to the helicopters, and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 432, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 433, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—the recovery forces that are around the vehicle. I’m sure when they saw the parachutes deploy properly, they were probably very relieved. I hope they were!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 434, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You said that nobody remembers who’s second. But—and we do tend to remember, you know, the tickertape parades that greeted Neil and Mike and Buzz. But what was the reception when you were finally finished all your reports and got out of quarantine? What was the reception?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 435, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was—hell, I don’t know how to express it. They—we were here at the [Manned Spacecraft] Center [Houston, Texas]. It was, you know, they gathered around when we got out and were glad to see us out. And they had a little homecoming going on. But we were sent by President Nixon on a around-the-world tour that lasted about 42 days with our wives and people from the State Department and from NASA. We visited something like 20 countries, starting with South America, went to Europe, Africa, Asia.\\n\\n It was very—that was a tough job, doing all that sort of thing, because you were representing your country in that regard, meeting heads of States in all these places, dealing with heads of States and the Ambassador staff. It was an interesting time, which I’d never had the opportunity obviously to do that before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 436, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I get that sense the—that, you know, 30 years later people may not remember who was second as much. But at the time, there was still a real sense of excitement surrounding Apollo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 437, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so. At that time, it—certainly the next flight, Apollo 13, had a little bit of excitement to it and then it probably started to fall off a little bit. You know, Americans are an interesting group of people. Once they’ve accomplished something, they tend to press on and go and do something else. James Michener addresses this very, very well in his book Space when he talks about the challenges that we have experienced during a Depression, during World War 2, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, that once we accomplish certain things, we tend to put it behind us and just go ahead and look into the future, see what else is out there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 438, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you’ve accomplished this. But you still had this other goal of, as you say, going the last 60 miles. So, I would imagine fairly soon you’re assigned as the backup crew to Apollo 15? And you start that training process?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 439, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As soon as we got back from that world tour." + }, + { + "turn_id": 440, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So, you’re in training. And Jack Schmitt is going to be your—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 441, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Lunar module pilot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 442, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—lunar module pilot. And I’ve read that in the training with him, that at one point, and you—I want you to tell this story, and you’ve got that little grin on your face. But that a simulation guy decides he’s going to, like, make your equipment fail so that Jack will have to fly and land on the Moon. And that—what did—tell the story as you remember it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 443, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Did Jack land?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 444, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You tell the story!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 445, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I didn’t—I wasn’t going to let them mess me up like that. So, I just traded places with Jack and landed from his side." + }, + { + "turn_id": 446, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You just pushed him out of the way?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 447, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, we just kind of said, “Jack, I want to trade places with you.” So, we just did that and then I flipped the bird at the simulation people as I left the building." + }, + { + "turn_id": 448, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were angry." + }, + { + "turn_id": 449, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I wasn’t angry." + }, + { + "turn_id": 450, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Someone else tells the story that you got—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 451, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t get angry. I get even!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 452, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How’d you get even? You landed it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 453, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well—No, that’s kind of a—that’s what—I think Jack put the Sim people up to it, because it wasn’t a Sim back with Houston. It was just done locally at the Cape. And I think Jack Schmitt went to those guys and tried to set me up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 454, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He never confirmed that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 455, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But we—you know, they in the duplication of controls, with the exception of rate of descent switch, is almost either side can utilize the navigational equipment and perform those things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 456, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, in the summer of 1970, you’re in training still as a backup to Apollo 15, correct? And you get the word that Apollo 18’s been canceled. And that’s what you’re banking on as being the your chance to be prime." + }, + { + "turn_id": 457, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Somewhere along in that timeframe, yes. I don’t recall the exact dates or the sequence of when I did learn that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 458, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Or do you even know where you were when you heard it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 459, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I have no idea." + }, + { + "turn_id": 460, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you know your reaction." + }, + { + "turn_id": 461, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I said, “How the hell am I going to get to fly 17?” That was my reaction." + }, + { + "turn_id": 462, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was—you immediately thought, “I’ve got to angle for that last flight.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 463, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I didn’t try to angle. I said, “I want to fly 17!” They really—with Deke Slayton, there wasn’t much angling going on that we made!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 464, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do—when Apollo 15 flew and you knew that prime crew—one of the things that came out of Apollo 15, and it’s unfair that it’s remembered for this, is the stamp affair. You know, and the fact that it was later determined that the guys took these stamps along and, you know, “We’re going to make some money off selling these stamp covers that had been to the Moon.” Do you remember what your reaction was when that came out and that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 465, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was long gone. I had left the Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 466, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had left because you were—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 467, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wasn’t here. I’d retired when that came out. I had no idea that that was going on. As a matter of fact, as I—Andy Chaikin tells me I’m mistaken about this, but Dave came to me some time later on, in fact, just before they were going to fly, and said that there were First Day covers in the safe at the crew quarters that they had signed but they’d left them in the safe. And he said, you know, “If anything happens to us during the flight, take these First Day covers”—I don’t know how many were there or anything—“take them and give them back to the families.” And I said, “Of course.” And I didn’t think anything more of it.\\n\\n I thought those were the stamp—were the First Day covers that they had taken. Andy tells me that that’s incorrect. And I don’t know how he found out. But there were those in the safe that apparently that—there were others that they decided that morning I guess, or I don’t know when, but they were going to take them all on with the flight. And if they had declared those being onboard in their personal preference kits, nothing would have ever been said about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 468, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But what about the sense of, you know, as one of the proud group of astronauts—I mean, I guess the sense at the time in the media was just shock that, you know, you all could do no wrong. You were America’s golden boys. And the sense—do you remember having a personal reaction to the first time there was, like, negative publicity about, you know, some astronauts? I mean, did that make—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 469, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I felt—probably felt sorry for the crew—Dave [David R. Scott], Jim [James B. Irwin], and Al [Alfred M. Worden]—in the fact that their flight was—probably is and will be probably remembered for that little caper and not the great success that they had. That was probably, arguably could have been the one of the best missions that were flown to the Moon in terms of scientific return.\\n\\n They did a tremendous job with the first flight of the rover and the lunar stay, the three EVAs, the arena, the area that they went. And I just think it’s a bloody damn shame that they did that to themselves. What their motivations were, I have no idea. It’s obvious that they regret it. But that—Apollo 15 will, you brought it up, will be remembered that way and not the great accomplishments that that crew performed. [Recorder turned off.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 470, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So, you’ve been on the backup crew for Apollo 15. And you state you—during that process, you know that Apollo 18’s been canceled and that you’re not going to fly again. But I guess you stay active—an active astronaut—through Apollo 15, obviously. Because if there’s any problem with somebody at the last minute, you could wind up flying. But then how quickly—how soon after that do you retire from NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 471, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let’s see. 15 flew in, what? July of ’71. I believe that’s correct. And then after 15 had flown their flight, I went back and assumed responsibility for the Office in terms of advanced projects and worked on that on an original design of the Orbiter for six months." + }, + { + "turn_id": 472, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how long did you have your duties as Head of the Apollo Branch in the Astronaut Office?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 473, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Until I retired." + }, + { + "turn_id": 474, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And Chief—Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 475, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From that—from the end of Apollo 15 for that next six-month period until I retired in January of ’72." + }, + { + "turn_id": 476, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, January of ’72 you retired. And there was already work being done on the Orbiter and the Shuttle Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 477, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Original designs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 478, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what did you think of the Shuttle Program initially? What was your first reaction when you said, “We’re going to build this space plane. And it’s going to be able to land and take off and be reused again.” What was your initial—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 479, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I thought that was the first logical first step to try and find a vehicle you can reuse. Everything we’d flown up until that time was space hardware and space junk, really. We dumped the boosters in the ocean or wherever they went. Everything that we flew could not be ever used again, except for displays in museums! So, I anticipated that that was a very interesting prospect. When we first started out, we were going to reuse the booster. We were going to fly them back and put somebody in them!\\n\\n And we were going to fly the boosters back and land to be reused. The Orbiter itself was going to be reused. And the arguments that we had, or the discussions, I should say, because really that’s what they were, was whether this Orbiter was going to have engines on it to begin with, before it first came—before its first flight. Whether or not it was going to have ejection seats. All of these things were being discussed and evaluated to the point that the boosters were even going to be manned and flown back. How would you like to have been that pilot? And so, these things were all in discussions in that six-month period. Those are the kinds of things that we looked at and tried to simulate different landing aspects. People were making tape for the simulators that would come back and land as a glider." + }, + { + "turn_id": 480, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your specific—I mean, do you remember specific involvements that you had in those early days of the Shuttle Program? Just in that short period of time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 481, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mostly management meetings and discussions about how we were going to build it, how we were going to do it. Flying some of the early simulations, we found that we could’ve flown—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 482, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You personally flew some early simulations of the Shuttle?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 483, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We found out in those days that we could not fly the vehicle. It was unstable. The—that it had to be flown and controlled automatically by computers. That there was a certain—there’s an aerodynamic quality that—in the spacecraft that you can actually simulate with airplanes by changing the center of gravity. It’ll give you those same kinds of characteristics. But we learned those things in simulation. We tried to fly it all the way back. As pilots, we wanted to be in control of course; we always were, and proven wrong a lot of times that it’s just beyond your capability. And this is what the thing—some of the things that we learned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 484, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why, after just six months of doing that, why the decision to retire? Why not stick it out like John [W.] Young? And, you know—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 485, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I’m not John Young. John Young could stick it out. I had an opportunity to do something else. A good friend of mine here in Houston, John Meekham, owned the New Orleans Saints. And we met—well, I’d known John many, many years. As a matter of fact, raced his boats for him; and we became friends. And we met, I forget exactly when, along in the end—near the end of 1971 at a reception that President Nixon had for race car drivers. USAC and NASCAR and those. He had the people that were involved in that, we had become friends with as well, so the Apollo 12 crew we’re lifetime members of USAC. And those people that knew that had invited us back to the White House for a reception for the race car drivers.\\n\\n And at that time, John approached me and asked if I’d be interested in going to New Orleans and working for him over there with the football team. I didn’t respond, obviously, right away but reflected upon it. I had 22 years of military service. I could retire from the Navy. I looked down the road to flights and there weren’t anymore. The three Skylab flights were assigned. The ASTP [Apollo Soyuz Test Project] missions were all assigned. So, beyond that, and that was the 1975 timeframe, beyond that, there weren’t anymore flights. And I was—I came here to fly. I had the opportunity to fly twice, and I saw no additional opportunities to fly. The good Lord only knew when Orbiter was going to fly, and it wasn’t until 1981! And I decided that I needed to do something else." + }, + { + "turn_id": 486, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Still a Saints fan?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 487, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can follow them. I’m not sure what—if I’m a fan. Losing is agony." + }, + { + "turn_id": 488, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The—so, you had retired before Apollo 17. Or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 489, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I retired before 16." + }, + { + "turn_id": 490, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, but you went back to watch Apollo 17? I’ve read that you were at the Kennedy—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 491, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 492, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—Space Center. Correct. What were you feelings? Reflecting on—this was a flight you had fought hard, I mean, you had fought really hard to get onto that flight, and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 493, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All those—that emotion’s gone and over with, you know. There’s nothing—you can’t go back and create anything. I just enjoyed being there and taking friends. Took the Meekhams as my guest to watch the launch. It was the first night launch of the Saturn V; and in spite of all the delays and waiting until about midnight for 17 to fly, it was just an—I enjoyed it. It was very spectacular to see. And any emotion that I had about 17, they were long gone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 494, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there the emotions, though, of just as an astronaut, you know, as a space explorer, was there emotion of knowing it was the last one? For anyone?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 495, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think there’s a certain amount of regret. I wish they had continued the Program through 20, which they had originally intended to do. They had—but I can’t argue with the decision. The decision was a good one, an appropriate one at the time. The risk-to-reward was going up. The risks were always there the same. The rewards were diminishing. The amount of scientific information and what we learned was minimal. I shouldn’t say “minimal.” But in a sense that it was repetitive and we weren’t gaining much more. We would have if we’d have landed on the back side of the Moon; that would’ve been a totally different story.\\n\\n But the Program ended. And probably appropriately so, because it allowed us then to look at Skylab. And that allowed us then to close the loop. The Cold War was over in 1975. Lo and behold! we have a joint mission with the Soviet Union. Two cosmonauts and three astronauts; joint operations in orbit. Full circle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 496, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you follow that flight closely?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 497, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 498, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you excited that Deke Slayton finally got to fly?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 499, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. If any—nobody deserves to fly in this business. But if anybody does, Deke Slayton was the one to have deserved to have flown." + }, + { + "turn_id": 500, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, there—you know, there’s not, like—because Deke controlled all your fates for so long, you could easily have developed either resentment toward him or what you seem to have developed, which is respect and friendship. I mean, I take it that no—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 501, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can’t imagine anybody developing a resentment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 502, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don’t think anybody has, which is amazing considering he controlled your fates, really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 503, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But we—that was an accepted—He was the boss. And when it—you know, people—a lot of people don’t understand this. When you’re in the military, you go, “Aye, aye, sir.” And you carry out your orders. That’s the culture. Thank God, it’s the culture!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 504, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 505, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I just feel that there—people felt that Deke was not—well, I shouldn’t say that. He was not treated improperly. But this—the decision could’ve gone totally the other way about his flying on Mercury. It didn’t, and he went through a lot of trouble and tribulations to get back on flight status, even though they probably would never have allowed him to fly alone. He was not about to, even though he was a Mercury astronaut, to be the commander of that [ASTP] flight. But Deke deserved to fly; and thank God, he had the opportunity to do so!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 506, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The—you know, you mentioned that you followed the Apollo-Soyuz. Were you struck at the time at just how far the circle had come?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 507, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so. I think so. Matter of fact, my command module pilot was a command module pilot on ASTP. Vance [D.] Brand was on my backup crew on 15, and it gave Vance an opportunity. I was glad to see that he had the opportunity to fly as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 508, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you still follow the space program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 509, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not to the detail, certainly, but yeah. I know what they’re doing, and what they’re not doing, and what’s going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 510, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think they’re not doing that they should be doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 511, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they’re not doing the things they should be doing because they can’t. The budget’s not there. The leadership’s not there. You know, beyond ISS, and I anticipate some problems along that one as well, but what’s beyond the International Space Station? Who’s out there challenging humankind to go further and return to the Moon? Or go to Mars?\\n\\n All of these things should be happening. I—the disappointment I have, we haven’t been back to the lunar surface since 1972. That’s a disgrace! And we just don’t—the culture is not the same as it was in the ’60s. It just doesn’t exist. It probably never will be replicated. And we’re just going to have to go along at the pace that we’re going along. And in some senses, I don’t think to point fingers, but the politics and the economics of the situation have probably—and the will of the American people have probably dictated that we are where we are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 512, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you compare the NASA of today with the NASA of your time, what stands out at you as the greatest contrast, greatest disappointments, greatest improvements? I mean, I don’t know if you know enough about the NASA organization—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 513, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that’s probably a true statement, Catherine. I probably don’t know enough about the NASA of today to make that comparison. The NASA of today is not the NASA of the ’60s. The leadership is not the same. The risk takers are not there. Can you imagine going to the Moon today with one computer? I can’t. And I don’t think anybody here could look at it and think of it in that way.\\n\\n We were one of two things. Either we were very good or we were very, very lucky in being able to accomplish those missions. But there was a Cold War. There were risk takers. There were people willing to take those risks, willing to make those management decisions and assume those responsibilities for their decisions. We don’t have that today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 514, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why do you think not? I mean, why—do you think made it possible then? Was it just the race with the Soviets?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 515, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think probably a great deal of it was the Cold War. It was the inspiration that young President John Kennedy gave. You know, he started—had rough times starting out behind, trying to find something to catch up. The Berlin Wall going up in his Presidency. The Cuban Crisis. This country needed a shot in the arm. Think about the 1960s. Vietnam. Riots. Campus unrest situations. Woodstock. I mean, this country was a bloody mess! And it was the one thing that gave it somewhat of a shot in the arm; and it was a totally different time and place in history." + }, + { + "turn_id": 516, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You all were the bright spot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 517, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we hoped that we gave people something to look up to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 518, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any stories that you think are worth telling that I didn’t know to ask you about? Because I can’t, you know, all the—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 519, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m impressed with the research you’ve done. I think you’ve done pretty well. I probably said more than I should. But I don’t care!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 520, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, no, no. Any—let me just have you reflect on a couple of key figures from this: Chris Kraft, just your reflect—thoughts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 521, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "His nickname was “the Teacher.” And he was good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 522, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 523, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was one of those rare individuals. He and Bob Gilruth and Wernher von Braun; and those people came along at a very, very unique time in our history. And their contributions are very significant." + }, + { + "turn_id": 524, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Gene Kranz." + }, + { + "turn_id": 525, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Gung-ho. All the way. A tiger by the tail." + }, + { + "turn_id": 526, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about some of the NASA Administrators of your time, like Jim Webb and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 527, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Jim, we respected. If it hadn’t been for Jim Webb and his acumen in the political arena, this would never have been done. And in particular after the Apollo 1 fire.\\n\\n Other leadership, I think a lot of respect I have for Dr. [George E.] Mueller, who if he had not made the decision for the all-up testing—don’t test these things; save missiles; put them all together and go for it—saved us a tremendous amount of time with the Saturn V and its development.\\n\\n There are other people of industry. Lee Evans in Grumman. McDonell’s for the Mercury and Gemini. The—Harrison Storms with North American and with the Apollo command and service module. All these people, and many, many more, just tremendous, great contributors to the—Bob Gilruth was one of my very favorites." + }, + { + "turn_id": 528, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why? Just because of his leadership and his—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 529, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "His leadership. You bet. His vision. He and Wernher von Braun were visionaries in this game." + }, + { + "turn_id": 530, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How do you want to be remembered in terms of your NASA career?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 531, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A contributor." + }, + { + "turn_id": 532, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Who would have liked to have gone the last 60 miles?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 533, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes, indeed!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 534, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Well, thank you very much for sharing all your stories." + }, + { + "turn_id": 535, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 536, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We really appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 537, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard F. Gordon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Enjoyed it." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "oral-history-at-the-national-archives-00041", + "metadata": { + "interviewee_name": "Brenda Kepley", + "description": "Brenda Kepley began her 42-year National Archives career as a typist at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston in 1971. In 1976 she transferred to Washington, DC to participate in the Archivist’s Training Program in the Office of Presidential Libraries. Upon completing the program she was assigned to the Central Research Room as a consultant. Later she worked as a reference archivist in the Old Military Branch, in the Records Relocation Branch, and in the Archives I Records Branch. She also served as an instructor for the Modern Archives Institute. In her oral history she talks about her work processing, rehousing, and digitizing records; coordinating volunteers for reformatting projects, such as the Freedmen's Bureau Project; the move to the National Archives at College Park, MD; and more.", + "file_url": "https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/oral-history-interview-with-brenda-kepley.pdf", + "collection_url": "https://www.archives.gov/about/history/oral-history-at-the-national-archives", + "original_file_name": "oral-history-interview-with-brenda-kepley.pdf", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04 22:30:16", + "publisher": "U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION", + "date": "January 25, 2024" + }, + "broad_source": "nara", + "collection": "oral_history_at_the_national_archives", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Stephanie Reynolds" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Brenda Kepley" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, I've got the recording started. I just want to thank you again for participating in this National Archives Oral History Project. We're documenting the history of the agency by preserving firsthand accounts. My name is Stephanie Reynolds, and I'm based out of our National Archives facility in Denver, Colorado. And I'm assisting the agency historian, Jessie Kratz, with these interviews. Today is Thursday, January 25th, 2024. And I'm speaking with Brenda Beasley Kepley. Okay, Brenda, just to get us started, could you tell me a little bit about your background and where you're from?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'm from the Boston area. I grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts and hadn't really ventured too far afield until I moved down to Washington. I graduated from Regis College, which is a small, all-girls Catholic college just outside of Boston. I was a day-student, so I never lived away from home. It was a good education. It's still there. It's now co-ed, but I'm proud of them. I graduated in 1971. I was a sociology/political science major. I tried student teaching. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I didn't grow up wanting to be an archivist. I hardly knew what an archivist was. But anyway, by luck, I was literally knocking on doors looking for jobs. Arlington is very close to Trapelo Road in Waltham—so I went over there. I knew there was a federal facility over there. I believe there used to be a Corps of Engineers facility. I ended up going into the Records Center, which I really didn't know at the time. If you walk in the center door, you turn left and the reception window for the Records Center staff was there, and turn right, and the Kennedy Library Offices were there. And believe me, it was just a warehouse, as you know Records Centers are just warehouses. But I'm right-handed, so I turned right. I didn't know about the Library at the time. But long story short, somebody came out and talked to me, and again, I was nervous as heck. And they said, \"Well, if you go into Boston and take a typing exam, we'll see what we can do.\" They needed somebody to sit at that receptionist desk. And so I went in the next day or so. I went into the federal building in Boston, failed the typing test, and was devastated. [LAUGHS] I had never taken a typing test in my life or a typing class. But the Library staff said, \"Alright, don't worry. Just go take it again.\" And I just barely made 40 words a minute. That's 1971. I think, in order to get entry level anything in the federal government, you had to take a typing test. And, you know, things have changed. But anyway . . . I did, and I ended up being hired as a GS-3 Clerk-Typist at the Kennedy Library, which was just amazing. I mean, I grew up in Boston. John Kennedy was our Senator and Representative. I grew up the daughter of an FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt] Democrat–and it's just the whole aura of that time. I know it's the same story . . . you know where you were when you heard the news that Kennedy was assassinated. I was sitting in a freshman high school class, and the nun came in and announced [Kennedy’s assassination]. And we were all dismissed to go home. So walking in and being hired as a clerk- typist for what was the John F. Kennedy Library was amazing. After the assassination, the Library staff had worked with the Kennedy Administration’s records at the Archives building in DC. Immediately after President Kennedy was assassinated, Kennedy administration records were brought quickly to the National Archives Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The staff that eventually moved to Waltham was working on the records until, I think, about 1969, when the records and the staff moved to the records center in Waltham. The permanent I. M. Pei-designed building for the Kennedy Library was not built until, I think, 1981. I mean, it was a long time. So I worked in the records center. I started as a clerk-typist, and I transcribed oral history interviews. I think I mentioned that to you. I had the earphones, reel-to- reel tape recordings, and a foot pedal! I guess things have changed! This is where I met some of the first mentors that helped to shape my career. John Stewart was the Acting Director. John, Bill Moss, and Larry Hackman conducted most of the oral history interviews. Larry Hackman became the State Archivist of New York in Albany, and he came back to the Archives to be head of the NHPRC [National Historical Publications and Records Commission]. He ended up being Director of the Truman Library. Larry conducted many of the domestic policy interviews. Bill Moss, who was a historian, did most of the interviews regarding foreign policy. Megan Desnoyers, a superb archivist, was a wonderful mentor to me. They were all mentors. They really were. And I went from being a clerk-typist to a technician and working with Bill Moss and Megan on processing the President's Office Files and declassification of foreign policy records. And again, this is a young woman who grew up in that era. To think that I was working with the President's files and seeing his notes and doodles and signatures, it was just . . . ! But it was all luck. It was nothing I earned. It was just all luck, because I turned right. But, I still think that it was just remarkable and how fortunate I was. I started at the Kennedy Library on November 22nd, 1971. November 22nd is the anniversary of the President's death. So that said something. And I walked in the door, literally, with the newly appointed Director, appointed by the family, Dan Fenn, who was just another wonderful person. And I was just in awe of all of their knowledge and their professionalism and the—you know, I was 21. And I just never met people that smart or that articulate or that devoted. And they were professionals. Yeah, they had an admiration for the Kennedy administration, but they were professionals. They made hard choices about what needed to be done. And then after Robert Kennedy's assassination, there was more of a sense that they had to tell the story of that time. Roberta Greene also worked in DC doing a lot of the Robert Kennedy oral history interviews, and I worked with her just a little bit. She was another passionate person who happened to be friends with President Biden's first wife, Neilia. And so there was this connection of that time. And there was a real passion and a real commitment. I worked at the Library for about five years. Dan Fenn’s primary role was working with the family and the City of Cambridge and the City of Boston to get the new building built. Again, we were just in the warehouse. It wasn't glamorous. But his job was to get the building built. Once presidential libraries are established and staffed, there is not much mobility or advancement. Although I loved the Library, and I'm a New Englander, I felt I needed to explore and grow. I've been in DC now for a long time. But New England and Boston are still my loves and to leave was very, very hard. Positions at the Library were already filled. There was no place to go; there was no place to grow. And the libraries, I think, are like that. They are set up. They're staffed. And people end up staying there, most of them—that's a generality. But anyway, there was no place for me to go [or for] other techs that were with me. It's a small unit, you know. So Bill Moss and Megan and Larry, they all kind of said, \"Well, if you want to develop . . .\" I mean, I was discovering this world of archives. At the same time, I didn't really have a sense of what they did. But, you know, the longer I was there, they were saying, \"Well, if you really want to pursue this, then you really have to go to DC.\" And it was a hard decision to leave everything that I knew and loved, but I ended up applying. At that time, new hires, especially new hires in the Archivist series, came through the Office of Presidential Libraries, because with the end of each administration, there was a need to staff a new Presidential Library. And so they had the Archival Development Program, and they had the training program. So basically, I applied to the Office of Presidential Libraries into the Archival Training Program. And so I was eventually hired to go through that, and that's how I came down to DC." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that training program specific to the Presidential Libraries, or was it kind of generic?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The end goal was that you were going to go to a Presidential Library. Many of the archivists who worked with the federal records in the National Archives Building came through the Presidential Libraries’ training program. They were the Office that hosted the training program. I think, by the time I was going down there, you could go to the Nixon Library, or they also filtered into the National Archives staff in DC, which at that point, there was only one building. But it was mainly to staff the Presidential Libraries. They had the training program, and it was one or two years. And you went through rotations in various units of the Archives— out in the Records Center in Suitland. The rotations gave you a sense of the National Archives. And that's what, for me—I didn't have a sense of the National Archives. I knew about the Presidential Libraries, but I didn't have a sense of the National Archives or what it had. And that's when I started to see the different records and the different opportunities, I guess, or the different units, you know—motion pictures, still pictures, cartographic, old military, modern military, diplomatic records, all of that. So that's how I got into that training program, that I got to see really what the National Archives had beyond the Kennedy Library or the Presidential Libraries. It was much, much more than that. But Presidential Libraries were coordinating the training program then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have to apply for that or how did you get in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. It was a promotion. I was hired as a GS-3, but at that time, I got into the [Archives] Technician series at the Kennedy Library. That's when I was working on the processing and the national security files. But to get this transfer, again, my mentors at the library were saying you had to apply. It was a promotion to a GS-7, Archivist Trainee. But it was a different series at that point." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Going back to the JFK [John F. Kennedy] Library, when you were there—you started on November 22nd—were they having any sort of, like, a commemoration or anything at the library?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was [like] any other day. I mean, I'm sure the staff, whom I didn't know then and see, were probably talking about it back there, but way, way back in the stacks. But I wasn't part of that. It was just ironic, that's all, that I started on November 22nd. And I walked in. I was the lowest person there, GS-3, and I walked in with the new Director, who was jovial and happy and a wonderful man. He died a couple years ago at the age of 98 or 99. [CROSS-TALKING] He had been on the President's staff. You know, he wasn't in the news all the time, but he ended up being the Director and appointed by the family. The Library Directors, at least at that point, were usually recommended and appointed by the family, so he had a very close relationship with Jackie Kennedy. But he was also a professor at the Harvard Business School and did that all the time that I was there. As I said, these were smart people! I had never . . . . I'm a working- class girl, you know. And I had never seen or been around . . . I think that's what attracted me to this world is just the knowledge that a lot of these people had. And they didn't lord it over you or say how smart they were. They just were, because they were steeped in—the people doing the oral history—they were doing a lot of study. I mean, this is me. I don't know anything. But they were interviewing the highest level of staff in the Kennedy administration or in Bobby Kennedy's campaign. I mean, these were people that were in the news all the time. And so the interviewers had to know their stuff, and they did know this stuff. And, oddly enough, I have a copy of very lengthy—you know, a couple of inches thick— oral history interview of that first group of managers of the Kennedy Library, and they're talking about this very thing: what it was like to be in DC and be in the training program and, all of a sudden, something tragic happens, and they have to begin to make sense of what to do with all the records. And so there are interviews of Dan Fenn and John Stewart and Larry Hackman and Bill Moss and others who were working with Dan Reed, head of the Office of Presidential Libraries and . . . what it meant, what it was like to try to establish the Kennedy Library and respect the records and lives of two assassinated brothers, and what it must have been like when Robert Kennedy was killed on top of dealing with the first. But they have done an oral history for the Kennedy Library and for the National Archives, you know. But I have a copy of that, and it's quite long. So they talk about all of their work trying to establish the library and the rules and the, well, emotions of that. I was just a 21-year-old just walking in, and I didn't know anything about any of this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you were transcribing some of these interviews?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. Yeah, yeah. With earphones, you know. They're taped. I don't know how you do it now, but we had reel-to-reel tape and a pedal on the floor that you had to stop, and I would type it. I remember Larry Hackman's handwriting was just awful, but I got to figure out how to read it. They had yellow legal-pad notes of their questions, and he would ask me before he went on the interview to type up his questions, because he just had them all scribbled and stuff. But, it was fun. The technology is very different now. It was reel-to-reel tape that I would stop and start when I couldn't understand the words. And I don't know what you do with \"Ahs\" and [LAUGHS] all of that, but it was very different technology." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, right. Yeah. Are there any interviews that really stick out in your mind?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I don't remember that. With that level of interview, it's like you're in the room, you know. I was just an eavesdropper. [It was like] I was in the room with these guys who were talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis or something. I mean, I think I was just . . . I don't know . . sappy and in awe. I'm not a historian. But it was like you were in the room with that level. And the other thing—and I don't know, I was asking my husband—I don't know when “oral history” started, but I think during this time, it was becoming a very normal part of academia. I mean, Don Ritchie, who was the Assistant Historian of the Senate, was very active in the Oral History Association. Bill Moss, who I worked with, was also very, very active in the Oral History Association. And they wrote manuals on how to do this. But I don't really know if the Oral History Association still exists. I think it's a valuable tool because it's very personal, you know, for historians. I have no illusion that anybody's going to look at this [LAUGHS], but for historians who are trying to get a sense of the time, I think it was then a very routine thing to do. And the hard thing was getting some of these people who were very, very busy and the egos are very high to sit down and talk. So the skill of the interviewer was probably, you know—you had to have the knowledge, too, but you had to be able to read the person and say, \"Alright, this is maybe too much today\" or something. And I'm sure many of them happened over several weeks. I mean, they had so many aspects of their interviews that they would have to talk about. I'm sure it didn't happen in one day, but . . . no, I don't remember any. [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Did you ever get a chance to see or meet any of the Kennedy family members?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Well, on the staff at the time—not the family—[was] Dave Powers, who was a good friend of the . . . I mean, from Charlestown. And he was, you know, a sidekick and told jokes. He was not a policy guy, but he was on the staff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went back for the dedication, when the building was finally dedicated, to be there and help with . . . I don't know . . . invitations or something. They let me go back. And the Kennedy family was there, so I was there at the dedication of the new building on Columbia Point in Boston Harbor. But no, I never really met them. But, I have to say I was a fan. So, that's alright. [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I could see being in awe when you walk in there and you're working on some of those papers and you're transcribing interviews and, you know . . . . It's history at your fingertips." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, because it was recent history. It wasn't 50 years later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Eight years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Even in 1971, it was very recent. And as I said, the Robert Kennedy assassination just added to what they had to handle. How do you handle, especially, the more personal records of assassinated men? You know, it was a trauma for that period of time in our history. But yeah, there is a little bit of . . . star . . . what is it? What is the word—you're caught up in the names and, you know, you're working with the President's records. I mean, how cool is that? I mean, yeah, and there was a lot of that going on with me. I know that I was just like . . . I couldn't believe it. It was all luck. It was not skill. It was luck. And as I said, the mentors that I had . . . . Mentors are so important and, later on in my career, I tried to be at least a little bit of a mentor to other people. But that was how I got into the National Archives. And that's pretty cool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Yes, I think so! Yeah. And so when you moved to the DC area, were you then working at AI? [CROSS-TALKING]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, that was the only building. There was no AII. [LAUGHS] So there was Archives I. Well, it wasn't even called that. It was the National Archives Building. The Records Center in Suitland was there, but this was the National Archives Building. And again, it's just like, I must have been very stupid. I know I am, but here I was now in the National Archives Building . . . . I got through the Archivist Training Program, where you did rotations. I don't know how they're training archivists now, but that model of doing rotations in different units of the building so you get a sense of different kinds of records and different functions and different tasks, reference versus processing versus conservation techniques or holdings maintenance—they didn't even call it holdings maintenance then—but that model, it moved out of the responsibility of the Office of Presidential Libraries into a more universal training program for archivists. I don't know how they do it now with new archivists, but I think it was so very valuable to learn. And it was also, alright, they’re looking at you and you’re looking at them and the different units and what you're like or are you’re good at this or are you good at that, you know. I don't know how they do it now. But that model was very, very valuable and that was like a year or two of going through . . . . The rotations were three or four months each. And so, you know, you got a sense of working in the different units, and you got to see the records. That's when I got to see the records that were in the real National Archives. That's when I got a sense of this is more than just the Presidential Libraries. It's way more. But, later on, I always said in my career that, \"Yeah, I got to work with the records of a President,\" and that was pretty cool. The records that I worked with later were not that. They were the bureaucratic, boring sometimes, records of federal agencies, and I always said some of them are deadly dull and just, \"Why? Why? Why are we keeping this?\" [LAUGHS] But others were just gems, but they don't have the President's signature on it. They had a soldier's signature on them, or a widow’s, you know. But I mean, that's when I got the sense of the breadth of what federal records are. It's those rotations and then my work after that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were done with that, did you have the choice to go where you wanted to go, or did they assign you to a place?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I forget how. I don't know how it came about, but I ended—I think my first assignment was in what they used to call the Central Reference Division, which was, again, for me, I'm not a historian. I don't have, \"My area is Civil War, military history or modern military.\" I'm not that. I was and always have been kind of a generalist. But the Central Reference Division, their job in the National Archives Building was you walk in the door as a researcher and I want to do research on genealogy or research State Department records. My job was to interview—it was a reference job—to interview them and try to say where in the building or where . . . do they need to go, and who do they need to talk to? So if they were doing diplomatic research or, what I figured out, they were going to need to look at State Department records. They needed to go to the Diplomatic Branch, and they needed to talk with . . . Ron Swarzak because he knows diplomatic records, and he'll be able to help them. And I would call. At that point, you would call ahead down to the Diplomatic Branch and say, \"Alright, I'm sending somebody down.\" Or if they were doing Civil War military history, not genealogy, but military history, then they needed to go to the Old Military Branch. So, you know, it was a triage kind of role, but a reference role. And my office was right next to the National Archives Library, and I did a lot of running into the library and looking up things for people. And, if they didn't need to go to a branch, maybe some of the holdings of the Library would answer the question. So it was a reference triage role." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were talking with the researchers to find out what they were looking for, and then you knew where to send them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I tried to know. I often had to call a branch and say, \"Hey, somebody is here, and this is what they're looking for.\" \"Yeah. Send them down.\" But again, I felt inadequate to be able to answer a lot of their questions, so they had to go—I didn't pull records. I mean, the people in the branches would say, \"Alright, you need to look at this series or that series, and we'll pull it for you.\" You know, I wasn't doing that. But again, that was a great exposure to the breadth of what the holdings were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Again, I had good mentors. Al Blair was an African American, head of the Central Reference Division and dignified and smart. You walk into this place. You know nothing. And then you meet people that know what they're doing. And I just was always fortunate to know or to work under some of these people. And then Garry Ryan, who was the head of the Old Military [Branch]—that's what they used to call it, and I still call it Old Military, and that was records, I think, up to World War I—he was a crusty old guy, but [LAUGHS] he said, \"Hey, do you want to come work in Old Military?\" Again, I'm not a historian. I don't know about Civil War battles. But what you learn by that—and I did–I ended up going to that unit as a reference archivist. And there were people who, you know, they were coming in with specific questions. This is their research topic, and you had to try to help them. But again, I wasn't all by myself. There were actual Civil War historians on the staff that I could go to, and they would say, \"Well, you need to . . .\" And we had all-paper inventories with very brief series titles and stuff. And sometimes if you were answering letters, you had to go into the stacks and look it up yourself. And that's great training. You know where to look. And if you can't find it, then you go to Tim Nenninger, who is still at Archives II, or Mike Musick, who is the Civil War Historian. Trevor Plante came much later, but he is a Civil War historian. Again, it's all great training, but I was in awe of these people who knew so much. I never knew a lot, but what you learn is how to find it, how to figure it out. That's what you learn. So I ended up in the Old Military. I forget how many years I was in each of these places." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were in the Central Research Room, was there anyone else doing the same thing as you, or was it just you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ted Weir. There were two consultants—we were called consultants—under Al Blair and Bill Lynd, who was a character, and he would joke—he was an old guy, too—but he would joke with researchers coming in, and the jokes would go over their head, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And Ted and I would be listening, \"Oh my God.\" And some of the things he said, he'd be called up today as very inappropriate. But anyway. [LAUGHS] But he's deceased. Al Blair is deceased. Ted Weir. Tim Mulligan, his specialty was World War II records. That was also his first assignment after coming through the training program. So yeah, there were others, because sometimes it got busy and you needed more than one person to field these questions. So it was a good assignment, but it wasn't working with the records. It was more like a reference librarian almost, or you know, you got to steer people in the right direction. So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Okay. Do you remember any policies there that, you know, just how things have changed in the reference room from then until more modern times? Were researchers coming in with all of their bags with them? Did they have to go through . . . [CROSS-TALKING]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, there was none of that. No, none of that. I mean, there were no lockers or anything like that. Again, I don't know the dates of this, but there were a couple of incidents of theft. And I don't remember the name. That is a good question, but I don't remember the name. But it is well-known. This researcher came in—dignified, dapper dresser, working on Civil War stuff. I know I talked with him. I know the people in the Old Military talked with him, brought out records. Come to find out, he stole quite a few things. And you feel like—I mean, archivists are nice people. Archivists want to help. Archivists want to be . . . not be part of your story, but listen to your story and help you, you know? But somebody like this guy–Trevor would know the name of this. I don't know if he was with us then. But this guy stole. He had his coat, put the coat over the back of the chair and, all of a sudden— and again, I don't know the dates of this and it wasn't the only one. But you feel taken. You feel used. And I think Mike Musick, who was the Civil War expert who lives in Harpers Ferry, which is a Civil War town–I don't know how it came about, but other historians began to see images of documents that they knew were from the National Archives, and they started notifying people at the Archives that these things were missing. And then, of course, there was a whole search for reference slips that showed the series and boxes that this guy asked for. The reference slip, you fill it out [that] it's going to so and so and this series and these boxes. And so there was all this searching of what he went through and what could be missing. And anyway, he ended up going to jail, and some of the records were retrieved. I don't know if they all were. But he wasn't the only one. I remember I talked with him. \"Sure! We're happy to help\" and blah, blah, blah. I think after some of these incidents—and, I think, come to find out [that] he had also been up at the Library of Congress and [did the] same thing. Some of those security measures began [at that time]. Over time, there were a lot more that went in [to effect]. And now it's a clean research room. There are lockers. And we'll give you the paper. The guards inspect as you leave. It's a lot stricter. But when I was [there], that wasn't—because archivists are trusting, you know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Anyway . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I'm sure because of some of those instances back then is why we have all the policies today about [CROSS-TALKING]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I mean, there were other instances. There's a video of Trevor talking about one of them on the Archives webpage. It just kills you, you know? You just feel so mad [LAUGHS]. But now there's a—you know, Mitch Yockelson and others in AII, they go out and investigate. Mitch goes to Civil War shows, and he'll look for things. \"This doesn't look right. Where did this . . .\" He's kind of checking things out. But there are other serious, serious instances of theft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. When you were at the Old Military Branch—that's what you were calling it— so how did that relate to the Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I mean, the Personnel Records Center . . . it's that. It's personnel records, the old military or modern military—they used to call it. It's not called that anymore. They are the operational records of the army during the Civil War. They're the regimental records. They're the correspondence. They're the pension files of Civil War soldiers and service records of Civil War soldiers, you know. I shouldn't say that. I mean, the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis is World War I and later personnel records." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the National Archives Building was everything up to World War I, so from the Revolutionary War up to World War I. The bulk of it was the Civil War service records—the military service files—and then, subsequently, the Civil War pension files. Just a statistic: there are three million—I believe I'm right—pension files in the National Archives Building. Three million starting from the Revolutionary War! It's amazing [LAUGHS], you know! So again, just stupid me, . . . that's when I say, \"Alright, you went from the records of a President to the records of a soldier or his widow, and heard their stories.\" And so the Archives is not just about famous people. Mostly, it's not about famous people. It's about everyday people. And whether you're talking about immigration records or Indian Affairs records or, you know, Japanese internment records, it's not about the Presidents. In fact, very little of it is about the President. Mostly, it is about other people and agency policies and things like that. So I came to really feel grateful that I got to see that difference. So . . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. When that branch, the Old Military Branch, reorganized, what kind of changes happened? It became the Military Service Branch, I think, is what you said?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Military Service Branch . . . yeah. I mean, again, my chronology–there's always reorganizations. And the military service and pension files and Census records, that's, I mean, a big part. Genealogy is a big part of the records or the work of the National Archives. And genealogists were a huge client, so to speak. And so, at that point, all of the Census records and everything were on microfilm. Very few of the paper/textual records from that time, other than Revolutionary War records, were on microfilm. So people had to come in and ask for the original Civil War soldier's file or a pension file. And we would help them figure out if there was one and all that. So yeah, there was a Military Service Branch, and I was assigned to that. Two more mentors: Gerry Phillips and Maida Loescher—again, I just felt privileged to—they were good people, smart, good archivists, you know, just professional as all get out. But it was to help improve the Military Service Branch. It's huge, like I said, three million pension files, and they had to be taken care of physically. At that point, I think I probably transitioned more to handling the physical aspects of the records, less so on the reference. But, yeah. That was the Military Service Branch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I wondered if that changed your responsibilities when the reorganization took place. So it sounds like you were working more with the actual records instead of doing reference." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, right. Right, right. Well, I was working with the records in Old Military, but that was a reference job. But, as I think of it now, in the Military Service Branch, I ended up doing a lot more physical work on the records, taking care of them physically, because there was a whole other staff, mostly technicians—again, you know, the technicians, they don't get the credit they deserve. But, I mean, they were the ones who were doing the reference mostly. I remember this was sometime in the 80s. The Archives was still under the ddIGSA, General Services Administration. And GSA said you could apply to get a desk computer. Wow!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[LAUGH] This was old typewriters, paper correspondence, everything. And so Maida and I—and there is an interview with Mayda. I didn't see one of Gerry. She should be included. Maida and I wrote up a proposal to get one of these newfangled computers with a desktop dot matrix printer. And we got it. [LAUGHS] I forget what we did with it. We probably made box lists or something like that. But, you know, that's . . . I'm just showing my age." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very cool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's the Archives. The Archives, you know, [had] old wooden desks that were there from the 30s, and manual typewriters that were there from the 30s, dial telephones—not even push-button telephones. I mean, it became a joke, but that's what we had. So, it was funny." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Technology has changed. [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[LAUGHS] Yep. Yep. From, you know, oral histories with earphones and reel-to reel- tapes to dot matrix printers, and now, look at you! [LAUGHS] So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you notice any differences, in your particular job, when the agency went from being under GSA to becoming independent in 1985?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so. Again, I was kind of down low, you know. But I remember the battles that the Organization of American Historians (OAH)—I mean, they were the lobbying groups–to get . . . when Nixon resigned, that whole Watergate thing. . . . Again, the Archives gets involved in everything, and you see it now with what's happening. And the whole Watergate thing was going on. You think it has nothing to do with the Archives. But, when Nixon was forced to resign, there was a threat. And historians can say it much more articulately than I can, but there was a real threat—the records were going to go to California—that records were going to be destroyed when they got there because of legal issues. And these are Presidential records. Before then, Presidential files were not considered federal records. A President could do what he wanted. The records didn't automatically come to the National Archives. Before that point, Kennedy records, Johnson records, Roosevelt records, they were all donated to the National Archives. Roosevelt started it, and it was just customary. But it wasn't law." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so the records, we assumed they were going to go to, what is it, San Clemente or wherever Nixon was living. But there was a real threat he was going to take all the records, he and his staff, to there, and what would happen to them? The Archives had no claim on them. The government had no claim on them. Others can tell a better story, more accurately, but this is my impression. But it was close that those records were not going to—something would happen to them. So Congress stepped in and said, \"No, those records are going into the custody of the National Archives until further things can be worked out.\" And it was after that that the Presidential Records Act that now governs Presidential records—it was in the 70s after the Nixon-Watergate scandal—established the fact that records of the Office of the President and his staff are public records. They belong to the federal government. They belong to the American people. And then there's the division between Presidential files, personal files, and campaign files. There is a distinction, and the staff at the White House is supposed to follow that. But that wasn't a given during Watergate. So I remember all of that. That was [when the National Archives was] part of the GSA, because the head of the GSA, I believe, was a Nixon appointee. And, you know, there was a real threat to the records. So yeah, but that's a whole other story [and] probably a lot of articles [have been] written on that. But that's why the Trump thing . . . who knows how the records got down there out of the custody of the . . . Lord only knows. But they don't belong to him, much less classified records. Sorry. I'm showing my bias. But it wasn't a given for the Nixon time. So that was the difference with GSA. The Archives now is independent, and we know when a record or records should be coming to us. So, I mean, that's how precarious it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. We don't think about that today so much. I mean, you know, obviously with Trump and classified records and that sort of thing . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. I always say that for a lot of things there's a reason that rules and regulations [are in place], or there's a reason that laws are passed. And that was the reason that the Presidential Records Act was passed. So I'm probably telling you all these stories out . . . [LAUGHS]. Who knows. But that's a true one. I mean, there were articles about that and how close they came. But that was a big battle then for independence, and I believe that came in 1975 or something like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. That's a really interesting viewpoint. I've asked that question before, and I've never gotten that story, so that's really interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. But, again, I'm just saying that people [should] want to research that. I mean, I'm just telling my memories, my version. But I think, basically, it's true." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So when Archives II was built in College Park, Maryland, did you move over to that building or did you stay at what then became Archives I?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that's another huge story. This was, you know, Gerry Phillips and Maida Loescher and Michael Kurtz. Michael Kurtz, unfortunately, passed away a year or so ago. And Adrienne Thomas, who also passed away a couple of years ago, was in administration. She was a Deputy Archivist. The Archives never had space. It still doesn't have space. Regions don't have space. There was lobbying to get money to build another building. They got money. The plan was that they were going to build, and they were looking for a site. Everybody wanted the site to be— there was an old dilapidated building across the street from Pennsylvania Avenue where we said, \"Yeah, we can build a tunnel under Pennsylvania Avenue for a new building right across the street.\" Well, that didn't happen because more powerful people—that was a prime site for development and now it's where the Navy Memorial is. I don't know if you've been downtown, but that's where they wanted the new building to be, and we could just go across the street. But no. So there was a long search for a site, and that's when it ended up in College Park. And Steny Hoyer, who's the Representative from that district, was instrumental in getting that. It's near the University of Maryland. So that was all playing out. And people who worked with the records, Michael Kurtz and others, said, \"Alright, we’ve got to start working on how we’re going to do this.\" And so he set up the Records Relocation Branch, and five years before the actual move, he appointed Gerry Phillips to head that and Maida Loescher to head it. The complexity of that move was unbelievable. So I was assigned to that unit with other people: Suzanne Harris; Jane Fitzgerald; Bob Matchette, who passed away just a couple of months ago. I mean, again, you get to admire just . . . yeah, we all have quirks. We all drive each other crazy. I’m exaggerating. We had a lot of laughs too. The people that worked on that project did tremendous work, and we got it done. It was moving the records from the National Archives Building that had been there since 1935, and also bringing records from the Washington National Records Center in Suitland that were archival records. They weren't temporary. They were archival records. And they shouldn't have been in the Suitland [facility] for so long, but there was no other room. They were always wanting to build a new records center out there, and they haven't been able to yet. But records had to come from Suitland either to downtown or to College Park. So the logistics of it was unbelievable. Plus, my job, us archivists, was to go into the stacks and figure out what the heck was there. You can't move anything unless you have a sense of what's there. And you know, we were all, “Okay, military records are on eight “W” and on the west side of the building. And civil records are on the east side of the building, and we know basically what's there.\" But once you say I have to move them, you have to have lists. And you have to be able to move them. If they're not in a box that's halfway decent, you have to rebox. The conservation staff gave guidelines. But one of their hard-fast rules was that the “volumes,” many of which date from the 19th century, had to be either in a box or shrink-wrapped. And everyone would say, \"[BREATHES IN SHARPLY] you've got to shrink-wrap all this stuff. That's not good.\" Well, there's no way they could have . . . . Shrink-wrapping allowed the volumes to go back on the shelf. If you box everything, it expands. Anyway, we had to have lists. We had to have labels. We had to have boxes; we had to have different sized boxes. But most of all, we had to know what we were moving. And some of it, we were describing it for the first time and giving it a name, you know. And it wasn't processing to the sense that we were refolding, although we did a lot of refolding inside the box or folding for the first time, but it was to get a minimum amount, a basic level of information to describe what was moving, how many boxes, number the boxes, and all that, and make sure that it was safe to move. And that's what we did. And it was dirty work. It was hard work, but it was very rewarding, too. And, sure, we complained. We always complained, the group of us. We had a good group, very good. And we had an army of students. We were able to hire students on temporary appointments. They were great summer jobs for kids . . . [or] Christmas break jobs for students to come in. We sent them up to the stacks to write a folder title list of what's in this box and then come down and type it, or do a box list of these boxes, and then come down and print out box labels. All shrink-wrapped volumes had to be—we couldn't put a label on the volume on the outside, but we had to put tabs inside saying what it was. And it was unbelievably complicated, tedious, and hands-on. Gerry and Maida, along with Bob Matchette, Mike Pilgrim, and Henry Mayer in Suitland, were figuring out the logistics and keeping everything on schedule. They were a wonderful group of people. And then the first day of the move came. John Carlin was Archivist then. Big trucks backed in. Oh, everything had to be sequenced—and this was Bob Matchette that sequenced what was going to move first and where in AII it was going to go, what stacks. Mike Pilgrim, he worked closely with Bob Matchette on just the logistics of it. We were just following, \"Okay, this is going to move.\" But it was unbelievable. But we got a lot of work done. We did a lot of good work for the records. It wasn't just moving them. We figured out what some of them were, and that wasn't easy. We were going from nothing. You know nothing about this stuff. And you're trying to do a lot of administrative history. What is this stuff? It was very rewarding. It started like five years before the move, [before] the first truck was going to come. And so we felt good about it. But it wasn't the kind of processing that I think all of us knew we should be doing. We should be really fixing this stuff up really well and refolding it all and all this. It wasn't that, but it was pretty darn good, I would say. I mean, and maybe those who are working with those boxed records now say, \"What is this?\" But it was a whole lot more than a lot of those records had [had]. And I remember even with stuff that wasn't moving, we went into the stacks and continued that. \"Alright, we’ve got to do a whole lot of reboxing,\" and at that point, the conservation people had a box machine, and they were able to develop custom-sized boxes for volumes. And that was terrific. But again, once you start doing that—there's thousands of volumes in Archives I—a box doesn't go back on the shelf. It expands, and so you need more space. And so we thought, \"Oh good. We're going to be able to really expand some of these records. That's not going to be a problem, because there's going to be more space in AI.\" Well, then they decided to renovate Archives I. So the stacks that were now empty after the move were going to disappear, because the renovation took away, I think, in some areas, the first three levels of the building. So those stacks disappeared. And so we didn't have the space to expand that we thought we would. So we had to do a lot of this moving within the building after we thought we were done with moving, but we weren't. But anyway, you look back on a career and you say, \"Well, there's reasons things happen.\" I mean, there were good reasons the building needed to be renovated. They did a lot of good work on the renovation, but they took away the first three levels, underground levels mostly, of stacks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's a huge loss of space." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's a lot. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I don't know if you've been to the building, but that's where the theater is now . . . So the renovation happened after that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it was good. And just a brief aside—I think it probably was before records relocation—I was assigned to work on the updates to the National Archives Guide, and Sharon Thibodeau was head of that. You know, archivist extraordinaire. She lives in Colorado. And I don't know if there's an oral history of her, but there should be, because she was a director of different divisions. And Bob Matchette, again, who worked on the logistics, had that kind of mind. But he did administrative history, which people forget. It's kind of a boring thing, but it's so necessary for archivists. You got to know when this agency was established or this office within the agency [was established] or when it was transferred to another agency, you know. He did it all. I mean, we all did, but he was just so good at it. These people were just doing their job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At what point were you digitizing records? This was after the move or . . . ?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, after the move." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, after all that, . . . my son was very ill, and so I had to take a couple leaves of absence. So I came back. Again, other reorganizations [took place], and I applied to—I forget what the position was—but it was basically a supervisor. I had not been a supervisor. I'm not naturally inclined to be a supervisor, but I did just because you had that sense, and I talked with other colleagues there. \"Well, if not you, then who? If not me, then who?\" You know, like that kind of thing. But then my son had childhood cancer, you know—lymphoma when he was 4 and leukemia when he was 13. So I had to take a long leave of absence. And then I came back part- time for a while, because he was still in treatment. But anyway, I came back, and that's when I became a supervisor. And then it was with the same kind of records: the old military, the pension files, the military service records, and all that. And it was in the newly renovated building. So they were giving us new space, new desks. Adrienne Thomas was instrumental in the renovation, and she got—well there was money for new [items]. They got rid of all the old desks and all the old telephones and all the old furniture. And by then, the computers were part of our daily work. And digitization—I had always worked on different microfilm projects, which was the mode of distribution of records forever, from the 50s, you know. And I was part of some of those projects. The Archives was developing a very active volunteer program. One of the big series that we worked on with volunteers was the Freedmen's Bureau Records, Record Group 105, and those were a vital interest to African American history, Reconstruction history, all that. And they're arranged by state. And it was a military function, the Freedmen's Bureau. So, we had a whole process over several years to get all of those records on film, each southern state. Cindi Fox was my supervisor at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so there were volunteers who worked on those doing that hands-on flattening. You know, you can't microfilm anything without it being [flat]—this is all tri-folded stuff. So flattening anything that needed repair had to go to the conservation lab. Again, it's logistics. It was a very proud moment when we got all of The Freedmen Bureau’s records on film. It took several years, but it's a huge collection but small in terms of the holdings of the National Archives. But it's a huge collection, and it's all hands-on. You learn very fast that archival work is hands-on. That's why working from home, it wasn't so much an option then. You have to be with the records. So anyway, that was microfilm. But after that, digitization started to come into being. Many of the microfilm publications that had been completed since the 1950s were converted to digital publications. We also had some partners from Ancestry.com who wanted— Ancestry wants a lot of things microfilmed, digitized. When each of the Census years is released, they buy up the rolls. I mean, this is how they do it. I mean, the Archives makes duplicate copies of all the Census rolls on Day One of the Census release, Ancestry has all of those rolls, and they have their volunteers indexing all the names on the Census rolls. Quite amazing. They wanted to get into a lot of the other holdings of the National Archives, mainly pension files, and that's when the pension files became. . . . Like I said, there's 3 million pension files. They're never all going to be done, you know? But Jackie Bedell, who is still working there, is passionate about access, about digitization, about care of the records. So she ended up leading the hands-on work and working with the volunteers on how to flatten records and all that kind of stuff. They all had to be trained by the conservation staff. And we also started a project on some of the land records–which are very valuable for the Bureau of Land Management— homestead applications, and things like that. But it's slow. There's never enough staff to do it. There's never enough space. Once those records are flattened, they're not going to go back into the same space that they came from. They're just not. So that is a constant. . . . It's a nice idea, but there's all these other factors that go on—space being a huge, huge part of it. You know, the microfilm lab is now no longer; it's a digitization lab. I've not seen it, but there's a digitization lab now at Archives II, where all the microfilm equipment [had been]. . . . After Archives II was built, there was no microfilm equipment in Archives I, and there's not enough space to build a dedicated space for digital equipment, meaning the big flat cameras and stuff like that. But there is a small operation at Archives I. There's, I believe, a bigger one now at Archives II. It's digitization, but that requires all the same care and prep and conservation work as microfilm prep. You know you can't handle some of these records. There's very few series in Archives I—maybe there's some at Archives II—that can go through a high-speed scanner . . . . So, I was part of the beginning of tha. But I think a lot more has happened now and part of that is, again, the Archival Research Catalog. Descriptions or information or box lists or whatever are developed in the process that hopefully can somehow be entered into the Archival Research Catalog, which is another way we use students a lot, to go out and make a box list for the Archival Research Catalog." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So people can know that it exists and can . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": ". . . be able to access." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it's just a drop in the bucket. Even though so much has been done, there's so much more to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. There's so many records out there, and they keep coming. So [CROSS- TALKING]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. So, I think, in my career, I was always more [in] processing and with the records. I mean, I did some reference, but I liked the hands-on kind of thing, working with the records. Not that it was all, you know, we all had our moments. \"Oh my God. I wish I was done with this\" or, \"This is boring stuff.\" But, on the whole, we have a respect for what the records are, and you just do it and you make them better. That's what you try to do. It was always frustrating. You go into the stacks and you see so much more that needs to be helped, and you're not going to get to it, you know? You're never going to get it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I mean, just not enough staff, not enough time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Not enough space." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. We do the best that we can. Brenda, do you have just a few more minutes? I think we're just a little bit over our time that I scheduled." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I just didn't know if you still had a little bit of time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. I'm fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Just wanted to make sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure, if I can ever stop coughing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm glad you've got some water there. . . . I know that you also were an instructor for a while with the Modern Archives Institute?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Institute. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, what that was and how you got to be the instructor for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[COUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just take your time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, when I was coming up or through most of my career, where did you go to train to be an archivist? There weren't any training programs. The National Archives recruited mostly people with history degrees." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If you were hired into the Archivist series from outside, not the way I came up—I came up from a Clerk-Typist, you know–but if there was an opening, the qualifications that you had [to have was] probably a graduate degree in history, not an undergraduate. That's why all these people were so smart. But so they were trained as historians, a lot of them. I don't know the percentage who had doctorates. They were historians. And I know there is a debate probably whether that's—you need to know history to work on some of these records. Anyway, where do you learn the practice of archiving? There were no training programs. Archivists in state archives, or little historical societies or foundations, don't have training programs. I mean, they're just small one- or two-person shops, most of them. The Society of American Archivists [SAA], I don't know when it was established or whatever, but you went to programs for the SAA to hear about issues and archives and donor relations and all of that. That's where you went. I don't know when it started, but it was going on for a long time before I ever got up. The Archives established the Modern Archives Institute, and it was a two-week training program for outside people—not for in-house staff, but for people from all over the country who came to get to the \"Mecca,\" I guess. I mean, the National Archives is a big institution. The Institute was co-sponsored by the Library of Congress. But [the Institute] was always held in the National Archives Building. It changed over time. There might have been a lecture or two by somebody from the Library of Congress, but most of it was done by Archives staff. And they brought in different people, different lecturers, . . . and they paid for David Gracy from the University of Texas, and he would come, and he was big in the SAA. He was great at telling stories. Anyway . . . . It was a two-week training program, an introduction to archives—not the National Archives, but an introduction to the archival profession, how archives got established, and best practices. The lectures covered the practical aspects of processing, description, figuring out what something was, coming up with series titles, what a good series title should include—not wordy, but descriptive—have good dates, and linear measurements, just the basics . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. [CROSS-TALKING]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": ". . . you know, and then come up with a series description. Specialists from various units would come to discuss different formats, such as archivists from the Still Pictures Branch [who would discuss]: How do you deal with photographic records? How do you deal with motion pictures? How do you deal with cartographic records, electronic records? Then how do you do reference? Things like that. So it was over two weeks, eight hours a day. These people came, and they paid their own way. There was a fee for it, but it was really—if you've ever tried to go to training programs outside, they're very expensive. This was not; the fees were very reasonable. But anyway, one of the lecturers, Director Maygene Daniels—[the Institute] was in different offices in the building, the offices of education–worked for the National Archives, but then she became the archivist for the National Gallery of Art across the street. Anyway, my friend from the Kennedy Library, Megan Desnoyers, was one of the lecturers, and she would come down and stay with me. She was the epitome of a very good archivist: detailed, smart. She worked a lot with Jackie Kennedy's files and others. The Kennedy Library has the Ernest Hemingway papers, because of Jackie Kennedy and her relationship with Mary Hemingway. So, Megan processed those. I mean, just a superb archivist. But she would come down and do the arrangement and description lecture—and that was two days because that's the core of—I hope I'm not offending other people—arrangement and description of papers is kind of the basics. And so that's two days. And then the lecturer would pull series from the National Archives’ holdings for them to work with real records and real record series and would bring in old stuff and new stuff. The workshop was to look through these records and describe them, and we'd have to rebox or hide the labels for everything, and figure out what they were without any background, you know? It was because of Megan's involvement that I ended up [teaching], when she decided she was not going to do it anymore. I worked with her a couple of times, and then I ended up taking over that arrangement and description [lecture]. [CROSS- TALKING]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to say it sounds like a very good, beneficial program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm wondering why they stopped it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mary Rephlo became the Director of [the Institute] for several years. She's retired, but she had various jobs in the building. One of them was the Director of the Modern Archives Institute. She was also involved in doing some work with Ancestry and digitization at a policy level. She was the Director of the Institute and, about the time I left—Mary and I retired about the same time—they just stopped it, and we felt bad because there was nothing else like it, and it provided a great service to the wider archival community. Now the hiring comes from university library programs. And, you know, that's fine. That's fine. But there aren't archival training programs. The clientele were all great. You know, people came from all over, sometimes from different countries, to the Institute. Many attendees were from religious organizations, nuns or clergy who were given the responsibility of caring for their order’s records. What should we do with them? They were not going to go to library school to be trained. We also had people attending from corporate archives, historical societies, non-profit groups, all different kinds of places that have records and archives. I don't know where they go for training or guidance now. I mean, I really don't. And it was a shame. It stopped about the time that Mary and I retired. But the powers that be, I think they just didn't want to deal with it anymore. But other than our time, it didn't cost the Archives all that much, I don't think. That's my personal opinion, and I think it's a shame. I think it was a great way for the Archives to give back to the broader archival community. We don't stand alone, even though we're a big institution. We're archivists, and we try to help each other. Besides Megan, Pat Osborne, and Don McIlwain, who were at AII, helped me and . . . . But there were other lecturers we could get, all from the Archives staff. One of the things you learn is, especially in a setting like that–the Institute–is that people like talking about what they do. . . . It brought me out of my desk job for a couple of days when I was talking about all this stuff. And I'm not a great lecturer. I didn't always get the best reviews, but I kind of knew what I was doing. But other people, they just love talking about, \"Well, I work in Still Pictures. And this is how we deal with different issues.\" I mean, they like talking about what they do. And so, I think it's a loss for the Archives. I don't know if there are similar programs, but I don't know what they're doing now. I don't think they're doing anything anywhere close to that. But it went on for probably 40 years. And then it just stopped." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh my gosh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I didn't realize it went on that long. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you'd have to find out. But it went on for a long time, and it's a shame, I think. And people look to the Archives. It was held twice a year, and there was usually a waiting list. People would inquire when the next Institute was scheduled: “When will you accept applications?\" And there were only—I don't know how many—probably 20 slots, 25 at the most, you know. So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Small class. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I mean it's all about room and . . . . Anyway, I think it's a shame. Again, I don't think of myself as a teacher. I'm not. And I don't think I was the best. I could have done better. But it was always nice. [Some of the topics were:] How do you move records? And some of them were faced with that problem of having to move records out of where they were to another place and, you know, you could give them pointers. You could give them names of, \"You might want to talk with so and so\" and all that. Where do you get supplies? What are access issues? [CROSS-TALKING] So I don't know what the profession is doing now. I think the SAA still exists." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think the Oral History Association still exists, but I'm not sure. It's still all valid. It's still all valuable. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Right. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I was just part of this. I wasn't running any of these, all my positions. I'm just a worker, you know. I wasn't responsible for a lot of the planning or anything. I just did the work. But it ended up being pretty rewarding. And I always, when I retired or [was] in the Institute, I've always said I felt very privileged to have had the experiences that I had with all the complaints, with all the \"Huh,\" with all the drudgery of some of it. But on the whole, I was very lucky." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So when did you retire?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh dear. [LAUGHS] Time goes. I think it was like 2014, 2015." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Forty-two years in the National Archives. So, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Time flies. From 1971 . . . I think it was . . . and I'm like, \"Oh, it was only about six years ago.\" No, I think it's been longer than that!!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was 65, and I'm about to turn 75 so . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh my gosh! I would never have guessed. Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Forty-two years. And that's why your generation or my son's generation, they don't . . . \"You stayed in one place the whole time? That sounds awful.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A lot of them do. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But, you know, starting out, you don't know. I worked for the same agency, but I think I had a lot of different experiences." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I met my husband there. So that's why I'm still in DC, and I'm not back up in Boston." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Mhm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But anyway . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did they throw you a party or anything when you left? Did they do anything?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't want to do anything. Not [CROSS-TALKING]. And I felt like it was time. David had already retired. And I felt like I was turning into somebody I didn't want to be. You know, I was starting to sound like one of these old people that just, you know, \"Well, years ago we did it this way or that way or . . . .\" I think that I didn't want to become somebody like that. And there's always battles. There's always, \"We gotta move this. We're going to regionalize this, so we're going to do this, that and the other thing.\" And \"Why? Why do you have to do that? Don't you know how valuable these things are?\" You know, I was starting to become that, and I didn't want to. But with close staff, we just went—I didn't want a big party. I'm not a public person, you know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. I hear that a lot, just wanting to kind of go out quietly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The archival profession is populated by a bunch of introverts, you know, and I know I'm one. I didn't want a big party, so just a group of us went—the Archives Building is situated in downtown DC on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the public entrance is on Constitution Avenue. On the other side of that is the Sculpture Garden or the National Gallery of Art. And they have a nice pavilion, and we just went out there and had–it was just a May day, and it was just beautiful. That's all I wanted. I didn't want a big public thing. So yeah, it was hard. It was sad. But, it happens to all of us. [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Right. What do you think is your proudest accomplishment from your time at the Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm not really sure. I think it was my relationships with the staff. When I was a supervisor—and I retired as a supervisor—that was a hard role. It's hard to be tough. I didn't want to be tough. I'd like to think the people liked me as a supervisor, as a person. I'd like to think—and I think I was—that I was somewhat of a mentor to some people, you know. You pass it forward. And I tried to be that. It didn't always work, but I think I tried to be that. You know, as you age, you get older, and you're the one that's been there. You're the one with the memory. And these young people like you just come up and, What do they want to do? They're having a hard time. They want to move to this branch, or they're not getting promoted. That was the hardest thing. As a supervisor, especially mid-level, but a supervisor in general, you have no power, even though that was the hardest thing. There were techs that should have been made specialists or promoted, or there were specialists that should have been promoted. “Why can't you do that?” It happens to every supervisor there that writes these letters recommending so and so for a promotion or this, and you have no power. You know, that was very, very hard and very hard to explain. \"I'm doing my best. I can't . . . .\" Especially with the technicians, some of them, they carry you. Not everybody. Not everybody is a good archivist. Not everybody is a good tech. But I'd like to think that I tried to help people in their work or in their careers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mhm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Anyway, I'd like to think that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Whether I did [the] work—I'm sure I have these, especially in Records Relocation—we had to put the sticky labels on notes and boxes or something and, you know, like a temporary series. I'm sure [the staff are] going in, and they're finding all of this stuff from Brenda about, \"You know, who is this person?\" like we've all done. We've all found notes from previous generations of archivists. And there's nobody that knows me now, except Trevor. [LAUGHS] There's some people at AI that know me, but it's your generation now so . . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There are good foundations there, but you know with what the Archives is dealing with now, with electronic records and everything else, I couldn't have worked in that. I couldn't work in electronic records. I liked the paper. I was fortunate, you know. So . . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Is there anything else that you would like to bring up about your time at the Archives that I haven't already asked about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well . . . I think the techs should be part of the Oral History Program. Again, I'm a novice, and I think I've always felt uncomfortable being somebody that's more privileged than others in life or, certainly, at work. When I came down into the Archival Training Program, techs had been there for 20, 30 years or, you know, and they were doing the work. I remember one— this was early on—going to a tech and [saying], \"Well, where are these records?\" And she flatly said, \"You're the archivist. You figure it out.\" That was just, you know, it's the hierarchy. It's the culture of the Archives. Then, and I think now, a lot of the techs, at least in DC, had only high school educations. They're not advancing. This is a job. They're supporting families. They're not going to get any higher than a GS-5 or GS-6 in DC, which is expensive. And I always felt a little bit uncomfortable with giving orders, you know. I did, and we worked together, and developed a relationship. And I think I had a good relationship with a lot of the techs. Some of them became experts in the records that they were serving. And I know others worked mightily to get—not everyone deserves this, but, you know—specialist positions. It's hard, and I think it's unfair. I know darn well that there's a professional series and a technician series and \"never the twain shall meet.\" But you can't do one without the other. And the techs—again, not everybody, not every archivist—but I think they need to be represented, and they would have a different point of view in terms of opportunities and work from the National Archives. It's representative of the times, where the Archives building was built in DC, the population in DC. Anyway, it's not just the managers. It's not just me. It's the whole agency. I'm sure there are people in the regions that might feel the same way, but what I felt—and we had good relationships—but, you know, there are problems in personnel everywhere. I just think if there's going to be an Oral History Program for the National Archives, it's got to include those kinds of questions about staffing and advancement or who's doing the work and . . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It can't just be management. It can't be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mhm. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But those are different stories. But yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we got where we are based on, you know, built on the people that came before us. So, it wasn't all management. Right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, yeah. Include the worker bees." + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. And I think that's one of the things with anything. I mean, if you have a job, whether it's moving the records or holdings maintenance, you're working with others doing that. You're giving them assignments to box and rehouse, and you're prodding them. My supervisor is saying, \"Why isn't that done? It's taken three years.\" And I’m saying, \"Well, you know. They're doing it. It'll get done!\" So . . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, we'll definitely reach out to others." + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're never working alone. You're never working alone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mhm. Right. It's all teamwork. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so, that's what I would say." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, thank you so much for all of this information, all of your experiences. You really have done a lot of different things and have been at the agency when there's been a lot of change. So, yeah. You've been there a long time!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But like I said, the Archives is always in the news, some good and some bad." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For an agency that most people don't think of, it's amazing how much of what is in the news touches the Archives, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mhm. Yeah, very much so. Okay, well hey, I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording now. Can you hang on for just one moment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brenda Kepley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Go ahead." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, great. Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00676", + "metadata": { + "category": "Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office Oral History Project 2012 - 2013", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/C3PO/HorkachuckMJ/horkachuckmj.htm", + "original_file_name": "HorkachuckMJ_11-6-12.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/C3PO/HorkachuckMJ/HorkachuckMJ_11-6-12.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "location_date": "Houston, TX – 6 November 2012" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Michael J. Horkachuck" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is November 6, 2012. This oral history interview is being conducted with Mike Horkachuck at the NASA Johnson Space Center [JSC] in Houston, Texas for the Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office History Project. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Rebecca Hackler. Thank you again for taking time out of your busy schedule, we appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’ve been involved with the COTS [Commercial Orbital Transportation Services] program since September of 2006. Share with us how you first got involved with NASA’s commercial efforts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess going all the way back, I was working in the [International Space] Station [ISS] Payloads Office. At one point we were looking for ways to bring samples back from the Space Station more frequently than was planned with the Space Shuttle. I had looked at a bunch of small reentry vehicles over the years, and I think I even wrote a short white paper for [William H.] Gerstenmaier [ISS Program Manager] looking at some options that the ESA [European Space Agency] folks had been working on in combination with the Russians. At the time we thought we just needed a small reentry capsule to bring some critical science samples down on a more frequent basis than we were getting.\\n\\n That went into the ether for a little while, and then I got called to help these guys that were working on this COTS proposal to help write the requirements for the initial RFP [Request For Proposal]. I rolled a lot of the science support requirements into the very top level requirements that they were developing for COTS. At that time there was a requirements document, top-level goals and objectives of the COTS vehicles that were going to be built. It didn’t get down to a lot of real specifics. It was how much total mass do you need, what was some of the top-level functionality that we wanted out of the vehicle, without dictating what the design was. I worked with them over in the procurement bunker for a little while developing the requirements.\\n\\n At about that same time the Constellation Program was ramping up, so I went off to a job in test and verification over in the Constellation Program [Ares rocket and Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle]. I was one of the managers for test and verification for all the Level II requirements. Then after being there about a year I got a phone call saying, “Well, we down selected to some COTS providers. Would you like to come over and manage one of the COTS companies’ development programs?”\\n\\n That seemed to be a pretty good fit for me because I always liked hardware development, I tended to do that and enjoy that more than the ongoing operations and sustain functions. And I’d had a lot of projects in the past that were more partnerships than strictly NASA contractor relationships. I worked a lot with the European Space Agency developing a bunch of the freezers that are on Space Station right now, and we worked as a partnership.\\n\\n Technically they were building them for me, but since it was another space agency it wasn’t like NASA was contracting with [The] Boeing [Company] or some other company to build it strictly for us and we could really dictate exactly how we wanted it built. We had to work in cooperation with their constraints and budgets, and some of their other political constraints, and jointly come up with the best solution.\\n\\n It seemed like the COTS program was going to be very similar in that respect, where it was a partnership instead of a formal contract. I had a lot of that experience, and I had also had a lot of experience when I was in the Payloads Office. Not only did I manage the whole fleet of the freezers and some of that laboratory support equipment that was used by all the science community, but I was the manager of all the payload engineering and integration. By that I mean I owned all the requirements for how the payloads would interface with the Space Station—both the basic requirements and the verification of those requirements—as well as the integrated stage analysis that we’d do to make sure that when we plugged in that complement of payloads to the Space Station, the integrated spacecraft was within its limits. We’d do a whole module level power balance, data, thermal, acoustics. A bunch of different analyses, so I had a whole team of different discipline engineers working for me.\\n\\n I did sort of the same thing in Constellation. Although we were trying to use other NASA centers a lot more in the Constellation Program, so I’d have people reporting to me from all different NASA centers with different technical expertise. That fit really well into the concept they were trying to roll out for COTS and having these COTS Advisory Team members, CATs. Effectively, it was a matrixed organization of people that we could go reach into, pulling their technical expertise when we needed help on a particular area or problem. Then they’d go back to their normal day job when we didn’t need them anymore. They weren’t around full time, and that had some pros and cons to it, but in a lot of respects it was similar to a lot of the things I’d done in the past." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Since you’re talking about the similarities, what were the non-similarities? What was so different now about this new way of doing business with industry partners?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it wasn’t a contract. It was a Space Act [Agreement], which is NASA’s Other Transaction Authority. We’ve got some unique authority under the original authorization to create NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958] that lets us do these Space Acts. That has a big benefit in that you can get things done a lot faster than you can in a normal contract.\\n\\n Quite frankly, I think our normal FAR [Federal Acquisition Regulation]-based contracting system is broken. It’s so out of date and so slow and antiquated that it’s, I think, a big part of the reason that not just NASA, but all federal agencies have such massive cost overruns and complete screwups on contracts. It’s just so antiquated, it doesn’t work anymore. There have been cases where we’ve tried to make a change in requirements on a contract, and it’s taken the pricing and proposal and contracts folks a year to get the proposal back on making a change. By then it’s too late. You’ve wasted a year of your development program dicking around with pricing and negotiations of the cost.\\n\\n It’s just so slow that it becomes a major burden. Your cost overruns go through the roof because you’re still designing it to your old baseline, which you know is wrong, but you’re still wasting money doing that because you haven’t been able to authorize what you know is right, because they haven’t gotten around to doing the pricing for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "With today’s technology you have new materials as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. If anything comes up new, you can’t implement it because you don’t have it on contract." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you found not using the FAR system to be a more liberating way of doing business?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. Since it was a partnership, they went in with their eyes open knowing that we’re going to do our best to determine what the basic top level requirements were. We weren’t going to go down really deep into the requirements, but they knew what the end goal was, so if there were changes in things that had to be done, if we could convince them that technically it was the right thing to do, then they just went and did it. There was some technical convincing that would have to happen sometimes. You’d have to have a discussion on the merits and why a certain change needed to be implemented, but once you got through the technical convincing, they just went and did it. It wasn’t a one-year monotonous, gory fight over “It’s going to cost this much,” “No, it’s not going to cost that much,” “It’s going to cost this much.”\\n\\n That was part of what their risk was going into the partnership. We came in with a fixed amount of money, and they had to come up with the solution that met the top level requirements, and how they got there was their business. We’d help them along the way and give them as much technical expertise as we could, but in the end it was their responsibility. They knew that either they were going to come up with a solution that was going to work, or they weren’t going to get the follow-on contract." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As we walk through your first year, talk about when you came on as part of this team. You became the [NASA] Project Executive for SpaceX [Space Exploration Technologies Corp.]—some of those first encounters with them, and how you started laying out that foundation to move forward with this new way of doing business." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were really small back then. In fact they were in small buildings in El Segundo [California]. They were in multiple different buildings. They had some of their manufacturing and avionics in a different building, and some of their engineering in a different building. It was spread out. They’d still only been developing a Falcon 1 rocket, which was a single-engine small rocket that was supposed to take maybe 1,000 pounds to orbit.\\n\\n We wanted a much larger class rocket in order to take the capsule to orbit, so they had to develop a whole new rocket, and the whole capsule. They’d been launching out of Kwajalein [Marshall Islands], which is way out in the middle of the Pacific, Reagan Test Range [Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site], a series of small islands and an atoll. The Air Force wouldn’t let them launch out of Vandenberg [Air Force Base, California] for risk that their rocket wouldn’t work and it would destroy some other national asset, some other [launch] pad for an Atlas or Delta [rocket].\\n\\n It was a big leap for them in those early days. They had a lot of really good smart people that were very enthusiastic, but they had a lot of work to go. They had some very early concepts, and they seemed to do a really good job of coming up with concepts and developing the concepts a little beyond what we would normally expect at a PDR [Preliminary Design Review] level. They actually would start building the hardware and testing some of the components even at the PDR level, then they’d roll into a CDR [Critical Design Review] without the level of maturity that we’d sometimes normally see.\\n\\n They wouldn’t have all the drawings released, although they were trying to move into more of the automation and electronic data and not do as much paper drawings and design. That worked to some degree. I think they are learning that when you’re still manufacturing parts there still needs to be some amount of paper trail there. They’re finding where that balance is today—how much can they do purely electronically, and how much do they still need to go from the 3D CAD [Computer-Aided Design] models to actually making drawings for the individual parts that they’re building.\\n\\n The advantages—they were a lot like the Lockheed [Martin] Skunk Works [Advanced Development Programs]. It was a separate brand-new company, and it didn’t have a lot of the baggage that a lot of the bigger existing companies have on processes and how to do business. So they could innovate in what processes and systems would work for them—which were lean and efficient and would help them get things done quickly, and which ones were burdensome.\\n\\n They’re still, I think, learning some of that. They’ve made a lot of progress today, they’ve come a lot closer to what we’re used to than where they were when they first started. Having that clean Skunk Works organization gives you a lot of ability to innovate and do things more quickly and more efficiently." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How were you involved in those first months with them? Were you in residence with them helping them along the way?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We’d have milestone meetings on a fairly regular basis in the early couple of years. Then, in between those, I eventually set up weekly meetings with their lead engineers for the rocket and for the capsule. We’d have regular tag ups to see what progress they were making, what areas they were doing well in, how they were progressing to schedule. In fact, I spent a long time trying to get them to actually build a schedule, because they had really no idea how to lay out a big project schedule when we started. They’ve learned a lot over the years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned being able to share NASA’s expertise with them as they were formulating those plans in those first months. Can you give us some examples about whether you and/or your advisory groups—some examples about how NASA was involved in those days. Did you help with actual development of the spacecraft, or things other than helping them develop schedules? What are other examples of what you did?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One thing I did was I tried to coach all the technical experts. Early on I tried to hand select a lot of the folks that we were using as advisory team members because I’d worked with a lot of them in the past, whether it was on the Space Station Program or on Constellation. I tried to pick folks that I knew really knew their subsystem and technical area, and were reasonable to work with.\\n\\n What I didn’t want to do was get a bunch of people that were strictly by the book. “The requirement says this, and you have to do it this way because that’s what the requirement says” types. I’m one of those people that asks, “Why is the requirement like that? What is the end goal that we’re trying to get to with this requirement? Isn’t there another way to get there if we need to?” The point of most requirements is to make sure that the system works the way that you want it to. The way we sometimes word requirements is a combination of a lot of history and “That’s the way we’ve always done.” That doesn’t go very well with innovation, so I tried to get people that really knew their stuff and their system, and then I’d coach them and let them know that this is different.\\n\\n It’s not the typical NASA-contractor relationship where you can’t tell the contractor how to do business for fear that you’re violating some contractual requirement. “Giving a constructive change” is the parlance I think in contracts, where if you tell them, “You have to go do this,” they may go do it, and then the government is liable for the cost and takes on not just the cost liability, but also the technical liability if it doesn’t work.\\n\\n I would tell the NASA people, “This was a partnership. You can tell them what you see the issues are, and explain to them some of the things that you learned in the past, what’s worked in space and what hasn’t worked in space and why. You can even suggest how they may want to do it, and they may take that and they may not.”\\n\\n I’d say, “They’re going to make some internal corporate cost trades and tradeoffs on what’s the best thing to do is for them. That may not necessarily fit with the way that you’d recommend, but they’re trying to do things a lot more cost effectively than we have in the past. Quite frankly, cheaper. They may come up with a different way of doing it than you suggested, but they’re going to listen and they’re very receptive to understanding from our history and what’s worked and what hasn’t worked in the past.”\\n\\n I tried to coach them into a more open and friendly dialogue from the start, when I got them on board the teams. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. There were some CAT members that I had in the early design reviews that didn’t work out. I still had to use some methods that we’ve done in the past. We call them RIDs, Review Item Discrepancy. You’d write up a little discussion, on a form, of what you see that may be a problem with the design and why you think it’s a problem. And then we’d have to go through that issue, understand it and how to mitigate it as we did the rest of the review. The big ones went up through the board and were reconciled.\\n\\n When I started getting a bunch of RIDs in from somebody that were just picking at the paperwork and the wording of something, I’d try to coach them that we weren’t trying to get to that. We were trying to get down to the meat of the technical areas and we weren’t so much worried about “Is the paperwork perfect?” If they continued down that route, I didn’t invite them to the next review. So there was some turnover in the CAT teams over the years. Some good ones moved on to different projects, but some of them just weren’t a good match." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was their participation voluntary in the sense that they did it as part of their normal job? Or did they become a COTS team member that charged to a code to come work as part of COTS?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had a charge code." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it that if you asked them they could, but if they didn’t want to that was okay too? There was no mandate that they needed to have to do that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we didn’t have that big a stick. At the time that we started, there were a lot of major projects still going on at the Center. The Shuttle was still flying, so the Shuttle employed a lot of people. The Space Station was still going full-bore in assembly and had a lot of people dedicated to it. Constellation was ramping up and still had a lot of people. So it was really hard to get people. It was hard to get people at JSC to give us the time of day.\\n\\n I think the only reason early on that we did get some of the experts that we did was because I knew them from the past and they had worked with me on previous projects, and they found this interesting and challenging. But otherwise they were dedicated full-time to other programs. The JSC Center didn’t give us any allocation of people, so we were more or less forced to go to other NASA Centers for a lot of the help. That’s good and bad.\\n\\n There are a lot of smart people throughout the Agency, but there’s a unique skill set in manned spaceflight that you don’t have in say some other research or unmanned centers. It just that that’s not where their primary expertise lies. If I got a recommendation about an acceptable material from somebody at an unmanned center, it could be wrong because they don’t know the toxicology requirements or the flammability requirements of manned spacecraft. So a lot of times, I’d have to temper the responses I got from some of the other organizations. That’s why it was really critical to be able to pull out some key folks at JSC and at [NASA] Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m curious, was there a type of broadcast system—you knew what experts to tap into that you sent a request for help, and then got responses? How did you tap the people at the other centers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We compiled a list of names on a spreadsheet. First we looked at each of the reviews. Myself and my deputy Warren [P. Ruemmele] and one of our contractor support people would sit down and look at what review was coming up, what the major topics of the review might be, and what kind of technical discipline support we had. We’d get a feel for what documents we were going to be getting in from SpaceX for that review, then we’d map out each one of the documents to a set of skills that we wanted it to be reviewed by: structures; thermal; power; avionics folks; guidance, navigation and control; some operations folks; maybe some ground ops [operations] folks. We’d map the review to the types of technical disciplines that we wanted to have for the review. We assigned each one of the documents to at least one, if not more than one, of those technical disciplines, so we knew we were getting coverage on each one of the documents submitted.\\n\\n We had acquired over time this list of people that we could call on and I’d send out an email to them en masse asking if they’d be available for a review during this period of time that was coming up and get responses back. If we got enough people in each one of the technical areas then we were okay. If not then we’d go out to some of the other centers and ask for additional help in specific areas.\\n\\n It took a while, but we eventually got a main point of contact at each one of the different NASA Centers. They’d be able to go out to their engineering directorates and pull some of the technical support that we needed. But that took a little while to get going. It’s a well-greased wheel now, but it wasn’t in the beginning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just identifying people had to be a task in itself, trying to find the right people at the right place, then having them carve out time to help you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A lot of times they were in the middle of another review that their management said was more critical. There was a major design review for Orion going on, and they didn’t have time to support us because that was where the Agency’s focus was. Flying out the Shuttle safely, continuing assembly of the Space Station, and then building up the Constellation Program, Ares and Orion, were the Agency’s focus. This was the back burner project. It was the side bet, literally, is what it was. I think at one point I heard that the [NASA] Administrator [Michael D.] Griffin was quoted as saying, “We’ll put in $500 million—no more, no less—to this COTS commercialization idea and see how it goes.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Look what happened. When do you think it didn’t fit into that term anymore, being a back burner project or being a side bet? What was the tipping point that moved you out of that spot?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Continual schedule slips of Constellation, Ares and Orion delays. Kept on slipping further and further out to the point where it wasn’t going to make it to Space Station. Shuttle’s retirement was becoming more and more imminent and was more of a firm date. The things on the outside moved around us and we were still tracking.\\n\\n Granted, we originally were going to be a three-year development program, and it almost took twice as long to get the flight off to Space Station as what SpaceX originally proposed. I told you they had some difficulties with scheduling early on. They were very optimistic on their schedules, very aggressive in what they thought they could get done in a certain amount of time, and had no schedule margin built into any of their schedules when they built them.\\n\\n I think, when we even signed the agreements, we knew that their schedules were ridiculously optimistic, and assumed it was going to take quite a bit longer than what they had proposed. But that was okay. As long as they were making good technical progress I think we were happy, because it wasn’t going to cost NASA any more.\\n\\n On a typical government contract, if the contractor is late and the schedule for a development program drags on by a year, you’re paying a lot more money. It’s not just that the rocket takes longer to build; you’re paying for a standing army of people that are on that project for another year. So you’re paying for maybe 10,000 people at $200,000 per year. That’s some cost overrun compared to what you originally thought.\\n\\n In this case, NASA wasn’t liable for any of those cost overruns. We had a fixed milestone-based agreement. When they met a technical milestone, we reviewed it. If they met those technical criteria, then we paid them the amount that we agreed on for that milestone. If it took them longer to get to that milestone, we didn’t pay them any more. It was just the amount that we had agreed on. Any delays were costs that they had to incur on their side, it was their contribution to the project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Things were running pretty much on schedule with your reviews when you first started, is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Early on. The first couple years I think were pretty much dead on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When it got to the point where [milestone deadlines] started to slip, can you share with us—not specifics of the conversation, but the conversation as a whole—how to get them on a track to move forward? Were there concerns on the NASA side that since they had begun to slip that it’d continue slipping, maybe not reach fruition?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, SpaceX was really scared that we would terminate them if they missed a date in the early years, because the agreement said, “You’re going to have this milestone in this month in this year.” It didn’t give you a lot of flexibility; it said you had to do it on that schedule. We laid out a schedule for the milestones partially so that we knew what the funding profile would be for our internal budgeting, just so that you had some kind of general guideline for what we were doing.\\n\\n There wasn’t a lot of language in the Space Act that said if you miss a milestone what happens. I think what it said was if you missed a milestone, NASA had the rights to terminate the agreement. So they were really scared that if they didn’t meet a milestone on a given date we were going to just end the agreement with them. I don’t think even on the NASA side we knew exactly how to deal with some of that early on, the first schedule delay.\\n\\n We terminated Rocketplane Kistler mostly because they were making no progress. It wasn’t that they had missed some milestones. I think they even rewrote the Space Act at one point and let them combine some milestones to try and help them, but they just weren’t making progress. In the case of SpaceX, they were making progress. They had made a tremendous amount of progress through the early design reviews.\\n\\n But when you get to the hardware build and assembly and test phase, things happen. It’s just the nature of actually designing new hardware and building new hardware and software. When you start integrating all those things together, some things work that you thought were going to work, and some things don’t work that you thought were going to work. Then you have to go redesign it and try again. That leads to schedule delays.\\n\\n We were getting to that phase of the program, but they were still making a tremendous amount of progress. I had lots of insight into how they were doing technically on all the different subsystems, but they weren’t exactly on the schedule that we had laid out in the beginning. So we had some long conversations here with our folks and legal to make sure that if they were showing good technical progress, was it okay to let them miss a milestone date? Then if they met the technical content of that milestone at a later date, was it okay to still pay them for the milestone? The first couple times there was some wringing of hands. We wrestled with that quite a bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were the eyes of the Agency beginning to look at what you were doing at that time period? Or were you still on the back burner when you were starting to make those decisions of letting them stretch that date out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At that point we still weren’t too far in the limelight, so I think they weren’t all that worried about us. They had much bigger problems to worry about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you given the authority, based on your position, where you could make some of those decisions to allow them to have leeway one way or the other? Or was part of your responsibility to come back and get that authority from here within your program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Alan [J. Lindenmoyer, Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Manager] had the real authority, although I think he needed to still check with his boss and with the rest of the NASA community, legal and other folks, to make sure it was okay. I’d make recommendations based on whether they had met the technical content of what the milestone was, did I think they were making technical progress. I was basically making recommendations on where we should go with things. I didn’t have the ultimate decision making authority, Alan had the final sign off on those things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’re learning more about how the partnerships work and how traditional protocol was set aside on some things, but it sounds like on this it still went up the ladder." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In a lot of cases we still followed a lot of the protocols that were done in the past. Even the proposal and procurement process, although it was streamlined. It was done a lot more efficiently than a normal procurement. They followed a lot of the same procedures and protocols and did a lot of the things that you’d do in a normal FAR-based procurement, even though it was a Space Act Agreement and they didn’t necessarily need to follow all those rules. Just to make it clean and not show even an inkling of favoritism or being unfair in the selection process. They tried to follow the typical process in a lot of respects so that it, by its nature, made sure we were fair and equitable." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As the process began for the development phases, how was the safety community within NASA involved? Or even the safety folks from the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]. Can you share with us on how they were brought in, or not brought in, and how they impacted the vehicles’ development?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right at the beginning of the project, we had a Chief Safety [and Mission Assurance] Officer that was resident with us. In fact, Mark [D. Erminger] lives right across the hall from me, so I’d have him coming to all our reviews, giving me his observations as we were going through different design reviews and understanding where they were and what the risks were. He’d sometimes call directly to the contractor and talk to their safety folks, get their Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. At some point I think he did a Probabilistic Risk Assessment, or got the contractor’s data on that.\\n\\n He was really helpful, and he was reasonable. He understood that there were trades that had to be made in order to actually get anything done, so he was aware of what those trades were. I tried to explain behind the scenes what was going on technically, and why there may be certain issues where it wasn’t strictly the way we would have done things in the past. He’d weigh that and balance it with what his understanding of the overall agency’s safety philosophy, and come back with recommendations in some cases, and just agreement in other cases." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the influence or impact stop here on his level? Was the NASA Headquarters [Washington, DC] safety involved, or the FAA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As time went on we started getting help from Headquarters. They requested to participate in a lot of our reviews. It was okay, they were mostly in listen mode. I didn’t see a lot of influence that put big roadblocks in the development program. They were interested to see how we were doing things, interested to know that Mark was an active participant. He was reporting directly up to the Headquarters [Chief] of Safety [And Mission Assurance] at the time, Bryan [D.] O’Connor, so he was passing on a lot of the information.\\n\\n They were more worried if we were going to go implement a crew program, because early in the project we were both cargo and crew. The idea was we were going to start out, see how they do with cargo, and if they did a pretty good job with cargo then we’d turn them on to do commercial crew as well. In fact the SpaceX Space Act Agreement has an Option D in it that would have let us turn on the crew program, the crew Dragon [capsule]. We just hadn’t exercised it at the time. The outside organizations were much more interested, if we were going to try to fly crew on board the vehicles.\\n\\n Then, as part of normal safety, as we started to have missions that were going to go to Space Station, the Space Station safety process started to take over the normal phased safety review process. Phase 0, 1, 2, 3 reviews, hazard reports and going to the Safety [Review] Panel. A lot of those safety requirements were Space Station requirements for any vehicle that was going to rendezvous and attach to the Space Station. There’s a certain number of requirements that you just have to have in order to make sure the vehicle and the subsystems on that vehicle are safe, and not going to damage the Space Station or any crew member on board the Space Station." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you the main liaison between SpaceX and ISS to make sure that that was covered, or were there other people involved with that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did some of it. Originally our office had a position for that, but Station really wanted to be the primary point of contact for most of that, so I just worked with their folks. A lot of those processes were standing processes in place, so once I got the SpaceX folks to learn how to play into them I didn’t need to be directly involved. There were too many different things going on all at the same time for one person to be a bottleneck of information. There’s no way I could have been the liaison in the middle of all that, as well as making sure the development was going right, and on schedule, and we were getting payments to them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s another nontraditional way of doing business to allow the flow and not have to go through one central point" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To actually trust people to know what they’re doing. They always knew they could call me if something didn’t seem right and they were getting into a problem that they couldn’t get out of. Then I could talk to both the NASA side, whoever was raising the concern, and understand, mediate our way through it. It wasn’t all that frequent, quite frankly. Once in a while we’d have to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If I understand correctly, going to the Station was not mandated. That was something that SpaceX could choose to do, is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that was the way it was originally written, although the whole point was to be able to take cargo to the Space Station, so not going to the Space Station—I guess you could not do that, but I don’t know what the point would be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So far as you understood, that was always their intent, to bring cargo to the Station, from the beginning of their development phase." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We’d given them information on what size packages they were going to take and be able to accommodate, and how much power you’d need to give to powered payloads, and the kind of cooling you’d need to give to powered payloads. They were all directly from our requirements that we had from EXPRESS [Expedite the Processing of Experiments to the Space Station] racks that were on the Space Station, and cargo bags that we’d normally fly in MPLMs [Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules]. It was all directly logistics for Space Station. They could not go into Space Station I guess, but they would have never gotten the CRS [Commercial Resupply Services] contract.\\n\\n SpaceX had three flights in the basic agreement. The first flight was just an orbital flight. Prove that the rocket works, prove that the capsule can get to orbit, can maneuver in orbit, communicate in space. Prove that their thrusters worked to make it point at a target, and that it could reenter, that the heat shield worked and the parachute system worked.\\n\\n Quite frankly that was the one that worried me the most, the first flight. They had one flight of the [Falcon 9] rocket before that COTS 1 [demonstration] mission, then the flight with the Dragon on board that was actually going to maneuver in orbit. Did their thrusters that they built themselves work, did they communicate with the TDRSS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System] satellites correctly? Then did the heat shield work through reentry, and did the parachutes work?\\n\\n I influenced them to do some more parachute testing than they had planned in the past. They had tried to leverage on the Orion parachutes, buying them from the same company that was building the parachutes for Orion. Then the Orion schedule dragged out so long that they never finished certifying and qualifying parachutes. So now SpaceX was left out in front all of a sudden, without the budget to do the full qualification program.\\n\\n We suggested they may want to do some things like some more drop tests, some more parachute tests. They eventually did a helicopter drop test. We learned from some of the things that the Orion folks did, dropping out of the back of airplanes, and how some of the systems to stabilize after you come out of the airplane cause more problems than the actual test itself.\\n\\n We tried to keep it a little simpler. Some folks would say that didn’t prove as much as you necessarily could from some other tests, but it showed the basic systems worked. They tried to keep it fairly simple. Simple release of drogue parachutes, and then have the drogues pull out the mains and make sure they were in a good packaging, would inflate well. The capsule comes down really slow if all three mains are inflated; it’s a very soft ride. Even if one or two of the mains is out, it’s still coming down slower than Apollo or Orion." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s interesting. Share with us what it was like on that test, the whole launch aspect. You said you were concerned for that first one because there was so much that had to go right. You really had put in a lot of investment, your technical expertise and your time with them. If you can just share with us what it was like to be there, and know that things were launching and working the way you wanted them to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, obviously it was nerve racking. The uphill ride is always really worrisome. Getting a rocket into space—those first nine minutes or ten minutes really worries you, because lots of things are going very fast. There’s not time for something to go wrong and still have a very good outcome. So that was nerve racking. We did a lot of things to “buy insurance” is probably the way to put it.\\n\\n Warren and I scoured the Agency—and other agencies—to find assets to help us have some additional insight into the demo [demonstration] missions, like bringing up some of the Shuttle radar systems. Some of the debris radar that they had implemented after Columbia [STS-107 accident] to look for foam coming off the Shuttle, we train those same radar on Falcon 9 for the ascent phase. If something goes wrong, we would have very high quality images of what might have been coming off the vehicle, so we’d be able to do a reasonable investigation if we had to. Luckily we didn’t have to.\\n\\n We sent the SRB [Solid Rocket Booster] ships up the coast, and out farther than they’d gone before on a Shuttle mission, so that we could optimally deploy them for staging events and other events. We looked at the history or rocket launches with The Aerospace Corporation. Where do you typically have failures of rockets? A lot of the events, when things are changing, is when things don’t seem to work right. So we tried to deploy assets, both optics and radar, to be able to see those specific events.\\n\\n Then we briefed all the way up to the [NASA] Associate Administrator [for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate] what our plan was. We’d even worked with a group out of [NASA] Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] called HYTHIRM [Hypersonic Thermodynamic Infrared Measurements] that has used some Navy P-3 Orions [aircraft] with some optics on them to look for Shuttle reentries. They started looking at what happens if some of the tiles aren’t in place right, or some of the gap fillers are sticking out.\\n\\n We used a lot of the same assets that they had to watch the reentry of the Dragon capsule, so that if something went wrong during reentry we at least had a chance of figuring out what the heck happened. You’re in a data blackout during reentry, so you’re not going to be getting telemetry back. You might get lucky and be able to recover some data recorder out in the middle of the Pacific, but in order to have good insight to what was going on we deployed a plane to go look and watch the reentry, especially during the max [maximum] heating phase. Luckily things went really well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Doesn’t sound like too much luck. Sounds like a whole lot of preparation, a lot of analysis." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did a lot of analysis, and we did a lot of work with NASA experts. But we tended on this project not to go as deep into any given technical problem as maybe we would on a manned mission. We didn’t look at all the corner cases to the absolute extreme; we didn’t do a bunch of ground-based testing of every single thing. They did a bunch of arc jet testing of the basic material. [NASA] Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] had actually developed the main heat shield material, something called PICA [Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator], for some unmanned missions. They worked with SpaceX to design the heat shield, and used some of the Ames code to figure out what the heating rates would be and how thick the material would need to be.\\n\\n SpaceX built a lot of margin into their design early on, so that if they didn’t do some calculation just right they had some robustness in the design. Granted, it added weight to the vehicle, but it gave you some flexibility for changes that inevitably happened. Or finding out that maybe they hadn’t designed to the right requirement for some structural margin for Space Station, or some load case that they hadn’t thought of before.\\n\\n They had enough robustness in their design that they didn’t have to completely scrap the design and start all over again. They could redo the analysis and show that they still had margin. That saves a lot of money in the project development cycle because you’re not scrapping out the hardware design and starting all over again.\\n\\n You don’t completely optimize performance, but I like their general philosophy where you retain some margin early in the first couple flights, and then you maybe redesign later to gain more performance. As opposed to trying to optimize everything right from the start, and you spend a lot of time and a lot of analysis trying to optimize, and then something from outside your influence throws you a curveball and you have to go redesign the whole thing anyway because you have no margin, you designed right to the limits.\\n\\n NASA tends to do that a lot. Not sure it’s necessarily all that efficient. Certainly builds you a spacecraft that is a Ferrari as opposed to a Volkswagen, but if all you need to do is have the function of a Volkswagen—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’re giving credit for that decision to SpaceX, so that was their decision to not fully optimize and retain that margin with their design?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s their general design philosophy. They tended a little bit more towards the way the Russians do business. They design something, and test it, and then see how it worked, and then make tweaks, and build it again and test it again. They used a lot of state-of-the-art computer code to design the hardware, don’t get me wrong, but they left some margin in there and didn’t try to overoptimize right off the bat, which I think is good.\\n\\n You have to have a booster that’s going to be able to take that extra mass to orbit, and I think we’re paying for a little of that right now. They’re working on the next generation booster that’s going to give them a lot more performance to orbit. Depends on where you want to get to and if you’ve got the flexibility to be able to continue development and make changes.\\n\\n There used to be somebody at Headquarters that was trying to do what they called spiral development. [Rear] Admiral [Craig E.] Steidle had proposed that in the Agency. I don’t think most of the Agency knew what he was talking about, where you design a little, test a little, fly a little, redesign, test, fly. You keep on iterating the design and evolving it. Not trying to come up with the optimal design right off the bat, which is virtually impossible to do. But we try to do it on almost every damn project, and it shows in how some of the projects go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After that first test flight, were you involved and invited to sit down with them to hear their debriefing and their evaluation of what they felt went right and went wrong?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. The flight itself was a milestone—successful demo flight. We had determined a set of mission objectives for that demo flight. We jointly agreed on them and had a document that defined what those top level objectives were. It was short, maybe a couple pages. The major elements of the goals for that flight I think were on one page. In order to get payment they had to show that they had met those major objectives. So we had a debriefing two days after the flight, where they showed proof that they had met each one of those objectives.\\n\\n Then a couple months later, when they had gotten all the data back and processed all the data, we had a much more detailed debrief for both the rocket and the capsule. We went through what systems worked and what systems didn’t work, and how they were going to fix the ones that didn’t work for the next flight. Or if they were making such significant changes in the design from the first demo flight to the second demo flight vehicle that it didn’t matter anymore. The vehicle changed significantly from the first flight vehicle, primarily because it had different mission requirements." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which leads to a question—what measures did you have to take to maintain the level of confidentiality that NASA and SpaceX have agreed to on the level of this partnership? We understand there’s so much of what they do that you’re privy to, but you don’t discuss outside of your NASA counterparts. I’d like for you to give us your definition of how the proprietary information, or confidentiality of their technical expertise, stays within their own environment. It’s not a traditional role of NASA when they develop spacecraft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes and no. In a typical contract, NASA is paying for the design and basically buying the design and the vehicle. So in that case we more or less own the design. We’re paying a contractor to do it, but we own the majority of the rights to it. There are some areas that are still sometimes corporate proprietary. If they have come up with a certain process or material through their corporate IR&D [Internal Research and Development] funding, or some other method that is unique to them, that you can’t share with anybody else.\\n\\n Typically the government would own the design because we paid for it. In this agreement, SpaceX retained a lot of the rights because they were putting in a lot of their own money into the development. As part of the agreement, it lets them keep a lot of the rights to it unless they for some reason default.\\n\\n We tried to keep it fairly tight, and remind anybody that was working on the project that they can’t share it with other contractors. NASA has so much contractor support, especially on big programs, Space Station and Shuttle Program. We flew a couple [SpaceX] DTOs [Detailed Test Objectives] on the Shuttle and some other hardware on the Shuttle.\\n\\n You have to work with some of those contractors during the integration process, so we had to get Non-Disclosure Agreements signed with those individuals or their corporate to make sure that they’re not using any knowledge they have on the SpaceX design for some other vehicle that maybe they were designing.\\n\\n In some cases they were really worried about Boeing, because Boeing was a potential competitor on the crew vehicle. Boeing is the prime integrator for the Space Station, so we had to firewall off some of those people from working on any proposals for a crew vehicle for Boeing. That was all done with the contracts folks.\\n\\n In general we tried to keep the data in a secure repository that had very limited access to just people that we had cleared for the project, had a right and a need to know and had signed agreements either themselves or with their corporation on that particular contract that had the nondisclosures in there.\\n\\n The other aspect that we had to deal with is ITAR [International Traffic in Arms Regulation]. It’s a launch vehicle, so got to make sure that we’re only dealing with U.S. persons, because you can’t share ITAR information with foreigners in any sense. So we had both of them coming at us like a double whammy to make sure that we kept things close to the vest.\\n\\n It made it difficult because it was hard to get data transferred between people when you needed it to be transferred to certain people, trying to follow the limitations of how they’re supposed to handle that type of data." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I can’t even imagine. In December 2008, SpaceX was awarded one of the two Commercial Resupply Services contracts. What role was yours in that process? Did you have one?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn’t have a role in the process. I was just trying to make sure that we built and demonstrated the basic capability. They had a whole separate group doing procurement for the services phase of the contract. I knew that ours was the demonstration phase, and if they did the demonstration phase successfully there was a follow-on services contract. I was just making sure that it worked, then I figured the rest of it was going to take care of itself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "From what we understand it did work. There were other pieces of the demonstration phases. Would you like to talk about the other flights and the roles that you played with moving those forward?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were supposed to be two other [demonstration] flights, a total of three flights. The second flight was supposed to take the capsule to orbit, be a more capable capsule. It would be in space for nine to ten days, and really let a lot of the systems start to see how well they worked in space over a long period of time, through lots of thermal cycles and orbits around the Earth and day-night cycles. Just see how well they tolerated the radiation environment.\\n\\n The surface objective was to do a flyby of Station and close the comm [communications] link with Space Station. There was no comm system on board Space Station that would talk to a visiting vehicle other than the Japanese [Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency] system that they had built for the HTV [H-II Transfer Vehicle].\\n\\n The ESA ATV system came up through the Russian side of the ISS vehicle. We had thought about that briefly, but then you were berthing to the Russian side of the vehicle. We didn’t know if the Russians were going to charge us a docking fee, and you had to go through the much smaller hatch that was available on the Russian side. Ruled that out early in the program.\\n\\n I guess I influenced SpaceX quite a bit. I had worked with the Japanese quite a bit on Space Station, and although they’re very good technically, they are very slow and methodical in their decision making process. I knew that working with the Japanese team probably would clash with the SpaceX culture and way of doing business. SpaceX wouldn’t understand why it would take three or four weeks to make a decision on some simple question. Whereas the Japanese culture would normally go back and have some team huddle offline before they came back and gave you a real yes or no.\\n\\n Quite frankly, I thought that the basic premise of COTS was to develop a U.S. capability to take cargo to orbit. SpaceX was building a vehicle completely in the United States. They were building their own engines, their own tanks. The rocket was a U.S.-built vehicle, their capsule was all built in the United States. I found it disconcerting to think that we were going to build all that capability, and then have the last mile getting to Space Station dependent on a foreign government.\\n\\n The idea behind COTS was to make sure that we weren’t dependent on foreign governments anymore. We had the Shuttle, which gave us this huge capability and was a tremendous asset. Then the only other way to take cargo to Station was going to be HTV and [ESA] ATV [Automated Transfer Vehicle], foreign governments or the Russians. I think the idea behind COTS was to build a capability in the U.S. I didn’t want us to be held hostage for the last part of the mission because we didn’t have a communication system.\\n\\n I started working with the Space Station Program and the comm folks. It seemed to be too much to go put a new antenna outside Space Station at the time. Space Station wasn’t paying that much attention to the COTS program yet, and having us do an EVA [Extravehicular Activity] to go install an external antenna, and either finding penetration through the pressure shell or making a new penetration just didn’t seem like it was in the cards.\\n\\n So we worked with the comm folks and decided that we could use the UHF [Ultra-High Frequency] system and antennas that were already there to talk to the spacesuits, and build a comm system that would be able to talk to the visiting vehicle. It had a lot of drawbacks because it was UHF, and it was a shared frequency band so we had to deal with the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] and the NTIA [National Telecommunications and Information Administration] for regulations on how much power you could communicate out of the Space Station.\\n\\n It was originally installed as just being for communications to spacesuits and very close to the Space Station, very limited power. Whereas we had a vehicle coming up from a far distance that we wanted to be communicating with at least 20 miles away, so you had to turn the power up. There were lots of complications and negotiations with the powers that be—both the frequency managers here at JSC, and at Headquarters, and then the whole rest of the government regulatory process—to be able to use the comm frequencies.\\n\\n But in the end it gave us a capability to have a comm system that wasn’t a foreign government’s comm system. We ended up launching two boxes that SpaceX developed in middeck lockers. I built a bunch of middeck lockers for all the payloads back in my days with Space Station. So I loaned them a couple middeck lockers to install their comm system into, because it got us away from a bunch of structural analysis and safety hassles.\\n\\n It integrated easily into some EXPRESS racks that were already on orbit. Then we hooked up the wiring. You need cable harnesses, so the crew had to go lay in some new cabling to tie into the existing UHF system. We ended up with two boxes on board Space Station that talked between the Space Station and the upcoming SpaceX vehicle.\\n\\n The objective of the second mission was to close the communication link with that new system on board Space Station, make sure it really worked, before we came in a lot closer to Space Station. Part of that system had a bunch of switches on a switch panel for the crew that if it looked like the vehicle wasn’t following the right approach corridor to the Space Station, they could hit an abort and it would send a command to the upcoming SpaceX vehicle to abort, fire its thrusters to back away from the Space Station.\\n\\n So it was very important that that comm link worked. It gave us data on range and range rate, information about the vehicle approaching to make sure it was still okay to continue the approach. That was what the big ticket item was for the second demo mission. Go check it out before you fly a final approach on the third mission, which was to finally get all the way up to the Space Station, berth with the Space Station, and then demonstrate that you can transfer cargo in and out.\\n\\n We had some problems with the MPLMs on the early flights, where getting racks out of the MPLM was pretty easy, but getting them back in for return and getting them bolted back down turned out to be a little problematic. There’s some things that “the best laid plans” and thoughts about the design—when you finally get into space, you realize that things expand a little bit because you’re in an airless environment and you’re pressurized. Well, take the racks out, they don’t go back in the same as when they came out because things move. You’re optimizing design for weight, but then the structure isn’t as rigid and changes a little.\\n\\n We wanted to prove all that out in the final mission, that it could do all the basic functions of delivering cargo to and returning cargo from the Space Station without issues. Partway through the program, SpaceX approached us and asked if it would be possible to combine those two missions, the second and the third demo mission. At first we didn’t receive it very well. It seemed like they were looking for ways to just save money by eliminating a flight, and adding a lot more risk.\\n\\n In the end we did a lot of work with them to do some integrated system-level tests. A lot of things like full-blown thermal vacuum test of the capsule, a full-blown EMI [Electromagnetic Interference] test of the vehicle. A lot of deployment tests of a lot of their mechanisms, the solar arrays, their door and grapple fixture. A bunch of testing of the LIDAR [Light Detection and Ranging] and proximity ops sensors that were going to be used on that final approach to Space Station.\\n\\n We added a bunch of new milestones and tests into the overall program that they didn’t have in their original plan. As we added all those more traditional tests that NASA would have done on a system, we got more comfortable with then being able to combine the two missions and not being so risky that it was just a throwaway mission. We came to another fairly reasonable compromise in my opinion, doing some things to reduce the risk, but still meeting some of their objectives.\\n\\n It also saved schedule and manpower for SpaceX, since they had been taking quite a bit longer. They were running into some financial issues. As I said, they were still having to pay for this standing army, more or less, that was working on the program, even though they weren’t meeting new milestones and getting new payments. So it helped them in that they only had to design one more new vehicle.\\n\\n There would have been slight differences between the design of the C2 vehicle and the C3 vehicle, so it saved them a little bit of nonrecurring engineering time, as well as just time to complete. Although that’s a double-edged sword, because the flyby mission wouldn’t have had as much insight and verification that the Space Station folks required of it as the mission that came all the way up and approached Space Station. They had to do a lot more work to get Station comfortable that their vehicle was safe and ready to fully approach Space Station. So, that made the next launch seem like a long time from the first." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you surprised, or did you start to see some hints that they were going to want to combine those two missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They’d been hinting at it for a while I think. I wasn’t sure it was a great idea at first, seemed like the benefits to NASA weren’t all that good when they first proposed it. They did caveat it, always saying that if for some reason they were unsuccessful they would go fly another mission and try again. We were still getting what the original value was out of the original agreement. We’d still, if need be, get three flights. Turned out this got us there a little bit faster than if we had had to really need three flights.\\n\\n Like I said, we did a lot of work with them, both the Station folks and some of our CATS support folks, to help them see where some big integrated system tests might be useful. We found some problems that delayed the flight by a little bit. Some of those big system tests found real problems that would have been a mission failure if we didn’t catch them on the ground." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess that’s the success of melding the new with the old." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, sometimes the old guys know what they’re talking about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Combining all these efforts, there was a lot on the line when they launched that flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I think there were a lot of hidden agendas as well. There was a lot of questioning, “Does this whole COTS thing work?” There was a lot of politics in the political world thinking is this the smart thing to do, should we really be messing with COTS and this whole commercialization, or should we be doing it the more traditional way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’re no longer on the back burner now. You were in the forefront, people were watching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that whole commercial crew thing was starting to take off. Quite frankly, if that flight was not successful I’m not sure commercial crew would have taken off. There was a lot of scrutiny as to, “Is this new approach going to work?” and “Could they build something that was reasonable and successful?” I think a lot of people breathed a sigh of relief after it achieved its objectives, because I think there would have been a lot more scrutiny and rethought about “Are we doing the right thing with this approach?” if it wasn’t successful.\\n\\n We had enough history, based on rocket developments over the years, to know that in the first three flights of a new vehicle, there’s normally a failure. A lot of times, it’s a catastrophic failure of a new rocket, whether it was built as a commercial rocket or the government had sunk its full resources into that development. The curves typically show in the first three flights there’s usually a problem, then it levels off for a little while.\\n\\n Then, at about six or seven flights, there’s another spike up in failures as they go from the development organization to the production phase, and lose track and focus as they transition from the guys that designed the vehicle to the folks that are more the operations and builders. Seems like there seems to be that spike later on as they go into production.\\n\\n We knew there was a lot of risk. The FAA and range safety, as part of their normal process for licensing and certifying that the flight is okay to launch, do calculations based on history and what the understanding of the vehicles are, what is the likelihood and probability of the vehicle being successful. So yes, there was a lot of risk on a lot of those flights." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find yourself in a position of explaining, and possibly justifying, more of the processes of reaching that flight as you approached? Were you in meetings with the higher ups?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we ended up briefing both here at the Center and at Headquarters. We managed to keep it fairly streamlined and not have to brief a lot of different organizations and panels. We managed to get them all pulled together. Mark helped quite a bit influencing, based on some of the reviews that had typically gone on for Shuttles, and combining them together with briefings to the Associate Administrator. Making sure that all the parties were in the same room at the same time, we didn’t have to do it multiple times. That was really helpful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s helpful, yes. Did you ever feel like you didn’t have the support of upper management to continue on the journey that had begun?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I didn’t necessarily have that feeling during the majority of the development phase. I had one manager at one point that went on vacation and gave me some of the wisest words I have gotten in my career. I asked him, “So what’s my authority while you’re gone?” His response was, “Proceed until apprehended.” And I’ve had people tell me over the years, “Ask for forgiveness and not permission.” That is the way you really get things done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At least you had a little more flexibility in this environment than you would have before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was happy not to get too much help. They gave us the authority to try and make the right decisions. Some of the upper management are really really smart and have a lot of experience. They were able to help us, point out things that we should look for based on their experience. I never found our direct line management to be a burden, they were really helpful. It was just really good, it’s been a pleasure working with them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s always good to know that you’ve got someone taking care of that side. The days leading up to that last launch, were you constantly with the SpaceX folks as part of their whole process?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was there with their team at the launch site during the final processing. They do a lot of things that are a little bit unique. They test fire the integrated first stage out in [McGregor] Texas and make sure that the whole integrated stage works. A lot of companies don’t test fire their rocket before they go fly it. Then they do a wet dress rehearsal on the pad, which a lot of the companies do. Fully fuel the rocket, go through simulated countdown, make sure all the systems are working.\\n\\n But then they go through one that’s a static fire on the pad where they actually light the engines for a couple seconds, still hold it down and make sure things are working. Part of that is because they designed their engines to be a little more robust than typical. It paid off in some cases. We went through a countdown and they actually lit the engines, and then had a check valve fail and aborted.\\n\\n If we had done that with the Shuttle, it would have been months and months before we flew again. They turned it around in a matter of days. They found where the check valve was that had failed, had pictures of the part that had come loose in it, knew exactly why it came loose. We jointly discussed it and reported to our upper management, changed it out and within a couple days they launched. They turned around and had the vehicle ready to go again. If you’d lit the engines on a Shuttle, you’re not going again in a few days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talk to us about the launch, and the pros and the cons that came from the results of all that work. What was the best part for you, the relief of it working out as well as it did? If you had to find something that didn’t work out well from that launch, or maybe the best lesson learned that came out from the mission itself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was actually in shock for days, if not weeks after, that everything worked as well as it did. We had done a lot of work, and a lot of due diligence and had a lot of review and tried to find where the problems would be, but as complicated and as complex as the whole thing was—and then to combine the two missions together, add the complication of trying to do both missions all in one—it really surprised me that it all worked as well as it did.\\n\\n The only thing that got a little dicey is on final approach when some of the rendezvous and prox sensors weren’t reading the same values. There was some built-in aborts that we were worried were going to trigger and have the vehicle back away. So it took longer on that first approach to come into Station, but the SpaceX ops team and the [NASA] MOD [Mission Operations Directorate] ops team worked really well together, and had done a lot of training and simulations together, and were pretty comfortable with the data they were seeing that they weren’t too far off from each other.\\n\\n Quite frankly, the crew could see the vehicle and knew where it was. It may have been more of a risk to really abort and try again than to just proceed. Then Don [Donald R.] Pettit did a great job capturing the vehicle, it’s amazing how fast he grabbed it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s nice to have competent help on the other end." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Don was amazing, yes. He had done some stuff for us when I was in the Payloads Office. We had some freezers up there that had, after a year, died on orbit. Thought, “All right, why don’t we give this guy a shot at trying to fix them?” They were never designed to be repaired in space, so I had our guys build basically a Chilton’s [auto repair] manual. I said, “Go take another unit that we have on the ground, take pictures of all the screws you have to take out, step by step, and lay it out in pictures. Little arrows pointing to what to do next and everything. Send that up.” It violates all the typical MOD procedure rules, but quite frankly I don’t care. Either he’s going to fix this thing and it’s going to work, or it’s trash.\\n\\n He was hilarious. It turned out it was his birthday, and he was thanking us for giving him something fun to do on his birthday. Completely disassembled this thing and resoldered the leads to the thermoelectric chips, and actually got it up and running for a while. That proves that you can do some things on orbit that we didn’t think you could do. Didn’t have to be all these ORUs [Orbital Replacement Units] that we typically thought for spaceflight. Very important if we do a Mars mission, where you can’t call home for spare parts.\\n\\n He’s an incredible guy. Some of the Saturday morning science that he did with the students on the ground—it was nice to have him on the other end, when our vehicle was coming up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I bet it was. Then of course it returned home safely, and hopefully as you wanted as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, reentry. It didn’t get very warm. The heat shield worked like a champ, even on the first flight. I remember looking at some of the thermocouples they had underneath the heat shield, and I was thinking, “Are we getting still data? The temperature hasn’t changed.” It just didn’t get through the heat shield." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How do you feel like your relationship with SpaceX changed from the day you walked in and met them until the day you sat down at a debriefing after this last mission? How would you explain that relationship?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was an evolving, trust-building partnership I think. As new people came in—I’ve been around more than 90 percent of their company. I had a lot more history than most of the employees at SpaceX on what was going on and how things worked. When they first came in, they had the “I know it all” kind of attitude. It took a while for them to learn that maybe they could use some help in some areas.\\n\\n I think what they were constantly fearful of was getting slowed down and bogged down by the NASA process. It was a bureaucracy on making decisions, so I tried not to have anything that would really slow them down too much. More of that “proceed until apprehended” philosophy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think you learned from them in this whole process?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s unique to me—when we talked to them about a given part or component in the design, they’d say, “Well, we could go buy this from this vendor, but it’s like $50,000. It’s way too expensive, it’s ridiculous. We could build this for $2,000 in our shop.” Almost every decision that they made had cost built into it.\\n\\n It was unique because I almost never heard NASA engineers talking about cost of a part when they were making design trades and decisions. They were worried about is it going to work, is it going to work reliably and safely and meet all the requirements. Cost generally, although a factor, was never really in the forefront as much as mission success. Here they were making more trades on, “Well, you could do it that way, but this way is a whole lot cheaper and probably just as good.” That was a different mindset, and I think something that maybe the rest of the Agency needs to look at a little bit more.\\n\\n I worked with some really great people over in the Space Station Program on being able to use commercial electronics on their vehicle. NASA is used to using these S-level rated parts, components that go into all the avionics boxes. They’re either RAD [Radiation Absorbed Dose] hard and/or screened through this process to make sure that they’re highly reliable. SpaceX wanted to use more of the commercial-type parts.\\n\\n Turns out that both the aircraft industry and the automotive industry have done a lot of work with a lot of these commercial component part vendors to make sure that the parts coming off the line are really reliable. Because you can’t have cars breaking down all the time, or they’d lose their shirt. Or airplanes. So, a lot of the reliability things that we’ve been concerned about through some burn-in process and testing, they catch. A lot of the vendors seem to be building much more reliable electronic components that they could use in their systems.\\n\\n Then it was a question of how do we deal with the radiation effects. We got SpaceX plugged in with [NASA] JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California] and some of our JSC ISS radiation experts that have been doing testing. I tried to get them to do testing early on, based on some of the work that we had done with some of our payloads where we’d sent them to one of the universities, I think Indiana [University, Bloomington], and done some level of radiation testing.\\n\\n It may not have been exactly the high rel [reliability] radiation testing that we’d done in the past, but it gave you a good screening, gave the payload guys a good feeling as to whether or not their parts were going to work in space. I tried to get them to think about doing some of that testing early on, and they didn’t want anything to do with it. Station finally put their foot down and said, “Look, you’re not going to make it to Station unless you prove that you’re not going to have all these radiation effects.” Then they eventually did a lot of the radiation testing that we had talked about.\\n\\n It basically showed that through smart part selection and some limited amount of this type of radiation testing at the more integrated component level, you could get pretty good reliability in a radiation environment. The combination of that and the redundancy that they had built into their system let you tolerate some radiation upsets. And reset, and be ready to work again.\\n\\n What was really important for me is back before I even came to Space Station I was working out at Ames for the centrifuge project. We’d done a lot of cost modeling trying to figure out how much the project was going to cost, so I’d done a lot of work with some price modeling people. We did a lot of iterations on the design and concept and folding into the price models.\\n\\n What I found was no matter how I sliced it and diced it into the price models, the avionics subsystem almost always came out as the longest lead time and highest cost. That, and the software which wrapped in with it, drove the project. You could have thousands and thousands of pounds of structure and just a small amount of avionics, and it still was the longest lead time and biggest cost subsystem.\\n\\n Finding ways for the Agency to be able to build avionics faster and cheaper, I think, is going to be a huge savings for projects in the future. Just my knowledge of overall project development says that’s always going to bite you. If you can cut down the cost in that phase of the project and the scheduling in that part of the project, you’re going to have some big paybacks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know we have more we want to ask, but we’re about through for today on our time, so you can get back to your life as you knew it before we entered it. So we thank you, and we’ll see if we can catch up with you again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael J. Horkachuck", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thanks." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00261", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HoneycuttJF/honeycuttjf.htm", + "original_file_name": "HoneycuttJF_3-22-00.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HoneycuttJF/HoneycuttJF_3-22-00.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 22 March 2000" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Jay F. Honeycutt" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is March 22, 2000. This oral history is being conducted with Jay Honeycutt at the offices of Lockheed Martin Space Operation in Houston, Texas. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright with the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, assisted by Carol Butler and Sandra Johnson.\\n\\n Thank you again, Mr. Honeycutt, for taking time to visit with us today. Currently you serve as president of Lockheed Martin Space Operations, but tell us, how did your interest in aviation and spaceflight first begin?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'm old enough not to be able to say I always wanted to be involved in space since I was a little kid, because there wasn't any when I was a little kid. But it actually isn't even that exotic a story.\\n\\n When I got out of school, I got drafted. I was raised in Louisiana, and when I got drafted, they sent me to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, and I worked in one of the labs up there under a program where they would take college graduate engineers that came into the Army and put them to work for the only ballistic missile agency in the laboratories up at what was, in fact, the forerunner of the NASA Marshall [Space Flight] Center [Huntsville, Alabama].\\n\\n When I got out of the service, I stayed for a while and then decided that north Alabama was too far away from Louisiana and too far north for me to be comfortable with. So at about that time they were opening up the NASA center here, which in those days was called the Manned Spacecraft Center [Houston, Texas]. A friend of mine had found a job over here, so I started trying to find myself a job down here. It took a couple of years, and I finally transferred. So my interest really was driven more by circumstance, the fact that I got drafted and, secondly, being that I wanted to get down here.\\n\\n Now when you interview these younger folks that around here, they all say, \"Oh, yeah, when I was a little kid I'd sit before the TV and watch Neil [A.] Armstrong,\" or something. Didn't even have a TV when I was that age. So it's not as exotic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But why engineering when you went to college? What was your interest there? What did you want to do with that interest when you got out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My degree is actually in electrical engineering, and I had grown up associated with the electrical power industry. My dad worked in the power industry, and I worked all my summers in powerplants. It just kind of was what I was expected to do. Then I got out. My degree is in engineering, but any expertise I have is really in operations more than—I mean, I couldn't design an electrical circuit anymore, but it was an avenue to get into operations, which is what I really liked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And were you able to do that when you were there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Once I got out of the Huntsville area and got here. When I came here, I went to work in the flight control division for [Eugene F.] Gene Kranz and got my first set of headphones and my first console to sit at, and I've stayed there for quite a while and loved every minute of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While you were in Alabama, Wernher von Braun was there with the scientists. Were you aware of what they were doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Sure. That was about the time of John [H.] Glenn's [Jr.] flight. I got there just a little bit before John Glenn's flight. So we knew what they were doing. I worked on several of the Army's rocket systems, surface-to-surface programs. So we knew about engines and reaction control systems and reentry bodies and all that kind of stuff, and we did all that. We just didn't have a crew on them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where were you when you learned about Sputnik, and did that have any influence on—or even to think about later as you entered the space program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was in Alabama then, but, no, that was above my pay grade. I mean, we were doing what we were doing, and we didn't change based on that, from my point of view." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned your friend that was working in the Houston area and one of the reasons that you came this way. Was he also working in the flight training area or the flight controller area?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was in recovery operations, naval recovery operations division." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you had somewhat in common, not something totally different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, tell us about those first days when you came to Houston and how you got that headset and some of the first things that you did starting to work for NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I came down here, I was assigned to flight control division. I was assigned to the mission simulation branch, which Hal Knorr [phonetic] was the branch chief. What our job was, was to train the flight controllers on the flight control team in how to execute the mission. So we took their procedures and their flight rules and their malfunction procedures and would write training exercises to put problems in the routine operation of the control center to force them to work together to solve a problem and then to allow them to work with the flight crew so the ground and the flight team could learn to work problems together.\\n\\n The crew had their simulator, and they were over in Building 5 down at the Cape [Cape Canaveral, Florida], and they would train for some period of time, just with themselves, and then we built systems in the control center that simulated the crew's simulator. Then our people would act like flight crew folks so the ground team would work first with our people and our simulation of the simulator, and the crew would do their thing with the simulator. Then at some point near the mission, typically three or four months before the mission, we'd bring the two together. Then we would conduct the simulations, they were called, for the integrated sim with the control center at their consoles and the control center crew in the simulators at the Cape or over in Building 4. Then we would practice missions three or four days a week to ensure that they could recognize problems, communicate amongst themselves and between the air and the ground, and be able to solve the problem.\\n\\n I mean, that's the great thing about operations and about the human space flight program, is when you've got a problem, you've got to solve it. A lot of the robotic satellites that are flown have a sleep mode, it's called, where some problem happens and the thing shuts itself down, and it just kind of floats around up there and doesn't try to execute any commands or perform any functions, and then the people on the ground can go off and take whatever reasonable length of time it gets to solve a problem, and then they go wake it up and do whatever they do. Well, in the human space flight program, you've typically got to get it solved.\\n\\n In those days, between one ground station pass and another or one trip behind the Moon, they had to get the problem solved so that you could tell them what to do the next time you had access to them. So the ability to recognize, work, resolve, and communicate in response to a problem is time-critical in human space flight program, much more so than in the robotics. And that's why, even today in the Shuttle program, even though we're coming up on the hundredth launch, they're still doing essentially the same thing with the simulation team and the crew and the Shuttle mission simulator, practicing what to do if you have all these problems. That's been a fundamental tenet of the way the crew and the ground have prepared for missions from day one.\\n\\n I was fortunate to get in on it during the Apollo program. When I came here, we were about halfway through Gemini, and Harold [G. Miller] just assigned me to work on Apollo because it was going to be coming up in a couple of years. So when I went to my assignment, my direct boss was [Richard H.] Dick Koos, and he said go and essentially write the requirements for the lunar module simulator that we're going to build as our in-house thing.\\n\\n Well, I didn't know what a lunar module was. I didn't have any clue. Actually, I knew very little about the Apollo program and how it was going to be conducted and all this sort of stuff, and Dick says, \"Well, go write these requirements.\"\\n\\n I said, \"Well, you know, where would I start?\"\\n\\n He said there were a bunch of technical field reps from Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corporation] down here. Grumman built the lunar module, and they were like two or three doors down the hallway. So he said, \"Well, go talk to those Grumman guys.\"\\n\\n So I went down there and said, \"Give me some documentation on what is a LM, what are all the parts, and what kind of telemetries they have and all that sort of stuff, and what's likely to break, because we've got to model these malfunctions so we can put the malfunctions in and allow you guys to react to them and work at this.\"\\n\\n \"Oh, no. Nothing's going to break on the LM.\"\\n\\n I couldn't get these Grumman guys to—I mean, they wouldn't admit that anything was ever going to break on the thing. So I said, \"Well, Captain, I'll have to make up my own,\" which we ended up doing.\\n\\n The first LM flight didn't have a crew, so you just put the thing up on an S-IB and separated it and fired it and maneuvered it around a little bit. So we did all that one in-house. Then we started in on what became Apollo 7, Wally's flight, [Walter M.] Schirra's [Jr.] flight.\\n\\n We [had] started, and then the [Apollo 1] fire happened. So they shut down the program and they got into all the fix stuff. Well, we didn't have anything to do in ops [operations] because all the engineering guys were off redesigning the command module and doing all this stuff. So twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday, we'd all meet in the control center, and Schirra and his crew would be down at the Cape. Glynn [S.] Lunney was the flight director, and we'd run Apollo 7 sims, and we ran them for about a year and a half. Every Tuesday and every Thursday we'd crank all this stuff up and sit in there.\\n\\n So that turned out to be, I think, good for the flight control team and for the sim team because we kind of learned how to do the business on a bigger scale because Apollo was a bigger scale than Gemini. We had more sophisticated simulators. The control center was more sophisticated. The crew would be in a simulator at KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida] and there'd be one for the command module and one for the lunar module, and then the data stream, you had two different data streams. You had the simulated mission data stream and then you had all the—and this was in 1966 and '67, and then you had the simulator data stream, the things that kept the things in sync so they both were operating with the same time and a visual display out the window. The simulator had the same ephemeris in it that the flight controller was looking at up here, and with middle-60s technology of trying to keep all that in sync—actually, I counted them up one time. Between the crew in the simulator and me at my console and the simulator, there were like fourteen computers.\\n\\n The control center had 360s, which were the size of that door and about as long as that door. Today you put all of it in something that looks like that [pointing to the audio equipment]. But huge, for their time, they were huge computers and computing complexes and huge numbers of people required to keep them all together and in sync and as real life as you could make it. Then our job was to try to poke holes in whatever they said they were going to do. We spent a lot of time—my folks spent a lot of time reading all the mission-related planning documentation—the mission is going to do this, we're going to land here, EVA [extravehicular activity] is going to occur with this, and the malfunction procedures where they would say, if this breaks, this is the way we're going to go fix it.\\n\\n Well, our responsibility was to poke holes in all that and say, \"Well, I don't really think this is the right way to do it,\" or, \"They'd probably do it but it's going to be hard to keep the communication chain running,\" or, \"Maybe they can do this, but I don't think they can do it in the amount of time they think they can.\" All those kinds of things it was our job to poke holes in, not necessarily to say, \"Well, you say you're going to do it this way. You ought to do it this way.\" I mean, our job was, \"Well, you say you're going to do it that way. That's not really going to work. You ought to go figure out another way to do it.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any constraints when you were coming up with these?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "None whatsoever. Well, I mean we had in the sense that you didn't want to kill anybody. I mean, you didn't want to put the crew in a set of circumstances for which there was no recovery. Occasionally that happened because the simulator would not do what it was supposed to. You tried not to generate adversarial cases in which you pitted the ground against the flight crew. You built ones that tried to bond the ground and the flight crew. It was never our intent to make anybody fail. So you try not to overload some individual console position, or, more importantly, sometimes in your quest to give every console something to do, because otherwise they're sitting there and get pretty bored all day long listening to somebody else work their problems, well, if you weren't careful, you'd give everybody something to do, and all of a sudden the flight director is overloaded because every console is trying to tell him about their problems.\\n\\n So you kind of just had to listen to the flight director loop and just make sure the traffic on it was kind of—I mean, it's one thing you learned in the sim area, is you can listen to a dozen loops, and we'd just sit over there and see how many different yellow buttons you could get lit up on the consoles. I mean, even today I can go over there and plug in and listen to eight or ten loops and catch anything significant that comes out. I mean, I couldn't repeat all the traffic that's on it, but when somebody starts talking about a problem, then you go concentrate on that.\\n\\n So we would try to keep the exercises balanced and not get anybody in trouble. There were some great people that were flight directors in those days, Kranz and Lunney and Cliff [Clifford E.] Charlesworth and people you've interviewed, I'm sure, or will. You guys plan to interview [Gerald D.] Gerry Griffin. All of those guys were incredibly smart and incredibly motivated and incredibly capable of managing the flight team. Unfortunately, [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] had stopped being a flight director by the time that I got here, but he was the role model for all of them. They would not tell you what to do. They might say, \"I think such and such a position needs a little—we need to work on them a little bit,\" or, \"I'm kind of worried about such and such a procedure, and maybe you could run a case.\" But they never would say, \"Well, I want you to do this and I don't want you to do that.\" It was our call as to what to do, and we had a reasonable amount of independence in that respect.\\n\\n Cliff Charlesworth, the day after the sim, he would always make me go up to his office and say, \"Now, why did you do this, and why did you do this, and why did you do this?\" But that was the way he was. He wasn't trying to get me to go or not do. He just wanted to harass a little bit over why we did things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you sat down to plan these sessions, was it a team effort where you all came up, or did each person on the simulation team take one area and devise that? Tell us how all that came about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The sim team was broken up by—but the leader was, and is today, called the simulations advisor, a.k.a. sim sup. And then we had booster people, we had trajectory people, we had spacecraft people, command service module and the lunar module, and then we had network or voice people, because there was no TDRS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellites], so we had these sites strung all around and they each had different—some of them were S-band, some of them were VHF, and some of them had radar, and some of them didn't. So we had to simulate that entire network.\\n\\n The trajectory had to be right so the look angle was right, so that our system picked up, enabled telemetry at the same time the fight dynamics officer had predicted that acquisition was going to occur and the mission computers. So it took one person just to keep up with all that configuration stuff and to chase some of the computers. Either the mission computer or the simulation computers in those days obviously weren't as sophisticated as they are today or as fast. The programming was a lot more complex. So occasionally things didn't happen right or you got the wrong—I mean, I remember several times we would initialize in lunar orbit and we'd be going north to south, and the big plot board in the front would get tilted. [Laughter] So we were always chasing those.\\n\\n It took somebody to do that, and then it took somebody to—each one of these sites had a person there that the people downstairs, the telemetry people and the track people and all the guys that were down on the first floor that actually ran the mechanics of all the dataflow stuff, well, they had to talk to people at all the sites. So we had to have somebody, actually one guy, that was everybody at every site for three or four different people to talk to. So there was this constant keeping up with where you are and what's happening.\\n\\n Every once in a while, you know, you'd throw in some malfunction that screwed everything up, and some of them, when you were coming, sometimes the computer would put one in, and we're off chasing the flight control team before you figured out what it was.\\n\\n So the sim team was about forty people or so, and they were broken up. There were some of them that were track people, and there were some of them that were LM people, and there were some command service module, and there were some trajectory. We would divide ourselves up into those positions, but we really were only one team. It didn't take forty people to run a sim, but it took about ten, but there were five flight control teams. So they had us outnumbered. The bad part was, on the flights that went to the Moon, they were on three-month centers. We called them integrated sims when the people in the control center and the crew were in the same thing. Well, we were running those for three months prior to the flight. We were running integrated.\\n\\n Then we were having to run non-integrated for some of the downstream flights. There were two floors in the control center. The second and third floors were identical ops rooms, so they'd run, like they ran [Apollo] 7 off the second—I can't remember—second floor, then number 8 was off the third, then [Apollo] 9 was going to be back on the second. So in any given week we'd have to run up and down the stairs to—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great exercise." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because on Mondays we were doing this mission, and on Tuesdays we might be doing this one. It was only for about a year and a half or so, but we ran sometimes six days a week, a twelve-hour sim. You had to get in there before to make sure everybody was set, and you had to stay afterwards to remind yourself what you were going to do tomorrow, and fixing things that were broken during the day, sometimes six days a week. So what we would do is on Sundays we'd come in and literally figure out what we were going to do next week.\\n\\n You'd start out, we'd have all these nice typed and formatted sim scripts, we called them, for this exercise, these are the things we're going to put in when we do it, and all this other stuff. After about six months of this, we'd go in and take some piece of paper and turn it over, and if you got this one, you'd go figure out what to do. It was reasonably unstructured. Fortunately, nobody really knew whether we were right or wrong. No one—I don't want to say no one knew what they were doing, but you had no experience to compare what you were doing with. So my idea of what could or couldn't happen was just as good as anybody else's. So that allowed us to have some amount of freedom. Somebody would start griping about, \"Well, you put that in, and that can't possibly happen.\" I said, \"Says who?\"\\n\\n So that helped us control, but it wasn't what you would call an academically prepared set of things. What we really would do is say, okay, what is the major objective we want to accomplish? Some runs were all day. If you were practicing going to the Moon or being in lunar orbit or something, you'd run from seven in the morning to eight at night. If you were doing like launches or landings, you might run six, eight, ten, twelve cases in a day. You'd try to figure out what's the main objective you'd want to accomplish with each one of these runs and then what other two or three things you'd want to throw in to make it exciting for a couple of other console positions, and, oh, yes, remember they still can't find the leak in the suit that you put in. When it's behind the Moon, they can't catch it coming around. So the ones they didn't get good, sometimes we'd repeat them to help them get comfortable with it. Then, as much as anything, the rest of it was just blind luck. [Laughter] Just go do it.\\n\\n But everybody wanted to be trained. Everybody recognized it was value added to what we were doing. Dr. Kraft at that time was the director of flight operations. He hadn't moved upstairs yet. And was even then legendary. I had never laid eyes on him. The bad news about running sim six days a week is you were in the control center six days a week. The good news about it was you never had to go to Building 1. So I'd never even seen Kraft up close. I had seen him in the control room. If you picture the old mission control room with the [screens] up front and all the consoles, there were some little glassed-in rooms over on the right, well, that's where we were, over there. So we looked out into the control room, and we could watch the results of whatever was going on.\\n\\n I'd see Kraft out there, but I never had been close to him, but I knew I was afraid of him just because of his reputation and the respect that he had from everybody. While we were doing the year and a half of every Tuesday and Thursday on Apollo 7, I'm sitting in there one day and Lunney was out on the flight director console, I'm sitting in my console, which was a long one but I was there by myself, and just room for two people, and there was a chair there, and I'm busily doing something, listening on the loops, and the door to the sim room opens and there comes Kraft into my room, and I went, \"Oh, my God. Now what?\"\\n\\n He sits down. He's got a headset on, and he sits down and plugs in, and he says, \"Any of these flight directors giving you any trouble?\" He didn't use exactly that word but one similar to it.\\n\\n I said, \"No, sir.\"\\n\\n He said—and I'll never forget this—he said, \"When you're sitting on this console, you're working for me. Any of those guys give you any trouble, you call me.\" He said, \"You got that?\"\\n\\n I said, \"Yes, sir.\"\\n\\n Unplugged, walked out, and never came back in that room again for the whole rest of the program. [Laughter]\\n\\n But that's the kind of guy Kraft was and is. I think I was twenty-seven. He took a bunch of people that were my age or younger, Steve [Steven G.] Bales, Jay [H.] Greene, Tommy [W.] Holloway, people that are still around and involved in the programs, gave them an incredible amount of responsibility, trusted them, trusted the success of the program, the lives of the crew on these people, and built really the leadership of the Johnson Space Center [JSC, Houston, Texas] is still benefiting from—and a lot of the contractor team is still benefiting from having had the opportunity to work for Kraft in the early age of the beginning of the Apollo program and be taught how to accept and execute responsibility.\\n\\n I mean, Chris was hard. If you did your job, you did your job. If you didn't, he didn't have a place for you on his team if you couldn't do what he asked you to do, but if you could, it was great. And that was his message to me really was, \"You, young man,\" as he always called everybody, \"you've got this thing, and you'd better not listen to the flight directors, because if they tell you wrong and you do it wrong, then I'm going to blame you, I'm not going to blame them. Because this is your little spot of responsibility, and I expect you to execute it, and if you have any trouble, you let me know.\" And out he went and never came back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had quite a tough job, that you had to think like a controller and you had to be able to know their job well enough to be able to set those simulations up. How long were the longest days that you had trying to prepare for some of those sessions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We spent time trying to figure out what the script was going to be, and we spent some time early on learning the systems, but the rest of it was just get in there, \"Well, you guys didn't do this. We expected that you would have done it this way, and we would expect that such and such a console position would have the ability to have found this data quicker than they did. So maybe their display is not formatted right, or maybe they're looking at the wrong display at the wrong time. You know, things like that. But mostly our job was not to critique them. Our job was just to point out the weakness and then let them go figure out with the rest of the flight control team and with the flight director on how best to handle it.\\n\\n I remember one time there was a failure, a lunar orbit insertion case, where you're getting to the Moon and you're going to turn the command module around and fire the engine and slow down and get in the lunar orbit, and there was this big helium tank in the service module that—I don't remember all the number bit counts, but every bit count was a huge amount of helium that would leak out before the telemetry would ever indicate any change. If it was like 200 psi in there, and to go to 199, there was this huge amount of helium that would leak out. So we would initialize the sim, and the flight controller would sit there with a band on all the telemetry parameters, they would put some tolerance on them so that they didn't have to check every number every time, they would just wait until they triggered some bottom or top on the band and then they would ring a little buzzer or light a light or flash something, then they'd go chase down what it was.\\n\\n So we'd fudge all the numbers and get right down on the edge of the band with it already having leaked out and then we'd initialize a sim and we'd leak it one more time, because we'd figured out that by the time you did that, they didn't have enough—they had enough helium to get into orbit, but they didn't have enough to get out again. So essentially we stranded them in orbit.\\n\\n But Kranz was the flight director, and they went off—I mean, Gene essentially turned the entire propulsion team's planning—here's what you look at and when you look at it and how you look at it, and what you do with it. I mean, he completely redid the entire way that they did that. It was one of the cases where he came and said, \"Run that thing again for me, because I want to see if we've got a—\" but he went off for like a week, with all the propulsion guys trying to figure out what they needed to do because it was a legitimate failure, and what do we have to do in order to defend against this kind of thing in real life. So we would see a lot of that. Nobody ever got mad at us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to ask you what the relationship was between the simulation team and the actual flight controllers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They always told us we didn't have to take the final. I don't know if you guys got to him or if you have him on your list, but the retroflight officer was a fellow named John [S.] Llewellyn, who's still around here. John was an ex-Marine, and he's a big, muscular guy with somewhat of the reputation of an ex-Marine. The very first simulation I ever ran was a set of launch aborts. For the Apollo program, if the booster shutdown caused you to abort, you parachuted into Africa or you parachuted into the ocean or you parachuted into a lake in the middle of Africa, depending on which way you rolled the spacecraft when you came off of it. And you had to tell the crew pretty quick which one of the abort modes you were going to use.\\n\\n So John had this bunch of answers essentially on the back of an envelope, and his technique was that as soon as abort was called, he would tell them what abort mode to go to, and then he would go to the mission computer and get the trajectory-driven solution that came out of the mock. Then if it was different than what he had called, he'd call up a change.\\n\\n Well, he called up the wrong one initially and then we failed the mock. So he couldn't get the right solution in so the crew went down and splattered all over the desert or something. He got up from his console and he stared and glared in there at me, and I thought, \"Well, this is going to be a short career.\" So I don't know, we broke for lunch or something, and he came storming in there, and I thought, \"Well, this is the end of my career.\" And he came up to me and said, \"That's the smartest thing you ever did.\" He said, \"I really appreciate it. I've been doing this. It was wrong. I knew it was wrong. I never got caught at it, though, so I continued to do it, but I'm glad you ran that case.\" And that's was the usual reaction that we got from some of them. Everybody griped every now and then, but in general." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There were some occasions, I guess, that you had simulations that you planned for and then they changed the missions on you. For example, the one that comes to my mind is Apollo 8. Were you already planning for simulations for 8, and then when they moved—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Actually, we were in the middle of 7, I guess, and getting ready for what turned out to be 9, [James A.] McDivitt's flight. Harold went off to Building 1 to a Kraft staff meeting and came back and said, \"Oh, by the way, we're going to the Moon in three months, so we've got to go and invent this mission.\" Fortunately, they all had a launch phase. Some of them use I-B and some of them used the Saturn V, but they all used a booster and they all used a command module. Some of them used the LM, and some of them didn't. So we kind of could put all the stuff together. Then all you had to really go try to figure out how to do was the kind of mission-specific things and the new things. I mean, when you added a LM to something with a command module on it, when you added an S-IVB to the launch vehicle, when you had to figure out how to do a translunar injection sim or a lunar orbit injection sim or a landing sim, but they all entered and you had to run launch aborts from all of them. So we could kind of patch together as they changed. The difficult part was in making sure that the simulation system itself could accommodate the new part.\\n\\n We didn't build any of the simulation systems. I mean, we were pure operators, but we wrote all the requirements, and then we would send the requirements either over to the simulator people or to [Lynwood] Lyn Dunseith’s organization, and they would then change the simulator computers to make them compatible with the new requirements. So we had to always know what was coming because there was a time delay between the time you told the computer people you needed something and they could get it in and tested and verified and all that. So we had to keep up always with what was coming down the road from a requirements point of view.\\n\\n Then as new phases got entered, you had to make sure that you had a malfunction capability to allow you to test and exercise those phases. You had to make sure you got all that in the systems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Those three months, once you found out that we were going to the Moon, did it change the attitude of the people there, or did people seem to be—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. None. I mean, everybody worked as hard as they could work, it's on this or on that. It was an incredibly dedicated group of people. I remember when I first got here, which was in, really, the middle of Gemini, you'd see a guy—I mean, Jack [R.] Garman must have been twenty-two years old or something, Steve [Stephen G.] Bales was about the same age, and you'd walk by their office and you'd say, \"Who are those guys? What do they do?\" Because they were always there. I don't care if it was during the day, if it was night, if it was on the weekend, they were always there, and all the response you'd get was, \"Well, they're working on the lunar stuff.\"\\n\\n We were in Building 30, right in the admin [administration] wing, right next to the control center, and it was hard to tell on any given weekend or any given evening at six or seven o'clock, it was hard to tell whether there was a mission going on or not because there were so many people working so many hours just making sure everything was covered. My memory is that one mission didn't have any more importance factor associated with it than any other one did. I mean, it just happened to be whatever's next is the most important one to do.\\n\\n For example, I think Apollo 11, we ran the least number of integrated simulations on 11 that we did any of the lunar programs, and that was partly because Neil [A. Armstrong] spent a lot of time training in the LLTV [Lunar Landing Training Vehicle] and some other things, and part because there was so much compression of time for them that we didn't have to run that much. [Apollo] 8 and 10 had been to the Moon, so the ground team was pretty confident. All the flight directors had quite a bit of experience and their teams were pretty experienced, so the integrated sims kind of went like that, with 11 being the one—I mean, most people would think it would have been the opposite, but—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess the major difference on that one was that you did simulations for the landing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and they probably were okay, but again, it was procedural-driven. I'm not sure that I know how much fidelity was in the actual visual display. Somebody would probably answer that when you guys get around to talking to them, but from a procedural point of view, it was pretty good. I mean, it was well done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "About eleven days before the launch, there was a simulation that was done with the white team that featured one of the alarms, and from our research, we understand that the conversation you had with Jack Garman led to that simulation being put in there, that you detected or you found out that that alarm could be something that went off. Do you remember that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know we did that, but—I mean, I've been asked that several times. I don't really remember the circumstances. Jack was one of our sources of \"Why don't you think about this, why don't you try that, I wonder if Bales can pick up,\" because Jack and Bales, one of them was real technical, had the most knowledge of the onboard computers, Jack did, and then Steve, as the guidance officer, he was out on the pony end of the stick in the mission control center. But we did do that, and we did run that thing, and it did help, I think. It helped them.\\n\\n My favorite one, though, the guidance officer console was on the end next to where we were, and that's all computer floor, in those days, anyway, the square computer floor. So we had somebody go in the night before and tied a string to the circuit breaker on Bales' console that drove his displays on the console, and then we run the strings on the floor of the sim room, and I think we run launch aborts. It could have been lunar landings. I don't remember now. But anyway, right in the middle of the sim, right when Bales was coming up to make this really critical call, we yanked the circuit breaker and took all the power off his console. Of course, there's a whole string of—I mean, it went from guidance to FIDO to retro to booster, and Bales just moved them all down, and the poor guy doesn't know they're in the booster thing. All of a sudden he's sitting down in the middle of the floor without anything to look at because Bales has taken over the console next to him, and they just dominoed everybody down [the consoles].\\n\\n We would do failures of the equipment in the building. One time we simulated that a circuit breaker, all those panels in the hallways in the old control center that were out there, all the breakers that ran essentially all the lights and consoles and everything and on the floor all go through these breakers.\\n\\n So we failed one one day, and they took out, I don't know, a third—we did it on an all-day sim kind of a thing, and they took out like a third of the consoles and half the lights. I mean, it was a bad deal. It took them forever to figure out—I mean, they figured that a breaker had gone, but they couldn't find the breaker because they didn't have a good set of drawings. The boxes weren't numbered, and the breakers inside the boxes had no numbers, and there were no schematics that you could start with a console and trace back. So they must have screwed around for twenty or thirty minutes, and they finally came in, and they said, \"Aha! We found the breaker, and now we want to put it back on.\"\\n\\n I said, \"Well, where's the replacement breaker? Show me the one you're going to put in there.\"\\n\\n The guys said, \"Oh, well, we don't have any here in the building. We keep them in the storehouse up at Ellington [Air Force Base, Houston, Texas], and you don't want us to go up there and get it, do you?\"\\n\\n I said, \"Yes.\" [Laughter]\\n\\n So off they go. Finally, about thirty minutes later, they came back, and they said, \"Now, here, can we turn the lights back on?\"\\n\\n I said, \"Well, yeah. Okay.\"\\n\\n Well, the next day we went in and got there at 6:30 or 7:00 o'clock the next morning, and there were these huge rolls of drawings spread out on the floor and guys on their hands and knees color-coding wires, and in about a week there was a number on every one of the boxes and there was a number on the breaker inside the box, and you could go and in five minutes get the right thing and trace yourself back. And they redesigned the logistics mends in the control center so they made sure they had the right spare parts for real-time kind of support that you would need.\\n\\n So, I mean, there were positive things that resulted from doing these things that they benefit from today, and it was all a learning thing. I mean, we had some incredible sims that we just stumbled into. You went to break this, and the guy would press the wrong button and did this, or the simulator broke something, and all of a sudden they're off trying to react from there. We weren't brilliant script designers as much as often just fortunate that something broke at the right time to make us look good. Of course, we'd never admit that this wasn't a part of our plan all along, so we took all the credit for it, but a lot of it was just blind pig finds an acorn or something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We've read descriptions of simulation people or teams that have ranged from creative and imaginative to devious and sneaky. So I guess you kind of followed the both of those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were all of the above. The fun part was, I mean, we listened to the Flights [Flight Director’s] looping and we would listen to the loops that the front room guys would talk to their back room with, and then we would listen to the internal to the back room loop, and every now and then the decorum on the voice loop declined as it got further and further away from the flight director's loop, and when you'd get in those back rooms, you'd hear us called some awful names and all kinds of cursing going on and yelling at each other back and forth. I mean, they were pretty good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you around for the debriefing as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we conducted the debriefings. Well, the flight director would do their debriefing. He would debrief with each one of the console positions as to how they performed for whatever thing and how they worked together and talk with the crew, get the crew's comments and all that. We would come in at the end and say, \"Okay, we broke this at this time, we broke that at that time, the thing went in, it took you guys thirty minutes to recognize that it was in.\"\\n\\n It was Flight's job to build his team and manage his team the way he wanted it to be managed. What we tried to do was point out things that were either not caught as they could have been caught earlier or could have been handled differently or did you ever think about doing this or that. So the debriefings, from our point of view, were primarily in that vein, \"Here's what you missed, Flight, in your thing,\" or, \"Here's the value of the leak,\" or, \"Here's the time of the something or other.\" That was pretty much the way we did that.\\n\\n You had the different teams, and each team was somewhat a function of the personality of the flight director, and they were all different. Lunney was kind of laid back, and Kranz was more dynamic. A lot more traffic on the flight director loop on Gene's shift than on Glynn's. Charlesworth was kind of like Glynn. When Kranz was the flight director, you didn't need too many things to do, because Gene would initiate his own, \"Well, why don't we go look at such and such,\" which would make the team work together to figure out what they were going to do about something, which was all we were doing. So when it was a sim for Gene, typically you'd put in fewer things, from our point of view, than you would for the other guys, because he generated a lot of work himself. So they were different and had different debriefing techniques and approaches and interests that they might have for some particular thing, whether it would be a console position or a mission event or whatever it might be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This past year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. Would you share with us where you were during that time period? Were you preparing for yet another mission, or were you able to enjoy the moment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Since I didn't have to take the final, as they said, what my job was during the Apollo programs, the [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, DC] people—Chet [Chester M.] Lee, just passed away, was the sort of Apollo person at Headquarters and was sort of the headquarters program office for Apollo. Chet and a number of his people would come down for each one of the missions, and they would actually sit in the sim room, and they didn't really have any job, anything to do, but they were providing Headquarters oversight. Although they may have been familiar with mission objectives and the bigger things of the flight, they really didn't know much about the details or the specifics, so what we did was we served as sort of their technical support. That's why I was in the sim room with Chet during essentially every one of the missions. [Apollo] 13, I was home asleep. Other than that, I was in the SCA [Simulation Control Area] with the Headquarters people. You know, everybody had to be pretty proud on that day because we worked pretty hard to get there. I mean everybody, the team." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I believe the value of the simulations and the training has proven itself many times over, and it's been said that the simulations and the training helped so much when it came to rescuing the crew of the Apollo 13. If you were asleep, I'm sure it didn't last for long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Somebody called, and I came out here and we helped. The various things that they wanted to try and all that sort of stuff, we essentially ran sims practicing some of that stuff. Some of our guys went on some of the teams that were trying to figure out how to—we asked a lot of our people. I mean, we had forty people that had to know as much as—I mean, I think Kranz was a division chief and flight control, and there were probably, I don't know, three or four hundred people in the flight control division, and my forty had to know what every one of them did, plus we had to know what went on on the first floor, which really was not in Kranz's division but it was in the mission, so we had to know all the ticks and tracks and recorder people and computer supes [supervisors] and all of what they did, too. So our people were pretty knowledgeable about the mission. So some of them went off on some of these teams that were put together to try all these different things on what might work and what might not work. So everybody was pretty busy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it seemed to work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Never had any doubts it was going to work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Some of these situations that you put these folks in, you didn't have any idea if that situation would ever occur, but then you'd have things like on Apollo [12] when the lightning struck. Did you plan on anomalies like that as well, natural problems that might occur?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did some of that. I mean, we'd have a hurricane take out the Canary Islands or an earthquake take out Guam. We'd make up some of those. Or a crewman has a heart attack and some of those kinds of things. But usually we got those by the simulator. That means some simulator funny that would just spit out some weird thing. I had a back door loop to the flight director, and we'd kind of decide whether to take the thing out, reset, or, \"Well, this looks pretty good. Why don't we play with this one for a while,\" depending on whatever their preferences were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, simulations changed as the mission changed and technology changed, but the other thing that changed was your role. As you walked in, you were starting in the flight training division, but yet you were the chief at this time, or at the end of the Apollo era. Could you tell us how that role came about, how you received more and more responsibilities and what led to that latest position?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as much as anything, it was being in the right place at the right time. When I came here, for whatever reasons I ended up on the console and stayed out of my own way. So I did okay. So Harold Miller decided that he had a section head opening, and so he asked me if I wanted it, and I took it, which didn't change anything other than I got a grade raise. But I was still on the console and stayed there until after Skylab.\\n\\n Then after Skylab, they reorganized the center, and they took the branch that I was in and moved it to—let's see. During Skylab, they had a reorg [reorganization] within flight control, in which they combined the requirements branch and the sim branch. So they put me in as the deputy of that. Then after Skylab, they took half of that branch and moved it to flight ops, [Donald K.] Deke Slayton's old organization that Warren [J.] North was running at the time.\\n\\n So they sent me over to work for [James W.] Jim Bilodeau, who had the procedures, the flight crew procedures bunch, Tommy Holloway and John [W.] O'Neill and Dave [David C.] Schultz, then me as the sim branch. We were the four branch chiefs that reported to Bilodeau. So I got taken from the comfort of flight control with all these people that I'd known and worked with and thrown over to flight crew.\\n\\n In the old days, flight crew people and the flight control people didn't really get along near as well as they do today, not the flight crew themselves, but the people that worked in procedures and training and the things over there. They worked with the crew, and we just worked with the flight control team. So then they threw me in there with all those guys. So all of a sudden I was over there with a bunch of strangers that suspected our heritage anyway, and working for Jim Bilodeau. That got us through Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project], I guess.\\n\\n Then after Apollo-Soyuz, I actually went up to work for—George [W.S.] Abbey was in the job that Sue Garman's in now, and Kraft was the [JSC] Center Director by then. So I went over to be essentially an aide to George, working for Kraft, and I stayed up there for six months or so.\\n\\n Then George moved down to the eighth floor to run flight ops, and I went down there with him and got out of the simulator training business pretty much. That was in '77 or so time frame, and then for the next two years we selected the astronaut class of '78.\\n\\n Then I went to headquarters after that. In 1980 I went to headquarters and spent a year with one of those same kind of horse-halter jobs, people call them, for John [F.] Yardley when he was in the job that [Jospeh H.] Rothenburg's in now.\\n\\n Then I came back and went in the program office and stayed in the program office till '89, when I went to Kennedy, and stayed there in Shuttle ops until '95 and when went upstairs for two years and I got out and came here, and still trying to figure out what I'm doing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, apparently someone thinks you're in the right place at the right time. So that works out.\\n\\n During those days that you were working so closely with the Apollo program, as you mentioned, you were working so many hours and so many days of the week, what were your thoughts when you heard that the Apollo program was going to be canceled?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Skylab was coming up. The other thing is, everybody now wants to know, well, gee, there are a lot of allegations that everybody worked hard on the Apollo programs to beat the Russians, and I never saw any indication of that whatsoever. I mean, we worked hard on the Apollo program to be successful. The President [John F. Kennedy] said we ought to go there and land and come back in this decade, and everybody was busting their buns to make that happen. I mean, I never had or knew of anyone or heard of anyone that said, \"Well, I've got to do this because it's going to help us beat the Russians.\" I mean, \"I'm going to do this because I'm working on the Apollo Program.\" I mean, I'm sure somewhere, maybe in the State Department or somewhere, everybody was wanting to know how we were doing against the Russians, but I never had that sense.\\n\\n I've been very fortunate, with the exception of a couple of very, very brief periods, I've been blessed with having a good job. I've been blessed with having some wonderful bosses, and I've been fortunate enough to have some really good opportunities. In those days Apollo was going to end but Skylab was coming. Skylab is going to end, but ASTP is going to be right behind. It got a little that way between '75 and '80 when Shuttle kept kind of moving to the right, but we had the Approach and Landing [Tests, ALT] thing that went on. For me, we had astronaut selection stuff, which was pretty cool. We had 7,000 applications. I read every cotton-picking one of them. We had 220 people that we interviewed. I talked to the references on every single cotton-picking one of those. I mean, it was an incredible task. Duane [L. Ross] and George [Abbey] and I spent more time than anybody else on going through all that stuff. So, I mean, although we weren't inclined, we weren't bored.\\n\\n Then I got to go, had to go, went to go to Washington, and I got to see a little bit of the Washington scene and then came back and stuck my oar in program office work, which turned out to be a lot different than ops, but just as much fun. I had a wonderful series of opportunities in NASA to do some really fun stuff. It never really was like a job. They paid you for it, you know. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was the good part of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Working with some great people and for some great people. When you can list John Yardley and Chris Kraft and George Abbey and people like that as your supervisors, you did all right. I mean, you had a lot of opportunities to learn from some pretty cool people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hard to select a time period that was your favorite?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right now is. You know, I mean, they all were. Apollo was when it was going on. It's hell to grow old, but having had the opportunity to work on the Apollo programs, it's obviously the highlight of anybody's professional career.\\n\\n The great part about it was that it was a bunch of twenty-five and twenty-seven-year-olds that were doing it and had all this responsibility, and the crime of today is that in virtually every case you've got to be forty-five or fifty before they will let you have that same amount of responsibility. It's a real downer for development of people. You develop people by giving them responsibility and giving it early, and some of them flunk out, but that's okay. The ones that are left will do okay for you.\\n\\n We do it within my company as well as within the government. Kranz and Lunney and Griffin and Charlesworth and [M. P.] Pete Frank [III] and all those guys, Chris, that were the truly great flight directors of the program quit being a flight director at a younger age than today most people get selected to be one. That and the creeping bureaucracy that tends to roll into the programs are the real disappointments that you see as it gets older. I mean, you could do things. If you wanted to do something, you just did it. And now you've got to go get forty people's permission, and nobody in the field is authorized to make all these decisions, they have to go to headquarters. That's all a result of bureaucracy taking over the system.\\n\\n By golly, in the Apollo program, we thought we were damned invincible. I mean, \"We've got to do this, and ain't nobody gonna stop us, and there's no chance that we're going to fail. We are invincible.\" And everybody had that attitude. Well, today not everybody, but there are a lot of people who now have the fear of failure attitude, and, \"Well, I don't know. Maybe we ought to review that some more. Maybe we ought to bring in some outside people to look at it. Maybe that's a little too risky, we shouldn't even try that.\" You see that beginning to creep into the management where, in the Apollo days, \"Hell, let's go do it. We couldn't possibly fail. We don't fail.\" Those are the kinds of things you see today that are different than they were then.\\n\\n Now, having said that, I've got a lot more insight into the system today than I did then, and it may be that a lot of that was there, we just weren't exposed to it because we were off doing real work and somebody somewhere had that same fear of failure and all that kind of stuff, but it wasn't filtering down to the guys on the floor like today I think maybe it does. So it may have been there, I just may not have seen it. But from a personal experience, that's the kind of differences." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were so busy accomplishing so much every day, did you know what was going on in the world outside of spacecraft?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I pretty well missed the sixties. I mean, I would see it on the news or something, but the hippie generation, I mean, I know a lot of music from the fifties, but you play tunes from the sixties and I don't recognize most of them. I don't recognize most of the movies or the bands or the popular events. I mean, what went on in Vietnam I knew about and some of the stuff that went on on college campuses. I know H. Rap Brown and some of those major events, but kind of the general cultural thing that went on in the sixties, I pretty well missed it, certainly the last half of the sixties." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I guess your family life was a little contained to the few hours that you had off as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. For a number of people, that was a pretty major strain on the families. Have you talked to Kranz? He used to do these family pep talks. He'd get the auditorium over there, and you had to bring your wife in and you had to bring the kids, and then Gene would get up there and talk about the program and the sacrifices that were being made and how they were all part of the team and the patriotic thing. I mean, you know how Gene is. All these wives were sitting there with this glassy look on their face, and 90 percent of them walked out and said, \"What the hell is he talking about?\" [Laughter] But he felt he had to do them, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I'm glad you shared that with us. No, he didn't mention that. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But they were classic Kranz, [General] Patton's speech up there. I mean, you'd see the flag back there, and you could see Gene in his little shiny helmet. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sometimes, as a sim sup, did you have to talk with your folks to kind of work them through a little bit as some of the days got long and kind of give them pep talks?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Never. Malcontents you got rid of. We used to be the burial ground for people that didn't fit in some other area, and all of the branch chiefs were always looking to dump some folks on us. They sent me this guy one time, I can't remember now where he came from, but they sent him to me, and I think he worked for Arnie [Arnold D. Aldrich]. I can't remember. They said, \"You've got to try to make something out of this guy because we owe it to him.\"\\n\\n Okay. I said, \"Well, what's your problem?\"\\n\\n He said, \"Well, nobody will give me any responsibility. They won't let me do anything. I just want some responsibility.\"\\n\\n I said, \"Okay. I can fix that.\" So I started loading him up. \"Write a script about this, go do this, go find out about this.\" This goes on for about a month.\\n\\n That's when personnel used to be up at Ellington before they moved down here. So one morning at ten minutes after eight, the phone rings—now, this was in 1968 probably. The phone rings. The personnel guy says—I can't remember the person's name now—said, \"They're up here and they're resigning.\"\\n\\n I said, \"They are? Why? He didn't say anything. He was up here yesterday and he seemed to be in a pretty good mood.\"\\n\\n He said, \"Well, he's resigning effective immediately, and the cause is too much pressure.\"\\n\\n So I said, \"Well, okay.\"\\n\\n So time passed, time passed, time passed. I was in the program office in probably 1983 or '84, one day. Shirley [G.] Huss was my secretary. The phone rings. She says, \"There's some lady wants to talk to you.\"\\n\\n \"Hello?\"\\n\\n \"Well, I'm So-and-so from the something Rehabilitation Center in downtown Houston, and do you know—\" whatever this guy's name was.\\n\\n I said, \"Yes.\"\\n\\n She said, \"Well, we're trying to make him a productive member of society and get him back in the work force, and you're his last supervisor.\" [Laughter] I mean, when I sent that guy out, he dropped completely out of this society for twenty years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Goodness. Haven't heard any more from him, huh?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I was his last supervisor. But those kind of people would pass through. Normally, everybody was motivated. People just didn't complain about hours or anything. The divorce rate went up, but you couldn't keep people away. My problem was more burnout than it was them grousing about having to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We'd like to close out the session today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Is this what you're looking for?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely. You're doing really well, and we'd like to set up another time, pick up from Apollo and move into Skylab and go from there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jay F. Honeycutt", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00081", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2019-052.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Montalto, Nicholas (1969-1971): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2019-052", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2019-052", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Nicholas Montalto served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Iran from June 1969 to June 1971 as an English teacher. He served alongside his wife Gloria. He describes his previous overseas volunteer activities and how the training he received did not fully prepare him for the challenges that he met both culturally and educationally, and how he and his wife overcame those challenges. After considering leaving within the first three months, Montalto grew to love Iran and continued in his position teaching English at a boys' school. He relates how his Peace Corps experience led him to his life-long career helping immigrants. Interviewed and recorded by Candice Wiggum, January 27, 2019. 1 digital audio file.", + "dates_of_materials": "27 January 2019", + "extent": "1 digital file (audio; stereo; 62 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "042. Iran.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Iran. Montalto, Nicholas (1969-1971): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Iran", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2019-052", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2019-052-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/17m3wb4oxuf54m2see10244f70osbma4.pdf?odc=20231115174145-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/073ef7f2-fb66-4b46-b6b9-d7223e163e17/a508d264-7cfd-4d55-b759-c8bcdd359bcb/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzI4ZjVfNjNmZWYwMDdiZmJiNzUwYTkwOTRmNzllMDQzZGQ1NDQ0YTlmODVmOTQyOWEyZmYxYWE1ODQxZjFjNDhkZTY0OV8vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS8wNzNlZjdmMi1mYjY2LTRiNDYtYjZiOS1kNzIyM2UxNjNlMTcvYTUwOGQyNjQtN2NmZC00ZDU1LWI3NTktYzhiY2RkMzU5YmNiL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Ringoes, New Jersey", + "length": "31 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed March 4, 2019, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Nicholas Montalto Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Candice Wiggum" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Nicholas Montalto" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:01", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is January 27th, 2019. This is Candice Wiggum and I am interviewing Nicholas Montalto, who was in Iran from 1969 to 1971, and he taught English at a boys school. So welcome, Nicholas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:22", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:23", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what inspired you to join Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:27", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I guess, uh, the travel bug somehow infected me when I was in college, and I guess I came from a sort of provincial New York background, if you can describe it that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:00:43", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:00:44", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I had a fraternity brother who had been to Morocco, and he told me about his adventures. And that sort of piqued my curiosity. And then when I went to graduate school at Georgetown, I had a roommate who had gone abroad to Egypt with a group called the Experiment in International Living, and he would wax eloquent about his experiences in Egypt. So that kind of reinforced my interest. So I actually then applied to participate in the Experiment in International Living. And so I went there for the summer of 1965. And the way that program works is you spend one month living with a family and then all the Americans in the group, and we were about 10 to 12, we were all paired with Moroccan families.\n\nAnd then we would spend the second month traveling around the country with our Moroccan brothers and sisters. So actually, to this day, we are still close with the family. So now how did I actually get interested in the Peace Corps? I guess everybody was talking about the Peace Corps, and it just seemed like a wonderful thing to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:02:09", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:02:10", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I just kind of kind of felt a calling to go. So." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:02:16", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what were you doing about the time that you joined Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:02:22", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was teaching high school. I started teaching high school in '65, and I taught at a boys Catholic high school for two years. And then the next two years I went to the public schools and I went to Midwood High School in Brooklyn, where I met my wonderful wife who was on the faculty there. So I guess we both had the same inclinations, not only to get married but also to do something adventurous. So we got married in February of '69, and we joined the Peace Corps shortly thereafter and went abroad in, I guess it was June of '69." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:03:09", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the application process like then? It sounds like it wasn't very long between application and acceptance and training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:03:20", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I don't remember the exact sequence, but I know I had applied earlier. And I had gotten assigned to go to Colombia and it involved riding horses in the boondocks of Colombia. And that did not appeal to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:03:46", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A New York boy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:03:48", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a bit, a bit much. So after Gloria and I got married, we both, I guess, had a preference for the Middle East. But the initial assignment was to Korea. And so there again, we, I don't want to say reject, but we asked if there was the possibility of going to the Middle East. And then when they said Iran, we jumped at the opportunity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:04:16", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So you guys got married, and a couple of months later, you entered training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:04:23", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:04:23", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what was training like for you? Where did you do it? What was it like? What was it like as a married couple?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:04:30", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would say because we were in a married couples group, we certainly didn't feel out of place in any way. I mean, there were some single folks training with us, but I would say most of the people in the group were married couples. We were in an idyllic environment in Brattleboro, Vermont. It was so beautiful. And ironically, we were being trained at the headquarters of the Experiment in International Living, which had a contract with the Peace Corps to do Peace Corps training. So I was returning to the Experiment in a different way. So we, you know, we had a lot of language training, which I enjoyed immensely. Um. They did some pretty heavy-handed psychological stuff. You know, in those days, T groups were very popular." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:05:28", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:05:28", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I didn't really like that very much. You know, you were supposed to kind of bare your inner soul and stuff like that. So some of those sessions were a little bit annoying, I guess I would say. But apart from that, I mean, we made, you know, we liked the people in our group. We liked the teachers. In fact, we're still friends with one of the teachers. So I would say it was a positive experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:06:01", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. And then from Brattleboro, you went to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:06:04", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we went home briefly and then maybe we had a week or so to prepare to leave. And then we went to Philadelphia and left from Philadelphia. Everybody reassembled in Philadelphia for departure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:06:22", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you decide what to take?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:06:29", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know if I really remember the details. There was one item that was pretty crucial, and that was our shortwave radio." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:06:44", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:06:44", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that was kind of our lifeline to the outside world where we were. In particular, we couldn't get Voice of America, but we did get BBC. And every night we would listen to the English language service of BBC. Um. But apart from that, I do not remember the details. I don't remember it to be a big deal. I'm sure it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:07:08", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was it like landing in Iran?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:07:14", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we, we had to go through Paris, I believe, and then Rome. And then Beirut and then finally Tehran. We arrived in Tehran at night. And the most vivid experience that first morning. They put us up in a hotel on one of the main squares in central Tehran. And so I guess we might have gotten in about midnight. And so after waking up in the morning, we looked out the window and we said, where are we? It looks like we're in a nunnery here. All of these nuns roaming around the street.\n\nIt just took a while for the reality of veiled women to actually set, you know, set in. You know, we just didn't expect that everyone would be veiled and they would be veiled in black. And, you know, I, I went to eight years of grammar school with nuns. That was my experience with women in black. But Gloria had the exact same reaction. Where are we here? It just seems like we're in a, you know, some sort of Catholic encampment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:08:40", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you didn't stay long in Iran, in Tehran?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:08:43", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, we didn't. They took us to this agricultural school on the outskirts of Iran and, uh, we went there for, I guess, initial in-country training. I'm guessing that we were there, I don't know, it was about a week, two weeks. I'm not sure exactly how long you were there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:09:05", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you stayed in the dorms at that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:09:07", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was like, yes, we stayed in dorms. One thing that was, created a lasting impression for me was the bats that encircled this place. I mean, if you went out in the evening to go for a stroll, the bats would like be dive bombing on your head." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:09:28", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, ow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:09:29", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's harmless but, you know, a little disconcerting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:09:34", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Did you feel like your training was good training? I'm assuming you had Farsi there and probably some, um, Teaching English as a Second Language training. How did you, what did you think about the training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:09:53", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, I thought it was good. I mean, I think we were one of the first groups to have significant in-country training. I mean, prior to our time, most of the training was in the United States. So I think with us, they divided a half in the United States and half in Iran, and I think that was a good move. Um. We certainly weren't prepared for the food. I think both of us felt some, my wife and I, we both felt some revulsion with the smells of the food, especially the oil that they used to prepare the food. Um. But, you know, I would say the training was good. We did, um, we were exposed to a form of language training that is now passé." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:10:56", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:10:57", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it's called the aural-oral method of teaching language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:11:04", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:11:04", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I'm not sure that method was kind of well suited to Iranian students who, at that time and maybe still to this day, you know, they, they learn by rote memory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:11:19", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:11:19", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And this is kind of challenging you to figure things out on your own. You know, they weren't actually prepared to do that, so it might have been better, but that was all the vogue in those days. So I can't fault the Peace Corps for teaching that methodology because that was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:11:38", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The methodology of the day. Yeah. Did you make friends with the other married couples? Did you guys hang out and talk a lot?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:11:47", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, yeah. I would say we were quite friendly with, uh, especially couples that came from the same background as we did, so that there was one other couple from New York City that we were close with. Another couple from San Francisco. And so. But, you know, of course you're scattered around the country. You don't have all that many opportunities to interact." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:12:19", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:12:19", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The nearest volunteers among the couples. Well, no, I take that, I'm sorry. I was going to say there was a couple close to us. Now by close I'm saying 3 hours away. That was close. But we didn't interact with them very much because I believe they came from sort of a rural Midwestern background." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:12:48", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:12:48", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But there was another couple that were maybe 8 hours away and we would go to their site and they would come to us and we seemed to have more in common with them. There was another single volunteer who lived in the next town over, which would be an hour and a half ride, and we got to see him every so often. He would come to visit us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:13:16", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And were all these on busses? Is that how you traveled back and forth?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:13:19", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Always by bus." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:13:20", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. You didn't have any scooters or bikes or anything that you used in country?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:13:29", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did actually have access to bicycles. And now that you ask me about this, we didn't, these were not our own bicycles. Somehow, when we went on a bike excursion, like very often we would go out into the countryside for a picnic, and we would go by bike." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:13:51", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:13:52", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think they brought the bikes for us. The people that we would go with would bring the bikes. Because we didn't have our own bikes and that was a big deal. Not so much for me, but for Gloria, because I don't think there was any other woman in town who ever went on a bicycle in the town. Of course, it would be unheard of today, but, well, maybe not so. Maybe not so much. You probably do find women wearing hijab who go out on a bicycle now in modern Tehran. But in those days it was rare, if not never. You'd never see something like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:14:33", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:14:33", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And of course, Gloria would always dress modestly when we were on one of these bike excursions. But we did take bike rides outside of town, which was a favorite thing that people would do. They would go outside and they would. The way Iran is, it's, the whole society is walled in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:14:52", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:14:53", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So your house would generally have a wall around it for privacy. And if you owned land outside of town, that land which would have a water source inside, would also be enclosed in a wall. And so if you took your family to that land for a picnic, the woman would be able to take off their veils and enjoy themselves in this parcel of land that was rural. They were growing things, whatever they were growing, and there was always a water source. And people would put their rugs down next to the stream and that's where they would have their picnics. So we did that quite often." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:15:34", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, did you go with an Iranian couple then? Were they the ones that brought the bikes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:15:40", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Either our neighbors, we often went with our neighbors who lived down the kucheh, the alleyway. Or I would go with my students. Now, by my students I'm talking about not my students in the, in the boys high school, but students who wanted to really perfect their English and would come to me for private lessons. So anyone who wanted to really have an intensive English language learning experience could enroll in this class in my house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:16:19", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:16:19", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I would say I had about ten students. I had high school students for one group and adults for another, and these people would come to my house for lessons. So it was those people in those private classes that would arrange these little excursions into the countryside." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:16:38", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So you got to go inside some of the walled garden areas?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:16:42", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:16:42", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Out there, some of that growing areas. Yeah. Nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:16:45", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Nice. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:16:45", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did, how did your site get chosen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:16:52", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I believe we were the second volunteers who were assigned to Fassa [also spelled Fasa]. There was a single volunteer who was there before us. Why was Fassa chosen as a Peace Corps site? I have no idea. I don't know. I mean, it is, it was at the time a rather large town. The population was 20,000." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:17:27", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:17:27", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And, um, you know, like I guess it was there were no native English speakers in that town. So I guess it was considered ideal to have us as a resource in this particular town. But nobody ever explained to me how Fassa got on the list of Peace Corps sites, and I can't exactly answer the question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:17:53", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your integration into Fassa like? What were some of the challenges? What, what surprised you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:18:04", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was rough, I would say, the first few months. We, when we first arrived, we stayed in a local hotel, which was, as I remember it, a rather dingy place. And you had absolutely no privacy. So you were in a room and there were windows all around and other people staying there. So it was a little really seedy place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:18:38", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:18:39", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Somehow we got transferred to the local military club. And so I don't think we spent more than one night in that hotel and we were moved to this. It was a local army base in town, very small, but there was a club facility that had accommodations for overnight guests. And so we stayed there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:19:06", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And who moved you there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:19:07", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So our contact was a fellow by the name of Et Behnam. And was it Amoud? Amoud was his first name. I think it was Mahmoud Et Behnam. And I guess he was the Peace Corps contact in that town. And he had served in that capacity for the previous volunteer. So he knew where the belongings of the previous volunteer were being stored." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:19:45", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:19:46", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I guess he kind of knew what would have to happen in order for us to really get established in the town. So he was sort of instrumental in getting us to the military club and then helping us find a place to stay. Um. I don't remember exactly how we ended up in our house. I'm guessing that he was the one who was instrumental in making those arrangements. But we saw the place and it was, I would say, by Peace Corps standards, rather luxurious. I mean, we had with a two story home. I mean, it was mud brick, but every house was made out of mud brick, and it had a hayat or garden in the back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:20:40", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:20:40", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then, you know, with every traditional Iranian home, the kitchen and the bathroom is separated from the living quarters. So there was another structure behind the garden with the kitchen and the shower and the bathroom. So it was, it was a very nice place, fairly new construction. It had a hot water heater." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:21:09", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Luxury." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:21:10", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, but of course we had no refrigerator. And I mean, there were some creature comforts that we didn't have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:21:21", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:21:21", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But the house itself was spacious. More than enough room for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:21:28", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. What did you cook on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:21:31", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we had this kitchen in the back and there was a sink in the kitchen, and we had this, the two burners, and you had to bring in, what are those cylinders called?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:21:47", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, like propane cylinders?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:21:49", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Propane cylinders. And, you know, we would." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:21:52", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Kind of like a camp stove." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:21:54", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. So we would refill that every once in a while. I mean, somebody probably came around and did that, you know, they would knock on the door. Do you need new propane? And then we needed oil, as I recall now, for the hot water heater, which only worked for the shower, not for any water sources anywhere else in the house. So we had sinks on the, a sink on the first floor. Was there a sink on the second floor? Maybe a sink on the second floor. But that was all cold water. If you wanted hot water, you had to turn on the hot water heater, which we did rarely, because then you used up your oil supply and that was rather costly. But it's a warm climate and the water heater was on the roof, so it usually was warm enough to take a shower except in the middle of winter. But most times of the year you didn't really need to turn it on to take a shower." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:23:04", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. What was the hardest thing about integrating?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:23:15", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there were a number of things that you had to get used to. One custom that Iranians have is their system of taroff [or taarof]. T-A-R-O-F-F, I guess is the way to transliterate it. And that is a form of politeness that to the typical Westerner appeals, appears extremely excessive. If you want to laugh sometimes, if you see two Iranians who are traditional and if they are from the same social status, watch them try to get through a door. And sometimes it's really laughable." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:24:07", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:24:07", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because as a sign of respect, you allow the other person to go first and. And you go back and forth and you say, I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not good enough to go first. You go first. And that kind of stuff. So, you know, they'll say, you know, I am like just under your feet, all of these flowery expressions that they have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:24:39", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:24:39", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And, you know, this goes against the grain. You know, we're very straightforward, most Americans, right? We say what we were thinking. Iranians don't always say what they're thinking. Iranians. An American who's not trained in Iranian culture will say they lie all the time, but they're not lying. What they're doing is they're trying to spare you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:25:12", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:25:12", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They're trying to show respect for you. They want to spare your feelings. They don't want to make, they don't want to make you feel sad. So, you know, like if somebody dies who we know in Iran, they might not tell us because they don't want us to feel bad." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:25:32", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:25:32", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Things like that. So that whole system of tradeoff takes some time to adjust to. After a while, you feel very comfortable with it. I mean, when we get together with our Iranian friends in the beginning, or if I meet somebody new from Iran and I do like a taroff gesture, it's really, you know, if they're living in this country, it takes them back. They find it very amusing that American, an American knows the system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:26:02", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:26:02", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So that was one thing. And then the other thing I would say that is. The way students, the way the schools operated. And, you know, I'm more interested in. You know, I believe that you learn when you impose some discipline on children." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:26:31", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:26:31", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I also believe that you should get a grade that you deserve." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:26:41", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:26:41", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so when you're thrown into a situation where everybody's cheating and nobody gives a damn, including the teachers, it's very frustrating. So. That was my big thing, to whip these kids into shape and to make sure that they weren't cheating and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:27:09", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how successful were you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:27:13", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would say I was pretty successful, actually." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:27:16", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:27:17", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In fact, the other teachers would remark how disciplined my class was. You know, like if they had, say, a quarterly exam or something like that, the students would go to the auditorium. I would make sure all the desks were spaced out so they couldn't copy from one another." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:27:38", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:27:38", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would make sure they were walking in an orderly line. Now, I'm telling you here, this is after a year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:27:48", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:27:49", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't just wave a magic wand and get these kids to do that. In the beginning, it was awful. I mean, especially with the methodology that we were taught, you know. So like the first thing, I don't know if I already told you this, but the first thing we did in teaching English. We were told to use songs as a learning technique. So to have someone like myself stand in front of the classroom and start singing, row, row, row, your boat. This was hilarious to these students and it was undignified behavior for a teacher to be singing a song in front of class. So I, you know, just lost the class with that. So it took a while to recover from all of that, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:28:38", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how many students did you have?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:28:41", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had classes of, I would say roughly 60 to 70 students." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:28:49", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And was it universal education?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:28:51", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I mean, one thing that was really interesting about an Iranian classroom is that you had kids from the elite and kids from the villages all together in the same place. But then the social structure was reflected in the classroom. So that the elite children would sit in the front and the kids from the villages would be in the back. And sometimes the elite kids, because they felt some sympathy for the poorer children, would give them help, like during an exam." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:29:31", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:29:31", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So here you had the American concept of how to manage a school with the Iranian concept of, well, these kids need a break and I need to help them and what's so wrong about doing that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:29:49", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:29:50", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's like a different moral." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:29:52", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, I know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:29:59", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, I forgot, what was the question?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:30:01", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What we were just talking about, I had asked you if education was universal in Iran at that point, if everybody could go to school?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:30:09", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. You know, the Shah was really into universal education. He introduced a program called the White Revolution, and universal literacy was very much part of that. So I think that's probably why the schools were so overcrowded, because he wanted everyone to get a basic education." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:30:30", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what was it like for you teaching such big classes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:30:37", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, I really didn't mind it in the end. I mean, as I said, it took a while for me to adjust to the Iranian system. So, I mean, I do remember feeling very frustrated in the teachers room. So we had this one room where all the teachers would assemble. If you weren't in class, you would go into the teachers room. And at any point in time there might be seven or eight teachers in there. And, you know, although we knew enough Farsi to communicate on a very basic level, when native speakers are talking among themselves, really hard to get it, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:31:25", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:31:26", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I remember feeling frustrated that I, my command of the language wasn't good enough to kind of engage in real conversations with them. I mean, if I stopped somebody and then we started talking one on one. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:31:40", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:31:40", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I usually understood. But when they're talking among themselves, I would lose maybe half the conversation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:31:48", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:31:49", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So that was a little frustrating. I think I got the most satisfaction out of the private classes, though, because these were the people who were the most motivated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:32:00", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And were they all self-selected?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:32:04", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I would say so. I don't remember screening people. You know, I don't quite remember exactly how. I think people just volunteered. I said that I was going to have a special class and if anyone wanted to join, they could come. It's quite possible that the class might have been too advanced for some young people and they might have opted out. I just don't remember the details right now. But in the end, I had about seven or eight students in this class, and those students have, uh, some of them have communicated with me over the years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:32:48", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:32:50", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did go back to Iran in 1999 and then we went back to our town. We were treated like visiting royalty." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:33:00", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:33:01", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And because we had such large classes, you know, there were a lot of people who remembered us, not that we remembered them, but they remembered us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:33:11", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:33:12", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it was really quite something to be feted by these kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:33:18", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:33:18", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And everybody wanted to invite us to their house and have us over for tea and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "00:33:23", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "00:33:23", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was really nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "00:33:24", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It must have warmed your heart after all those years and everything that had happened in the interim." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "00:33:30", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But of course, the kids that I was closest to were the ones in this special class. So we made a point of getting together with them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "00:33:39", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were they using their English?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "00:33:42", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, um, as a matter of fact, I think some of them, in particular in my wife's class, did become English teachers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "00:33:53", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "00:33:53", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And most of those young people were quite successful and, uh, I can't say that they're using English in their daily work life, but their command of the language is good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "00:34:11", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, good, good. Nice to hear. Nice to hear. What was your biggest challenge during these two years in Iran?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "00:34:24", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the biggest challenge was in the beginning we felt very isolated. We didn't have any friends. We didn't have any other English speakers to interact with. And there was a certain suspicion about us. What were we doing there? Were we really English teachers or were we just spies sent there by the government? Um. Were we going to somehow corrupt the younger generation because we weren't Muslim?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "00:35:11", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "00:35:12", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it took a while before people warmed up to us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "00:35:17", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "00:35:17", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I would say during the first three months that we were there, so let's say September, October, November, we came pretty close to just calling it quits and going home. It was less of a, an ordeal for me and more for my wife, you know, because she was a woman. So I mean, I told Gloria, I said, if you want to go home, I understand. We'll go home. You know, we don't have to stay. And Gloria was determined to see the thing through. So it was the first Christmas really that kind of turned, things turned around for us. And I guess people just got to know us better." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "00:36:08", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "00:36:09", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They realized that we weren't brother and sister, we were husband and wife, and that, you know, the woman changes her name to the man's name generally in the United States." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "00:36:19", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "00:36:19", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was, they didn't quite understand why we both had the same last name." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "00:36:27", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "00:36:28", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But the first Christmas, we got to meet a number of people and they realized how homesick we were and they realized how important Christmas was to us. And I guess Gloria might have mentioned that to some of the teachers at school. And I believe one of the teachers at school was either the governor's wife or a friend of the governor's wife. I don't know exactly how it came about. But the governor saw to it that we would have a Christmas tree by cutting down one of the trees in the public garden. So we had more evergreen than we could ever use. Not exactly a tree, but huge branches of evergreen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "00:37:24", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And in the desert." + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "00:37:25", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And in the desert. And we invited folks over and for a little party. And I had kind of a birthday, my wife's birthday is around Christmas, so I had a little party for her. And that's when things really, things started to improve at that point." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "00:37:43", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did your family think about you going?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "00:37:46", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, ridiculous. They had, no, nobody thought it was a good idea. I mean, I remember, um. I was a little bit of a rebel in those days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "00:38:03", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "00:38:04", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was one uncle that I had, my Uncle Joe, who I looked up to and admired. And I thought of, I come from a very big extended family, lots of aunts and uncles. And my father knew that I kind of looked up to my Uncle Joe. So somehow he commissioned him to come over to the house to try to dissuade me from doing this. And I was kind of surprised that my Uncle Joe was turning on me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "00:38:36", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "00:38:40", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um. No, it was a very unusual thing for some, people of our background to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "00:38:48", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. And especially newly married and you're taking your wife over there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "00:38:51", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "00:38:52", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did gender roles impact you over there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "00:39:00", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Gender roles impact us?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "00:39:03", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "00:39:04", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I mean, certainly less of a problem for me than for Gloria. Um. But I think. Iran wasn't exactly a backward society in those days. And so there were women working outside the home. So for Gloria to be a teacher, as a woman, it wasn't strange. So I think she could feel comfortable in her professional role as a teacher." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "00:39:43", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "00:39:43", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The problem was that she wasn't observing Muslim dress code." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "00:39:50", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "00:39:51", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Now, there were also Iranian, this is a small conservative town, so you would find more women not wearing the veil in a place like Tehran than you would in Fassa. But even in Fassa, I would say, I'm guessing here, maybe out of a population of 20,000, there might have been 25 women who didn't wear the veil in the street. So the fact that Gloria was on the street, dressed conservatively, always covering her in her arms. It wasn't something that startled people. What startled them was that this was a Western woman, not so much that she was a woman without a veil. Uh, but there were certain times of the year when you had to be very careful and these would be the times of the religious, certain religious observances.\n\nAnd in Iran, sometimes the people were kind of whipped up into a frenzy over certain events in Shia history. And what they would do is they would recreate those events through poetry and song. And people would start crying, remembering what happened to the Shia leaders of the past, the death of Hossein, and all of that. I don't know if you know anything about that. So when those events were going on, you had to be very careful and make sure you didn't go anywhere near where those festivities were taking place actually out on the street. You'd have somebody who was, you know, kind of chanting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "00:41:47", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "00:41:47", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then also people whipping themselves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "00:41:50", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "00:41:52", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So that was a little scary. I mean, not, not that we it forced us to stay indoors. But you thought twice about how you would get from point A to point B and you didn't want to go anywhere near the mosque in those times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "00:42:08", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you guys celebrate Ramadan with others? Did you go to ikbar any time? Did you, what was your interaction with that part of the culture in Fassa?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "00:42:21", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's a great question. So I told you that I had these private classes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "00:42:30", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "00:42:30", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I'm remembering now that not only, I had three classes. I had a class for the young kids, a class for the high school students, and a class for adults. And in the high school student class, there were some very devout Muslims. And I don't know if you know this, but in Islam, you can earn a special place in heaven if you can convert someone to Islam. So I constantly had people trying to convert me to Islam. They would give me copies of books to read in English. So that was a little bit annoying because you knew that there were some people that were kind of cultivating a friendship with me. But they had an ulterior motive, you know?\n\nNow, on the subject of Ramadan, I guess it intrigued me a little bit. And so I did observe the Ramadan fast one year. I don't remember what year it was, but I observed it for a period of three days just to have the experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "00:43:59", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "00:44:00", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I mean, you probably have to get up early in the morning before sunrise, and you have enough to, try to have enough food to sustain you to the end of the day. But I just wanted to know what it was like. Not, not that I was seriously contemplating becoming a Muslim." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "00:44:20", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "00:44:20", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But, you know, they talk about the health effects of the, of the fast and how it's good for your body to do that. So I just wanted to see what kind of effects it would have on me. But three days was enough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "00:44:37", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And Eid, did you, were you there with the slaughtering of the sheep or anything like that? Any of the post-Ramadan or the other Eid?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "00:44:46", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We saw sheep being slaughtered all the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "00:44:53", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "00:44:53", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was very common for somebody to have a sheep just right out in the kucheh and just be cutting up a sheep." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "00:45:02", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "00:45:02", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know why they did that, but they did it. So. But I don't remember ritual slaughter or anything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "00:45:10", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just picturing two young kids from Brooklyn walking out in the kucheh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "00:45:19", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course, one of the grossest things was to go to the meat market, because they don't quite understand that there are different cuts of meat. So the meat market would be the carcass of some animal just hanging from a hook. And if you wanted meat, wherever they were in the carcass, that's where you would get your meat. And it might have not been the healthiest of cows or whatever it is. You know, you couldn't really cook the meat the way we cook the meat. You needed a, you need a pressure cooker. Nobody ever told us that. So we didn't, that wasn't covered in Peace Corps training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "00:46:08", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It wasn't in your trunk." + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "00:46:10", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had to arrange to get a pressure cooker to do anything with the meat there. Um. So. So, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "00:46:24", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. How was the food?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "00:46:27", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We grew to love the food. I mean, it took a while. Like anything else, you have to get accustomed to it. Especially the flavor of the cooking oil, which I guess is sheep's oil? Something like that. It's not in the oil that we use in the United States." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "00:46:51", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "00:46:51", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But after a while, we loved Iranian food. If we have an opportunity to do Iranian, we do it. And in fact, my wife cooks Iranian sometimes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "00:47:00", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Cool. Cool, cool. What was it like for you as the end of your time came? Did you guys think about extending it all? Was there even that opportunity? What did it feel like when the end came for your time in Fassa?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "00:47:21", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We didn't think about extending as far as I can recall. So we were ready to go home. We were ready to get on with our lives. We missed our families and we didn't want to go back. I wanted to go to graduate school. We had arranged that from Iran for me to go to graduate school. Um, I remember the day we left Fassa, in fact, I can't even talk about it now without getting teary eyed, as the saddest day of my life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "00:47:58", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "00:47:59", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Believe it or not. And when that bus pulled away from that town. Because in those days, you know, chances are you're on the other side of the world, you're never going to get back to Iran. So it's a form of death to leave a place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "00:48:17", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "00:48:17", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And by that time, we were, you know, I didn't want to say members of the community, but we were accepted in the town and we had lots of good friends there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "00:48:29", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "00:48:30", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And just to see all these people outside the bus saying goodbye. I mean, I cried all the way to, we had to go to Shiraz and then get back to Tehran. But all that bus ride was the worst bus ride of my life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "00:48:47", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then what was it like when you came home?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "00:48:55", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh. Well, it was very strange because we went from the desert, you know, to Minnesota. So that was kind of weird. Um. You learn to adapt to a culture over two years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "00:49:16", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "00:49:16", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I remember when we got to Minnesota, I mentioned the taroff and all of that, the formal courtesy. A part of taroff is anytime you meet someone, even if you saw them 2 hours ago, you meet him again, you shake hands. And so when I arrived in Minnesota, I remember offering my hand like a million times to people, and it was kind of strange. This guy just wanted to shake hands all the time. I mean, little stupid things like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "00:49:58", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "00:49:58", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Or, you know, being deferential to people and making sure that they go through the door first. They didn't know what was going on in my head. But kind of interesting that most people, maybe it's because of our background and the people we knew, where we came from, but not too many people were really interested in what the experience was like. You could have a 15 minute conversation and that was it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "00:50:29", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "00:50:30", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So that was a little bit disappointing, but I don't remember it bothering me that much. It was just surprising that we had gone through this experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "00:50:42", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you had all this stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "00:50:44", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, most people were really didn't care or didn't know. They probably couldn't appreciate what it was like to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "00:50:54", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "00:50:54", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Experience culture shock, make the adaptation, and then come back and experience reverse cultural shock." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "00:51:01", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "00:51:01", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And we did indeed experience reverse culture shock. A certain amount of revulsion to life in the United States compared to, you know, the simple life in rural Iran. And you get used to that, and you see how kind of wholesome it is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "00:51:25", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "00:51:26", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, people work hard, but they also know how to enjoy themselves. And it's, it's a lifestyle that I miss actually." + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "00:51:36", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. Was there any time when you were in Iran that you felt like you guys were in danger or that your health was threatened? Anything like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "00:51:49", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um. Danger. Well, health, you know, that was always an issue, the possibility of having some gastrointestinal problems. Um. And I think Gloria had a worse time of it than I did. In fact, we used to joke because I would take more risks with eating. And she was always very cautious, but she was the one who would get sick. Um. Any time that we felt in danger? I would say only those times during those religious celebrations or commemorations, whatever you would call them. Once or twice, stones were thrown at Gloria.\n\nOne time we were traveling in the northern part of Iran. This was during the, uh, it's called the Nowruz celebration. That's their New Year's celebration, the first day of spring. And we were traveling in, uh, all the way up near the Russian border in a town called Ardebil, A-R-D- E-B-I-L [also spelled Ardabil]. And, um. Beautiful little town known for its carpets. And while we were there, we visited a carpet shop to purchase an Ardebil carpet. And at one point we were walking along the street and somebody touched Gloria." + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "00:53:50", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "00:53:50", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I knew who the somebody was. And this is really out of character for me, but it just so enraged me that I lunged at the guy and just pushed him down on the street and called him some sort of curse word and he ran away. There was one other incident like that in the city of Tabriz where we were, uh, crossing a very crowded street. And again, somebody touched Gloria, but I had no idea who it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "00:54:33", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 237, + "timestamp": "00:54:33", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was just too many people. Just, you know, Gloria knew that she had been touched. So it was very frustrating." + }, + { + "turn_id": 238, + "timestamp": "00:54:43", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 239, + "timestamp": "00:54:43", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, you feel like it's your obligation, especially traditional male thinking, it's your obligation to protect your wife." + }, + { + "turn_id": 240, + "timestamp": "00:54:51", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 241, + "timestamp": "00:54:52", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so the way we generally did that, if we were in a crowded city street, is instead of Gloria walking behind me, which is what normally happens in Iran. The man walks ahead of the woman. I would walk behind Gloria so I could protect her from the rear." + }, + { + "turn_id": 242, + "timestamp": "00:55:17", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your contact with Peace Corps once you were settled in Fassa? There were no telephones, there wasn't any direct contact, was there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 243, + "timestamp": "00:55:30", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, our Peace Corps director did travel around the country visiting the various sites, and he came to Fassa at least once. He might have come twice, I don't remember exactly. And then, of course, we were called back to Tehran all the time for, you know, maybe it was an inoculation or a physical or just some sort of gathering. But I would say over the course of two years, maybe we went to Tehran I'd say ten times something like that. So." + }, + { + "turn_id": 244, + "timestamp": "00:56:07", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how long a trip was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 245, + "timestamp": "00:56:09", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, for us it was a long trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 246, + "timestamp": "00:56:11", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 247, + "timestamp": "00:56:11", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was like all by bus. So it was like 3 hours to get to Shiraz. And then from Shiraz to Tehran, I want to say 13 hours. Maybe 13, 14 hours on a bus." + }, + { + "turn_id": 248, + "timestamp": "00:56:27", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, so that was a trek." + }, + { + "turn_id": 249, + "timestamp": "00:56:28", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 250, + "timestamp": "00:56:29", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was a trek." + }, + { + "turn_id": 251, + "timestamp": "00:56:31", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it was nice to go to Tehran because, you know, we got to see other volunteers who were there. So it was kind of a reunion." + }, + { + "turn_id": 252, + "timestamp": "00:56:40", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 253, + "timestamp": "00:56:41", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We got to go to the U.S. embassy and have pancakes or whatever you could get at the U.S. embassy, hamburgers, you know, that kind of stuff. We stayed at this hotel that was a favorite haunt for all the Peace Corps volunteers called the Hotel Polaris. And it was really a dive. That's where we stayed. We once discovered that all or some of the rooms had peak holes. That was towards the end when we realized that there were peep holes in the rooms.\n\nUm, but Tehran had like an assortment of restaurants. So, like, if you wanted French food, there was a French restaurant. There was an Italian restaurant. So you could get your, if you missed that, you had an opportunity. There was a Hungarian place I remember that was very good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 254, + "timestamp": "00:57:49", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what was alcohol consumption there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 255, + "timestamp": "00:57:55", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that's a very interesting question because we liked our wine and that we had to be very careful with, because as I said, Fassa was quite a conservative town. We understood that there was a Jewish person who lived in Fassa, maybe the one and only Jewish person in the town, who sold liquor to people. However, we were told, do not patronize this person because you don't want people in town to know that you drink." + }, + { + "turn_id": 256, + "timestamp": "00:58:34", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 257, + "timestamp": "00:58:35", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So generally what we would do is we would smuggle in bottles of wine in our luggage every time we went to Shiraz. So in Shiraz we were able to go to a, it was a store either owned by Jewish people or by Armenians. There's quite a large Armenian community in Tehran, in Iran. And Shiraz had this wonderful wine which was called Hazaroyek 1001, was the brand name. And, uh, the grape growers in Fars province. By the way, this is a little bit of an aside. All of them, I understand, left Iran after the revolution and do you know where they established themselves?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 258, + "timestamp": "00:59:34", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Australia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 259, + "timestamp": "00:59:34", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. Yeah. They went to Australia and they began cultivate, I'm trying to remember what's the kind of wine that's famous for?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 260, + "timestamp": "00:59:43", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Shiraz." + }, + { + "turn_id": 261, + "timestamp": "00:59:46", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Is Shiraz one?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 262, + "timestamp": "00:59:48", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, there's a couple of different names of it. One's Shiraz. The other one is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 263, + "timestamp": "00:59:52", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's another name that I'm not remembering." + }, + { + "turn_id": 264, + "timestamp": "00:59:53", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah, it's \"sha\" something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 265, + "timestamp": "00:59:55", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 266, + "timestamp": "00:59:59", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's how I knew it was from Australia, because that's where that came up from." + }, + { + "turn_id": 267, + "timestamp": "01:00:01", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The production of these grapes was transferred from Iran. But that's the wine that we would get from Shiraz and bring back. We usually would bring back maybe two bottles, which would last us like two months or something like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 268, + "timestamp": "01:00:13", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Interesting. Well, is there anything else you'd like to say about either Peace Corps or your experience in Iran or what it's meant in your life?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 269, + "timestamp": "01:00:26", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I would say it was like the most formative influence in my life. It certainly set me on a path professionally." + }, + { + "turn_id": 270, + "timestamp": "01:00:38", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 271, + "timestamp": "01:00:40", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What I did subsequently is I studied immigration history at the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota." + }, + { + "turn_id": 272, + "timestamp": "01:00:50", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 273, + "timestamp": "01:00:51", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So living in Iran kind of helped me to understand the immigrant experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 274, + "timestamp": "01:00:58", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 275, + "timestamp": "01:00:59", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Although I had the support of the U.S. government, you know, unlike most immigrants, but still, I understood a little bit about what it's like to adjust to life in a new society." + }, + { + "turn_id": 276, + "timestamp": "01:01:09", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 277, + "timestamp": "01:01:10", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I have pretty much devoted myself to immigrant causes. I had a, I headed up a social service agency that helped immigrants resettle in the United States, and I'm still doing work in that area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 278, + "timestamp": "01:01:25", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Cool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 279, + "timestamp": "01:01:26", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 280, + "timestamp": "01:01:27", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Cool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 281, + "timestamp": "01:01:28", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 282, + "timestamp": "01:01:28", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. Well, thank you very much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 283, + "timestamp": "01:01:31", + "speaker": "Nicholas Montalto", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 284, + "timestamp": "01:01:32", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very fun." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00121", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/DeiterichCF/deiterichcf.htm", + "original_file_name": "DeiterichCF_2-28-06.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/DeiterichCF/DeiterichCF_2-28-06.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "location_date": "Bertram, Texas – 28 February 2006" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Charles F. Deiterich" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is February 28th, 2006. This oral history session with Charles F. “Chuck” Deiterich is being conducted in Bertram, Texas, for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal and Sandra Johnson.\\n\\n Thanks again for participating in this project and letting us come visit you when you’re home this afternoon. We’d like to start with you sharing with us what motivated you to apply for a position at the Manned Spacecraft Center in August of [19]‘64." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I moved to the Houston [Texas] area in 1951, and I went to Galena Park High School, and I was always interested in space and that sort of stuff. I went to the University of Saint Thomas in Houston, and I remember standing on the library steps when Sputnik [Russian satellite] went up, and we thought that was really pretty neat. So I was always interested in space, and when NASA came to Houston, I went ahead and put an application in. In fact, I put two applications in.\\n\\n I’d actually worked for a little company called Transport Flight Systems, and they had simulators for airplanes, and I worked on these simulators. They were over on [William P.] Hobby Airport [Houston, Texas]. It was kind of an aerospace—more aero than space, obviously—so I worked on the simulators.\\n\\n Then I left there, and I went to Dresser Electronics. I worked in an electronics lab, where they were doing signal conditioning equipment and things like that for Titan 2s and stuff. So I worked on that. And they also had electronic controls for pipelines, and I worked on that.\\n\\n Then they kind of lost their budget, so I got laid off, and I went to work for a company called Test Equipment Corporation, where they built test equipment for transistor checkers and things like that. When I left Dresser, I made an application for NASA, and they looked at it, but they rejected me for some reason or another, and that was like in [19]’63. Yes, that was the early part of ’63.\\n\\n Then I went to work for Test Equipment Corporation, and I put an application in. A friend of mine from Dresser had gone to work for NASA, so he put an application into the Operations area. The other application was in Engineering.\\n\\n The Operations guys called me up, Glynn [S] Lunney called me up and wanted me to—well, he didn’t call me, but one of the people in Personnel, and I went and interviewed with Glynn, and he hired me into the Flight Dynamics Branch. I was assigned to the Apollo Section, and that was under Grady [Grayden F.] Meyer. So I was working Trajectory Operations, and essentially I worked Trajectory Operations until I became a Section Head in 1978.\\n\\n So for fourteen years, I essentially worked Trajectory Operations. Although the name of the section changed and the name of the division changed and the name of the branch changed, it was still Trajectory Operations of one sort—either the Flight Dynamics Branch or the Mission Operations Branch, whatever you want to call it, but that’s kind of the way it worked. You asked me how I got there. It’s because I enjoyed space and I had a chance to go down there. My dad always wanted me to go to work at NASA, so I put my application in and talked to Lunney, and then he hired me in ’64." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us about some of the first job duties that you had and how you evolved during those fourteen years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, like I say, I was what they call a Retrofire Officer, which was part of the Flight Dynamics Team. There was a Flight Dynamics Officer, a Guidance Officer, and a Retrofire Officer. We were a team to do trajectory operations, or trajectory control, and we each had our own little areas that we worked in.\\n\\n The Retro was more concerned about recovering from abort situations and in normal re-entries and de-orbits, returning from lunar trajectories, and things like that. So the Retro was always worried about aborts and just bringing the crew back, either nominally or in an abort situation. The Flight Dynamics Officer was worried about getting into orbit and doing rendezvous and doing lunar landings. And the Guidance Officer was worried about the flight software and the on-board computer.\\n\\n Of course, depending on who was most active at any given time, the other two would help him. Like, for example, during lunar descent, the Retro was not planning an abort, but he certainly had a lot of things that he would do to help the Flight Dynamics Officer, like we worried about the weights and CGs, the centers of gravity. We worried about the engine thrust [alignment] and those kinds of things. And during the descent, there was a call for when the engine would throttle down, and we had some telemetry parameters that would help us predict that, so the Retro would predict that for the Flight Dynamics Officer.\\n\\n So as a team, depending on who was in focus at the most time, that was who supported. Like during reentry, the Retro was kind of on the forefront, so the FIDO [Flight Dynamics Officer] would worry about the ground vector and the Guidance Officer would worry about the on-board vector and those sorts of things. So as a team, we kind of worked together. Of course, that was the real-time stuff, and that was after we had all our tools put together.\\n\\n One of the things that you asked about, or you mentioned, was what did we do with the getting ready to go? Well, early on, we didn’t really have much—we didn’t have any tools to speak of at all. We would sit down with the people in Mission Planning Analysis Division, and they had a lot of trajectory runs that they would make, depending on altitude, velocity, or whatever, and we would look and see what kind of conditions would give us problems, like during powered flight, what kind of conditions would give us a problem. If you were to fly too straight up and the engines were to quit, you’d pull too many Gs [gravity] when you reentered. So we knew all those kinds of things, and we would look at the data that they presented us, and then we would take and say, “Now how would we monitor this in real time? What do we need to know to prevent from getting into that kind of a [region] of the flight or into that [region] of the envelope?” So from that, we said, “Well, we need to have these kind of things we need to watch,” and there was a lot of stuff had been done in Gemini and Mercury that kind of led us along there, but the problem was expanded when you had all the different kinds of things you could do with Apollo. The Apollo spacecraft had a tremendous amount of energy, much, much, like probably ten times that that the Gemini had. And so when you think about that, you had a lot more options you could do. So we expanded on the knowledge of how that worked, and, of course, once we got on orbit, we had to plan maneuvers, and so we said, “Well, what do we need to plan maneuvers?” Well, you have to put some targets into the on-board computer. You have to come up with these targets, and you, depending on what you want to do, whether you want to rendezvous with something or if you want to de-orbit or if you want to do a mid-course correction on the way to the Moon, so we had these targets that we understood. We put them in the computer, and they’d give us the answer. Well, we had to define what those processors needed to be so that when we got into the mission, we’d had these tools to work with. So it was an iterative process. We started out small. The first two flights were lob shots, where we just went up, re-entered into the Atlantic Ocean on the first one, and we re-entered into the Pacific on the second one, so we weren’t even completely in orbit. But then, from that we got our ascent monitoring techniques down, and we expanded on those as we got into the orbital flights with Apollo 7, for example, and we came up with rendezvous processors when we started doing Apollo 9, because they did have the LM [Lunar Module] when they went out and the re-rendezvoused with the LM. So as the program developed, we developed more tools to do the different jobs and the extra jobs that came along." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you share with us the differences of doing your task for Gemini compared to Apollo and then, of course, with Apollo as you were starting to talk about the unmanned missions and how those rockets were different from the manned missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, I never worked on Gemini. I monitored a sim [simulation] or two, a simulation, down at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], so I strictly worked Apollo as my assignment. And sometime in the early part of [19]’66, we reorganized. We had an Apollo Section and a Gemini Section. The Apollo Section was under Grady Meyer, and the Gemini Section was under Cliff Charlesworth. I’m sure you’ve heard of Cliff [Clifford E.] Charlesworth.\\n\\n In fact, that branch really had a lot of people. It had Charlesworth, it had Lunney, it had Phil [Philip C.] Shaffer—I don’t know if you’ve talked to Phil Shaffer. We have Jerry [C.] Bostick was in that branch. There was a lot of guys that came out of that branch that did very well.\\n\\n But anyway, so in the early part of [19]’66, we reorganized, and we had a Retro Section, we had a FIDO Section, and we had a Guidance Section, and I think Bostick was the Section Head for the FIDOs, and Charlesworth became an Assistant Brach Chief. Charlie [B.] Parker was the Guidance Officer Section Head, and John [S.] Llewellyn [Jr.], which I know you’ve talked to, was my Retro Section Head. And they were still flying Gemini, but we were also getting ready to do more Apollo stuff.\\n\\n Sometime in that time frame, we turned in the Retro Section—no, actually, I beg your pardon. Grady Meyer was the Section Head for the FIDOs for a while, but then he left, and I think Bostick then took that Section Head job.\\n\\n But anyway, to make a long story short, we were there in Building 30, and we would have these kind of brainstorming sessions where we’d try to figure out what we were going to do, how we were going to fly. We’d write down our procedures, what things we would look at, what things we would monitor. So even though I didn’t work Gemini, I’d talk to those guys that did and use some of their expertise, what they had done, and try to move that over into Apollo.\\n\\n And after Gemini was phased out, those guys moved over to Apollo, and the things were set up. So we kind of did it as a group, although some people were—we were worried more about Apollo, so we were kind of doing the pick-and-shovel work as those guys came on over from Gemini. Don’t know if that answers your question or not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It does. And we were talking then about the unmanned missions and how you were involved with the first Apollos." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. I was a Retro on [Apollo/Saturn] 201, which was a lob shot down the Atlantic Ocean, and it landed down there at Ascension Island. What we did is, it was the first Saturn 1B flight, and I forget exactly how high we got, probably 250 miles or so, and then we pointed the SPS [Service Propulsion System] engine down and burned that engine straight down to increase the entry speed. So we were actually above orbital speed, but we were pointed down. It was a heat shield test to get a higher velocity on the heat shield and also to test all the systems. And, of course, after we separated the Service Module off, the Command Module reoriented, and somehow or other, there was a wire that got shorted out, and so it was supposed to fly a full lift trajectory down to land. Well, it actually ended up rolling, so it didn’t land where it was supposed to, but they had beacons on it, and the recovery guys did find it.\\n\\n Then, on [Apollo/Saturn] 202, which was like in August of [19]’66, we again fired the—it was an S [Saturn] 1B—we fired the thing, and we flew over Australia and landed near New Guinea, and we pointed the—we did a big SPS burn again and got the velocity up higher than normal. And 201, we did not have an on-board guidance system per se. It was kind of a very rudimentary autopilot, if you will, but 202 actually had an Apollo guidance computer on it, and it flew a guided reentry, although it didn’t exactly land where it was supposed to either, because the L/D [lift to drag ratio] wasn’t as high as it was supposed to be. But anyway, so we got a lot of systems tests, and we got some heat shield tests out of that.\\n\\n There was two other missions, [Saturn/Apollo 4] 501 and [Saturn/Apollo 6] 502, which I did not work on, and they were the Saturn V, where we went way high up, and I forget how high, 20,000 miles or so, and came back, screaming back, almost at lunar velocity for reentry for heat shield tests. Plus it was the test of the Saturn V. Now, on the Saturn 1B, we flew 201, 202, [Apollo/Saturn, AS-] 203, and 204 [-LM 1]—all unmanned. [The AS-204 booster that was on the pad for Apollo 1 was used for the unmanned LM flight, 204-LM1 (Eugene F. “Gene” Kranz was the flight director for 204-LM 1)]. [AS-] 501 and 502 were the only two unmanned Saturn Vs, and 503 was Apollo VIII. So we flew people on the Saturn V the third time it was flown, which was kind of exciting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, before there was Apollo 8, there was Apollo 1, and I understand that you were on the console." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I was on the console. It was in the wintertime. It was cold. And they were doing pad tests, and John Llewellyn always wanted—well, we were required to be there, but he always—anytime the real-time computer was up, anytime there was any testing going on, he always wanted his guys over there in the Control Center just as a learning experience. And so I just happened to be on the console when they had the fire, and it was evening, I think, like six o’clock or something like that. It was in the evening. And yes, I was there. It was kind of hard to exactly figure out what was going on initially. We lost data, and we heard a lot of noise. And then later on, you know, we got to where there was a fire, and I think one of the EECOM [Electrical, Environmental, Communications Engineer] saw a big—they played the data back and saw a big voltage spike where something obviously had shorted out—not a voltage spike, a current spike, so obviously something shorted out. And so that was really kind of a bad day, to say the least. And it put us behind in what we were trying to do, and that was a Block 1 Command Module, and they actually went to a Block 2 Command Module, which had a lot of revisions in it. So I think back, Gemini and Mercury had worked so well, and nobody really had any—there was some dicey things happened, but we never lost anybody, and I think people redoubled their efforts to make sure that we would not ever let that happen again. Each guy has his own area, but it kind of borders up against somebody else’s area, and sometimes something that happens over here will affect you. Guys tried to be more broad and understand what other people’s areas were, so I think there was a lot more integration of the whole system after the Apollo 1 fire. People were more concerned about not just their own little area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Apollo 8 was a significant milestone in the history of space flight, and what was your reaction and your colleagues’ reaction when you found out that you were going to go around the Moon?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, it was funny. You asked a question about Apollo 11, but it was really Apollo 8. But, we were getting ready for Apollo 7, and I was on the console for Apollo 7. I was going to be one of the Retros for Apollo 7. And along about September, Bostick called me into his office, because he was a Branch Chief then, and said, “Hey,” and he closed the door, of course, and he said, “we’re going to go to the Moon with Apollo C-Prime,” we called it, because Apollo 7 was called C, and this was C-Prime. “You can’t tell anybody, and you’re going to be the lead Retro.” I’d never even been on a manned mission before. I’d flown two unmanned missions, and oh, boy. He said, “Your other two Retros are going to be Bostick and Llewellyn.\\n\\n I said, “Oh, great. I’ve got my Branch Chief and my Section Head supposed to be working for me. Right.” So that was pretty overwhelming.\\n\\n But we had a long way to go. The tools that we had for lunar missions were just now being developed. Nothing in the Control Center as far as lunar kind of trajectories worked until like November. We were trying to do simulations with things that didn’t work. We had a lot of backup charts, and, of course, we dug out a lot of the MPAD [Mission Planning and Analysis Division] trajectories and figured out what was sensitive and what was not sensitive.\\n\\n And of course, everybody else kind of figured out that we were going to go to the Moon—that was the rumor—but we couldn’t verify it because we knew that we were going to the Moon, but we were told it was a secret deal. So it was kind of frustrating. So we just played along. They’d say something, and we’d just kind of ignore them and go on and do our thing because C-Prime official thing was just the second Earth orbital mission.\\n\\n So we had to get all our procedures together. And there was a lot of things in the real-time computer that didn’t work exactly right, so we had certain work-arounds we had to do, certain things, when you compute them, they wouldn’t give you the right answers so you had to do something to move it around to make it give you the right answer. It was a struggle, and it was kind of a bare bones kind of a thing. We had a lot of capabilities that we got later on for missions when we had the LM, etc., that we had to add later on, but it was scary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to ask you, could you share with us what it was like knowing they were going around the Moon, what it was like in the Mission Control Center?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes. We did have sims, and Apollo, like I say, a lot of times the computer didn’t give us the answer we wanted it to. And I can’t remember, but I believe the simulator was at the Cape at that time. I don’t believe we had a simulator in Houston.\\n\\n Jon [C.] Harpold, I don’t know if you interviewed Jon or not. Well, you won’t get to. But he was the reentry guy from MPAD. He and I went down to the Cape right before the mission, right before Apollo 8. I forget exactly when it was. It was like, oh, maybe the [December] 14th or something like that, the second week, to talk to [Frank F.] Borman and watch some sims down there and then talk to Borman. And in the crew quarters we were sitting there—he had a shaving dispenser with shaving cream in it.\\n\\n We were talking about blunt end forward, using that as our demonstrator on the reentry vehicle, and we got to eat supper with him. And of course, we had to use some of our per diem to pay for the food, believe it or not. But in walks Arthur Godfrey. He had a cane, and he came in to see the crew. This was before they started quarantining. After the guys potentially could have gotten sick, they started quarantining them, but this was before they quarantined them. So Arthur Godfrey walks in, and he shakes hands with everybody. I go home and tell my kids, “Hey, I saw Arthur Godfrey.” Well, they didn’t know who Arthur Godfrey was.\\n\\n So we had so many things to do, and it was really hard to—you almost detach from worrying about anything. For example, we’d provide a lot of information to the crew to do maneuvers. We’d tell them what way they needed to be pointed, what the time of the burn is, how long the burn is. We give them the stars to look at that they can check in their telescope to make sure they’re pointed in the right direction. We give them the weight. We tell them which way to point the engine bell so it’s pointed through the CG. So it’s a lot of information that we give the crew. Well, we hadn’t figured all that stuff out for lunar missions.\\n\\n And Bill [Howard W.] Tindall had a group called the Data Priority Group, or Mission Techniques I think they later called it, but it was mostly the trajectory guys and the crew would get together and figure what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it, what kind of stuff we’re going to pass each other, how are you going to align the platform, where are you going to point it, what kind of errors can you take and still not have a problem, how much does a platform drift over time, how often do you have to do a platform alignment with the stars, do you turn the computer off while you’re flying or don’t you, do you leave it on? Do you turn the platform off? All those questions had to be answered.\\n\\n MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts], who was responsible for the on-board software and, I guess, had a lot to do with the computer and the platform, were involved in these meetings. Bill Tindall would say, “Okay, what are we going to do about this?” and the guys would go away and study it and come back.\\n\\n Well, during some of these meetings, we also came up with what we called pre-advisory data, or PADs, which was the information we passed the crew. Actually, I wrote down what I thought we ought to have, and in like two weeks we had those things all done. Later on, to make a change, it took months of getting approval and all that sort of stuff. When they got the Shuttle, I think it was even worse. So we were doing a lot of things as a small group because we were all these secret guys. They were doing Apollo 8 in a small group, so we could get a lot of things done in a hurry, and we didn’t ask for a lot of advice, so we didn’t get a lot of advice.\\n\\n And, like I say, Tindall really did a very good job of pulling all that integration together. He used to put these things out called “Tindall Grams,” which would explain why we would do things, and we would write down the rationale of why we did all these things, and he would publish these minutes. We probably wouldn’t have made Apollo 8 happen had he not done those kind of things, and the trajectory guys, the flight dynamics guys, were so involved with that.\\n\\n The systems guys didn’t really get too involved in the early data priority meetings, because it was more of an exchange of trajectory and flight planning kind of information between the crew and the flight dynamics guys. And I think the flight planners, which were actually in the crew directorate, the Crew Operations, the Flight Crew Operations—when we were in Flight Operations Directorate, they were in Flight Crew Operations Directorate, which had the flight planners, the guys that wrote the flight plan, the crew and some of the support people worked in that directorate. And then Flight Operations had Mission Planning and Analysis, who did the pre-mission trajectory work, and then all the Operations guys. So we were not too close together, but this was one place where we did get really close together.\\n\\n And you asked a question there about interfacing with the astronauts, and it turns out that early on, there wasn’t that much interplay. The crew had checklists that the flight planners wrote for them, the checklist writers, and we didn’t really have a lot of access to those early on. Later on, it became very apparent that the ground team and the on-board team need to really work together. So we used to get copies of checklists and copies of flight plans, and then we’d keep updating. There’d be updates, and we’d update our books as new pages came out. So somewhere around Apollo 8, that whole integration activity started getting a lot stronger, which was good, because those guys would also participate in the flight techniques meetings." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While we’re talking about Bill Tindall—as you know, we won’t be able to talk to him either—those meetings that you all had together, was it a pretty free flow and exchange of information, or how did Mr. Tindall keep some type of order and exchange going within that group?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a big conference room, and I don’t remember exactly how—I don’t know if he had an agenda or not, but it never got out of hand. Anybody could say anything they wanted to. We always had what we called block data, which was data that you would use—it was a maneuver and return to Earth if you had a problem and you couldn’t talk to the ground. Now, when we were in Earth orbit, we always had what we called block data, which would give them a de-orbit opportunity to put them down near a ship or someplace.\\n\\n When we were going to the Moon, we had the same kind of thing of going out, and if they lost com [communications], they could do this maneuver and get back to the Earth. And I remember sitting in a chair and saying, “Hey, here’s what we ought to do. We ought to have one here, here, here, and here.” And it was based on almost using all the Delta V [change in velocity] but getting back as quick as you could but at different times, about eight hours apart all the way out, and it was the data I’d gotten from MPAD.\\n\\n Everybody said, “Hey, that’s the right thing.”\\n\\n We did that, probably, in fifteen or twenty minutes, but it probably got revised a little bit later on. Anybody could say anything, but people usually paid attention, and it never got out of hand that I can remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How often did you meet and for how long?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the meetings were always a couple of hours long, and I think they were like once a week. They were pretty often, because, we had from like September to December to get ready. And of course, what we would do, and I don’t have any, but they would write—TRW [Incorporated], I think, were the secretaries for the data priority, and they would put out a document, because I have one on retrofire for Apollo 7, and it was a document, it’s about that thick, and it tells you everything that you’ve got to do, all the flow, all the data flow, who does what, what the errors are, and they had one for rendezvous, they had one for the lunar return, and all that sort of stuff. So—I don’t know where we were, but I got off on that. But anyway, all that stuff was documented, and—I lost my train of thought." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We were talking about how long the meetings were and how often." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So after the minutes came out, then they would put together the document, and people would review the document and mark it up. So we had a couple of documents that were put out before the mission that would kind of describe how we intended to do things.\\n\\n And a lot of the mission rules—and I’m sure you know what mission rules are, the things that, if this happens, this is what you’re going to do. A lot of the mission rules, from a trajectory point of view, flowed out of those data priority meetings. Like how bad does a state vector on board have to be before you update it, or how far does the platform have to drift before you fix it, and those kinds of things.\\n\\n And where you do maneuvers, like, for example, when you’re coming back from the Moon, we had three maneuvers that were scheduled. One was right after we passed the lunarsphere [of influence], like fifteen hours after trans-Earth injection. Then we had another one about twenty-four hours out. Then we had one that was two hours out. And I think we started out to have—I forget exactly how it was, but after the first flight, we decided it was too close, and we moved it back an hour because we didn’t have time to do the maneuver and get ready for re-entry. It was those kinds of decisions that were made in those data priority meetings. They were very important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We seem to, today, live in a time period where lots of things get leaked out or secrets get shared before it’s time. Did anybody have any doubt that Apollo 8 would remain a secret until it was time to announce it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know. When you’re sitting in a room and you’re talking about lunar trajectories, it’s pretty obvious—although we had talked about lunar trajectories—we do things two or three years in advance anyway, so you really never knew. I don’t know how much the public knew about it, because I really wasn’t paying too much attention to the public. I knew people in the office kind of suspected what was going on. But I don’t know if the newspapers said much about it or not. I don’t think they did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think it was a surprise until it was announced.\\n\\n Well, after Apollo 8, you became a lead on a number of flights after that as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I was. On Apollo 10—let’s see, Apollo 9 was Earth orbit LM mission. I was not on that. Apollo 10, I was on the launch team. No, I was not on the launch team. I did not work Apollo 10. I did work Apollo 11, and I was the lead on Apollo 11, and I worked the descent with Jay [H.] Greene and Steve [Stephen G.] Bales. And that was kind of interesting. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed that.\\n\\n It got to the point where guys just kind of fell out, that we needed a lead Retro, and he’d done all these things, so I ended up being lead on everything from—from [Apollo] 13 on, I was the lead on all of them. I didn’t fly all the different phases, but I always flew the mission, but I was always the lead.\\n\\n What the lead does is he negotiates with all the other elements in the Control Center. If you need to have some sort of an agreement with an EECOM, the lead would take care of that. Now, he’d ask other guys to go do things, he wouldn’t do it all, but he was the guy who was really responsible for making decisions or for integrating with the other areas, and he was always the guy who had to worry about writing the post-flight report and the mission rules and all that sort of stuff. He didn’t do it by himself, but he was kind of the focal point. If the other guys had questions or whatever, they would come and deal with the lead. So I was the lead from 13 on.\\n\\n I was Lead on [Apollo] 8, I was lead on [Apollo] 11, and I was lead on 13. I did fly Apollo 12 [launch], and that was all I flew, and I was not the lead. Tom [Thomas E.] Weichel was the lead on Apollo 12. I was there when the lightning struck and all the data went off, all the on-board Apollo data went off. The booster data had a glitch, but it kept on going. Greene was the FIDO. So we were kind of concerned about what had happened. His indication, the on-board guidance said, hey, we made it to orbit. Of course, it’s going to say we made it to orbit, because that’s what it targeted for, and it thinks it got there. Anyway, his tracking pretty much said we were in orbit.\\n\\n But we came over Carnarvon [Tracking Station, Western Australia], and we got data a couple minutes early. Well, the only way you get data early is to get there early. The only way you get there early is not to be as high as you thought you were. And all the systems guys, they were happy as clams, because they’re getting their data so they can see what’s going on. Greene and I look at each other and say, “Oh, man, this is not good.” But then, when we got some tracking data in, we realized it was okay. But he and I were the only ones that were kind of concerned about getting early telemetry.\\n\\n What it was, it was what they call multi-path. It was some way the waves bounced off the atmosphere and we got data before we really should have, or before you had a direct line of sight. Let me put it that way. So that was kind of interesting.\\n\\n I was a little surprised that we could get everything pulled together and get the spacecraft—because the computer had gone off and everything was turned down, the fuel cells were off. We got everything back up and running again, got the on-board state vector, and really checked out the whole vehicle as best we could with enough confidence that we were willing to go to the Moon, and we did. But that was really doing things in a real big hurry. A lot of guys worked real hard to get that stuff done.\\n\\n Of course, for Jay and I, we were on a nominal trajectory, and all we had to do was figure out, well, if they’re going to go to the Moon, we’ll compute the TLI [translunar injection] maneuver. Yes, we’ll do all those maneuvers, but we were going to do those anyway. And all the block data, well, we were going to compute that anyway. So we didn’t really have a lot of extra things that we had to be too concerned about, whereas the systems guys had to make sure all their things were working." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, things didn’t work well on Apollo 13. Where were you when they received the message that there had been a problem?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was in bed, I think, and my wife came over and told me about it. So I went into the Control Center, and I think I stayed there a night or two. At that time, they had a dorm in the Control Center where you could stay. So we went in, and of course, by then they knew what had happened. They knew that they were losing oxygen and that things were not too well. And they still hadn’t made the decision what they were going to do about coming back.\\n\\n My concern was that the SPS really wasn’t there and wasn’t usable. And we would have had to jettison the LM to do an abort at that point, to come straight back, to do a direct abort. We had been on a hybrid trajectory, which means we weren’t going to—most trajectories, our early trajectories, we were free return, which means after you did the maneuver to get you to the Moon, you could actually fly around the Moon and come straight back and reenter. That’s called a free return.\\n\\n But you can gather performance, carry a heavier payload, or get to different landing sites if you go to a non-free return trajectory. And so we did the first TLI, which was the S-IVB [third stage], the big burn, put us on a free return trajectory, but then we did what we did what we call a hybrid. We actually did a little maneuver that took us off of a free return but made our performance good so we could land where we wanted to land on the Moon, but we were non-free return.\\n\\n Now, it turns out in [James A.] Lovell’s [Jr.] book [Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13], he said we had a perigee of 40,000 miles. Well, it was 2,500 miles. I went back and found one of my old post-flight reports, and it said 2,500 miles, so I’m sure that’s the right number. In fact, I’m not sure where Lovell got that number. I might have given him the 40,000 miles. I might not have remembered then and said, “I don’t know, it was really big.” Well, if you miss by 2,500 miles, it’s like missing by 40,000 miles, it doesn’t make much difference. You’ve missed.\\n\\n So we clearly weren’t going to be able to come directly back. We didn’t want to jettison the LM. We needed to get back on a free return trajectory, which was a small maneuver to do that, but just getting back on a free return trajectory put us on to impact on Africa. I said, “Well, if we’re going to do this, we ought to do it just enough to get it onto water so we can land on water.” So we came up with a maneuver that would put us in the Indian Ocean. It slowed us down a little bit—no, I guess it sped us up a little bit to go ahead and land in the Indian Ocean, and so that’s what we did. We did a little maneuver to land on the Indian Ocean.\\n\\n Of course, they powered the vehicle down and all that sort of stuff, but the next thing we did was then do a big burn to speed up the trajectory to get us home. Now, we had a couple of options, a couple different things we could have done. We were going to do this with the LM. We could have jettisoned the Service Module and come back faster, because we’d have had more energy without that weight. And probably, if we’d done that, we probably wouldn’t have been ready for reentry, because we’d have gotten back too fast.\\n\\n But this PC-plus-two maneuver was always a plan—in fact, we had a plan in our abort scenario, we had a thing we called a flyby. If you had a problem before you got to the Moon, you’d do this flyby maneuver, and you’d fly by the Moon, and you’d come back and reenter. We had another maneuver. If you didn’t get into lunar orbit, we’d do what’s called the PC plus 2, pericynthion plus 2 [hours] burn to get us back to the Earth, and it would actually speed us up.\\n\\n So those, that flyby maneuver to get us back to the Indian Ocean really wasn’t anything new. It was just that it was targeted a little differently. And the PC plus 2 maneuver really wasn’t anything new. It was something we’d always had in our back pocket that we use if we had to do an abort out of [high] lunar orbit [due to a Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) underburn].\\n\\n So we did this PC plus 2 burn with the LM engine to speed us up, and it took us from the Indian Ocean over into the Pacific Ocean, and it started us on our way back. Then we had to power down the platform because our batteries were running low, and all we had was the Lunar Module batteries. We didn’t have any batteries in the Command Service Module. All it had was fuel cells. We had some batteries, entry batteries, but they were not nearly big enough to do what we needed to do, so we powered everything down. That’s when it started getting real cold in there.\\n\\n We had another mid-course correction we had to do. The LM had an evaporator cooler on it, and it was venting out gas, and it was causing the trajectory to wander. It was making the trajectory get too shallow, the entry flight path angle get too shallow, so you wouldn’t reenter properly. So we had another maneuver. And what they did is—in fact, we came up with this on Apollo 8, and Lovell remembered it, as a matter of fact—but if you look at the Moon [or Earth], you can see where it’s dark and where it’s light. That’s called the terminator. Well, they would take an optical device in the window of the LM, and they would line that up on the [Earth’s] terminator, and that would put them in an attitude that would—depending on whether it was this way or this way, they could do a burn and correct the trajectory. So that’s what they did.\\n\\n Now, we didn’t turn on the guidance system. They did a kind of a manual burn. Fred [W.] Haise controlled one axes, and Jim Lovell controlled the other two axes with the hand controllers, and they actually just timed the burn, and then they lit the engine and timed the burn and then shut it back down, and that got them pretty much back in the corridor.\\n\\n And one of the things that—well, I’ll talk about that in a minute.\\n\\n The water boiler was still boiling water, so we were clearly not being stable—we didn’t stay in the trajectory, so we had to do another mid-course correction. We did that several hours out, like five hours out, but we had a different problem than we had before. Before we usually were coming back with just the Command Service Module. You’d do your last mid-course correction, and right before entry, you’d jettison the Service Module, and it has little jets on it that pulls it away from the Command Module. Well, the Service Module was dead, and we had developed—John Llewellyn, bless his heart, made us—he was always worried about contingencies, so we had this book that we developed on separations, and one of them was, you’d be on the trajectory that you want to be on, you’d burn forward a little bit, and you’d turn loose whatever you wanted to get rid of, then you’d back up so you’d be right back on your trajectory, but it would be on a different trajectory. And that’s essentially what we did with the Service Module. We thrusted forward with the LM and then separated the Service Module and then thrusted back, and it put us right back in the corridor. That was one of the techniques we had developed.\\n\\n Well, the second one was, how do we get rid of the [Lunar] Module? Well, I remembered I was in the Control Center on [Apollo] 10, although I didn’t work 10, after they had done their maneuvers around the Moon and re-rendezvoused. And [Thomas P.] Stafford—we’d always wanted Stafford to get in a position for separation, and he said, “No, no,” he says, “I can do that. I’ll just separate it, and I’ll get where I need to get.”\\n\\n Retros are always worried about recontact, for some reason or other. Well, we always were. So pre-mission, he decided he knew how to do it. Well, what happened to him is they forgot to depressurize the tunnel between the LM ascent stage and the Command Module, and when he released—when he fired the bolts to separate it, the air pushed it away right into the Sun. He couldn’t even see it. So he didn’t do anything, and, of course, the LM was going to do another burn and go out to solar orbit, which it did, and everything was fine.\\n\\n I remembered that’s what happened, so I said, “Why don’t we leave some tunnel pressure between the LM and the Command Module, and then when we separate the LM, it’ll just pop off with that tunnel pressure,” and that’s what we ended up doing. So we came up with a way to make the two separate.\\n\\n We had separation issues on lots of flights. On Apollo 8, after they separated from the booster, Borman was afraid the booster was going to run over him. It looked like it was getting closer. So we did a big SPS burn. Jay Greene was a FIDO and I was a Retro. In fact, by the time we left the console, almost everything was done that had to be done before you got to the Moon, because we did the first big mid-course correction with the SPS just to get away from the booster.\\n\\n On Apollo 10, I told you about the thing popping off into the Sun. On Apollo 11, Jay and I were on the TEI [trans-Earth injection] team, and they came up and re-rendezvoused, and that’s about the time we changed over shifts. Well, they closed out the LM, a rev [revolution], two hours early, and we—so our LM was over there powered up, but they had the hatch closed, and we really didn’t want to leave them over there that long with the two attached with that thing hot, so we actually had to separate a rev early. So that was another separation thing. Then on 13 we had a separation thing. I guess that’s the ones I remember.\\n\\n And I wrote something down here. “Nothing is easy, but the worth of an accomplishment is in the number of obstacles overcome.” And I think that’s right, because we always had problems, but we always had some backup procedures. We always figured out how to get around them.\\n\\n So anyway, the Apollo 13, the other issue was, there was a radioactive cask on board. It was a device that would reenter, but it had a piece of radioactive material in it that [the crew] would put in the lunar surface experiments that would run a radioactive electrical generator, and they would put this thing in there. They did it on [Apollo] 12, too. It’s called an ALSEP [Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package], is what the acronym for what the lunar surface stuff was. But that cask was on the LM, and of course, the—it turns out—I’m kind of digressing. Every time you fly a flight, you’ve done so many things, and the next time, you find another thing that you really need to look at. So we always worked at new things and took care of more contingencies as we got further and further along.\\n\\n Well, one of the ones that I worked on before 13 flew is, what do we do if we have to come back with a LM, what do we do with this cask? We were really thinking more of Earth orbit, if we did an Earth orbit mission and we had to get rid of the cask. So I worked with a guy named Bill Remini from the Atomic Energy Commission [AEC], and some of the guys in the MPAD, Bob [Robert E.] McAdams primarily, and we developed some aerodynamics for this cask. We figured out what we would do with it, how we would do things. When we came back, we were actually in the Pacific Ocean, and we were putting the LM in a pretty deep part of the Pacific Ocean, and so we had figured out where it would probably go, and we developed these procedures.\\n\\n And the AEC guys were always—they were listening and watching what was going on, and when we got to reentry, they actually had an airplane out there sniffing to see if there was any radioactive material released when the LM came in. Of course, they didn’t find anything. But we actually got a letter from the Chairman of the AEC thanking Bob McAdams and myself and a couple other guys for working this thing out. That was just one thing that we had done before 13 that turned out to be good.\\n\\n The other thing that we did, the real-time computer was always evolving, and it took almost six months to get any procedures in there. The LM engine, for a docked burn, they would start the engine at 10 percent, and they would throttle it up, and they would throttle it up some more. We could not model that sequence in the computer until Apollo 13. So if we’d had to do that kind of burn on 12, we’d have just had to kind of fake something. We’d have just averaged it or done something, and it would have worked fine, but it was just another one of those things that happened to be ready at the right time for Apollo 13.\\n\\n The other thing about 13—this may be a little hard to understand, but a platform is fixed in space, and it’s an inertial platform. It’s like a horizon in an airplane. The vehicle flies around this thing, so it’s a little eight ball that tells them what their attitude is, which way they’re pointing. This thing is frozen in space, and the spacecraft flies, maneuvers around it. Well, the thing that defines how that thing is oriented in space with respect to the stars is called a REFSMMAT. That’s a Reference Stable Member Matrix is what that stands for. It’s a mathematical set of numbers that tell that platform how it’s aligned with the North Pole, for example, and you have to have that in the computer to tell them what to fly with that little eight ball so they’re in the right attitude for reentry or for anything else they do.\\n\\n Well, the ground computer, was set up so it would take the last REFSMMAT that was used for a maneuver, which would be like mid-course seven, which the Command Module would do, and it would use that for reentry. Well, in [Apollo] 13, our last maneuver was done with a LM. It had a different REFSMMAT than what we were going to have for reentry.\\n\\n Well, [H. David] Dave Reed and I—he was the FIDO for 13, he was the lead FIDO for 13, and I think this was his idea. In fact, I just talked to him about it not too long ago. We decided we’d better go down and run our processors in the computer downstairs the day before reentry. So we went down and brought up another real-time computer and ran the thing and got our numbers, and the attitude for entry was way off. What can this be? We figured out it was the fact that the Command Module simulation was using the LM REFSMMAT for reentry, and that’s why it gave us the wrong angles. So what we did is we put in a Zero Delta V maneuver, a maneuver that wasn’t going to happen but it gave us the attitude for the Command Module, and then that gave us a REFSMMAT that we’d use for reentry. Because the REFSMMATs in the computer identified by like current 001 or current 002, and there’d be a current 001 for the LM, there’d be a current 001 for the Command Module. You couldn’t tell them apart. So after that, all the LM REFSMMATs started out current 501, 502, and the Command Module was 001 or 002. So that was something we learned. But being thorough, I guess, we went down and said, “Let’s try out this thing that we’ve never done before,” the day before reentry, and that’s what we did, and we saved ourselves—because there would really have been a panic if that thing would have popped up with the wrong angles just prior to reentry. Because we knew what they were supposed to be. They were supposed to 180,0,0, and with the other REFSMMAT, they didn’t come up that at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So many of the different areas were coming up with different information. Tell us how all of you got back together to exchange the information so all this could work out as well as it did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, part of the stuff was the leads were pulled off, and we didn’t fly a lot—although we did fly some of the shifts, we didn’t fly all of the shifts. So we would actually go in the back rooms and sit down and—I know we put the checklists together, or John [W.] Aaron kind of—since he had to power it up, he was the EECOM, he kind of pulled that together, but we all had our own little things that we want to see happen. So it was a group—in the books you read, they call it a tiger team. I don’t remember it being called a tiger team, but in the books you read, they call it a tiger team. But the guys who were—another group who were off line doing these kinds of things and making sure that the checklist was written, making sure that we had—what we were going to do to maneuver—this whole timeline of doing a mid-course seven with the LM, jettisoning the Service Module, jettisoning the LM, and jettisoning all that sort of stuff, that all had to be—that whole timeline had to be worked out, and then it had to get in the flight plan, it had to get in the checklist. So that’s where that all took place, is in the back rooms where we had our meetings.\\n\\n For example, there was so much debris, you couldn’t see stars, because the debris looked like stars. And we came up with the idea that the Sun’s out there, and you can certainly see the Sun, and the Moon’s out there, you can certainly see the Moon. So we used these bigger objects. Although they might not have been as precise, at least you could see them.\\n\\n The other thing that we did was, getting in reentry attitude, we always had this line that we could put on the horizon and track around. So we had them—I said, “Hey, why don’t we just have them look at the Moon and just stay pointed at the Moon and with the Moon set, just track the horizon around from that? In fact, why don’t we give them the time that the Moon’s supposed to set, and they’ll know, hey, if it sets at the right time, they’re on the right trajectory.” And we used that Moon set time for all the rest of the missions. So we gave them Moon set time, and it worked right. It was right on, and it blinked out when it was supposed to.\\n\\n So there were a lot of things that were kind of innovative that we did, but there were things that—we had always—on our sims there were always all these problems, and we always came up with some kind of a way to get around certain things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was a question I was going to ask you, how much the sims played a role in bringing the crew home safely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The simulations, a lot of times, they don’t simulate what really happens, but they make guys think, and they test our mission rules. So things that do happen are somewhat related to what happened in sims, because I think the alarm that they had on Apollo 11 had happened in a sim, so guys were ready for it. So the simulations are really extremely valuable in helping guys think things through. And a lot of the little things that they do find, some of them happen and some of them don’t.\\n\\n This thing with the REFSMMAT , we never had done that before, and we were happy that we went down and tried it in the computer. So it was kind of a sim, but it was our own sim." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was the confidence level for Apollo 14 with Mission Control when it was ready to launch?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "On 14?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, on 14, after all the issues with 13." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I think we were—I was confident. I was confident. We knew what had happened, and they’d fixed it. So I was confident.\\n\\n In fact, talking about 13, I never had a doubt that we weren’t going to do what we needed to do. It never even crossed my mind that we would have a problem. People say failure is not an option. I don’t think failure was even in my vocabulary, seriously. Because Dave Reed and I talked about this. He said, “You know, we never thought about that. We knew what we were going to do, we knew we had to do it, and we knew all these things were going to work.” I never had a doubt that we would get them back.\\n\\n And I have a lot of confidence in the designers and those kinds of guys, and when they go back and they do the fixes, I think they’re going to work. I never had any conflicts. And sims, much as we do, and you know nothing bad’s going to happen in a sim—numbers can come out wrong and you can look stupid, but you do so many sims that once you get to the real mission, it’s really hard to tell them apart. So they’ve kind of conditioned you not to be panicky or what have you when you’re flying the real mission. That’s my understanding. I may be naïve, but that’s the way I kind of look at it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Anything else you want to add about 13 before we go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No.\\n\\n You were talking about 14. One of the things, they wanted to bring back the probe because they had a problem with the probe. The only thing that really did to us is we had to find a place to put it, and it changed the center of gravity. And the Retros worried about the center of gravity.\\n\\n Why does the Retro worry about the center of gravity? Well, two reasons. One reason we do burns, our job was to compute the angles that point the engine bell through the center of gravity so they can do the burn, so you want to be able to compute those angles. The other one is, for reentry, the center of gravity affects the L/D, which is the lift to drag. The lift to drag is those parameters that actually allow the spacecraft to fly.\\n\\n You can think of it as it actually controls where it’s going by the way it points the lift. If it points the lift this way, to the north, it’ll fly to the north. If it points it to the south, it’ll fly to the south. So you actually do your targeting to land on a spot on the ground by modulating where that lift is pointing. If you point it further over, you won’t fly it as far downrange as if you point it straight up. So it’s important to have a good L/D.\\n\\n Plus, the number of Gs you pull during reentry is a function of the L/D, so we had to make sure that the probe was in a good place so the L/D would be okay, and it was. In fact, I think it actually increased our L/D, which was good. Because Apollo started out to have an L/D of about point five [.5], but by the time they got around to flying it, it was like point two eight [.28], point two nine [.29].\\n\\n That’s kind of 14. It was really kind of frustrating, because they kept trying to bang on that thing to get it to dock, and they finally did manage to—I guess—I forget how long, but they flew quite a while in station keeping with the booster until they finally got it docked, because they smashed into it several times pretty darn hard as far as I remember. It’s hard to remember those things. It was a long time ago." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s okay. How did your role change from Apollo to Skylab?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we still had a launch to do. We had a rendezvous to do. We had a reentry to do and a de-orbit to do. Of course, the FIDOs are always responsible for the state vector on the spacecraft and the state vector in the real time system, because the flight planners need the state vector to know when acquisition is going to be, when daylight and darkness, how to schedule their experiments, and that sort of stuff. So from that point of view, the FIDO job didn’t change. But there was a lot of times when we were just boring holes in the sky.\\n\\n Now, the FIDOs, by that time we had a secondary system. I think it was called a FOPS [Flight Operations Planning System] or something like that, as well as a real-time system, and you could build data tapes and put them in there. Now, I never told you about block data. Well, of course, in Skylab, block data was—you didn’t jump in the thing and de-orbit right away. You had to safe the Skylab or do whatever you had to do, and you had to get in the Command Module and power it up and that sort of thing. So there was some Delta time between when you had an emergency and when you could de-orbit, but we will sent them block data, and we had block data—actually what we’d do is we’d have it available for them, and we’d send it up on the teleprinter, because there was a teleprinter on board. So we’d come in in the morning, we would take all the radar in, get a new state vector, tell everybody where we are and update the FOPS. We would compute the block data, and we’d look at the ground track. Now, the ground track in Skylab was what they call a repeating ground track. I think like every so many days, like every fourteen days, it would go right back over the same ground track, and this was so they could do Earth resources things. They could always look at the same spot and see how things were changing.\\n\\n Well, that’s good, except the spacecraft decays. The orbit decays a little bit, so the ground track moves. So we’d have to come up, “Well, if it gets too far off, we’ll do a trim burn, push the orbit back up, and actually overcorrect it and let it drift back across.” So we’d do trim burns. So we’d look and see, how’s our ground track doing? And we’d say, okay, we need to schedule a trim burn two weeks from now, or a week from now, or whatever.\\n\\n And that’s the time we’d compute the block data, and we’d go. So we were only there about four hours a day, and then we’d get to do a rendezvous or a de-orbit or something, we’d go in two or three days ahead, and we’d work full shifts. So the poor system guys are here watching all these things happen, and they didn’t have anything [much to do], just sit and bore holes in the sky. And the flight planners and experimenters were always working some sort of experiment. The trajectory guys, we’d do our job, and then we’d go work on Shuttle or do something else. So it was not nearly as bad. We were on call. Somebody always had a beeper on. They would call us. We were always on call, so if we had a problem, we could go in and do our thing, but—of course, that never did happen. So from a trajectory point of view, it wasn’t too bad.\\n\\n I forget which flight it was. I think it was the second Skylab mission, they had a quad failure, which is where one of the attitude jets on the Service Module, one of the little thruster groups—and we were concerned about what we were going to do. We were going to have to go rescue them, so there was a big task on putting together a rescue mission for that. It turns out we didn’t need it, and they came up with a work-around how to control attitude, but we did work quite a bit. So the trajectory guys worked quite a bit on this rescue mission that never came about, and there was a lot of work done. I think Vance [D.] Brand was involved in that quite a bit.\\n\\n So Skylab was not too big of a deal as far as what we had to do. We had to do the rendezvous. Since we didn’t have fuel cells on the Service Module, we just had batteries, our timeline for re-entry was somewhat constrained, so we had a couple of backup procedures for doing RCS [Reaction Control System] de-orbits and two impulse de-orbits and that sort of stuff. And I kind of vaguely remember how we did them, but rather than try to explain them technically, I think I’ll just say that we did have multiple means to do de-orbits, either using the Service Module RCS or using the SPS, because our timeline was somewhat constrained with the amount of battery life we had in the CSM [Command and Service Module]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is this about the time where the Retros changed over to becoming Flight Dynamics Officers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. After Apollo, everybody was a Flight Dynamics Officer. I was a Flight Dynamics Officer. We had what we called our boy. We called him Trajectory. And Bill [William M.] Stoval [Jr.] and I were the FIDOs, and Mike [Michael F.] Collins and Ron [Ronald D.] Epps were the Trajectory guys. We all worked together as a team. So we did the same thing that the FIDOs and the GUIDOs [Guidance Officers] and the Retros did in Apollo. As far as the job description, it was the same, we just didn’t need a prime Retro and a prime FIDO. The FIDO could really handle it all because there really wasn’t that much more to do.\\n\\n Oh, one other thing I was going to tell you about. Retro picked up a lot of weird jobs, like telescope pointing data. We generated telescope pointing data for JSC [Johnson Space Center], for Kitt Peak [National Observatory] out in Arizona, for Jodrell Bank [Observatory, University of Manchester, Macclesfield, Cheshire] in England, wherever it was, and somebody wanted telescope data, so we had a little off-line program that we’d say, hey, take this vector and generate—we didn’t really do much with it. They’d just generate it, and then we’d have it teletyped off.\\n\\n There was this guy—I’ll never forget his name was Flight Lieutenant Gilmour, or Leftenant [English pronunciation], I guess they called him, but he was over at Jodrell Bank, and we would send this data over to them, and they would use it to look at the spacecraft. And Andy [Indulis] Saulietis, who worked in Building 12, was in charge of the telescope there at JSC, and we went over, actually, and saw—I think we saw Apollo 13 before the accident. I remember going over and looking through the telescope, and you could see the Command Module and you could see the booster, and you could see the panels floating around. I think it was 13 when we went over. And then, of course, he saw the explosion. When it exploded, he saw this big cloud of stuff come out, and wasn’t a while later that we realized that he had seen it, but that was based on the telescope data that we had passed him. So we did the telescope data.\\n\\n We also worried about the on-board clocks. We had a special procedure to keep the on-board clocks in sync, because if the clock’s not right, you’re going to burn at the wrong time. And if you’re tracking something on the ground, like the landmark for lunar landing, you would like to land in the right spot, and if you don’t have the right clock, you won’t start at the right time. So the Retros kept track of the on-board clocks as well. So we did a lot of little housekeeping kind of things.\\n\\n We did the same thing in Skylab. It was just that FIDO did it instead. We did the CGs, the centers of gravity, and all the mass properties and all that sort of stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, Apollo wasn’t over until ASTP [Apollo-Soyuz Test Project]. You were quite involved with that project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I was one of the FIDOs on ASTP, and Stoval was a FIDO on ASTP, and Ron Epps and Collins—Collins was a Retro. We had to go back to a Retro on ASTP, because I was a FIDO, and he was a Retro, and he did the de-orbit computations for ASTP.\\n\\n They had a sequence of maneuvers where we’d fly around the Soyuz to take the pictures. You know, it was a UVA experiment, an ultraviolet experiment of some sort or other, and I was responsible for computing the maneuvers to fly around that. And then I think—I don’t remember. I can’t remember who the Guidance Officer was for that mission. So we kind of went back to FIDO, Retro, and Guidance Officer for ASTP.\\n\\n But yes, that was the last of the things. I did get to go over to Russia for a week and go over to their Control Center, which was kind of neat. It was a neat trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that your first time on a trip of that sort?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was my first time to go overseas, yes. I’d been up to MIT and the Cape and places like that, but I’d never been overseas. The thing that struck me about the Russian stuff, it was bigger than ours. Their Control Center was bigger than ours. Their hardware was bigger than ours, which was really not a compliment. You know, they had big things.\\n\\n We were treated extremely well while we were there, and they were very nice to us. I remember one time I had a sore throat, and I said, “I want to go to the American Embassy and get some penicillin.” So I got on the subway and went over there, and I came back, and I got on the wrong subway to go back to the space place. Some guy says, “I think you’re on the wrong subway.” So he must be my KGB [Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, Russian State Security Committee] guy that was following me taking care of me. But it was a nice trip. I learned a lot over there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk about how you helped negotiate some of the joint planning and operational procedures? What role did you take in doing that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the fly-around, we had to work with them as far as our distance and the training and how we were going to do it, because they are pretty safety conscious, although some of the things they have done is not too safe. But the trajectory guys—in fact, the FIDO, his name was Vladimir Ubersterov, I think his name was. Of course, they didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Russian, and so we had to work with an interpreter. But we did work out the fly-around maneuvers and what we were going to do and what we expected them to do and the mission rules and that sort of stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did they come to the United States?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, they came over. In fact, I think he was—we had some people in Russia during the mission, and they had some people over here during the mission, and he was one of the ones that was over here during the mission. So yes, and then of course when they were working on the docking mechanism, they had some engineers over here for a long time, a year or something. But for quite a while they were over here working on the design with the Americans. So they had a contingent over here quite a while.\\n\\n And we had a bunch of people that went over to do negotiations, but most of them were Program Office types. And a lot of the flight planning things, when we’d schedule different things, those kind of guys spent a lot of time over there. I think Ed [Edward L.] Pavelka spent some time over there working that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did the end of the Apollo program and the reduction in federal budgets affect the morale and personnel at JSC?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think everybody was upset that we had all these Saturn 5s siting around, we weren’t going to use them, and we had spacecraft sitting around that we weren’t going to use. And I think that it was kind of bad. Of course, I guess around that time they had a reduction in force, and I’m not sure exactly when that happened, but a lot of guys were upset about that. I was never, I guess, targeted for any of that, so I didn’t worry too much about it, but it was depressing that we were going to stop flying for a long, long time. Because I guess Skylab was over in the mid-seventies, and we didn’t fly again until [19]’80. When was ASTP? I don’t remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Seventy-five [1975]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, right, ’75. Yes. So it was five years without flying, except I got to fly ALT [Approach and Landing Test]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, why don’t we take a break for a minute. We’ll stop here, and we’ll come back, and we’ll talk about ALT and your involvement, how it started with the Shuttle program.\\n\\n [pause]\n\nI’d like to start this next part of the session by asking you when you first became involved with the Shuttle program and how those duties changed as you went through the years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I told you, back in Skylab, we only worked four hours a day. So there was actually two teams of us, so each team worked four hours a day. So the other team didn’t do anything in the Control Center. When I say worked, in the Control Center is what I’m talking about. We’d have one four-hour shift a day for two teams, so that meant half the time you weren’t doing anything in the Control Center for Skylab.\\n\\n So we’d go away and work on the Shuttle stuff. Primarily, we worked on things like, how do we update the state vector on the Shuttle? We talked about using TACAN for ground navigation aids, which is a kind of a navigation aid that airplanes use. It’s called Tactical Air Navigation System. But they send up signals. Well, we talked about how you would incorporate that into the on-board system for flight guidance and navigation, and maybe thought about working our procedures of how we would fly things.\\n\\n One of the things that happened in the Shuttle that didn’t happen during Apollo was, [NASA] Marshall Space Flight Center [Huntsville, Alabama] had controllers in the Control Center that monitored the booster performance, and they would give the Retro the weight and the amount of propellant that was in the booster for the translunar or injection burn and those kinds of things. They would worry about fuel depletion. They had an abort switch. They could actually abort the mission for fuel depletion or certain booster failures.\\n\\n Well, in Shuttle, the SRBs, the Solid Rocket Boosters, and the external tank and the main engine on the Shuttle were under the purview of the people from Johnson Space Center as far as the real-time system as far as the Control Center is concerned. So the FIDOs had to figure out how to monitor the performance of the Shuttle during powered flight and come up with what abort region you’re in, if you have an engine failure or failures, what do you do at this point in time, and if you do, what kind of an abort maneuver are you going to compute? Those kinds of performance parameters were something new that the FIDO was kind of given to him during Apollo from Marshall, but he had to come up with those answers himself.\\n\\n So that was a whole new area that we had to work on. And that was one of the things that we did do during part of this time, because our buddies in MPAD, they’re out ahead of everybody else worrying about these trajectories, and they were working up those kinds of solutions and trajectories. So we would work with them to try to come up with how you do that.\\n\\n We also were worried about how we do the re-entries and that sort of stuff. So there was a lot of Shuttle data out there, it’s just that we would just kind of bring it in so we could operationally use it. So that’s kind of what we did during our off time on Skylab.\\n\\n And then, as we got closer and closer in, we started worrying about how we were going to build our tools in the Control Center. We had what we called an AME, which is Abort Maneuver Evaluator, and an ARD, which is called an Abort Region Determinator. Those kinds of processors had to be determined, figure out how you’re going to do those and how we’re going to use them, what numbers we’re going to look for, because there were some really different kind of abort modes for the Shuttle.\\n\\n For example, if you had a problem with the booster on Apollo, you just separated the spacecraft away and did your abort. Well, it turns out a big part of the booster is the main engines on the Shuttle, so you’ve got to recover the booster part as well as the crew part. So that made things a little bit different. We had these maneuvers we called Return to Launch Site, where they would actually burn downrange. They got the propellant down to the right amount, and then they would turn around and come back and land at the Cape. Of course, you had to get rid of the external tank without it hitting Cocoa Beach [Florida] and that sort of stuff. So those were some new procedures that we had to develop and figure out how we were going to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you share with us what your process was for determining these procedures? As you mentioned, everything was new, and you were basically creating new rules for a new vehicle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, remember we talked about the data priority meetings, and a lot of the questions would be talked about in those kinds of meetings. There may not have been that many—boy, it’s hard to remember. But the best I can tell you is we’d just kind of sit around and kind of brainstorm about what we needed to do and then how we were going to go about doing it, what kind of maneuvers we’d have to worry about, what kind of trajectories we’d have to worry about, what kind of failures we had to worry about.\\n\\n Turns out the biggest failure that you worry about in the Shuttle is loss of an engine. Well, that’s not the biggest, but losing a main engine, depending on where you lose it, really tells you what kind of abort mode you’re in. If you’ve lost all three of them, it’s a whole different situation. There you’re talking about a ditching effort. And I guess from a contingency point of view, the likelihood of more than one main engine failing has got to be pretty low. So the main thing that you were really concerned about was how you recover from an engine failure.\\n\\n We had some things like, if you lost all three main engines, we had what they call a contingency abort. But that was really probably not survivable. Although the main engines seemed to work pretty well. I don’t think we ever lost a main engine, even with all the flights that we’ve flown.\\n\\n But to get back to how we determine what we were going to do, we would get the trajectory data, what the altitude profile looked like, what the down range profile looked like, what the velocity profile looked like, and put that stuff on the table and say, okay, now, where do we need to stay with respect to these nominals to stay out of trouble, how far can we let the thing drift off before we declare we have a guidance problem, and those kind of things. And it was just kind of the guys sitting around a table." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It worked?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess—yes, I think it did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At what point did you start getting involved with the approach and landing tests?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, very early in the beginning. As soon as we got off of ASTP, I was put on ALT, or very, very close to that. And so I worked ALT almost from the beginning to the very end, and it was probably my most favorite thing to have done. There was a guy named Bud Foster, who was an Army guy—I think he’s a General now—that was working that a little bit right at the end of ASTP, and he left. He was assigned to our branch, so whatever he was doing, I kind of took over. And one of the things he was doing was writing a mission operations plan. And what that did is, that defined all the missions that we were going to fly, whether they were captive where we’d fly around on top of the [Boeing] 747 and then land, or if we were going to have a free flight and separate off of the carrier.\\n\\n The people over in Engineering had all kinds of tests that they wanted to do, whether it be fuel cell tests or communications tests or aerodynamic tests or whatever, and the mission operations plan took all those different tests and arranged them in a set of flights. Well, I wrote that book, which was really kind of fun, and defined the number of flights we were going to fly. We started out with like fifteen flights, and we ended up with like five. But that was kind of a fun job, to pull all these things together.\\n\\n And then, once we got the mission operations plan written, we kind of had a road map of how we were going to fly the rest of ALT, and we knew what—there were some tests that had nothing to do with how the vehicle flew, they were just systems tests. There were other tests that were really more based on aerodynamics and the capability of the vehicle to fly. And of course, there were tests on how the computers would work and that sort of stuff.\\n\\n So we got all these tests, and I worked them all into the five flights, and we ended up with three tail-cone-on flights. Now, the tail cone was a device that covered the main engines. It had less drag than with the tail cone off, which means it would glide further and glide at a shallower angle. So we decided we were going to fly three flights with the tail cone on just to be safe and get more time and make it more benign for the pilot. Then the last two flights were tail cone off. For example, on tail-cone-on, we’d separate at like 25,500 feet, and it would take us five minutes to reach the ground. On the tail-cone-off flights, we’d separate at somewhere around 21,000 or 22,000 feet, and we were on the ground in two minutes. So it was like half as fast, or twice as fast, if you were tail-cone-off.\\n\\n Anyway, I got involved in that, and it was lot of—it was a small group. Don [Donald R.] Puddy was the Flight Director. It was a small group, and I got to do lots of stuff. I got to deal with the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] out at Palmdale [California], because when we flew this carrier, we had to fly in their airspace, and when we were doing our tests, we had to fly in their airspace. So I got to negotiate with them, tell them how we were going to do it, what we were going to do, and I would send them data packs which described the flight, when we intended to fly it, where we were going to be, and all that sort of stuff. And so I had a lot to deal with with them.\\n\\n We had to deal with the Edwards Air Force Base [Edwards, California] radar ground controllers and deal with their air space and tell them what to do. And it worked out real—we had to deal with [Naval Air Weapons Station] China Lake. China Lake is a Navy installation north of Edwards, and we had to deal with them, and all those guys just seemed to work out real—very, very neat. We went out to Palmdale, which is where the L.A. [Los Angeles, California] center is located, and spoke to those guys several times, and it worked out real well. But anyway, I got to integrate with those guys. What I did is I took a little old HP [Hewlett Packard] computer, which didn’t have hardly any memory at all, and designed and put in—made a simulation of the Shuttle. I could do tail cone on or tail cone off, and I would fly that thing through the maneuvers that I had put in my mission operations plan and see if I could get all the test conditions done, see how long it took me, and that sort of stuff. Then we’d go over in a simulator, and I’d fly them in the simulator, and then the crew, either [Joe Henry] Engle or [Richard H.] Truly or [Fred W.] Haise or [C.] Gordon Fullerton would go out and fly them in the Shuttle training airplane. Then when we did all that, we’d say, “Hey, we’ve got a good flight.” Then we would document all that stuff, and I’d put together a data pack and send it out to everybody, the rest of the team. I’d send it out to FAA. I’d send it out to [NASA] Dryden [Flight Research Center, Edwards, California], because Dryden, they were actually configuring the vehicle, and they were actually stacking the vehicle on top of the Shuttle carrier airplane, and their pilots were flying the carrier airplane. So then we’d go fly it.\\n\\n And, of course, during the mission, I would vector the 747 around this race track that I had built, and then I’d count, and I’d give them a mark a minute before separation. Then they’d fly up to the separation point, and they’d separate, then I would manage the trajectory down to the ground. Then I would talk to the CAPCOM [Capsule Communicator], and he would give the crew different cues or whatever.\\n\\n One of the programs that I wrote was, if you fly in the wind, you’ll blow sideways. And if you bank in the wind, you’ll not—if it’s windy, you won’t fly a perfect circle, you’ll fly an elongated circle. Well, when you’re climbing out with the Shuttle carrier airplane and the Shuttle on top, you don’t have very much performance if you get in a very steep bank angle. So what we would do is we would bias their ground track so that when they turned their bank at eight degrees or so, they would come around and come out where we want them to come out. So the ground track wouldn’t look the same every time. It would be different depending on the winds.\\n\\n Well, we would get the winds from balloon data, and then we would get winds from the carrier airplane itself. But when we’d get the winds from balloon data, we’d actually go out and plot a new ground track. They had an inertial guidance system on the 747, so we’d give them some latitude and longitude points, and they would put that in their guidance system, and then we’d vector them around this new ground track and bring them up to the drop point. That little program was just a little HP 9820, I think it was, and a very simple program, but it worked very well.\\n\\n Then I had a program that was—of course, as the Shuttle flew through the wind, it would blow around, so I would actually bias the drop point so when they finished all their test maneuvers, they would end up pointing at the runway. And the thing that’s interesting is later on, when I got to be a Branch Chief, the guys had little programs like that, and I used to make them verify them and run them and test them. Well, we did a lot of runs on the ones I did, but it was not near as thorough. We didn’t document anything. So we were a little more—I won’t say cavalier, but we were a little more loose with the way we did things.\\n\\n One of the points to be made, though, is ALT was a small, short period kind of a program, so there wasn’t going to be any hand-offs to another group of people that didn’t know how you do things. If you’re going to have a long-time program and you have some intricate things, you need to document that so when you hand it off to a new team, they don’t have to start from zero. And so from that point of view, what we did was not all that bad, because we knew we were going to start and end the program, and our knowledge was going to go with us, whereas the knowledge from a Shuttle guy ten years ago, if he didn’t document it, the guy today doesn’t know what has gone on before. So the hand-off difference really made it not quite as bad as I made it sound.\\n\\n Anyway, so ALT was really a lot of fun. I got to go out and ride the STA [Shuttle Training Aircraft] training airplane with Truly. I think I got ten approaches with Truly and ten approaches with Joe Engle. This was in the tail-cone-off configuration, which meant if came down at about a twenty-four degree angle at that time. I think now they’re down to about eighteen degrees.\\n\\n But it was funny. In the Shuttle training airplane, they have this simulation pilot, who is the instructor pilot, who sits in the right seat. The astronaut sits in the left seat, and they have a sim engineer that sits between them. And they had shoulder harnesses and all that sort of stuff for those guys.\\n\\n Well, the first steep approach which we flew, the sim engineer didn’t have his shoulder harnesses on or anything. I reached up and grabbed a hold of his thing because I was standing behind—I think it was Engle. It was Engle. I was standing behind Engle, and he pushes over, and we’re coming down—you can’t even see the horizon, we’re coming down so fast and so steep. And he does his training run, and I turn loose of this thing, and I walk in the back of the airplane and come back up to the next run. The sim engineer has got his harness on, because we’re really coming in steep. But you couldn’t even see the horizon. And at 2,000 feet, you’re only about ten seconds from hitting the ground if you don’t pull out. But that was neat. That was really a lot of fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you feel five tests were all needed, or had you hoped that you’d be able to do a little more testing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there was a couple things I would—one of the things that we never did do, we never did test autoland, and I would have liked to have tested autoland. It was originally in the program, and I don’t think we’ve ever flown an autoland to this day. It would be nice to fly an autoland.\\n\\n I know the crew doesn’t like it because they’re concerned about it. They have a problem right near the bottom. Right prior to touchdown, will it upset the airplane, crash, or whatever? So I know they feel more comfortable by holding the stick. It’s just like if you’re a passenger in a car, you feel much more comfortable if you’re driving it than you do if you’re sitting there in a car. And I’m sure they feel the same way about monitoring autoguidance. They fly auto all the way down till they get within 25,000 feet of the ground, then they take over manually and fly it in, and they fly the needles most of the way.\\n\\n But it would have been nice to have done an autoland, because if they ever had a window problem—and I’m sure if they have a problem, they’ll do it.\\n\\n We did a little autoland on one of the flights. We did engage the autoguidance for a little bit, but then we disengaged it. We didn’t touch down with it on. I can’t remember which flight it was. I think it was one of the tail-cone-on flights that we engaged the autoguidance for just a bit. What was your question?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "About the five flights, did you feel that was enough?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. So I would have liked to have seen a little more trajectory kind of work done on some of the flights. I’d like to have seen another tail-cone-off flight. But the tail-cone-off flight was kind of hard on the Shuttle carrier aircraft. The reason being is the disturbance of the air flowing around that blunt back end interfered with the tail on the 747. So with the tail cone on, it smoothes it out, because that’s what they use to fly it from California to the Cape or wherever, depending on where they land, so it’s much smoother. So they probably didn’t want to do any more tail-cone-off flights. Anyway, that would have been nice, to have done some more just to have done them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had worked closely with flight crews before, but this was a bit of a different type of interaction. Is that a correct statement, that you were working a lot closer with the pilots in developing the guidelines and the procedures?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably a little closer. Probably a little closer. Yes, well, it turns out that, back in Apollo, most of the time we were in a different building. During ALT, we were in the same building. I could run upstairs and talk to them. So we were a little bit closer.\\n\\n In fact, organizationally, we were all now in Mission Operations Directorate, which had both the crew and—the flight crew, the flight op [operations] planners, and the ground team were all in the same directorate now, so we were closer in that respect. So yes, I would say we worked a lot closer with them. I know we did. Yes, we did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You worked with the pilot of the carrier as well? Or tell us how that interaction worked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The carrier for ALT was Fitz [Fizhugh L.] Fulton [Jr.], and he was a DFRC [Dryden Flight Research Center] guy. And we spent a lot of time out at—I don’t know how much, but we spent a lot of time out at Edwards, and so we worked with them quite a bit, not nearly as close as the orbiter crew, but we did work pretty close with them.\\n\\n They had some flight test engineers, they called them, which were essentially FIDOs, that we worked with and picked up how they did things. Now, they could have done the whole ALT thing, but I think [Christopher C.] Kraft wanted the JSC guys to do it just because they wanted them to be trained, they wanted them to have exposure to the systems, they wanted the trajectory guys exposed to how it flew. So that’s why he insisted that even though the mission was conducted out at Edwards, he wanted it controlled from back here just for our training and our experience.\\n\\n But those guys were pretty good, although they did call us Apollo lunatics every once in a while, and they were always worried about the budget. “Oh, you manned space guys get all the budget. We don’t get any budget.” But I think if you go back and look, you’ll find that they got just as much as they’d ever gotten before the lunar missions and what have you. But they were good to work with, and I did learn a lot.\\n\\n They had a guy named Jack Kolf, who was from DFRC, and he came back. He was stationed at JSC during ALT just as a kind of an advisor, but he worked a lot of things. He worked X-24s and X-15s and stuff like that. And he was essentially a FIDO type of person back for DFRC." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know there were some concerns of safety for both the aircraft and spacecraft when they dis-joined. Were you involved in those discussions of the safety measures for that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The separation maneuver itself, Ivy [F.] Hooks was in E&D [Engineering and Development], and she was in charge of the—she had a separation panel, and she worried about external tank separation during a nominal launch, she worried about SRB separation, and she worried about the carrier and orbiter separation. In fact, it was in her panel where we decided what the angle between the Shuttle and the carrier would be, and we determined how we would separate and what the maneuver would be and that sort of stuff, because the orbiter would hold a little bit of a pitch up rate, then he’d pop off, and he’d back off one way, and the carrier airplane would be pushed over, and he would go the other way. So all that stuff was worked out in her panel.\\n\\n As far as the hardware, that stuff was done in E&D, and we weren’t too involved in the development of that, but we were involved in the mechanics of separating and that sort of stuff. And Ivy had this panel that she would run." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, tell us about your memories of STS-1 and your involvement in that first mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After ALT, I was going to be the FIDO on STS-1, and a job came open up in the flight planning area. Now, if you think about it, this is in 1978. I’m still doing FIDO stuff, which I started in 1964. In 1978, a Section Head came open in the Asset Entry Procedures Section in [James W.] Bilodeau’s Division, and it was in Ed Pavelka’s branch, in the Flight Planning Branch, and I applied for it, and I got that Section Head job. So that job was to work with the crews and put together an ascent checklist and a re-entry checklist. And then there was somebody else that had the on-orbit checklist and rendezvous checklist in another section. So, of course, STS-1 was all about ascent and entry, so we did a lot of stuff to put the checklist together and figure out what the procedures were, which switches to throw and that sort of stuff. I think Chuck [Charles O.] Lewis was the Ascent Book Manager and Bill [William M.] Anderson was the Re-entry Checklist Book Manager. And so my biggest involvement with STS-1 was getting the checklist squared away for the crew to use. And they would go over and do sims in the simulator, and then our guys would go over and watch the sims, and they’d mark up the checklists and that sort of stuff.\\n\\n Of course, again, CG is even a bigger issue with the Shuttle, because you had a certain band you had to stay in or the vehicle wouldn’t be stable enough to fly. It’s unstable as it is, but you’d be outside of its controllability. And one of the things you’d do is you would get rid of some of the propellant while you were in orbit, depending on how much you had. So we’d actually burn out of plane a little bit just to dump some propellant.\\n\\n So Bill Anderson came up with a way for the crew to track the CG themselves in case they lost com [communications]. We built a little hand-held calculator that you could compute the CG with based on what your propellants were and where things were located. So we started out with that, and eventually—this is kind of digressing a little bit—eventually, we put together in our section what they call the SPOC, the Shuttle Portable On-Board Computer, which was like a little laptop that you have today. It was a Grid. It was made by a company called Grid. And they had a pretty good sized screen in it.\\n\\n You’ve been in the Control Center, where you can see the ground tracks go by and you see the little circles when you cross over land. Well, we built a program that the crew could actually see the ground track and see where they’re flying by putting a vector in it, and they could keep track of what their center of gravity was by putting in stuff. So we actually started that whole little program in that little section, and now they use it to control some of the experiments in the Shuttle. It’s grown tremendously, but it started out with that little hand-held calculator then it went to the laptop. And Tim [Timothy M.] Brown and Pearline [E.] Collector were very involved in that activity.\\n\\n Of course, once we did that, it had batteries in it. Now the Safety guys were, “What kind of batteries you got in there?” and we had to get waivers to carry lithium batteries in the computer and that sort of stuff.\\n\\n The other thing that we did for the STS-1 is the crew has spaces between their instruments so they put cue cards in there, and they have little Velcro, and they snap these cue cards in there. Our section was responsible for the cue cards. Terry Creighton, who was Terry Stanford at the time—that’s John [O.] Creighton’s wife, if you know who John Creighton is—Terry, she’s an M.D. [Medical Doctor] now, but she was involved in the cue card stuff, and she’d go down to the Cape and climb up in the cockpit and stick them around and all that sort of stuff. So we got quite involved. So we were really close to the crews, because they were using procedures that we helped document and work on.\\n\\n So from an STS-1 point of view, I was in the Control Center when they flew, and we had people on the console that—I think Chuck Lewis was on during the ascent and Bill Anderson was on for entry, because they were most familiar with the checklist and if a question came up for the Flight Director, those guys were there to answer it. But it was exciting. It was neat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What lessons did you take away from STS-1?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that’s kind of hard to answer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there a lot of modifications for the next few flights?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I think again it was a matter of expanding what we had already accomplished, because once we got to STS-1, we pretty well had a good—the simulations give you a big handle on what you’ve got to worry about, and so we were just kind of upgrading what we had done. Every time we’d come up with a procedure, we would go over and run it in the simulator. One of my biggest problems was just keeping our guys access to the simulators, because there was other people who also wanted to use the simulators for what they had [to do]. There was an engineering simulator that we were very close to that the E&D guys had, and we would go use it, but then, budget and things, whenever, it got shut down. So most of my problem was figuring out how to get the guys in the simulations to do validation of their procedures. Because, everything was getting to be more and more documented and that sort of stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Maybe we could talk about the entry procedures and how they evolved over time, because first we’re coming in at Edwards." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, once you pick a landing site, the procedures are almost the same. The only thing that changes is when you do the de-orbit with respect to where the landing site is. Now, there were certain backup things that we had. For example, the way the energy was controlled was you bank one way for a while and then you bank the other way for a while. If you flew full lift all the way in, you’d fly too far, so what you’d do is you’d do like kind of doing S turns. So you’d do these S turns. Well, if you stay over this way too far, then you can’t get back. So we came up with procedures like if you get more than half the way what your return is, you’re going to go ahead and reverse—you’ll reverse manually.\\n\\n And we came up with procedures when you should take over and try to fly—what conditions would cause you to take over manually and fly the vehicle without letting the guidance do it. And there were some displays, analog displays, that showed how the vehicle was flying, kind of like in the Control Center. Well, our guys were responsible to put those displays together and define what they were so that the people who did the programming would put them in the vehicle that way. So we did do the ascent and entry on-board displays as well. Chuck Lewis did a lot of that. But like I say, instead of a big change after STS-1, I feel like we just added to as we went along." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, one of the things that you added at some point in time were night landings." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Night landings, STS-8. Well, early on—and I’m not sure when we put the PAPIs [Precision Approach Path Indicators] in. I don’t know if we’d had that for STS-1 or not. We may have. I’ll bet we did. I can’t remember when we did that.\\n\\n Anyway, the PAPIs. [Karol J. “Bo”] Bobko had found some lights that when you were too high, they were white, and when you were too low, they were red. Well, if you were high, above a certain angle, they’d be white, and if you were below a certain angle, they’d be red. Well, if you put four of them out there and you’ve got them at different angles, you’d be on the right glide slope if you had two of them white and two of them red. And Bobko had found these things somewhere. I think he had them put out at White Sands [New Mexico]. He did. And he got to talking to me about them, and so we said, okay, well, let’s see what we can do, because he wanted to put them at the landing sites instead of just out where they were testing there at White Sands.\\n\\n I don’t know where he got his. They weren’t very good ones, but we found out that they were made by a company in England, and I think it was Barrel Light Company, I believe, but I’m not sure of the name. Anyway, we said, “We’ll go buy some of these things.” Well, I didn’t realize how hard it was to buy stuff out of the U.S. when you work for the government. It’s tough. But we managed to buy some. I forget how many we bought. We bought enough, I think, for the KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] and for Edwards, and then we bought some for New Mexico.\\n\\n You were asking me earlier about my experience with Dresser and my electrical engineering. Well, it came into play here, because we had to come up with—the way they set the lights up, they were all on a transformer, so if one of them goes out, they all won’t go out. But the transformers primaries, which are pretty reliable, are all in series. We had to figure out how to buy this stuff. So we were kind of the blind leading the blind.\\n\\n But Jim Clement and I figured out how to do it, and we bought these things and went out. They shipped them in out there—I forget where it is, out there by the back gate, and we went out there, and we went through these boxes. “Yeah, that’s the right stuff,” and then we had them shipped out to White Sands. And then we went out there, and we were carrying some variacs. Now, a variac is a thing that changes voltage when you plug it in. Well, this was before there was a lot of security at the airport, but there was security then. They gave us some fits about carrying these variacs on the airplane, but we managed to carry them on there. We went out there and set them up, set the lights up, and went out, and they [the astronauts] flew against them.\\n\\n So from that point of view, we got the PAPIs in, which the crew could then fly down the outer glide slope very precisely. If you got too high, you’d see three whites. If you got too low, you’d see three reds. So what you wanted is two reds and two whites. And I’ve seen pictures out the cockpit window of the real Shuttle, and you can see the PAPIs, and boy, they’re right on the money.\\n\\n And that kind of led into the night landing stuff, because all that would do is get you coming down the outer glide slope. The outer glide slope was almost a mile from where you were going to touch down. So at 2,000 feet, you started pulling up. Well, you lost your target, and you went ahead and landed.\\n\\n Well, we decided we needed some way for the crew to be able to watch the inner glide slope, if you will, which was a degree and a half, which is really shallow. So we came up with this—we were talking to Rick [Frederick H.] Hauck, and he was talking about how [aircraft] carriers have this ball that they look at, and when it’s right on—you hear them saying, “Roger ball,” well, that’s what they fly—they keep that ball in the center of a mirror. We got to talking about it and drawing things on the board. So we said, “Well, we’ll just put a row of lights out there. We’ll call that the bar. And we’ll put a light up high and call that the ball.” And when you line the ball and the bar up, you’re on this inner glide slope. And you could watch that ball come down and meet the inner glide slope, and then you just hold up until you go to touchdown. “So we’ll just try that.”\\n\\n So now Tim Brown and I were working this, and so we called up to Pasadena [Texas]—we called all around trying to find some lights. We were going to do this night landing thing, tried to find some lights to see if the crew could land at night. And he’d also gotten some night vision goggles, a helmet from someplace in the Army, we came up with these things, so we’re going to try these things. So the only place that we could find these lights that we could carry around and crank up and light up the—well actually we went out to [Houston] Intercontinental [Airport, Houston, Texas; now George Bush Intercontinental Airport], and they got a short landing area, they got an STOL [short take-off and landing] landing area, with some night lights on it. So we went out there and flew against it. Well, we decided we couldn’t—that wasn’t good enough. You couldn’t see what you were doing. And we flew in the Gulfstream, the G-1 that NASA has, and I think—what’s her name, Ivins? Marsha [S.] Ivins? She was one of the pilots on there, because that was when she was in flight crew. Anyway, so we got these lights from Pasadena, and they trucked them out to Alamogordo [New Mexico], out to Holloman Air Force Base. It was cold. It was in wintertime. George [W. S.] Abbey was the [Flight Crew Operations] Director, and he said, “Yes, you can do all that, but do it when the Moon’s out so the crew can see the ground a little bit.”\\n\\n So we set this thing up to do on a weekend so there wouldn’t be anybody else flying out there. We carried these lights out there, put the lights on the end of the runway so they could shine on the runway so the crew could see them, and they had their night vision goggles in the airplane with them. And we set these PAPIs up as the bar. I think they were all white. Maybe they were all red. I don’t know what color, but they were all one color.\\n\\n Then we had this light that we’d gotten from Pasadena, and I had a rope. I knew how long it was. I knew how far it was from the bar. And I cranked it up so it would be on a degree-and-a-half glide slope, so the ball was, I don’t know, fifty feet in front of the bar. So they were flying the T-38s [training aircraft] against this thing. And sure enough, they could fly.\\n\\n The night vision goggles were not very good. It’s too foreign. You’ve seen some of the pictures on TV. It’s kind of green looking, and things just are not crisp. They said, “No, we can’t fly that.” And the lights really weren’t bright enough. We did have some lights out and some strobes out centered so that they could see those and it would bring them around to this ball bar, but the ball bar worked real well. And later on, we got these great big Xenon floodlights that would shine down the runway. I’m sure you’ve seen those, where the guys—they could see the runway, but the lights weren’t shining in their face, and as soon as they passed it, they could still see down on it. That’s what they used for the night landing, but they used the ball bar as kind of an indicator of how they’re coming on to the inner glide slope, because—let’s see, I’m trying to figure out—the ball starts out below and then moves up. In fact, I’ve got a ball bar out on my runway out here, but it’s not lights. It’s just a piece of white stuff and another piece of orange stuff, and it works." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember who the pilots were that helped you test this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. It was Mike [Michael J.] Smith, good old Mike Smith. And it was Rick Hauck. Those were the two guys. In fact, we went up to—have you ever been to the lodge in Cloudcroft [New Mexico]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was in February. It was cold. And we drove up to the lodge for supper, and there was about that much snow on the ground up at Cloudcroft. See, Cloudcroft’s only fifteen miles from Alamogordo, but it’s about 5,000 feet higher. Yes, Mike was a good guy, but Mike and Rick were the pilots." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This work also was awarded the Federal Incentive Award. Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes. We got it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us how that worked and what that meant." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know who turned it in. Somebody turned it in, and I got a letter from [President Ronald W.] Reagan saying, you guys done good. I got $2,000 or $3,000 or something like that for it, and there was a bunch of us. There was several guys involved in that. There was more than just Smith and Rick. I think Bobko was involved. There was a bunch of guys, and there was a lot of guys on the ground, too, like Tim Brown and myself and Dick [Richard D.] Tuntland and a few guys like that.\\n\\n One of the things that Ascent, Entry, and Procedure Section did do was work on some of the visual aids, because there was a triangle at the end of the runway. There was a triangle at the [outer glideslope] PAPIs. We went down to the Cape to figure out where to put those. Walked out, and they flew us out on the helicopter and flew us around. Then we walked out there and walked on up and got chiggers like you wouldn’t believe out there in that palmetto. So that was kind of a fun thing to do, that visual aid stuff. And every time I could get out of that Section Head business and get back to the technical stuff, I tried to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not so fun was, of course, the [Space Shuttle] Challenger [STS 51-L] accident." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. You know, that’s interesting because I was watching the TV, and I saw all the ice and how cold it was, and I could not believe that we were going to launch. There was nothing that said—there was no black and white thing that said don’t fly. There was just too many things that add up that said, hey, you know, this is probably not a good plan.\\n\\n At that time, I was a Range Safety Manager for JSC, and the Range Safety guys at Patrick Air Force Base [Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida], after we talked about it later on, they were kind of amazed that we went ahead and flew, too. In fact, one of the guys said, “Every fiftieth solid booster fails.” Well, I think that was the fifty-first.\\n\\n But that was pretty bad. When that happened, people went back and redoubled their efforts, tried to make sure—even after talking about Apollo 1, I think guys realized that we were vulnerable and tried to learn more about other people’s stuff, what things do affect you that somebody else is doing. I think that even got expanded after the Challenger accident. People said, “We need to take a step back and make sure we understand all the different things that can happen and try to protect against them.”\\n\\n I know that after that, after the Challenger, I got involved in two activities that I spent all my time on. One of them was a flow process panel. We talked about how the whole process of putting together a flight design and initializing the vehicle for flight was going to be from the flight design point of view, because at this time I was the Flight Design and Dynamics Deputy Division Chief.\\n\\n Then the other thing I was involved in was all the range safety evaluation. We did change a bunch of things in the way the range safety things kind of happened. So I spent a long time working those two items. We’d come up with questions, and then we’d go away and answer them, and we’d document them. Eventually, that range safety stuff got turned into the—I had to write part for Tommy [W.] Holloway for the Rogers Commission [Presidential Commission investigating the Challenger accident].\\n\\n And the flow process panel, we went out and see—a lot of things were done here, and then some were done here, and they were talking about initialization parameters for the on-board computer and that sort of stuff. So it was not really well integrated. It certainly wasn’t documented. So we put together a flight design handbook which described how you do this stuff. Now, the people who had to do that was Rockwell [International Corporation].\\n\\n Rockwell stepped up to the mark and did document it. And the flow process panel, we talked about where numbers came from, what the pedigree was, and how we were going to control that stuff so we would have a good understanding of where everything came from. And that has been done.\\n\\n As a result of all that, since I was kind of new from a managerial point of view—I probably knew more about the flight design system and the methodology and the procedures and the process than anybody else in my division anyway. I know that they have what they call flight design managers who would take a flight, and they would make sure everything was put together for that particular flight, all the mission timelines and all that sort of stuff, but they would just do it for that particular flight, and they didn’t know so much what was going on over here. But I’d kind of gotten the whole schmeer of the thing.\\n\\n So Jon Harpold says, “You know, we need a new—,” One of the things that we recommended was, “we need a flight design system that’s integral, a single tool, one that’s put together that you can share data with.” And he said, “We need to come up with a flight design system.” So I got asked to put together what they call the FADS, the Flight Analysis—I can’t remember what FADS stands for anymore." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Flight Analysis Design System?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think that’s what it is. Because we had analyses where you would just go off and study a problem. Then once you understood the problem, you would go away and design a mission using the analysis that achieved what you wanted to achieve. So it was a long, hard, drawn-out battle to get that thing done. I had Rockwell, who were the users, and they knew how they wanted it done, but it had to be built by Mission Support Division, because they were implementers, which meant Loral [Corporation] had to actually build the stuff. Well, they would do something, and Rockwell would say, “I don’t like the way you’re doing that.”\\n\\n Then Loral would say, “Hey, Rockwell, you shouldn’t be doing that. You’re doing our job.”\\n\\n And there was like 200 on Rockwell’s side and like 50 on Loral’s side, but we managed to get the system put together, and it still works. In fact, we got rid of the Univacs, because we were doing some work on the Univacs, we were doing some work on what they called Perkins-Elmer, and some of the stuff was on desktop computers. It was just a hodge-podge, and it was none of it written down how you do it. Like remember me telling you about handing off? Well, it’s hard to hand off a process if it’s not written down. So that’s what we did. And we got the FADS going on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand you completed it not only on schedule but within budget." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Yes. We were on time and on budget, yes, which is pretty unusual. We converted somewhere around—because a lot of the code was Univac code or in some other code, and so we had to convert it all to work in a distributed system, in a Unix or whatever, because a lot of it was in Fortran. And we converted a couple million lines of code." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember how many people this impacted, how many were going to be affected by this new system?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would guess probably 300 or something like that, because it was all the flight design people in Rockwell. And then there were some terminals over onsite that the civil servants would use.\\n\\n But one of the things that happened during Apollo, and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse and worse, back early on, the civil service people did everything. As time progressed, as we closer and closer to the Shuttle, more contractors were involved, and now the civil servants were just contract monitors. It’s probably a little hard to say that. They’re more than that, but they became more of an overseer and a manager than they did a doer. So you’re losing a lot of internal expertise.\\n\\n So essentially, by the time we got to the Challenger, most all the detailed work was being done by contractors, and just the civil servants would kind of look over their shoulder to make sure it was being done right. So that took some of the control away from them. And I don’t think you can blame any of the accidents on that, but it certainly didn’t help anything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s probably a good time for me to ask you about your participation on the Source Selection Board." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I was thinking about that, and I think—when was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I don’t think I have the date. I just saw that you had been on there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, I think that was like March to June of [19]’85. I think it was like a three-month time. I’m not sure. It was a long time. I know that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Felt like a long time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know that. Well, I looked at my calendars, and my calendars are blank for those three months, so that’s when I assume I was over in the Nova Building. I was Chairman of one of the panels, and we were worried about flight design, we were worried about range safety, we were worried about some of the flight planning activities. Rick [Richard J.] Hieb, I don’t know if you remember Rick Hieb, but he was on my panel. Ken [Kenneth W.] Russell was on my panel, and J’Ann Hanson was on my panel. Pearline Collector was the board secretary, or board technical person.\\n\\n But we sat down, and we read all these proposals, and we had a room downstairs that was paneled. I called it our lodge room. We’d go down there and have our meetings. I wish I could find my schedule, because I had a schedule where we’d meet and talk about all these different things and write up findings and then answer them. And some of the guys, because there was more than just my part. There was people who worried about the simulators, and there was people worrying about the ground computers. Those guys would schedule meetings on Saturday, and I said, “You know, we may meet on Saturday, and I may come over on Saturday, but I’ll be darned if I’m going to schedule a meeting on Saturday. That’s crazy. I mean, probably any one of these groups can do the job, so to schedule a meeting on Saturday is not the right thing.” So I didn’t. So my schedule was devoid of Saturday meetings, although I was usually over there on Saturday. But I wasn’t going to make fifteen people come in on Saturday when they really didn’t have to. We’d just get the job done when we needed to.\\n\\n So we’d go down, and we’d talk about the findings, and we’d come back, and eventually, after all of them were done, and we’d decide what were the right words we should put in our report, and I’d write the report, and then we’d turn it in. And we really never were privy to too much of what was going on outside of—where the decision was going to made and that sort of stuff. But I did spend, I think it was three months over there, and it was—I’d never been on a source board before, and then to be put on as a panel chairman was kind of new to me. But we did all right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This contract was going to cause a big change for the Space Center, on how Space Center did the—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Well, see, because it was really all the Shuttle STS operations contracts, so they were going to do all the stuff. They were going to do all the flight design. They were going to do all the flight planning. They were going to do all the ground computer stuff. They were going to do all the on-board computer stuff. They were going to do everything.\\n\\n And, McDonnell Douglas [Corporation] had been doing that, had been doing the flight design part of that, for a long, long time. Rockwell thought they were going to get to hire all these people from McDonnell Douglas to come over and do the same job they always did. Well, a lot of that didn’t happen, so Rockwell struggled for a long time. And Jon Harpold, he kind of held Rockwell’s feet to the fire and made them kind of tell him what was going on and how they were going to solve this problem. And he was always concerned about, what’s your safety net, if this happens, what are you going to do? So he was really good about trying to get them on board and up to speed to be able to do the job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you feel this contract changed the way that business was going to be done in the future for the Space Center?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I think so, because now, you’ve got one area that’s responsible for everything. That could be good. It could mean things really get integrated well. But then, it could be that it gets so big that they can’t manage it, so I don’t know. And I guess they’re—well, they’re called USA [United Space Alliance], I think now, aren’t they? It’s essentially the same process, where they’ve got everything.\\n\\n Yes, because the tools were Unisys, was part of the STSOC [Space Transportation System Operations Contract] group, and they were building all the tools. Now, some of those guys—I can’t think of the guy’s name—actually did come from McDonnell Douglas and went over there, but he came over as a supervisor. So I’m sure that’s why he went over, because he probably got more money for it. But Jon would really keep on their case to make sure they got the things done right, more so than I probably would have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We were just talking about one difference between the Apollo era and the Shuttle era. What are some other ones, since you worked so many years in Apollo and then worked so many years in the Shuttle, -- what were some differences in the environment down at the Space Center?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I don’t know if it was a difference in the programs, but I know that we became much more budget conscious in the Shuttle era, because we were always trying to figure out how to do more with less. Now, that may have been because I was a little higher up in the management that I could see this. I never did worry about it before. But I don’t think so. I think it was more of just the climate, that we were trying to tighten our belt, and people had to be more conscious about what they could do and what they couldn’t do and what kind of moneys they had.\\n\\n So I think the biggest factor, I think, was the budget pressure that people were being put under once Shuttle got flying. I really do. Of course, now, the Control Center is now in the new Control Center building, and all the big mainframes and stuff are no longer being used.\\n\\n In fact, we were talking about the FADS, just talking about it, and that was the first big distributed system that I know of that was put together. We had over 300 work stations, and we had these compute nodes, and we had data nodes. Before that, there was no way that you had that much integration between all the different re-entry, rendezvous, orbit. Now they’re even putting the flight planning system in them. The flight planners and the flight plan and the checklist guys are now part of this integrated flight planning system. That’s all together now.\\n\\n I don’t know how far they’ve gotten, but—and I know they’ve upgraded the hardware some. But that system, when we put it together, it was the first time that we really put together a distributed system. Everything else was on mainframes with cards and stuff. It was the first time we had an interactive system with what they called a GUI, a Graphic User Interface, which is what your [Microsoft] Windows [operating system] is. I didn’t know what a GUI was.\\n\\n It was really funny. Putting me in charge of that was like—I don’t know. I knew what the answer had to be from the system, but I had no clue about the system. Every time they’d talk about something, I’d say, “Well, tell me about it. If this was MS-DOS [Microsoft Disk Operating System], how would it work?” Because I knew a little bit about DOS.\\n\\n And I had one guy who was a consultant that was living in Colorado Springs [Colorado], and he’d come down every week or two weeks and stay for a couple of weeks, then he’d go home. He helped me quite a bit. But he was an old implementer, and he knew how to implement things. And a guy named—you ought to probably talk to this guy, Pat [Patrick M.] Duffin. Do you know Pat Duffin?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was an MSD [Mission Support Directorate] guy. Now, you’ve got to remember, MSD was the people who developed the systems, and MOD [Mission Operations Directorate] were the guys who operated the systems. Well, I was an MOD, but now, with building FADS, I was really a part of MSD. There was always a little friction there, because we always wanted to tell them how to do it, and they wanted to tell us to stay out of their business.\\n\\n But Pat Duffin, he really helped me quite a bit, because he was an old implementer, and he was a Branch Chief over there, and he really helped me quite a bit. When I would come up with more of a policy question than anything else, I’d go down and say, “Hey, Pat, tell me about this,” and he’d lay it down the line for me. But we put together this system that worked out pretty well.\\n\\n And Jerry Powell worked for Loral. He was the Project Manager for Loral, and he was really good. He did a lot of good work and kept his guys—we’d sit down and have a conversation with him and Art—Art Nolting was a Rockwell guy, and we’d talk, and we’d hash things out. We had to keep our guys under control. It was fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you’re talking now about some of the new technology that is now everyday technology, integrated networks. And then also about this time, I believe, is when some of the PROFS [Professional Office System] Internet or email system came on line." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "PROFS was up at that time. PROFS was up at that time. We could send emails back and forth. In fact, one of the things that was really funny, everybody wanted to put FADS on the Internet. There ain’t no way you’re going to put FADS on the Internet. There is no way you’re going to have a—there ain’t going to be a modem near this system, because it’s too sensitive. It’s not that it has secure data on it, or secret data on it, but it has data that can’t be tampered with. It’s got flight-critical data on it.\\n\\n And I had a heck of a time—in fact, security on that thing was one of the biggest problems. We had to record every keystroke. We had gigabytes of security data every day. You couldn’t walk up to a computer and stick your little floppy disk in there, because who knows, it might have something. So you had to take it to a system administrator, and he would look at it and make sure it was safe, and he would put the data on it and tell you where he put it. But there was no removable memory on any of that system. There still shouldn’t be any. I don’t know if there is or not.\\n\\n But some of the time, the guys could actually get into the Univac from their home computers and stuff, from their modems, but not in the flight design system. That was one of the things I would not let them do. And Loral was really strong on security.\\n\\n A gal named Charlene [E.] Gilbert—I don’t know if you know Charlene or not. She’s a Director down there now. I think she’s in the—what do you call it when you exchange data? Anyway, she’s in charge of a directorate that gives data to different areas, data information. I can’t think of the name of it. Anyway, she was an MSD person, well groomed in their policies and procedures, and she was always on my case. She was my counterpart from MSD, although I was in charge, and I kind of had to get on her a couple of times. She would always try to keep me towing the line as far as security is concerned, because she was concerned about it. But that was part of her upbringing. She was raised by Pat Duffin. But she was good.\\n\\n Actually, she started out working in the Control Center as a contractor for somebody, Lockheed or somebody, and then she got in the civil service, and then she went to MSD. But she’s done well. But she was my conscience, I guess you might say.\\n\\n You talked about IPS [Integrated Planning System]. When we started the IPS Office, I made her my deputy. So the whole flavor of how the flight design is done now is kind of based on the way the flow process panel came up with its conclusions that we needed a more controlled, integrated system, and it has changed the way—there’s not so much job shops now. They’re more integrated. And, of course, most of it’s being done off site by non-civil servants, which is unfortunate.\\n\\n But I guess, if you take a step back, what should NASA be doing? Should it be doing operations, or should it be doing research. And if you say it should be doing research, then it’s time to give it to the contractors, let them do the job, and let the NASA civil servants do the new stuff and be on the leading edge of things. So I don’t know. It’s just that when you get to doing a job, it’s hard to turn it loose." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned the Integrated Planning System Office. Did you want to talk anymore about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, after we got the FADS up and running, they decided they wanted to put more stuff into the FADS. They wanted to put the flight planning stuff into the FADS. They wanted to separate operating that job from the FDDD [Flight Design and Dynamics Division]. They made me an Office Chief, which is about like a Division Chief, except probably not quite as glamorous. So the job was keeping the things going and also adding more capability, which was like the flight planning stuff. Of course, all we did was talk about budgets, what we were going to do and how we were going to do more with less.\\n\\n You asked why I left. Well, that’s one of the reasons why I left. I got tired of fooling with budgets. And I could. I had my thirty years, almost thirty years, in, and it was an opportunity, and I bought this land in [19]’83, so I had a place to go. And I had a lake house out on Lake Buchanan [Texas] since the early seventies. So that’s what we decided to do.\\n\\n And then, when it was time to take an early out, they brought Ken Russell over to run the office for a while. But yes, that’s about all I want to say about IPS, because it was more of a management headache for me than anything else, because there wasn’t much technical stuff I could do anymore. When I was doing FADS, I was down in the nitty-gritty figuring out how all these things were going to work together and that sort of stuff, and that was fun. But just managing a system that’s running is not a lot of fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just kind of a somewhat related question before we move to the close of today. We talked earlier about you were so much involved with ASTP, and before you left, the agency became involved in working with the Russians as part of the Shuttle-Mir Program [Phase 1, International Space Station]. Were you involved any at all with the planning or any of those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really. Not really. Not really. Now, the Mir stuff was kind of after I had gotten into FADS, and it might have even been after I left. I’m not sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you believe to be your most significant contribution to the space program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, let’s see. I wrote that down. I think the biggest thing I did was Apollo 13, there was certainly a lot of things that I thought of, but probably other guys would have thought of, too, that I think really helped get that job done, like separating the Command Module from the LM using the tunnel pressure, like using the Moon set time for a trajectory check, using the Sun and the Moon for stars to look at, making sure we had the right REFSMMAT [Reference Stable Member Matrix] for re-entry. We just kind of stumbled onto that. And in general, just the whole plan of how we were going to put the maneuvers together and do that. I think that’s probably where I helped most.\\n\\n And then ALT, which I worried about cradle to grave. I was involved in the whole planning exercise from the very beginning till its execution, and I was kind of the ground operator during the GCA, Ground Controlled Approach kind of stuff. So those, I think, were the two biggest things that I did.\\n\\n Now, the FADS is not very dramatic, but it contributed a lot to the—the biggest problem we ran into was flight rate. We couldn’t get all the stuff done in time. Of course, the flight rate is not what we were hoping it to be, one flight a week. But the FADS really did allow us to be more integrated and have a better understanding and do things more efficiently." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have an area or an aspect of your career you found to be the most challenging?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wrote down here, “Developing the FADS and managing the two contractors, the user Rockwell and the implementer Loral.” [Laughter] That was probably the biggest challenge, just keeping those guys together, and it was a big job. It was like a $40 million project, and I had never done anything like that before, so that was really quite a deal.\\n\\n But I knew enough from a technical point of view that—and I had some guys I could call on to help me out, like Pat Duffin and Jon Harpold, guys that I could go counsel with, and they would give me the straight scoop, and then I could go do it.\\n\\n But that was probably the most challenging, was working the FADS. Because the mission stuff, we had time to think about it ahead of time. Llewellyn insisted we have about three or four different backups. You’d give me the velocity of flight path angle and altitude at cutoff, and I could tell you where we were going to land. I had charts for all that stuff. I had notebooks that thick of all kinds of stuff. And we didn’t have to guess at anything. “Oh, you’ve got to de-orbit? Well, if you do this right here, you’ll probably get within 100 miles of where you want to be,” without any computers at all. And we had worked all these procedures. And we’d sit around in the office and talk about what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. So thinking about these things in real time was not that—it was not foreign, and it was not something you had to struggle with.\\n\\n And the ALT thing, as you know, that was not a struggle, that was just a pleasure, because it was a small group of guys, nobody messed with us. They were all worried about the STS-1 and getting on orbit and all that sort of stuff. We were just off doing our thing. It was a small group of guys under Puddy.\\n\\n I’ll tell you a funny story. We were out at DFRC, and I was driving the car. Why I got the car I don’t know. We were staying over in Downey, but we had driven up to Lancaster [California], up to Edwards, which is a long way. So we stopped in Lancaster on the way back, and [Eugene F.] Kranz said, “Let’s get some beer.”\\n\\n “I’m not going to drink a beer. I’m driving.” I didn’t know it was against the law to have an open beer in a car in California. We drove all the way to Downey, never did get stopped. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was the good news." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was the good news, yes.\\n\\n But yes, ALT was really a neat, neat, neat project. And that was before there was a lot of security. We’d go out there and walk through the hangars, and they X-24s sitting there, and you could look at those. DFRC would probably have been a fun place to work, probably would have been a fun place to work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, before we close today, I was going to ask my colleagues, see if they had any questions or anything that you all can think of to add?\\n\\n You want to take a second to look at your notes and see if there’s anything else that you want to add?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I want to tell you about—we’ve had some documentaries on TV lately, and my feeling is, they set way too theatrical and sensational a tone. Their tone was way—it may have been the way it was edited, but if they had just talked about the technical history and workings at JSC, it may not have been appealing as the sensational, but I feel they really over-sensationalized it.\\n\\n My problem is much of the conversations sounded like everyone was always disorganized and close to disaster. Frankly, most were really methodical, had backup procedures in place. It sounded like the NASA designers took chances with the design, and the operators were cavalier, and that’s not right. All the guys I knew, they had—in fact, I don’t think anybody really had “failure” in their vocabulary. Nobody that I talked to.\\n\\n There might have been some people in the back room who were concerned, but everybody I worked with were very professional. They weren’t grasping for straws. They knew what they had to do and knew how to do it, and all they needed to do was work out the details. And when I watch those documentaries, it sounds like we’re on the edge of disaster at any given time, and I don’t think that’s right, for anything.\\n\\n Now, let’s talk about the [Space Shuttle] Columbia [STS-107] accident. I think that accident could have been prevented. I know that on STS-1, we took pictures of the Columbia and saw the tiles. They didn’t even take pictures. If they’d taken pictures and saw the problem, they could have powered that thing down—and this may not have been able to happen, but it would have at least been looked at—and they could probably have mounted a rescue, and there may have been something they could have done with the re-entry trajectory that would have kept that thing from getting as hot as it did. There may have been a way to shield it, shadow it from the—probably not. But that wasn’t even tried.\\n\\n And like the Challenger accident, I don’t think—if I had been asked, should we launch, I would probably have said no. Now, it may have been that the management may have just been misguided, but I just think that we kind of maybe got a little cavalier with the Columbia. And the thing that’s interesting about it is I could have stood right out there and watched it, and I was in the house watching it on TV when it—because I didn’t realize it was a low inclination orbit. I thought it was a high inclination orbit like they go to the space station with, and you can’t see those from here. But the low inclination orbit you can. And I could have—I’m glad I didn’t see it, I suspect.\\n\\n But I just think that the Columbia thing, more could have been done—it was almost like it was ignored, and it shouldn’t have been. And now we’re paying the price for it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All the years that you spent at the Space Center, now that you’re away from it for a few years, can you imagine anything else you would have done during those almost thirty years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I probably had, next to the astronauts, when I was working in the trajectory area, I probably had the best job on the Center, because that—and the systems guys probably won’t like you to say this, but they had really nothing to do unless they had a failure. They had a lot to do then. They had to watch these things, but most of the time, they’re just watching and made sure things worked right.\\n\\n We had things to do. We had rendezvous to compute. We had de-orbits to compute. We had trans-Earth injections to compute. We had all this block data, that we never did use, to compute. We had things to do. So it really was more almost being like a pilot, except you weren’t. So I really didn’t—except to get a promotion, I would probably have stayed there. But after fourteen years, I decided I wanted to get a little more money.\\n\\n So I think I had probably the best job on the Center. Now, maybe the Flight Director might have a—because he gets to do all that, but as a trajectory guy, or as anybody, we did try—after fourteen years, you do learn about a lot of the other guys’ stuff, how the fuel cells work, and how the RCS [Reaction Control System] jets work, and all that stuff. So there’s never a dull day. There was always something new, and you’re always trying to expand your little bag of tricks and your little back pocket procedures. So you always had something to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we certainly enjoyed hearing everything and are glad you shared so many of the details. Is there anything else that you’d like to add?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Deiterich", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can’t think of anything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we certainly thank you for all your time this afternoon and look forward to talking with you again." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "oral-history-at-the-national-archives-00029", + "metadata": { + "interviewee_name": "Joyce Burner", + "description": "Joyce Burner came to the National Archives in 2010 as an archivist after having worked as an intern, volunteer, contractor, and briefly as a student hire for the agency. In her interview Burner discusses her internships at the National Archives Central Plains Regional Archives and the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library; the move from the Bannister Road facility to Union Station; and her work at the National Archives at Kansas City. Burner retired from the National Archives in 2019.", + "file_url": "https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/joyce-burner-oral-history-final.pdf", + "collection_url": "https://www.archives.gov/about/history/oral-history-at-the-national-archives", + "original_file_name": "joyce-burner-oral-history-final.pdf", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04 22:30:15", + "publisher": "U.S. National Archives and Records Administration", + "date": "February 20, 2020" + }, + "broad_source": "nara", + "collection": "oral_history_at_the_national_archives", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Joyce Burner" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "My name is Jennifer Johnson and I am conducting an oral history interview for the National Archives and Records Administration with Joyce Burner today. Today's date is February 20, 2020. Joyce was an archivist at the National Archives in Kansas City for nine years. Joyce, can you talk about what you were doing before you came to the National Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. I'm kind of a poster child for where a Master’s of Library Science degree might take you in life because I meandered through a number of different positions before I wound up at NARA. My undergrad degree was a Bachelor of Science in Education in social studies. I had a social studies comprehensive major with an emphasis in history. So I consider history as my undergrad major. I had a minor in journalism and I also took enough hours of library science for a certification because when you do an education degree in secondary ed, you want to be certified in as many areas as you can to teach. So I taught junior high social studies in Carrollton, Missouri, for one miserable year and knew that was not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. At the end of that year I got married and relocated to Kansas City so I needed to look for a new job anyway. I was offered a middle school library position in Spring Hill, Kansas, which is one of the really outer ring suburbs of the Kansas City metro area. It's a little more rural than some of the other suburbs, but it has been a strong school district and is known for its technical prowess even now. It was a much better fit, which I knew immediately going into it and I really enjoyed it but I also realized I did not know what I was doing. I started right into graduate school taking night classes through Emporia State University towards a Master of Library Science degree. I took night classes and I did a couple of summers on campus. It took me about four and a half years to get through that degree, but it was a very practical degree. I came in every day after class and used what I learned the night before and it was a really good situation. It was a good program. I was the middle school librarian there for about seven years. I quit when I had my first child. I was actually a stay-at-home mom for 12 years. During that time I looked for things to do professionally so that my résumé would not just be a big black hole. I volunteered at the local elementary school library even when my kids were very small, before they were in school yet. I was very active in PTA once they were in school. I did things like I started a publishing program—a book publishing program and also a book discussion program at their elementary school. I also was asked to come in and work on the library in the church where we were attending. That library was kind of a disaster when we started but there was a person on staff who had a vision that it could be something better. So they gave me the authority to throw things away and buy things and also a team of people to work with. We really went in and renovated it and it became one of the hubs in the church that was very popular. We added different kinds of audio/visual media. We started a separate children's library as well. After I had been a volunteer in that position for, I think about eight years, we decided we wanted to open a bookstore in conjunction with it. So I learned book retail from the ground up all on my own. That was really interesting. It was a small book store. It was open to the public in conjunction with the library and we had a pretty good outreach into the community around us in the neighborhood and from other churches as well. I did that for, I think, 12 years. I was on staff there as a paid employee. During that time, I was very involved in a local professional organization, the Church and Synagogue Library Association, which is actually a national organization. I was president of the local chapter. I also won a national award as Outstanding Congregational Librarian from that organization. I chaired a national conference that was held here in Kansas City. So again looking for those professional kinds of things that related to library science or information management. I kind of hit a point after I was in that job for about 12 years where I just was ready to do something else. I was in my mid-fifties and I knew I had time for a final act in my career. I knew I did not want to go back and work in a school library again. I noticed on the Emporia University website for the library school that they had added a certificate in archive studies that was about 20-22 graduate hours. I called them up and just asked if I could do that certificate since I was an alum already and they said sure. You wouldn't have to redo anything. You can just do the certificate and by the way, if you want to start this fall, the application has to be in tomorrow. I got online and put in my application as a non-degree seeking student to start that fall and then I went down the hall and told my boss I was giving my year and a half notice on that job that I was in. I started back to school. They were weekend intensive classes and graduate school had certainly changed since I'd finished my MLS in 1982. But it was a great challenge. I met some fabulous people, made some friends—people I continue to be friends with now. It was just a lot of fun and it was very challenging. The job I was in, we hired my replacement and I actually trained her. She worked alongside me over about six months and I phased out as she increased her hours. So we had a very smooth transition there. It was just a great experience going back to school and earning that certificate. I think I did about 24 graduate hours. It included classes in just the introduction to archives, arrangement and description, doing archives reference, lots of preservation work, records management. There was a hands-on class. We actually got to go out to Estes Park, Colorado, and worked in the archives at Rocky Mountain National Park as well as in historical archives around Estes Park. It's a very historic community up there in Colorado. We got to do all kinds of preservation and it was just a very good experience and hands-on, plus what better place to go than Colorado to go to school, you know, up in the mountains." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's very interesting. How long was it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a week." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember what year you were doing your certificate?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went back to school—I think it was about 2008/2009." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I see. Okay. So then you worked as an intern, contractor, and volunteer before you worked full-time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. As part of the certificate, I did have to do at least one internship and I'm enough of an overachiever that I decided to do two. One of the classes, the intro to archives class, was taught by Mark Corriston, who was Director of Records Management here at NARA Kansas City at that time. I had a bit of an introduction to NARA through that experience because he taught a little bit of a NARA-centric class approach to that. We met at NARA when it was out at the old Bannister location in the Bannister Federal Complex before NARA moved downtown. I got to go through the stacks and spend some time out there and kind of got to know him a little bit. He talked about their internship program. I thought, well, this seems like a slam dunk that I should just do an internship or apply for an internship with NARA. I sent a letter to Steve Spence, who is an archives specialist here, and was the internship coordinator at that time. I sent a letter to Steve and he responded. He said, well, we're getting ready to move to our new facility in downtown Kansas City by Union Station. So, you can either do this now (and I think it was early 2009). He said you can do this now or you can wait until the summer after we move. I don't really know what you want to do, but he said, well, seeing an archives move is kind of like Haley's Comet. It's sort of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I said I think I want that. So they brought me in as an intern and it was at the old Bannister location. They were in the process of packing things up and organizing for the move. All of the oversized volumes were being shrink-wrapped by this crew of student employees. Packing things up, trying to plan strategically. There was a massive amount of overtime and comp time going on just to get this move done. It was really very interesting. About a week into my internship, which went over four weeks, they shut down the reference service because things were getting packed up and they couldn't answer reference requests anymore. My first week I did get to help with some reference requests and screening some Leavenworth files and re-boxing and just some of the different things that were going on. By the second week I was there, Lori Cox-Paul, who was the education specialist at that time, and is now the Director of Archival Operations at NARA Kansas City, and her officemate Mary Burtzloff, who was an archivist, realized, oh, we have a librarian in the house. We have all of these books because everybody's office had books that they'd accumulated that they wanted to put into one central reference library. Let's let her do her librarian thing. I organized all of these books and went through and weeded out the duplicates and questioned things that just looked too old or asked if these things could be weeded out. I organized them by subject and then when they moved into the building here at Union Station, they were just unpacked onto the shelves by those subject categories and they are still that way in the research room. So that's one of my lasting legacies here is the organization of everybody's cast-off books that's down there. Over time doing reference, doing processing, I've gone down and consulted those books time after time. It is really a very valuable resource." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I know the library. I use it myself a lot. How long did the move take?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the whole thing, I think, was months. I'm not sure exactly how long the physical move itself took because I wasn't on site during that. But it was months of planning just because you have to know where everything is to maintain physical and intellectual control of all your records at all times. They had the added challenge that there was some disorganization in the stacks at Bannister. So there was a lot of identification of “What is this?” going on at the same time that continued for a while after the move, I think. It was just a very interesting time. Lots of moving parts. Lori Cox-Paul and Jake Ersland were really in charge of it and they were off huddled in the stacks most of the time just trying to get control of what was going where because some things were also going to Lenexa and some things were going to Lee's Summit, I believe. Not everything came downtown because there's only 20,000 cubic feet here in the stacks. So even though the total holdings were maybe a third then of what they are now, you're still talking a massive amount of stuff. It was just a mind-boggling undertaking to do that kind of a move." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I can only imagine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was so glad that I came in as an intern at that point and really got to see that. I spent a lot of time putting volumes through the shrink wrap machine with the rest of the students and, you know, just doing all kinds of different things. They were still doing some kind of webinar education events and I got to sit in on some of those things. It was just a very interesting time to observe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I bet. I saw you did a mix of archival and preservation work for NARA. Did that internship involve preservation work or was that later? Past your internship, can you walk through what your path was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. Well, actually the following month I did an internship at the Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri. It was a very traditional internship. That is a manuscript collection. It's not an archives of federal records as such. Things are not organized by Record Group. It's much more of a traditional manuscript collection." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What a nice variety for internships." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a big contrast and I was so happy I did that because I really made good friends over there. Those were our colleagues as well. Through these two internships I got to establish relationships with people at both major NARA facilities here in the Kansas City area. I got to do a different kind of processing and writing descriptions and different kinds of preservation work at the Truman Library. I got a tour of the Truman home one afternoon. The interesting thing there was that my tour guide was Elizabeth Burnes who later came here as an archivist. She was hired as an archivist here at NARA a few months before I was and it took me a while to figure out where I had seen her before. Finally, I had to put a Park Service hat on her head and I said were you at the Truman Library? She goes, yes, oh, that's where I've seen you before. So it was interesting that we kind of crossed paths. She was working for the Park Service over there before she came to NARA. Anyway, that was just a different kind of internship and it was really good. It balanced out the more chaotic one that I had at NARA. While I had been at NARA, there was a preservation contract position they had that was re-upped annually at that time. The person who was in that position—their contract was about up so they were getting ready to fill it again and this was doing oversize record preservation out in Lee's Summit, Missouri in the cave facility. While I was at NARA they encouraged me to apply for that job and so I did. I was awarded that contract. I had my NARA internship in February, Truman in March. I think starting in about April maybe—it was pretty quickly—or May maybe—I started this contract, which went for five months. I actually worked in the preservation room at Lee's Summit dealing with oversized records. I started out working through a lot of record groups, RG 30 Bureau of Roads. It was a project that had been started downtown. Then they moved the records to Lee's Summit. So I finished up with that. Mostly they just needed to be humidified and flattened, a little bit of encapsulation maybe. Then just created a database because it was pretty much an item-level database of what was in there. I finished that up and then they started bringing piles of things that were mostly Record Group 77, Army Corps of Engineer's records that had been on shelves at Bannister and were not too well identified. There were some old finding aids. A lot of it had just come in from the Corps and trying to figure out what these things were and they were huge and some of them were very old. That was more challenging because I really had to go through and identify what these things were and my knowledge of Corps of Engineers records was a little sketchy at that time. I had to talk with other people on staff and Jake would come out from time to time. Jennifer Audsley-Moore was on staff as an archives technician at that time and she was actually my supervisor because she was the preservation liaison at that time and would come out and help me figure out what some things were. But it was really interesting—just old maps mostly. Old maps and charts and one of the cool things that we did find in there was a set of Missouri River charts from 1870, 1880-something that were rolled up. They're mounted on linen, rolled up and had been rolled up for decades, more than a century probably, and could not even be eased open to see what they were without the paper cracking and they were huge. I mean they were, like, I don't know seven feet, six or seven feet wide. And maybe 20 to 30 feet long. They were enormous. So those were really one of the cool things that we found." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have the space and equipment to be able to unroll them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, that preservation lab has really big humidification tanks. And lots of big counter space. Those maps had to humidify for about a week before they were pliant enough that they could be safely unrolled. Then it took two of us to unroll them and, you know, I had to kind of jigger some furniture around and extend my counter space so that there would be enough room. They were very exciting to find. We figured out what they were and it was just a set of charts of the Missouri River going across the entire State of Missouri. One of the cool things in there—my hometown where I finished high school is Boonville, Missouri, which is right on the Missouri River right in the middle of the state and it's a very historic, old town. Well, Boonville showed up on this map and it showed the streets and where churches were and things like that and it was very cool. I could see the church where I got married. It was marked on there and I could see where schools had been or other buildings that were there. It was just a very interesting personal find. That was an example I used when I was doing talks to the public about preserving things and what you could find in federal records—I used to pull up my picture of my hometown that I'd found on this ancient map and, you know, your history is here. Your personal stories are here. So anyway I worked as a contractor for about five months and at that point there were banks of map cabinets in the archival bay in Lee's Summit. Those were all moved up to the Subtropolis facility a couple of years ago now. But at that time I was going through this stuff and then putting it in the map drawers and keeping an item-level list of what was in the drawers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was HMS (Holdings Management System) in existence at this point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. This was pre-HMS. This was still what was called the MLR. Master Location Register. Which was just a massive set of Excel spreadsheets. Actually, what I created was a database that was sort of parallel to that. It had the same kind of information. It was not really part of the MLR. At the offsite facilities these things were a little non-standard. We had our own set of databases that we knew that if you got a reference request you were going to have to spend some time looking, searching through Excel spreadsheets for this. I included as much physical detail and also intellectual detail about what was in the records. Very interesting work. Toward the end of that time, they also started having me come downtown and work in the afternoons on what was called the ARD or the At-Risk Database. It was a process of going through all of our records and determining what kind of physical condition they were in. What was at-risk? And I think this was all done kind of in preparation knowing that something like HMS would be coming. That wasn't actually rolled out for a few more years. But all of this data went into that in the end. It brought me downtown working with the staff side-by-side more and more. I finished that contract in September of 2009. And so I'd finished my certificate, I'd finished all my internships, I finished my contract. What do I do now? Now I was looking for a job. So I was applying for jobs and had some interviews for some different kinds of jobs, but I knew what I really wanted to do was work at NARA. I just kept coming in as a volunteer about 20 hours a week. I kept working for free, putting my eggs in that basket increasingly. I was getting plenty of encouragement to do so. Mary Burtzloff, who had been one of the senior archivists, left that fall and went to work at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas. Her backfill was coming open. Diana Duff who was the Director of Archival Operations and Reed Whittaker who was the Regional Administrator—the hierarchy was a little different then—were working on getting her backfill. They were hoping that I would be able to come into that position. You never know until you get the whole pool of applicants. It was written so that the job started at a GS-9 instead of a GS-11, which made it a little bit easier. They also started giving me archivist-level work to do as a volunteer. I wrote the descriptions for the Catalog for all of Record Group 75 Turtle Mountain Agency records. Barbara Larsen who was a technician here at that time had gone through and done the physical arrangement and re-boxing of those, and she had identified the series and she had made wonderful copious notes about what was in them, but she did not write descriptions herself. I am actually a good writer. I've written professionally for School Library Journal a lot and I had a journalism minor as an undergrad. That was one of the strengths that I brought. Lori had me start writing descriptions for the Turtle Mountain Agency records. There was a whole set of oversized volumes from Record Group 58, which is the Internal Revenue Service and those were actually the first descriptions that I wrote. It was a pretty big series of volumes of records that you might find information that was useful in. I always questioned why they were permanent records. They were on a form and writing the description was pretty easy because the headings on the columns going across the page pretty much gave you your scope and content. It was an easy thing to do as a first description assignment. Ever since that, after my whole nine years here, anytime anybody wanted anything out of those records, I was the one that had to go up and find the specific volume and answer that, but those requests are very rare. Then I did the Turtle Mountain descriptions. There was a lot of that. I was also being pulled in to do preservation work and also helping teach people how to do preservation work like humidification and flattening and encapsulation because once you've been the contractor out of the cave you know how to do that. You're kind of the onsite person. So I did a lot of that. I helped with special events. I just kept coming in for about 20 hours a week and kept my face in front of them, and did get through the interview pool. Then at the end of that year, 2009, Reed Whittaker, the Regional Administrator, John Allshouse, who was the Assistant Regional Administrator, and Diana Duff all retired on the same day at the end of the year. It was at the end of the year after the move in the spring of 2009. They all got us through the move and had completed their mission and moved on to retirement. Well, the whole interview process ground to a halt because there's nobody here who is a permanent director. Lori was named as interim director and so I just kept coming in knowing that my name was in the pool and I had a good shot at it and, actually that spring they said if you want to take a class some place you could be a student employee and you could actually get paid for being here however many hours a week. I went up to the junior college in Johnson County here, which is a very good one, and just took some classes in word processing, you know, something that had a transcript and actually worked as a student employee for about six weeks. I got to answer the phone and sit at the consult desk and it was just a little bit closer in the circle of contacts and responsibility. Finally, that spring Lori was named as permanent director and the first thing she did was start this interview process up because they really needed to fill the position. I got an interview in March and was offered the position. I started in April of 2010. It was in retrospect a little bit of an arduous process to actually get on staff, but I just worked the connections and the system that I had, and I was applying for and interviewing for other jobs and looking for things. This was such a better job that anything else that was coming up out there that it was worth waiting for and it worked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you started having had so much variety and you were introduced already to the system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I did come in being pretty familiar with NARA, how records worked, how federal records worked. Which is different from anything else in the world, I've realized. Having some good connections and I really was able to pretty much hit the ground running." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So speaking of that—I don't want to skip over anything—but I did notice you did several large processing projects. Can you talk…" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. Well, that was one of the things that Lori tasked me with pretty early on. Our Record Group 75, Bureau of Indian Affairs records are some of the most frequently requested records here, sometimes by individuals working on their own genealogy, more frequently by academics. There are so many professors and graduate students who are working on research in some level of Native American culture. We hold the records for the reservations in North and South Dakota, so Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, very significant—historically significant places where things—we have the Wounded Knee records. Also, in Nebraska and in Minnesota and there's one reservation out in Kansas, nothing in Iowa, nothing in Missouri. Most of those records were really not processed. At the time of the move into this building a lot of those agencies had not really been set up in a final form where the individual record series had been identified and housed together, described. The intellectual and physical control could be a little hazy on things. Some of them had, as I said, Barbara Larsen was a technician who did a lot of that processing. She was very knowledgeable and had gone through and kind of done the arrangement on a lot of things but had not written descriptions. The labels could be a little wonky sometimes. There was some variety. Some of those agencies' records had already been in DC and had been regionalized and sent out here. The Pine Ridge records for instance, the Rosebud Agency records, were in that situation where they actually had been described and were in pretty good shape. Then the requirements for description and labels once we got into HMS, the holdings management system, all these systems that have to match up and things didn't match up anymore. There was some retroactive processing that needed to go on and description updates and such that needed to go on with those. Then there were others where it was just a thousand boxes of folders, that in a single box, maybe the folders in this box related to each other and maybe they didn't. Maybe what was in the folder actually related to what the folder title was and maybe it didn't. I mean there was just some kind of random hodgepodge going on. There were a couple of different agencies that were really the worst. The Fort Berthold Agency records were bad and the Cheyenne River Agency records were bad. Each one of those, I just called it a thousand boxes of chaos when we started out because that's just kind of where it was. There were also lots of records that weren't even foldered. Tri-folded things that had never been, once the agency tied a string around them 100 years ago, they've never been touched since. They were just in a box. Some of the boxes weren't acid free. Finding anything was just a real adventure. As I said there's a lot of academic demand for those records. It can be very challenging when you're working with a professor who is on a grant and they're on limited time and they need to find specific things. There is going to be an awful lot of work just to try to help them find the specific thing they're looking for. It really was just a process of being organized in approach and over time we kind of learned. We streamlined our process and learned some things. I think the Winnebago Agency was the first one that we did and the Cheyenne River Agency was the last one that I finished about a month before I retired. Each one of them, if it was just a massive agency, a thousand boxes or so, it could easily take a year to get through it depending on how bad it was when you started out. Over time we really learned that just to go through and do an initial inventory of what was in the boxes really made all the difference in the world. I kind of got to where I was and on some of the agencies I actually just did that myself. When we did the Minneapolis Area Office agency records I went through about 500 or 600 boxes and just did that, made a massive spreadsheet of folder titles. And from there you can start to identify series. One thing that's helpful in all these BIA agencies is they all tend to have the same kinds of records. They all tended to have the same forms that showed up over and over, the same types of correspondence. In different time periods, the correspondence would be organized in a specific way. One of the big things was before 1925, there were a bunch of weird ways that they would organize their correspondence. Starting about 1925 they actually assigned what they called a decimal correspondence system, which as I always told people if you can find a book in the library using the Dewey Decimal system—it's the same kind of thing. A number is assigned to it, to a subject and everything with that number on it will be about the same subject. So all the land records will be 400 something. That was actually very helpful and it was something the Bureau of Indian Affairs did—the Office of Indian Affairs at that time—to try and get some consistency across their agencies. That ran from about 1925 to about 1960. Then local agencies would go through and put earlier things into that system. Or continue to use it afterwards. But before that also there were just massive runs of just chronological correspondence and they were in bound letterpress volumes. In one volume, you could have any subject in the world. You just needed to know what timeframe you were looking at and then you just had to sit and look for it. Anyway, over time, as I started to work with different agencies and seeing what tended to happen consistently between agencies, you see some patterns and you know what to look for. So, anyway, that just kind of helped. Knowing what I was likely to find. Every agency did their own thing to some extent. They took the systems that were given to them from the headquarters office, tweaked it for their own use. People will come in and out over time. There's not necessarily a lot of consistency. There's just all kinds of odd things that you can run across and uncover and you can't make any assumptions about what you'll find mostly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, speaking of uncovering, do you have an example, like the Boonville. Are there memorable records that you remember just randomly discovering as part of your processing…" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes. You had to look for them. And, one of my things is that I like to find those personal stories in records. Sometimes, especially in the old correspondence, oh, you'd learn about all the personnel problems that they're having. There was one really memorable run of records we found in the Fort Berthold records that there was just a fight going on between the field matron and somebody else, who was in the administration of the agency and just calling each other names in these letters back and forth to the superintendent. It was, from our perspective now, pretty funny. I'm sure it was horrible to be stuck out there, you know, on the prairie in the late 1880's and life could be pretty miserable, but…" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what's the name?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was Fort Berthold. It's in North Dakota by the Canadian border. There were just those kinds of things. But also I was interested to see the relationship that the superintendent of the local agency would have with the Indians on the reservation. We always say Indians and we say Indians in the descriptions because that's what it says in the records. I know that now we only say Native Americans. But, I'm sorry, we say Indians because that's what's in the record. They could be very warm and especially when there were young men who had gone off to war in World War I and World War II and were writing home. It was almost a paternal relationship a lot of the time. It was very nice. Then there would be other records where the attitude toward these “savages” and “we have to get rid of this Indian problem” was just blatant. I mean it spilled out there. So you really get both. Looking for those personal stories was cool. Sometimes the photographs could be very interesting. I didn't do the arrangement on the Haskell Institute student case files. Those were already done. I did a lot of reference work out of them and finding the individual stories in those files could be heartbreaking. It could be really encouraging. There's funny stuff, but again those are those personal stories. I've never made any pretense that I came to this work as a historian. I do have this history major as an undergrad. That was a really long time ago. My work is as a librarian and I came in as a librarian, and I never made any bones about that. It meant that I brought a lot of organizational skills and information management skills. When you're dealing with these massive amounts of records that really have to be processed down to sometimes an item level, that was very, very useful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I bet. As an agency, my understanding is we've gone…" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The other way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have specific Record Groups you were focused on throughout your nine years or was it a variety?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I could get reference on anything. I was in the general reference rotation. One day a week I got all the emails and all the phone calls and all the walk-ins no matter what they wanted. If it's a naturalization or a court record or BIA or whatever, that would be my responsibility to find or answer that request. There were also things that Lori would send requests to specific people on staff depending on their knowledge of a subject area. I frequently would get BIA requests that were from academics just because I had worked with those records so much. What happens just as practical fallout of the work is that if you're the one that's led a team of people processing a thousand boxes of chaos and so that you have discrete record series that you have written the descriptions and you've made sure the labels are right and match up with HMS and you handled all this stuff, you are by default the expert on what's in those boxes. So anything that I had processed I frequently got the reference requests on. Knowing that and knowing that I would not be here for 30 or 40 years, I really tried to make detailed folder lists and finding aids so that my colleagues, once I was gone, would be able to help people just as efficiently. From what I understand, that has really worked out well. There were some of those though, especially the Cheyenne River records we left for last mostly because we knew it was kind of the worst and I just put them off as long as I could. Finally, I had to do it. There actually were lots of records that I just had to go through stacks of correspondence and what is this about and do I have, have I identified the series that this would fit in logically. One problem with this, as archivists we try to maintain that original order as one of the bases. Original order so that you maintain that institutional evidence of how the records were created. Sometimes you just can't do it, because the original order is gone. The files and boxes or whatever have been cleaned out and dumped into boxes and brought here and make some sense out of it. So at that point what I always found was, well, you just have to think like a researcher. If I'm an academic and I'm working on a specific topic then the records have to be organized and the folders have to be identified in a way that would help me get to those specifics. It's a bit of an artificial arrangement compared to what the original would be. But at this point we have let people have access. So it's that “make access happen” thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We had to gain intellectual control." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly, exactly. So that's really what we went after. And, I would talk through that with Lori and she was always, like, you think like a researcher and so go for it. Because it just makes so much more sense that way and for chronological things, at least if somebody comes in and they've got a date span that they're looking through I can bring out less boxes for them to go through. So, you know, that's just kind of where you are. Because sometimes it is what it is but we can help identify as much detail as possible to give researchers a boost." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned court records, naturalization records. Did you ever have much interaction or relationship with other federal agencies, that you would need to consult with them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Kind of limited. Occasionally, we had contacts at the local district courts. So there's one thing. People would call and want a copy of their own court records. And are they old enough that they've come to the National Archives yet or are they still in the Federal Records Center? So often to the public, it's just one big thing. To try and explain to them, well, they're still on the Federal Records Center side. We know that's part of our agency, but we don't, as Research Services, have access to them. We would have to call the Clerk of the Court or whoever the records managers were at the courts and just have them look in their system. Has this particular case been accessioned over or not yet? So we did that. I did that to some extent. More than that, I worked with the Alien files on research and reference a lot, which are USCIS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service records. I'm sure it's only increased since I retired but they were the most frequently requested records. They have surpassed the Leavenworth inmate case files. Again, this is genealogists who are looking for their family history. We would have to call people at USCIS, which is located here in Lee's Summit, to try and help patrons sometimes who were just hitting a brick wall with USCIS on getting records that had not been accessioned over. Sometimes we tried to act as a liaison a little bit and find out what's going on over there that you're getting this automated response and you've paid money, but you're not getting anything. Again there were specific contacts we have over there that we had created relationships with and we know who is good to work with. Other than that, you know, people from agencies come to look at their own historic records that have been accessioned over. I had some researchers from the Army Corps of Engineers who would contact me directly because I guess I helped them on something and researchers will come back to the archivist that helped them in the first place and that was kind of good. They were more researchers but because they were from the agency we wouldn't have to get into screening their records as much and they were good to work with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you want to speak to any challenges or issues that you faced, either on a project or…" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just as far as challenges go it was keeping up with the massive amount of stuff. Even since I've retired I've heard from my colleagues about tens of thousands of cubic feet of records that continue to come in, and as the bankruptcy records were all consolidated here. I know there's an ongoing project to get all of the appellate court records from the whole country. It's just because real estate costs less in Kansas City. I think it's really an economic move as much as anything. And we have so much cave storage in Kansas City. So it's a good locale for that. But just the sheer amount of stuff is overwhelming and to keep up with what's coming in was kind of overwhelming at times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you say the staff here in Research Services have the amount of records exponentially increasing but maybe not staff levels increasing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, exactly. When I retired they've not been able to backfill my position. When I started with NARA, there were three of us who were archivists downtown. Jake Ersland who is now deputy director, Elizabeth Burnes is still an archivist but also a subject matter expert, so she's really only halftime here as archivist, and me. There were three of us. Well, when Jake was promoted, which was needed because we have archivists at all three offsite facilities, we didn't get his backfill. Now we're down to two people downtown. I've retired. Now we're down to Elizabeth downtown. I know what that's like because I filled in for Elizabeth while she was on maternity leave twice. There were two stretches of five or six months where I was the only archivist downtown. It just really does become overwhelming and very stressful. It's hard to provide really good one-on-one service to individual researchers when you've got so many requests coming in. There were months that I had a hundred reference requests." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's a lot and when you're only on reference one day a week, it's a lot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know we can't even begin to cover everything, but is there anything else I haven't asked you about that you want to speak to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One thing that was interesting for the time that I was here, it was a time of local cultural shift because of the move to the new facility. When I started we had four to six student employees at any time who covered the phones and helped with processing. And we hit a point where we were no longer able to hire student employees. The union complained that the students were doing permanent work as temporary employees. So we gained more technicians but it was not a one-to-one replacement. We had non-student staff having to cover the phones. It was a real culture shift. Just in the way work was lined out and we had a couple of people downtown who were long-term, long-time employees. Jennifer Audsley-Moore was a technician. Jessica Hopkins was a specialist. Both were promoted to be archivists and work at Subtropolis. So people who have been here a long time that are out the door." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I see. Well, any anecdotes or words of wisdom? I think I've covered everything I wanted to ask you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It really was a great place to work. It was very challenging. I really enjoyed my work a lot. I learned a lot. It was really kind of a cool thing to end my career in the hardest job that I had. It's taking that non-traditional student work in your mid-fifties and taking a real switch at the end is not the “ride it out into the sunset” sort of thing that some people think of. But it was really good. I really, really enjoyed it. I got some great benefits to take into retirement too. This is not to be sneezed at. And really made some great relationships and good friends and I just think it's worth it. If you think you can try something else; if you're not happy with what you're doing, you can take on a new challenge, you shouldn't let it stop you. Time keeps ticking. So you gotta do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I would say what an exciting last half. Well, I do appreciate your time very much. Thank you for doing this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joyce Burner", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00074", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2019-042.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Garrido, Yancy (1987-1990): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2019-042", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2019-042", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Yancy Garrido served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras from January 1987 to August 1990 in a community mental health program. He speaks of how his heritage as the son of Cuban refugees influenced his decision to join the Peace Corps. As he was already fluent in Spanish, he convinced the trainers to let him do an internship at a health center in Comayaguela. Garrido was stationed in Gracias a Dios in Lempira Department, where he gave workshops and ultimately built a network of community mental health facilitators. He talks about the rewards and dangers of being a volunteer in Honduras at that time, and how he integrated with the community. He shares a continuing connection with the country because his wife and daughter are from there. Finally, Garrido discusses the importance of the Peace Corps and states that people of color should be more actively recruited. Interviewed and recorded by Candice Wiggum, December 9, 2018. 1 digital audio file.", + "dates_of_materials": "9 December 2018", + "extent": "1 digital file (audio; stereo; 95 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "039. Honduras.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Honduras. Garrido, Yancy (1987-1990): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Honduras", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2019-042", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2019-042-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/hx2nc3u50nnyv450r51k07kj3j7c86c2.pdf?odc=20231115174152-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/d74c87d4-5579-4aeb-a3e4-3692fd2ad275/40070441-f548-4458-b0aa-969b4ee50ab8/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzMxYzhfYjIzYTQ1OTZkYTYyYjVjNWQzYTAzNDhhZTRiOWE5NGU2NWU2NmM2YWRmMWY5MWQwZjdhMjg3OTE2ZjYxM2RhY18vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS9kNzRjODdkNC01NTc5LTRhZWItYTNlNC0zNjkyZmQyYWQyNzUvNDAwNzA0NDEtZjU0OC00NDU4LWIwYWEtOTY5YjRlZTUwYWI4L21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Ringoes, New Jersey", + "length": "47 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed December 20, 2018, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Yancy Garrido Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Candice Wiggum" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Yancy Garrido" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:04", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Today is December 9, 2018. This is Candice Wiggum and I am interviewing Yancy Garrido." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:12", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yancy Rubén Garrido Gutierrez." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:16", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras from January 1987 to August 1990 as a community mental health volunteer. All right. Let's get started." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:29", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:00:31", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell me why you joined the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:00:33", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Why did I join the Peace Corps? Ah. I probably first heard about the Peace Corps sometime in high school. I did lots of service things in high school, like lots of kids. I was an athlete. I did all sorts of projects. Key Club, all those things. So I think it got stuck in my mind that it was there. And certainly during college I was exposed to what is Peace Corps, but from a negative angle. All my professors were liberal sixties professors, and for them Peace Corps was, um, not a positive thing in how it was structured. It was, you know, from their perspective, a negative intervention for the United States, imposing basically other kinds of policies on countries that really didn't need that kind of service. But that never stuck with me.\n\nI'm the son of Cuban refugees. My parents left Cuba because of the Cuban revolution and actually probably would have never have met if it had not been for the United States, because my mother was the daughter of Batiste's diplomatic photographer. No one of high importance in the government, but still in the government. And my father cut sugarcane on a farm that my grandfather worked on, and they had a cantina in the little town that they lived in in Marti. So if not for the revolution, they would never have met because the rich city girl doesn't marry a campesino from the middle of Cuba. But they met in New Jersey. And so always in my mind was just being thankful for living in the United States, for having opportunities that I never would have had. I'm sure because of what happened in Cuba, I would have had a fine education because that was one of the things that got established. But I wouldn't have the freedoms and the things that I have today.\n\nSo it was always in my mind, how could I give back, uh, not as a Peace Corps at the time, but to Latin America and represent my country. So after studying abroad in Spain, and I partially went to Spain because I knew I would always go to Latin America having, you know, being the first generation here. I didn't speak English till I went to kindergarten, so it was always on my mind. I'll go to Latin America. I don't have to study abroad there. And when the opportunities started to arise, okay, what am I going to do? I looked at Jesuit Volunteer Corps. I looked at a number of other nonprofits that were working abroad. But then I got to meet the Peace Corps volunteer recruiter who came to Bucknell University, where I went to school. And that's a whole other story of how I got to go to Bucknell, because I wasn't slated to go to college, so I was slated to go and work immediately to help my family. But again, I bucked the trend of what my family said. And I said, hey, everybody I see successful in this country goes to college. So I'm going to college. And paid for that myself because they didn't want to pay for it.\n\nBut a Bucknell I was exposed to, I think, the beginning of what were some challenges I've always had all my life, which is what's it like being, um, a minority student or person in the United States trying to assimilate, trying to become one, but always not being part of the big group? And at Bucknell, it was an economic change for me. You know, my father was working class. I had the fortune of being from a two parent family with all the strengths. My cousins were not so lucky. I am the first graduate of college and other advanced degrees in my family. And when the Peace Corps volunteer came, the way they spoke about what the experience was exactly what I wanted. And it wasn't what the commercials were, you know, toughest job you'll ever love. And all this other stuff, which ended up being true. But the way it was pitched, I never thought Peace Corps was going to appeal to me because what I thought was, and to be honest, I just saw a lot of looked like rich white kids going to foreign countries in Africa.\n\nAnd I really didn't know what that was about. That's why I looked at Jesuit Volunteer Corps and others, because I came from a Catholic background. But once I spoke with the volunteer and they really express how, no, no, no, you know, don't get stuck with the messaging. You're really going and you're working in another country. You're trying to see if you can add value. And if all goes well, when you leave, you know, you'll help to establish something and people will continue that project without you. The idea was to help get things started, not to actually take the place of someone, because the last thing I ever want to do is take somebody's job. So hearing that, after that conversation with that Peace Corps volunteer, it was just one of those things inside me that said, this is for you and you're going to go. You know, it's funny. Everyone always says, you know, I knew this was meant for me until it didn't happen, but it happened.\n\nWhen I, um, so I applied. And of course, my professors did not want me to go. They were grooming me to be go get my doctorate and be a professor of Spanish literature. My parents didn't want me to go because they said, we left Latin America for you. Why are you going back? But I went, and it's the best decision I ever made in my life. And again, the challenges were in, in just getting set up for that. So I actually, and I think this is offered anymore, but when I graduated in May of '86 and there wasn't a posting available immediately, so I had to wait. So I did a grad, I did some graduate credits at Bucknell. And then in October they called and said, well, we have a placement for you in the Philippines. And I said, why are you going to send me to the Philippines? No, your skills match up. I said, I am bilingual, fluent in Spanish. I'm sure I could pick up Tagalog, but I have no contact with that culture. It doesn't make any sense to me. Well, we've decided this is what would make sense for you.\n\nI'm like, I'm not going to do that, but I'll wait for another posting. And I don't know if it was that the recruiter liked me or there weren't that many Latinos in the Peace Corps or whatever it was. They said, okay, okay, you can wait. She called me back in December and said, there's two postings coming up. Actually, there's three postings they said. There's Dominican Republic, there's Paraguay, and there's Honduras. Which would be best for you? We're going to give you a choice. And I said, you know, let me talk to my parents, you know, and I spoke with my parents. And I was going to go to Paraguay because I wanted to go as far away as possible. But no, my parents said, please go to Honduras, because none of us wanted me to go to the Dominican Republic because we had had family that had bad experiences there. And so my mother said, look, my best friend's from Honduras, and I'm like, okay, let's go to Honduras. So that's how I ended up choosing Honduras.\n\nAnd then a few weeks later, I was going for the training in Miami, which was, again, it was like going back to college actually, because that first, I guess it was we were there for, I don't know if it was a week or a few days, but it was all these people coming out of college, like me, and it was like orientation that first year, freshman year college. And I was like, is this what it is? Because that's not what I signed up for. I thought this would be like more adult experience, but you bring with you what you are. And so if college partying is what you bring with you, that's what you find. We went in country, um, and this is where I had my second kind of, I don't know, it was kind of this, the same thing happens again but it's different. So obviously, having grown up in the United States, even though I had heard about my parents talk about Cuba, especially my father, about the poverty that he had lived in, I had never seen that kind of poverty.\n\nWhen I got to the country, and whether it was intentional or accidental, you fly, we flew into Tegucigalpa, which in itself is an experience to fly into that airport. And we. So this was '87, yeah. And then we drove, uh, it took about 2 hours. Now it takes about an hour because they fixed the roads, but it took about 2 hours to get to, I think it was Nacaome in terms of where we were, where we did our train. No, somewhere in southern Honduras we did our training. I don't remember where it was. For like an initial one week initiation where you went and you were near a volunteer site and they did all the first intro welcome to Honduras stuff. And I was, a small group of 25 in our training group. The groups prior to us were much bigger because there were 400 volunteers in the country. It was a big build up of volunteers at that time.\n\nWe had a small training group, but unusually for the training group we had, uh, I can't. It was 7 to 10 people of color in the 25, which was unusual for my later experience of finding out how many people of color are in the Peace Corps. And of us, we were three Latinos. Actually, four Latinos, if you count Norma and Norma was from Puerto Rico. And Norma didn't speak English. So Norma had a whole different challenge, which we tried to help her address in that beginning and then the three months of training that we later did, because all the training was structured in English and she couldn't do it. So we had that week of training, and again it was this, it was once again beginning to find our way because as Latinos we spoke, most of us were bilingual. Only one of us wasn't. And, you know, the first few weeks I understand it, they're like, you know, teaching you basic Spanish. I'm like, I taught Spanish. Why am I being taught Spanish?\n\nSo we expressed these concerns. But since they're outside consultants doing the training because everything gets bid out, it was this group Arawak, and they didn't know what to do with us. And when we got to Tegucigalpa, and we got to Tegucigalpa, we were all placed in this town outside of Tegucigalpa, a wonderful, idyllic village called Santa Lucia, which, um, at the time because Peace Corps is now pulled out of Honduras. But at the time, part of its economy was built around Peace Corps training, because all these families hosted these volunteers and it was extra money and extra lots of things. So, you know, again, I think it was pretty typical. We all went through the how do we adjust not to living in Honduras, but how do we adjust to living in this kind of weirdly structured society where we were actually the paid wards of these host families who were wonderful people, but were more interested in knowing about us and the United States than actually teaching us anything about what they did in Honduras or how their culture worked.\n\nBecause they're not trained professionals. They're not trained nurse or teachers. They're just people who live. And, you know, and they were given all these rules of what you should do rather than just saying, you know, feed them, let them live in your town, you know? And that was part of, again, probably the trainers' problem. The training site, which was right there and walking distance, was for us a bit of a joke. You know, how to do basic gardening. I mean, I think at the time it was still, you know, very unstructured of how training was set up beyond language. It was really high intensity language training. So they didn't know what to do with those of us who already spoke the language. So we kept, they said, well, you should take the courses because there's different words in Honduran. I'm like, I know there's different words in Honduras and there's going to be different dialogs and different accents and curse words. But we're going to learn those pretty quick, you know.\n\nIf anything, if you want us to learn how this culture is different, let us live in the culture. So different people, as we did when we were minorities in university, responded in different ways. Some people just said, oh, just going to do the training and just go with it and not rock the boat. Others protested and didn't go to any training. I took a middle ground and I said, set up an internship for me. You say you're going to have me work in mental health. That's fine. I have no background in mental health outside of having done poetry workshops and doing legal work with prisoners in a prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and doing, I mean, my background is community development and teaching non-formal education. But you want me to do mental health work? Okay, I'm not a trained psychologist. That is not my major, but we will give it a try.\n\nSo what they did was they placed me to work in a community center in Comayaguela, which is the sister city to Tegucigalpa. And it's where you see the shantytowns and everyone living on the mud stacks and in, and God bless them, because I really liked the Peace Corps office itself. And these were the trainers I didn't like. But the Peace Corps office, once they figured out. They got me a placement. They talked to the minister of National Mental Health, who I got to meet and ended up being a mentor for me during the time I was there actually, from afar. I forget his name right now, but very nice man. He actually, part of mental health was they did all the film gradings for, uh, for all the American films that came through. They did, they did the grading and the censoring of what needed to be censored." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:13:32", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:13:33", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so he would always share those stories with me. So I was in Las Crucitas Medical Center and it was great because I really got, over the course of a month and a half, a precursor to what my experience would be out at the site I would eventually go at. And that was more valuable than any training that could have been given to me. And also because I got my first counterpart, which was the Minister of National Health, who I would speak with every now and then and say, this is happening. And look, what am I going to do in a month and a half? Learn how their health system works. And that's what I did. I learned all the politics of the health center itself, how the union worked, which was, um, what was the union? SITRAMEDHYS. And I can't tell you what the acronym stands for anymore. Sindicato Union, yeah, probably the Union of Medical Workers of the System of Honduras. Um, how the different departments worked in that health center.\n\nSo I got to understand that mental health didn't really exist. There was a psychologist assigned to each region and each region had multiple health centers. And so the psychologists were being assigned mental health workers to go and do projects which mostly revolved around education, around drugs and drug prevention, and epilepsy, which had, which was considered still, unfortunately, a mental health issue, even though it's a totally a physical issue." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:14:58", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:15:00", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So the psychologist of that health center, because that health center was big enough to have a psychologist and that was her base, she was kind enough to talk with me and basically explain to me, this are the problems you're going to have as an American when you go and work in your health center. They're going to think you're CIA. They're going to think that you're paid a lot of money. No one is going to trust you. They're going to trust you less because you speak fluent Spanish. And they're going to trust you less because your Spanish accent is a weird accent for them. So that was the best training I could get, really understanding. And again, this is what the training should have been about, not how do I get along and cultural training about the culture, but as a professional going into a professional environment in a country. My job wasn't one structured where it was necessarily, oh, I'm, you know, the quaint guy in sneakers in a village building latrines.\n\nInitially I'm going to be, even if I'm dressed in khakis and a polo shirt, I'm going to be viewed as a professional with a license, with a licenciatura, which is a college degree, which has this pecking level of respect in this culture, which, whether you like it or not, you got it. And all the machismo and the mix with that. She was very, I mean, this was a woman struggling, one of the first psychologists, and I got assigned to the other one. I'll tell about her in a second. And so what she had to deal with day and day just for people to give her respect are the same things that we're seeing now and the Me Too movement has really highlighted. You know, getting paid half of what other male psychologists got. But also understanding, her telling me, you're unconsciously, and she was right, not even going to realize all the privileges you have as a man in our society and as a foreign man in society. So to use a." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:16:54", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And a college degree yet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:16:55", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I mean, to use a term coined, not coined by me, but coined by my former law professor at Columbia University later, when I went to Columbia University for law school, Kimberlé Crenshaw. It's the intersectionality of race, gender, class. On top of that, foreign country power, which, whether you like it or not, you're part of it. And look, Sargent Shriver did a smart move in not putting Peace Corps in the embassy and in AID, which were the first things, and having its own separate office, even though it was a big budget drain. I get that. But it made all the difference. And it made all the difference in a time in '87 to '90, during the Contra wars, when people just assumed I was in Honduras as a spy because they didn't understand how CIA worked. And, you know, as I explained to people, I'm not probably going to be the spy. It's going to be somebody higher up than me and probably your colleagues, because that's kind of how intelligence works. You recruit local host people, but hey, I can't change your mind. I can only be here. Won't go into, I go down these rabbit holes. I apologize." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:17:57", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's alright." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:17:58", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The big issue, though, was coming to terms, identity issues that I had begun in college, which was not only who I was, but who I was as an American. And understanding that I was there, but a lot of people in the country weren't necessarily happy that I was there. And, you know, that would change on a local level, because after my three months of training, I was assigned pretty far. I was, at that time, it would have been a two day trip. It's now much faster because the highways have been fixed out to Gracias Lempira which is in western Honduras. So Gracias a Dios is the capital of the Department of Lempira, one of the, at the time it was 21 departments. I think there's like 27 now. They've split up some more. Population of Honduras at the time was four and a half, 4 million, four and a half million. Now it's like 9 million, uh, 30 years later.\n\nAnd I worked in this really western region where I had to take, I had to travel. It was 6 hours at the time to San Pedro Sula. I would spend the night to travel another full day to get to Lempira. Although I spent, actually I did a stopover in Santa Rosa because Santa Rosa, which at the time was 2 hours north of Lempira. And Honduras is about the size of Massachusetts, just to give you a concept. But it's all these mountains, so everything takes a little longer. So I went to Santa Rosa because that's where the regional psychologist who was going to manage me was from, and her name was Lorena Cordova. Brilliant woman. The other female psychiatrist, actually, not a psychologist, psychiatrist in Honduras who was assigned to the mental health department. And she was based in the center, the región número cinco, the region number five, area one. I was working in area two, I think. Yeah. Area two.\n\nAnd so I met with her, and pretty typical. She didn't know what to do with me. I mean, her thing was, here's a list of the trainings I want you to do around epilepsy and drug prevention at the health center. Make sure you go with a suit and tie. I'm like, I didn't have a tie, I had to go buy one. To work at the health center because that's the status of your job. And I was like, what do you mean status of my job? I went in thinking a whole different thing, but I quickly realized, you know, whatever I thought, I had to remove my preconceptions of what I should be because my job was to assist here. And I was assigned, and this is what I did like about the Peace Corps. I wasn't assigned to a Peace Corps office, I was assigned to work for the Ministry of Public Health. I was an extra employee of the Ministry of Public Health and Peace Corps paid me.\n\nAnd so I went to Gracias. There were a couple, there were volunteers in Gracias, so I had a place to stay for the first few days until I could figure out my own apartment situation. And it was, it was funny because I went to a site that had. There was a joke because, uh, it was, they called them the models, because it was seven thin, tall, beautiful women who were working in that region of Gracias. And then I popped up. I was the first man in a long time. So they, right away there were all these preconceptions about who I was. Not by the volunteers, but by, but by the locals. I spoke fluent Spanish. I was the first volunteer ever to go to this region that spoke fluent Spanish. And the fact that I was Cuban American even made them even more suspicious because from their perspective, you know, Cuba was a good thing.\n\nAnd I soon learned, and this is something very important that I actually have debates with my family about still, because I say, look, I understand if you compare Cuba to the United States, especially if liberty is your focus, you're going to say, why would you want to live in Cuba? But if you start working with the people that I worked with, which were poor, you know, I wouldn't even call them farmers. They were poor people who worked a plot of land to hopefully raise enough chickens with eggs or raise enough, you know, corn or beans that they could sell them and have enough money for their family to survive, um, on land that they probably didn't own anymore. It was leased to them. I mean, it was almost like a sharecropper situation. They had terrible schools. Malnutrition was horrible. You know, we want to talk about infant mortality rates, and there was no hope from their perspective for their children at all.\n\nSo if you tell that person your child will be healthy and live a long life. Your child is going to get a top-notch education and graduate from college. Your child is going to be employed and have a job. Your child will never worry about eating, um, eat much better than you do. Oh, but they're not going to have any rights to vote. What do you think they're going to say? They're going to say, take me to Cuba." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:22:55", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Feed me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:22:57", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You've got to put things in perspective. And now there's all sorts of things you can do to change that, you know, but that wasn't my job. And also, you know, I really had to, and it wasn't that I was a fan of what had happened in Cuba, because the issue is how do you provide so people have their basic needs and then also provide a civil society and a civic society that they can function in and flourish in, which still isn't happening in Honduras, unfortunately. Um.\n\nSo the funny story about my first day at the health center is, and I was told this by the, by the psychologist, you know, they're really hostile down there. So they're hostile to me. They were hostile to her because she was a woman with power, in a situation of power. She also wasn't from that region. She was a woman from southern Honduras. I mean, within countries, you have what we have here. You know, you're from the south, you're from the north. You know, we all have these." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:23:52", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tribalism." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:23:52", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, it's your localisms, I like to call them, because the bottom line is, when you have nothing, all you have is your localism. Um, so and I'm being dumped into an office in this health center that somebody else should have gotten through the union, etcetera, etcetera." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:24:11", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And these seven women that worked there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:24:13", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They did not work at the health center. They worked in Gracias, in the region. So two were assigned to the public schools. Actually, they all were in education, but they were in different schools across the region. It's just that Gracias was the base of where they were. And then when I arrived there, three of them were ending anyway. Just at one time there were seven." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:24:33", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:24:33", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then by the time I was there, it ended up being they all left actually. People cycle out. So I got, so I arrive at the health center. I went to the health center. The doctor, head of the health center, came out. Shook his hand, introduced himself. Dr. Pineda. He was a politician kind of doctor because you get those positions by appointment. Here is your office. We're so glad you're here. When will you start seeing patients? I'm not that kind of mental health person. Oh, we thought that you would, you know, you have a licenciatura. I'm like, yes, but my degree is actually in Spanish literature, English literature, and Latin American studies. But I have a lot of experience in non-formal education. Oh, that's nice. I thought you were a psychologist. Well, here is your office.\n\nSo I sat in my office for a week, tried to meet people. No one was really meeting me or talking to me. Got to know people in the town. Walked around. Because I had done community service work. So I knew you just, you're there, you're working. You go to work every day. You sit in your office. And it's a typical thing you see in the movies and stuff like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:25:43", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:25:45", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then on the seventh day, Dr. Hernandez walked into my office, the sub director of the health center, to sit me down and to berate me for one hour about what was my place there, gringo? Go home. Why are you here? Tell the CIA we don't need them. Um, I'm not speaking for Dr. Pineda, but you don't seem to add any value to us. You're just taking up time and resources. You don't speak any Spanish, and we don't have any time to deal with you. So I took that in. There were many ways I could have responded, but he was very, very hostile to me. So in the nicest, um, dirtiest Cuban words that I knew, I proceeded to berate him for half an hour in Spanish. With all due respect, after every single time I spoke an incorrect word, about how I had only arrived there to try to help. If he could guide me, I would be happy and thankful for his guidance because all I was there was to help.\n\nAnd if it turned out that I needed to leave and go work at a different department and a different part of the country, I would do that. But at this point in time, I'd not begin even an opportunity to see what were the needs of the center and if I could contribute in any way. And who was he, after Dr. Pineda had told me that I was welcome here, to tell me that I was unwelcome? I could smell alcohol on his breath. And why was he even spending his time wasting his time talking to me if he had patients waiting for him out the door? He was total silence. He goes, you speak Spanish? I said, is it obvious? Okay. Now, understand that Dr. Cordova had told me, look, you may have to show your machismo at some point, and whatever you do, as long as you give me a heads up afterwards, I will back you up. So I called her up right away. I said, look, this is what happened. This is what I did. She goes, you did the right thing. Maybe I wouldn't have cursed as much as you did, but you did the right thing. What are some of those Cuban words you used? Because they don't know them. Okay. I'll take care of it.\n\nI never saw Dr. Hernandez again in terms of meeting with him. He was always in the backdrop. It turned out he was actually a chronic alcoholic and there was a problem in the center with him. But, you know, um, perhaps it wasn't the best move to do at the time. But hey, you're on your own. You're 22. You perhaps do things because your brain isn't fully formed yet that you would not do when you're 54 like I am now. But I did what I did and I said, I'm just going to keep coming here. And what happened? Finally, you know, people come in, they introduce themselves. But as I heard from when I went back to, you know, talk at the bar or at the local comedor where I was eating with other people, well, you know, you're not part of the union, so they're not going to talk to you.\n\nMy counterpart, who wasn't my counterpart, appeared magically. His name was Wilfredo Aviles. He was working at the time with vectors, which for those of you who may not remember or don't know, vectors is everybody who goes and keeps diseases from passing on to other places in the community. Because you are building latrines, you were spraying, you were fixing the thatch roofs and pulling out all the things that will attract the mice and the bugs that pass diseases. And educating people about this. Wil pops in. He goes, gringo, habla espanol? I'm like, yeah, I speak it. I speak Spanish. You want to come with me? So I went with him, not knowing I was going for a two day trip to southern Lempira, but I had, I had always carried a backpack with all of the things you would need. And I began just shadowing him to see all they went, to round down the 150 villages and towns that they would visit, the 10,000 people that were part of this region.\n\nAnd I went everywhere with him and would assist. I was his assistant. I would take things, move things. And then I started seeing, you know, he would say, you know, we're doing all these, we have these people together. You know, we're doing all these workshops. Are there workshops you can do? I said, yeah, I could do workshops. So I did workshops on some topics which anybody else could have done in Honduras. It wasn't a complicated thing, but it allowed me to get to know these communities and see what the needs were. And after time, I'll tell later, Wil ended up going to different, uh, different. He got, he rose within the health center, but then he left the health center and I'll talk about that in a second. But he was my counterpart. And once I had a counterpart and he gave me the visto bueno, the okay, other people would talk to me, you know. Because while he was, he was a respected person who was in the union but was outside the union because he didn't really get involved in all the politics of the union. But he was very well respected and people knew he got stuff done.\n\nSo I got lucky that the guy who got stuff done said, come with me to see if you can get something done. And what did I discover traveling with him? I discovered that, and again, I had to keep in my mind that I'm a community mental health volunteer supposedly. So I did workshops on epilepsy, basically, you know, sharing with people what is epilepsy, which was good because a lot of these towns and villages had epileptics and didn't know what it was. And it wasn't from the devil and all these other religious things that were there. But it was really once I could get them to the health center with, so the nurse could take care of them and they'd get the Dilantin that they needed at the time, maybe phenobarbital if they happened to have it in health center. But most of the time all they had was Dilantin. That's a whole other issue of medicine.\n\nBut you know, I did some drug prevention workshops, but that was really ridiculous. I mean, there was drug trade going through there. But the biggest problem was, you know, some kids smoke pot. It really wasn't a big issue in this part of Honduras. In other parts of Honduras, it was a huge issue. Alcohol was the problem. But, you know, doing alcohol prevention outside of getting somebody to AA in a country that doesn't have anonymity is not going to work too well. And I'll be honest, I didn't have a lot of experience working with alcohol prevention, but what did I have experience with was in non-formal education and what did I discover over time? And it took about six months to figure this out. There were all these centers where people would congregate, the health center or the school. So there were true community centers and you had all of these teachers and nurses trying to do health education, but they had no idea how to do it.\n\nThe teachers were too formalized in how do I teach academics. The nurses and the health promoters were never trained in non-formal education techniques. I'm like, this I know. So what I ended up doing over time was building a network to train, and I trained about 10,000 people in how to deliver workshops." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:32:40", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:32:41", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Charlas. Which was, and at the beginning the health promotor, the psychologist was very upset with me because she was like, you're supposed to do this amount of workshops for me. And that's how I then get judged, because I've got you doing workshops. And I said, you're doing workshops in non-formal education techniques. That's not workshops in mental health. I said, but wouldn't you rather have 1,000 people doing workshops in your topic if I train them to do it? Oh, that's different. Let me see if I can talk to the director of the region to see if this is okay. Because there is a hierarchy which they don't teach you about when you go to these countries. Maybe they do now. You've got to tell somebody who's going to work in a hierarchy, this is how the hierarchy works.\n\nIt took me two years to figure out the hierarchy, which is why I asked to re-up, because after two years I had built goodwill with the people I needed to build goodwill with, which was the local teachers and their union. The local health workers and their union. And then they would say, give, bring us people with the content now, you know. So I love my experience in Peace Corps because they say toughest job you'll ever love. There was a joke in the Peace Corps, only job you'll ever have. Because no one ever thought in Honduras, how am I going to get employed after doing this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:34:07", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:34:08", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because until you came back, you didn't realize the prestige that a Peace Corps experience had at that time, which was when I came back, was the early nineties. I can't speak for now, although I still think it's a fantastic thing. Um. But while we made fun of the toughest job you'll ever love, I actually embrace it now because what I learned in Honduras was what am I good at and what do I love to do? And what I love to do is what I'm doing now. I'm the senior program officer at a very prestigious foundation in New York City. We distribute in New York City alone about, uh, what is it? $18 million a year in grants to what we consider to be 90 of the best nonprofits in the city. But I also provide technical assistance coaching to executive directors. I connect resources, and that's what I learned in the Peace Corps. I am really good at connecting resources and learning how a bureaucracy works and then helping people to maneuver that.\n\nAnd that makes sense. That's what I had to do in college as a person of color. That's what I had to do in the Peace Corps, both within the Peace Corps and in the bureaucracy of Honduras. And that's what life is. And if I've never had that one cause or the one thing that says, I'm going to be a teacher and teach kids all my life. I am dedicated to the environment and will kill myself, because I've been offered jobs as an executive director of different nonprofits. But I'm like, unless you love that cause. My cause is infrastructure. My cause is how systems work, how people work. And I discovered that in the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:35:50", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:35:51", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I'll give you a story to what I think the impact that ended up happening. It wasn't the impact that I thought I was going to have. You know, they always talk about leaving your legacy, and I certainly wanted to set it up so when I left Honduras, someone could take my job, which would exist at the health center, but that wasn't in my power. That's the bureaucracy of Honduras in determining is mental health an important thing and what kind of thing. And they ended up, yes, getting a psychologist at the health center, as they should have always had, but not doing what I was doing, because I was doing something different. I was doing true community development, which, again, I learned this from the counterpart that I had, from other volunteers who were around over time that I met, but mostly from other volunteers. Let me rephrase that, from other workers.\n\nSo I met all the people who were working for Catholic Charities, who were mostly Germans and Dutch people. But again, they had structured it like, this is your job and you're going to work there for five years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:36:54", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:36:54", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It wasn't a two year volunteer commitment. This is your job. And so that was my mindset. This is a job, Yancy. This isn't like, oh, go and get to see the world. No, this is a job you're working here and as long as you're here, you're going to be professional. And these people, they think you're bringing great knowledge. So if you're not bringing great knowledge, at least bring great knowledge about systems that you know and then bring the content. So that's what happened. Once I set up so the health workers could do their training, I didn't need to do that training, but I was able to help set up within the school system because there were more schools than health centers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:37:29", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:37:29", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I discovered at the time there were still normal schools. And this is important for another reason I'll talk about later. There were normal schools in Honduras, so you had to these students who graduated high school and they were teachers and they immediately were sent out to these villages to run one room classrooms, 12 grades. These kids, they were kids, when they were in their final year, were sent for three months to a local school, supposedly under the supervision of a teacher, to teach and run the school, in groups of 12. At most of these schools, the teacher would go on vacation for three months and they would leave poor kids who are being learned. Twelve juniors in high school are running your school. All dedicated, excited. They're supposed to be your teachers. I looked at this. In the region I was working at this normal school, there were 150 a year doing this. I'm like, these are my volunteers.\n\nI developed a program that was called Facilitadores Comunitarios de Salud Mental, Community Mental Health Facilitators, because I always had to be at mental health. We built a curriculum with the teachers in that normal school and with them. And I built a curriculum around how they would do this one week of the mental health week, which ended up becoming this kind of national thing, in their school with a whole curriculum of activities. But what did that allow? That allowed me to do for them what Peace Corps could not do for me, which was to give, uh, set up a structure where they actually got a pre three day training in what are you going to experience when you go out to become a school teacher? The same stuff I went through, because from the villages' perspective, these were rich kids who are coming from a high school imposed upon them. Same stuff. It's funny how humanity is the same everywhere.\n\nAnd so this one particular class of 118 was kind of my gestation class. And I would go out to visit them. They were in 30 different schools. I would visit them all once a week, ostensibly to see how their mental health week was going along. But over the three months it was more of, how are you doing? I was their counselor. How is it going? What issues are you having in terms of learning this? And then during that time, I'm like, these kids, they've got a lot of the content knowledge. They have no practical implementation knowledge. So I brought in the volunteer, the Peace Corps volunteers who are experts in education, because they did exist. And so it wasn't difficult for the locals who were like, local 2 hours away from me, to come and do it. But I brought some who are specialists and the mental health people like this specialist in, um, I don't have the words for it right now. IEPs. In deficiencies. So kids who are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:40:23", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Learning disabilities." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:40:23", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Learning disabilities, maybe dyslexia, maybe just other things. They were doing WISC testing. I said, we had hot springs in Gracias, natural hot springs. So it wasn't tough because Peace Corps volunteers had all these vacation days they never used, to say, hey, why don't you use your vacation and come and spend two weeks with us and do a workshop for my teachers? Because this had grown now from the students. Once the teachers saw what I was doing with the students, the union wanted me. So I ended up doing it for the thousand teachers in the region." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:40:53", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:40:54", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And again, my job was to set up just, this is how you do non- formal education technique. But when they wanted more content, I drew from other resources. I would bring in people from mental health, and this is what got me into trouble. So, uh, and I'll say her name, Ana de Ortiz, who was the Peace Corps ACP, are they called? The assistant? Okay, I had the supervisor, I forget what it was called. My supervisor was Angela and then it was Terry, who oversaw my sector. And then there was the education sector. So Ana Rosa came out to see me because, with Terry actually, because why was I working in schools? I was supposed to be working. And now if I don't know if it's still this way, but it used to be that half of the whatever their title was, these, half of the supervisors were U.S. based former Peace Corps volunteers, half were local Hondurans, which is great. I think they all should have been local Hondurans.\n\nAnd I actually knew a couple of them, but not her at that time that well. I got to know her very well. And she came out because her volunteers, that was the excuse, had been coming and working in schools that were not under my authority. And she knew the head of the Ministry of Education, who was concerned that I was doing so much work in schools. So she came out, she saw what I was doing. Terry said, do you have a problem with this? She couldn't say no, but she said, well, if he's going to work in the schools, he has to report to me too. I said, okay, I can fill out another report. That's not a big deal. I don't care about that. I respect that. And I told her, I apologized profusely. If I had known that I had to speak with you, I would have done it. But you guys all say, you know, I see you once every four months. You know, I'm out, way out there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:42:42", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Go out and do your stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:42:44", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Do your stuff. And my, and my supervisor in Santa Rosa is very happy. The director of the Santa Rosa is very happy. Okay. Well, Ana Rosa, and during this time you should know Honduras was in a very difficult time. The military was very, very, um, active. Special forces were active in Honduras. U.S. Special Forces were very active because we were on the border with El Salvador. So there was the El Salvadoran conflict happening. There were the refugee camps in Honduras from El Salvador and Guatemala. You had the contra war happening in the south. And there were, and I won't go into it today, but there were people coming through and out. I certainly met from all sides everybody. In fact, I met my counterpart who had been in Honduras running special forces, when I went to law school at Columbia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:43:35", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:43:36", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were in the same class. He actually won the social services scholarship to Columbia, which is called the Patino Fellowship, which I didn't know actually, it was, it was, they called it that was a military fellowship, which I had applied for. I didn't win this. But that's a whole other story. Um, so. So during this time we did have, um, there were people being disappeared. There was forced recruitment happening of local school, of locals, especially school, high school age kids. They would close the movie theaters during date night and raid it and bring kids out and drag them to the military." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:44:17", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:44:18", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I actually on a number of occasions, this is nowhere recorded anywhere, got into the trucks with my pass as a Peace Corps volunteer, bludgeoning it like it actually meant anything. And with my ID that I worked with the Ministry of Public Health and with Education to get my students out of being forcefully recruited, because they weren't supposed to be recruited if they were in school. And then also, there's a whole other story about how one of the, uh, the serious girlfriend that I had at the time, who I almost married but didn't marry and was dating, caught the eye of a local lieutenant of the, we had a military installation actually in the town at the, at the little prison that they had. And one that he got drunk and put a gun to my head because he wanted my girlfriend and I shouldn't be with her." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:45:10", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I was going to ask you if there was ever any time that you were afraid." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:45:14", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. That's when I, my first, you know, you think you're invincible until something like that happens. He put a gun to my head. Ta niente. And, uh, it was interesting. We were actually in the local priest, Father Rudy's, in his, his I guess the casa coral, the priest house, checking out his collection. He likes Bengal tigers, photos of Bengal tigers that he had, with another woman, Rosario, who recently passed away from cancer, unfortunately. But she was in another room, an adjoining room. We were there talking when the colonel jumps in, puts a gun to my head, literally, like I'm showing you now, about a foot away. And at the window is his, uh, his assistant with a machine gun in the window saying, hands up, we heard that there are rebels here from El Salvador.\n\nAnd in my mind, I could smell the breath of his alcohol like he is drunk. This all happened in a second. In my mind, it feels like still to this day, it feels like it was an hour, but it was literally a couple of seconds. Antonio's drunk. He's got a gun pointed to my head. Rudy is with me. He doesn't like Rudy. He thinks he's a rabble rouser. He wants to kill him too. I don't think he necessarily wants to kill me, but he wants to be with my girlfriend and he doesn't have problem killing me. Uh, it's been a good life. And somehow Rosario walked in at that moment, saw what was happening, and started saying, lieutenant, lieutenant. And like in his eye, the, something changed. You could see the flicker in his eye. He put the gun down and said, oh, I'm so sorry. I thought you were robbing the Father. Um, if Rosario wasn't there, I don't think I would be here today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:47:06", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. And Rosario was your girlfriend at the time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:47:08", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. She was just another person who was there because she was in this cultural society that we had formed, which also was threatening to them, although it still exists to this day. It was the Sociedad Cultural Lempira and it was about helping people, because part of mental health is self-esteem. So we built into the curriculum a whole thing about your Mayan heritage, because it was 500 years happening at that time, and the Lencan heritage of that area of Honduras more than the Mayan heritage, to be honest with you. The Lencans were workers for the Mayans. They did also amazing pottery and other stuff. Um. And maybe that's in the Peace Corps. I did, I do think I shared, I do think I shared that with my supervisor later, like a year later, because if I had told them that at that time, they would have pulled me out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:47:52", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:47:52", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I didn't say it. That was after I'd been re-upped though. But. But what was one weird thing about was Ana Rosa de Ortiz came to me one day and this, during this time there was this intelligence gathering happening. And she goes, I want you to write for me the names of all of the people that you train and all of the people who talk to them. And I said, I'll send you the list of the people who are trained. Why am I going to send you the people who talk to them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:48:19", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:48:20", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And she goes, well, I want the names of people in your cultural society. I'm like, no. We have a list of who the members are. It was very unusual. Now, she was married to Colonel Ortiz, so I don't know to what extent Colonel Ortiz. But again, that's what made me realize. I told people, look, I said, you know, I'm not involved in this stuff. And it's happening though, and you have to understand it's happening. So anyway, to make a long story and not to go down rabbit holes anymore, I ended up integrating myself into that society and becoming part of it. And that's the difference I was saying before. I don't know if I changed the lives of any of the kids who we did workshops with. Probably not. You know, like I say, Mr. Urban was a great science teacher and I remember a couple of classes he had because they made me think. They might say, oh, I remember that gringo and he made me think that day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:49:09", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:49:09", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But the people who changed were my close friends. So it was my counterpart who I'd become friends with. His life changed. Without realizing it, he started picking my brain. I know a lot about small business. He started picking my brain about small business. He left the health center and started a small business. He now has one of the largest Home Depot kind of organizations in that region." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:49:29", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:49:29", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because he was a smart guy. He had a college degree and he figured out. And he set up now scholarships for local students. He, he is the good employer. He is the good, uh, business for the local people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:49:44", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:49:44", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because he gives them, he doesn't gouge them on prices of things and all sorts of stuff. You know, he does community development like I always think, look, I live in the United States. I live in a capitalist society. Let's take advantage of the good of it, you know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:49:56", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. And you're still in contact with him?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:49:59", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, with his, with his children. Yeah. He's gotten very ill recently. So but, I mean, his sons were like my younger brothers. My youngest brother, when I left for the Peace Corps, he was five. And then I pop in and here's a family with a five, a seven, and an eight year old. So I've been at their weddings. But even the group, at the time in Honduras, there was a big thing. Your graduating class had a sponsor, a father, a godfather, a padrino, and these kids, God bless them. They, uh, four, four, went the traditional. We pay the, we ask the local politician to be our sponsor, pay for our big party, and we give him a ribbon. And they raised the money on their own and made me their sponsor and their godfather for the day. And then the irony of all that is that in that class of 114 was my future wife." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:50:56", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:50:57", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Now, I knew her at the time, but I reconnected with her ten years later. And I almost stayed in Honduras at that time, you should know. So I, when my time ended, my two years, I said, you know, the work is just beginning. You know, is there a possibility I can stay? And they said, yeah, you could apply and stay for a third year. We'll see if it's approved. It was approved and it had to be requested by the Honduran government. That was the issue at the time. I don't know if it's changed. Then the Honduran government requested that I stay for another year and then my counterparts told me, if you want to stay for another year, that's fine. But if you stay, it's because you're going to stay here. You're going to stay for another ten years. Because the work you've begun, you're only going to have an impact if you really stay more time. If you're still about you want to go and study more, you need to go do that now.\n\nAnd they were right. I wanted to go and continue further education. It wasn't to get my doctorate in literature. I've always had the social service bug in me, so it was to go to law school or something like that, and I did end up going to law school. I went to Columbia Law School and I did my master's at Columbia as well. And that set me up for life. But like I always say, you know, it was Bucknell that set me up for the Peace Corps and the Peace Corps that set me up for Columbia. And then Columbia set me up for where I am today. And that's the American dream. That's the American pipeline. That's the dream I think that we want for more people in our own country and we want for people in other countries, which was why I was, it always appealed to me about the Peace Corps. You know, look, I studied political science. I studied John Kenneth Galbraith, all those people who said, you know, look, the way the Peace Corps was structured wasn't necessarily the best way you do community development work.\n\nYou know, you don't say, oh look, there's a disease and we happen to have this vaccine. It cures it. No, you know. Oh, what do they need in Latin America? They need money and technical assistance. We got that. We can solve their problems. Doesn't work that way, as we know now, many years later. And, you know, and Galbraith wrote about it in his books and many other political scientists. But what always appealed to me about Peace Corps were the two other angles of it. I'm sharing who I am and who I am is a representation of my culture and my country. And for me, the United States is about diversity, it's waves of immigration. It's waves of tolerance, it's waves of struggling. We have a Constitution which is a, it's even though, you know, when it began, it had slavery embedded in it. Those guys were smart enough to know things will change. Slavery itself was a compromise within the Constitution. It ended up getting undone because the Constitution was a living, breathing, debatable, working document." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:53:36", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:53:37", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I still believe that I'm not a literalist like they are, uh, many other judges. I think it's really about where society moves us and takes us together. And that for me was what Peace Corps represented in the sharing of who I was, but more importantly in what I brought back. People have no idea where Honduras is still. People do not understand. I mean, it's timely, what's going on at the border. I can tell you, sure. I have no doubt in my mind that among now the thousands of people who are in the border, there is going to be, because they are in Mexico, a bunch of drug dealers and other bad people. They've infiltrated. Yeah, they always do. Sure, there's going to be. I actually met once a person from the Mossad in Honduras. There's everyone and their mother. But 99% of those people, they've walked barefoot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:54:29", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Over thousands of miles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:54:30", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Something you would not do with children because they think this is their only alternative, because in their country, there's not. And I know the president of Honduras. How do I know him? Because I dated his cousin. Actually, technically, it's his aunt because it's a generation removed. When I was in Honduras, I lived in the power center of power of Honduras without me realizing it. My letter of recommendation to Columbia Law School was the current president's half brother, Marco Augusto Hernandez. He was secretary of Congress at the time. Now, did I know when I was at the Rio Lempira on Semana Santa, which is Easter Week, with Luisa and with her, with, uh, with Juan Orlando Hernandez, or Joh like they call him, J-O-H, when we were swimming there that he's going to become the president of Honduras? No, but I should have known because they were grooming him for that.\n\nThey sent him here to get a college degree in New York State. He went back. They set him up in the post that his brother had had a secretary of Congress. He learned how all the politics work. And I won't go into the politics of Honduras, but basically they got another strongman of now, it's a bigger oligarchy in structure. And the people are leaving because people disappear in Honduras still. People get killed. A woman who spoke out against him and came out on Facebook has disappeared recently. It's sad. It happened when I was there. It continued to happen. It's still happening. That structure has not changed and that has a lot to do with us and not a lot to do with us. It has more to do with the people in power knowing how to work the international system. It's not just the United States. It's Japan. It is Holland. It is China. They're in power and they're going to stay in power." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:56:14", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your daily life like, like you had your own apartment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:56:18", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. And in the first six months, or I say first three months, I stayed with the volunteers. Then I stayed in this, because you don't know any better. I stayed in this, you know, basically you call it like a pension. It was like, you know, row apartments. I had a room with a window. It was like a jail cell, until finally I was able to get to know a family who said, oh, you know, our cousin has an extra room that you can rent. And that was, um, that was the, oh, gosh. I spoke with her the other day. Uh, with. No. No, that's not the Bolles family. Well it's, it's." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:57:00", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:57:00", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Anyway, my memory's not what it used to be with the names. And so then I had my own apartment and again it was like, I'm living in the town. I've got my own single apartment. But no, my, my day was, uh, much like my days now. I would set up so at least once a month I was a week in the office in the area, and then the other three weeks I was traveling around the department." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:57:24", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mean, how would you travel? Just on local transportation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:57:27", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I was work part. I mean, yes, if in the beginning. But I became part of the health center. So I just coordinated my trips with them. I tried never to go alone. It would be, I told people, I said, when you're doing non-formal education where you're bringing all these people together and you are not necessarily wasting their time, but you're taking up their time, you think they don't have things to do? They got kids to raise. They got water to walk to the river to go get. There's lots to do in the day. So for them to come and spend an hour with you, we're entertainment. So we structured, if we're going to go to the town, you know, I always call it the audit. You know, why can't auditors all go to the nonprofit during the same week? No, they go different times during the year, which is incredible time and effort resources." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:58:11", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:58:12", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I would go with vectors. I would combine with the early childhood people. I would combine with the maternal infant care. Find out what their schedule was, and then just put my schedule on top of theirs. So I'd go out in, at the time it was Toyotas or I'd go out with one other guy on a motorcycle. Learn how to drive a motorcycle, realize I'm really bad at it, and let somebody else drive the motorcycle. But no, we set up. It was a traveling carnival show. And then we actually, uh, once a year, which would start now in January, we did what I called the festival tour. In Honduras, in Lempira anyway, every village has its own festival, kind of like their own Mardi Gras or their own Carnival, and that's what they call it, carnavales or fiestas patronales. And it's all tied to the saints. In Lempira, it begins. So if Lempira is this piece of paper." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:59:07", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:59:07", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If Lempira is this, and I'll just use it as a square piece of paper, okay? In the northern area had Gracias, which was close to Santa Rosa. But then you have the southern area, which is all border with El Salvador and then with another poor province, Intibuca. So along here there were, there's 100 villages, but there were like about 20 key villages. And literally the dates would follow the villages of having these festivals where, what would happen? All, like in the old days, these traveling carnivals would go with them, the vendors would all go, the food vendors. We would just go with them. And so we would be able to structure in the daytime after, when people were hungover, but before they would start partying again, but they were hanging around, these workshops. Because schools were closed, so we could use the schools. And they still do it to this day. I helped to set up a system where it just saves everyone time. This is the day where we're coming." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "01:00:09", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "01:00:10", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And as part of that, that's how I got hooked up to medical brigades." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "01:00:14", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "01:00:15", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And what you do with medical brigades is you just try to make the best of them. Nothing is worse than a medical brigade without a purpose. So the medical brigades that are dentists that are going to areas of Honduras and they have schedules with local health centers and saying, we're coming here twice a year for this, to do work. They're fantastic. There is no dental care. People go to these, they call them dental mechanics, who destroy their teeth with instruments you don't want to know about. Paying for dentists is incredibly expensive like it is here. So to be able to say, you know, dentists are coming, that's a beautiful thing. Keep doing it. I just help them set up so they could connect with the people. And rather than set up their own system of intake, follow the medical, use the health center, use those people because you invalidate their purpose when you show up and take over their health center. People don't think that they actually are, are as good as you, or as it educated as you. So with dentists, that's fine. Those who go to do the special operations for mouth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "01:01:17", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "01:01:17", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's all good too. What is terrible? We're general practitioners, and I don't care if you're just secular, non-secular, faith based, if you are going to a village you've never been to before and you don't have a relationship with and you're just going to parachute in and we're going to bring medication and we're going to provide doctors for you. You're doing more damage. You are undoing the year of community development prevention that those people have been doing. You are getting people who are coming and they're going to walk for hours to you to basically tell you that their back hurts and you're giving them back pills for their back because you think. It's not helping. Their back is always going to hurt. Now, if you were there, you had a long-term relationship or you structure with the doctor, perhaps they would tell you, well, in addition to my back is hurting, I've got this problem. I've got that problem.\n\nBut most of these things, which is why the best tool I was ever given were all the books from the Hesperian Foundation, the Where There is No Doctor, Where There is No Dentist. They've developed how to help health workers learn, which when I discovered it, I incorporated it into my training stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "01:02:26", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "01:02:26", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That, and I still donate to them. She's still doing great work out there in California. That is the best tool because they were books I could leave with people in their language. They, the books are even structured with pictograms so those who weren't at that time as literate, because literacy has come a long way since then, thankfully. But the brigade. So I ended up joining these brigades to basically try to mitigate damage. I did four of them because they were in my region and my job was to try to talk to the leaders who had set up, but they didn't know where we're going. And so luckily this one group set up to structure it with the health center. So the health center wasn't going to do what I was going to do about pre- work and prep work and go out to the other health centers and say these people are coming. What's happened in the past with them? This is what's happened. Okay, let's do this. Let's do that. So we could at least have follow-up on the visits." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "01:03:18", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "01:03:19", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, again, something small, but it was about systems and that's why I ended up being the boring guy about systems and the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "01:03:26", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you take any vacations while you were there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "01:03:28", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I took. But my vacations, um, I knew I was going to do traveling in Latin America afterwards, so I didn't bother with that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "01:03:40", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "01:03:41", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And on weekends we could go to Guatemala if we wanted to. So that wasn't a big thing. So I got to see Tikal and all those things, you know. So, no, my vacations. I was forced to take a vacation back to the United States when I re-upped for a year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "01:03:52", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "01:03:53", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I came back to see my family. And then I didn't have to take vacations back to the U.S. because I came twice as a facilitator for Honduran business people with Partners for America. Was that what it was called? Partnership for America? It was also started with Peace Corps at the time. It no longer kind of exists, and its goal was the reverse Peace Corps. It was you bring people from a foreign country to the United States." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "01:04:17", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "01:04:17", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it got kind of moved into we bring business people for training here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "01:04:20", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "01:04:21", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I did reverse. I was a facilitator. We went to Mississippi and Vermont. It was done with another foundation. And so I was, I was loaned by the Peace Corps to them. So those were my trips back. And then my vacations, I just did local stuff. I went to La Ceiba, I went to the coast, but I tried to mix it with work. So I went to the northern coast of Honduras, and then I repaid the favor of all those people who'd come and done training for me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "01:04:46", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "01:04:46", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went and did stuff for them. And then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "01:04:49", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And were there a lot of other Peace Corps volunteers in your area, since there were so many in-country?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "01:04:55", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not when I, for a while I was the only one. And then they started sending in environment ones, which was good. So they sent this guy, Bruce Gunn, who was fantastic. He helped set up the national park structure there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "01:05:08", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "01:05:08", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In Honduras, which Peace Corps volunteers did in Costa Rica. So it's nice that they're doing it somewhere else. Um. But in that area, because Honduras already had some national parks that were very famous in. But Celaque, which is the highest point in Honduras, 2,849 meters. And it's a cloud forest. He really helped set up what is their visitor center and all this other stuff. Now, he made Ben Box's Central America travel book, I think he's still in it. Not his name may not be in it, but the center is there. A couple of others came to Gracias to work in the school system, but I have to be honest with you. And then this is, this is outside of my group of volunteers. This was a point of contention for other volunteers. I would go to some local reunions that would happen in Santa Rosa. We had a house there that we all chipped in and used because if you had to travel, it was good to spend the night there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "01:06:00", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "01:06:00", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I know people, many people, and this was my tension with my own fellow Americans. They thought I'd gone native because I spent more time in the country with the people that I worked with than with them, that I thought I was better than them. I didn't think I was better than them. I just, I was like, I don't have time to deal with you in country. You know, when first people first came, I introduced them to the town, I showed them around. But, you know, um, I wasn't there to train them. They had to have their own experience, you know, and many did. But we interacted if, a couple ended up dating people that I knew who were Honduran. So we had interactions. But there was some friction at times because, um, you know. I can't even remember this stuff now, it's so long ago. You know, I would go work in villages in a different way than other people would go work in villages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "01:06:53", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "01:06:53", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they would feel that I was badmouthing them or saying they did things wrong. And I didn't. I just did my thing and they did their thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "01:06:59", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "01:07:00", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Many thought that I got too involved with the local culture, and because of that, with the local politics. I never helped anyone run for an office. I never did that. But Honduras is a political place, so if you are doing things then, you know, and I worked the bureaucracy of the school system to do stuff. And so, you know, and perhaps so, you know? I think the, to talk about bureaucracy, but I guess was my, I'll call it my comeuppance. But I think it was a valuable lesson I learned. I had an ego. I was in my mid twenties. I helped establish this kind of structure. They did this for the first time in the health, the health centers across the country, they did, um, it was a contest of projects. Like, what is the best project in the country? And every health center, every health region could nominate a project.\n\nSo my psychologist, my supervisor came to me and said, Yancy, why don't we present your community facilitator project? I'm like, okay. I said, I like it. She goes. So I wrote, and I'm a Spanish literature major so I can write in Spanish. So I, it was very formal. It's kind of like the grants you write today. I answered 100 questions, laid out all the framework. It was an echo environmental framework that I used and all this other stuff. Laid it out. We had photos of everything that we did from turtle races, mental health day. It's a lot of activities. But I wrote it out. It was a wonderful rubric. Submitted it and then never heard anything back. And then the lady said, oh Yancy, it wasn't picked. Another project was picked. Well, it turned out the other project ended up winning on the national level. So it was released, what the project was.\n\nI kid you not. It was my framework, verbatim. But they had changed the words for another project in a different part of the region. Now you can imagine at that time, my ego, I was so upset. I was appalled, I was cheated. It was taken from me. I didn't get the recognition, you know. You know, it passed. On hindsight, and this happened really when I was in law school in reflection, you leave it. I was like, boy, you know, you were really stupid in your arrogance. What you wanted to happen happened. You set up a framework that was so good, it got co-opted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "01:09:27", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "01:09:28", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The people who, who, the project that, they did a good project. Okay. Their project was about teaching teachers, I'm sorry, teaching health workers about something else and they never really did your thing, but that's what got presented. It's a model that's been adopted by the country and is getting adopted by Central America. Not all of it, but portions of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "01:09:50", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "01:09:50", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm like, your name's nowhere but what you said you wanted to do, you got done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "01:09:55", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "01:09:55", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And now I'm very proud of that. But at the time I was really upset. And you know, again, it's life, we're humans, we make. I'm still crying about it, you know, I'm not crying about not winning it, but just how I stupidly reacted. I mean, I just became what everything I didn't want to be. But, you know, you're human. And that has really served me well. That was the biggest lesson that I have now taken it with me. You know, I do work now where I'm meeting, I'll go on site visits to see nonprofits in New York City. And, oh Yancy, you understand what's going on with poor people. I don't understand poor people. I'm not a poor person anymore. Yeah, I was poor growing up, but even poor growing up, I had a two family parent household. I wasn't a single kid or a foster care kid. Oh yeah, but you understand the health workers who work with them. Not anymore. I worked for legal aid. I did have clients where I did legal services work and met with them after law school, but I don't do that work anymore.\n\nOh, Yancy, but you work with their supervisors. You were a supervisor of people like that. Yeah, but I don't do that work anymore. The closest I can do now is I can talk to executive directors. They're dealing with back office infrastructure challenges. How do I manage people? What do I do? They need someone to talk to. They can call me and I can be an ear for them. You have to know where you are and your place. And this is good hierarchy. People need to learn things and share practices. And, you know, my, I fell into philanthropy just quickly, although it's because of Peace Corps. I tried doing the corporate law thing. I had loans to pay. I graduated law school with, you know, $100,000 in loans, which would be more now. So I tried being a corporate lawyer. I worked at two big law firms. I could do the work. It just wasn't for me. It wasn't my environment. Yes, because I was Latino struggling in a really, really white male environment.\n\nBut yes, I mean, it was tough to help rich Brazilians hide money in offshore companies in the Cayman Islands, or help get a bond deal through that I knew was going to put my state in debt for years, because we did bond and future interest rate bond swaps and all these other things. Intellectually, it was all fascinating, but it wasn't me, and it wasn't the kind of law that I thought I was going to practice. Then I did human rights law. I did asylum cases. I was a consultant. I couldn't pay the bills. And my dream job of working with a human rights organization, because there are not many of those jobs, popped up but not at that time to be able to do it. So I ended up doing going back to Columbia and for a year I was doing administration. I basically was the assistant director of the Center for Public Interest Law, helping shepherd Columbia Law School students into nonprofits, internships, setting up systems to guide them.\n\nAnd I ran the international placement program. We sent every year 50 students to go do a Peace Corps kind of thing in law in a foreign country, which I had done myself. I did that in Brazil in law school. I didn't mention it. In law school, I did three months, I extended it to five months actually, in Brazil doing civil rights work. And the same thing happened. I was assigned to work at the university where all the white Brazilians were. Of course, the definition of white in Brazil is different than the definition of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "01:13:21", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "01:13:22", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I was closer to that definition than anything else. And in the university they were doing all this thinking, but they weren't really doing all the work that was happening on the ground. I happened to bump into and meet by accident over coffee one day the head of one of the major civil rights organizations. Civil rights in terms of not doing protesting but actually doing civil rights cases. Defending the black Brazilian boy who was near the scene of a crime and got arrested because he was near the scene of a crime." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "01:13:51", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "01:13:51", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Stuff that still happens here, but not as, it was more frequent and still is more frequent in Brazil. And also the condition of the prisons. He was at Igualdades SOS Racismo and he himself was a man working for 20 militant Brazilian women. That was the nonprofit. I ended up working with him for eight months and living with him and his family, and they're still good friends to this day. I sent my daughter to go spend a month with, actually two months with them in Brazil, between high school and college. So, um, but it's Peace Corps all over again. It's sharing cultures and bringing back what you learn here. And so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "01:14:30", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So that's one of the ways that sort of Peace Corps is continuing to impact your life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "01:14:34", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, no, no, Peace Corps impacts everything that I do. And then it helped me make that choice of after I was doing law school administration, I'm like, this isn't for me. I went to work for a nonprofit. And then I discovered two things at the nonprofit. I did, I had 100 cases a day helping people get their food stamps, Social Security benefits. I did all the civil side stuff, domestic violence, simple divorces, all that stuff. I discovered two other things. I really love teaching and training people. I'm not really good at day-to-day. I never could have been a school teacher. I never could have been that health worker they wanted in Honduras who would have seen clients every day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "01:15:14", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "01:15:15", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's not me. And also I like the history of law. I like everything about law. I don't like doing law." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "01:15:21", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "01:15:22", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I like systems law, doing cases even though I do them well. And also, and this was the Peace Corps law school kind of coming together. I was working for the Passaic County Legal Aid Society. And part of my job was food stamp cases where people got denied their food stamps. Well, I learned very quickly, gosh, it took, it took sometimes up to a month for someone who had been cut off from food stamps to go to court with the administrative law judge, adjudicate it, and then get their food stamps back on. And I would discover that sometimes the reason that, most of the time, not sometimes, most of the time the reason they didn't get their food stamps was they forgot a piece of paper. They filled out something wrong. The caseworker made a mistake. The caseworker didn't like how the person talked to them that day and cut them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "01:16:12", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "01:16:13", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was an issue that could be literally resolved in a day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "01:16:15", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "01:16:16", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What would I discover if I went before the ALJ would always say, do you want to have a conference beforehand to see if you can settle this? And policy at our office was not to do that. What if I did that? In one month, I resolved 152 cases that would have taken. And people got their benefits on that day, because I knew the statutes back and forth. I went to Columbia Law School, for Christ's sake. I knew every single statute and how to manipulate them, and these people were just doing it wrong. And all I was telling the judge was, I'm just asking them to reinforce their policy. I never blamed it on the person or said they did a bad job. I learned that in the Peace Corps. I said, look, they just made a mistake and the policy just wasn't applied right to my client with AIDS who needs their food stamps. The judge was happy. This was fast. And the people, the clients were happy. They were not happy at my office. Our grant was tied to adjudications." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "01:17:09", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "01:17:09", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My salary was paid by my grant, that grant." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "01:17:12", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "01:17:12", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we didn't get reimbursed for all those 152 cases because I settled them. And that's when I realized, you know what, I'm a systems person, I've got to be somewhere where we're working on these systems or helping people who work on these systems and changing these practices. And I thought that was going to be going on higher up in Legal Service of New Jersey to policy. But that's when somebody I went to law school with at Columbia called me up and said, I'm at the Robin Hood Foundation. We're looking for a program officer. You have all of the criteria that we need. They wanted somebody who had on the ground national and domestic community development experience in the areas that I was working with at Passaic County Legal Aid Society, who had a corporate background, who had gone to an Ivy League school, that wasn't stated, but that was kind of understood, and who was, uh, spoke multiple languages. I also speak Portuguese fluently. I learned that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "01:18:12", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In Brazil?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "01:18:12", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Before and after. Again, I'm a, if you're a student of literature and of language, it's easy to pick up these other romance languages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "01:18:20", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Especially Spanish, or Brazil it's Portuguese. No?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "01:18:23", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "English. No, it's English to Brazilian. The big mistake people make is how things are written is what's important. Now you learn you, if you try, the people who learn Spanish can't understand Portuguese. The Portuguese understand Spanish. You know why? Because there's more, there's more sounds and consonants that exist in Portuguese that aren't used in Spanish. And if you just hear, if you're a Portuguese speaker and you hear Spanish, it sounds like a slow Portuguese. If you are a Spanish speaker hearing Portuguese, you can't make it. I'll just tell you one, one word that you would know. You've heard the last name Andrade, right? Andrade, Spanish. In Portugal they go Andrade. In Brazil, Andrade. It sounds Italian. If you look at it on a paper, they're spelled the same way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "01:19:07", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "01:19:08", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The same goes with how grammar works. Portuguese grammar is more complex, slightly more complex than Spanish grammar, and it's used differently. So in Portuguese. Um, okay. So in Spanish, no is no. So in Portuguese people say no, no, all the time. And in Spanish they don't understand what. In Portuguese, no is nao, N-A-O with the tilde. No, N-O, is the pulling together of two articles. In Spanish you have en la casa, en el car. In the house. In Portuguese, it's M-U. Well, it is house, so la casa. And Portuguese, em la casa. They combine the M and the la and they go na. So it's na casa. Na escritoire. You're in your desk. So when you're saying na in Portuguese, you're saying two articles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "01:20:11", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "01:20:12", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it's simple things that, you know that if you're a student of literature and you've studied the grammar and you can see the differences, then it's easy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "01:20:18", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Can I get back to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "01:20:20", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sorry." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "01:20:22", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you first came back to the United States." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "01:20:23", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "01:20:23", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was that like for you after three plus years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "01:20:26", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was culture shock. Huge culture shock. I was in a village with, it's different now because now there's all the phones and everything. But I didn't know what \"where's the beef\" meant. Because that happened when I was away. So I was culturally behind. My parents were frustrated with me because I learned how to speak Honduran Spanish, which is much slower than Cuban Spanish. I came back with a lot of machismo, unconscious things that I did, like not washing my plates. Not because I didn't want to, I washed my plates in Honduras. They wouldn't let me. So I'm sitting there. My grandmother is like, you think I'm going to wash that plate? And things like that. Law school was probably the best environment I could go into in the first three months. It was a distraction. I had to read 1,000 pages a night. So I just focused on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "01:21:15", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you went almost directly into law school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "01:21:16", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I literally walked off the plane and walked into a classroom the next day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "01:21:21", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "01:21:22", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't go to the law school orientation. Nothing like that. I walked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "01:21:24", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That would be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "01:21:25", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was fine. I was, I was high energy already. I was high energy coming back. The crash happened in February. When I came out of the, I had really high grades in law school and the first semester I could have gone, if I'd kept them up, to law review and I crashed, it all hit me. I hadn't processed my experience in Honduras for four years. I hadn't processed culture shock. I hadn't processed the differences of everything, the noise at the malls. I brought back a parasite with me which damaged my intestine. And so I weighed 119 pounds when I came back because I had caught this. I'd gotten sick with giardia before coming back, which was my bane of my existence there. And I got photos. I mean, I was pale. And then I just crashed and it was just too much, too much pressure, too much everything. My grades, I had a good year long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "01:22:25", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "GPA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "01:22:25", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's not a GPA in law. It's a whole different thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "01:22:26", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "01:22:27", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I certainly dropped enough second semester that I barely passed a couple of classes. I didn't make law review and I didn't care. I mean, I almost didn't go back to law school. I almost dropped out. You, again, I don't know how. It's funny. In a way, it is a grief thing because you are leaving this, if you had a good experience, this high. I also, um, I also. Oh, okay. So the other thing that happened to me in Honduras is that I did end up meeting somebody there who had a child, my daughter, but I did not marry her. So that was still in the back of my mind. And I didn't know I had a child when I left Honduras. I found out after I left Honduras. So I actually now, I've had a 30 whatever year, because I would go back to Honduras to see my daughter. I did not raise my oldest daughter. My oldest daughter was raised by her mother who married somebody else.\n\nAnd I did have a relationship with her, although she didn't find out that I was her father till she was 16. I was able to get her recognized. That was a whole other story of how I got her recognized and what we had to do. But Honduran recognized her as my daughter, because if you're born into the daughter of a matrimonial, Honduras doesn't matter the biological father, it's not considered. I actually had to get the biological father. That was a hard conversation. I'm sorry. The non-biological father to agree to not fight my request for custody of her. So Honduras would put her name, my name on her birth certificate. So then the U.S. Government would accept her legally as my daughter. And she is here now in Dallas, a U.S. citizen, and my two grandchildren." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "01:24:17", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "01:24:17", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I brought her over when she was 18 because there was no opportunities for her in Honduras. I paid for her to go to a private English speaking school. It wasn't that good though, so she didn't even learn English. But here she is. And she's set up in Dallas. Now, because I kept going back, that's when I reconnected in San Pedro Sula many years later with my current wife and with her daughter, who is not my biological daughter, but I adopted her and I've known her since she was born. And then, you know, I was involved with her mother since she was six. And when they finally came over, I was able to adopt her when she was 11. And she just graduated Fairleigh Dickinson University. So, uh, and she's working at the W in Hoboken and she loves tourism and hotel. That's her thing.\n\nSo, yes, Honduras had a big impact because I really looked at Honduras. Um, I didn't plan to have a daughter there out of, out of wedlock. But I did become part of that culture. And again, if I had known that I had left, had a daughter in Honduras, I probably would have stayed. I wouldn't have left. I would have done a different thing because family has always been primary for me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "01:25:26", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you find out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "01:25:31", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, I'll tell you later how I found out. It's a long, long story. But when I found out, it was, it was easy to confirm. It was easy to confirm because, well, you can't see my hair because I don't have any more. I had black hair and brown hair, but I was born with blond hair. And we have a side of our Cuban family that had blond hair. And in this Honduran family with a long line of how people look, there was this, uh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "01:25:58", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Blond." + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "01:25:58", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Blond and, uh, you know, and believe me, getting a daughter recognized in two different countries is, is, a bit of a challenge. But I learned how to work the bureaucracy. And by working I don't mean subverting it, I mean just how it works, getting what you need in front of the person that you need." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "01:26:16", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Finding a way to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "01:26:17", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And getting everything done legally and appropriately. But sometimes you've got to give it a little, a little grease to just get it moving because it just stalls sometimes, not because of anybody's fault. It's just a paper. It gets accidentally filed in the wrong place. It took two years for my wife and daughter. I married my, I did do everything you're supposed to do. I married my wife in Honduras because there was no way to bring her daughter with her here. She could have come here. But I wasn't going to have another child left behind. So I married in Honduras and I had her, and she should have come over in eight months. But paperwork got misfiled. It took two years to get them over and it actually took a contact I know knowing somebody at Homeland Security, Homeland, um, Office of Homeland Security to just look at the file, to find it, and say this should have been processed a year ago and processing it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "01:27:09", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "01:27:10", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, and I'm always thankful to those people who, again, if there had been a problem, you know, not going to tell you. But it wasn't a problem. It was just that it wasn't followed appropriately." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "01:27:19", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Is there anything else you want to say about Peace Corps or your experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "01:27:23", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I still think it's a valuable thing. I think we need it. I mean, the, if. I may not have been as active in the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Honduras, but I'm very active in all the things that have to do with educating people about what's going on in Central America in my daily life and when there are campaigns that pop up. Liberia wouldn't be Liberia today without returned Peace Corps volunteers. We've had Peace Corps volunteers now serve in all sorts of positions of government, and they bring just a perspective of we live in a big world and we need to understand our indirect impact that you may not think we're having, but everything that we do. When I was in Honduras and Clinton beat Bush, people in Honduras did not believe that Bush was going to cede power to Clinton. And that sounds funny. But, you know, in Honduras, that hasn't happened recently." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "01:28:20", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that was the big thing when Obama got elected, too, people couldn't believe that, A, somebody not from a rich political family had won." + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "01:28:29", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "01:28:29", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And B, that he would be allowed to take power." + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "01:28:32", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And we don't, you know, what's, what. Everyone identifies different things that make the secret sauce of the United States. Thinking as a lawyer, there's a couple of things that just don't exist in a lot of these countries. You know, we take for granted our judicial system because it's a system based on faith. People believe in their day in court. You're indoctrinated in this, not so much in school, in TV programs, since you grow up. You'll have your day in court. Yes, there are problems and excesses. This is why Black Lives Matter, these other things have come to challenge this. What does it mean to have a fair, independent judiciary and a country of laws? Life is life. Humans are humans. We're all going to have bias. But is there a way that you'll eventually have your day in court? We have retroactive justice. You're going to get arrested, but then you have to be proven innocent. In most countries in the world that doesn't happen. It's totally opposite. It's very rare. And so that we keep promoting this.\n\nAnd what does that, how does that happen? It happens because there's an independent judiciary. In Honduras, I'll use the example because I know. Those in power behind the scenes, which a lot of them are drug dealers, understand this faith, which is why they kill judges. They kill prosecutors. They kill anything that will allow a rule of law, which is rule of law, is a system of belief that the U.S. supported with structures that reinforce that belief that you do get fairness. It's not perfect, but there's a fairness to it. We need to keep that alive. That's why I'm scared about all the rhetoric. I am liberal. That's me. But I have friends who are conservative. But we can't have dialogue. We can't have discourse. Where are the days when Clinton and Dole would cut a deal? Nobody was happy. But we move forward as a country. The same goes with how law is done. It's never perfect, but we move forward because something is unjust and we don't get caught in rhetoric and we move together.\n\nIt's not evolution, it's just movement, but it's got to be a movement. And Peace Corps is about that. And if anything, I think it's valuable. I think we need to promote getting. The more people who are exposed to other things in other cultures, the more they can question their upbringing and then validate what makes sense and what doesn't. And not get caught in an echo chamber of cacophony, which reinforces antisemitism and all sorts of things that are happening now. I'm not Jewish, but that's what's on the news today. And I'm a recovering Catholic. I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore. I just can't accept the things that are going on in the Catholic Church and its structures. And it has to take a look at itself. And it seems like there's a pope that's trying to do this, but there are systems in place that I just, I can't accept patriarchy anymore. And it's not that I'm the biggest feminist, but just it's wrong. Things are wrong.\n\nBringing things to light is what Peace Corps is about, helping people expose. And if anything, I just, you know, wish that when, and maybe it's not when you're recruiting people, but when you're down there, it's helping people understand what your role is when you come back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "01:31:44", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "01:31:44", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There wasn't enough preparation about preparing for you when you come back. Here's what you should do. You should be sharing these stories, not just, hey, it's been 30 years, let's put some archives in. But you want to be a Peace Corps volunteer? Hear about the stories. And you see this written, you see this in the Peace Corps Facebook. Everyone has these experiences, because how can you not be changed by cultures when you're involved with them? And that's what makes, you know, and I'm really not all that different and there's no superiority. If there's any superiority, it's because of privilege. And privilege comes in many shapes, ways, and forms beyond race and color and beyond class. And it's understanding that makes us better and it's what we strive to do every day.\n\nI mean, people talk about being Christian or being, you know, other faiths or religions. It's being human. And if we want to survive, and this really takes me back to the early days of law school, I mean, you know, if we want to survive, what does it mean to be human? What are the basic things that you need and what do you deserve? You know, I'm still appalled that we don't guarantee, truly guarantee health care for children, you know, but let's debate it. Let's just not get stuck in a quagmire of nothing happens. Because when nothing happens, we don't progress as a country and it's hurting us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "01:33:00", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "01:33:01", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So that's, that's my soapbox." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "01:33:03", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "01:33:03", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it's all because the Peace Corps and Peace Corps just helped me fine tune and reflect because I tell people it's the greatest graduate education you could ever have. I went and got my master's of international affairs at the School of National Affairs at Columbia. The smartest people I've ever met. They were killing themselves to pay money to get the experience that I basically got for free. And I wish more people had that. I wish more people of color and Latinos had this. The proposition isn't presented to people about how this actually helped set you up for the future. So much of even going to college now is about it's a zero sum game of how much does it cost? Will I make money? No, this will set you up for life. Peace Corps is the American dream. You want it? Go back and do this.\n\nI mean, that's the biggest recruitment I try to do is when I'm in schools and I hear about that kid who's like they're interested in social services, or the college student who's looking at jobs and they don't see for that point in time. I mean, I had great corporate, I had great corporate experience. It just wasn't for me. But at that point in time, they're not ready to go to business. They want to do a social service thing. Peace Corps is a great option, and no one's presenting it to them because it's still viewed as a thing that privileged white kids do. And it's, that's not what it has to be. You know, um, you're going to have a culture shock no matter who you are because you're going to go to Bosnia or someplace else, you know, you're not going to Honduras right now. You're going someplace else. But that's the big thing. And then, you know, you're going to learn humility. And I think it's the biggest lesson we could all learn." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "01:34:34", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "01:34:35", + "speaker": "Yancy Garrido", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, sorry to spout off so long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "01:34:37", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, no, that's great. Thanks, Yancy. Let me turn this little sucker off here." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00012", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/AaronJW/aaronjw.htm", + "original_file_name": "AaronJW_1-18-00.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/AaronJW/AaronJW_1-18-00.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "John W. Aaron", + "location_date": "Houston, TX – 18 January 2000" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Kevin M. Rusnak" + ], + "respondents": [ + "John W. Aaron" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is January 18, 2000. This interview with John Aaron is being conducted at the Johnson Space Center for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Kevin Rusnak, assisted by Carol Butler and Rob Coyle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I could just do one of those \"in the beginning\" kind of things. I grew up in a very rural community, a ranching and farming background. I grew up in a large family. My mother was a minister. My dad was a cattle broker and farmer. I have seven sisters, and I was near the youngest in the family. Most of my sisters, as well as my parents, were tremendous examples of work ethics for me, because they were always older, they could always outdo me, and most of them went on to very professional careers and very successful careers. So the stage was kind of set that I grew up in that environment, would come to NASA eventually and work night and day on the programs, because to me it was just kind of like being on a farm and ranch, because that's basically all we did, was work.\\n\\n I went to college, again from a very small school, and when I'm talking about a small school, I'm talking about a very small school. There was nine people in my graduating high school class. I went to college and decided, almost with not much high school background, that I wanted a degree in physics and a degree in math, with the intent of becoming an educator, because most of my sisters were education people. They were teachers.\\n\\n I went to a small school, started off at a church school, Bethany Nazarene College around Oklahoma City area there for a year, and then went to school at Southwestern State down in Weatherford, Oklahoma. The interesting that was I became so enamored with math and physics, I never got around to taking my education courses, and when I got to about my junior or senior year, I forget exactly what, I could tell what was about to happen. I was going to have to go another year in school in order to get my education courses.\\n\\n And, of course, being a person of a very meager background, working my way through school and working summers on the farm and ranch to support myself, the next thing that happened to me was some people that had graduated from my physics class before me, primarily Richard Bates, who worked in the Shuttle program for a number of years, is now working over in SN [Johnson Space Center Earth Science and Solar System Exploration Division], put out the word that they were hiring people at NASA to work in the space program, which I didn't know much about, being from rural southwest Oklahoma, I didn't know much about in 1963 or whenever this was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you recall having heard about Sputnik and then the early days of the space race as a teenager in college?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I guess, looking back on it, I'm not exactly aware of how aware I was of that. I was not aware to the point that it invigorated me to come and work for NASA. I think I was so focused on what I was doing, trying to get out of school, and I had my career, I was going to be a teacher, I wanted to be a teacher and I thought, well, I can make enough money teaching to get into my real profession I wanted to be, which was to raise cattle, which is a very capital-intensive, long-horizon kind of thing, and I needed a way to support myself while I was raising cattle, building up a herd.\\n\\n Richard Bates sent us a note that they were hiring people at NASA just based on people's particular skills they were looking for, but also based on people's personal recommendations. So, on a fluke, I sent out a Form 57, I think it was at the time. I filled out one of those Form 57s, thinking, well, I might get an interview or something.\\n\\n And lo and behold, I didn't get an interview; the next thing I got was a telegram from Miss Kazmierski, I believe, who was the hiring person. I hope I'm saying that right. Mona Kazmierski, I believe was her name. A telegram and it was not an interview; it was a job offer for more money than a country boy had ever seen. I'll never forget what it was. It was 6,770 a year. And I thought—this is how kids think, you know, and I was a kid at the time. \"Well, you know, I'm broke. I'll go down there and do that a couple of years and then I'll come back and raise Herefords.\" That was my—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was the plan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was my plan. Of course, you can tell I never got back to raising Herefords, and it's probably a good thing. I would have probably starved to death in the meantime.\\n\\n So that's how I got to NASA, and as you can imagine, I came from that kind of a background, a very conservative rural background, and I showed up down here with another gentleman from my same college, and we reported in to the Stahl & Meyers building down there on Wayside, where Oshman's had a warehouse after that. We got there and it was in the summer, June, the air-condition was broke, and everybody was walking around with their ties off and almost their shirts off, and we walked in there with our black suits, you know. We were all dressed up in our real dark suits. The first thing the supervisor said to us, \"You guys are interesting-looking. You look like a couple of IBM salesmen.\" And, of course, we didn't know what that meant at the time.\\n\\n So it was a brand-new world. I mean, I walked around for days kind of in a fog because I didn't know exactly what all was going on. They were speaking a foreign language. They were speaking in acronyms I had never heard of. I mean, I thought, \"What have I got myself into? This is a different place.\"\\n\\n In fact, the thing that made the whole thing successful was that I got into a group. My first line supervisor at the time was Arnie [Arnold D.] Aldrich. I take that back. Ted. Ted. I lost his name. But my second was Arnie Aldrich. So I was blessed in that. When I first came to NASA, I had some very good mentors, I think who realized the background that some of us were from, certainly realized that what they were trying to do was totally brand new. There was no blueprint for how to do it. And so the thing that was really important to me, coming from that environment, was I had some very good mentors who looked out for me and we had a lot of Dutch uncle kind of talks and kind of steered me in my career and got me over the transition. So that's kind of how I got to NASA.\\n\\n The next thing that happened was, I was assigned to the Gemini program. The Mercury program had finished." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Starting off?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right off the bat, I got assigned to the Gemini program. We had not yet launched Gemini II, but we were trying to get ready. The organization I was in was the operations organization. I came into flight control division and went into the Gemini systems section.\\n\\n They were trying to prepare themselves for the Gemini program, to launch and operate the Gemini program, and I was trained to be a flight controller with the responsibility for what I call the utilities of the spacecraft, the power system, the life support system, the communication system, and so forth. They called me EECOM: electrical, environmental, communications officer. I was being trained as a remote site flight controller.\\n\\n In those days we didn't have the high-speed networks that we have and everything, so we deployed flight control teams around the world to view the spacecraft for six or ten minutes as it came overhead. Except for going to a remote site that was to participate in a big network simulations, called NS-1, which they called network simulation 1 for the Gemini program, or some people called it NONSUCH 1, but it was actually network simulation 1, except for going to Hawaii to participate in those activities, my management migrated through the Mission Control Center.\\n\\n So except for that one tour of Hawaii as a remote flight controller, I spent the rest of my time in Mission Control Center for the next ten years, starting off with the Gemini II launch, which the Mission Control function was controlled out of the Mission Control Center at KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida]. I guess it was called Canaveral in those days; it was on Cape Canaveral island. And then Gemini III and then Gemini IV and beyond, through the Skylab, I was the mission controller here in Houston.\\n\\n I pretty much was delegated to the launch team. We have very different kinds of teams. We used to have them color of teams in those days, white, green, gold, and so forth. But for some reason they stuck me with a launch team. I guess that's where they wanted me to be, so I pretty much specialized in the launch phase in terms of my flight control duties at Mission Control, but I worked on each of the manned flights from Gemini III through the end of Gemini XII, then picked up on Apollo.\\n\\n I had just transitioned over to the Apollo program as a flight controller when the fire happened, the AS-204 fire. In fact, I wasn't there the night the fire happened; we were conducting a test, as you know, in Florida. But the Mission Control Center here in Houston was monitoring. So I was the EECOM on duty when that happened here that night, and I don't think I'd been on the program but a week or two when that happened.\\n\\n So I was mission controller for the resulting—when we redesigned the command and service module and then Apollo 7 through the whole series of Apollo 17, and then picked up with Skylab. Skylab started in about the '72, '73 time frame, and also the Orbiter and Skylab program were starting development here. So Skylab, I was an EECOM, head of the EECOM section by then and trained the EECOMs for the Skylab mission, and that's where I made a transition in my thinking as to what I would do next in my career.\\n\\n I had worked by then in Mission Control, got a lot of—probably the best system experience I'd ever gotten because it turned out that my background in physics, which, from an engineering standpoint, gives you probably a more generalized background across a lot more subjects than if you specialize in a particular field of engineering, my duties in the Mission Control Center being all the subsystems that I mentioned, you know, power and environmental control and cryogenics and instrumentation and communications, required a diverse set of knowledge. The physics training that I had in school fit that well, plus it fit what I was really interested in at system-level kind of work. So that was a good ten years of experience.\\n\\n One thing I found in Skylab was, though, I tended to get a little bit complacent, because once we got that vehicle stabilized and got everything in operation, I began to lose interest in watching it go around the Earth, because I had all the EECOMs trained, and I went back over to the office and got some material, and I was sitting over in Mission Control Center reading about this new Orbiter we were going to build for the Space Shuttle program, and that's when I made the decision that, well, they'd transition me over and start working on the Orbiter.\\n\\n The interesting story about how I got involved in the Orbiter—and I'm giving you a very top-level overview here, and we can go back and dive into any of this—how I got involved with the Orbiter in the way that I did, the Orbiter was the next-generation vehicle that was going to be much more software-intensive than previous vehicles. On previous vehicles, the software concentrate was primarily focused in the GNC, the guidance, navigation, control subsystem. The rest of the vehicle control was done with traditional logic—relays and so forth. It wasn't under central software control.\\n\\n The Orbiter was a vehicle where the transition was to be made to a very software-intensive controlled vehicle that was beyond guidance and navigation. Since I had worked on the instrumentation, I'd developed ground monitoring techniques, because that was what you do if you're a ground controller, you're working on a lot of techniques about how to do monitoring of a spacecraft remotely, my management's theory was, \"Well, John's developed all these techniques for ground control monitoring of these vehicles, and the Space Shuttle Orbiter is supposed to be a more autonomous vehicle, we need to get him over in the software side of the development house in Orbiter\" so that I can incorporate the techniques that we worked out on what works on the ground.\\n\\n I went over for a six-month tour of duty to another directorate that was in charge of developing the Orbiter software and never came back. It turned out to be the next set of experience that was very important. One of the things you'll find about my background is, fortunately, I have been moved around enough to see the space program from a lot of different perspectives, because I spent ten years in operations, so I knew what the end result of a vehicle needs to be. Then I moved into the development side of the house, then got indoctrinated in development, how to build stuff, what's important, what's important aspects of project management, [unclear] control, all the projects and program aspects as opposed to just operations.\\n\\n Started off working there as kind of a subsystem manager of software in a particular area of systems monitoring, and progressed in responsibility in that organization to the point that I became the project manager for all the software. And we're talking about a very large effort. It was a GFE project, government-furnished equipment, so we had a major interface with the prime, called Rockwell at the time, because they were building all the Orbiter and the hardware. It turned out, in today's dollars, probably 300 or 400-million-dollar project.\\n\\n I wound up managing that and doing the software development. That took me through about '84. Very, very complex, risky development of flight software for the Space Shuttle Orbiter, in that it was the first fly-by-wire multi-flight computer voting system that had ever been flown before, where the voting was done strictly in software. Had five computers, and hardware-wise they were all identical, but the thing that made them unique was the way the software worked and the voting. There were a couple of years there in the throes of all that, that we weren't even sure that was possible to be done.\\n\\n In '84—and I'm still giving you the broad brush—in '84, I got a call from the center director here, Gerry [Gerald D.] Griffin, to come over, and he told me that I had been proposed as the deputy program manager for this new thing called Space Station. It had just been announced in President [Ronald] Reagan's address to Congress that January, and this was like in March.\\n\\n I thanked him for his consideration, but since it would have to be approved in headquarters by the administrator and so forth, it wasn't likely I'd be approved, so I went back to Building 30, kept working on software, didn't think much about it.\\n\\n Well, as it came to pass, he called me later, and I figured that was a consolation prize, and I wound up being the deputy program manager for Space Station, in the formative years of Space Station. I'm talking about a time frame of starting up Space Station program as a formal program in April of '84.\\n\\n We put together a 200-person skunk works here from over in the Nova building. I don't know whether you've run across that chapter in our history or not. But we had about a 200-person skunk works of people, civil service, from across the agency, and our job was to find the program both technically as well as what the configuration was, as well as to find out how we were going to manage the program, because it was going to be a multi-center endeavor involving the development efforts of four major centers to pull this program off.\\n\\n So I worked that problem as a deputy to Neil [B.] Hutchinson, who was named the program manager, from '84 through '86, and as a result of the Challenger accident, the agency made a decision to move the program management and program office to Reston, Virginia, at which time we packaged the program up and tied it off at the end of Phase B, we call it. We had program Phase A, B, and C. So at the end of Phase B, my team tied it off and handed it over to Reston.\\n\\n Then Aaron Cohen sent me off to JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California] to form a joint venture with JPL on a thing called a Mars sample return mission, so I spent some time building and merging the skills of the Johnson Space Center and the skills of JPL, because that was a very large program to return sample of the moon, and JPL knew they would need some extra help to do that. So I merged that relationship. Some aspects of those initial seeds that were sown are still growing today with respect to JSC's involvement in the exploration of Mars.\\n\\n That got me involved in the unmanned exploration side of the agency that I had never been associated with, and that was a very interesting challenge which led to, when Sally Ride—one of the criticisms of NASA, as part of the Challenger accident, one of the offshoots of that was the criticism that NASA didn't have a vision of where it was going long term. I think you probably know Sally Ride put together, in the '86, '87 time frame, an ad hoc team across the agency to plan what NASA should do longer range with their programs.\\n\\n That was accepted in principle by the agency and the supporters of the agency, so it was time, when Sally was to move on, to turn it into an ad hoc study approach and to make it a formal organizational structure within the agency. I got my arm twisted to go to headquarters for two years and work directly for Dr. [James C.] Fletcher, who was the NASA administrator at the time, to lead the agency's efforts for Mars and lunar exploration. Again, a very challenging assignment and put me in an environment I had never worked in before, which was the very top-level program planning, and building a constituency within both the agency as well as outside the agency, with Congress and the White House, as well as international partners potentially to put together this endeavor. I did that for a couple of years.\\n\\n Then with the change of administration and with Jim Fletcher retiring, I just made a decision to return to JSC here, and shortly became the manager of JSC's efforts in the Space Station program again. By then the Space Station program had gotten into the Phase C, had a major set of contractors, primarily which was McDonnell-Douglas [Corp.] on the West Coast at Huntington Beach. So it was like a 4-billion-dollar effort comprising some 60 percent of the total Space Station program, which was JSC's piece. So Aaron asked me to manage the JSC aspects of the program, and I did that from '89 to '93.\\n\\n In '93, the program got in cost overrun issues, and Senator [Robert C.] Krueger called for my resignation in '93. Of course, that's a long involved story all by itself. But from there I moved over to the engineering directorate, which I currently head up the engineering office here.\\n\\n Now, shortly after they called for my resignation and I had to be moved aside, that was like in January, first part of February, and also the administration made a decision to totally redo the Space Station, and so the whole redesign efforts happened from the February through the June time frame, where once again, having been taken off of Space Station in February, I found myself back on the redesign team, having a primary role in a thing called Option C. We had an Option A and Option B and Option C. Option C was the large single-launch vehicle. I don't know whether you're familiar with that concept or not.\\n\\n I worked that from February to June. I worked that locally here with, again, a skunk works kind of environment over in Building 17, and Chester [A.] Vaughn was in Crystal City [Washington, DC] and, of course, he was my counterpart in Crystal City. So it did not get selected in June, but we can talk about that for a whole other tape. Option A got selected, and then the next thing that happened was the administration and the agency made a decision to involve the Russians as an international partner in a major way. So I had a team of people here that continued on, on Option A, to refine the design of the Option A, to incorporate the Russians, so we had a major part of that activity here.\\n\\n Then in October of '93, the program office formally moved down here and established headquarters in Building 4, and that's the point at which I turned over and merged the skunk works personnel in with the program. Then I dropped back into being a support role, which is where I have been since '93 to today. My job within the directorate, the engineering directorate, is to integrate all the support that we have across our 700 or so engineers that support Space Shuttle and Space Station, integrate all those issues as they go forward.\\n\\n That's a fifteen-minute bird's-eye view of my career. I have been fortunate enough to move around a lot. All those moves were good, in retrospect. I approached each one of those moves with a standard amount of trepidation, but after having made each one of those moves, I found the job equally challenging on the other side, and I found that by moving around, I could bring a different and enriched perspective of how to view things, because there's lots of ways to view the space program or any enterprise that's large, and that proved to be beneficial to my career, my own personal satisfaction, and I think it probably was beneficial to NASA, because I've seen these programs from lots of different angles, a lot of different disciplines, and the view fits my mental psyche in terms of what I like to do and what I'm challenged by." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Certainly in your thirty-five years here, you've covered quite the spectrum of responsibilities." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I spent ten years in operations, ten years doing software development, probably ten years doing program or project management, two years doing Mars exploration, and almost ten years now doing systems engineering for the Johnson Space Center. So it's been a good career for me. I tell people that as a young person—I know my own kids, they tend to fret so much about getting started in their career, about trying to map out their career to the most infinite detail, and their horizon, you're always too close to your horizon to see everything, and I tell people, try to tell my own kids you've got to take one decision at a time. Don't try to get all the dominoes lined up for the next twenty years, because you can't predict what's going to happen.\\n\\n I believe that the key thing with NASA was, I had some early mentors who kind of looked out for me. I didn't have to plan my career. In fact, probably if I had planned my career, I'd have screwed it up. My philosophy was that I always tried to do a good job and I always just worried about that, and I didn't have to worry, fortunately enough, about what gains may or may not come as a result of doing that. I just always tried to do the right thing, do a good job, and then seemed like I got off to where the gains always came in the right direction or the degree that I needed them. I didn't have to worry about the gains; I just focused on doing a good job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The other things will take care of themselves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they came. Now, I know that was then and this is now, but I still believe that mentors are a very important aspect of your career growth and contributions, particularly at NASA.\\n\\n Now, where would you like to go next? That's the bird's-eye view." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I guess I'd like to start back at the beginning with NASA. When you mentioned showing up at the door in your dark suit and such, how did they train you to be a flight controller? How did you learn about the systems and procedures and that kind of thing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The training was a lot of self-instruction, classwork, some classwork, and a lot of OJT [on-the-job training]. I think a key aspect of particularly flight control in those days, the thing that they did, they put you in a situation, gave you some coaching, gave you some material to study and so forth, but it was kind of up to you. It was kind of trial by fire.\\n\\n Now, it's hard for me to remember back thirty-five years, but that's a thing that I remember. We spent a lot of time, just among ourselves, learning the subsystems, asking ourselves a lot of \"what if\" questions, because our job was to react and be able to handle the things that weren't supposed to happen. The things that were supposed to happen you could write a procedure for and say, \"If this happens, do this. If this happens, do this,\" the thing that our contribution was, to be there when things didn't necessarily happen the way you expect them.\\n\\n A key part that was important to me being successful in that environment, and I think I was successful, without blowing my horn too much, we had a number of major incidents that you may or may not be familiar with, for which I made a contribution. The Apollo 12 launch phase during the lightning strike, you probably know about that story. Apollo 13, you probably know about my contribution or what I thought I contributed there.\\n\\n Skylab was a program that we don't put in the Apollo 12 and Apollo 13 kind of class, but when I look back upon that, what happened to that vehicle right after it launched, and the fact that it went through a major structural unshucking, we were flying that thing by the seat of our pants and creativity for at least a month, because they left two teams on the console and managed what's going on in space problem, because that's a major problem to orchestrate, as well as took two teams off and planned how they were going to launch a command module and try to salvage the vehicle. So Skylab was a place where all the training and research I had done on all the space systems really made a difference.\\n\\n I think the thing I remember that really made a difference to me was, I was, just by my nature, I can't stand to be around anything that I don't know how it works. I'm always intrigued by knowing how it works or why it works. I will tend to dig into anything until I understand it. So it's that natural curiosity with why things work and how they work, coupled with the fact that that was kind of my job here in NASA when I first became a mission controller, caused me to be able to dig into something like the command and service module, the Gemini vehicle, and understand it top and bottom, and the cross-cutting effects.\\n\\n You know, complexity comes in not so much in terms of how you handle it, not so much with what you know about a single subsystem, but these spacecraft are highly integrated. What I mean by that, each subsystem depends on the other. It has to work as an integrated unit. So if you picture the depth and knowledge in a particular subsystem which you normally assign to engineers, like, \"You're going to be the power person,\" \"You're going to be the environment control person,\" \"You're going to be propulsion,\" and they go off and learn all they can about those subsystems, if you're not careful, they'll kind of get a silo view of that and not understand how when power goes down, what it does to the propulsion system and what happens to the guidance system, the propulsion system in there to honor the commands. It's the cross-cutting horizontal effects, is where the real intrigue comes in, because it's those interactions.\\n\\n I was just naturally curious. Natural curiosity is a thing that probably motivated me to go understand these vehicles to that level, so that when lightning strikes Apollo 12, I mean, we had never simulated that before. Our simulators were not even sophisticated enough that if we had, would it have necessarily produced the exact signature that I saw. So only just by your research and \"what if\" and contemplation and thinking about things and try to think of all, do you prepare yourself for that kind of event.\\n\\n And luck plays a part. I'll give you an example on Apollo 12. Apollo 12, when the lightning struck the vehicle and caused a major power outage, you would think, well, normally the parameters that are powered would go to zero and just kind of read zeroes. In fact, in the simulator that we were training to, they did read zero. If you cause the kind of power failure that we had during Apollo 12 launch, they read zero.\\n\\n The way luck played into that was, again, luck and curiosity. I happened to be on the third shift one night watching a test of the command module that they were performing at Kennedy, and due to the fact that the operators on the third shift at Kennedy were not all that—you know, they weren't the A Team—they had gotten themselves in a sequence where they dropped power on the vehicle. They dropped all the power on the vehicle to go on battery. These numbers of the way the system reacted to that, this pattern of numbers came up and I was intrigued by them, because they didn't go to zero. They were at 6.7, 12.3. I mean, some squirrelly kind of numbers.\\n\\n So I did aid the technicians at KSC to get the spacecraft reconfigured such that they were back in a safe condition and we didn’t have loss on one battery. But I drove home that night, thinking where did those squirrelly numbers come from. And the next morning I came in the office and I sat down with Dick Brown, who was a Rockwell [International]—it wasn't Rockwell then. It would be North American [Aviation, Inc.], wouldn't it? North American engineer that worked in our office. We sat down and went through all the circuitry to find out just how does this thing work. Why would those pattern of numbers have come up? Well, never thinking that when lightning struck the vehicle on Apollo 12, that exact pattern showed up. So it wasn't that I understood exactly what had happened, I recognized a pattern and how to get out of it.\\n\\n Now, it was not only luck that at a pad test I saw that, an inappropriate sequence was being executed in a pad test, it was also the luck that it would happen during the launch phase and that I was the flight controller. If you had had any other EECOM there, they didn't see that pattern. But it's digging in with that kind of curiosity of why things do what they do and how things interreact was the motivation for why I think I became a good flight controller." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have much of a chance to get your hands on the hardware particularly early on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did, but not to the extent that the flight controllers have today, an opportunity, because things were moving so fast, it was hard to get around and get all that hands-on hardware experience, because we're talking about programs it didn't take very long from start to finish.\\n\\n The other thing I was always curious about watching was not only just the technical aspects of systems and what makes them work and what makes designs work, I was fascinated by NASA. I was fascinated very early by how an organization could manage a program as big as these programs were, so I was always interested in how the dynamics of management worked, how people interact, what verbal communication skills worked and which didn't, which people were good at verbal communications, which were not.\\n\\n Of course, in a program the size of the Apollo program, you can't build anything bigger than what you can integrate. What I mean by that, the efforts. How do you get the efforts and designs of thousands of people to work together? I became very intrigued about how to interact with people and how to communicate with people within their own language. And I think that curiosity later paid off as I moved into program management.\\n\\n It certainly paid off when I made the transition from hardware subsystems being in mission control work to software development. I found that I could learn about the software world, which a lot of hardware subsystem people were not versed in, in the seventies. Since I came from that world, I could explain the software, what I was trying to do on the software side, in their language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That makes sense." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it was a natural bridging way to get with the hardware people that didn't necessarily understand software, talk their language, and from that, distill what the software needed to be. They got to where they would always come to me because I could talk to them in their language. And I think that had a lot to do with how to get the right software built to serve and manage their subsystem. I was just always curious about how people work, as well as subsystems work.\\n\\n I know someone pointed out to me one time, I was sitting in a meeting, when I sit in meetings, you know, you always go into a meeting early and maybe some other subject being presented that I had nothing to do with, and the person told me one time, \"You know, John, you listen just as intently to the subject that you knew that's totally out of your expertise, as you did to the discussion we had about your subject.\" That was interesting. But I'm always curious as to how other things work. So that set me up to be able to make these transitions from mission controller to a software developer, to a program manager, to all the various fields that I've worked in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It certainly has served you well. Let's go back to Gemini for a little bit. Let's talk about the first mission where you're at Hawaii on the tracking station. What was that experience like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I was at the Hawaii tracking station, of course, we were simulating a mission, but in terms of my training, it was just like a mission. I was the Gemini systems mission controller, and I think we had a canned set of tapes, you know. The way these simulations worked in those days, the tapes were cut in the simulation and they were canned, and they would play them with the tapes. So once the simulation was set, depending on what action you took, it didn't necessarily get taken. So it required quite a bit of improvising when you would ask the spacecraft to do something for you, to correct some anomaly, and, of course, that wasn't in the script. So it didn't necessarily happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not a lot of flexibility." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One of the things I remember. The thing I learned about in Hawaii was that we were not only trying to get ready to control the spacecraft and mission, but also we were in the shakedown cruise on the ground system. So I spent as much time learning about the ground system and how it works and what its idiosyncrasies are as I did being trained on the spacecraft. In fact, that's probably more what I learned.\\n\\n In addition to just the overall setting of what our mission was going to be about, a lot of what I learned uniquely with that Hawaii trip was the ground systems, because I became attuned very easily that unless you understood the ground systems, you had to be very careful interpreting what came from the spacecraft, because the ground system's idiosyncrasies and failure modes could make it look like you had also failures in the spacecraft which weren't real.\\n\\n One of my disciplines that I worked when I wasn't a mission controller was instrumentation and, of course, the ground system processing, the telemetry system and command systems, was something that I not only had to understand the spacecraft, but had to understand the design of the ground systems and drive those ground systems in terms of what kind of systems that we needed.\\n\\n I think the other thing that I got attuned to in that remote environment was being part of a small team. I mean, we basically stayed on top of the mountain, lived in a cabin up there in some state park that we read, and so with a dozen people living very close together day in and day out for about three weeks, that kind of tests your ability to do the job also, is to be in a very close environment, closed environment, with a small number of people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We've had other people tell us that there were worse locations than Hawaii to be assigned. On one of the ships, for instance." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, there were. There's stories after stories about—I probably had it cush compared to certainly the guys who pulled ship duty." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that just random chance, where they were assigned?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was random chance how I got assigned, at least on the first simulation, NS-1. I think it was random chance where I got assigned. Later on, I think certain crews, subcrews, got kind of set as to which manager was going to which location, and therefore they started kind of picking which team they wanted to take with them. But it was random.\\n\\n The thing that happened, of course, I then came back to Mission Control Center in Houston and spent the rest of my career there, so I never deployed after that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talking about coming back to Houston to work at the control center, what was your first mission there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "First mission I worked in Mission Control Center was Gemini IV, if my memory's right. We controlled Gemini II out of Florida, and I was there. Controlled Gemini III out of Florida with Houston, I believe, in a parallel mode, not active but parallel. In fact, I think they had a power failure right in the middle of the launch here in Houston. Do I remember that right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think so, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then Gemini IV we controlled strictly out of Houston, and I think I was the second shift EECOM on Gemini IV. Dick [Richard D.] Glover was the prime EECOM. He did the launch. I believe I was on second shift there. Gemini V through Gemini VII.\\n\\n Now, along about Gemini IX, we kind of pared it down, if I remember, to just a two-team operation, because we started flying short missions, and a lot of the people went off to work Apollo. I stayed on Gemini and went through Gemini XII. Of course, those were where we started doing the very active rendezvous missions, EVA [extravehicular activity]. That's when we rediscovered EVA was difficult. In Gemini IV, we got fooled. It's just a piece of cake. You just get outside.\\n\\n It was Gemini IX, I believe, before we did an EVA again, and that's when we found out, ah-oh, this is something you've got to pay a lot of attention to in terms of both the hardware subsystems support, cooling of the astronaut as well as the planning of the EVAs and the training of the EVAs as well as the vehicle accommodations to give you mobility as you crawl around in the vehicle. We learned all that the hard way on the Gemini program. And it was a good thing we learned that, because that certainly served us with some experience that we needed down the road.\\n\\n The thing I remember about the Gemini program, it was a fun program to work on because it was a small organization. That program was pretty much put together, based on my memory, of John [F.] Yardley and his team at McDonnell-Douglas in St. Louis, and Chuck [Charles W.] Mathews and his team here. It was a somewhat small, but very cohesive team, very special contractor-NASA relationship that was formed on that program. A very tight team.\\n\\n It was quite a transition to come from that environment out into a program that is much, much larger than that, called the Apollo program, which not only was a lot larger, but didn't have that kind of—the program wasn't small enough that two people could manage it. I always say that Gemini was the kind of program that was small enough that Chuck Mathews and John Yardley could manage it. Apollo was a different kind of program, much larger, much more diverse.\\n\\n The Apollo program, the thing that I worked on to get my real teeth cut on Apollo program, was Apollo 7, and that was with [R. Walter] Cunningham, [Donn F.] Eisele, and [Walter M.] Schirra [Jr.]. When we were flying Apollo 7, being a systems flight controller, it was kind of a systems flight controller's dream because it was about systems test. So we got to interact a lot in exactly what the flight plan was and how to do all these thermal tests and power tests, communications tests, and so forth. It was kind of a systems man's mission. Now, that didn't really merge in what Wally Schirra wanted to do, because he was a stick and rudder man, so that caused a little conflict in flight, as I remember.\\n\\n We had no idea when we were flying Apollo 7—at least I didn't and most of the team here—that there was also a plan to take Apollo 8 to the moon if we were successful. We were totally in the dark about that, because there was a small group off planning that. When they announced Apollo 8, I just couldn't believe it, but we were all over George [M. Low] to go try it, because we were young enough to try anything.\\n\\n To me, Apollo 8, if you just had to plot a graph of the pinnacle of the exciting part of my career, that was probably the peak, more so than the landing on Apollo 11. Now, that probably sounds funny to say that. Well, two reasons, I think. One, just the boldness of it, that it was announced over such a short interval. In my case, being a command and service module systems person, systems flight controller, it was the vehicle that I watched when I had the prime stage, and the fact that it was first and it was going to be done over Christmas, I mean, looking back on it, that was the pinnacle.\\n\\n The lunar landing, the actual landing on Apollo 11 ranks right up there, and I don't think I'm unique there. You ask people like me. I think they'd probably say Apollo 8 was kind of—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think in our project we've had at least as many people say the same thing as you, that Apollo 8 was more their highlight than Apollo 11 was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was very surprised on Apollo 8, because I had helped make some calls to correct a couple of anomalies with both the command module on the way out to the moon, and so I was very surprised when they came around the moon and started naming off craters and they named one after me. It bowled me over. I would have never had thought they were going to do that. So that was a big surprise." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then the other big surprise, of course, because we were all sitting there with our fingers crossed, because we were in lunar orbit and we couldn't wait to get out of lunar orbit, I remember that, but when the crew came around the horn from the far side of the moon and started reading from Genesis, to watch the reaction in the Mission Control Center, because here we are, you know, totally concentrating on our technical job, and for that to happen and then the onset, it just didn't occur to us, because none of us had any clues that was going to happen. And it took us a while to realize what was happening, the significance of that, and—wham!—it hit us. I mean, looking back on it, nothing could have been more perfect of a thing to have been said." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it not only impacted everyone in Washington, but it particularly impacted the mission controllers, because they were sitting there doing this highly technical jargon-oriented job, and then just the transition from that to a reading from Genesis, that was the big surprise.\\n\\n Apollo 8, of course, culminated a lot of things, because we had spent so much time redesigning the spacecraft, it seemed like a lot of time then. In today's world it doesn't seem much time at all, because what we do now in years we judged then in months. But we just completely redesigned the vehicle, had one test flight on Apollo 7, and then made the decision to go to the moon, and it was highly successful, not only the spacecraft, but the Saturn V. I mean, we forget sometimes the shaky start the Saturn V had. We had 501 and 502, and those were not anomaly-free missions. Had major anomalies with the boosters on those two unmanned flights. So it was a bold move." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But one that proved spectacularly successful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. It set the stage to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If we can pause here for a moment, it's four o'clock." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I've got some more time, but you may want to collect your thoughts and understand what you want to zoom in on, because we have not touched on particular facets of sort of my perspective of what makes things work at NASA and what doesn't work, and I can comment about that technically as well as management systems, and you may want to save that for another day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Again, depending on how much time you have, if you think it may take longer than what you have, you know we're more than happy to come back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One of the things I would think that you'd want to capture as part of the history, because a lot of the stuff we documented here about Apollo and the flight control business, Apollo 12 and Apollo 13, are well documented.\\n\\n The most challenging thing that I was involved in, that is probably not well documented, is the history of the early days of Space Station in terms of the decision process, both management and technical, about how you take an integrated vehicle like Space Station Freedom or any configuration of Space Station, and then go through the technical and political and management process of dividing it up and giving it to four centers to build the pieces of that is managed by one organization, whether or not it be Reston or at Lead Center like Houston, and then have each of those centers' contractors do the work and have it all come back together and be integrated into a single monolithic space ship without being a white elephant.\\n\\n The subset of history that I was in the middle of from early '84 through the '87 time frame, that I got reengaged in and when I came back here in '89, '90, that is something that NASA needs to develop a blueprint for, because as we go forward, we were blessed in the Apollo era in that we either could hand pretty much a holistic technical problem to a center and say, \"Do it,\" or you could divide and conquer.\\n\\n What I mean by divide and conquer, like we did in the Apollo program, that was integrated. You just kind of sawed the stages up in pieces and have everyone go solve their unique problem in their own unique way. It turned out to be something that from an integrations standpoint and a management standpoint, that's pretty efficient, because you could go take your problem and solve it and just worry about the interface.\\n\\n The down side of that particular way of doing business is you wind up developing unique hardware for common functions. An example was, everybody needs a computer system function. Well, it may wind up being a unique computer in every module, every vehicle, every stage. So how to divide programs up and get a very efficient design where you have common hardware doing common functions is something that I think I can truthfully say NASA has not mastered. In fact, I suspect it would be judged as making a pretty good mess out of it. That's probably something I'll be capturing in the history, whether it will be captured in this book or somebody else's book or somebody else’s archives. So that's the one thing that I worked on for a number of years and I never felt we totally successfully did it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's one advantage of our project, that we're not working towards a specific book or whatever like most people who do these types of interviews. We're looking to collect the reflections of people so that it gives you a little bit more flexibility in what you want to talk about and look back on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The interesting thing would be, because this is really just an archive, the interesting thing would be, because everybody sees the problem from their own perspective, and I'm as guilty of that, because we're all a product of our experience, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It would be interesting to interview Neil Hutchinson, who was the program manager at the time, interview Aaron Cohen, you're interviewing myself, Gerry Griffin, John [D.] Hodge, Phil Culbertson. I don't know whether you know Phil Culbertson or not. He was the associate administrator for Space Station when all this got started. And then try to piece the story together as to what was our decision process that caused all that to happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it's only through talking with the people that were involved that you really do get a sense of that decision process. In reading meeting minutes or whatever other documents doesn't really give you an idea of the true process behind these things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So the Space Station you see today still has heritage to some of those early decisions. Some were good and some were not so good. That's protracted its technical efficiency to weigh more, take more power than it probably should have as a monolithic design, and certainly cost more. Now, the reason that's important is because that's the way of the future. We're not going to return to the world of Gemini, where you write a one-page summary of a space ship and just have one organization monolithically build it. We're in the business of how to farm out work to international partners, probably anybody that will take it, right? Because I'm convinced going to Mars, no single country is probably going to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think a lot of people agree with you on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John W. Aaron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We have to come up with a way that we can divide up the work and not cause the integration overhead to bring it together to be more than the value of the work that you gave people to go do. Otherwise, you're in the law of diminishing returns. So we'll save that for another day. I'm going to be here for at least another six weeks, and maybe you can take what I've said here today and figure out which way you want to penetrate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "oral-history-at-the-national-archives-00019", + "metadata": { + "interviewee_name": "Howard Lowell", + "description": "Howard Lowell was the state archivist for Delaware and Oklahoma before coming to the National Archives in 2000 to be the Deputy Assistant Archivist for Records Services - Washington, DC. From 2007-2010, Lowell served as the agency's External Coordinator for Disaster Preparedness and Response. In his oral history, he discusses his time before coming to the National Archives, the agency’s records management program, and NARA’s disaster preparedness efforts.", + "file_url": "https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/howard-lowell-oral-history.docx.pdf", + "collection_url": "https://www.archives.gov/about/history/oral-history-at-the-national-archives", + "original_file_name": "howard-lowell-oral-history.docx.pdf", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04 22:30:16", + "publisher": "U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION", + "date": "May 14, 2020" + }, + "broad_source": "nara", + "collection": "oral_history_at_the_national_archives", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Howard Lowell" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hi, good afternoon. My name is Jennifer Johnson, and I am conducting an oral history interview for the National Archives and Records Administration today with Howard Lowell. Howard Lowell worked for the Archives from 2000 to 2010, and we're going to get started here with the interview. Howard, can we start with you providing a brief overview of your career at the National Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It basically was divided into two different parts. From 2000 to the end of 2007, I was the deputy assistant archivist for the Office of Record Services in Washington, which at that time was responsible for all the archives operations in Washington—the Center for Legislative Records, the National Archives exhibits program, the National Archives preservation program, the records management program in Washington, and the records center at Suitland. And all of those were my direct reports. The second half from late 2007 until I retired at the end of 2010, focused on being NARA's contact person on disaster response and recovery issues as it related to continuity of government at the federal level and also at the state and local levels. I was actually a full-time telecommuter and one of the first in NARA to have that experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Going back to even before NARA, I did see you have experience from several different jobs before joining NARA. What led you to the National Archives and how did that work help you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. I started actually in archives work at the Maine State Archives in the late 1960s in a program that had just been legislated. And so I was one of the first hires there, and many of our consultants actually worked for the National Archives. And so I, early on in my career, was exposed to people like Frank Evans and Frank Burke and Bert Rhodes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Later on, I spent about five years doing consultant work, mostly on funding from the NHPRC, including a project that looked at library and archives preservation needs in all the states west of the Mississippi. And from there, I spent about eight years as the state archivist and records administrator in Oklahoma and another 11 years in the state archives and records administrator in Delaware. And that brings me up to roughly my time of starting it at NARA. I think the relevant experience was being a state archivist. That was kind of the key experience I went to. I'm an archivist that's really never processed the collection. All of my experience has been on the administrative side of government archives programs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your impressions of the agency at the time that you started? You just mentioned some pretty significant names." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I always had a favorable impression of the National Archives. I think it was reinforced once I got there by the really thoughtful quality of the professionals who work there. This was where some of the cutting-edge technology was being discussed. I mean, back as late as the early 1970s in Maine, we were working with Frank Burke on SPINDEX issues, which was an early National Archives initiative in trying to control records using electronic means. And so I always had a pretty positive vision of the National Archives. And after my ten years there, that hasn't changed. The people there are exceptional." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What part of that job did you enjoy? What was the work? I mean, you mentioned being an archivist who didn't process collections. So what part of your days did you like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think overall it was the variety of the job and the challenges that we faced on a number of different levels, some of them positive challenges, some of them having to react to negative situations. I think it was kind of going to work and not really knowing what might happen that day. Certainly there were days when the surprises were not very happy. But that was part of the challenge of the job. I really like the challenge of it and being around really smart people who knew a lot more about, especially, the technology part than I did. I spent two years of that first seven years also running the National Records Management Program. In effect, I had two jobs for about two and a half years. I learned more about electronic records in that period because that was what we were trying to deal with. It was also the period of time that the records management program across the country was really separated between people who work for the regions—that was a separate office, the Office of Regional Records at that time—and people who worked in records management with headquarters agencies here in Washington. And that didn't make any sense to me. And so one of the things working with Mike Kurtz and Tom Mills and Lew Bellardo and John Carlin, who was the Archivist at that point, was starting to move towards, what I think is now in place is a team of record analysts across the country who work as a coordinated unit. That's the one of the accomplishments I'm actually proudest of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, wow. I think that's how it works today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. You know, it was the same issue which never made any sense to me, and I wasn't able to move on this one. But all of the records centers were under the regional program except the one in Suitland." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess I did not even ever think about where Suitland fit in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And basically we were one of the records centers in the system, except we that records center reported through a different chain of command. And David Weinberg, who still runs that program, I understand, you know, was very accommodating to that. But it didn't make any sense to me. And Suitland was always one of the problem areas. Maybe I would have been happy to give that to Mr. Weinberg." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. Well, I would think it would not help with continuity and things like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. There were physical facility issues at Suitland. Early on, we had a serious fire at Suitland, which damaged a lot of records, which we investigated but were not able to substantiate. But there were indications that it was an inside job. A disgruntled employee." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. You mentioned it. One of your questions down here below about the flood in 2006 at Archives I." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, about a week after that, we had a water incident at Suitland that damaged 15,000 cubic feet of records." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, my goodness." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it seemed like about once every six to eight months there was some kind of water leak. It was an old building then, and it was one of the challenging areas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I see. Well, speaking of, I just realized I'm tangentially connected to it because some of the records got loaned for an exhibit that is now in storage. Did you have any role in it? I know there were archival records brought from Iraq in 2003. I mean, they were in a flooded basement. Correct me if I'm wrong, but could you speak a little bit to that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We were contacted by the Department of Defense, about what ended up being called the Iraqi-Jewish Archives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were in a flooded basement in Saddam Hussein's headquarters. And we detailed three people to go to Iraq. Actually, two of our conservatives went into Iraq, Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler and Doris Hamburg, to oversee the removal of those records from that basement and the shipping of the records back to the United States for conservation, treatment, and preservation. Luckily I found some volunteers. Probably not one of the things I look forward to doing is sending, you know, people who work for me into a war zone. But that's what they did and that's what we did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, it's an amazing story, the records being saved and preserved. Are there any other events that you want to speak about before we move on to your duties in your second role as the Senior Advisor for Disaster Preparedness?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think the other role was working with a lot of other people at NARA, but being involved in the development of the Archives Research Catalog, the ARC catalog, being involved in development of ERA [Electronic Records Archives] and really moving NARA into the electronic records age both in how we dealt with our customer agencies and also how we dealt with our internal processes and procedures." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Huge shifts forward. Can you speak at all about your role during the ERA? I mean, what did it look like? Were you part of a huge team or was there only certain staff? Just explain a little bit how it worked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "NARA put together a staff of mostly senior officials, of which I was one, that spent about a year kind of scoping out what ERA would be, what it needed to do. Working with the contractor to do a concept of operations. It grew to be much more than just the preservation of electronic records. Some would say it had scope creep, a good Washington term, but it's also the way that we started to get a handle on controlling records scheduling as part of the system. If you think about records scheduling, you know, there's in the end, there's two dispositions. The records are either destroyed or transferred to the National Archives. And so it made some sense to build that kind of functionality into ERA as well. And there were a lot of baby steps to that. There's a system called AAD [Access to Archival Databases], I think it is. And that's if you go in, I think still today, if you went in and looked at the Vietnam casualty records, that's what you would be using. We used it initially working with the State Department on State Department cables, which were structured, but not as a database. And so that was one of the challenges as well. So there's lots of steps along the way until you get to ERA. All that was pretty interesting. And again, having some of the best thinkers in the country working on those issues." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's amazing. Did ARC kind of coincide or run parallel to that as well then I assume?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, they're in parallel. ARC was more of finding aid and collections control system. ERA was more a preservation system. But they were running in parallel silos, but had intersections at points. As we were the office of the National Archives that ran both the archives part of the program and the records management part of the program, we were involved in a lot of those intersections and trying to see where they were and how they relate to each other." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Would ERA have debuted before you switched to your different role around 2007?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think early iterations of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At that time, they had moved it to the off-site location out in West Virginia. And they moved ERA staff out there. And I'm unclear about the timing of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you kind of describe in your mind then, especially being part of such huge shifts in how records management was, how did the mission transform with electronic records being added on to it, or it still remains largely the same?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mission has always been the same: to determine, you know, what records need to be preserved, for how long, to protect rights and obligations, to hold us accountable as public officials, and to document the history of the United States. Mission in the National Archives really hasn't changed, probably at that level from its inception in 1934. So how we accomplished the mission changed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, back in the Carlin administration there was a brief statement of what the mission was that everybody was supposed to know and it was \"access to essential evidence.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I remember that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's what the National Archives did. I actually like that because people could you know, you could have that tattooed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I thought it was intuitive. And sometimes it's hard to describe what an archive does." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And it was something everybody could remember, you know, from the guy who's pulling records out there in the records center to the Archivist. You could say that. But there were some people who didn't like that. So hey, I'm glad I didn't get it tattooed anywhere." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was another employee down in Houston who had a tattoo of the NARA seal on his arm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh my gosh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I hope he's got his whole career in NARA because it would have been really tough to go to work for another agency." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, maybe a little awkward. Is there anything else you want to add about the years you were the deputy? Or I would like to hear from you about really kind of what your relationship looked like with other agencies while you were advising on disaster preparedness." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. NARA was always disaster preparedness. I was there during 9/11. Probably one of the worst workdays any of us in the public sector have had. Not to mention the country. As we worried about whether our staff in New York and our staff at the Pentagon were safe. And not knowing what was going to happen potentially in Washington, where we at the National Archives weren't on the A-list of targets, but we were on the B-list of targets. There was a lot of thinking at the National Archives after that about the continuity of our operations, at least. And so as one of the primary offices and the one responsible for all the records from the Declaration of Independence on down, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about issues of disaster response. But it really hit us with Katrina and Rita and I think the other one was Wilma. There were three hurricanes all at once, which, as you well know, devastated New Orleans and especially the Mississippi coast. All of a sudden, we were getting calls from people in Mississippi and New Orleans about whether we could help. And people were calling. My perception was the people in the impacted area down there, anybody they knew at the National Archives, they picked up the phone and called just to see, could we help? And we had no vehicles to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just to clarify, is this like other local archives or a records center?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Archivist of the United States got a call from somebody who apparently he knew who was the chief coroner in New Orleans." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, my gosh. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Asking if we could help him recover his records. And in fact, the National Archives got a big mission assignment at the end, and we sent our preservation people to New Orleans to help pack out records from the morgue in New Orleans Parish. I have some photographs of what it looked like down there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, wow. And do you remember any of the staff who were there or who were sent down there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Again, it was Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler who was the lead on that. And she was also one of the leads on the most interesting project that I was involved with, which was the conservation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I like to think I'm one of probably less than a hundred people who have ever seen both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence up close and personal outside of their cases." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's incredible." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They had been in for 50 years and the new encasement was supposed to last for another 50 years. And that was as close to a religious experience as one can have, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I can only imagine. So were you there when NARA started having a conversation that there needed to be some \"TLC\" given to the Declaration and Constitution and better cases? Or had that been a conversation that had been happening for a while?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's been happening, I think, since kind of the mid-1990s. They started to notice that things were starting to bubble in the glass, and so there were some concerns that there was changes being made in the encasements themselves. And so that suggested at some point that the documents needed to be taken out of their 1953 encasements and at least get re-encased. And while they were out of the encasements to have the conservators actually evaluate the documents and do what needed to be done from a preservation point of view and a conservation point of view. And if you haven't talked to Mary Lynn about these things, I think that would be a fascinating oral history. She was one of the few people to touch those documents in the past 50 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I agree. I just made a note to check. We have a master list of people who participated in the interviews, and so I made a note to check that because I think she would be someone, if we have not yet, that we should talk to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the other person who was kind of the early point person besides Mary Lynn was Hilary Kaplan, who is also on Doris Hamburg's preservation staff. We sent a number of the people to New Orleans, both from Washington and also from the Fort Worth Records Management Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Since New Orleans was in the Fort Worth region. And we also sent our staff from Atlanta to Mississippi since Mississippi was in the Atlanta region. And so we had NARA staff on the ground including the Archivist of the United States, who was Allen Weinstein by that time. And he really wanted to go and look. And I talked to my colleague down in Mississippi, who was the head of the Mississippi program. Finally, we had to convince the Archivist that we don't want you to come to Mississippi right now. We can't accommodate you. We're in the middle of a disaster response. Please don't come." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So Allen did defer for about a month, but he did go to Mississippi and he went to New Orleans. Let me tell the story at least a little bit here, because I think it's a relatively important story for the National Archives and it kind of change. My colleague Barbara Voss, who was the regional director of Denver, came to Washington and spent about two weeks trying to figure out how to respond to all the requests we were getting from people in Mississippi and Louisiana. When we sat down with FEMA, we found out that, in terms of the national response plan, which is the thing that drives FEMA response to any kind of disaster, both historical and governmental records were not in the plan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No kidding." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And therefore if it's not in the plan, we don't have to respond to it. And so part of what I did in the last three years at the National Archives was to work with FEMA. But in particular to work with the Department of Interior, which was responsible for that part of the national response plan that dealt with historical sites to incorporate records as a critical asset that would be subject to response and recovery in case of disasters." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, so you're saying that it wasn't until Katrina that there was a conversation about including records." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the National Infrastructure Protection Program and the National Response Plan, records were not considered. And if people talk about them at all, they talk about vital records, which they thought were births, deaths, and marriages. Because for a lot of people, that's what a vital record is, as opposed to an essential record that you need for the continuity of your operations. And so a lot of it was working within the bureaucracy to try to figure out how we raise the issue of records as an asset that needed to be recovered for the purposes of government continuity following a disaster. And the last time I checked, those are still all in the plans." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we just did a COOP [Continuity of Operations Planning] exercise maybe a week or two ago. Were there COOP exercises before this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, there were COOP exercises. There was an office in FEMA that was concerned with continuity of government, and that was our entrée. And a lot of it was also working with the Council of State Archivists, because the way disaster response is set up in the country, it's primarily the states who are who are initially responsible. And so the Council of State Archivists, which are the state archivists of all the 50 states plus some of the territories. We went together to FEMA, and they were able to write a grant to meet one of the Archivist’s requirements. Allen Weinstein apparently was on Air Force One with President Bush soon after Katrina. And Bush asked him, \"well, what's the status of records recovery programs in the states?\" And Allen said, \"I don't know, but in three months, I'll have a report to you that provides that information.\" I'm sitting in my office in College Park. And the phone rings, and the Archivist says, \"I just told the President in three months I'll have a report to him about the status of records disaster preparedness in each of the states. Make sure it happens.\" Okay. Lesson number one, never let the Archivist on Air Force One." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I went to the Council of State Archivists, which had a small staff. And we started talking to FEMA, and the result was that the Council got a small grant from FEMA, in the $20,000 range, to produce this report, which they did. And they came back and got about a $3 million grant from FEMA to provide disaster preparedness training for each of each of the 50 states. That's a partnership that the National Archives has really always had with state archives. But that's a very good example of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, yes, it is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So early 2007 I told my boss I was going to retire. As we worked through that, the Archivist came back to me with a counterproposal that if I was to look at the position, would I be interested in working in disaster preparedness, trying to get this into the national plan. And I could work in Maine instead of retiring. That sounded like a pretty good deal. The second part of that assignment was to still try to coordinate coalescing the records management staffs across the country and into one unit. I spent the last three years working basically only on two issues: disaster response and the Integrated Records Management Program. And that was probably the most rewarding part of the whole National Archives 10 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There's the old saying, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And I think in this business, that really is true. It's making the relationships. There's a disaster preparedness thing that says you don't want to be exchanging business cards as the fire department comes to put out your fire." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And FEMA and a lot of this thing is all about building relationships across the government. So when there is a disaster, you can pick up the phone and call somebody and they have some idea who you are. And I think the National Archives did that fairly well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's really great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Parts of the National Archives that were fun? I think working with our colleagues up in Ottawa at Library Archives Canada. I enjoyed that immensely. Having a chance early on to look at the script for National T reasure , because at that time they wanted to film part of that movie inside the National Archives. So we had to try and figure out where they could film and where they couldn’t film. And interestingly enough, once they did all of that and they looked at all the requirements to film in the building itself, they found it cheaper to rebuild the Rotunda of the National Archives on the soundstage in California. And if you look at the movie real carefully, it looks like the National Archives, the Rotunda, but there are some things that are different. You know, the whole premise of the movie: there was something on the back of the Declaration of Independence." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And there actually is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, right. Yes, I knew that. But what was it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "July Fourth. So in a sense it’s a file header. So when the document was rolled up, there was an indication about what the document was, July 4th, 1776." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. I see. Well, I will definitely look very closely next time. I had heard about the movie. They did end up doing some street shots, correct? Or do you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They did three shots outside and the opening sequence outside, but they ended up doing nothing inside the National Archives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But Nicolas Cage did come, and I was not there that day. My boss, Mike Kurtz, took him through the National Archives and said he was really just kind of a down-to-earth guy. And he went into the Rotunda and he spent a couple of hours just signing autographs for anybody who was there, who said, \"oh, that's Nicolas Cage!\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's so neat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I thought so too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm sure that becomes quite onerous after a while." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would think so. Although I suppose if you're a movie star, if you were someplace that nobody recognized you, that would be even worse." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I never thought about it like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So that was one of the fun things that happened at the National Archives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. There's so much you were a part of and you were involved in, I'm not even barely hitting the tip of the iceberg. I was going to shift focus to your time serving as commissioner for the NHPRC, but I don't want to move on if you still have other things to speak to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I actually don't have a lot to recall about that, and I didn't have any notes for that that I could go back and look at. I was on the Commission from the late nineties while I was still a state archivist in Delaware. And obviously had to resign from the Commission when I started working for NARA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure, of course. Got it. I think that's why you were recommended to me to ask about the archivist who did some work in the USVI [U.S. Virgin Islands], maybe because the NHPRC provided a grant for a year for that. But it was a little bit before your time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And maybe now that you said that, maybe the person to talk with would be Larry Hackman." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Larry Hackman." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yup." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Longtime state archivist in New York, longtime director of the Truman Library, out in your neck of the woods. But probably in that time, he was on the staff with Frank Burke at the NHPRC when that grant was done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't have contact information for him, but I know he's now living in Massachusetts, and I could get that to you if that would be useful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, that would be. Thank you. Well before. Real quick, did you, did you spend a lot of time while you were at NARA being involved with other professional organizations? Or did it help your role at NARA to have those organizations to look to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I mean, the work with the Council of State Archivists was critical to reacting both to the Katrina situation itself and then incorporating disaster preparedness into the NARA portfolio. After Katrina, we did two or three disaster response work with the state archives. Especially in the Midwest with the river flooding, which in Missouri, at least on the other side, happens quite frequently. There was some serious flooding probably in 2008, 2009, somewhere around there that we did some work with. We worked a little bit with the Hawaii State Archives and some people on the west coast when there was a typhoon in American Samoa. And actually the last kind of disaster response thing, which has nothing to do with the United States, that I worked on, was trying to support the archives recovery efforts in Haiti after the earthquake." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So. And that was working primarily through what is known as the Blue Shield and the International Council of Archives out of Paris. But overall trying to support the archives in Haiti. The Foundation of the National Archives actually provided some money to them to be able to buy supplies. It's always interesting to work with a foreign government. It made the job at NARA interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds very interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, and so you have mentioned a couple, but are there any other challenges or issues that you've faced? I can't imagine that for disaster preparedness, that things were easy on many days, but anything that you want to speak to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were responding to all these disasters, like 9/11 and stuff, but all the regular business was still going on. That kind of surprised me going back because these issues are so in your mind about your experience. But the day-to-day stuff continued." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. We're kind of wrapping up. Is there anything you want to add? Anecdotes? Words of wisdom? Any memories? I mean, like the Nicholas Cage one is kind of along the lines. I was thinking of anything like that that you want to share." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'll tell you another kind of fun story, if you like. The Archivist was supposed to go to meet with the National Archivists of the European countries and Canada. And for some reason, Allen couldn't do that. So he said to Mike Kurtz, Mike, you go in my place. And about a week before this happened, Mike came to me and said, I got a problem. I don't have a passport that's current." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I looked at him and said, I do. And so my last trip to Paris was to that meeting, and it was a very interesting meeting. One of the social things that we did there was that all the archivists from the European Union countries and the Commonwealth countries went to the ballet at the opera house in Paris." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "An amazing experience. One of our staff members on the records management staff had a sister in the State Department who was in Paris at that time. So I also got a tour of the American Embassy in Paris." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, what a trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So for every 15,000 boxes of records that we had to deal with on the not-too-good days, there were always a lot of good days at the National Archives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, well, that's really nice. If you don't have anything else to add, I think I'll conclude our interview. I do appreciate your time very much. Thank you for speaking with me today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Howard Lowell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was fun to kind of go back and revisit 10 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good to hear. Let me just stop the recording." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00754", + "metadata": { + "category": "Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project 1998 - 1999", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Shuttle-Mir/AleksandrovAP/aleksandrovap.htm", + "original_file_name": "AleksandrovAP_3-25-98.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Shuttle-Mir/AleksandrovAP/AleksandrovAP_3-25-98.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Aleksandr P. Aleksandrov", + "location_date": "Houston, TX – 25 March 1998" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Mark Davison", + "Rebecca Wright", + "Paul Rollins" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good morning. The first question I'd like to ask you is, what part of Russia are you originally from?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm a Muscovite born in Moscow, in Russia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where did you go to school and which university did you attend, and what were your areas of study?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I started my education in Moscow, in high school in Moscow, and then I graduated in a little town not far from Moscow, but the quality of education basically was the same in Moscow and that little town.\\n\\n After my service in the Russian Army, the Soviet Army, I went to the university. Now it's called university, but it used to be called the Technical Institute named after Bauman. It's a high technical institute in Moscow. I graduated from that university and I majored as an electrical engineer. To be more precise, spacecraft control systems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How long have you been with the Russian Space Program? When did you become a cosmonaut, and what was your first mission?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I worked on the Russian Space Program, the Russian space industry, since 1964. The first opportunity that I was trying to use to become a cosmonaut was back in 1967. So the things worked out in such a way that my first flight took place in 1983." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you explain the cosmonaut selection process, what the educational requirements or the work or flight experience requirements are?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the practice, the experience in the Russian Space Program is such that all the commanders of spacecrafts and/or space stations are former military pilots or current military pilots. Mission specialists--we call them onboard engineers--they are technical specialists. They are civilians.\\n\\n The requirements are basically the same to both categories of the cosmonauts. First is health. You have to have good health. You have to have the graduate degree specifically in the technical field, preferably. And the category which we call cosmonaut investigators or cosmonaut researchers, they also had to have the graduate degree in astronomy or biology or medicine or all the applicable fields. Of course, it also is preferred to have a person who had some experience in space program before he decides to join the Cosmonaut Corps. Of course, there is also an age limit. It's not that rigid, it's not that strict, but, of course, we prefer to hire younger people. They go through basic general training and then they are assigned certain plans, certain programs for certain missions. That's the process, how it goes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you. The selection process seems very similar to that of the U.S. astronaut program. Can I ask him, which of these categories did he fly as: engineer or the researcher?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, as a mission specialist. Yes, I flew those missions as what we call an onboard engineer or mission specialist, being a civilian person, so during those missions I represented the RSC [Rocket Space Corporation] Energia. It's not exactly mission specialist; it's onboard engineer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us about your flight to Mir, the 2B flight? How many days were you in orbit, and did you accomplish any space walks?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was in the second mission, second flight to the Space Station Mir. I've been up there for 160 days, but I didn't conduct any EVA [Extravehicular Activity] during that particular flight. I did conduct EVA. I did participate in EVA during Salyut 7 flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was the 1983 flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. During that EVA, we installed the solar arrays." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell me what areas of Mir operation are your management responsibilities focused on now?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Since I'm in charge of the office of the operations on Space Station Mir, part of my responsibility is the EVA. So what we do, we train our people on the different operations, on implementing different tasks. During the flight, from the Mission Control Center [MCC] in Moscow we control and monitor their activity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How does your operational experience from your cosmonaut days help you make key management decisions that concern the crew and the EVA training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'd like to add one more thing. We are in charge, in my office, not only of EVA; we do selection of cosmonauts. We also select them and design, if I may say so, the functionality of them in the orbit. We also design the flight simulators so that they would maintain their skills. Also we develop different means to support the activity of the crew members on board, using computers and other means. I hope I answered your questions, since being an astronaut, I was in orbit a few times and I understand the problems. I understand the challenges that they are facing, and thus I can make certain management decisions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us how you integrated the American astronauts into the crew training flow and what changes, if any, you had to make to the training plan to accommodate your new partners in space for the EVA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right now we can talk not only about the Mir, but the International Space Station, ISS. The first crew already started the training on the EVA and IVA [Intravehicular Activity] on the FGB [Functional Group Block]. The fact that [William McMichael] Shepherd, as the new commander of that first crew, was present there during the training, of course imposes certain changes, imposes certain corrections into our training plans and programs. We've learned a few lessons during our joint flight on Mir and during this training for the International Space Station. We took into consideration the way the training is organized at NASA, and we act accordingly. As you know, the American astronauts conducted the EVA on Mir, and they went through the training for those EVAs at our facility in Russia, and they've done it beautifully. Of course, we would even have achieved more results if we hadn't those language barriers, and those constraints imposed on us certain difficulties." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He anticipated my next question. On a different subject, did the additional capabilities of the Shuttle resupply and return help Mr. Aleksandrov's job of exchanging crew member, hardware, and other resources during the Phase One Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, of course. This experience in those joint flights on the program, Shuttle-Mir, Mir-NASA, has contributed a great deal to our success and our experience. Both sides are learning very useful lessons from this experience. And, of course, Shuttle bringing the astronauts on board Mir helped us with our traffic, like delivering power supply, and that program turned out to be beautiful and very useful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A follow-on question was the capability to bring Mir hardware back to his facility at Energia and what problems might have been experienced, and some failures. Was that helpful in redesigning equipment for the service module?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, absolutely. For example, the tools for the EVA, we have changed the design, changed those tools, and we took into consideration our experience of joint activity, joint work with NASA. You see, we have an experience of making special tools for the EVA, specific tools for the EVA, but that experience of joint activity, joint work with NASA, where you can have a set of standard tools, helped us a great deal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk to us about the Orlan suit, some of the capabilities, maybe the size limitation, the pressure, the amount of flexibility that the crew member has while he's wearing the suit?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would probably go too far ahead in answering this question about this particular thing and the comparison, probably, question. I can tell you, based on our experience, the Orlan and units are basically, as far as the capabilities are concerned, basically about the same. Orlan is a very reliable space suit, and the main thing, the comfort, actually, of this particular space suit is that it's almost like a refrigerator. You can open it and walk in there without anybody else's assistance. It's pretty simple to control from the panel, from the cosmonaut's panel.\\n\\n It has a few levels of protection against any off-nominal or contingency situations. It has redundant systems. It has a redundant pump, a water pump. It has a redundant vent. Also, in case of a contingency situation, if both systems fail, it can work in what we call injector's mode. So, in other words, it injects the oxygen into the space suit and the cosmonaut can continue working. It requires some modifications as far as the elbow hinges are concerned, to make it more flexible, which actually we've done, but as far as the capability is concerned, it's a very rigid and very reliable space suit. And the fact that our cosmonauts can work continuously up to seven hours in those space suits, it tells a lot about the capabilities of the unit.\\n\\n Now we're adopting a new schematic where the crew members can conduct EVA, can perform EVA both in Orlan and EMU [Extravehicular Mobility Unit], and they're being trained right now on both units. Why is size our concern? You're talking about the excess pressure is .4 atmosphere. We use oxygen and it weighs 80 kilograms without the cosmonaut in it. There are three types of dimensions and sizes for the gloves and for the unit itself, so you can adjust accordingly, according to the height of the cosmonaut. Each pair of gloves is changed for each EVA. We change the gloves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They're disposable?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As a souvenir, they bring it back to Earth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you get one for your EVA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I have two gloves, and some of them I just give as a gift to my friends. One I gave to Mr. Glushko. Back then he was the general designer of Energia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How much involvement do you or your group have in EVA training in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Russia? I'm not sure of the proper name for it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For each cosmonaut who's training to perform EVA, we have a standard program, standard plan. First, they learn, they study the space suit. That's about ten hours. Then they train in the pressure chambers and vacuum chambers, using the space suits. Then they are trained in the vacuum chambers. They train different procedures for air-lock procedures, and with scenarios of contingency situations. Then on the airplane with zero G [gravity], they also train cosmonauts for the flexibility to ingress or egress for the EVA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The Orlan suit or the air lock?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Both Orlan and air lock. Foot restraint training and, again, ingress and egress, to allow them to be more confident that in real life, in a real situation, they know what to do. And in parallel with that, they train in the higher lab. Then they conduct different what we call typical operations, translation along the difference paths in the station and bringing a crew member who's, for example, fainted and cannot perform the tasks, bring him inside. Opening hatches, bringing out the hardware, using the tools and things like that.\\n\\n Then only after that, they are trained to perform specific tasks for a specific mission. For example, bringing the solar arrays from the docking unit into a Kvant module. For each of those tasks, they conduct not many trainings, maybe two or three. Prior to that training, my office evaluates all those tests--how to achieve it, how to do it, how to perform it. Mr. Tsygankov is in charge of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Also we not only conduct those training and those evaluations especially in the hydro lab, we also do it on the special zero-G stands. Also in space suits in our office , where Mr. Tsygankov is in charge of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How much ground support do you supply to the suit or the MCC during the Mir crew's training, EVA maintenance?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "During the training, the personnel that participate in that-- [Brief interruption.] So in other words, it's like a reverse link between the personnel and the cosmonauts. They can participate in that operation of the Mission Control Center to understand what's going on. In other words, my people from my office, my personnel, explains to the MCC personnel of what will be going on and how and when.\\n\\n When MCC plans a mission and different activities during the mission, we become part of that planning process where we give them our input, and it becomes part of the time line for the cosmonauts. During the EVA, the shift flight director is sitting there at the MCC, and next to him our expert is sitting, just in case, who is aware of different tasks, who knows all the tasks for that particular EVA. He monitors and controls that EVA and, of course, prompting the crew what to do, what kind of operation, where, how. And we're there for the sole purpose in case of some situation arises that requires fast decision-making. We consult between ourselves, we make a decision and let the flight director know. For example, the last EVA, we were discussing of whether we should allow David Wolf to open the hatch for the crew to ingress, because he hadn't gone through that training. So we were discussing that and trying to make a decision, and we made a decision to okay this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The final question is, which one of the Mir onboard systems do you spend the most amount of time, if there is one specific one, or your EVA or maintenance operations? For example, life support system or computer system, for EVA, maybe solar arrays?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "First of all, you have to distinguish between IVA and EVA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is he responsible for both? I was mostly looking IVA, but I didn't know if that was his area of responsibility." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We have standard procedures for maintenance in that activity, as far as IVA is concerned, on a continuous basis during the mission. On the EVA, we do it from time to time. When we plan EVA, if it's planned EVA, sometimes you have to conduct some operations on maintenance, for example, tighten some bolts or things like that. For the EVA, actually there are three directions that we follow: scientific program, repair, and the maintenance. But maintenance is a matter of fact; we do it on an almost constant basis. I would say that 50 percent of EVA right now is used for the repair, for the last year.\\n\\n But of course we do not neglect the scientific program SPSR, that will be operated during the EVA. And, of course, a number of tasks, former tasks which we had performed, was the build-up of the station, so we used EVA to build up in different increments. For example, the April 1st EVA we're planning, we will conduct the solar array repair. The following EVA, we will replace the hardware and equipment.\\n\\n During IVA, we also do repair and maintenance, especially of this is thermal control system that we take care of. Then the composition of the gas system for controlling station atmosphere and the replacement of the electronic boards in the control system. So that's how we do it in general." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He's lived and participated in thirty years of space history. Would he share with us what the most significant time for him during that time period is?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "First of all, my first launch. You cannot compare it with anything in the world. Also another two events is the test of the first launcher Energia and the Buran, Space Shuttle Buran, which, in automatic mode, unmanned, performed two orbits and landed in a specific spot, without any glitch, without any problems. Those were the launchers Energia and the Space Shuttle Buran. Also another impression that affected me greatly besides [Yuri A.] Gagarin's first flight was the time when I was in the Mission Control Center ground station in Yevpatoria, the Crimea, the first docking of two Soyuz." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul Rollins", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you for all your insightful information. It's very helpful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome. It helps our future cooperation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell him we look forward to hearing soon of his next accomplishments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul Rollins", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How much sightseeing do you get to do here in the States?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Aleksandr Pavlovich Aleksandrov", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "L.A., Hollywood, D.C. Alaska and fishing." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00982", + "metadata": { + "category": "NACA OHP National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics 2005 - 2015", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NACA/presleyll.htm", + "original_file_name": "PresleyLL_7-16-14.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NACA/PresleyLL_7-16-14.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Headquarters NACA Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Leroy L. Presley", + "location_date": "Los Altos, California – 16 July 2014" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright", + "Sandra Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Leroy L. Presley" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is July 16, 2014. This oral history session is being conducted with Leroy “Roy” Presley at his home in Los Altos, California, as part of the NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] Oral History Project, sponsored by the NASA Headquarters History Office. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Sandra Johnson. We want to thank you for letting us come to your home today and spending the afternoon with you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it’s a little more pleasant here than Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very relaxing, sitting out in your side yard. If you would start today by sharing with us a little bit about your background and how that led to you becoming a member of NACA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was going to school at Oregon State [University, Corvallis]. I got a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering with, at that time, what was called an aeronautical option. Every year, we were always very fortunate to have a visit from a man from NACA. He would come up and talk to us. That guy���s name was Vic [Victor C.] Stevens. I think at that time, he was the Assistant Division Chief at Ames. We always enjoyed them, and then the whole group of us would take tours every year, and go down to Los Angeles [California] to a student convention. Vic would always invite us to come out to Ames and see what was going on, and usually go up to his house at the same time. That was just very familiar. After I finished my bachelor’s degree, I came down to Ames and worked one summer, and actually worked in what was then called the 6 x 6 [Foot Supersonic Wind Tunnel] Branch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What year was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That would have been 1955. At that time, the Korean War was going hot and heavy, so Ames volunteered to not let me quit. I got a 10-month leave of absence, which was sort of unique, and I went back to Oregon State and picked up a master’s degree. Then, I came back in 1956, full-time. It was convenient because Ames was, at that time, classified as an essential industry, so I could evade the draft by not quitting and coming back, which was very fortunate. I was an aeronautical engineer, so I was very interested in that kind of work.\\n\\n I started out then in the 6 x 6 Branch in ’56, and I think that lasted until about 1958, in that timeframe. At that time, NACA became NASA, I think. My dates may be a little off. They abolished the 6-Foot Branch, and they wanted to show more interest in space-type activities. All of us in the 6-Foot, my group leader—I was at that time working in what was called internal aerodynamics, primarily writing computer codes to try to solve for the flow in the jet engine inlets—and we all went over to various places. I had become interested in high-temperature gas dynamics associated with hypersonic or Mach 3, 3.5, 5 flight. They figured out that I could go into the Physics Branch.\\n\\n I went in at that time to what was called the Physics Branch, and there was a division, I think it was called the Vehicle Environment Division. Worked in the Vehicle Environment Division, I worked in that branch until about 1972-3-4. I can’t remember the exact date in that timeframe, in the fairly early ‘70s. Did work on high-temperature gas dynamics and developed some facilities. At that time, I was leading a small group that worked in the gas dynamics area. The Branch Chief was a man named Morrie [Morris W.] Rubesin, who was a really outstanding, outstanding individual. Sometime during that timeframe, we had a change of Center Directors. Harvey [Harry Julian] Allen, at that time, was a Center Director.\\n\\n He retired—after driving his old Duesenberg around Ames. He had this fantastic old Duesenberg car that he used to commute to Ames with, once in a while. Harvey lived in Palo Alto, would drive this thing down Bay Shore, top down, hair flowing back. Harvey was a real character. He retired, and then Hans Mark came in. Hans’ background was from the Lawrence Livermore [National] Lab [Laboratory, Livermore, California], University of California, so he was really a true physicist in his background, and moved Ames more into some aspects of space research.\\n\\n Sometime around 1980 or late ‘70s, Hans and, at that time, Al [Alvin] Seiff, who was the Division Chief of that division, locked horns. Hans RIFed [Reduction in Force] the whole division, and as you can see in my write-up there, that was my first RIF notice. We were all fired, RIFed, told we wouldn’t lose our jobs, but we had to go find a job at Ames. You take 100 engineers and say, “Go find a job at Ames,” and that just gets to be sort of a chaotic mess, high-stress mess, for a while. I ended up back in what then was called the Aerodynamics Division, and working back in internal aerodynamics, and again, doing more computational work with the newer, more advanced techniques in computer flows.\\n\\n I kept working in that area, with a couple of different branch chiefs. Vic [Victor L.] Peterson was the Branch Chief there for a while. He was a classmate of mine at Oregon State. He was promoted to a division chief, went up, left the division, another guy, Gary [T.] Chapman, came on board. Sometime around that time in the late ‘70s, I believe it was, there was sort of some kind of deal cut between Ames and NASA Headquarters [Washington, DC], that Ames, in fact, we had the helicopter research with the Army at Ames, is that Ames would become the Center for helicopter research in NASA, and again, I don’t know exactly how all that took place. The work that we were doing in internal aerodynamics was now considered to be secondary, so I got a second RIF letter and was able then to refocus on other work in the helicopter research.\\n\\n I did that, not really terribly actively, for a year or so. Then, sometime around early ‘80s, I think, sometime around in there, or late ‘70s/early ‘80s, Gary Chapman left and I was fortunate enough to get the Branch Chief job at then what was called the Aerodynamic Research Branch. It was still in the Aerodynamics Division, and I held that position for a couple, three years. At that time, Dick [Richard H.] Petersen, who was the Division Chief at that time, he left and went to be Assistant Director of Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia], and then ultimately became the Director of Langley Research Center.\\n\\n I was fortunate enough to get his job, and that’s when I became a division chief of then what was called the Aerodynamics Division. We had four branches in the division. A couple of them dealt with aerodynamic research, one for more fundamental aspects, one for more systems, whole airplane concepts. There was a Wind Tunnel Branch because we ran several of the wind tunnel programs at the same time, and several of the wind tunnels—mainly the higher speed wind tunnels at Ames. At that time, it was the 12-Foot [Pressure Wind Tunnel], 14-Foot [Transonic Wind Tunnel], and Unitary [Plan Wind Tunnel] complex that we were in. Held that position for quite a few years, in there 13 years as the Aerodynamics Division.\\n\\n Then, there was another reorganization at Ames. I became then—still as a division chief, but they took all of the research capability out of the division—we became just a Wind Tunnel Operations Division, and I became Division Chief for the wind tunnel operations, all wind tunnels at Ames, that included the 40 x 80 [Foot Wind Tunnel], as well as the simulator, of which I knew nothing about simulators. Could barely spell the word. Held that position till I retired in, I think it was 1997, I retired, in that range. That’s about the thumbnail sketch of the whole, and it was a very, very enjoyable job. In the early years, more enjoyable than in the later years. The accountants were starting to get a hold of Ames, and of NASA in general, and then Ames, and changed the way we did business." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s go back to those first years, and actually, when you were still in school, in Oregon, what did you hope to do with your degree? Did you want to work in industry or research?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We took tours, so we had seen industry, and we took tours at Ames. We saw the working environment at Ames, which was really not far from a college environment. You had three or four people in an office, you were doing hands-on research on something that you thought was really important. It was a nice environment and I loved airplanes, I loved the aspects of airplanes, so I wanted to continue. Some of my classmates also went to work in industry, and you would tour industry and you would go into these almost football-size buildings with row upon row upon row of desks, and the people would be working on one small aspect of airplane design or something. That just didn’t appeal to me. I was more interested in research and understanding the broader theme. That’s what really attracted me to NACA, as opposed to going to work in industry. Salary structure would have been better right off the bat, although I can’t complain at all. It would have been better going into industry, but it had its ups and downs. There were famines and there were feasts, and if you were in a famine, you could really be in a famine for a long time.\\n\\n I did interview with a couple of different people after being at Ames for a while, to think about going someplace else. The first summer I was at Ames, in that first summer period, the group leader was a guy named Emmet [A.] Mossman who, by the time I came back after going back to get a master’s, he had gone to work for at that time, what was called the Martin Company, in Denver, Colorado. I could have gone, and he wanted me to come and work there with him. At that time, I was also interested in graduate study, and driving from Ames to Stanford [University, California] was easy, and the weather was good. Had I gone to Martin and they said, “Well, you can do the same thing here, but you drive from South Denver to Boulder.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a little longer in the snow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, right. That was all factors. Main thing was the work environment. I was also a child of the [Great] Depression, so job security, working with the government, always factoring into that. By that time, we were married, and had to start worrying about things like that. Appealing, and then after you were at Ames for a few years, you just stopped contemplating leaving, and really concentrated on doing the best job you possibly could, there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you work on a number of projects when you came back after getting your master’s degree? Or were you just assigned to the one?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went back almost to the same office, and basically picked up where I had stopped the following fall. I did some related work for my master’s thesis, more of an experimental project, and then came back and worked on—at that time, the supersonic transports were foremost in everybody’s mind. We were going to just dispense with subsonic transports and go into supersonic transports, so we were working very hard to try to figure out how to make good inlets to get the air into the engines in a very efficient way.\\n\\n We did both experimental work and then one of the first computational aerodynamics type programs at Ames is what I was working on, to analyze the flow that went into the inventory. A way you could solve supersonic flows as a method of characteristics, which works out, and that was what we were trying to develop—computer programs to solve that flow. It’s a totally impossible job, to solve that by hand, although the first summer I was there, we were trying to solve flows by hand. At that time, we had computers, but they were ladies, most of them, up in an office, that computed on spreadsheets that we had devised for them to do the calculations for us. It was a continuation of the work, and I worked in that area and then became interested in a higher-temperature inlet operation, in a couple, three years. We tried to do some high-temperature testing.\\n\\n It was all of a sudden a shock, when we were used to doing testing and looking through the window and seeing our models there, and then we went to this device called a pebble-bed heater, which blew hot air past the model. You looked in through the window and the model was glowing red-hot. Then, you start saying, “How do I make that thing work in that environment?” That was a challenge, and we tried, got a little data, but not much. By about that time, they decided that they were going to reorganize Ames, and we reorganized there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s one thing continual, wasn’t it, just wait for the next re-org?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s the only thing constant, is change." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s what I hear. Speaking of such, it wasn’t too long after you came back on a full-time position that the move was to have the NACA absorbed by the new organization of NASA. How was your job impacted at the beginning, or was it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It wasn't an impact until that was, I think, the motivation of why they wanted to realign Ames more along the line to emphasize that we were really getting into space research. I think it would have been the death knell, to try to stay as a sole aeronautics center. Ames was a little bit in a precarious position all along, anyhow. There were several attempts to close it. We always suspected it was the folks at Langley who were closer to the congressmen, who were saying, “You ought to close that place out there.” Things change very quickly after we became NASA. As far as our working environment, you changed offices, you changed things you were supposed to work on, but you didn’t change what you were supposed to be doing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find it still to be somewhat collegiate through your whole career?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, yes. It’s always been that way. The only aspect that started to become non-collegiate was Ames was always core-funded, and all of NASA was always core-funded. Then, the move to go to a full-cost accounting system affected us for what we saw, really, in the wind tunnels because then we had to start being conscious of the operation in the wind tunnels. That has kept on going, until they essentially run as private businesses.\\n\\n During the time I was there, it did not affect the research too much, although the research now is more competitive. Space guys have always had the problems, pretty much always had the problems, that even though they were NASA employees and they’re working on a project, if they wanted a new project, they went and competed for that new project, and they competed against university groups and industry groups at the same time, to finally win that. That is coming into aeronautics more, and aeronautics is really a small chunk of the operations, now.\\n\\n Right off the bat, it didn’t change—it just evolved fairly slowly. The first thing was we got the full-cost accounting systems for the wind tunnels. I’ve always thought that was a mistake, to go in that direction. You got to understand it, with budget pressures and everything, but I think you do better work when you’re core-funded and you’re not out there competing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, you actually get more done, in a sense." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right. That was sort of the motivation, there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you still able to get your research published?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Once I became a branch chief, I did not do any more research or publications. I think I finished up some work that I had started and was in the pipeline, but the tasks of running it—you could make up your mind, I always thought, as a manager, you could keep on doing your research, your management will suffer. But if you say, “Well, I’m going to pay attention to manage it,” and do everything you can to be a good leader, there’s just not enough time to do research. Then, the problem of it is if your goal is to be a manager and then go back and do research at some time after you retire or something, you’re pretty much out of it, so it’s hard to do. You sort of have to make a binary decision. Am I going to be a good manager or am I not? I guess I was really focusing on trying to be a good manager.\\n\\n You got the care and feeding of, as a branch chief, 15, 20 people to worry about, the care and feeding of 100 or so, plus contractors at the division level. You just didn’t have time to do that. Particularly when you started getting into the fact you spent a lot of time when you’re in NASA Headquarters on your knees, begging for money, there just wasn’t enough time to keep on doing that. In some cases, you can lead conceptually and then try to get what you would like to see done through others, and I tried to do that quite a bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that when you started, your computations were done by computers, but at some point, technology changed and your computations were done by other types of computers. Talk to us about how technology impacted your line of work, and then what also that you saw at Ames, the changes that were caused by the evolution of different types of technology. Whether it was in the wind tunnels or whether it was in your division research." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Technology had a profound impact. Sort of the same impact that we see today, even, at an accelerated pace. One hobby I have now is studying cosmology, and trying to understand the universe. There—and I was talking to another fellow just yesterday about something—the great advances there have been made in the last 50 years. There’s a whole business now of trying to understand the brain, and there’s a new book out, I read parts of it, and the author states that we’ve made in the last 15-20 years, as much progress as we have made in all of humanity up to this point, in understanding how the brain works. I think it was interesting, and I was sort of in on the ground floor of that, to see how that technology, which was just starting to evolve, it started becoming more and more a thing.\\n\\n First off, we were writing computer programs to calculate the flow around the outside of a jet engine itself. One of the first computer programs, again, using a method of characteristics, was written to do that. At that time, we were using what was called an IBM 650 computer machine, which you could do then in a few hours what you could do in a long, long hand-calculation, a weeks-long hand calculation. That same technology now is succeeded by the standard iPhone as far as computational power. All of that has had a big impact.\\n\\n One humorous thing is that IBM machines, we would get the answer and look at them and say, “That’s not right,” so the standard thing was, “Let’s run it again,” because the machines made mistakes, in those days. Then, we saw that progress. We started seeing where we could do much more complicated problems, more complex problems, in less and less time. I remember once I was writing a paper and I had to try to get some work done over the weekend, so I was out at Ames, working with a young guy that did the programming for me, we would get complicated internal flows calculated almost as fast as you could turn around. You would submit the job—and these were calculations that would have taken weeks by hand—at that time with a deck of cards, how you communicated with the system, and almost immediately, you’d hear the printer start going to print out all of your information.\\n\\n We were able to see all of that grow and manifest itself in both the ability to handle more and more complex problems and the ability to do it faster. Then, you started seeing computer graphics coming in, so instead of trying to stare—and these listings of answers would often be a stack of, you’ve seen the old computer pages, they were almost 18-inches wide and 12 inches, and fold upon fold upon fold—a stack of those that high, you would just be able to put on a graphic display system and see that right up in the wind tunnel, there. That was all a gift to see all of that. In the wind tunnels, we sort of started seeing the same thing.\\n\\n When I first went to work at Ames, we took photographs of manometer boards to measure the pressures. You saw that and you would take a photograph, and then you would, again, get that developed, hand it over to a computer or somebody who would go into a dark room and read those levels by hand, and record them all by hand, and do all the calculations of the pressures that you were measuring by hand. We started then seeing more and more work coming along with the pressure cells, and smaller and smaller pressure cells, become very miniaturized. Your ability to sense what was going on was much increased. We started seeing lasers come along and being used.\\n\\n To see that end capability to improve to do our sensing of what was going on, then that was sensing and it was, again, computers would help us reduce that data very, very much faster and get that going on. That became manifest in the wind tunnels, too. We were able to record the data from the wind tunnels, do that very fast, and see that get, as the wind tunnel tests were being run, you would see in the control rooms, the output and the answers being printed. They were large computer codes, then, to just analyze that data. This sort of became manifest in something I was very proud, many of us had a role in that, is we were very fortunate and through lots of pleading with Headquarters, to get big chunks of what was called their Wind Tunnel Revitalization Program at Ames.\\n\\n With that, we were able to modernize some of our facilities. Again, what we were able to do, then, is to get the facilities to modernize because they were old and we were really worried about staying competitive enough, and particularly in a full-cost accounting atmosphere, to get the wind tunnel, to get business. If we couldn’t produce the data fast enough, somebody else, the users would want to go someplace else. We were worried about that NASA-wide as falling out of the capability to remain competitive in a testing environment. We were able to get funding and we modernized the wind tunnels, we modernized the data systems, we started encouraging the employees to be conscious of something called Total Quality Management, and to really focus on customer relations.\\n\\n The net result is, I was just talking to a friend who I know who still works at Ames, who’s been doing a lot of testing on the Orion capsule, all across many different facilities, and has come back and said, “The Unitary facility,” the 11-Foot [Transonic Wind Tunnel] and the 9 x 7 [Foot Supersonic Wind Tunnel], “are the most productive, best wind tunnels in the country to us.” I think we saw that as the evolution and the coalescing of better sensing and better computing at the same time to increase the ability to obtain and analyze data.\\n\\n On this Astrogram [newsletter], there’s a picture in front of it of [David] Korsmeyer, I think it was, who was doing work with trying to integrate computer results with wind tunnel results, and ship that data up to industry at the same time, in real time, so they would be able to understand what was going on in a wind tunnel and during testing. We had a large role in getting that work going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your customers changed quite a bit from the day that you walked in to the Center regarding the wind tunnel uses. Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We used to have a lot of internal NASA customers. Unitary, when I was in the 6-Foot, it was a lot of internal NASA customers. There was quite a bit of support for military programs. The 6-Foot, where I was to start with, had no commercial aircraft testing at all. Military wanted to use the wind tunnels, they came in, the wind tunnels were used. Someplace in the great accounting system, that was all washed hands, but the military was never charged for—at the same time, Unitary Wind Tunnel was set up to provide testing for external users, mainly. They did some work, but the priority was always for external users. When I went over and became that, we were still on core-funding when I started there, so industry would come in, military would come in, wanting to do testing. We’d say fine, get enough hours for it, your program is high enough, so we could do it in.\\n\\n If industry wanted to do testing, that was always on a contractual basis because NASA tried to bend over backwards not to give any particular company a favored status. In both the 12-Foot and the 11-Foot, and the 9 x 7, I think primarily that was hooked up with if industry was testing in those, they paid upfront for the cost of the wind tunnel testing. That has changed over the years. Now, if the military wants to come in, they have to bring their money in, so there’s an accounting there. Even for the NASA research programs, they have to go and get money from one of the program offices, more than likely at Langley, and then buy the wind tunnel time for doing the testing. I think it’s all basically, it’s the same cost for industry as is for internal customers.\\n\\n The enhancements that we made in the NASA wind tunnels as a function of that meant that industry could get their data faster and quicker with better service, and so, their total cost was less. That’s where you get into the ability to get data as fast as you possibly can, and make it work. That’s where technology really came in and increased the competitive position of Ames to stay in the testing business. Is that important? They’re good facilities. It’s important from a personal standpoint because the care and livelihood of a lot of people is locked up there. That’s people’s jobs and their careers, and if you close that facility and go someplace else, they might not be as lucky as I was, to land on their feet again after another RIF." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The data that came from the test, if it was industry-purchased, did it stay with the industry or did NASA, was it able to use the test results and test data to benefit research in other areas that NASA was working on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had two kinds of programs with industry. We had the straight fee testing, is what we called it, that’s where industry would pay for, for instance, a prime example is Boeing was developing a 777 and we did a lot of testing for the 777 aircraft in Ames wind tunnels. If that data was a part of their competitive position and they wanted to prevent most characteristically, at that time, Airbus—although when I first went to work there, they wanted to prevent Lockheed and Douglas and Airbus wasn’t even on the face of it—if they wanted to make sure that those data were held privately and not getting into the hands of a competitor, that stuff was just put in a box and industry took it away. There was no residue at Ames whatsoever. They took the tapes and everything with them.\\n\\n The other thing we often did was do cooperative tests. A cooperative test would be where industry has an idea, they say, “Let’s test this idea,” and it’s not part of an airplane program, very early on, we had a cooperative program on airfoils with Boeing. What they were after was to try to make a thick, transonic airfoil. The reason they wanted a thick transonic airfoil, and you can start to imagine, if you get a big, long wing, like a 777 wing, if the airfoil is not thick, by the time you get out to there, that thing is so thin that you can’t get enough structure in it to hold it together. We would give them wind tunnel time to do it. They would make the models, bring it in, and do the stuff.\\n\\n We kept the data and quite often, there would be an agreement to publish the data after a certain time period, and so, that was the core part of our cooperative testing. We liked to, whenever we could, encourage that because it was helping our industry out. That program, those thick airfoils did end up on the 777 wing, so they were able to make a more advanced-structure wing and still get the same transonic flow around it. We did it both ways, but again, sometimes there would be joint papers between industry and Ames written, sometimes industry would publish the paper in a conference, various ways of doing it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The people who came to work for you, once you became a branch chief and division chief, were their interest in their desires to use their educational training much like yours when you first started NACA? Or did you see a change, a different aspect, when people, 20, 30 years later, came through? It was a different type of working environment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think you could say that people that came into the research areas were pretty much always motivated to do research. That was a very common denominator in their preference. Their attitudes weren’t a heck of a lot different than ours, I don’t think, but I think the key thing is, is the person interested in research and understanding, or not? You always have and had individuals that came in that were self-promoters and wouldn’t necessarily have exactly the same motivation. When it came down to making a hard decision, do I help that customer or do I help myself, it would be help the customer. We really, really—and particularly late in the time of the Aerodynamics Division and then before we became the Operations Division—focused on meeting the customer’s needs. We had a lot of people who had many contacts with industry and worked across those lines. Later on, we did not have too many young people coming in because staffing limitations were such that we didn’t get too many. In general, if a person in their genes have the desire to do research, they sort of have the same inquisitive, curious nature that characterizes many of us who wanted to work there early on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you feel is, for yourself, your most significant accomplishment, looking back on when you were able to be out there for those years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was trying to think about that last night, or the last couple of weeks. It’s sort of a dual duality. Personally, I think I have a fairly significant role in developing the internal computational capabilities because the same computer programs that we developed were ultimately picked up by Boeing and some of the other companies to use in their analysis. You probably can’t find a paper trail that says that, but I think that was important. I think getting some of the research programs initiated and started, which then blossomed into other work at Ames, and ultimately, in industry, was a contribution. We ended up doing a fair amount of classified work, which led to some of the—one of, I think, fairly directly—current airplane programs that are flying. I think that was something that I felt and had a role in getting that established at Ames. I think the way that the wind tunnels ended up, I don’t like to be boastful, but I feel good about that. It for sure left the wind tunnels in much better shape than when I came in and found them. I think that was a significant thing to do out there because for a while, we were not competitive.\\n\\n The environment has changed so much. We sold the Wind Tunnel Revitalization Program largely on the argument that the ATF, that was the Advanced Technology Fighter, which ended up as the F-22, I think it is, the latest. That was a huge program that the Air Force initiated, and there were competitors all over the place in there, and requests to do testing in our facilities. We convinced Washington, “Look, we’re just barely able right now to meet this demand. The next program that comes along,” which worked out there was one more, would justify, “unless we do something, we will not be able to meet that demand.” That convinced them, yes, NASA’s facilities were getting old.\\n\\n I first went to work there in ’55, the first summer. I roomed, three of us—at that time, you could rent an apartment cheaply in Palo Alto—we roomed together, and two of the guys were in the Unitary Division, doing the calibration of the unit. That tunnel was just coming online in ’55. The basic facility had not been modified much, and the data systems had evolved and become better and better. We needed to make some major leaps on three sides: on the analysis, on the sensing, and on the attitudes of the people doing the work. That’s what we tried to do. I think we put that together and it still is applicable today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The fact that Orion’s using it is pretty amazing because that’s an up-and-coming program and it’s still using that technology." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Those are, I think, interesting things. I really enjoyed it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to ask Sandra if she had some questions or some thoughts to share?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned when you first started that one of the things you were doing, you were actually programming, early programming. We’ve talked about the difference in computers, but you were writing computer code." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I should correct that—actually sitting down and writing the code lines, I didn’t do that. What I did is I wrote down and told the programmers what equations to use and the steps to us, and then they translated those instructions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, so you were writing the instructions, and then the women, or the human computers, would take it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And program the machines." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, and they would take it and put it on the machines?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s pretty interesting. I was wondering exactly what you were doing to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I never really learned in my whole career how to write a computer code. I tried to worry more about the physics of what was going on and how to do that, it was interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned a couple of people as you were going through—is there one or two people you feel had a significant impact on your career, or served as a mentor to teach you the insights of succeeding at the Center?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think one of the first people that really had an impact on me was Frank [A.] Pfyl. His name was mentioned in there. When I came back from getting a master’s degree, Emmet Mossman had left, Frank Pfyl was the group leader, and he mentored me for many years there, and then when I came back in the Aerodynamics Division, he was an assistant branch chief at that time, and provided a lot of mentoring to me. He was always a person that I had a great, profound respect for.\\n\\n The problem that you get into, most of these people have now passed away, but Morrie Rubesin was a big influence on my life, also. It’s a gift, I think, to work at someplace like Ames, where you work with some of the smartest people that you ever come across. Morrie Rubesin was one of the smartest guys I’ve ever, ever known, and just a great human being at the same time. He had a big influence on my life and what I did.\\n\\n I enjoyed working with Leonard Roberts. It was a funny situation because when I was being promoted to Division Chief, I went through one set of interviews with Len Roberts, and the rumor mill came back that yes, Len recommended me for the job. Then, he quit before I was anointed, and he went to Stanford and Tom [C. Thomas] Snyder took over. I went through another set of interviews with Tom Snyder, and then finally, got the job. Another individual that affected me a lot in my career was Clarence [A.] Syvertson. I had a personal relationship with him, or knew him very well. He was an outstanding guy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you feel like you learned management lessons or styles from any of these that you used in your tenure?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. To a certain extent, yes, right. Frank Pfyl was, again, the strong mentor. Roberts was a strong mentor, helped me, and my relationship with him continued after he quit. He was teaching at Stanford. Vic Stevens had a big impact on my getting there. There used to be a guy named Tom [Thomas] Kenny who worked at Ames, and I knew him fairly well. He always told me, “Roy, it’s not what you know that matters, it’s who you know that matters.” I think Vic was always helping out on attitudes because a lot of the attitudes were you all had to go through promotions and promotion boards as you were coming up, so who would put in a good word for you at the promotion board quite often made a big impact on whether you got the promotion or not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It helped for someone to understand what you were doing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Understand what you were doing and had respect for what you were doing, and didn’t denigrate your activities; was supportive. Tom Kenny, I think, was supportive of a lot of my activities. You meet lots of people as you go through that, or you met lots of people as you went through your career, who had big impacts on your life, really. Work career is unfortunately part of our life—it’s a big part of our life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were close to Stanford—were you able to continue studies? You had mentioned that that was one of the things you had wanted to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I did. Actually, I passed the orals to get a Ph.D. and sort of got bogged down in writing a thesis, and then about that time, I got promoted to a branch chief, so that sort of went by the wayside. Sometimes, I wish I’d have finished that off. Not sure it would have made much difference. In your life, you’ve met a lot of Ph.D.s who are really smart, and you’ve met a lot of Ph.D.s who are really dumb, so a Ph.D. doesn’t open your doors, many. Depends what you’re after, and if you wanted to go into academics, you had to have a Ph.D. If you were not inclined to become a teacher or you were down a different path. I know many, in fact, some of the smartest people—smarter people—at Ames I ever met didn’t have Ph.D.s. Morrie Rubesin didn’t have a Ph.D." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You chose to stay in the area all these years, so did your family participate at some of the activities at Ames?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some, yes. Some, not too many, but some." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Enough?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I wish I had probably had my wife more involved, but a lot of demands for time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. We all have lives full of wants more than we have time to do them, that’s for sure. Is there anything else that you could think of that you want to talk about, or any other projects, or anything that we might have missed over?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I can’t think of anything else." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We thank you for your hospitality." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Leroy L. Presley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00257", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HasbrookAP/hasbrookap.htm", + "original_file_name": "HasbrookAP_7-21-09.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HasbrookAP/HasbrookAP_7-21-09.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 21 July 2009" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Annette P. Hasbrook" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is July 21st, 2009. This interview with Annette Hasbrook is being conducted in Houston for the JSC Oral History Project. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Rebecca Wright. Ms. Hasbrook was the lead ISS [International Space Station] flight director for STS-124. She’s here to talk about planning, training, and flying this mission. Thanks again for coming over this afternoon. We appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[I] know you’re busy with all the flights that are going up. I’d like to start by asking you what’s the role of the lead ISS flight director? Can you give us a summary?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. The lead ISS flight director typically takes the requirements laid out by the Station Program, and they work with the Shuttle flight director to integrate an overall plan for the mission, because you’ve got two huge vehicles. They’re both independent, and you bring them together. You have to work as a team. The lead Station flight director tends to be the overall conductor, because now the focus of activities is on the Station. We run all the EVAs [Extravehicular Activities] out of the Station airlock. Most of the tasks are Station-related, so we do a lot of the discussion and the planning, assessments, and ops [operations] trades, with our team, and then make the recommendations to the program. Or tell them, “This is how we’re going to do it,” or, “You can do A or B, and this is what you gain or lose by each option.” So I’d call that in a nutshell." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When did you become a flight director?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was selected in 2000. So we’re the class of Y2K. Matt [Mathew R. Abbott, Shuttle flight director for STS-124] and I were both class of 2000." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you originally a Space Shuttle flight director, or were you a Station flight director?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’ve been a Station flight director for my whole career. The grand plan was to start in Station flight director, and then after STS-124 flew in 2004, I was going to cross-train. The Columbia [STS-107] accident changed a lot of that. I ended up working the 1J mission for eight years before it flew. So I had a very long tenure with that mission, which is atypical for a Station flight director." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you give us some more information about that, in terms of your preflight experience on this mission?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. I first started working with the Japanese back in the ’80s or early ’90s on what they called the Manipulator Flight Demonstration [MFD] Project. It was their Small Fine Arm. They were demonstrating it in the Shuttle before they eventually were going to launch it on Station. I did some early work, Preliminary Design Review [PDR], for them, and then got involved in other things. Between the time of the PDR and the flight, I went and worked as the Mission Ops Rep for a second Japanese mission, the Space Flyer Unit [STS-72]. It had been launched on one of their vehicles, but then we went and retrieved it and brought it home in the shuttle because it had science collection on it. That was my second foray into the Japanese space agencies.\\n\\n Then I flew the MFD mission [STS-85] as a payload officer. The payload officer is responsible for explaining Shuttle problems to a customer, what the impacts are, the payload problems to the Shuttle, and figuring out solutions. So then when the Japanese mission came along, and the Space Station assembly missions, that was a good fit for me, because I really enjoyed working with the Japanese people. As a new flight director, I went once as what we call an assembly and checkout officer [ACO]. Those are the folks that are responsible for keeping the Station and the Shuttle team, the two rooms, on the same page. We cross-communicate to each of the teams as needed. So I went as the lead ACO with the flight director and his team, and we had our first joint operations panel where we talked the mission in general and very high concepts. Then once I was selected as a flight director, I was the backup for Bryan [P.] Austin, and then he subsequently left the office and I became the lead for it.\\n\\n My role was really to assimilate the Japanese and their mission requirements into the way the Space Station Program does business and the way Operations does business and make sure we had a workable plan to fly the mission. In some respects, we took it on to teach them how to be Mission Operations. They had done a lot of work on unmanned vehicles, but they had never worked really in the manned spacecraft environment—the responsibilities and the need for quick response to failures, because you have a defined limit of time that your crew members are in orbit. It was a different concept for them. We spent a lot of time just teaching them how we do business. It’s not to say ours is the only way to do it, but saying, “This is how we do business, and here’s a way you can organize your team and manage your team, and you need to define rules for your element. When is it considered a failure? When do you have fault tolerance? How are you going to interact with the US team? How are you going to interact with the Russian team? How do you write your procedures so the crew members can understand it?”\\n\\n It was really an evolutionary process. “How do you interplay into the emergency procedure development?” Because obviously, when the Space Station is up there and the crew members are up in space, if we have an emergency they have to be able to respond and take care of it themselves. Hopefully the ground is there and can help them, but they have to manage it themselves. The Japanese needed to understand that we had three major emergency cases, and how did their element fit into the overall emergency scenarios as an example. So I would do a flight controller 101. It was revolving around the JEM [Japanese Experiment Module] module and all their system, but in a sense it was the broader scope of teaching, “This is how we do business, and this is how we would like you to interact with us. How do you want to do business?” Then modifying and adapting from there. It was fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a lot of work. Do you speak Japanese?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just a little bit. I took about a year of Japanese in the early years as a flight director. I had a little more time, because they speak fluent English and also Japanese. For us to go into their culture and make an attempt to try and at least have some words of Japanese or a couple sentences at least, that was important to me. I grew up overseas, and it was very important to try and respect the culture that you’re entering into. So I took it for about nine months to a year and just had simple phrases. But it goes along way toward building a bridge to your colleagues, the fact that you show interest in their culture and their language. It was fun. I enjoyed it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What impact did the Columbia accident have on this flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The original timeline for the mission—we were supposed to launch somewhere in the 2003 era. Then in 2002, I believe—some of these dates are fuzzy—Japan requested a one-year delay. They basically said they wanted to swap places with the ESA [European Space Agency] module, the Columbus module. I think it was roughly 2004. We were preparing for that. Then when the Columbia accident happened, of course no one knew exactly when we were going to launch. That ended up delaying them. Instead of launching in 2004, we launched in 2008. You had the downtime, and then it was the return to flight, and then once you finally were operational, then we got back in the sequence. So they ended up being delayed about four years.\\n\\n They would have been ready before 2008. I don’t know if we would have been ready in 2004, because it’s hard to know whether the pressure of a time deadline, [if] you’d still get there. But having the additional time gave us the capability to more fully develop a lot of their procedures and thought processes. In a sense, you got a maturation of their flight control team, because their culture, they basically move around in their professional life, and that’s expected and routine. Basically every three years, they’re moving somewhere else. So if you have a flight control team of 12 people, every year they would lose four and get four new ones. It took a while to come to the realization that they really needed to maintain a core set of people to be ready for their major element. I think having more time to grow helped them learn that, and then realize that, and then implement that in their staffing. I think that became a good strength for them, because they really had a very strong core set of people when they flew the mission that understood their systems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In between the time that this flight flew and Columbia, were you working other Space Station missions as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was. As the Space Station flight director, the way our certification was is you joined the office, and you did training, and then we did simulations, because you practiced going through a lot of failures. Then we achieved what we called an increment certification. So we were certified to sit on console for stage operations. That means when there is not a joint assembly mission, a Shuttle there. Then we did basically a delta cert [certification] to become what we called assembly certified flight director. So we went through those flows.\\n\\n My first assembly mission was STS-121, which ended up being after the accident. Prior to that I had been what they called a lead increment flight director. So I basically managed a Space Station crew for six months [and] prepped them for some of the training. Then you’re basically their prime interface with the ops team for the six months that they’re in orbit. You become an advocate, because the flight control team moves. Your teams are constantly rotating and shifting, going on and off console. But you were there every day and knew the problems. You’d know the longer-range problems, solutions, problem solving, and what was going on to solve the issues that were coming up. It was a very fulfilling experience, because you felt like you flew the whole mission with the crew members. Assembly missions are stretched out for six months. You’re not quite at the sprint pace of an assembly mission, but you’ve certainly done plenty of work by the time six months is over. I did that for Expedition 10, which was Leroy Chiao and Salizhan [S.] Sharipov. Then I worked STS-121 and several other missions prior to my lead on 1J.\\n\\n What that does is it helps you learn and grow in your roles, because your first mission, you’ll be a planning shift flight director. Then usually you might do one or two missions with that, and then you’ll be the orbit one flight director, so you would get your crew members ready for the spacewalks or do the first part of robotics activities. Typically on the Station side, our lead flight director is on the orbit two side, what we call the second half of the execute shift. All of that background prepares you and gives you your skill set, so as you’re working with your flight, you know the issues that can be expected and things that you ought to be thinking about and preparing for.\\n\\n Space Station has a lot of challenges with structural loads, thermal impacts based on attitudes. We have a lot of hardware. When you add on to it, you’re changing what the vehicle looks like. So many specific solutions are being designed for your specific mission. When you see that going through the process of some of the other missions, that helps you prepare for your own mission. You know to go talk to certain folks to get this data and work underway.\\n\\n For the Japanese, of course, you now have to bring in the international partners and say, “Okay, you need to think about this, think about this, think about this. We need the data in these deadlines in order to develop the products.” So having the background with them helped, because you get asked for a lot of things very late. Someone would ask them, and they may not respond, but then if I would ask them and say, “No kidding, we really need this,” “Okay, Annette-san said we need this, so we need to go work on this.” That’s where the years of background and trust really helped, in probably the last year, year and a half when the pressure was really getting built to go solve the problems or go determine what your solutions were. Everybody’s stretched for time. Nobody has unlimited time and resources. So you’d have to help prioritize. “We really need this piece. That’s a contingency piece. You should think about that, and maybe have a skeleton thought, but here’s the priority of the analysis we need.” That helped a lot. Just having done the training beforehand helps you think about that for your own mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about planning from your perspective as flight director. We’ve heard from the FAO [Flight Activities Officer] and the lead timeliner. But when do you become involved with planning for the mission, and what’s your role?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When you’re assigned as a lead flight director, you really become involved in the planning at that point. First I say strategic, really, but when they assign the flight director, usually that’s when you’re in more of the tactical planning. The overall requirements for the mission have been defined. For ours, it was pretty high level. Install and activate the Japanese module. Okay. So that’s easy enough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not much detail." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, right, well, there’s a lot to installing and activating. You had to do spacewalks to configure hardware. You had to do robotics to actually get the element out of the bay and put onto the Station. You had to do IVA, Intravehicular Activities, to install jumpers so that the lifeblood of Station: power, data, water, command, telemetry, you could now hook into the new element. Then you had to actually turn the element on, and then go into it, and then outfit it.\\n\\n Those are the flow down. We worked with the Japanese to say, “Okay, well, how do you get it out of the bay?” So there’s a piece of planning. “Well, I need to remove this connector and this jumper, and I need to pull this cover off.” The robotics were pretty much left up to the United States, because the Space Station robotic arm was putting it on the US segment. But of course, my robotics officer needs to understand all the constraints on it and build the robotic timeline. Then once we mate it, well, what do we need to attach first, or what do we need to connect first?\\n\\n Most of the elements have what you call a prime and a redundant string. They (the Japanese) were like, “Well, to be considered activated, we have to have both strings.” This is where you pull back on your knowledge. “I know that’s what you want, but what is our minimum mission success criteria?” You’re defining what your minimums are to achieve mission success. In a sense, that’s a planning activity. They said, “Okay, one string has to be activated.” So we worked out the details for that, and there are thermal delays, and obviously you’re going to end up with crew day constraints. You negotiate back and forth. “Okay, well, is this really a strong thermal requirement? Do you have to have a wait time of this many hours? Because this is what it’s going to cost you. We can’t activate till the next day, for example, if the wait time is too long.”\\n\\n Okay, well, then you go back and negotiate. So in a sense, the planning starts very early. That continues on, because the Kibo module, once it was installed and activated—it only launched with four racks installed. It was so heavy. It’s the largest module overall, not the heaviest, but the largest. Based on the CG [Center of Gravity] in the Shuttle, it could not launch with all the system racks in. It has eight total system racks. So they ended up launching what they call the Japanese Logistics Module, which is the little guy on top of the Kibo, the flight before, with four systems racks installed plus four other racks to transfer into the Kibo once it arrived. Once we finally got Kibo installed and activated, then you had to work the process to get all those racks out and into the module. There’s another planning aspect. What’s the priority? What are the constraints?\\n\\n We developed that timeline. When we first started, we were on an Orbiter that we called a non-SSPTS [Station-Shuttle Power Transfer System] Orbiter, [Atlantis], so it did not have the capability to transfer power from the Station to the Shuttle to extend its docked duration. Our mission was so heavy, we were very low on ascent performance margin. We had a three-day docked mission. It was like a seven-day mission total. So it was a very short, condensed mission. We said, “Okay, what is the minimum that we have to get done in order to be able to undock safely?” So we defined that. Then gosh, I don’t recall, maybe two or three years before the flight, they switched vehicles on us because of where we had moved in the sequence. Now we had one of the extended duration capability Orbiters, [Discovery]. So we could add so much more into the timeline.\\n\\n Then it was back to planning. “Okay, well, how do we want to prioritize our mission? What is really important to get put into the timeline to set up the module in the best situation possible?” Planning from that perspective goes on all the time. As a flight director, I don’t sit there and lay out the crew’s timeline and manage it down to the five minutes. That’s what the FAOs and the ops planners do. That’s their specialty. They’re very good at it. But it’s more of working with the Japanese flight director and saying, “Okay, how do we generally want this plan to work, and what are our constraints, and where are the tight spots?” Then you review what the planners lay out, and you think, “Okay, does that make sense, or is there some other way that we could orchestrate it to make it more efficient or line things up so maybe from a spatial perspective where we can deconflict people or bodies from an area?”\\n\\n We continue to do that through the whole evolutionary process as the timeline develops. “Okay, well, if we get new requirements for the program, how do we add that in? Where does that fit based on the list of priorities that the program gives us?” They give us a whole raft, 1 through 57 for example. We tend to timeline and plan it in priority order, but not always, because there’s efficiencies that you get. So that’s how I would describe planning from the flight director level. Does that make sense?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Tell us about crew training for this mission. How does that work with the ISS and the Shuttle FCR [Flight Control Room], and then you’ve got all these international partners? It sounds very complicated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There’s two parts to training. There’s crew training and there’s flight controller training, because not only does the crew have to be trained, but the flight control team has to be trained and ready to execute the mission. The crew training perspective, there’s an organization that is dedicated to crew training. When a crew gets assigned, there’s a certain basic catalog of courses that they need to take for the mission, because they need to know how to fly the Shuttle. If they’re assigned to do a spacewalk, they’ll have a sequence of lessons that they have to complete to be qualified to work in the spacesuit. If they’re a robotics person, there’s a series of lessons they would have to take to be certified to operate either the Shuttle arm or the Station arm and finally the JEM arm, because the arm came up on our module. So there’s a catalog.\\n\\n Then one of the very early things that we do is sit down and have a crew task panel. That involves the training team, the crew, the flight directors. We invite some management types, robotics folks, EVA folks, and the planners. Basically, the commander will provide a broad brush of, “Here’s how I’d like to utilize my crew, and this is what I’m thinking.” Then we review that in this board, with all these participants, to say, “Okay, does this make sense?” Because we know, based on the tasks, the training loads required for different things. Like CBM, the Common Berthing Mechanism, that takes quite a large chunk of training. Robotics takes a large chunk of training. EVA. So does that line up? Are we really going to be spiking somebody in their training? Or based on how the timeline lays out, we want this person to do A, B, and C, but all three of those are happening at the same time, so that doesn’t make sense, so we need to rearrange how we train, or who’s responsible for what. So you lay out the straw men and say, “Okay, we think this works.”\\n\\n Then the training team goes off and lays out the lessons. If it’s an experienced crew, they get some credit for previous training that they’ve taken, so they may not have to take all of the same courses over. They take some core courses, and then they start doing standalone training. They will go over into the SSTF, the Space Station Training Facility, or the SMS, the Shuttle Mission Simulator, and they’ll run through their paces with the training team. That’s all autonomous. They’re developing their skill set.\\n\\n For the Space Station training, and obviously with the Japanese in this case, they now had to go to Japan to do some training for the Kibo module, because the big module simulator is in Japan. The Space Station Training Facility here has a model, but there’s training courses that the Japanese teach that we do not teach. So there’s negotiations there to determine who would go over for the training. Just because it’s time away from the family, and it’s also time that you’re not here to be able to do some of the other activities. That gets negotiated. They actually flew over there and took training. We sent some of our folks over there with them, both as monitors and also from the learning perspective. They’re building up their repertoire, and then eventually they get to a point where they’re ready to do what we’d call integrated simulations. That gets them ready to work with the ground teams.\\n\\n The ground teams conversely. You have your generic flows. I described the flight director one. Every flight controller has their generic flow to get certified either to be in the back room or in the front room. Then for flight-specific, it depends whether or not there’s additional training requirements from a specific system perspective. For the Japanese, it was a little unique since it was a new module. They’re responsible for it, but we wanted to have a good understanding of how their module worked. So they offered us a weeklong series of training classes. We were able to send anywhere from eight to 16 folks to these classes and attend them. They conducted them three times, so we ended up being able to send quite a few of our folks through the class and really learn their systems. Once we got that, then they came back to the United States and were able to teach the rest of their group the ins and outs of the Japanese systems. They at least had the knowledge.\\n\\n They also ended up being the lead team for the activation. They had a lot of knowledge. It helped because they could then converse in great detail with their Japanese colleagues, and we were all working from a good understanding of the Japanese module. So that went on. That was probably in 2005 timeframe, 2004, 2005, 2006, right in there, when we conducted those lessons.\\n\\n Then once we got our mission timeline built, you’d build the timeline, you’d build procedures. We’d have a big review to say, “Okay, are we ready to do simulations, integrated sims?” We reviewed the procedures, the timeline, and the flight rules. Then out of that we started doing what we called the integrated simulations. The crew members are in the simulator. The flight controllers are in mission control in our training room. We had our Japanese colleagues in Japan in their flight control room. They ran the simulator. The training team puts in malfunctions, and then we have to respond to them, communicate to the crew and communicate with each other, communicate to the Japanese, and figure out what’s the problem, what are the impacts, what are the workarounds, and what are the downstream impacts.\\n\\n We conducted a series of simulations with the crew. It really teaches the team how to work together as a whole team. The crew has been off training on their own. They’ve become a very tight, close-knit group of people, because they have to depend on each other for their safety and their lives potentially. They do a lot of autonomous training. We’ve done our training and development with the Japanese. Then we bring it all together to make sure we can mesh and function as a single unit, because once we get in flight, we have X number of days to accomplish the mission. So the better our background and our interactions are, the more likely we’re going to be able to succeed as a team with whatever failures come our way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were some of the periods that you did integrated sims [simulations]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You usually do your highest priority mission objectives. Then the areas that you think might be the most difficult coordination-wise, where a whole lot of different things are occurring. So we typically sim the rendezvous docking twice, because it’s a very dynamic phase, and you pretty much get one shot to bring the vehicles together correctly. We will do the undocking once just to make sure we know how to get away and separate. We did EVA 1. That was the major EVA to get the module ready for installation. One time as a standalone, and then we did one what we called a long sim. It was say 36 hours, and that was in order to execute the Category 1 objective, which was get the module installed. That included EVA 1. Then to activate it the next day.\\n\\n Then I think we did another activation sim, a shorter one, just because we wanted to make sure that we could actually activate it. Then from a complexity standpoint, activating our second channel was the hardest, because even though it was what we call a Category 2 objective, it was on top of also conducting EVA 2. So you had a huge amount of comm [communication] going on with the spacewalk, and you had a huge amount of comm going on with this activation. So we simulated that. I think we ended up simulating that twice, as well, just to try and make sure that we had that down pat. Because we did it once, and it was pretty messy, so we did it again. It was good, because we changed the way we did things.\\n\\n Part of these integrated sims is to practice cockpit resource management and make sure that you’re aware of your inputs, and you’re keeping your eye on the objective. The feedback I got at the end of that sim was my flight controllers felt they could not talk to me because I was so busy with the spacewalk, dealing with EVA and my CapCom [Capsule Communicator] and the crew, and as you’re probably very familiar with, the spacewalks are extremely busy, because the crew is talking all the time. The flight control team felt they couldn’t talk to me to get the activation going for Channel [A], because they were never sure when they could step in. So based on that I said, “All right, we need to have a second flight director here for that phase, just so you have someone to talk to.” So I kept the offgoing flight director. He just stayed a few more hours, and we practiced it once. He managed to work with that team. That worked very well in simulation.\\n\\n In real time, we would have been able to do it with one flight director, just because the spacewalks were calmer. You don’t get all the failures. But it showed me that if we had a bad day, we really were going to need two people to be able to do those activities in parallel. That’s where I felt it was very beneficial to do the training, because it gave you a chance to evolve and change." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you keep that same configuration for the flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did, yes, he stayed about three hours I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Who was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[Robert C.] Bob Dempsey. He was my orbit one flight director." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many hours of sims do you end up doing before a crew ends up launching?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In terms of integrated sims, it will vary anywhere from about 80 hours to maybe 115. The hours have come down over the years, trying to streamline the time and make sure that the hours that we do spend doing that are the most effective possible, and trying to keep the crews’ workloads down, because one of the drivers is their weekly workload and hourly load. So it’ll vary depending on the mission. But somewhere between 80 and 115." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many hours does a crew train, compared to how many hours they’re on orbit? Or how many hours do they spend training on the ground versus how many hours they’re spending in orbit? Do you know what that works out to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, from a gross perspective, we basically assign the crews one year before flight. They’re not training 40 hours a week. But if you think about it that way, they train for a year and they fly for ten days. So if you want to do spacewalks, typically the folks will train in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab five to seven hours for every hour of spacewalk that they conduct." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s the one I could find. I couldn’t find the other question that I had, so thought I would ask. Do you want to talk about the flight itself? Actually we should probably talk about some of the delays. I understand there were delays because of the External Tanks, and then there was a delay, you were supposed to launch in April, but there was a delay because of some power issues with the Shuttle and Station. Or not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re right, this is where the memory lapses are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You could just talk in general about delays, and what impact that had on the flight, or if it really didn’t have much impact." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Delays have an impact. The other thing with Space Station that’s unique is the flights before you have an impact on your flight. Shuttle flights before Space Station, they were very self-contained. You had “Here’s my mission, it’s wrapped up in a book, you launch it, you do everything you can, you come home.” With Space Station, you’re building the book chapter by chapter. So you put a chapter up there. Well, you almost got to the end, but the last paragraph is missing. So the next flight has to somehow incorporate that paragraph before they write their own chapter. Often you find out that that paragraph is missing a month or two before your flight. If it’s a really important paragraph, then you’ve got to do something about it. One of the largest challenges for these missions is you spend a long time developing it, say one to two years. Eight being a very crazy extreme. But most of our flight directors are assigned a year or two before flight.\\n\\n You spend a long time developing this mission. It becomes your lifeblood. You’ve got it all laid out, optimized. Then you find out that “Oh, the mission before you didn’t get this task done on the EVA, or this broke.” Now you’re bringing up this new piece of hardware. You’ve got to stick that in your mission, and you have to add that to your EVA. You have to be ready to reprioritize and replan and figure out what, no kidding, do we need to train or discuss in detail to get ready for this now, my new mission. That goes on with every single one.\\n\\n For our flight, one of the things that were looming over its head for a long time was the tile repair DTOs [Detailed Test Objective]. Was it on, was it not on? So you had that going along, until finally, okay, decision is made, and that’s put behind you. Then inevitably something else will come up. That’s probably one of the biggest challenges. Then from delays in general, just like coaching for a game, as a flight director you’re a team leader, you’re a decision maker, but you’re a coach in many senses of the word and the pep committee. You’re getting everybody ready, and you’re getting them in there. Okay, this is flight time. Then, all of a sudden, a delay comes. It’s very hard for people. Because once you’re ready to go, you want to leave, and then you have to wait, hurry up and wait. It can have an emotional toll on your team, and you have to be there to say, “It’s all right, there’s no rush, we’re going to get there, take some time for yourself, relax, take a few days off, come back.” Meter and manage your energies is really key. That can be hard. It’s hard for the flight directors, too, because you’re getting ready, and I always say it’s like being at bat. You’re next up, and then all of a sudden they come in with TV time-out and you’re like, “Oh.” So that’s probably a frustration for folks.\\n\\n One month isn’t bad. I think about this last Hubble [Space Telescope] mission, [STS-125]. We were two weeks from launch, and the component failed, and they ended up flying nine months later roughly. That was a big deal. It takes an emotional toll, and then you have to build yourself up again and modify your whole mission based on the new priorities. But that’s what we’re trained to do. MOD [Mission Operations Directorate] has always been very good at that. They continue to do that very very well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about the flight itself. What are your recollections of that flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s a blur. The flight itself was very very smooth. We really had no major problems. The challenges we were given right before our mission we were able to incorporate. It was when the Solar Alpha Rotary Joints were having the contamination problem, and we were having to go do inspections. A month or two before our flight, we were told we needed to go start inspecting these joints. So we had to modify our plans and put that in, which my EVA guys did very well. My EVA crew members had no issue with that. But we launched, and I remember when they open the hatch, as you recall the Russian toilet was nonoperational. Mark [E.] Kelly opened the hatch, and he goes, “Do you need a plumber?” It was such a great line, and it was in high def [definition]. So I died laughing. But you could see the focus, because they always show the greeting ceremony, hugs all around. Man, right into the safety briefing, and off they went. Then it was straight to work. They got the crew members into the airlock, got them ready to go.\\n\\n The next day they did the first spacewalk and pulled the LTA [Launch-to-Activation] cables off of the JEM [and] the protective cover off of the Passive CBM. Then watching them pull the JEM out of the payload bay. It was just amazing. This big structure comes out of the bay. I always call it the pirouette or the baton move, because they had to pull it out and then basically flip it 360 to install it. When you see it sped up in a digital recreation, it’s very impressive. They did it extremely slowly, but it was just really neat to see it attached. The activation went really well. We had one hiccup. The crew was attaching the Internal Thermal Control System [ITCS] lines, Moderate Temperature Loop, and we saw a funny signature, and the Japanese were worried that they had a big air bubble in the system, and that if we started it we may cavitate the pump if we pushed the air bubble through the pump. So we spent quite a bit of time talking with them about the trades of if we swap the line, then use the Low Temperature Loop, because it would change the activation sequence.\\n\\n This is where the years of interaction really helped immensely. Because my THOR, your Thermal Operations and Resource Officer, Victor [C.] Herod, had spent years working with his counterparts in Japan and trading this is how things work and suggestions and helping them develop procedures and flight rules. So the respect and the trust were there. He was talking to them. He goes, “The way the lines are built and the ITCS lines, there’s so many bends and turns in it that there’s no way you’re going to have this one big bubble.” He convinced them to go ahead and stay with the nominal plan. I think that really set the mission on the right course, because then we ended up proceeding with activation nominally.\\n\\n There were no problems. The whole mission proceeded really smoothly. Probably the most striking moment was when they entered the Kibo module. It was really neat. Aki [Akihiko] Hoshide was one of our crew members, astronauts on the Shuttle, but he was also a JAXA [Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency] crew member. It was just really neat. He hung a banner at the entrance to the module. You see these banners in Japan hanging at the entrance to restaurants and shops. It’s usually either advertising the name of the restaurant or their specialty. I think of it as restaurants, because that’s where we would go a lot. But it said Kibo in Japanese.\\n\\n Then they opened the module and went in. It’s gigantic, because it’s empty. There’s only four racks and it has capacity for 24 racks. So as opposed to seeing the labs that are maybe seven or eight feet by eight feet, you saw the circumferential diameter. So it was 15 feet. Huge. They go flying in. Garrett [E.] Reisman was on orbit. If you see in the video, you thought you were in a Romper Room watching them. It was just pure joy. They’re floating around and doing flips and having lots of fun. Again, it’s like you get your five minutes of ecstasy and fun, and then bam it was back to work, because then they started moving the racks from the Japanese Logistics Module into the big module. By the time they left, it looked like a laboratory. It was really neat.\\n\\n The real-time operations really did go very very smoothly. The goal is to try and execute your mission as you have designed. You always have to be ready for whatever happens. But having done all the preflight planning and thinking and training, it sets you up to be able to take anything that might come and incorporate that into your plan pretty smoothly. So putting the lead team on orbit two, the purpose of that is you do your EVAs, your major robotics, and then depending on what, if anything, goes wrong, that team and that flight director establishes direction for the planning team, “This is what you need to have done overnight, and this is what needs to be ready to go the next morning,” because you have the background and the knowledge. So you can lay the framework for the planning team. Then they’ll go off and develop the timeline for the next morning. You come in and execute. Fortunately, we didn’t have anything major on our mission. It actually executed quite smoothly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any other anecdotes from the flight that you can recall? Doesn’t sound like there were any challenges." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We heard that from Terry [L. Clancy] and Gail [A. Hansen]. They both said that this was a pretty nominal flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a very smooth flight. One of the things that makes it smooth is we had one large module that we had to put on board Space Station. One major player that you had to deal with, and one significant set of requirements and constraints. For example, this current mission, [STS] 127/2JA, where we’re putting on the last element for the Japanese, they’re just one part of that mission. You have their Exposed Facility, which some people call the front porch. Then you have your logistics pallet, which has more Japanese payloads that they have to attach on and transfer the payloads and return this pallet back into the bay. It has a carrier that has a whole bunch of US spares on it. So you have to put that on board Station. EVA, move everything off and bring the pallet back.\\n\\n So it’s much more a composite hodgepodge of things. They all have different drivers, in a sense. You’re trying to take the multiheaded Medusa and flow them into one nice smooth swim lane, whereas for the Kibo we were fortunate. It was one big thing. It had lots of parts that had to get activated, but you were all still focused on the same objective. It was one system basically, one big system. But it was more streamlined, I think, really to get it activated.\\n\\n So blessing or curse, depending on what you enjoy, but it was a lot of fun. It was neat to see. That was really the premiere for the Japanese, for their real-time flight control operations. First time they’d had flight directors. Watching their team execute and perform under pressure was very very impressive. That gave me a lot of self-satisfaction, to see how well they did after all the years of discussion and preparation. You never know how it’s going to work, and it worked very very well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Knowing that that module was up there, what are your thoughts about that? Knowing that the mission succeeded, met all the objectives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it gave me immense personal satisfaction. Because it’s something you’ve invested years and years in. Also, from NASA’s perspective, it really rings home and brings home the truth that it is an International Space Station to see all the partners up there. It’s just fabulous. All working together for a common cause. You have good times and bad times, but you have multiple nations all working to a common objective, where on the ground they may have a lot of differences of opinions. But in space, they’re all continuing to achieve the goal of Space Station and do the research. So I just found that very personally fulfilling. Then just seeing a job well done. It’s always nice to see the success from all the hard work that’s been put into it. Watching my team operate. I’d seen them develop over the years. I had some folks who were very young and inexperienced in 2000 when we first went over to Japan. Then see them as the senior flight controllers. Granted, they’d had a lot of time to evolve. Eight years is a long time. But to see that evolution in them is really neat, too, and knowing you had some part in making them who they were as flight controllers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many people are on a Station flight control team?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A lead team will be, I’ll say, 15. It’s 12 to 15 flight controllers, including the flight director. That’s just your front room. The flight controllers is just one aspect. You have the MER, the Mission Evaluation Room, so they have a whole bunch of people evaluating the systems. Then your program folks dealing with all the requirements. They have a cadre of folks there every day as well. So it’s a big group of people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes it is. It is. Were there any lessons that you learned from this flight that you’ll take forward?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Lessons that I learned. It taught me patience, and it continued to help me learn my prioritization skills. I figured, you can’t do it all, so you need to understand what has to be done and what can be put off. It continued to teach me that there’s nothing more exciting, fulfilling than working with a team of folks that are motivated by a common objective and wanting to see the job done. Continue to want to do that for as long as I can." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you don’t mind, I’m going to ask Rebecca if she has any questions for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When did your responsibilities stop? When they undocked, were you somewhat relieved of your first and foremost duties?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. When they undock, basically about three hours after undocking, we hand Space Station back to what we call the increment team. Then you stop sprinting, and then you go back to the marathon of Space Station, because we’re always up there. My team went off console about three days before the Shuttle actually landed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right when you first started, you used a phrase called ops trades. Could you share a little bit more about the trading off of the operations of when? You also mentioned your prioritization skills. How do you know that when you get down to those negotiations, that this is what’s got to be done over this, when both of them are so important? Can you give us a clue?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ops trades are usually—a simple thing would be I could tie my lace left over right or right over left, what’s the difference? Well, left over right I could do it with one less step, but right over left ends up being a better knot. So which should I do? Should I take more time and tie a stronger knot, or is tying the looser knot good enough for what I need to do because I’m short on time? Depending on where your constraint is: time, people, power, you may have to make a trade between solutions. If you had no constraints, you might do your activity one way, but based on the other constraints that are out there, you can either put something at risk and do it this way because okay, this is the right way to do it, but because of the thermal environment I’m in, I run a higher risk of freezing or burning something up because it takes me longer to do X action. Or I don’t do everything, and I can basically get it activated, but the capability may not be there as early, and then later on I come back and finish it potentially. So does that explain it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Then the prioritization. The program will always give you a list of priorities, 1 to 50. But if you do it in that priority order, I may only get 30 of those priorities accomplished in the mission. But if you let me optimize again within my constraints, people, time, power, what we’re doing, I may be able to get 37 of them. So they always give us a shopping list longer than we can hope to achieve. Because that way, if you get ahead somewhere, then you have a shopping list that you can go through and say, “Oh, well, we can pick that up for you, or we can pick that up for you.”\\n\\n The priorities are always geared usually: Category 1, those are required for the continuation of Space Station, i.e., install the Kibo module. You could say, “Okay, Space Station doesn’t need that to continue,” which is true, but the partnership needs that to continue, and the Japanese have spent a huge amount of time and effort. So that’s Category 1—and activating it. Single string. Then my Category 2, one of the highest priorities was to activate the redundant string, because now we’ve put this multimillion-dollar facility up there, but one power failure and it’s blacked out again. Obviously you’d want to have redundancy as soon as you can. But depending on what else is going on in the mission, I can get you that redundancy right after I activate Channel A, or maybe we do something else, and then I activate that second string. That’s how you play the priority games.\\n\\n EVA does that a lot, because on the spacewalks you basically have six and a half hours outside every single time. You tend to do it in priority order, but you get your major goal accomplished, and then there’s say an hour left at the end of the EVA. Well, that’s not enough time to accomplish your second objective, but I could go do objectives 7 and 8 right there. Person one can go do 7, and I can go do 8. Or because it’s right on the translation path back to the airlock, it makes sense to do it there. That’s where you’ll often see your priorities mismatched, but they’re doing it from a crew efficiency and time fit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you get to make those calls? Is it your sole responsibility, when there’s a possible conflict of priorities, or people are giving you input that everyone thinks their issue is the priority; do you get to make that call?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In a sense, I do. But you never make that in a vacuum. These joint ops panels that I had mentioned, these are meetings where you have all your specialists, and your MER reps, your safety reps, the crew, and your partners, and that’s where you’re discussing the various different issues that are arising. Often times those discussions will come to that panel. This person is advocating for why you have to do it this way, and person Y is advocating for why no, this is more important. You have a discussion and try and assess the trades and make the recommendations.\\n\\n If these people don’t agree with your recommendation, they can go to a higher board. The joint ops panel is considered a program level panel, but the program basically, not empowers, but they delegate the authority to the Flight Director Office to chair the ops panel, because we have the operations expertise. But if these people, by God, they disagree with the decision we make, they can go up to a program board and re-review it. Often if it’s wildly divisive, we’ll make a decision, and then we’ll take it to the program board. We’ll say, “Okay, here was the issue. Here were the trades. We made this decision, and here’s why. If you choose to go this way, this is what it’s going to cost you.” Because ultimately all the hardware belongs to the program or belongs to the international partners. They get the final say in what you do with the hardware, but they usually allow us to execute according to our knowledge and background.\\n\\n But for some of the big things they’ll weigh in as well. They may redirect you. They tend not to, because usually we have pretty solid rationale. But sometimes there’s reasons why, even though we say, “Operationally it makes the most sense to do it this way, and here’s why,” we end up doing it that way, because there’s a programmatic reason why. Which is fine. They just need to understand the trades and what it’s costing them. We do that every day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Makes me tired just listening." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s fun. In a sense you’re a problem solver. You just figure it out. Or a puzzle solver, if you want to think about it that way. You got all the pieces out there, and you have to figure out how to put it together. The interesting thing is the picture is not on the front of the box. You end up designing the picture based on all the pieces that come together. Then in the end, it’s a beautiful thing called Space Station. So it’s pretty amazing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What’s your background?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My background. I got a degree in mechanical engineering. Then when I graduated from college [at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana], I actually worked for Arthur Andersen for two years in consulting. Our social life was down here. A gal who worked in the Payload Operations Group was moving on to Space Station back in the Reston [Virginia] days, the early early days, [Space Station] Freedom. She’s like, “Oh, I think you’d really like working in payloads. Send in your resume, and I’ll have my boss interview you.” Literally, he picked my resume and interviewed me. I was on site a week later, two weeks later. It was crazy.\\n\\n When I first started in Payload Operations Branch, we were in the same building as the flight directors. I just remember going, “Wow, what a cool job.” You think of them as just these amazing people that just have so much knowledge. You don’t realize that you gain knowledge over time. I don’t really recall what year it was, but it was like, “I want to do that job.” So I worked at it till I was selected. It was fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Glad you did. So it was fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Still is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Will you keep working in this [position] until Space Station is finished?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know. There’s a life cycle to every flight director. I don’t really work console anymore, because I’m the deputy of the office. So more I do management of the flight directors. During the missions, I sit at the MOD console, the Mission Ops Directorate console. So the purpose of that console is to facilitate between the real-time team and the programs and the MER. The flight director runs everything and deals with a lot of things on the loop, but if people have questions and issues come up, MOD can do a lot to answer those questions and keep it out of the hair of the flight director. Or conversely, package it so it’s in a smaller neater box that then the flight director can go figure out how to attack it. We try and understand really what’s going on and what are the drivers, boil it down, and then give it to the flight director, because they’re in charge of the mission.\\n\\n It’s a fascinating job. It’s a whole different facet of mission operations. So it’s really interesting, because when you’re in the real-time environment, so much is going on, and you’re all tied into it. Then you realize there’s a whole lot of people who aren’t as plugged in. So really, most of the time people just want information to understand what’s going on. But then there’s negotiations that go on as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s interesting. Is there anything else you think we should know about planning or training or flying that we haven’t touched on that you think, “You should really know this if you’re going to write about this aspect”?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mission ops, their foundation was built back in the early Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. The whole concept of mission ops was plan, train, fly. They have a very organized structured approach. That’s what makes, I think, good flight controllers. You plan for what you’re going to do. You train really hard. Then you can go execute, and you can deal with whatever challenges occur in that mission, because of all the planning and the training that you’ve put into it. In a sense, there’s a methodology that they go through in this whole development process. So it makes them very flexible and smart and quick on their feet in real time. So those foundations were laid back with Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft and Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz, and it’s evolved today. But it really has maintained. That is the core for MOD. Everybody in that organization believes in it. That’s what I think makes them so strong." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Well, we thank you for coming in today and sharing your thoughts with us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Annette P. Hasbrook", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00176", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FisherAL/fisheral.htm", + "original_file_name": "FisherAL_2-17-09.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FisherAL/FisherAL_2-17-09.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Anna L. Fisher", + "location_date": "Hosuton, Texas – 17 February 2009" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Anna L. Fisher" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is February 17th, 2009. This oral history with Dr. Anna Fisher is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is the interviewer. She is assisted by Sandra Johnson. Thanks again for joining us today. We really appreciate it. I know your schedule is busy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good to be here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’d like to start by talking about your pre-NASA days. Could you tell us about your interest in science when you were growing up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was always interested in science and math, just because that was what I was good at. I tended to be kind of shy, so I wasn’t somebody who wanted to go into theater or anything like that. I just always gravitated toward science and math. My father was in the military. I’m an Army brat, so we moved every two or three years. When I was in seventh grade, I remember we were stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. We were out at PE [physical education] class, and our teacher had a little transistor radio. We were listening to Alan [B.] Shepard’s first flight. That was when I first really thought, “Wow, I would love to go do something like that.” But of course all the astronauts at that time were male. They were all fighter pilots. For whatever reason, it never even entered my mind to consider trying to go to pilot training. That wasn’t something that I had access to or that entered my imagination.\\n\\n But I did think about, “Maybe someday there’ll be a Space Station.” I started thinking a little bit about medicine but not in a realistic way. I did not read a lot of science fiction, because I had this thing when I was growing up that I only liked to read books that had a female lead character. There weren’t a lot of books with female lead characters that were in science fiction novels. I didn’t read a lot of those kind of things. Like I said, I got interested in science and math. Then as I got older and started focusing more realistically on medicine, I was a volunteer at Harbor General Hospital because my best friend’s mother was a nurse there, which is one of the county hospitals in Los Angeles [California]. Back then they had us developing film for X-rays. I’m not sure if you’d be allowed to do that anymore today, but that’s what we were doing. We were in the darkroom. I remember telling her, “I’d really like to be an astronaut.” She’s the only person I ever even said the words out loud too.\\n\\n She was a good friend. She didn’t laugh at me. Then I pretty much forgot about it, because as I grew up and went to UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles], I got into chemistry. I started out in math, and then I sat down and said, “Well, what am I going to do with that? I either have to go into research, and I don’t know that I’m that smart.” I liked working with people more. A bunch of my friends were in chemistry. So I started going into chemistry. As I saw my friends graduate after getting a PhD and spending six years and not getting jobs, at that time I said, “Hmm. I think I’ll be a little more practical and shift gears to medical school.” Plus I found that I really didn’t like doing lab work. I wanted to work more with people. So that’s how I evolved from math to medicine.\\n\\n I was very fortunate to get into the MD/PhD program at UCLA. As I got going into my medical training I got much more interested in the practice of medicine. At that point medical training is just very overwhelming. You’re just so focused on that. I was doing my internship—I can tell you more about that if you want—but I was doing my internship, and I had a very good friend, Dr. Mark Mecikalski, who’s in—I believe he’s in Arizona now. He used to follow the space program avidly. He got all the NASA newsletters and all those things. I remember he had lunch with my then fiance, later husband, Bill, and said, “Hey, NASA is looking for people. You and Anna have always talked about how you’re interested.” I remember Bill paging me over the loudspeaker system, getting his call, and saying, “We have three weeks to apply before the deadline.”\\n\\n So we got our applications. I think we wound up having some vacation. In those days it wasn’t an electronic application. It was just a regular civil service application that you filled out by hand. I remember where you put in the title, what you were applying for, and it was astronaut. It felt kind of weird. I think I got mine in the day before the deadline, because you had to get transcripts and all that kind of stuff. It was a pretty arduous process. So I got mine in maybe the day before the deadline. I think Bill got his application postmarked the day of the deadline. For me it was a real struggle in that time period, because we had both accepted surgical internship positions. Bill was a year ahead of me. At the last minute we sat down—well, not the last minute, but fairly early in the process of when you get your internship. We sat down, and we talked about it. I said, “Here I am. I’m going to be a surgical resident. Is that the kind of life I really want to lead where I’m going to be on call at all hours of the night?” We started having second thoughts even before the NASA application came along.\\n\\n Then when the NASA application came along we decided to take a year and wait. I spoke with Dr. State, who was the head of surgery at Harbor General, and said that we were going to wait a year. He wasn’t too happy with that. Once I got accepted to be at NASA he was much nicer. So anyway we decided to spend a year practicing ER [Emergency Room] medicine while waiting for a decision from NASA. We wound up practicing in emergency medicine for the year in Los Angeles while we were waiting to find out what happened, which was a really hard year. Just practicing emergency medicine in Los Angeles was a very challenging thing.\\n\\n But it did allow us to make a fair amount of money, which was very nice when we finally wound up coming here. We could finally have some money to buy a house and start paying off our thousands and thousands of dollars of loans which we were both in debt for. Maybe I’ve wandered too much on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, it’s great; it’s wonderful. Those are the kind of details we’re looking for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s a funny thing. When we were working for this particular ER group, and Bill was working probably ten 24-hour shifts a month, and I was working probably eight 24-hour shifts, which is really grueling. I never want to work another 24-hour shift as long as I live if I can help it. But that was what our group did. A lot of docs liked to do that, because then they could work two weeks real hard and then take two weeks off and travel and do other things. I didn’t like it. I like a nicer pace of life, but that wasn’t an option. But it did allow us to earn a fairly large amount of money, because all we did was work, go home, and save. We didn’t really spend a lot. So we were making—oh, I guess I probably was making $8,000 a month and Bill was probably making $10,000 to $12,000 a month. So all of a sudden from being on loans to here. Then when I finally got accepted at NASA, all of a sudden they said, “Well, do you want to come work?”\\n\\n I looked at my very first payroll sheet. I think it was $30,000 a year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that’s a huge change." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was like our financial status was just changing; it was so funny. As Bill said, “Hey, we would pay to come work here,” or something like that, when Dr. [Christopher C.] Kraft asked. It was just kind of funny. We had this one blip of a year where we made some money, and it allowed us to buy a house and pay off loans. So that was nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about the interview process. Did you come with your husband at that point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I was in the second interview group, but the first group that had women. It was real interesting, because [Margaret] Rhea [Seddon], Shannon [W. Lucid], and I were in that same group. Also I’m blanking on her last name. Nina. She’s also a scientist here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I know who you are thinking of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Cintron, Nitza [M.] Cintron, yes. She was in our group as well and wound up coming here and working. It wound up being a pretty successful interview group for NASA. So Bill and I were working, as I said, and we had just started in that ER group. We had arranged a couple days off, because we decided—I’m trying to remember. My birthday was August 24th. We were trying to take some time off for my birthday. Then we were also going to plan our wedding. We were just going to have a small wedding in Florida with Bill’s family out where they have some property and an old house that meant a lot to Bill. There was a little church. It’s called Windermere, Florida. It’s a little town on one of the lakes. It’s now near Disney World [Orlando, Florida]. At the time Disney World wasn’t there.\\n\\n So we had just arranged about a couple days, and we were going to go get married. We were just sitting there making plans and flight plans and all that sort of stuff when the phone rang. It was—I don’t remember who called anymore, probably Duane [L.] Ross asking if I wanted to come interview. This would have been on a Friday I guess, Thursday or Friday. Would I want to leave not that Sunday but the following Sunday and come for an interview? That was the week Bill and I were targeting to plan our wedding. As you see, I’m not one of these plan a wedding a year in advance kind of person. We were sitting there and I said, “It’s NASA. They want me to come interview.” He said, “Say yes, we’ll figure it out.” So I said yes. I said, “Okay, now what?” That began one of the hardest weeks of my life. Let’s see.\\n\\n This was a Friday. We went shopping. We bought a dress. We went and talked to the Wayfarers Chapel, Paseo Del Mar, [San Pedro, California] which is this beautiful chapel where Marilyn Monroe got married at one point. It’s designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s beautiful. It’s built out of glass and rock. We went over there, and we explained our predicament. They had an opening that Tuesday at 2:00 or something like that. We went and got dresses, we got a photographer, did all this stuff. We called a couple of our friends that we wanted to come. Bill’s family wasn’t even able to adjust, but they were very understanding. We did all that. We got married on Tuesday. We went to San Francisco [California] for that night to the next day and came back. I think I worked a shift on that weekend and another shift. It was supposed to be my tenth high school reunion that Saturday, and I really wanted to go.\\n\\n That was it. I just ran out of steam that Saturday night having to be ready to go the next day. I said, “If I’m going to go for this interview, I’ve got to give it everything I have.” It’s my only reunion that I missed for high school, but they were very understanding as well. Then I got on a plane that Sunday morning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh my gosh. You must have been exhausted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was. I was exhausted. Because I was so busy, I didn’t really have time to think about the interview process, study, or research. Back then you didn’t have the Internet and Google. You couldn’t just instantaneously get the information like you can today. All of a sudden I realized, “Jeez, I’m on my way to do this, and I really haven’t researched it, other than I know I want to do this with all my heart.” A lot of the people who come now, they know exactly who’s on the board. They know all this sort of stuff. They’ve planned their whole life to do this. So I’m going, “Jeez, what have I gotten myself into?”\\n\\n We arrive Sunday. John [W. Young] and George [W.S. Abbey] meet us at the then Sheraton Kings Inn where we were all staying. We were in one of their little rooms and they told us to write an essay on why we wanted to be an astronaut." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember what you wrote?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I know I wrote that it was a dream that I’d always had, and that I wanted, and that if they selected me I would do the very best I could, or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, and then I wound up being on the astronaut selection board in 1987. Then I saw how when you get these—because they still do the same thing, ask you to write that. It was just funny being there, reading the things—remembering back to when I wrote mine.\\n\\n I’m trying to remember. I know I had medical tests. I know I had my interview on Thursday. I remember we had the social on Wednesday night. As I mentioned, I was pretty shy even at this stage. I’m not somebody who in a social event just goes up and goes and talks to people. I remember Mr. Abbey bringing me over to meet Dr. Kraft, seeing that I got to meet people.\\n\\n Around that time I was starting—I don’t know where it came from, but I just had this feeling that this was possibly going to happen. I remember I called Bill and I said, “I think you better come here, because if this is real, you better see if you want to live in Houston.” So I remember that morning we were getting ready to leave, and they came with a bus every morning. I remember Bill pulling into the parking lot right around the time the bus was going to leave. I told him, “You better go look around and see what you think, because—I don’t know, I just have this feeling about all of this.”\\n\\n Then that day I wound up having my interview. To this day I always wonder what they must have thought, because most people wear suits. I was from California. I still have it in my closet now. I wore this one-piece long green pants outfit with my wedge probably about this high. [Demonstrates] Wedge shoes that were ’70s timeframe. I just had this thing, “Well, this is NASA. They’re going to know everything about you, so I might as well just be myself, and either that’s good enough or it’s not.” So I still look back going, “I went to my interview like that!”\\n\\n As I said, Bill was from Florida. I remember driving around and seeing John Young Parkway. I was very shocked to find him on the selection board, because I was sure that he must have been someone who died earlier in the space program, because everything was named after him. I’m now really good friends with Susy Young and John Young. We go over to their house for Thanksgiving. I don’t think I ever quite had the courage to tell her that story yet.\\n\\n I had my interview, and again my attitude on all of that was, “NASA is this big entity that knows everything about you.” They already had done background investigations. I knew from some of my friends that people had come and talked to them. I just figured, “Well, I better be honest.” I even remember saying, “I want to have children, so if that’s a factor in your selection, I definitely do want to have children.” I even said that at my interview. Then you leave. After you’ve been here for a week, then you really want it. Before I was able to keep it at a distance, but those months from August till when they announced in January were probably some of the hardest months in my life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about that phone call that you received from George Abbey. What’s your recollection of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, let me just backtrack a little bit. Because then remember Bill came here and he spoke with people. I don’t know if that helped him a little bit in terms of getting an interview or it would have happened anyway. He wound up being in the interview group with Judy [Judith A.] Resnik. I think it was in November. He was towards the end of the interview process, either the last or next to last group, something like that.\\n\\n So then we both really wanted it, but realized it was really hard to think that we’d both get selected at the same time. The night before that call went out I started getting a lot of calls from reporters, so you started to have an indication that something was happening. Roy Neal, who was the big space reporter, called. They wanted to have an interview. The next morning that call came from Mr. Abbey. Of course we were the only ones where he had to say yes to me, and Bill is the only one who ever has gotten a rejection call from Mr. Abbey, because he had to talk to both of us at the same time. But Bill took it pretty well.\\n\\n We had both talked and said that if either of us got selected I probably had the greater opportunity, because I also had the background in chemistry as well. At the time they were really looking for people that had a background in two areas. Bill really didn’t have that. I remember that whole day was kind of surreal. Connie Chung was then a local reporter. She came and interviewed me. It was really strange because then you were kind of on your own. There was no NASA. You were sitting there thinking naively—this was around the time when the Shuttle hasn’t flown, and they were getting a lot of criticism, and the tiles were all going to fall off on the first flight. You’re sitting there thinking, “Well, should I do these interviews or not? I’m sure NASA wants some good publicity, but I don’t know any more about the Shuttle today than I did yesterday.”\\n\\n We would call Houston to ask advice on things. It was always, “Use your own judgment.” So those first couple of weeks and months you were stumbling along, because there was all this interest. You were just not sure what to do and what to say. I remember I got invited to the International Harvester dealers’ convention in Las Vegas [Nevada]. I think it was sometime in February. Jim [James A.] Lovell was speaking, and I was speaking. This was my first speech I had ever given. Like I said, I was pretty shy. So I had this all written out and everything, and I was sitting next to Jim Lovell. He was so gracious and kind.\\n\\n I remember he got up and talked about going to the bathroom in space and all those things. I’m getting up and giving this little goody-two-shoes kind of speech. It was so funny. So that was my introduction to learning how to talk in public for NASA. Going back to that first day when the announcement was made, there was just interviews all day, and then I remember Bill took Judy and I out to dinner that night." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Judy Resnik?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Judy Resnik. She was working for Xerox." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You knew each other at that point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because Bill was in the same interview group with her, we had made some contact before. Even the night before, because she was getting the same kind of calls that I was getting. We had an idea that something was going to happen the next day. We had talked the night before. I don’t remember if we went somewhere. But definitely Bill took us both out to dinner the next evening. I remember going over to her apartment. She lived right along the ocean on Redondo Beach Boulevard. To this day, when I go to LA I almost always, when I drive to go to my mom’s house—before my mom sold her house, I would always drive that way and think about Judy, because we went over to her house and were standing on her balcony. “Can you believe this is really happening?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you guys talk about all this publicity that was landing at your doorstep and how you were going to deal with things?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We talked about it; we did a couple things together. It’s hard to remember. Everything blurs. It’s a good thing you’re doing this project now, because ten years from now I might not remember all these things. We had something at the Griffith Park Observatory [Los Angeles, California] that we did together, I remember. Just a couple things like that. We did some joint interviews. They had us both be on a morning talk show, some things like that. Very quickly they brought us all to NASA for one day where they had the official announcement with that picture where there are all of us sitting on the stage. I believe that was—January 16th? No, that was when the announcement was. It was just about maybe a week or two later.\\n\\n We all got to see each other. But we still weren’t official NASA employees, because we didn’t actually start until—I think my first day was July 5th. Judy and Jim [James F.] Buchli, I know they started early. They came earlier. For the bulk of the group we started on July 5th." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You and your husband had been out here to check out places to live." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, yes. I can still remember actually driving to work that first day. I can remember exactly what it felt like, and I’m thinking, “God, I can’t believe I’m driving into work to be an astronaut!” But yes, Bill had come out. Yes, that’s right. When I had to go do that talk in Las Vegas he had gone out. We had looked around when we came that day when they announced everything. I remember we drove around, and we saw this one house that we really really liked and would have loved, but it wasn’t for sale.\\n\\n We talked with a realtor and talked about what we wanted. Then she called and said, “There’s this really neat house that I think you all would like. It fits your description, but you better come quick because it’ll probably sell pretty quickly.” That was that same weekend I had already committed to give that talk in Las Vegas, so Bill said he would go out and take a look. He goes and takes a look and says, “I really think this is the house we should get.” My first house I ever bought without ever even seeing it. But Bill and I had pretty similar tastes in things.\\n\\n I was back in Houston on a later trip. I don’t remember exactly what the reason was for the trip. I went to go see the house, and I remember looking. I go, “But the windows don’t open,” because there were very few windows in the house that opened. There was maybe a bathroom window that opened. The real estate agent says, “This is Houston, you’re not going to want to open your windows.” Funny the things you remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where did you guys end up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We wound up living in Clear Lake Forest Subdivision." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a nice area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and what was really weird then when I realized it, that house was right on the water on Armand Bayou. It’s really called Mud Lake. Then it connects to Clear Lake and Taylor Lake. You know that bridge where the Hilton is? It goes under there. There’s only about nine houses. There’s really a right-angle bend, and there’s about six houses on this one street and there’s the three houses that we had. Our house was the one that’s right at the right angle.\\n\\n Right across was a vacant lot that for years and years was vacant so that’s how I had seen that house. I had stood on that lot and looked over there and said, “Oh, I really like that house.” It turned out it was that one. The house that Bill bought was the house that I had looked at that I liked. It took me a while to realize it was the same one, because I wasn’t as familiar with the area, and I didn’t know exactly where I was. Finally I realized it was the house I had always wanted when I’d been looking around. It was really funny. It was kind of sad though because the person who bought it was going to move here from San Francisco, I believe. He and his wife had moved here, and then their daughter got in a car accident. The mother went to go be with her and take care of her and everything. Finally they decided to sell; he stayed there for a year and then moved back to California, which was why they sold it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What a shame." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sad." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you think of all the publicity? We’ve seen a lot of the articles about you and Bill, how he applied, didn’t get accepted, and you got accepted. There seemed to be a lot of focus on you, especially as a married couple. What did you think of all that press coverage?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Bill was really great then. He was just happy that we both got in the program. He was glad to give NASA publicity. All his comments were really sincere. He never ever made me feel—if anything I was just a little more conscious of not saying things. Later on when we got here and I would go do something I might be a little hesitant to say, “Oh, wow, I had such a great time today,” or something like that. Just to not make him feel bad.\\n\\n But like I said, he had pretty much expected that. I think if he hadn’t gotten accepted the second time it might have been different, but he was really good at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now you were in the first class that was selected in close to ten years. What was the reception like from all of these male astronauts to this new very diverse class coming in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it was really interesting. It was fun. They were all very nice. I’m sure privately they had their thoughts, but they never in any way expressed that. I know that with the flight rate the previous ten years they certainly didn’t think they needed a bunch of new astronauts; they could quite adequately take care of it themselves, I’m sure. I’m sure that many of them thought that. In fairness to them I would have probably felt the same way, but they were very gracious. One of the neat things they did—it’s really interesting now watching the way our training went versus how it’s set up now for the current astronaut candidate classes.\\n\\n Actually, now I’m involved in how we’re developing the ASCAN [Astronaut Candidate] training flow for this new class that we’re in the process of selecting. It’s interesting, because it’s the first class that’s not going to have any Shuttle training and trying to figure out how to do that.\\n\\n For us, I don’t think they really thought it out ahead very well. I was expecting to come in and have it be like in the military flight school kind of thing. But really they were inventing how they were going to train us on the fly. For example Jim Buchli, who was a military backseater, I told you he came early. Then Dale [A.] Gardner, who I wound up flying with on my flight, both were military backseaters. They put together the training plan for the mission specialists in the group who had absolutely no aviation experience. They put together the little course and taught us how to do navigating and talking on the radios. The pilots out at aircraft ops [operations] right now are a really professional group, and they really handle all the training of both the pilots and the mission specialists.\\n\\n Back then it wasn’t exactly that way. We each—the mission specialists who had no aviation background, or little or none—got assigned to one of the pilots in the astronaut corps. I was assigned to [Thomas K.] Ken Mattingly. It pretty much then became a matter of pride for them how their mission specialists did when they talked on the radios and how quickly they progressed.\\n\\n Jim and Dale came up with this ten-flight syllabus that you would go through. On this flight you went out, and you concentrated on visual flight rules. On this one, instrument rules. It was just a ten-card syllabus; something like that is still in existence today.\\n\\n So that was the T-38, which was probably the first thing that happened when we got here. That was the first priority, to get us qualified to where we could fly in the T-38s and start getting experience. So we got sent to water survival training in Homestead [Air Force Base, Florida], which was also real interesting, because Tom [Thomas D.] Jones wound up being a pilot there for the Air Force. He was doing his water survival training at the time that we, the six women, came through, with all the reporters that were there covering it. It was really interesting that he wound up coming and many years later being selected as an astronaut. We laughed about that a lot, because he and I wound up working together on Space Station many years later.\\n\\n Then we were sent to Enid, Oklahoma [Vance Air Force Base] to do land emergency training, which they don’t do anymore, thankfully. They now send people for winter survival, where you learn to navigate and eat bugs and all that kind of stuff. Luckily we didn’t do that. I’m not sure I would have passed that one. I think I would have rather died than eat bugs.\\n\\n What they did with us though, they took us to Enid, Oklahoma, which is Shannon Lucid’s hometown area. Of course everybody there was all excited about Shannon. They literally had this pickup truck. You know how you do parasailing off of a boat? Which is what we did in Homestead, and it was really neat. I’m not sure if they do it to this level of depth, where you actually parasail and then they cut you loose. The guy gave the signal and you hit these two handles, they fall way, and then you do the last part of a water entry as though you were ejecting from a T-38. Then you had to get into your raft. Then a helicopter actually came with the water swirling around. So you actually got to see what it would be like to be in a water rescue. You got on the little thingy and saw what it would have been like to hoist you up. Then they left you there. Then they went on to the next person. So it was actually really interesting training.\\n\\n They decided to do something very similar in Oklahoma, where they use a pickup truck instead of a boat. Suddenly you’re going across the land. It was actually pretty scary. I was kind of light. Some other people weren’t as light as me. Some of them were really struggling to get up into the air. I remember poor Shannon was getting dragged for a while. So I think after that experience people perhaps looked at the safety aspects of that. I don’t think any other class did that.\\n\\n I don’t remember, but it was probably one of the more interesting parts of our training. It still was very interesting. Then you actually did a parachute landing, because they cut you loose and you did the same thing. So I think it was pretty remarkable that none of us got hurt." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were the press following you around this whole time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were somewhere nearby. I think it became apparent that there was this possibility that someone could get hurt, and they probably better not have anyone too close by." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was it like having all this press attention while you were in the midst of doing water survival training and other activities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For me, NASA needed good publicity because we still weren’t flying. By this time we were becoming a little more knowledgeable about things. I just felt that was part of our job. I don’t know; it didn’t really bother me. I guess I understood people being curious. I just felt like if there’s anything I can do to get good publicity and to get this Space Shuttle off the ground, so that I have the career I want to have, I’ll do it. If the Shuttle didn’t fly and things weren’t successful, I was going to be figuring out what I was going to be doing.\\n\\n Many, many, many years later when I was head of our Space Station Branch, before the first element flew, the class of ’96, which Mike [Edward M.] Fincke, who’s up on board the Station right now, was part of—I remember looking at them. There were several of them, Sandy [Sandra H. Magnus] and Dan [Daniel C.] Burbank, Mike, and they were all assigned to the Space Station Branch, because at that point I had convinced Charlie [Charles J.] Precourt that our office had not really been that involved in the development of Station, and we really needed to be more involved in it. I was the only one at that point left who remembered what it was like before the Shuttle flew and how when things weren’t perfect. People were really complaining about the Station. I was able to say, “The Shuttle wasn’t always like this either.”\\n\\n I remember looking at that group and saying the same thing that I had felt back in ’78 and ’79, “If this thing doesn’t work, have you all looked at the manifest? It’s all Space Station built. If this doesn’t work you guys are out of a job. I suggest you do whatever it takes to get this thing to fly.” They did. They were just troopers, just as we were in ’78. Our training was—instead of learning how to operate an APU (auxiliary power unit) or the computers, the engineers would come over and tell us how to build one, what the fuel was, and what the temperature was. There were no procedures for how to operate it and malfunction procedures. Your training now, you might know vaguely how an APU is built, but what you really want to know is how to operate it. What do you do if it shuts down? Our training wasn’t like that at all.\\n\\n We had a couple months of classes. We were divided into two groups, the red group and the blue group. We still to this day have red T-shirts and blue T-shirts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Whose group were you in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was in [Frances R. “Dick”] Scobee’s group, the blue group. [Frederick H.] Rick Hauck, who was later my commander of my flight, was head of the red group. It’s interesting how these military folks just emerge as leaders. Those two guys just really emerged as leaders from very early on.\\n\\n We would have our classes separately, so that it wasn’t such a large group. That’s how we went through things. It was always a friendly camaraderie and rivalry between the two groups. Then we went on all of our Center visits, which was a lot of fun. That was a time where we all got to bond, got to know each other, and learn about the different Centers. A lot of fun memories from those trips.\\n\\n Then all of a sudden, we were here for about one year, and all of a sudden John announced, “Okay, that’s it. Training is over. You’re all astronauts now.” We were supposed to have a two-year period. It was like, “No, we’ve got a lot of work to do now. We don’t have time for all this foolishness.”\\n\\n So we were all given our assignments of what to do. The military folks, I think, obviously having come from an aviation background, had a little more understanding of how to just get in there and start doing things. I remember they decided who the ascent, orbit, and entry teams were going to be for the first Shuttle flight. Then the CapComs [Capsule Communicators] were assigned. I’m trying to remember. I think it was Rick Hauck for ascent, Dan [Daniel C.] Brandenstein for entry, and Jim Buchli for orbit.\\n\\n Then I remember that they started just having all these meetings with the flight controllers coming up with procedures; nobody had written any procedures or anything about how we were going to write an ascent checklist. What it was going to look like. I think they all finally got the idea that they were going to need cue cards. I remember Dan Brandenstein going down to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], fitting all these cue cards. Figuring out where they were going to go. To this day they all pretty much fly exactly as was envisioned by our group. We certainly didn’t write all the procedures. We weren’t the experts in the systems, but the idea of what the ascent checklist had to look like and the entry checklist came from us. Then okay, we need a malfunction procedure for this. Then the flight controllers would go off and do that.\\n\\n Many years later I was in charge of our flight data file, after it was much more established. Every class that’d come in would always be complaining about how this procedure in the ascent checklist is this way and this one in the entry—they were pretty much essentially the same procedure. Luckily I had seen the evolution of all of this, so I was able to say, “Well, that’s because there were three different teams, and they all independently developed this.” It was just fun to watch all of that.\\n\\n Then after the Challenger accident, we had the two and a half years’ downtime. That was one of the things we did. We went in and just cleaned up all that stuff that we never had time to clean up, like make a procedure the same if it was basically the same procedure, and try to have common standards throughout.\\n\\n We were so busy up until that point, because all of a sudden we were developing procedures, getting them ready to go, and then all of a sudden very quickly the Shuttle was going to fly, and there just wasn’t enough time to get all that polish work done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of your first assignments according to the records that we have was working with Bill [William B.] Lenoir. What were some of the things you were working with him on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, my actual most fun first assignment was—now that there were going to be women on board the Shuttle, what did we want in our personal hygiene kit. That was a real interesting assignment, because I had long ago decided when I was in medical school that since I was going to be on call and having to get up in the middle of the night, that I wasn’t going to wear makeup. I didn’t want to be one kind of person in the daytime and sleep and have makeup running all over my face; so I went all through medical school with no makeup. I was one of these no-makeup kind of people. Then there was other people who felt differently about it.\\n\\n It was just really interesting coming up with this kit. The one thing that I did, my mom is European. In Europe they use Nivea cream a lot. So I had grown up on Nivea cream, which probably wasn’t that big in the United States. I got Nivea cream on board in the kit. That was one of my actual first fun assignments was to come up with what we wanted in our kit.\\n\\n I remember years later somebody complaining about the Nivea cream. I said, “Gee, I don’t know how that happened.” It was too greasy or something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What typically goes in one of those kits? Can you tell us?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s your toothpaste, your toothbrush, creams. All that stuff then has to go out to White Sands [Test Facility, Las Cruces, New Mexico] and be tested for outgassing and flammability. You can’t just take whatever it is you want. So I just let everybody else decide what they wanted, but I picked the cream. That was the thing I cared most about. That was one of my first assignments.\\n\\n My second assignment was to work on the development of the extra-small EMU [Extravehicular Mobility Unit]. Early on, Mr. Abbey really wanted to force the program to design a spacesuit to fit everybody in the office. So they were working very hard on trying to build the extra small hard upper torso [HUT]. I actually started out doing a lot of EVA runs with Jim Buchli; he was also assigned to do that. When we first started out they didn’t even have a Shuttle EMU available to go in the water. The water tank was right by the astronauts’ gym. It was this old building. This tank that you had to walk up some steps to get up to the top. I don’t know how deep it was, maybe ten feet or something. They had a little mockup of the 576 bulkhead where the latches come.\\n\\n It’s definitely not like the NBL [Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory] today. It was this little tiny thing. That’s where we did a lot of our early development of the contingency procedures if the payload bay doors wouldn’t close. That was honestly the hardest job I’ve ever had, because they didn’t have a suit that fit me. They put me in Pete [Charles] Conrad’s A7LB. He was short, but he was definitely bigger. Now that we’ve gotten so much more experienced in doing EVAs, if you don’t have a good suit fit and you have a lot of air in there, it’s just going to make it almost impossible to get a good weigh-out and to work. Now we have weight trainers who help us really bulk up. But again back in those days it was just, “Okay, you’re doing this,” with no training whatsoever as to how to go about doing that. So that was hard.\\n\\n I would get in that water tank. You’d have these heavy tools. It was really hard. Then they kept trying to get the suit small enough, but there’s only so small you can get that hardware. Getting in and out of it was a real challenge. Have you ever seen anyone get in? You might want to go over to an NBL run one time so that you understand and just watch at the beginning when they’re getting in the suits, because they have it hooked on this thing, and you kneel down, you crouch in, you’re trying to get your hands up through it. It’s hard torso. I would come home and my whole arms would just be totally bruised from trying to get through those metal rings and things.\\n\\n Finally after several years they decided that from a cost point of view it was going to be so cost-prohibitive. They decided to just go with the medium and the large. If you didn’t fit in those you weren’t a candidate for a spacewalk. I did not disagree with that decision, because the extra small HUT, the hardware that’s in front, all your gauges and all the controls, you can’t really make that smaller. Even if you make the torso small enough to where it fits, your useful arm reach, which is where you do most of your work in these spacewalks, is going to be much less than one of the guys with the big orangutan arms. It’s like saying, “Okay, I wish I could be a pro basketball player.” Well, I wasn’t given those assets. You can’t always do everything. That was my first experience was with that job.\\n\\n Then I started working for Bill Lenoir. He was actually working on the development of the PDRS [Payload Deployment and Retrieval System], the arm. He worked with Sally [K. Ride] a lot on that. Then in September of ’80, somewhere around late August, September of ’80—the Shuttle wound up flying April 12th of ’81—somebody decided we needed an on orbit tile repair capability. So Bill Lenoir was tasked to head that up. Dave [David M.] Walker and I and a little bit Charlie [Charles F.] Bolden, because the new class had just come on, started working the early tile repair effort.\\n\\n It was this real crash effort of coming up with the material, coming up with how we were going to do it. Looking back on it now, for me it was a crash course in how you start off a program from nothing to design requirements to building actual flight hardware. In the end, they decided wisely to not pursue that on the first flight. The first flight was challenging enough as it was. When they wound up coming up with tile repair after Columbia, they actually started with where we had left off. It turned out that a lot of the challenges we identified at the end of that program were the same challenges they were going to face. The material was still bubbling and outgassing when you tried to put it in vacuum. How you restrain yourself for the task. All those same issues. To make a long story short, we came up with the idea of using the manned maneuvering unit, because you had to get under the Orbiter somehow. We were going to fly, and they had these pads that you attached to either side that you could heat up. They would stick to the Orbiter then you could release them. That was a real challenge in the design, designing those pads.\\n\\n As part of it we got to fly up to Martin Marietta [Denver, Colorado]. They had this huge room with this mockup of the underbelly of the Orbiter. They had this manned maneuvering unit and a huge room where you could fly the manned maneuvering unit. It was all this hardware behind you. It was the most fun simulator I’ve ever been in in my life. You could just actually fly this thing. It doesn’t exist anymore, I don’t think. For these whole six months we were flying back and forth to Martin Marietta and trying to devise these procedures and come up with this. Finally in the end we recommended that, if they really and truly wanted to develop it, it was going to be another two years, at least. Which is about what it took them to come up with something after the Columbia accident." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a lot of work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, but for me it was a real education. Because then later on, when I wound up being in charge of our Space Station Branch about a year prior to when we launched the first element, and then about three years before we launched the first crew—I had had all that history of watching all this development, which by this time nobody in the office had seen that. Everybody was used to the Shuttle: you got into your flow, it took you about a year to train, you had gone through a nice ASCAN training year with a syllabus for learning the Shuttle.\\n\\n The way we learned Shuttle was we were sent over to SAIL [Shuttle Avionics and Integration Laboratory]. We worked at SAIL, and that’s because there was no time in the simulators for us. The simulators barely would stay up running long enough to get the first four crews that were announced in training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also worked in SAIL for a while. Can you tell us about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was really fun. That was where I really learned the Shuttle and the Shuttle procedures. I worked for STS-2 to 4. I worked at SAIL. For STS-5 through 7, I was a Cape Crusader. I did the first payload flows that we supported, because the previous flights up to then had not really had real payloads.\\n\\n I just had some really interesting jobs. Each of those were, I think, extremely helpful in allowing me to be a good crew member when I flew on the Shuttle. Then I wound up being a CapCom for STS-8 and 9. My actual CapCom stint was for 9. Then I got into my own training. I had pretty much seen all the major jobs that our office has.\\n\\n I was really glad I had, because just going straight into training without understanding what’s going on at SAIL, what’s going on in mission control, how does the Cape operate, and to really know the people, because you worked with them, you didn’t just come over there for a meeting or something. That was really valuable experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your work hours like at this point? Was it long hours or was it quite comfortable for you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After being an intern and working 24 on and 24 off, anything looked easy to me. I was like, “They actually put time to sleep in your flight plan. They actually assume you need some sleep to do a good job.” You had rules; if you were flying a T-38 you needed to be on the ground so long and have so much rest. You had a duty day that you were not to exceed and all that sort of stuff. So for me it was like, “Wow! Somebody actually cares about you and your health.”\\n\\n But your days, they just varied according to what you were doing. If you were at SAIL, their shifts would go 7:00 to 3:00 and then they usually worked two shifts a day, so we usually had to cover. Like if you were on for a day covering, you might work a really long day. One of my favorite memories was when they took a dinner break, and I ran home to go water-ski. I said, “I can’t get my hair wet, can’t fall, because I got to go back to work, and I don’t have time.” I did it. I went skiing and back to work, didn’t get my hair wet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Who was your first officemate when you came into the office?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Dan Brandenstein. That was so funny. We walked in. I had been on the cover of Redbook. That was a time when they were doing normal people on the cover. I’ll backtrack. That was probably one of my most favorite experiences I had prior to coming to NASA. It must have been about in May, I think it was. I got a call, and they wanted to do regular people on the cover. Out of the six of us, they asked me to do it. I am still friends with the lady who did the interview. All these years later we’re still very, very good friends.\\n\\n They flew us to New York. I was so sick the night before. I had a fever of 103. I was so disappointed because I’d been so looking forward to this. I rallied around the next day. They did makeup. They were focusing at that point on working out. What was your exercise routine? I’m trying to say politely what I couldn’t. “Hey, look, I just got off of doing 24-hour shifts for the last couple years. My workout regime is eat dinner and sleep.” I think I started working out truly in the sense of working out when I got called for my interview. Bill said, “Okay, you got to go out and go jogging.” He started playing Rocky theme music for me.\\n\\n It was ironic. Here I am being asked what’s my workout routine. There’s no time in my life for working out. That was what they wanted to focus on. It was kind of funny. They took literally 800 pictures. I think I had two different outfits on. It was like being a model for the day. It was just kind of fun.\\n\\n That night they had arranged for us to go to the theater. Jason Robards was in a play. I’ve forgotten what the play was now. We got to go backstage and meet him. They had us in a limousine that took us there. I remember getting out of the car. I had on all this makeup. As I told you, I didn’t wear makeup. It’s really weird how people treat you differently. As I was getting out of the car they didn’t know who I was. There’s just people standing on the street. Because you’re coming in a limousine and all made up, they all think you’re somebody. You could see them trying to figure out, “Now who is she? Do I know her?” It was just really a funny experience. But it was neat. You were asking me something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "About your officemate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, my officemate, okay, so I was on the cover of Redbook. Dan got to be on the cover of some military magazine, some Navy publication." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No comparison." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He wanted to consider that a comparison. So we called ourselves the cover office. It was so neat, too. When you got there, there were two desks in every office. This was before the office got huge-huge, and we were all crammed into every nook and cranny. This was when we all had the third floor of Building 4 North. You came in and your desk was there and your little calendar. Everything was all nice there. I remember I picked up the calendar of where I was supposed to go. I looked at it, and I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t read any of it. It was all in NASA acronyms, and I had no idea what any of it meant." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that your first couple days?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "July 5th, that morning we arrived there. They have your schedule on your desk. “Dan, do you know how to read this?”\\n\\n Oh, I forgot the funny story. In my interview week I had my eyes dilated for my eye exam just before I went for my interview with the selection committee. I remember I came out into the sunlight with my eyes dilated. I couldn’t read where I was supposed to go for my interview. I didn’t want to be late for my interview. I remember stopping this person and saying, “Excuse me. Could you read this for me?” I always wondered who that person was, because I didn’t realize till I got outside that I didn’t know where I was going. I’d never had my eyes dilated before. So I didn’t know that you wouldn’t be able to read after that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s so painful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, so Dan and I shared an office. The cover office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When the ’80 class came in did you guys have more officemates at that point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t remember how that all worked out, come to think of it. I think we slowly had more people in. Eventually we wound up getting the whole upper third floor. I think originally we didn’t have the whole third floor. We kept expanding. I don’t remember all the details of exactly how that all worked out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your class was called the Thirty-Five New Guys. I’ve heard that Judy Resnik had some involvement with that and the T-shirt." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, remember she and Jim arrived early. Jim was actually a little bit of an artist. Has anyone of our group shown you our shirts?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No. You’ll have to bring one in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’ll have to bring one to you. They designed a Shuttle. There’s 35 people all over the Shuttle: on the outside, EVA, hanging from the arm. We have the blue version and the red version of this shirt. So they were the ones who did all of that. Also because they got here early, they tried to sequester better office stuff than we did.\\n\\n I remember Judy had this—she and Jim were in an office together. They had gotten this red recliner chair. I used to keep it after the Challenger accident. I always made sure that chair stayed. It’s still up in the office. Because I went on a seven-year leave of absence, I told a few people the story that that was a chair that somehow Judy managed to get. You know how it is in an office where you all get a certain amount of equipment, and somebody else has something way fancier than everybody else. That chair is still up. I’m not sure which office it’s in right now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You guys will have to get a little marker or something to put on there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s a red leather recliner. Burgundy, not bright red." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now I’m looking at our clock. I notice your watch is a little ahead. It’s about a quarter to. Do you want to keep going or you want to stop?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We’ll go to 12:00. What if I take you to about when I got selected for my flight? That’s an interesting story too. Then we could pick up from there, because I’ve had a pretty what I would call nontraditional path in the office.\\n\\n I’ve told you all my jobs that I’ve had pretty much up to when I was assigned. That was interesting. I started to feel like when I was around 33, having been a doctor and studying all these charts about how your ability to conceive really dies off, and not knowing when I was going to be assigned to a flight. Bill and I decided we need to make a commitment to having a family if we want to do that and let the chips fall as they may in terms of flight assignments. I wound up getting pregnant. Kristin was born July 29th of ’83.\\n\\n I was a Cape Crusader, and we fly T-38s. It’s really inconvenient to fly commercially when you have to go to Orlando and drive that long drive. I don’t know if you’ve done that before. I didn’t want to tell anyone I was pregnant as long as I could, because that would keep me out of things the least time possible, and also until I knew if everything was going to be okay. I’m kind of small, and I wore my flight suit a lot. I don’t think people really knew I was pregnant. So I was flying T-38s up until about I was probably four, four and a half months pregnant.\\n\\n I was always very careful and made sure I had the oxygen on. Perhaps not one of my smarter decisions in retrospect. But it worked out, and Kristin is fine. Because I was a Cape crusader and for STS-7 I was the lead crusader, I really didn’t want to not be able to do my job. I felt being able to fly T-38 was pretty important.\\n\\n Finally somewhere in there I told Mr. Abbey that I was pregnant. I remember I flew to the Cape, and I got the word that you’re coming back commercially. The rest of my flights were commercial after that. Which I understand, once you tell people formally, they’re responsible for the decisions. In fact I remember one trip where I was heading back, I think, on a Sunday morning in my flight suit for some reason. I had just finished some all-night tests, and I was trying to make it home. I was driving, probably speeding a little bit. This officer stopped me. I’m in my flight suit, and I’m very pregnant. I said, “Oh, for sure he’s going to have pity on me.” No. So I wound up working. There’s some really interesting photographs of Sally and I doing testing at the Cape together, because we were getting ready for her flight and we were testing whatever their payloads were at the Cape in the payload processing facility of me while pregnant.\\n\\n Let’s see. Kristin was born in July, so it must have been the beginning of July. Bill and I get called over to talk to Mr. Abbey, which is real unusual. He said he wanted to assign me to a flight. Did we have any reservations particularly? Bill, too. I’m probably the only person who’s been assigned to their flight about two weeks before they deliver. I doubt that’s probably ever happened in the history of the space program since, which I thought was really neat that he showed that confidence in me. So our crew was announced. I was assigned with Rick Hauck and Dave Walker, Joe [Joseph P.] Allen, Dale Gardner and me. I remember I delivered on a Friday. I was so happy. My whole pregnancy had been really easy.\\n\\n We had our cargo integration review. I remember I was at work all day Thursday. I started to suspect I was going to go into labor that night. Bill had already taken time off several times thinking we were going to have the baby. That night he decided to work at the ER—he was working in the ER. Sure enough that’s the night Kristin decides to come. I had worked all day that day. Went in and had a pretty pretty long labor. Then she was born. I wasn’t even going to stay in the hospital. After doing medical training, I don’t want to be in a hospital unless I’m in an accident or something where I have to be. So I had decided I wasn’t staying there.\\n\\n We were delivered about 9:30 in the morning. We’re staying in this recovery room, because the plan is for me to go home. Bill is asleep on the floor in this recovery room. I’m asleep. All of a sudden I remember Dave Walker coming in. He had this little basket, which is in my room to this day. Right now it’s sitting up in my bedroom. He said, “Bears for the bairn and the bearer who bore her,” or something. Dave Walker was always coming up with these things, this little note there. He’s the first person that shows up. Finally it hits me. This is probably not one of my smarter decisions. I probably ought to get one night of good rest before I go home, to take care of a baby and do all this.\\n\\n Now they’re scrambling trying to find a room for me and everything. We did that. But then that was on Friday. Monday, I was just feeling so happy and so good. I was assigned to a flight. I had my new baby. I decided to go into the Monday morning meeting with my little doughnut to sit on the chair. I showed up for the Monday morning meeting. It was just neat. Just to say, “I’m here and nothing’s going to change.” It was neat.\\n\\n So for the first couple weeks—luckily Rick had just flown. They were all off doing all their postflight stuff. It kept him out of our hair for a little bit. Our training wasn’t real intense at the beginning. I really wanted to CapCom. Rick didn’t want me necessarily CapCom. He wanted us to start training, and I successfully told him that I thought that was part of training. So I wound up—I guess Kristin was about four months old where I was pulling those weird shifts—I forget which shift, whether I was orbit one or orbit two. Long days. Now everything’s nice and they acknowledge that you might need to pump breasts, because I was breastfeeding. But I was just sneaking off by myself doing everything. It was kind of weird. It’s so much nicer now that people are so supportive. Most restrooms you go into now, at least on the site, there’s a partitioned area where you can do things like that. That was a bit of a struggle.\\n\\n Then I didn’t really take any formal leave. If I didn’t have training I didn’t come in. If I had training I came in. Probably about two months like that, and then training picked up and went to full-time. I had a wonderful lady who came to our house and took care of Kristin. She wound up going to the launch with us. We used to go over to their house for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we’re still very close friends with them. They became part of our family. That was how I got assigned to my flight, and the beginning of training. I don’t know if that’s a good place to stop and then start." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s perfect." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One other thing. I just forgot. It was along the lines of you were asking how we were accepted by people when we first came. That was one thing that I was very pleasantly surprised about. Everybody was warm, receptive. Carolyn [L.] Huntoon was assigned to the women. I don’t know if other people have told you. I think she was our unofficial person we could go to if we had any unique problems or anything with publicity or any of those kinds of issues that came up, things that we had to figure out, like urine containment for the launch. That was the first time they were encountering how we were going to handle urination for women from launch to orbit; we came up with a concept for diapers, which now actually I think both male and female use. So Carolyn was the person who was our unofficial mentor to help us and guide us through all that. Which I thought it was nice that Mr. Abbey had thought to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Have you read [Richard M.] Mike Mullane’s book [Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you think of what his thoughts were initially about the women astronauts coming on board?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I enjoyed his book, because it captured a lot of what it was like to be in that group of people. We just had our reunion last May for—was it [STS-]122? Yes, and some people I think were offended thinking that he told things that he shouldn’t have told. I don’t know. I wasn’t offended by it. I thought he captured what it was like to be in that era, the kinds of things that the guys would say. For example, my crewmates would tease me—less so probably Joe and Dale, more Dave probably. Every time we would do a transatlantic abort, they would say, “Well, we’ll trade Anna for camels, and then we’ll all get out,” or something like that. Nowadays people would think that’s probably not very politically correct. Then Dave gave me this neat collection. I have this neat collection of camels, all different kinds. This was just as we were training and joking. These are guys who were trained in a different era. They flew. They were pilots in Vietnam. They saw all kinds of things. I had gone to medical school. In histology class as they were doing their slide lectures, they would stick in Playboy centerfolds. I had seen all this. It wasn’t anything new to me. That didn’t offend me. I understand it’s just a way of just breaking the ice. Other people were perhaps not as open-minded as I am about those things. So we’ll see." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. Well, I think this would be a perfect place to stop." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00177", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FisherAL/fisheral.htm", + "original_file_name": "FisherAL_3-3-11.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FisherAL/FisherAL_3-3-11.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Anna L. Fisher", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 3 March 2011" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Anna L. Fisher" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is March 3rd, 2011. This oral history with Dr. Anna Fisher is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is the interviewer, assisted by Sandra Johnson. Thanks again for joining us today. I certainly appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Glad to be here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know how busy you’ve been, so thank you very much. I have a couple of questions for you about your preflight experience that we didn’t cover last time. Did you continue to work as an ER [Emergency Room] doctor once you came to Houston or was that something you pretty much gave up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For the first year a little bit, very little bit. The group I belonged to in Los Angeles [California] had a hospital in—let me think where was it? Tampa [Florida], I believe. So I did a few ER shifts, but it was just too difficult to try to do both. Being in a visible position, I just felt that was probably not a good thing to do. I had so much to learn. So that pretty quickly stopped." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I had read that you were in charge of medical ops for the first orbital test flights. Can you talk about that assignment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I wasn’t in charge of medical ops. What they did was they took all the doctors in the office, and we were sent to each of the launch and landing sites. So for STS-1, I was actually out at White Sands [Northrup Strip, New Mexico]. We had the doctors at KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida], White Sands, and Edwards [Air Force Base, California] for the full duration of the mission. We participated in exercises like Mode 8s, if the Shuttle goes off the end of the runway and you have to rescue the crew. Worked with the PJs from the military, which are the paramedic jumpers, but I wasn’t in charge of it. I just participated in all of that, as did all of the doctors in the office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you come up with a list of how you might save the crew, how you would get into the Orbiter, and what sort of things you might encounter? Did you come up with checklists and things like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, we really didn’t have checklists. It’s a lot like EMTs [Emergency Medical Technicians]. The rescue folks who are trained to do that in all kinds of situations would actually do the actual rescuing or bringing the crew out. We were there to provide medical assistance and to answer any questions they’d have. We practiced things like which way the wind was blowing, because you were worried about nitrazine and some of the fluids that are on board the Shuttle harming the rescue workers and crew. So we were more there in an advisory capacity. If there were an accident to be the link to Houston, to let people know what was going on. We never really got into the mode of post accident, what would happen. That was how more we envisioned the role, I think, was just being the liaison between the rescue folks and NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you simulate those possibilities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. I was out at White Sands where we did a Mode 8. The helicopters came in, and we practiced taking the crew away and flying the helicopters. I talked with the PJs to tell them a bit about the Shuttle and what to expect, if they had to go inside. Then I was there for the entire STS-1 flight. I was there probably about three or four days before and then for the entire flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Since you had practiced emergency medicine, did you feel like you offered advice to some of the other folks who hadn’t practiced like [M.] Rhea Seddon or Jim [James P.] Bagian?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, she was a surgeon, so she’s well versed in all those kind of things. No, I think we were all equally well trained and ready for those things. I don’t think we particularly talked among ourselves about how to do it. I think it was left to each of us to figure out how to do it ourselves, which is kind of the way things were in those days. Everybody was expected to perform, and you figured out what you needed to know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It just sounds like a very interesting assignment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh it was. It was really fun to see how all that worked and very educational. Then they stopped doing that. I think STS-4 was probably the last one. I was at Kennedy for STS-4 the entire time. I was at Edwards for STS-2 and then White Sands for STS-1 and 3." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, interesting. So did you get to see the crew land the Orbiter at Northrup Strip?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the one and only time. It was definitely an interesting time. Of course it went well, so there was no need for a Mode 8 or medical things like that. That all went very well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s interesting. I know we talked a little bit about Bill last time. You were the first married couple in the Astronaut Office. Do you think that had any impact on your career or your experiences?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think it had an impact on my career or anything. There was a lot of attention given to it when he was first selected. It was like a lot more interest in the media. We had parallel interests from the time we met, which is probably one reason we were attracted to each other. So it was nice to have somebody who really understood exactly how the office worked, but it was more of a personal benefit than a professional benefit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When Rhea Seddon decided that she was going to marry Hoot [Robert L.] Gibson, did you offer her any advice in terms of how to deal with all the media interest?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, Rhea was well versed in how to do that. She didn’t need any advice from me. It was fine. Right in my closet at home I have this picture of the four of us, Bill and me and Hoot and Rhea and our two babies. It was a cute picture. I think we were both being interviewed for one of the morning shows or something and then someone shot that picture of us as we were sitting there. It was cute." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh that’s funny. We talked to her actually. She was talking about how her son introduces himself as an astrotot. I suppose you have two astrotots as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I totally embarrass my younger daughter when I say, “Well, half of your DNA was in space.” She goes, “Mom!” At least when she was younger, she would get embarrassed. She’s probably proud of it now. There’s a very small number of people who both parents have been in space. Kara gets that distinction, my youngest." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, it’s an interesting title, I hadn’t read about it before. Last time you had also talked about the personal hygiene kit and the Nivea cream that you had put in there. What else was in the personal hygiene kit for the women? Did you talk about other things that would go in it at the time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I canvassed them and asked what things they wanted. It’s a pretty diverse group there from Judy [Judith A. Resnik] to Shannon [W. Lucid]. So some people didn’t care at all. I think there was a little bit of makeup that went in there, probably some mascara. I honestly don’t remember. I’d have to go back and check, but we really didn’t have a lot of extra things. We just added things that were appropriate for women. Some creams and a little bit of makeup, and that’s about all I can remember that we added that was different than what was already there for the guys." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about feminine hygiene products? Was that something that you dealt with at all?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know what? I think it was left to each person to deal with it. In fact, I’m going through training right now to be a CapCom [Capsule Communicator] for ISS [International Space Station], and that was one of the questions I was asked. Back then everybody just did their own thing. I think most women elect to just stay on birth control pills so that they don’t have to deal with it. You’ve got enough to deal with without dealing with anything else. I’m sure we carry something on board just in case of an emergency or something like that. It’s not something that we all talked about. That’s what I personally did. I think that’s what quite a few of the females do even now who are on board Space Station, because it’s just one less thing you have to worry about. With all the products they have now that I hear advertised about birth control pills, where you don’t even have to have periods for long periods of time, that’s what I would opt to do. The only people who might opt not to do that would be if you’re still planning on having children after you fly on ISS then you might not want to suppress everything, particularly if you’re up there for six months.\\n\\n But again it’s pretty much an individual decision with you and your flight surgeon. In fact, I’m trying to think if we even discussed it. I probably did discuss it. Being a doctor, I just told them, “This is what I’m going to do.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When I talked to Kathy [Kathryn D. Sullivan] and Rhea, and we’ve talked to Sally [K. Ride], it all sounds like everyone had their personal preferences for things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was very rare for us to get together and discuss things and have a consensus. I don’t remember. We would have some social get-togethers once in a while, but I don’t really remember us ever getting together that much and discussing issues unique to us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s interesting. That says a lot actually." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Carolyn [L.] Huntoon was of course available. She was assigned to be our mentor, someone we could go to if we had issues or problems. I don’t think any of the issues we faced were that much different from the guys. Wondering how you were doing, when were you going to fly. I think it was more issues unique to being an astronaut than specifically being female." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that’s really interesting. So you feel like you were treated particularly equal in the Astronaut Office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really do. I think NASA had made the commitment to accept women, and they were very accepting. They really tried very hard to develop the extra small EMU [Extravehicular Mobility Unit]. A lot of the development effort was put into it. I think I discussed that last time. I was involved in a lot of that early work. I think only after we just ran into a lot of technical problems and then the cost of it was going to be so great that they decided to cancel that. I think we were all treated very fairly. If anything I think the guys felt we got too much attention compared to them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s funny that you say that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They would always make comments like, “Here, let me carry your bags for you.” But it was all just teasing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just for fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When it came to being treated professionally, sims [simulations], and as CapComs and our various support roles, I never felt like we weren’t wanted. I have to say that even when I was in medical school, that was actually a little probably more difficult, particularly around some of the surgeons at that time. It was just at a cusp. I read an interesting article recently about the number of women in medical school classes around that time, and mine was very typical. We were probably like 15 in a class of 150. You would encounter little things at that point. There weren’t that many women in medicine. Now it’s 50-50. I might have told you that story where I was working in the emergency room and there was a male nurse, a really big tall guy. No matter how many times I would say I was Dr. Fisher and he was the nurse, they kept looking at him. He was the doctor, and I was the nurse. Finally we just joked about it. I just said, “Go ahead, just be the doctor. Tell them what they want.” It was just funny. Those kind of things happened a lot more in medicine actually than when I came to NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s interesting. That’s good for NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was another interesting thing that happened to me. I was at the [STS]-133 launch, and I arrived just as the Blue Angels were flying. That was really neat. I got in the elevator with this lady who was one of the Blue Angel pilots. It was just so interesting, because nobody thought anything different of her being a pilot. I was just thinking how far we had come in that short period of time, because nobody thought anything about her being a pilot in the Blue Angels. I was going like, “Oh wow, how neat.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was one of the questions I wanted to ask you. What role do you think that you played in furthering women coming into the Astronaut Office, you and the other five women, and the acceptance of women as pilots and commanders in the office?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I’m sure it really helped that we were there. Then young women could look up and say, “Hey, if she can do it I can do it too.” I’ve had funny experiences since I’ve been here so long. I’ve had some of the women astronauts say that they heard me speak, or one of the six of us, and that’s when they decided they wanted to be an astronaut.\\n\\n One Friday I was doing some ISS training, and one of the instructors asked specifically to teach my class, because she had had my picture on her wall when she was 12 years old. So a lot of people, not just becoming astronauts, but just going into science and math and engineering in general.\\n\\n Another time about a year ago I was at the University of Hawaii Hilo for El [Ellison S.] Onizuka science day. This Oriental lady came up and asked if I had been in Japan about 20 years ago. I said, “Yes, my husband and I did go make a trip over there.” She said she had heard me speak, and that’s when she decided she wanted to be an astronomer. She was working at the observatory there in Hilo. It’s been interesting to actually get feedback from people that it made a difference. I take it pretty seriously now when I go talk to schoolchildren. You never know when you’re going to touch a life, somebody who either gets inspired or who thought they couldn’t do something might be able to.\\n\\n Another interesting experience was when I was on that same trip to Hawaii. One of the people involved in bringing me there was a wealthy businessman but came from a very disadvantaged background. He got his start at this particular YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association], and he asked if I would come speak to these kids. He kept warning me. “These are kids who do drugs; these are kids that are troubled, a lot of them dropping out of school.” I think he was preparing me that they were going to be loud and maybe not as polite as some of the audiences.\\n\\n They were the most polite audience. It was about 100. He twisted all their arms, and so I tried to talk about some of the hardships I had overcome. Neither of my parents had been to college. My father was in the military. He got his GED [high school equivalency] in the military. My mom only had an eighth grade education, because in Europe at eighth grade you decide whether you’re going to the university or to trade school, and she went to trade school.\\n\\n By the time I was in eighth grade I had gone to 13 different schools because my father was in the military. So I tried to tell them that even with all those kind of things in the United States, if you’re motivated, and you get a good education, which you can do, that’s your decision. That’s a particular group I would like to be able to follow in ten years and see what came of it. There were a couple people—I remember looking in the audience—that seemed to really be hearing that message. And afterwards all these big Hawaiian kids came up and wanted to take pictures. It was neat. That’s, I think, one of the neat aspects of our job is that we do get to try to help motivate kids.\\n\\n In this day and age, where everybody wants to be a rock star or an NBA [National Basketball Association] player, and they’re so motivated by that type of thing, it’s nice to be able to get kids to be excited about science and math too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, there’s a new push for that now with the Obama administration." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s hard though. It’s a tough sell, when you see these guys making millions of dollars. Most rocket scientists don’t make anywhere near that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s true, that’s true. Do you ever do any work with Sally Ride and her science camp?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She asked me haven’t. I told her I’m happy to; I’m willing to do that. I don’t know how she goes about who she asks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s an interesting concept. I wanted to ask you about the diaper concept. You had mentioned that in the last interview as well about using diapers for women for urine collection. Were you involved at all in the testing of that product before you flew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We all were. They gave us diapers, and we were supposed to go home and use them. Have you ever tried—after years and years of potty training—to lay on the floor in a seat with your seat laid back so you’d simulate being on the launch pad? It is not easy to do.\\n\\n You have to overcome all these inhibitions you have. But by the time you’re out on the pad for three hours you’re going to go. Who wants to be uncomfortable in your flight into space? No matter if you absolutely drank nothing the morning of launch, absolutely nothing, just because of that position and the blood in your legs pooling, you’re going to have to go to the bathroom.\\n\\n Now it used to be that guys had a condom thing that they would put on that’s hooked to a tube. That’s what they used in all the early flights, but they had a couple of malfunctions of those, which that could be a gigantic mess. So now they just went unisex; everybody wears the same thing and for EVAs [Extravehicular Activity] too. You’re in a suit six or seven hours, plus all that prebreathe time. Can’t imagine that you don’t have to go to the bathroom." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you make any suggestions for changes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The guy who developed this, what was his name? I’m sure you can find out if you call the Space and Life Sciences Division. He developed that really absorbent polymer which was what led to all the baby diapers that we now have whatever that stuff is that absorbs it. It was his research that led to—for us—all these billions probably of diapers we now have for babies that are so absorbent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s an interesting concept. I wanted to ask you when they made the announcement for the first crews that included people from your class, so STS-7, 8, and 9, was there any discussion amongst the six of you about who might go first? And when you heard that Sally Ride was going to be the first woman in space?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really. We all knew that was coming up eventually. I don’t think it was something you discussed. You just were aware of it. To me it was apparent that Sally was a front-runner because of the positions they put her in. They put her to be a CapCom and put her to do different things so I guess I wasn’t really surprised." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there a lot of competition amongst your class for flights at that point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think everybody wants to fly first. Everybody wanted to fly and get into space as soon as you can. But that’s also tempered with hey, I’m really lucky to be here, doesn’t matter if I’m first or last. Other than Sally, I don’t think anyone remembers who flew first and who flew last in our class, unless somebody tells you. I think Shannon was the last woman, and yet look how she had the endurance record on Mir for so long. I don’t know if she still does. I lose track of all those kind of things.\\n\\n At the time those things seem like big deals but you need to keep things in perspective. I do think it’s interesting that the first three women that flew didn’t have children and the last three women that flew had children so I don’t know if that was a factor. I don’t think it was performance, because everybody did pretty good jobs, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you weren’t surprised?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was just interesting. No, I wasn’t surprised." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had mentioned last time that you were working at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] with Sally for her flight. Were you there for the launch of STS-7?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, yes, I was there for the launch, because I was the lead Cape Crusader. I was eight months pregnant at the time, so it was a definite difference." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us about that day? Is there anything that stands out about that time for the launch of Sally’s mission?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, for some reason I remember more the time we were doing the payload testing together. It’s just strange what things stick in your mind more than others. The launch itself, I was there doing my job so I don’t even remember. Because I was pregnant, I wasn’t the person who helped them strap in so I wasn’t out there. I was doing one of the shifts, where we did the cockpit configuration or something like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you actually get to see it lift off the pad?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. I was at the roof of the LCC [Launch Control Center]. All of us that worked at the Cape would always go there and be there to be ready to help in case there was a problem with families. That was of course before [STS]-51L [the Challenger accident] so at that time there really wasn’t a formal plan for what to do if there was an accident. We learned our lessons after 51-L and now have a much more tightly controlled environment. At that time we were just there ready to help if there was a problem, but there was no plan of what we would do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you came to the Center did you have contact with other professional women who worked at JSC like Ivy [F.] Hooks or Rita [M.] Rapp?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really. Nitza [M.] Cintron, who was in our group, of course I knew her and then Carolyn. Basically we were in our own little world. It’s only if you encountered someone through your food testing. In fact I’ve even noticed that just in general, not just with other women, our biggest interaction was with MOD [Mission Operations Directorate]. Well, early on I guess our class probably had a little more interaction with Engineering Directorate because we got here before the Shuttle flew, so we interacted with a lot of the subsystem managers for the Shuttle. But other than that our interactions tend to be primarily with Mission Operations Directorate, our training folks and our flight controllers.\\n\\n For different reasons, I’ve had chances to go lately to other buildings or other areas, and it’s like wow, there’s a whole part of the Johnson Space Center that I really don’t know much about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was just curious if you had any sort of interaction. If they offered any sort of career advice, as most people were fairly young when they came in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really. Like I said, we were—and I don’t mean that in a bad way—we were just left on our own. I see a lot more intentional mentoring now. Also it’s probably really important—not that it wasn’t important then—but it’s really important now as you get ready to go do these six-month-long missions. There’s a great deal more hardship in terms of the traveling and training for ISS. Your training is so long, and you’re gone so long. So I think there’s a lot more mentoring of folks to be sure that they’re ready for what they’re getting into.\\n\\n It was more like we were selected and you were expected to do well and that’s it. Kind of the same as it was in medical school, too. I think now they tend to do a little more mentoring of medical students as well. Kind of watching out, because it’s a pretty difficult time as well. It used to be, “We picked these people that are talented.” But just because you have good grades and everything doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ready for all of that. I think now maybe in a lot of those areas they do a little bit more mentoring." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I had read an article in the New York Times. I don’t know, from 1980. You said that the only trouble that the female AsCans [Astronaut Candidates] seemed to have were getting the clothes to fit. Can you talk about that? I’m assuming you meant the flight suits." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I was probably just joking—just getting flight suits that weren’t big and baggy and stuff. They wound up having ours special-made." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They were cut for men." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was probably also referring to the EMU, because at the time in 1980 I was still doing WETF [Weightless Environment Training Facility] runs in Pete [Charles] Conrad’s A7LB Moon suit, which was like being in a big balloon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I think you had talked about that last time, the difficulty that you had." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One of my officemates right now was an EVA trainer, and he was telling me how for the smaller women if you can get a good suit fit, they can do just as well, but if you don’t have a good suit fit, you’re lost. That’s it. You just cannot do things if you don’t have a good fit. That’s true for male and female, but it’s just harder to get a good fit. So it was definitely a struggle. We’ve learned so much with all the EVAs we’ve done in building the Space Station which we just did not have that experience back when I came." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I thought we would turn our attention to your flight, STS-51A. You had told us about how you had been selected maybe about two weeks before you gave birth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was a very interesting time. Our commander was Rick [Frederick H.] Hauck, who just finished STS-7 and was back. They were still doing their postflight appearances. Now the AsCan class has finished the 2000 level Shuttle training series, which is the introductory classes; you do that as part of your AsCan year. Back then we didn’t have that kind of training. Dave [David M. Walker] and I were the two inexperienced people so we had to complete that whole 2000 series flow, which we did together, to catch up with our other crew members who had flown on previous flights.\\n\\n So that was our focus. I was a CapCom at the time, and Rick actually wanted me to give that job up. This was like Julyish, I think. STS-9 flew in October so it was fairly early in my flow. I spoke with him and said, “I really want to do that, because I think you’ll be a better crew member if you are CapCom and you see how Mission Control works.” It was really hard for me, because I have a new baby, I was CapComing, and I was also trying to get my training flow done, but I really felt that I needed to do that. Because I was breastfeeding at the time, I can still remember being on these shifts trying to go to the bathroom and pump.\\n\\n Now everything’s so nice. They have these little protected areas where you can go breastfeed, not so back then. Nothing was really set up. It’s not that people were bad. I don’t think they really thought about stuff like that. Of course as women we didn’t want to draw attention to those things. You don’t want to ask for something special. That was pretty challenging to try to do both, but I’m still glad I did.\\n\\n So those first couple of weeks, when I had a sim either with Dave for our 2000 flow or when I had a CapCom sim, I would come into work. When I didn’t have anything on a schedule—and they were nice, they tried to bunch it up—then I could be home with Kristin a bit. So I never really had time off. I never took a leave of absence for six weeks or something like that, but they were really nice about trying to balance my schedule so at least I had some days off.\\n\\n Then I had a wonderful lady, Susie Galvin, whose husband actually is a contractor working in the space program as well. At the time she didn’t have any children, so she was really good about being there in the morning with Kristin. She took a nap in the afternoon so that when I got home at 4:30 or 5:00 we basically had that whole evening together. I didn’t put her to bed till 9:00 or 10:00 or something.\\n\\n We actually had quite a bit of time together, and it worked out. Towards the end of the flight that was probably really hard. I thought it was hard having a little baby and training. Now that I’m an experienced parent, I know that it would have been way worse if she was in school and I was trying to worry how was she getting to this, how was she getting to that, because with a baby you totally control everything. They’re not off going doing activities and you’re not missing performances of this, that, and the other. Now in retrospect I realize that that was probably good.\\n\\n For example, Karen [L.] Nyberg who was assigned to an ISS crew and just had a new baby, she’s traveling back and forth to Russia and to Europe. I probably wouldn’t have been as good at that. So I admire her, that she can do that, because that must be really hard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You received recognition for being the first mother in space. Was that a big deal at that point do you think?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was neat. Although I think I told you that I find it ironic that when I was gone a lot I get a mother of the year award but when I stay home and take a seven-year leave of absence to be with my girls there’s no award. But it’s come in handy. I can show it to the girls and say, “See? I got a mother of the year award. So don’t argue with me.” It’s just funny. It was neat. Susan Lucci was in the group that I was with, and there was a female governor of Kentucky at the time. It was an interesting group. A fun trip to New York [City, New York]. It’s some group based in New York City that makes those selections. I don’t know if they still do it or not. Probably do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you win that award after your flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was the Mother’s Day after I flew. I flew in November, so that following Mother’s Day, the following May." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were in this book Starring Mothers: [30 Portraits of Accomplished Women by Jill Barber]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was really fun. I remember Jill. It was really fun. I thought it was a really interesting book. That was a fun picture with Kristin and the mockup over in Building 9. I thought she did a really nice job, back in those days where people were trying to say yes you can work and you can have children too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you write the piece that was in there? Or was that an interview?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I didn’t write it, no, that was her interview. I think if I recall correctly she sent copies and let you review it for accuracy, which I always appreciate and think is nice when people do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, it’s always important; don’t want to get something wrong. Tell us about the crew relationship for this mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the first thing was really funny. When we first got assigned to our flight we were an IUS [Inertial Upper Stage] deploy flight. So we went all the way up to Seattle [Washington] to get training from Boeing on the IUS. On our way back we found out oops, it’s not going to be our payload. It was shifting around for some reason.\\n\\n I don’t even remember what the next one was. Let’s see. I was assigned in July. In February I was sent up to be on the Today Show because it was the first flight of the manned maneuvering unit. They wanted somebody there in case Bruce [McCandless II] got lost in space, I guess. They were also deploying two satellites. Just before I left, the first satellite was deployed, and about four seconds into what’s supposed to be a four-minute burn to take it to geosynchronous orbit it failed a few seconds into the burn. So basically this good satellite is right in a useless orbit.\\n\\n I figure there’s no way they were going to launch the second one until they understood what the situation was so I flew into New York. Before I left I knew that they decided to launch the second one, which I was really surprised. I was traveling on the plane while it happened. So I asked the taxi driver, “Hey, you heard anything about.”\\n\\n “Yes, they launched the second one and same thing happened.” I was surprised the taxi driver knew. I was sitting here going, “Oh great. Now I’m going to be on the Today Show.” Sure enough they started asking me all these questions. I’m trying to explain why they launched the second one, which I don’t understand either so it’s hard for me to defend them. They asked me specifically did I think NASA would try to go get those satellites.\\n\\n I said, “No way.” The Hughes 376 spacecraft was basically a cylinder. The whole thing is solar arrays, and then there’s a motor at the end. It’s probably a little bit taller than this room, about the size of a little school bus." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a big satellite." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as satellites go it’s not that big, but relative to people yes it’s pretty big. It’s a cylinder, and it’s got total solar arrays all around it. It was not designed to be handled. I knew that, because we were launching a Hughes 376 on our flight. We had already at least had that part of it defined so I knew a fair amount about them, and I said, “No, NASA has never done anything like this before.” The satellites weren’t designed to be retrieved.\\n\\n Then I got back to NASA, and it turned out the insurance industry was really pushing NASA to do the retrieval mission. I don’t think NASA really wanted to do it. I think they thought it was a pretty high-risk mission, not risk of death but risk of failure. This was only the 14th Shuttle flight, so it’s pretty early in our experience with that. I don’t know what negotiations went on at the high levels. Somehow the insurance industry convinced NASA to do the retrieval mission, although it was in doubt all the way through up to when we flew. I think they didn’t sign the final paperwork baselining it till maybe a few weeks before we launched.\\n\\n So we got real excited about it, the four of us on the crew. Rick, I think, this was his first command. I think he was a little less enthusiastic because he considered it as a chance to fail. I think he became more enthusiastic as time went by. I could certainly understand that as a first time commander, you’re going to sign up to do this, something that nobody’s ever done before. You’d probably like just a nice plain vanilla flight, if you can call any Shuttle flight vanilla.\\n\\n Dale [A.] Gardner and Joe [Joseph P.] Allen were the two EVA crew members on board. Dale was actually fairly instrumental in coming up with the concept of how you would get the satellite, because at the time we didn’t think you could just handle something that big. He came up with a concept of a thing called the stinger. The satellite like I said is a cylinder, and there’s a nozzle at the end for the engine. If you take something and put this up the nozzle end and then open it up like an umbrella, it captures it. [Demonstrates] On that piece of hardware was a grapple fixture. This thing attached to the manned maneuvering unit so he would fly the manned maneuvering unit over to the satellite and dock with the satellite. I could use the arm to grab it and bring it down into the payload bay.\\n\\n Then the problem is how are you going to hook that satellite into the Shuttle and have it be secure for entry and landing. The only part of the satellite that is structurally sound is the same end that Dale had stuck the stinger into so you had to somehow get the stinger out. They designed another piece of hardware that went over the top. I don’t remember exactly how it all attached.\\n\\n Then I was supposed to release from this grapple fixture, come across to this top grapple fixture, and grab it. [Demonstrates] Then they would take the stinger out and put a docking mechanism in and then hook it into the Shuttle bay with that structure. So that was the plan.\\n\\n While we were training and doing ascent/entry training and all that sort of stuff, Joe and Dale—and Dave was the IVA [Intravehicular Activity] person inside—they were training how to do the EVA portion of it. I was training doing the grapple, the release, and the regrapple.\\n\\n I still remember one night. We were intimately involved in developing the procedures with our flight controllers and our trainers. There was so little time. This is February to November where you’re designing a whole new thing that no one’s ever done before. I remember being over at the SES [Systems Engineering Simulator], which is where I trained for the arm stuff. I had Kristin in the little car seat, because we were coming up after hours. We were doing something. We wanted to develop some new procedure for something to try the next day so I just brought Kristin with me and put her on the floor. We were there working on stuff. So that all was developing as we were doing all the routine things that you have to do, the ascent/entry training; I was also the flight engineer.\\n\\n We flew pretty much as a three-person crew. Joe Allen was MS [Mission Specialist]-1, but he was just too busy with EVA stuff to train with us as we do now with pretty much a four-person crew on the flight deck. So it was the three of us off doing our own thing, ascent/entry, and me doing robotics training. They were just off doing the EVA stuff with that compressed time. We would occasionally be together for integrated sims or for postinsertion deorbit preps.\\n\\n It was a pretty intense time. We didn’t really know up until the very very end if NASA was going to get comfortable and say, “Yes you really can do it.” It was really interesting watching that whole process; now the payloads and everything are pretty well defined in advance now. Crews are not that much involved in developing procedures. All that is pretty well done and handed to them by the trainers now so that was really fun, demanding but fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the media interest like in this mission where you’re going to release two satellites and then you’re going to salvage two satellites?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were really interested, plus flying the manned maneuvering unit. Quite honestly, we were so busy we didn’t have time for any of that. Six weeks before launch, they had the day where you do all your interviews. I did a little extra stuff with Kristin. They took some pictures with Kristin over in Building 9. My poor mom. We brought Kristin and all Kristin wanted to do, by this time she’s like about 13 months old, was climb the stairs. Those stairs that go up to the mockups, she’s climbing up and down the stairs, climbing up and down the stairs. Whenever Mom tried to pick her up, she didn’t want to be picked up. Mom didn’t want her to cry so Kristin climbed up and down those stairs a million times, I think, that day. Then I would take her, we’d do a picture for somebody, but that was pretty much all of the media that we had time for. We were just too busy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Take us back to that day of launch, getting up, and getting ready for that flight and launching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I’ll go back a little bit further, because finally sometime in the October timeframe the mission was agreed to and we knew what we were going to do. Those last few weeks are very very intense. I tell people you almost had to tell your scheduler, “Schedule time to go to the bathroom.” Literally you’re just either in a sim, going by checking—at that time—phone messages. Thank God we didn’t have e-mail then. I think that would have put me over the edge, having to respond to e-mail. So that was nice, you kind of lived in this little cocoon of not knowing what was going on. Every other moment that I had I was spending with Kristin.\\n\\n We went into quarantine on Halloween, and it was Kristin’s first real Halloween because the previous Halloween she was just a baby. I know you’re not supposed to, but I ran back home real quick. We just took her trick-or-treating to three or four of our neighbors, because I just wanted to be there. Then I came back. I don’t know if anyone even noticed I was gone, or if they noticed and just didn’t say anything. Technically I was in quarantine, but I just wasn’t going to miss that.\\n\\n I think Bill, my mom, Kristin, and Susie left for the Cape a day before me to get down there and be there. I remember going home. We launched on a Thursday, but we were supposed to launch on Wednesday. So I guess it was a Sunday that we left to go to the Cape. I remember going by the house because it was okay; I could go by the house because nobody was there. It wasn’t breaking quarantine. I remember it all just seeming so surreal. It’s like I’m really getting ready to go to the Cape, and I’m really going to launch. It doesn’t seem real.\\n\\n We flew down in formation in T-38s, which was really neat. Our families were waiting there. That was hard, because I couldn’t really hug Kristin. She was over there. She was always really good. We had a little blue flight suit made for her so she was in the flight suit. The really nice people who have our flight suits gave me a little bit of that material. It was out of the light blue ones that we used to wear, so it was really fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, how fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We get to the Cape, and I went jogging. Of course it really helped that Bill is an astronaut. So I went jogging, and he brought Kristin for me to see her while I was out jogging. That was really nice. The first launch attempt, we scrubbed that first day. The first launch attempt, again it just has this whole air of unreality about it. You’ve been training so long. You’ve been looking forward to this for so long. It’s like when Christmas finally comes when you were a kid, and you were looking forward to it, and finally it’s really there. It just doesn’t seem real.\\n\\n Because it was back before the Challenger accident, there wasn’t as formal a process. Again since Bill was an astronaut he could do things that other spouses would not be able to do. He came and brought my mom and Kristin to where you see the crews walking out. They were back there in the rental van he had. He told my mom to not get out, because they weren’t supposed to be there.\\n\\n I told my mom that was going to be looking to see Kristin and her. Because we launched around sevenish, it’s still dark; all the cameras are flashing. Just one thing is on my mind, looking for Kristin and my mom, and Bill too of course. But I’m looking for Kristin. My mom saw my eyes, and she saw that I wasn’t seeing Kristin. She knew Bill told her not to get out of the van. She saw my eyes. She got out of the van. Somewhere in the netherworld of articles, there’s a picture of my mom and Kristin that some newspaperperson took. It didn’t get out too much though.\\n\\n So that was neat. Once I saw her that was fine. “Okay, that’s behind me.” Like I said, Dave Walker and I were the two rookies on board; the others had flown previously. I can remember us moving up to the front of the Astrovan. Looking out, because it was dark, and the lights are shining on the Shuttle. It was just gorgeous. We were both looking at each other going, “Are we really going to go do this?” Also we had had a weather briefing. We knew that the winds at altitude were pretty high. So we already knew that we were probably going to scrub unless something dramatic changed, because it wasn’t like a storm, it was a front coming in. It’s not something that’s going to change in a couple hours. I think in the back of our minds we were already prepared for a scrub. That happened fairly early in the count. We didn’t sit out there for a long time before they just said that the winds were too high and they are not going to change, so we’ll scrub, turn around for tomorrow.\\n\\n The first two things you think about, I thought, one, “Oh my God, we’ve got to pay for those buses again for our guests.” Back then all the guest stuff you took care of yourself. I think after Challenger they’ve got some plan that NASA helps with some of that stuff. We’re all sitting there, “Oh, God, we got to pay for those buses again?” Got to figure out who’s staying, not stuff you should be thinking about. My second thought was, “Oh, God, I saw Kristin, now I’m going to have to try to redo that again tomorrow.” So it was fun.\\n\\n We go back to crew quarters. I went jogging, saw Kristin. That night we were getting ready for bed. The first night I went to bed. Joe Allen looks at me and he goes, “Did you go out and see the rocket ship on the pad last night?”\\n\\n I said, “No, Joe, of course not. I went to bed like we were supposed to.”\\n\\n Joe is a real avid photographer. I don’t know, have you seen? He published a book [Entering Space: An Astronaut’s Odyssey] with pictures. He’s a real avid photographer. In fact he’s responsible for getting me interested in it. So we decide to go out to take pictures at the pad. This is November 7th now, and it was pretty cold. I have no idea why he’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt. I was dressed more appropriately in a jogging outfit or something. I don’t remember. We didn’t put on our flight suits. I know he didn’t for sure. We get out to the pad with our badges, and they won’t let us in because he’s not dressed; you’re supposed to be completely covered, in case of fire.\\n\\n The guard wouldn’t let us in. We explained. We said, “We’re the crew; we’re going to launch tomorrow.”\\n\\n He goes, “I’m sorry, but my rules are you can’t come in shorts.”\\n\\n All we could do was drive around the perimeter and take pictures and head back. We didn’t have time to go all the way back, get other clothes, and come all the way back. That was fun.\\n\\n The next morning we get up and do it all again. This time it’s feeling real. This time the winds are okay, the weather looked good. So again we walk out. Same thing happened, although now Bill was really upset at my mom. Again she saw me looking, and she got out again. Saw Kristin. This time we get out to the pad, and I’m lying there. As the time goes by thinking more and more about the diaper, “Oh my God. This is not feeling good. I really want to enjoy my launch. I don’t want to be uncomfortable.” Going through all the formalities. Then as it starts to go inside 30 seconds, that’s when you start to say, “I changed my mind, let me out of here.” No, just kidding.\\n\\n When you see those engine bells move you can really feel that from way up in the cockpit. Then the solids ignite. Comes bright as day. We launched around 7:00 or something. It was Dale Gardner’s birthday. When they said goodbye to us, he said he promised not to blow the candles out. It was cute. I remember just as we lifted off Dave turned around and looked and reached his hand back. All I remember is watching engines, altitude, airspeed, engines, altitude, airspeed. That’s all I cared about was that those engines keep working and that we were hitting all of our marks. Of course I was MS-2, flight engineer, so I was watching all of our abort boundaries. That single engine press to MECO [Main Engine Cutoff] call was just beautiful. You can lose two engines and still make it to orbit. So that was good. Then right at MECO I knew immediately. You could just feel the blood rush to your face.\\n\\n You see all the pictures of how all the astronauts look so fat in their face because all the blood rushes to your fact. It’s great for wrinkles. Didn’t have them then. I wish I could go do it now. I knew almost immediately that I’m going to be the 50% that doesn’t feel well. Joe was so sweet. He came up. Joe and Dale were doing all the postinsertion stuff, because the three of us on the flight deck, we’re having to reconfigure all the GPC [General-Purpose Computers], the computers for on orbit.\\n\\n That whole process and doing the OMS [Orbital Maneuvering System]-2 burn, all of that takes about an hour and a half, two hours. So basically we’re in our seats. They came up. I remember Joe came up and helped me take off my boots and started stowing our helmets. We’re staying right on the timeline so they were just helping us in whatever way. Just really sweet, great crew members.\\n\\n We were really fortunate in that our first day was a relatively relaxed day. I had to do the RMS [Remote Manipulator System] checkout. Did not feel well. Thankfully our training is so good you can do anything, no matter what. Every moment I had I just wanted to sleep. You’re really tired with the adrenaline rush, and you’ve been up early. It’s a long day. So even if you don’t have a lot to do you’re still pretty tired. I remember that.\\n\\n Sleeping the first night is so strange, because you feel like you want to put your head somewhere, but you can’t figure out what to do with your head. You don’t realize you don’t have to do anything with your head, but you feel like you want to. I remember the first night laying there thinking, “I wanted to come into space so badly. I feel so terrible. Why did I do this?”\\n\\n The third day I remember Rick looked at me and said, “Anna is back with us.” It’s not like you’re feeling so bad that you can’t do anything. It’s like if you have a cold, and you feel out of it. You’re not totally there. You can still function, you can drive, you can do everything you need to do, it’s just not as much fun.\\n\\n I remember the morning of the third day there was a hot dog that we had. I’m not a big hot dog eater, but boy that was a good hot dog. It’s my favorite hot dog I ever had. Thereafter the rest of the flight was just absolutely so much fun. Very demanding, very long days. We deployed two satellites. I was the lead for one of the deploys, and Dale was the lead for the other. Then we had the day in between where we had to get the spacesuits all ready. Then on day five and on day seven we did the rendezvous with the satellites.\\n\\n Nowadays when you do a rendezvous to go to Station, you’re not getting ready to do an EVA at the same time. The whole crew is doing the rendezvous together. Well, Joe and Dale were on the middeck getting into their suits. Dave was having to help them so it was just me and Rick doing the rendezvous. I’m in the pilot’s seat, Rick is in the commander’s seat. Even though we had trained and I should have realized it, I didn’t realize that for a lot of that last part of the rendezvous, you’re just nose down to the Earth. You’re just straight looking down through those windows. We’d come across Houston. You could see Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. It was just a crystal clear night. You’re just 200 miles looking straight down. You could see San Antonio with this, like a hub of a wheel; the way their freeway system is, they have a loop and then wheels. Just very distinctive, because when you fly T-38s you see it all the time.\\n\\n We called down to Mission Control. “Hey, tallyho.” It turned out that Bill and my mom and Kristin—we live over on Mud Lake there, so it’s pretty dark there. There’s not a lot of light. They’re out on our dock, because we live right on the water. They could see. You could see the satellite and the Shuttle, like two stars going overhead. My mom gets real excited, so she was apparently screaming really loud. That is Kristin’s first real memory that she can remember. She doesn’t exactly remember seeing that but she remembers the excitement and everything. When she was in lower school, all the teachers knew me and knew what I was doing, but then when she went into middle school the teachers weren’t as familiar, and there were more kids in that whole class. They were given an assignment to write about their earliest memory. So Kristin writes this story. The teacher said, “Well, that’s really nice, Kristin, but you’re supposed to tell a true memory.”\\n\\n All of her friends go, “But it is true.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Her mom is an astronaut!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So that was funny. So we’re doing the rendezvous up to the point where they’re in the air lock and are ready to go out. At that last portion of it Dave comes up to the flight deck. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before and realized how challenging it was. And we were only a five-person crew; we weren’t a seven-person crew.\\n\\n There were a couple times in those two days that it would have been nice to have an additional crew member. If you look at the photography from our flight, the first rendezvous, we got almost no pictures at all. We were just too busy. On the second one we had to very consciously say, “We’ve got to make the time to take some pictures.” By the second one we felt a little more comfortable, like we knew what we were doing. The first one it was just total focus on our jobs.\\n\\n The one other thing that had happened was when we were in quarantine back at JSC we had talked with the flight director. [J.] Milt [Milton] Heflin, that was his first lead, our flight. It’s really neat to see him and remember that. We had talked with them. The one concern we had about the whole thing was that piece I told you about that had to go over the top. Because the satellites were on orbit, there was no way to fit-check things like we do at the Cape. We do lots of fit-checks of everything particularly. If you look back at the program historically, a lot of the failures had to do with mechanical interferences. So that was the one thing we were worried about. Joe and Dale talked with Milt and told him they had a plan—and Dave—of how to just actually manually pull in the satellite if they had to.\\n\\n We get out in the EVA, all the flying over goes great. Our training was really excellent—the only thing that really surprised me was the lighting, because you can’t really simulate the lighting. For example when Dale was flying over to rendezvous with the satellite the Sun was directly in his eyes and he had to figure out some way to see. You’re in a spacesuit. You can’t put your hand over your eyes. He had to adjust his approach to get the satellite to give him some shadow because he couldn’t see what he was doing.\\n\\n When I was operating the arm, the satellite is spinning, because it’s stabilized, very slowly. The Shuttle is moving a little bit. I’m moving the arm. You’re going by the Earth. The clouds are moving. The thing I remember so vividly is all the motion. I’m supposed to stay focused on this arm and what I’m doing. I was so grateful for all the training I had, because your tendency is then to start doing everything really slowly when you’re used to doing it a certain way. That was the thing I really remember, was that I really had to focus hard, because it was so much motion.\\n\\n That first part everything goes well. I’ve grappled it. Bringing it down. They’re trying to attach the metal across the top. Dale said, “It doesn’t fit. And it’s not going to fit.” There was an interference somewhere where it was supposed to attach. If Dale tells you it’s not going to fit, there’s nothing you’re going to do; there’s no work-around for it. Dale is one of the smartest guys I know, one of the most capable. There was no point.\\n\\n So luckily it was back then. We only had one TDRS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite]. Right now we were out of com [communication] with the ground, so we talked about it a few minutes. They told Rick that they’re ready to go with their backup plan that they had discussed with Milt.\\n\\n So we came AOS [Acquisition of Signal], and we explained the situation and said, “We’d like permission to go ahead with our backup plan.” Five minutes. You don’t have a lot of time to discuss it when they’re out EVA, and we’re already probably two hours into the EVA. So five minutes later they came back and said, “You’re go for your backup plan.” Which nowadays they would have told them to come back in; they would have had mission management team, all this stuff. It was just neat.\\n\\n I released the arm, and Joe got in foot restraints on the side. Basically Joe just held the satellite at the nozzle end. They slowly turned it around. We are looking out the back window and using our cameras giving them a GCA [Ground Controlled Approach]. He can’t see anything when they’re holding the satellite. He can’t see if he’s going to bump it into the longeron or hit something. He’s moving it very very slowly. We’re telling him what to do, and he maneuvers it down. Dale put the docking mechanism on the bottom, and then EVAwise the two of them worked together to hook the satellite down that way. That’s the first time anyone had ever handled something that big in space.\\n\\n Now we do it routinely all the time but that was the first time. So then we came inside. We had a day between. We got to change our plan a little bit from what we were planning to do. The first time Joe did the docking with the satellite. The second EVA Dale did the docking with the satellite, and I maneuvered Joe on the arm, because he’s going to take the satellite. Joe always tells the story. He says, “Woman, be careful with me.” He says he felt like he was on the highest diving board ever.\\n\\n It wasn’t like now where you’re around the Station. Basically there’s the Shuttle and nothing. We didn’t have as formal protocols as they have now. When you talk with Dale who’s very much of an engineer, who also was an arm operator, he would tell me in arm terms how to move him around. Joe is just the opposite. Joe is this wonderful free spirit. So I interacted with them differently, and they gave me their commands of where they wanted me to move them differently. So it was really fun.\\n\\n That EVA, everything went well too. I think then that evening we looked out, and we had launched two satellites successfully. We had the two satellites in the bay. I think we just couldn’t believe it. It was like did we really do it? Did it all work just like we had planned it would? The last day was just so much fun.\\n\\n President [Ronald] Reagan called, which was neat to have got to talk to him. We did some interviews in space. I remember some guy asked me how did operating the arm make me a better mother. I said, “Oh, I don’t think it did.” You try to quietly say, “That’s a stupid question.”\\n\\n It was so fun. I remember Dale also had a baby just a few months older than Kristin. We were the only two that had little children at home. All the others had older children. I remember we were packing things up. He looked over, and he says, “Are you glad to be going home?” It was really a neat moment because he really understood.\\n\\n It was one of those days where you wish you could stay longer, but you’re also glad you’re coming home and you’re excited about everything. It was really neat. I just got a note from Dale just about two weeks ago. That son just died unexpectedly at 28, just a few months older than Kristin." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh. What a shame." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I felt so bad because I was just remembering that neat moment. That’s the son he was referring to when he was talking with me.\\n\\n But anyway a really neat flight. We deorbited on the morning of the ninth day, landed at the Cape. It was only the second or third landing at KSC. It was pretty early in that program. I was really glad I was going back to the Cape, because that’s where everybody was. My ex-husband wound up having to land at Edwards when they thought they were going to be at the Cape, and it’s really hard. It’s much more fun to land at the Cape and be right there.\\n\\n I remember when we landed I felt like an 800-pound gorilla. I had some switches to safe the OMS and RCS [Reaction Control System] overhead. About eight or ten switches I had to throw in the postlanding. In the simulator I’d just go chnk chnk chnk chnk chnk. I felt like I had to lift my arm up. [Demonstrates] Again the same thing. I also felt really lightheaded, because they want you to drink all these containers of water and take salt pills. I knew if I did that I was going to throw up, because it just tasted horrible. So I did the best I could, but I know I was not hydrated. Now they have that vehicle that pulls up to the Orbiter, and they take you out. A lot of times people need an IV to get some fluids.\\n\\n Back in those days, you were going to walk down the stairs. I was really worried that I was going to fall. You don’t want to faint on TV. Plus I was excited. I wanted to see the Shuttle. I was really worried that I was going to not make it. Finally we went out. We walked around. Went back to crew quarters. Finally you get to take a shower. Here I am flying with four other guys. You know they’re going to be out of the shower in two seconds, and I really wanted to wash my hair.\\n\\n I really remember being in the shower and thinking, “I could fall over here.” There was nobody there. Now I think they keep somebody with you, because I’m sure they probably have had people fall. You’re just a little bit disoriented when you come back.\\n\\n I didn’t want to take long. I was trying to hurry. I think within five hours we were on the plane heading back to Houston. I remember landing at Houston and getting in the car. Again that was pre-Challenger. We just got in our own car, went home. All my neighbors were out and had signs, “Welcome Anna,” which is really nice. You really appreciate it, but you’re also really tired and still really unstable on your feet. You’re just trying to get through that long day, because you started way early. You’ve now deorbited from space. Now you’re just coming home. It was just a very surreal experience.\\n\\n One of my officemates remembers we were one of the first flights that actually just went right overhead Houston. We apparently left some really huge contrail, because the weather conditions were just right at the time to do that. Of course we didn’t see it but everybody said it was really one of the really impressive entries. You go over Houston, and you land at the Cape four or five minutes later. Pretty amazing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s quick." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Pretty amazing stuff. Then had a lot of neat postflight experiences. I just can’t say enough about the crew that I was with. They become like your second family. You’ve spent so much time with them. Rick was just in town last week, and we had dinner together. Joe is up in DC. I see him frequently. We had a get-together for our 20th reunion. Even now I miss Dave so much. He died of cancer a couple years back. You really miss them. They become part of your family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your crew actually received the Lloyd’s of London Silver Medal, and I understand you’re the second woman to receive that. Will you tell us about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was really neat. Oh, one other thing. They were joking when we landed, asking if we had anything—custom officials—to declare, because we were the first crew to bring anything back from space. Now they do it all the time, but that was the first time we had brought something back.\\n\\n As I told you, the insurance industry, which if you had asked me before my flight, I would have said they’re the most boring thing you could possibly imagine. But boy, I won’t say that again, because really and truly they pushed very hard for this flight. Then it was the second largest—or financially largest—recovery that Lloyd’s of London ever had. The first was a Spanish galleon with tons of gold that went down somewhere in the 1800s. This was the second largest recovery of money and stuff.\\n\\n What was really kind of funny is the satellites were refurbished. They were launched about three years later by the Chinese, because that was after Challenger. After Challenger they said no more deploying satellites, it’s not worth risking crews for. Somehow they contracted with the Chinese.\\n\\n But anyway so they gave us that award. We went to the White House and President Reagan presented it. It was so neat getting to actually meet him and be there. We got to meet [British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher, because Lloyd’s brought us to London afterwards for a week of activities. We got to go see how that actually works, which is really fascinating.\\n\\n Did I tell you the story about going on the Concorde?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had signed up to do an appearance in Tortola months before I flew. Because I thought, “Oh, by the time February comes, our flight will be over, and it’d be nice. Bill, Kristin, and I could take a little vacation there.”\\n\\n As it turns out, the trip to Tortola I was committed to. Nowadays I’d probably just say, “Send somebody else to do it,” but I was committed to it. Right after that our crew was leaving for a week to go to London. I go do the appearance in Tortola, and so it must have been a Saturday. Then I’m coming back the Sunday. Alexander [M.] Haig was there wearing his power suit. I’m in this little flowery thing. It was just kind of a whole weird thing trying to talk to these people, but it was really interesting. I give my talk.\\n\\n Getting to Tortola is no easy feat. You have to fly to Miami [Florida]. It was like three plane changes and then three plane things coming back. I just made my flight coming back. I almost missed that connection. I remember I walked in the door about 11:00 p.m. that night. Kristin was asleep already and walked out the door at 5:00 a.m. the next morning to go to London [United Kingdom] for a week.\\n\\n I didn’t want to miss that trip, because they flew us over in the Concorde. It was just so neat. We flew to [Washington] Dulles [International Airport, Virginia], because that’s when the Concorde was flying out of Dulles. The Concorde is just an amazing aircraft. Because it flies at 50,000 feet, you can start to see the curvature of the Earth. Felt a little bit like being back on the Shuttle. I got to sit in the jump seat, because again this was all pre 9/11. So I could sit in the jump seat for the landing at Heathrow [Airport, London]. Oh, it was just really neat.\\n\\n Then we met with Prince Charles at Kensington Palace [London, United Kingdom]. We had dinner at the mayor’s place. It was so cold. They said it was one of the coldest winters they ever had. Oh, it was freezing, but it was still fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand that Margaret Thatcher was a chemist. Did you have a conversation with her?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh I didn’t know that. No, I would have. She’s one of my heroes. That was really one of the highlights for me of all my time in the space program. So that was that. I was assigned to my second flight two weeks after I landed.\\n\\n It would have been the flight after Challenger. After that happened, Bill and I decided to have a second child, because we didn’t know how long all that was going to go. Then they redid the crews. They named a special crew for the post-Challenger flight. My commander Rick Hauck was the commander of STS-26. Then I wound up taking that seven-year leave of absence, and came back in ’96, which was very interesting.\\n\\n I don’t know if you want to stop there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think it would be a good place, because actually I wanted to ask some questions about Challenger. I know you went to school at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] to get your master’s in chemistry." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh no, that’s another funny story. I didn’t actually do that. I was doing an appearance at UCLA, where they were trying to get women to go into science and math. I was doing it for the lady in the chemistry department who looked over people’s requirements who were getting masters’ and PhDs and kept track of all that stuff.\\n\\n We were on a panel. Afterwards I was sitting there joking with her, because I had been on the MD/PhD program. So I spent a year there, because the first year I was on the waiting list to go to UCLA Medical School. That year I was a TA in chemistry. I took all the courses.\\n\\n But the way things work, I think that’s true in most places, if you’re on a PhD program you just bypass the master’s. You’re never even awarded a master’s. You just get the PhD. Well, I elected not to continue my PhD and then went on to medical school and my internship, came to NASA, and totally forgot about it to be honest.\\n\\n So I was just joking with her and I said, “Gee, I certainly did enough work. I should probably get a master’s.”\\n\\n She said, “Well I’ll go back and check the records.”\\n\\n I said, “No, I’m just joking. I really am just joking.”\\n\\n She went back and checked, and I had all the requirements for a coursework master’s, so they awarded me my master’s." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was wondering how that worked with you being in Houston and going to LA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Truly that year was a lot of work in chemistry. Because my plans changed so drastically, I just never thought about it. So it was just purely coincidental that I even thought to say anything to her." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How funny." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If I hadn’t done that appearance and hadn’t done that, I would have probably never even thought about it. I try as much as I can to do. I go to UCLA at least once a year, both at the undergraduate and at the medical school level. I try to because I feel very strongly that getting a good education was vital to my being able to do what I do. I like to be able to go back and say thank you and help them any way I can." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m sure they appreciate that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. That’d probably be a good stopping point. I’ll try to not let so much time go by, because the rest of it probably won’t take that long. But it is interesting, because having been in the office as long as I have, I’ve got to see a lot of changes. It was very interesting being gone for seven years and coming back. That was hard but very interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I did want to talk to you about that. So I think that’d be great." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00068", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2019-028.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Reierson, James (1973-1975): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2019-028", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2019-028", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "James (Jim) Reierson served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji from July 1973 to July 1975 as a physics teacher. After an orientation in San Francisco, Reierson's training was conducted in Suva, Fiji, and included language classes and cross-cultural orientation, including stays with families in two Fijian villages. He taught physics at the University of the South Pacific (USP), where the faculty included several other Peace Corps volunteers and expatriates. The interview includes a discussion of his life prior to Peace Corps service, his motivations for joining, and his working and living experiences. Reierson also discusses his continuing connections to Fiji after his Peace Corps service. Interviewed and recorded by Julius (Jay) Sztuk, October 17, 2018. 2 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).", + "dates_of_materials": "17 October 2018", + "extent": "2 digital files (audio; stereo; 70 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "032. Fiji.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Fiji. Reierson, James (1973-1975): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Fiji", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2019-028", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2019-028-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/pm5k1ka5cnmoj3bws23tcpyo2u36urj4.pdf?odc=20231115174203-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/86accfea-41be-491f-9a27-12c0e2a45020/fc793561-188b-464f-84a0-a1832b244c17/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzJhOTlfNDQzOTA4ZTZlMGFlMGRhODMzNWNkMGNhNWQ0N2ZiZDkyY2I3MmJlNTUzYWNlNjYxODA5M2VhZTVkMWNjNTY4N18vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS84NmFjY2ZlYS00MWJlLTQ5MWYtOWEyNy0xMmMwZTJhNDUwMjAvZmM3OTM1NjEtMTg4Yi00NjRmLTg0YTAtYTE4MzJiMjQ0YzE3L21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Washington, D.C.", + "length": "27 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed December 12, 2018, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "James Reierson Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Julius Sztuk" + ], + "respondents": [ + "James Reierson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:00", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. Today is October 17th, 2018. This is Jay Sztuk and I'm interviewing Jim Reierson, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji from July 1973 through July 1975. Jim was a lecturer in physics at the University of the South Pacific. Welcome, Jim, and thanks for agreeing to be interviewed today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:28", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:30", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So let's start off by telling us a little bit about how you initially heard about Peace Corps and why you joined." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:37", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "OK. Well, it might be easier to start with where I came from." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:00:44", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:00:45", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because I grew up on a small farm in Nebraska. And my father was not a college graduate and my mother had gone to college for a couple of years and taught school. But anyhow, I grew up on a small farm, and this was in the forties and fifties, so we didn't have electricity or running water until I was in the fourth grade. And I went to one room schools three of my grade school years. Then I went to high school. There were 17 in my high school class. And then from there, I went to the University of Nebraska and majored in physics. And after that, I went to Iowa State and got my doctorate in physics there. So I was I guess 27 years old when I kind of walked out into the sunlight after being buried in physics labs and so forth most of my young adult life.\n\nAnd so I missed the sixties, essentially. I didn't miss it, but I was doing math and physics and stuff. And so I came out to Washington, D.C., area for a job. And I mean, I had heard about the Peace Corps before that, but as I said, I missed the sixties pretty much, and I missed, I had war deferments while I was doing my physics research. So I missed the Vietnam War. And I came out here and I worked for a not-for- profit that worked for the Air Force, defense stuff. But I kind of had this, I guess, feeling that kind of I owed the country something or that, since I had friends that had gone to Vietnam. And I'd heard about the Peace Corps, and that sounded pretty cool.\n\nAnd then when I came out here, I met some returned volunteers and they impressed me as really nice people. And so that got me thinking about it. And after working for three years, I decided I would kind of like to try teaching physics, because when I first got out of graduate school, I was totally burned out from whatever it was, 20 straight years of schooling, and I didn't want anything to do with a university type atmosphere. But after three years of working, I thought, well, I ought to try teaching sometime before I forget all the physics. And so it kind of my reasoning was, well, if I apply for jobs, I'll wind up teaching at a junior college somewhere, you know, for a couple of years to see if I like it. Or I could do something like go in the Peace Corps. The pay is a little less, but not much less. And I could have an adventure at the same time.\n\nSo I applied for the Peace Corps and filled out the paperwork. And, you know, I was semi-serious about it. But what I said on there, and they ask you, where do you want to go and what do you want to do? And I said, I want to teach physics at a college or university in the Caribbean or South Pacific. I figured, fat chance. And so about a month or so later then I got this thing back from the Peace Corps saying, we've got an opening in Lesotho. They have a little college there. And so I looked on the map and back then Lesotho was, I don't know if it's still a country or not, but anyhow, it was completely surrounded by white apartheid South Africa, little black enclave there. And they had a university with a couple other little other little enclaves.\n\nAnd I said, uh. So I reply. I said, no, that's not quite what I had in mind. I mean, I sound like it might be too much like real Peace Corps. So I turned them down. And then I went, uh, it was getting close, and this was about the, I guess, summer of '72. I decided I needed, uh, I did my Europe. Back then there was this book, Europe on $5 a Day. So I bought a copy of that and I spent like five weeks seeing Europe on $5 a day, staying in hostels and stuff like that. And I took a leave of absence from work when I did that and I came back and got a new apartment and started work. And I'd been to work less than a week back to work, and the Peace Corps called me up and said, how would you like to go to Fiji? And I said, that's what I had in mind.\n\nHowever, I just went back to work and told them I was going to go back to work and I've just signed the lease on my apartment and stuff, so I guess I can't do it. And so, I dropped it. And then, so I figured that was the end of the Peace Corps for me. And then like, uh, it's like March of '73. I was at a party and there was a young lady there who worked for the Peace Corps. And so I was chatting with her and she had something to do with the Pacific region. And so I said, they ever find anyone to teach physics in Fiji? And she said, no, do you want to go? I said, OK. And so this was like April or so. And so I quit my job and dispersed my possessions and, uh, drove my car back to Nebraska to tell my parents I was going.\n\nI told them I was going to see them for the last time. My father says, I don't know, Jim, you had a really good job. I don't know why you're doing this. That's probably what all fathers say." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:08:07", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:08:07", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so. But then I went on to San Francisco where they had the staging there. So after I kind of, after I said yes to this lady and filled out a few forms, I never heard from the Peace Corps again. I guess things were a little looser back then. And in fact, I didn't know how I was supposed to get to California. And they said, well, buy a ticket and then send us a bill and we'll reimburse you. So that's what I did, they said." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:08:37", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So they did give you a date to show up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:08:39", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, they said show up on July 4th." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:08:42", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This must be one of the longest recruitments ever." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:08:45", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I flew to San Francisco on the 4th of July and I said to myself, they won't be doing anything on the 4th of July, anything official. And so a friend from graduate school met me and we spent the day looking around San Francisco and all this kind of stuff. So I walked into the hotel like 8:00 at night and went in this meeting room. And there were all these other new recruits who had spent the whole day in meetings. And it it turned out, well, what we figured out was that kind of everything was done by contractors, and they were getting paid time and a half or double time for working on holidays. So they had all these meetings on the 4th.\n\nSo we were there for about two days to get our shots and, you know, get some orientations and stuff. And his name was, I forget his first name. [Berenado] Vunibobo. He then was at the U.N., I believe, but he was some kind of a minister or something in the Fiji government, so he was there to escort us down. So I sat by him on the plane on the way down. So that's how I got in the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:10:16", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So yeah. So that was, like I said, it was pretty long recruitment. You have second thoughts at any time in there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:10:26", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, after I said, after I said I'd do it, then I got pretty gung ho. Well, so I guess one of the questions on here was, what was the first thing you did when you found out you were going to Fiji? First thing I did was I went to the library and looked at the encyclopedia and then the National Geographics, because I didn't know what Fijians looked like or really anything about it other than it was down there in the South Pacific. So then, as now, it seems like the only way you can arrive in Fiji is in the middle of the night or early morning. I mean, it's always dark when you, whenever I've gone there, I haven't been there that many times. But it seems like you're always getting there at 4:00 in the morning or something, some weird time. So I guess one of the questions was, what happened when you first got there or whatever?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:11:28", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Anything memorable about when you first hit the ground there in Fiji. How'd you feel and did anything impress you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:11:37", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I first hit the ground, it was dark and so the Peace Corps met us there with a few rental cars and stuff. And I remember almost killing myself on that because I, you know, tried to get in on the wrong, on the." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:11:56", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The wrong side?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:11:56", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Wrong side of the car and hit the steering wheel on my way in. And then they took us to, uh, I was going to say the Coconut Inn, but I'm not sure that's around there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:12:08", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is that like a boarding house?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:12:11", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:12:11", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Next to a river?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:12:12", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And it was run by an American guy who'd married a Fijian, and which was interesting in that he, I don't know how he'd gotten to Fiji, but he'd been in Fiji and he met his future wife and they were planning to come to the United States. And then he found that he couldn't legally get married. They wanted to come back and get married in the United States, and back then they couldn't legally get married in Fiji. I mean, in Fiji, in Tennessee, to a black woman. And so he said, to hell with this, we're going back to Fiji. So he was running this Coconut Inn.\n\nBut anyhow, the first thing I remember then is that they had a kava ceremony. And, you know, you're walking. What I remember myself thinking, you know, staggering off the plane after not sleeping. And then it's dark and you're here and you're plopped down on a mat and they're stirring up this muddy water and stuff and, you know, give you some, you know. I distinctly remember thinking, if I drink this, I'm in. I mean, I'm here for two years. I mean, it's, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:13:36", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did they give you any kind of warning about that ahead of time or tell you about kava?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:13:39", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A little bit, I guess, but I didn't, you know, among all the other stuff. So that was that. And we did our, um, then we were assigned. There were four of us assigned to a language instructor and Komai, Ratu Komai was our language instructor. And so we spent, I guess, six weeks with him. We spent two weeks at a village outside Suva, the capital city, about 40 minutes outside called Cautata. And it's a, uh, so that's where we went kind of for our first two week village stay. And what I remember there is, well, I guess the other, kind of the other aspect was that this was 1973. And as I got on the plane leaving the U.S., John Dean was on the television in the airport and, you know, the Watergate thing was just getting wrapped up.\n\nAnd what occurred to me when we went back this summer for the 50th anniversary, getting on the plane there to go to that, we have Donald Trump. I mean, it's the same, in a sense, in both cases I was kind of, felt like I was in a position where I'm kind of apologizing for our country's leadership. And so when we got to Cautata, you know, they had a kind of a meeting of, you know, meet and greet with all the people in the village and stuff. And it's close enough to the capital city that a lot of people commute and work. So a lot of people even back then had, were very good in English. Had good English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:15:52", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:15:52", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And like the guy that was the chief, he had a job as an editor of the Fiji Times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:15:59", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, no kidding?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:16:00", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And but anyhow, we didn't know all this at the time. So we're kind of standing around and this little guy walks up, and he says to me, Otis Elevators. I said, huh? Otis Elevators? And he points at his shirt and it says Otis on there. And it turned out he was the Otis Elevator repairman for the country of Fiji, which at that time had one elevator." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:16:28", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to say, he couldn't have been very busy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:16:29", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some building in Suva had like, you know, it's five stories or something. So he was the guy who kept the elevators running. Then another guy comes, walks up, and he goes, what's this about the Watergate? And so, uh. You know, I was expecting, you know, how do you like the food or something?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:16:48", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And to be in a Fijian village." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:16:51", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:16:53", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And to be quizzed about current affairs in the United States. That was probably surprising." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:16:58", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah, that was surprising to me. And I guess the other thing I would say about the village, that kind of occurred to me at the time was, uh, then I guess there were a couple of houses that had electricity. They didn't have any running water, anybody. So we had outdoor toilets and stuff. I guess one thing was that it hadn't occurred to me that you could have water trap toilets outside, you know, because not coming from places where it froze, you assumed that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:17:31", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So that was an advancement from where you grew up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:17:33", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. And what I decided was that in many ways, kind of the, I don't know what the measurement is. The distance between where I grew up and the village in Fiji was in a lot of dimensions, smaller than from where I grew up to living in Washington, D.C., before I went to Fiji. In terms of electricity and things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:18:05", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. Yeah, I was going to ask you that. How do you feel like your background growing up in that kind of area without electricity and indoor plumbing, do you think that made it easier for you to adapt when you went to another country that didn't have those conveniences?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:18:23", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't as unusual for me, you know. And I think a lot of the stuff that you learn on a farm, you know, kind of translates in that you learn how to fix a washing machine with a pair of pliers. That's the only tool you have, and that kind of stuff. So. And there were things, you know, I guess one of the things. Like back when I was growing up, the guys my father's age would sit around telling World War II stories. And in the village at night when they were doing talanoa around the kava bowl, you know, the old guys were telling World War II stories." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:19:16", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:19:16", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So there's a lot, some of the same kind of stuff. So anyhow, we did two weeks in Cautata and then we did some time in Suva and some time, I guess, a couple other places. But then we were supposed to go to another village and it fell through. And so we, uh, Komai took us to Bau Island, where he was from. We spent I think about two weeks there, essentially living with his family. And his father, his parents were alive then, and his father was a big cheese. He was the mata ni vanua, the spokesman for the chief of Bau. And the chief of Bau, at least according to the Bauans, is the most important person in Fiji. I'm not sure all the other Fijians feel that way, but they felt, the Bauans felt that way about themselves. And then it turned out he passed away while we, well, like '74 or '75." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:20:36", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The father?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:20:36", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The father did, yeah. Komai passed away a few years ago." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:20:43", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were studying Fijian then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:20:45", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, we were being taught Fijian. I can't. I was the class dummy in terms of learning the language and part of it's probably, part of it I blame on my age. I was the oldest, you know, I was like 20. No, I was 31. I think 30 or 31. It was '73. 31. You know, and everyone else was like, or just about everyone else was like early twenties. So I figured it was an old age thing, but then I don't have a good ear for music and things like that. And they did it totally, totally oral, orally and immersive, you know. And to me, it all sounded like a Japanese person trying to speak Italian, just staccato consonants with a vowel after each one, just blasting away there. And so I didn't do too well.\n\nBut the skill I did have in languages that, from graduate school I guess mainly, that really helped out was, I discovered that I could understand practically anything any of my students said. And some of the Indian students, particularly, they had terrible accents." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:22:26", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, so you could understand their English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:22:29", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I could understand their English. I couldn't, you know, or the Fijians' English or the Tongans' English or the Gilbertese guy, you know. But so and I don't know if they could understand me or not. I caught them a couple of times mocking my Midwestern accent. But the one was, like one semester the first day of class, this Indian kid stood up and said, sir, do you have a yachet? And I thought about that a while and I had him repeat it. And then I realized what he was saying was, do I have a yacht? Because our offices were in the old hangar building of the, down by the breakwater at USP, and that had been the flying boat base in World War II. And so a lot of the faculty had little sailboats and stuff and they kept them there.\n\nAnd it turned out that Dan Cantor, the Peace Corps director over there in Fiji, had a little ten-foot little boat, not a massive boat, and he had kept it over at the Suva Yacht Club. And that bothered him, I guess, to have a Peace Corps director with a boat at the yacht club. And so when I came, he says, after he said, you think you can work it out so that I can keep my boat over there at USP? And I said, yeah, if you let me use it sometimes. I knew how to sail a little bit, but not much. And so I said, OK. So we sailed it around one time and kept it there. And so that was one of the, every semester then we'd do a little physics about how yachts work and vectors and wind vectors and things like that. And then we'd go out for a sail." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:24:43", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Couldn't fit the whole class on that one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:24:44", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it'd take a couple. Two or three groups of students. So anyhow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:24:53", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So your training was primarily in Suva, in the capital city?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:24:58", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And in villages. And in the villages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:25:01", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then when you completed training, your assignment was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:25:05", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went to USP, the university." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:25:08", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And that's also in Suva?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:25:11", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's in Suva, yes, the capital. And as I said, it used to be a New Zealand, during World War II, it was a Royal Air Force, I guess, flying boat base. And Americans were there, some I guess, and trained. And then after the war it became a New Zealand flying boat base. And then when Fiji became independent in, uh, whenever that was, '60 something, mid sixties, kind of as a gift to the country of Fiji, the British Commonwealth gave that land of the air, of the base. They gave them their land back and so they could use it as a university. And so there weren't a lot of built or new buildings there. When I was there, they were just, they built the library while I was there. But so they used a lot of the old air base buildings as classrooms and so forth. And where I lived was a, uh, had been a bachelor's officer's quarters. And so it was like a long building with a veranda and about half a dozen bedrooms on one end and then a communal bathroom and then a communal kitchen and sitting room." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:26:41", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. Set up like a barracks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:26:42", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. And so I was there with other Peace Corps volunteers there, Bruce Carlson and David Tyson and some others." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:26:57", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So how many Peace Corps volunteers were at USP at that time, do you remember? Approximately." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:27:03", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was probably on the order of 15, I would guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:27:10", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Quite a large group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:27:10", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'm not positive now but anyhow, so I after we came back from the 50th anniversary, it occurred to me I start making a list. I wondered, can I write down? I don't know if you want to keep this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:27:27", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:27:27", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so one of the attractions was, I guess, is that we had hot showers. And so whenever. We had a lot of visitors. So people that, the Peace Corps volunteers that taught on outer islands or in remote places, whenever they'd come into Fiji once or twice a year, a lot of them would wind up sleeping on our floors and using our showers. So I got to meet a lot of the volunteers that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:28:06", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so your housing was on campus, which isolated you a little bit from the neighborhood." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:28:15", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:28:15", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So did you have much interaction with the local neighbors or anything? Or the other staff at the school? Outside of school time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:28:29", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, outside of school time. It was, uh, most of the staff were Australian and New Zealand expatriates and a lot of them were there for just a few years, you know, kind of relatively short assignments. And majority of them were married and some of them had kids and stuff. And so, but they, you know, I went to some faculty parties and stuff and they had the School of Natural Resources where I taught. Well, back then they didn't give a, I guess you got a Bachelor of Science degree. That's what it amounted to. You didn't, you couldn't major in physics or chemistry. So most of them took a couple of years of physics and a couple of years of chemistry and a couple of years of biology and stuff.\n\nBut so but the faculty, I guess this is a British tradition, they had high tea every day at 3:00 or something like that. So all the faculty go into the staff meeting room and you sit around and drink tea and talk and stuff. So that was okay. And they invited, you know, I got invited to staff parties of various kinds. So that was my main interaction with them. And a couple of them were really nice people and I'm still kind of, I haven't really kept in touch with, but one of them I got back in touch with after I went there this summer. And so I guess the rest of town, I really didn't, other than the Peace Corps volunteers that came through or that were stationed around there. Those were, that was my main interactions. So I did do, I mean, we. I felt, so I felt more of an attachment, I guess I'd say, to the students than to the surrounding community." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:30:46", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:30:47", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One of my students was this guy named, a Fijian guy named Wami. And this was in the mid seventies and it's back when, uh. So anyhow, he dressed like he was from California. And so a lot, and a lot of the, well. So he was wearing, you know, tight bellbottom jeans and flowery shirts and stuff. And so were the, a lot of the Indian students too. It's just the way, I think they still dress that way. Maybe not with the bellbottoms anymore, this time with tight jeans and a shirt. But anyhow, Wami was a very charismatic guy. And so when we were going back to Fiji this summer, I got in touch with him. And, I mean, I looked him up on the internet and stuff and figured out a little bit about him, and found out he was, got in touch with him anyway. And so we met, he and his wife, there at the Grand Pacific Hotel for breakfast one day. And he became a doctor and was the head of Fiji School of Medicine for a few years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:32:06", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:32:06", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Apparently straightened it out and got it accredited and everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:32:12", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's impressive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:32:12", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And his wife was a high-end lawyer. But anyhow, so. You know, so you feel like, well, I taught this guy so, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:32:30", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Had some influence." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:32:30", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He's a success because of me. So my wife asked him, what do you remember about Jim? And he says, well, the thing I remember is he'd have us over to his place and he'd make popcorn. So my influence on this guy was me teaching him about popcorn." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:32:52", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So the students at, uh, USP has campuses all throughout the Pacific. So you had some other islanders attending school there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:33:01", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah, the main." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:33:03", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Pretty mixed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:33:04", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The main campus, well, still is the one in Suva. And they had a mixture of, uh, so I suppose like 80% of the students were from Fiji and probably then about 60, maybe 70% of the Fijian students were of Indian descent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:33:30", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So I think a small percentage of Fijians actually get to go to university. So would you think that these were the elite of Fiji or did they come from chiefly families or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:33:48", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some of them did, yeah. Because a lot of the, if you come from a chiefly family that was kind of your best, you were more likely to get into a good high school. But back then, the university was fairly new since it started in '68. And so back then I guess the really the superstar students were still getting Commonwealth scholarships to Australia and New Zealand. And so like, you know, the ones that were, you know, obviously bound for med school or something like that would go straight from Fiji to undergraduate school. And so the main, the main, uh, one of the main reasons for setting up the university was to stop the brain drain because they, you know, they found that kids that went overseas to school, a lot of them don't come back or anything.\n\nAnd so the notion was to stop the brain drain and also to train, because they were at the point where they were starting to need a lot of secondary school teachers and civil servants and so forth, because it had only been a few years since the British had pulled out of Fiji. So, you know, vacancies in civil service needed to get filled by educated people and so forth. So that was kind of the reason for the USP. So the students were pretty sharp on the whole, but they weren't. Well, in physics, there was one kid, a Chinese kid that, you know, when he walked in the door, you could tell he was really smart. You know, he, wow. That guy's smarter, a lot smarter than I am. He could go to school anywhere in the United States. And he did go on and get a PhD. And it wasn't, I don't know where he is now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:36:00", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any particularly memorable episodes or experiences in teaching these kids?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:36:10", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the boat rides I guess were the main things. I guess the other. Well, when I first went there, I was, their school. Their school year ends in December and starts, well anyhow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:36:34", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The seasons are different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:36:35", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It corresponds to the, kind of corresponds to the calendar year, same as their school year. And so I got there in July. So it's like, I guess I got there at the semester break and so they'd already have teaching assignments for the second semester, assuming I wasn't going to be there. I mean, they didn't know I was coming for that year. And so I taught math, taught some math at first.\n\nAnd then the other thing that was happening then was my predecessor, the guy I was supposed to replace if I would have accepted the first time, I would have replaced, overlapped a little bit and replaced the guy named David Berkowitz. And so he had been the first Peace Corps volunteer there and teaching physics. And this happened to him and then happened to me, is since a lot of the expatriates rotate in and out, my last half. Well, yeah, my last half year there, I wound up being the head of the department because I was the one, no one had been there as long as I had been. And that's what happened to him.\n\nAnd he was digging around and he found and applied for some, a grant I guess it was, to get use on a communications satellite. The USP had, I mean, the United States government had in during the sixties launched, start launching communication satellites. And then as they were replaced by better technology, they still had some. They had this one that was kind of floating around over the Pacific or equatorial orbit, you know, geosynchronous orbit. So it was just floating there over the equator, covering most of the South Pacific. And they had time on it that you could, uh, you could apply for time, so many hours a week, when you had the time budget. And so the university got time on it. And the whole thing was to set up, uh, they wanted to start teaching extension courses and using satellite for community so the teacher could be in Suva and answer questions from someone in Niue." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:39:25", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:39:25", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so when I got there then, my first six months there, a part of my job, I got involved in going to some of these other little countries and surveying them for setting up satellite reception there. And so I went to, back then it was called New Caledonia. I guess it's Vanuatu now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:39:56", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:39:56", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was French then and the French were very suspicious. They didn't, they weren't sure they wanted an American satellite. For people, natives talking over an American satellite. So anyhow, I was climbing, had to climb around on the roofs there, raising and kind of waving a television antenna type thing, you know, see if I could get a signal, how good it was. So I did that a couple of different places. And then I went to the country of Niue and set up their, took along some tubes full of antennas that I had put together and receiver and stuff. And we set up their little teaching office, about the size of this room, with a table so the students can come in and sit around and talk to a tutor once a week for an hour." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:40:52", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was pretty high tech for those days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:40:54", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:40:55", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how did it work out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:40:57", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It worked pretty, it seemed to work pretty well. And they had, they got centers going in several countries. And when I went back this summer, I went on campus and everything was shut down when we were there. But they have a building now that's there, I guess like a communications building, they call it, with huge, I mean, it looks like a building here with the satellite dishes sticking out on it. So they still do, I imagine they have video now too. But and it said something about a gift from Japan. So. So as you mentioned, they've been big in putting, not only putting that kind of thing, but campuses on other countries. So you can. Different island countries, I guess, have different specialties. Some of them, I think maybe the law college is somewhere, and different cultural things are on other island countries." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:42:11", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that's impressive. So you were a pioneer in distance learning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:42:15", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know pioneer. An enabler." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:42:23", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So what did you enjoy most about living in Fiji and Suva?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:42:38", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I guess part of it was just kind of the cultural kind of just the mix, the mix of cultures and stuff. Well, you know, growing up in Nebraska, you know, I. It was probably almost, not quite, but almost until I got to graduate school that I really knew anyone that was not of northern European heritage. And so to me, it was just really neat seeing all these different people and getting exposed to some of the cultural things and just. You know, kind of some of the things were just, well, I remember like they had a, you know, they had a cultural exchange or something. But anyhow, a bunch of Aborigines came and put on a show, you know, and did their didgeridoo and their." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:43:49", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At USP?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:43:51", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was either at USP or at the civic center downtown. But the impressive thing was, I don't know if they were faked it or not, but the first guy walks out and he sits down on the corner of the stage and there's a little pile of sticks. And he picks up a couple of sticks and starts twirling them and stuff. All of a sudden he has a fire going, a little smoky fire. And so I was kind of off in the corner while they did their. I thought like, wow, I wonder if he palmed a match or something. But anyhow, then that kind of a culture, just reading about and talking to people from there and from Fiji, you know, like some of their legends and just struck me as so different. And, you know, how could anyone even come up with that, you know, he's talking about various kinds of gods and people getting eaten and people eating other people. And it's just, I mean, just so exotic. I just thought it was fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:45:05", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Since you had this interest in the local culture and legends and stuff, did you get to travel much within the country when you had some time off? Did you spend more time in Fijian villages or the outskirts of Suva or any of the other islands?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:45:23", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What I tried to do was, uh, like when I have a long weekend, probably say every two months or so, I would go back out to the village of Cautata. And it turned out that one of the guys from the village was a security guard at the university, and so I got to know him. So I'd go out with him, and they used to have a bus that went up. The village had a, owned a bus to bring people in and out. And so you could go down to the bus stop and get on the bus and go out there. And so about once every couple of months I'd go out. I'd tell them I'm coming out for the weekend. There was a lady that, I guess she was kind of my unofficial grandmother, and she would give me her bed and she'd go to sleep with her kids or something. So that's." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:46:26", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, so that training experience became a permanent connection for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:46:29", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then when we went back this past summer, we made arrangements through Sala. And I asked her if she knew anyone from the village, in that village, and she came up with a name, and so we communicated on Facebook and he became my spokesman. And so he picked us up at the Grand Pacific and took us out to buy kava. And we went there and spent half a day in the village. And I took along prints of old pictures and gave it to him. So he gave them copies of old pictures I had." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:47:12", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, old pictures you had?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:47:13", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From 40 some years ago. Oh yeah, that's so-and-so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:47:18", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did they remember you? Anybody remember you in the village?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:47:19", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I didn't see that many people in the village. And the guy that was a security guard, he died a few years ago. And I mean, so I mean, I suppose some of the kids. I don't know. We all look alike, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:47:40", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, it's been a long time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:47:41", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it's been a long time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:47:42", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And people don't always stay in the village." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:47:44", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But so I did go to, uh, went to Taveuni and Ovalau, other islands around there. And I went down to Kadavu. So essentially those were all, uh, staying with the volunteers who had essentially slept on my floor. I went to sleep on their floor, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:48:14", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so in those days did you go by boat or did you fly?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:48:22", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think we, I went by boat to, uh, I don't think you could fly to Kadavu then. And I think I went by boat to Ovalau. And Taveuni I think I flew. And then the one, the one other time was I and two other volunteers went to Tonga on a boat. And it's called the Anyu was the name of the boat, which I think it means the coconut or something. And it was like a day and a half or two day boat ride and all the way over there. But the one thing I remember was all the way. So we were the, there was a Tongan lady and her little boy up on the decks and they wouldn't let us sleep on the deck. We had to have a cabin. Since we were Europeans, I guess. And so they had this little cabin with two sets of bunk beds in it. And so we climbed in there and someone climbed up on the top bunk and it just crashed right through the bunk. So we had to get that all straightened up. And it was just, it was not a very clean boat, let's put it that way. Especially the head.\n\nBut then when we got, so we thought we were kind of all alone on this boat, but except for the captain and the cook and someone down in the engine room. And as we pulled into Tonga, all of a sudden the deck was full of people, and the cargo was bags of cement, taking cement to Tonga. And I guess the way they did it back then was a lot of Tongans came to Fiji to, you know, to work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:50:32", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:50:33", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For a short period of time. Then they'd make some money and then go back home. And so what they would do is they'd stow away. And so they were all stowaways on this boat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:50:43", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, no kidding?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:50:43", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so it pulls into the harbor there in Nuku'alofa. And sure enough, there's the local Tonga police paddy wagons there and their lights whipping around. And so all the guys get off the boat, get in the paddy wagons. I guess they go down to the station and they let them all go. So that's how you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:51:04", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's right. So they were hiding the entire trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:51:06", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. I never didn't even know they were there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:51:09", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's funny." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:51:12", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And back then, I think it's probably still true today. Places, countries like Tonga made especially Suva seem like a hubbub of civilization." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:51:27", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like Las Vegas or something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:51:28", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Bright lights and all that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:51:35", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So you were there at USP for two years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:51:39", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Two years, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:51:41", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And since then. Well, did you consider extending at all or did they ask you to extend?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:51:50", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I guess the one other thing I wanted to mention about the beat when we were there. When I was there. Is that I guess this is probably true of all Peace Corps volunteers, but it was especially true at the university, I think, and that's because there were a lot of us and we, you know, a lot of us living in the same place and stuff. And so we had these kind of endless, not endless, but we'd always have these long discussions about what are we doing here? Are we doing any good? You know, why are we here? You'd say things like, now wait a minute, you know, this is a country where old people are taken care of. They love kids, you know, they have a fairly good life expectancy and everything, you know. What are we really, what are we doing bringing them into the 20th century? And so that kind of went on and on.\n\nAnd, you know, kind of one of the things was it kind of concluded that, well, what I wrote on the blackboard was my equation was the letter P divided by C, which you could read as P into C. And so someone said, what we're doing here is we're pissing in the ocean in terms of helping the world out. And so I thought that was pretty good. But the one positive thing I think we did was that, uh, when I came in the early years of the university, they had a lot of Peace Corps and a lot of volunteers from Canada and other places that kind of their job, what they were doing was what graduate students do in the United States in university. They were teaching the labs and grading papers and doing that kind of thing.\n\nAnd so our analyst discussions about this, you know, we finally came to the conclusion that, you know, by the mid seventies, they were starting to graduate enough people from the university that and they could do those jobs, you know, and a lot of them were kids that might want to go on to graduate school and things like that. And so we convinced the Peace Corps, and I remember writing letters and stuff to the Peace Corps, and I mean, to Dan Canter and to the university, saying, you know, we think that you could phase out those kinds of jobs for volunteers and start hiring locals. And so my last year there, we hired for a physics, I guess, lab assistant is what they were called or something like that.\n\nWe hired this kid that just graduated, an Indian guy from Fiji, and so he was there a few years, and then he went on to Australia and got a PhD in physics eventually, environmental physics. So I felt good about that. That was kind of one of the positive things that happened, kind of it was positive in terms of the Peace Corps kind of got rid of some jobs, but they reassigned them to other things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:55:23", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At least you feel like you had a positive impact." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:55:25", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:55:27", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So after." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:55:28", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:55:29", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, go ahead." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:55:29", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "OK. So then as I was coming up on July of '75, I guess was kind of the earliest. I mean, my two years were up and what I kind of thought was that maybe I would at least stay on to the end of the school year, which would have been like December, November. And but what happened was that this young lady, Polly, came down to visit me the winter of '74, and she, you know, I'd known her from back here in D.C., and so she came down and visited me. And one thing led to another, as it does in the South Pacific. So she came back here and then we had this long several months of the blue aerograms flying back and forth. And so then she came back to Fiji and we got married there in May of. She came back in May and got married in June of '75. And so because of that, I didn't extend. When my time was up, I left after two years rather than extending." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:56:49", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you actually got married in Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:56:52", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We got married in Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:56:53", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where did that take place? Was it a church or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:56:56", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We got married in the Catholic cathedral in Suva." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:57:02", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, right downtown?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:57:04", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And it's still there and we, they remodeled it, I guess, since we got married. And we tried to go in it this last summer, but it was locked. I mean, they locked the church, these black churches now. And they have guards around the, I mean, they have a compound around the Peace Corps office and they keep track of where the volunteers are at all times and all this kind of stuff that was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:57:31", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's changed quite a bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:57:32", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Changed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:57:33", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you can't get in the embassy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:57:34", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Can't get in the embassy. Yeah, the embassy compound has nothing. Because it seemed to me that when we were in the Peace Corps, it's kind of that's what you did on Saturday mornings. You went down to the Peace Corps office and wandered in there to see if you got any mail and, you know, talk to people. And then you'd find these other people that were just into town from some outer island. And they'd said, you got a place to stay? You'd say, uh. But all that is by the wayside now, I guess. But to some extent it was easier back then in a lot of ways, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:58:20", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So how do you feel that that experience of being a Peace Corps volunteer impacted your post Peace Corps life in the past several years? I know you've remained connected through the Friends of Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:58:42", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, that's been a nice way to stay connected. And Polly has enjoyed that too, because she only spent a couple of months in Fiji. You know, so that's been kind of a nice cultural thing. And we brought our kids to a couple events and so, you know, they get a little flavor of it. I guess I would say one of the things that, uh, I guess in terms of myself, I'm by nature an introverted nerd and, uh. Well, the joke is, how can you tell an extroverted physicist? He's the one that looks at your shoes while he talks. And so I think one of the big things for me is spending the two years in Fiji is that it really made me become more attuned to other people and just kind of being more in the present than I used to be. I mean, I'm still not too good at all of these things, but I'm miles ahead of where I was back then.\n\nI mean, I guess I kind of felt like, kind of looking back on it. It was like when you're, when I was in Fiji, it was kind of like the record button was pushed in my head, you know, and kind of everything was just. I guess just, I just remember things, you know, it was a very, what you'd call a very vivid experience, a lot of the things. And I felt that a little bit going back this past summer for, you know, the time we spent there, you know, you kind of get back in that kind of mode again. You know, you're kind of, you aren't worrying about your stuff anymore. You're more you don't have any stuff. So you can spend your time thinking about people and finding out about them and they're finding out about you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "01:01:20", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So this trip was for the 50th anniversary of Peace Corps that you made this summer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "01:01:25", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "01:01:25", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how did it feel to be back?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "01:01:32", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It felt, I guess, well, and like 20 years ago, I guess it was '90. Yeah, like 20 years ago, I had gone back to a conference in Denarau Island because I worked for the Mitre Corporation, which is a not-for- profit engineering company. And the stuff I worked on was at that time was oceanic air traffic control. And Fiji controls a big chunk of air space down there, and the conference kind of rotates around and they managed to convince everyone to come down there one year. And I finagled a ticket so I could go down there. But then I only spent, like, a couple of days, kind of after the conference when over to Suva for a day or two. And I really hadn't told many people I was coming. And so it was just a snapshot.\n\nAnd so this time, I guess we were both expecting to be disappointed. Or that we'd heard people say, well, you know, it's more crowded than it used to be. And there's a lot of traffic and the streets are dirty and on and on. But I was surprise, I thought it was great. I enjoyed being around. And we saw, like I mentioned, the student we saw that I hadn't seen before. And the other person we saw was, when I was there, the lady that ran the labs, the lab manager for the physics. A lady named Lemba Savu, and she's spent her career at the university. And so I got in touch with her and she's still around. She's retired now, but she gave us a tour of the university and, um, took us around. And we brought her to the event at the Fiji Library there in Suva. So she saw some other people there that she'd know from the old days.\n\nAnd she is, uh, the main thing she showed us going around the campus is that back when I was there, it still looked like an airbase. It was, there were. I guess that's how you make military bases. So you have clean lines of sight. You don't have a lot of vegetation or anything and a few palm trees. That was it. But now it's just like a botanical garden." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "01:04:34", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Looks more like a college campus?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "01:04:36", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. And now Lemba and, uh. Bill Albersburg and Randy Thaman, those two guys were both Peace Corps volunteers who then came back to the United States and got PhDs and then went back to Fiji and were at USP for 30 or 40 years. And Randy Thaman is still there, I guess. I didn't see him, but he's an emeritus type professor now. But anyhow, those two guys and Lemba, at least according to Lemba, planted all the shrubs and trees and flowers and stuff on the campus over a period of several years. They'd go out and find native plants to put here and here. And so that was very impressive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "01:05:42", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any other, anything we missed or any things you want to say in closing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "01:05:49", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let's see. I think I've blasted through about everything. Well, I guess the other thing was that, I guess what. Kind of one of my generalizations is that people seem to have kind of hinge points in their life, you know, kind of high points. And then after that, at those points their lives kind of change or that that's the high point and everything's downhill after that. And for some people, it's high school football. It kind of goes on from there. It could be the military or college or, you know. But for me, you know, partly because of getting married there and stuff, but just the adventure of that period was to me a kind of a hinge point in my life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "01:06:52", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A high point in your life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "01:06:52", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, after that, you know, coming back here, I kind of would come back and went to work for Mitre Corporation and stuff and had a career as a nerd. But, you know, you kind of do things differently, I think, you know, like, you know, is that I don't want to be a manager. So I didn't become a manager and just, you know, didn't worry about not making the really big bucks. And, you know, a lot of the people that are in Friends of Fiji that, some of them like David Downes and Cynthia Grant, you know, I knew from back there. So it's kind of nice that that was kind of a big part of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "01:07:38", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh right, so some of the people that are your good friends now are people that you'd met because of Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "01:07:46", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "01:07:47", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Maybe not during your service but because they share that in common." + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "01:07:49", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, well, they were there in Fiji when I was there and a lady who was a couple of miles from us, Carol Reeder. She was married and she went, we were in, she was part of the same group of four people that did the training together. And she was married then and her husband, Bob, was also in that group. And their marriage fell apart. Well, it was a complicated thing. But anyhow, she is around and we're very good friends with her. It seemed like there was something else I was going to say, but I. Nah, I think that's pretty much it. Oh, well, I guess the other thing I was going to say is I guess just a part of when I was talking about how I felt like my tape recorder was running and I felt alive and all this kind of stuff while I was a volunteer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "01:08:53", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "01:08:54", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The other thing that's happened that I've done that has made me feel kind of the same way is I went, I did a week with Habitat for Humanity down in New Orleans after, a year after Katrina. And I guess I would, anyone that's considering the Peace Corps, I would recommend do a week with Habitat for Humanity and see how you feel about it, because it's very much the same thing except compressed. You're thrown in with a bunch of new people and you kind of have goals, things to do, kind of, and you're assigned jobs and stuff and you sleep on cots and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, you really kind of use, it gives you very much the same, at least it gave me the same kind of feelings of connectedness with these people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "01:09:51", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, camaraderie." + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "01:09:52", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And camaraderie and bitching about stuff. So that's my advice to someone who wants to join the Peace Corps. Do a week for Habitat for Humanity first." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "01:10:07", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. All right. Well, thanks very much, Jim." + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "01:10:10", + "speaker": "James Reierson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "01:10:11", + "speaker": "Julius Sztuk", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This concludes the interview." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00716", + "metadata": { + "category": "Shuttle Carrier Aircraft", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/STS-R/TaylorHT/taylorht.htm", + "original_file_name": "TaylorHT_8-26-11.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/STS-R/TaylorHT/TaylorHT_8-26-11.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA STS Recordation Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Henry T. Taylor", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 26 August 2011" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Henry Taylor" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is August 26th, 2011. This interview with Henry Taylor is being conducted for the NASA STS Recordation Oral History Project. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Rebecca Wright. Thank you again for taking time out of your day. We certainly appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you for having me, and I hope I can provide some good information." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think so. Steve [Steven R.] Nagel recommended you to us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wondered where it came from." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I asked him for the people he thought were the best candidates. I thought we’d start out by asking you to just give us an overview of your career with the Air Force and then at NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I started my Air Force career in 1971 working on fighter airplanes, F-4s and 111s, and then became a flight engineer on C-141s. Did that for three years or so and then came to NASA in 1979. At NASA I flew on the C-130 Earth resources airplane, the old Super Guppy, the Shuttle Training Aircraft, and then got on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft [SCA] in 1989." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How’d you find out about the opportunity to work on the SCA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was already here. The guys that were in charge of our operation, as openings came up, they selected people that were qualified and available to fly, because of background experience. It was like just waiting your turn until somebody retired." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that one of the nice posts out of Ellington [Field, Houston, Texas], one of the coveted positions, I guess you might say?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes it is, because it’s an interesting program. Back when I first started flying on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, more landings were at Edwards [Air Force Base, California]. So we got to do it more often. Later on in the program they tried to land at KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] much more than they did in the earlier days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about the training that you had to take to become a flight engineer for the SCA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At NASA, when I was selected for the airplane, they sent me to two weeks of systems training, and then I went to the simulator for four, five sessions of practicing procedures, especially emergency procedures in the simulator. Every system on the airplane—it’s a very complicated airplane because it’s so involved—they would create malfunctions in the flight simulator of every system, and you’d have to learn how to perform procedures. So after that then I just started flying and took a couple training flights and then became qualified." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In that two-week training period were you out at Dryden [Flight Research Center, California]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Actually the ground school was done up in Dallas at a company called Dalfort which was part of Braniff Airlines back in the days. They had a simulator, and they had instructors that did ground school. In the simulator I had a United Airlines instructor who came and worked at the simulator. There was like five four-hour sessions in the simulator." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about being a flight engineer for the SCA. What do you do? What are your job responsibilities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The flight engineer is responsible for preflighting and managing all the systems of the airplane. Also I do all performance calculations to say, “Okay, can we take off on this runway; how much fuel are we going to need to go from point A to point B?’ Because of temperature and altitude effects on the performance of the airplane as you get higher elevation airports like Edwards or El Paso [Texas] or Amarillo [Texas] or anyplace that’s higher elevations and temperature gets higher, the performance becomes more limited. You can’t take off with as much weight. So that’s the calculations we do ahead of time to plan. Okay, we want to go from point A to point B. How much fuel can we get off with, and can we make it from that point because of it? When can we take off? Sometimes we can only take off early in the morning. We can go somewhere, but we can’t get out of there and leave to go to the next point until it’s early in the morning. That’s why we fly early in the morning, typically. Also to avoid buildups of weather." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think originally you had mentioned something about the flaps of the airplane as well—the flap retraction speeds." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the performance we calculate the takeoff speeds. We calculate what speed the pilot needs to rotate at. What it’s going to climb out at. Based on the weight then you calculate when do we start retracting the flaps after takeoff because you use flaps to create extra lift on takeoff so you have to build up speed before you have less flaps because you got less lift. So as the speed increases on climbout, you retract the flaps in different stages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you’re busy a few days or a few weeks before these missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "On a normal Shuttle mission, about a month before, we do what’s called a ferry planning readiness review. That’s where it’s run by the Shuttle Program Office, and one of the things that needs to be done is create a plan based on the weight of the Orbiter at that particular time and time of year and the availability of airports. How are you going to get it from Edwards to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]; what days are you going to leave; what days are you going to fly on based on the normal end-of-mission landing time; what time is sunrise, because we can only take off during daylight, but we can take off up to 20 minutes before sunrise. We have to land no later than 20 minutes after sunset. So we calculate when we’re going to leave from Edwards; what fuel stops we’re going to make; where we might need to spend the night based on the temperature. The heavier the Orbiter, the more stops we have to make from Edwards to KSC. So that’s done at that meeting. Also they review the status of what the Orbiter is going to be.\\n\\n So that plan is kept until they land at Edwards. After the Orbiter lands at Edwards, then we go out to Edwards a couple days before the actual time we start the mission. We review the plan, get new weather forecast, and then update it as we go. Frequently the plan you’ve put together a month before launch is no good when it comes time to actually leave because the weather is going to keep you from going to a certain airport. So you have to do it on the fly and replan it real-time like a day before you leave from Edwards. You frequently, as you stop, have to change the plan because you may have gone from point A to point B but you can’t get to C so you go from B to D and on from there. You have to change your route based on weather." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned something that I thought was interesting. You could basically only fly during daylight hours. Why is that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s because of seeing and avoiding weather. We can’t fly through thunderstorms. We can’t fly through clouds. We can’t fly within any more than light turbulence. Because the Pathfinder airplane, which is out in front of us by about 100 miles, is scoping out the route, they can tell us that we need to change our route or deviate or climb or descend. We’re limited on altitude with the Orbiter to eight psi [pounds per square inch] and minus nine degrees centigrade, which is 15 degrees Fahrenheit. So sometimes we have to deviate on our route. Seeing clouds at night is much more difficult when you’re flying. So unless it’s absolutely clear—we have got a couple waivers a couple times to complete a flight at night when we knew it was absolutely perfectly clear and there was no chance of any problems, but normally we only fly during the daytime." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is that because of the thermal protection system [TPS]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The TPS system, the tiles on the Orbiter, any rain just erodes them like all get-out and causes significant damage, or can cause significant damage. So we don’t fly through rain, and we can’t be near thunderstorms. So it’s just much easier just to see and avoid during the day than at night." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you’re working at these plans a month in advance, you have an idea what the Orbiter weighs. Does that weight ever change? Do you weigh the vehicle once it comes back in case they brought something else?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. They don’t weigh it at Edwards. What they do is the Orbiter mass properties folks keep track of what the Orbiter is weighing based on propellant uses during a mission and cargo offloaded. Before the mission they have a pretty good idea, approximately, what it’s going to weigh if they land at Edwards. Once it lands at Edwards they give us an updated weight that we can use for the final planning. This is just a best estimate of what it’s going to be when we do the meeting a month ahead of time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me where you sit during the ferry flight itself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the cockpit of the 747 you have the pilot’s seat, the copilot’s seat, and the flight engineer’s panel. The flight engineer’s panel is on the right side of the cockpit. The seat that the flight engineer sits in swivels and slides such that I can turn sideways and face the panel, which is right behind the copilot’s seat, or slide it right up in between the two pilots’ seats because when we get ready to take off the pilot just calls for me to set the engine power settings. So I’m pushing the throttles up. He’s got his hand on the yoke, and he rests his hand on the throttle so if we have to abort beforehand then he pulls it back. But otherwise he just tells me what power setting to set during the takeoff roll and then on initial climb out and during climb. So typically I sit between the pilots and turn so that I can still see my panel, but it depends on the phase of flight.\\n\\n Now once we get up in cruise I usually slide my seat back and face mostly my panel. My panel is the size of that board [about 4 ½ feet wide x 3 feet high]. It’s full of gauges and switches, which I have to constantly monitor. As we burn fuel I have to burn fuel out of certain tanks at certain times. So I’m maneuvering switches and valves to burn the fuel out of different tanks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many tanks are there on the SCA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There are four main, one center wing, and two reserve tanks. We normally only use fuel out of the mains and reserves. We don’t use fuel out of center wing mainly because the Orbiter just takes up too much weight. The airplane can only weigh 710,000 pounds at takeoff. So with a 200-and-something-thousand-pound Orbiter we can’t put a full load of fuel on. So we never get fuel in the center because you make it too heavy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me why you would burn fuel out of different tanks. How does that work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s just to manage the load on the wings, to keep the wing loaded right, a certain weight. Certain types are bigger than others. So you start out burning out of all the main tanks. Then you get down to a certain amount, and then you switch over, burn out of the inboards. When you get towards the end of the flight you get lower on fuel so you have to use the reserve fuel and dump it into the tanks to use." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like a lot of juggling." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It is a little bit, but it’s not too bad." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What are some of the challenges that you might face when you’re flight engineer working on the SCA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Biggest thing is a lot of performance calculations: the balancing of flap setting for takeoff versus climb limit, because with more flaps for takeoff you’re limited by takeoff climb weight more than with the less flaps setting. But with less flaps you need more runway to get off. So it’s a balance between what can you climb with versus what can you get off the runway with. That’s the biggest pretakeoff challenge. In flight the main thing is just monitoring the systems, keeping track of what’s going on. During Orbiter ferry mission the SCA provides power to the Orbiter, and we have to keep track of that. Every 15 minutes we record the voltage and the amperage of the transformer rectifier [T/R] output to the Orbiter to make sure that the Orbiter doesn’t lose power. If part of the Orbiter loses power, then some of the circulation systems and coolant loops become affected. Depending on what the temperature is and where we are, if we lose too much power to the Orbiter, they will say, “Go land,” because we don’t want to damage the systems on the Orbiter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That would damage avionics in the vehicle?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I believe so, yes. We have two gauges. You can either select volts or amps. We have four T/Rs. So keep track of the volts and amps that they’re putting out. That tells us the Orbiter’s power being used. You can see over flight time. You can see the load on those going up as the Orbiter cold-soaks in altitude. Their systems have to work harder, their coolant loops and pumps work more. So you can see an increase in load." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many people end up flying a ferrying flight? Is it just the two pilots and the one flight engineer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Normally during an active ferry mission, it’s two pilots and two flight engineers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you switch off at some point during the flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sometimes we do. It depends how many legs we’re going to do. If there are enough legs so everybody’s going to get a chance at the seat then one flight engineer will take a leg from point A to point B. Then the other guy will take it from B to C. The pilots will do the same thing. They’ll switch legs. It depends on how many they’re going to get. If there’s a very limited number of legs, then sometimes people will switch in flight so that one guy will get the takeoff and one guy will get the landing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’ve been in the SCA, I think, once. If memory serves, there’s a lounge where there might typically have been seats in a 747." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the SCA we retain the seats in the first-class area, downstairs, but nobody rides down there during the active ferry missions. When we go from the Cape back to Edwards without an Orbiter, the mechanics who had been riding on the Pathfinder sit down there. Now upstairs behind the flight deck in commercial 747s there was a lounge area. We have four seats up there, but we don’t really use them for day in, day out operations. Everybody’s in the cockpit. Also it’s very noisy in the airplane aft of the first-class section and in the lounge area where the structure has been modified for the forward support upstairs and then for the other supports in the back of the airplane.\\n\\n Because all the insulation and all the galleys and all the lavatories, everything’s been taken out to reduce the weight, it also gets very cold in the back. So there’s a curtain that’s put up to try to keep the air temperature not so cold.\\n\\n Now usually what happens is after takeoff the other FE [flight engineer] goes back and walks through the cabin and looks out at the wings and the engines. When you get to the back of the airplane you can look out the windows and see the wing of the Orbiter on either side. So look and see if it’s still there. I’m just kidding. We just look over it, make sure that there’s not something leaking or something going on. We call it a scan. We just go out and walk around, walk through the cabin. Look and make sure everything’s okay, because normally you just stay in the cockpit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a cool job, I would think. Have you ever taken anybody on an active ferry flight who wasn’t part of the crew? Say the [NASA] Administrator or other visitors." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We used to take Orbiters from KSC to Palmdale [California] for their OMDP which is Orbiter Maintenance Down Period. We had four vehicles. Because of space at the Cape, they wanted to get work done in California. We’d take them out there, and they’d be out there for like nine months to a year. Sometimes on those missions because those Orbiters were inert, they did not have any toxics on board, they would allow a couple people to go along who were involved in the management of the program. But we just didn’t take tourists or anybody who wasn’t officially involved in the thing. In other words maybe the ferry manager or the KSC ground operations manager or somebody like that would ride in the airplane. But we don’t carry extra people on active ferry missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned the fact that there were toxic substances on board. Are you trained in hazardous materials and things like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We are. In the SCA they used to give us what was called these Scott Air-Paks. It’s like a scuba tank that you put on your back. It had a face mask, I don’t know if that’s the right term, but a mask where you could breathe air from the tank. They gave us this thing called a Draeger checker. It was a sniff checking device that had tubes, and you’d break off the tip and stick it in this pump, and it was for ammonia or hydrazine or whatever.\\n\\n Normally the Pathfinder lands ahead of us. We land, pull into a remote area, and with binoculars they look to see if anything’s leaking, and also they go around and sniff, just like after landing. If you’ve seen at the Cape, they go around and sniff and make sure there’s nothing leaking out. Then they give us the okay to turn the air conditioning on and taxi into the parking spot. If we land without the Pathfinder somewhere, divert the Pathfinder, something happens or whatever, then the other FE has to be capable of putting on that Air-Pak and going out and doing a sniff. I have done that one time before. I know another guy has had to do that because we’ve landed somewhere without the Pathfinder.\\n\\n Nowadays they use a small ten-minute breathing supply which is just a hood and a little small tank. It’s not as big as it used to be. It’s called ELSA [escape pack]. It’s just a little breathing pack, but they put enough on for everybody so that you can get off the airplane in case there’s a problem, if there’s toxics." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Have you ever encountered that other than that one time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Only one time I had to go out and do it. I know other guys that had to do it once or twice. But there were never any toxics leaking. We had to do it because we landed. So we take off without the air conditioning, turn it on, and we turn the air conditioning off just before landing so that if there’s any leaks—when you’re flying they’re all getting blown away, but when you land and you slow down, to make sure that there’s no chance of any toxics leaking before we get to safety check, we just keep the air conditioning off. It doesn’t take very long after we land for them to check the airplane over." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I didn’t know that. Learn something new every day. You told us about the training that you undertook before you became a flight engineer. Tell me about the training that you participate in on a regular basis to keep yourself up on equipment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Every six months we all go to the simulator and spend three or four days getting refresher training on systems and also practicing emergency procedures. They’ll give us a scenario where they’ll give us problems starting engines, systems fails, engine failures on takeoff, aborted takeoffs where you get up to where it’s time for takeoff, they fail an engine, then you have to stop and evacuate the airplane. Electrical problems, flap problems, gear problems. All the different problems that can occur on the airplane, we practice every six months." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where’s the simulator located?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We have been using the simulator at Denver [Colorado]. In the years that I’ve been on the airplane we went to Seattle [Washington], to Boeing, to the simulator. Went to Pan Am in Miami [Florida] to the simulator. We’ve been going to the United [Airlines] simulator in Denver. We’ve used the Evergreen simulator in Denver. Before I got on the airplane they’d use American Airlines simulator. So we’ve used different simulators. We now have a couple of guys who do all of our ground instruction and sim [simulator] instruction. They used to be United pilots and flight engineer instructors, and now they work for CSC, which is our contractor. They just lease the simulator for us to use." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For some reason I thought maybe there was a simulator on site or over at Ellington. You also fly the plane on a regular basis too, do you not?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we fly the airplane about once a month, three weeks to a month. We go out and do a training flight so that everybody can get their landings and proficiency. We have to fly every 60 days to be current." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How do you simulate a Shuttle being on top of the SCA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Through software, the simulator folks created the drag. You can adjust the weight in the simulator. You can change the weight and cg [center of gravity]. So we tell them what weight we want to be at, 710,000 or 600,000 or whatever weight we want to be. Through the software they can change the way the simulator responds because it simulates that we’re heavier or lighter. The Orbiter drag is a math model that was created back in the ’70s and passed from simulator to simulator. It’s a program that we own to create the drag simulation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you’re not flying an active ferry flight where do you normally take the SCA just to practice?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Normally we take off from Edwards and sometimes we go up to altitude north of Edwards and just check the pressurization. It all depends on what’s been done to the airplane in the last month. A lot of times we just go over to Palmdale and just shoot touch-and-gos and full stops so that each pilot gets an instrument approach, a couple touch-and-gos, a full stop landing and a takeoff. Then they swap seats and we go do it some more. It depends. Sometimes we have just a couple pilots on the airplane, sometimes four or five. Because of people’s schedules everybody tries to fly whenever they get a chance." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It must be a dream job for a pilot or a flight engineer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, after doing it for a long time, it gets windy and bumpy out there in California. So we try to fly early in the morning before it gets too hot and bumpy. As you can imagine, it’s the desert. In the summertime, it’s bumpy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s hot out there all the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At lower altitude, because we’re just a couple thousand feet over the ground as we’re in our patterns." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now that the program has ended, what’s happening with the SCA? Do you continue to practice and do simulations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We continue to fly the airplane, and we will keep flying the airplane about once a month. Next spring in April is when Discovery is scheduled to go to the Air and Space Museum. Once it gets delivered to Dulles [National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Virginia], to the Air and Space Museum, we’ll pick up Enterprise and take it to New York. Now the equipment that they’re going to use at Dulles after it gets loaded has to be torn down and shipped to New York. So it’ll probably be four to six weeks with Enterprise sitting on the 747 in New York before that equipment gets there to take it off. After Enterprise gets taken off in New York, then the airplane will go back to Edwards. Then in the summer Endeavour will go. We’ll take the airplane back to Florida, pick up Endeavour, and then fly it out to LA to deliver it to California Science [Center]. That’s it. Then after the Shuttle Program is done delivering all the Orbiters to museums, the airplanes are scheduled to be transferred to the SOFIA [Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy] Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What is the SOFIA Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "SOFIA Program is an airborne telescope in a 747 that is a different model. It’s called an SP; it’s a shorter model. It has a telescope in it. It’s an infrared telescope. I’ve flown on it some too. It’s operated by Dryden out at Palmdale Airport, which is just around the corner from Edwards. They take off in the evening and fly for ten hours all night and go up and look at whatever scientific investigations they want to do. It’s a large infrared telescope. You can Google SOFIA, and you’ll see lots of pictures about it. It was bought from United Airlines years ago and took many years to modify. It’s starting to do its science flights now. They’re doing more and more flying with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Will the SCA have to be modified again?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, they’re not going to modify the airplane. They want the engines as spares for their program. Use the same engines as we do and any parts they may need. So the airplanes probably won’t fly anymore, but they may find use for one. Now they may use one for currency, because they can’t go fly currency flights in that airplane because of the very, very expensive telescope and the cost to operate that airplane. They don’t want to take any chances just doing touch-and-go landings with it. They only want to do mission flights. There are people who call from time to time that are interested in possibly using the 747s to carry something or to do something. They call us up, or they write us an e-mail. I tell them, “Okay, it’s going to cost you this much to operate the airplane,” and they say, “Oh, okay, thanks.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Never mind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we get calls from time to time, people wanting to do projects. As far as I know, unless something changes, after the Shuttle Program is done delivering, everybody says, “Yea verily we’re all done,” and [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, DC] put out a memo a couple three years ago says the airplanes will be transferred to SOFIA to reduce their cost so they won’t have to go buy more engines or anything like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many people used to work on the SCA as pilots and engineers? And how many have you retained now that you’re done?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right now we have two pilots at JSC [Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas]. We used to have six pilots and four flight engineers throughout many years, four pilots at Houston and two pilots at Dryden. All four flight engineers were in Houston. Now with retirements and this and that and the other there are two pilots at JSC that are civil servants, and there are two qualified flight engineers at JSC. There’s one ferry-qualified civil servant pilot at Dryden and one civil servant pilot who can fly the airplane but is not certified yet for ferry operations. We have one contract flight engineer who used to be a civil servant, and one guy in training. Within the last few months, they hired as a part-time contract pilot one of the former civil servant pilots from JSC, who’s now retired. He’s also going to be flying SOFIA part-time. Then we hired another guy part-time to be an SCA pilot.\\n\\n The one guy who used to work at JSC and retired, he was on the airplane for a number of years, probably 20 years before he retired. We had two people retire within the last year and a half or two years from JSC that cut into the pilot pool significantly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You all work on other planes and other projects." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Everybody flies something else and has multiple things that they do. So it’s not just the only thing to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’re the chief flight engineer for the SCA. Can you tell us about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Basically I provide the standardization for all the flight engineers. I administer the evaluations to determine when somebody’s qualified. I just manage the flight engineer part of the operation. I do just about all the performance planning for these ferry mission readiness reviews. Just a point of contact for all the FEs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had talked earlier about the ferry readiness reviews and how long in advance you had started working on those. Can you tell me who else is involved in those ferry readiness reviews besides the pilots and flight engineers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there’s a guy who works in the Shuttle Program Office named Don [Donald L.] McCormack, which I think you’ve talked to or answered some questions. He has been the ferry manager for the last number of years. He runs the ferry planning readiness review. He has folks from all different parts of the Shuttle Program Office that answer to him about the Orbiter configuration. He has DoD [Department of Defense] folks that respond to him for the status of our approved airports to go to. He talks to the KSC processing folks to say they’re ready to support. Basically it’s just a review of what the status of the Orbiter is. Is everybody ready to do a ferry if we have to? What is the configuration of the vehicle? He’s the manager of that program.\\n\\n Now once we get out to Edwards to start a ferry mission, then he’s coordinating with the weather folks. He’s coordinating with all the processing folks to say when we’re going to be ready to go. Then we as the SCA crew provide him with plans on how to get there and how we recommend going. Also the weather folks who are saying, “Yes you can go from point A to point B but then you’re not going to get any further than that until three days from now when this weather system gets out of the way.” So he’s taking a lot of inputs to manage the ferry mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that things change, things are moving along on the fly, if you encounter weather for instance. Have there ever been times when you’ve just really had to go way out of the way, very far up north, out of the way from KSC because of weather?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, recently—I say recently—within the last probably two, three, four years, on a ferry mission we went from Edwards to Amarillo to Nebraska to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to get to KSC, because there was a big blob of weather. It was just constantly staying and evolving over the Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi area. So we had to make this big circuit. Plus the Orbiter was quite heavy so we could only just make short hops. So we’ve had to go all that way to get around to get to KSC.\\n\\n One time from KSC back to Edwards we flew from KSC to Missouri and then from Missouri to California to get around weather. You can imagine the Gulf Coast, which is the shortest way to get from Edwards, typically in the summertime or sometimes in the spring you can have a lot of weather issues with thunderstorms. We try not to go anywhere where it’s going to be any bad weather while we’re there. In other words if we can fly from point A to point B today, but it’s going to be bad after that we don’t go because we don’t want to go somewhere and get stuck without being able to get out of there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What’s the typical flight path that you might take from California to Florida? Or is there one?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Depending on the weight of the Orbiter and how many stops, typically it’d be from Edwards over the Southwest part of the country over the El Paso area and land somewhere in Texas, either San Antonio, Fort Worth. We used to go to Abilene to Dyess Air Force Base or to Oklahoma, and then go in.\\n\\n Now that’s for the Orbiter that’s like less than 200,000 pounds. We can usually do that and make two legs: one from Edwards to someplace in Texas and then on to Florida. But with a heavier Orbiter you’re going to make at least three stops, three legs, and sometimes even four. We try to stay further south, if we can, just to cut off distance and cut down stops. We try to do it as safely, as efficiently, and as quickly as possible to minimize the time that the Orbiter is not protected.\\n\\n In other words it’s not in the building at KSC or it’s not at Edwards. It’s not protected by a building at Edwards, because it’s in the mate/demate facility out there. Generally the weather is pretty decent out there. It’s dry. It’s not going to get rained on very much. They really don’t like to get rain on the Orbiter. That’s what we’re trying to avoid. The goal is to do it as quickly as you can, as safely as you can and as efficiently as you can." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You primarily land at DoD sites?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Military bases, just about all the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why is that the case?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Security, support capability. There’s a lot of people on the Pathfinder. There’s probably a team of 30 people or something on the Pathfinder, or more. So if we spend the night, everybody’s got to get vehicles, hotels. The military provides security, because the Orbiter has to be roped off. It has an entry control point where they have armed guards, and nobody can get within 200 feet of the 747, unless they’re on the access list. The only people on the access list are the 747 crew and some of the ferry team members that have to do stuff with the airplane or the Orbiter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Who is on the Pathfinder? Tell me a little bit about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’ll have weather officers. You’ll have a ferry manager. You’ll have all the KSC support personnel. You’ll have the 747 mechanics. You’ll have the Pathfinder flight crew and maintenance crew. You’ll have safety folks. You’ll have security folks. It’s a big crowd. It’s typically 30, 35 people on an active ferry mission on the Pathfinder." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As you’re coming into a landing, who needs to be there? What are your duties as you’re landing the vehicle?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Pathfinder is there ahead of time, so they have things set up. The airport or the base knows where they’re going to put us, because it’s all been coordinated. When we land of course we have safety vehicles like fire trucks and ambulances standing by. We land, and we go to the spot where they’re going to check and make sure we’re safe with the sniff checks and then we go to our parking spot.\\n\\n The mechanics are there. They’re ready to marshal us into the parking spot and put chocks around the gears so that we know it’s secure and won’t roll once we park and shut down the engines. So we really don’t have anything to deal with, other than just getting to the spot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Once you’ve landed are you greeted by press? Do the media want to do interviews?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, media wants to do interviews. Of course any base we go to, the commander of the base always seems to have an entourage he wants to bring out. Once we’ve declared that the vehicle is safe, and it’s okay with the ferry manager, then they’ll let select people come inside the 200-foot rope for tours. So we sometimes have to hang around to give tours of the airplane, just short ones. If we’re on a turnaround mission, there’s not a lot of time. If we land somewhere, going to just refuel and leave, we’re only on the ground a couple hours. So we’re busy from the time we land to the time we’re ready to leave. There’s not a whole lot of time for show-and-tells. If we spend the night somewhere, depends on how long our day has been too, and when we have to leave the next day, how long we can stay out there and provide tours and show-and-tell for people to come see. It’s just an empty airplane but people like to walk up the stairs to the doors and that way they can get a closer look at the Orbiter. Of course everybody wants to take pictures." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s a cool thing. When you’re not around it every day, I think that that’s pretty cool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s an iconic symbol. It’s an American icon, the Orbiter on top of the 747. When we land at bases, there are so many people around, on the highways nearby, to watch us come in, it’s just amazing, especially if it’s been well publicized in advance that we’re coming in there. It’s released to the news media, and they start putting out the information. Here comes the herd of people. Of course a lot of them can’t get on the base, but they get as close as they can to see. Some bases it’s much more receptive to people being able to get close by and see. Others are out in the middle of nowhere, and there’s not that many people anywhere. Go to Abilene, there’s not many people that get close to the base, because it’s out, it’s way away. Versus you go to Fort Worth, to what used to be Carswell Air Force Base, and there are just people everywhere around there. Thousands of people parked on the sides of the roads. Depends on which way we’re landing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Has the SCA ever flown into Ellington?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We have never brought an Orbiter that landed from a Shuttle mission, because of the weight and the toxics, but we have brought inert Orbiters through. Challenger came through on its first flight in 1982. After STS-4 [Columbia] landed, it landed in California, [President Ronald] Reagan was there to greet the crew. He gave a big speech at Dryden. Challenger already was loaded up on the 747 and took off from the lake bed over the crowd at Dryden and then came to Houston and stopped and then left and went to KSC on its initial delivery flight to KSC. We brought Endeavour on its maiden trip when it came from California. We brought it through Ellington. Atlantis came through Ellington also when it was new.\\n\\n We’ve had other vehicles. We brought Columbia through. I’m pretty sure Discovery has been through. I’d have to look at my records to see which ones have come. Enterprise came through when it was being flown around to go to KSC for testing. Of course it never went to space. But Enterprise has come through back in ’78 or something like that, ’79." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s exciting for people who work on spacecraft here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A couple years ago on the way from Fort Worth we did a flyover of the JSC area in December." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I remember that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But we couldn’t land because of the weight. We did a couple circuits around the JSC area and a couple flybys at Ellington. We did a flyby at Intercontinental Airport on the way to Louisiana. It just worked out to where we could route it that way. Any time we’re flying a ferry mission, we get lots of calls to try and do flybys. That has to be approved by the Shuttle Program, because they control the Orbiter.\\n\\n We don’t decide where to do flybys, the SCA crew. We get told we’d like to do a flyby here or there, because they manage that risk. We just fly it when they tell us to. Now with the JSC flight, we worked out a little route. They just say, “Do a flyby at JSC.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was neat. I do remember that, going out, getting that e-mail. How many missions have you flown from Edwards to KSC? Do you know offhand?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know. I’d have to look, but I would think probably 40 or more just guessing. That includes some KSC to Palmdale flights too so probably 40 plus missions total since ’89." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your final ferry flight that you did?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Last one, let’s see. I don’t have my records here to know the last one I did. When was the last time we landed at Edwards?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was trying to think about that this morning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "2009?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Probably, yes, it’s been a while, because they try to land at the Cape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did that Endeavour flyover in 2008, December ’08 I think it was. Then it was the following year. So it’s been a couple years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What are some of the more memorable ferrying flights that stand out in your memory?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first one that I did, when I walked out to do the preflight on the airplane at Kelly Air Force Base [Texas], I walked around and said, “Wow!” So to get to do the first one that you did. Then the one where we flew Endeavour flyover was special because of getting to show people. One time we went to Salt Lake City [Utah] on the way to Palmdale, and there were just thousands and thousands of people lining the roads. We got there a little late because of some Pathfinder issues. Military airplane had problems. It was late in the afternoon, and people were using their flashes as we flew over at 1,500 feet, trying to take a picture of this airplane flying over. We circled the area quite a bit. There was just thousands of people.\\n\\n Then the next day we delayed taking off for a while. They had a bunch of schoolkids come out, gave tours, TV and stuff. They’re all special. The first one, and then each one is unique, and each one has some special stuff to it. It can be very tiring because you’re getting up very early in the morning. You typically have a long duty day, because we show up for briefing two hours before takeoff, and that’s 20 minutes before sunrise. So when you leave Dryden, it’s 45 minutes from town to Edwards. So you’re looking at a pretty early getup." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s like 2:00 in the morning? If you’re on Houston time, that’s four. How long would your day typically be after you flew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Our duty day is 14 hours. So from the time we show up to the time we leave the airplane can’t be more than 14 hours." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many hours does it take to fly from Edwards to the Cape?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it depends on how many stops we’ll make. If you just make one stop, it’s about—I’m going to round it up—it’s about seven hours. It’s about three and a half hours from Edwards to Kelly, and then about three and a half more from Kelly to the Cape, depending on the tailwinds. So you got two, three hours on the ground at Kelly. You got a couple hours on the ground at Edwards. Then when you land you’ve got to stop on the runway. They got to do the safety check. Then they got to tow us in the mate/demate facility. We get off right before they tow us into the facility. So it can be two plus seven plus three plus an hour. So easily 12 hours, if the weather is good. Now that’s if we just land and refuel and go. If we have to spend the night, then you add a couple more hours onto that each way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many gallons of fuel does the SCA use typically on a flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Depends on the weight of the Orbiter. The airplane, the lighter it is, the less fuel it uses. On a typical end-of-mission ferry weight it averages about 38,500 pounds per hour. Now divide that by 6.7. I’m not going to do that in my head with the recorder going. If you divide 38,500 by 6.7 that’ll give you the gallons per hour. It burns about 130 pounds per nautical mile of flight. So it’s burning 20 gallons every mile, something like that. Is that right? If it’s 130—I’d have to do the math." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a lot of fuel. That adds a lot of weight too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s not fuel-efficient. We’re flying low because the Orbiter has altitude temperature restriction. So if we could fly higher with the Orbiter we could use less fuel. Eastbound is 15,000 feet typically, and we average about 38,500 over a three-and-a-half-hour flight. That’s a good round number." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me just in general how the 747 was modified." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The airplanes were modified by Boeing. Inside the airplane, where the aft attach point is, there are two bulkheads that go down into the belly of the airplane that support the weight where the Orbiter is mounted, both in the vertical mounts, and then there’s a horizontal mount that goes forward of that. So there’s a bulkhead there. There’s also one for the front mount. There’s also extra layers of skin added in various stress points throughout the airplane. Two and three layers on the outside of the airplane in places where the engineering decided that’s where the stress is going to be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That skin, is that extra aluminum?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now NASA has had two SCAs over the years. I think in your notes you had mentioned you went out to Wichita [Kansas] to oversee some of those mods [modifications]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The second airplane, the modification started in ’88. It was finished in late 1990. I was also working in quality assurance. So I spent some time at Wichita, as did other people, monitoring that contract, and looking at the work that was being done. Its first time carrying the Orbiter was when we carried Endeavour on its maiden flight out of Palmdale. I was on that first takeoff. So that was interesting. The first time we used that 747, and the first time that Orbiter had flown, that was a memorable flight too, that first time with that one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Does NASA still maintain both of those SCAs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Both airplanes are currently maintained, although probably in the next few months we’re going to have one just in final storage because we just will need one to take Orbiters to museums." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is the SCA used for anything else besides the SOFIA program and the Orbiters? Is there anything else that NASA uses the SCA for?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s not currently used for SOFIA, but it’s supposed to be transferred to them for use. Now we a couple years ago, actually a year and a half ago, we carried an unmanned vehicle called a Phantom Ray from St. Louis [Missouri] to Edwards for Boeing. We did a flight test to determine how that vehicle would respond. Because it was unmanned, they were not allowed to fly it from St. Louis to California over the populated US on its first flight. They didn’t have the flight facilities in St. Louis where they could do it. They wanted to do it in California. So over a many-month period they designed an adapter to mate to our mounting points. Then they mated their vehicle to that adapter, and we flew it nonstop from St. Louis to Edwards for them.\\n\\n First of all we did an hour flight test with a photo-chase airplane to see how it would handle, because there’s some unknowns. Then we did some inspections to make sure it hadn’t caused any problems. Then the next day it was like a 5.8-hour flight from St. Louis to LA, because we did it low at altitude and reduced speed. You can Google that. It looks like a little mosquito on top of the airplane. It was like 30-something-foot wingspan. With the adapter it weighed like 30,000 pounds. But it’s an interesting picture." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’ll have to go out and look at that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It made the national news on the day we did the flight test. Flying around St. Louis. It’s interesting-looking, it’s like a little bug." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not quite as big or as heavy as the Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We’ve had requests to do other things with the airplane. Mostly it’s just been used for carrying Shuttles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s been that workhorse for all these years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s its job. Don’t want to take any chances on anything happening while doing something else. They agreed to use it for that Phantom Ray project, because we still had two airplanes. There was a time period where we could do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess I do have one other question that I hadn’t thought about. Obviously the Shuttle, you didn’t always know where you were going to land because of weather. So were you ever working on the possibility of it landing at Edwards, and it didn’t end up landing there, but you had to be prepared in case there was that contingency landing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Every mission we would put together a plan just in case. The Shuttle Program would be looking at the weather ahead of time and trying to decide whether to activate Edwards, to have it ready just in case, because the forecast at the Cape was bad. So we would be actively working on plans, especially sometimes during a Shuttle mission. To say it’s looking more and more like they might go to Edwards so we’ll sharpen our pencils." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How far in advance do you have to be out at California? Or do you wait a couple days?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We usually go out at least a couple days ahead of time. At least one day before they’re scheduled to ferry we have the part B of the ferry readiness review. That’s when the ferry manager gets all the people from KSC and all the folks at Edwards that are—of course KSC folks go out to Edwards to process the vehicle. He gets everybody together and has a big long meeting about the status of the Orbiter, when we’ll be ready to ferry. He gets a weather briefing from the weather folks to talk about okay if we’re ready tomorrow we’ll plan to take off at this time, and this is where we’ll go. We, the SCA, are all involved in that decision process.\\n\\n Frequently the weather briefing says ain’t going to happen. Or the folks processing the Orbiter say, “Well we were supposed to be ready tomorrow, but we’re not going to be ready tomorrow,” or “We’re not going to be ready for an early morning takeoff, but we’ll be ready in the afternoon.” Well, what does that do? Do you decide well, we’re just not going to try to leave late in the afternoon because it really doesn’t buy us anything. We’ll wait till the next morning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you have to delay do you just come back to JSC?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, once we go there we stay there till we leave. I have gone out and spent anywhere from one or two days to a week waiting to leave. Once you get out there there’s no reason to turn around and come back. You just stay until you’re ready to leave." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I tried to be pretty thorough. But is there something you think I may have overlooked about ferrying operations or the SCA or any anecdotes or stories that you would like to share?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This is a personal one. It’s a very sad time for me, to see this come to an end. To me, it’s such a wonderful program. I just hate to see it come to an end. There has been a lot of discussion about as we take them to museums should we do any touring around, make several stops on the way to each museum. Yesterday there was a meeting at Headquarters, and they decided not to do any extra flying around for a variety of reasons although the White House may push back on that. I’m not sure how much I should really say about that, because the Headquarters, White House, there’s going to be going back and forth about that.\\n\\n What they call the Executive Council, which is the Administrator and all the wheels and all the Center Directors, they have this NASA team. They decided they didn’t want to expose the vehicles to any more hazards than necessary as they take them to museums. Plus there’s some cost issues which are not trivial. It’ll be great for people to see them in museums, but I don’t think it’s time. My personal opinion, not an official NASA opinion, my personal opinion is we shouldn’t have retired them this early. That’s how that goes. I sure wish they were still flying." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A lot of people we’ve interviewed for this project have talked about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s bittersweet. It’s a sad time. I spent my whole life. I came to work a year and a half before the first Shuttle launch. I’ll be here probably for a year and a half after the last landing—it won’t be the same." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s changing the Center, that’s for sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it’s changing not just the Center but the agency." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you get a chance to see the launch of STS-1?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "First launch I went to was STS-3. First landing I watched was STS-4 at Edwards. Then I’ve been to a lot of launches and landings since then. One of the other airplanes I’ve flown is the Shuttle Training Aircraft, which is a modified Gulfstream II which has half the cockpit like the Orbiter, half like a regular airplane. We used it to train Shuttle pilots to land the Shuttle. So I started flying with it in 1981." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you trained Steve Nagel, I guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Henry Taylor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Took a lot of bananas but we got him trained." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think he talked to us about that a little. Well, I thank you very much for your time today. I certainly appreciate it." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00806", + "metadata": { + "category": "Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project 1998 - 1999", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Shuttle-Mir/WetherbeeJD/wetherbeejd.htm", + "original_file_name": "WetherbeeJD_8-6-98.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Shuttle-Mir/WetherbeeJD/WetherbeeJD_8-6-98.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "James D. Wetherbee", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 6 August 1998" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "James D. Wetherbee" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is August 6, 1998, and we're speaking with Jim Wetherbee, with the Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project. Thanks again for taking time out of your schedule to meet with us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James D. Wetherbee", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My pleasure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We would like to visit with you specifically about your two missions that you visited the Mir. All the missions were important, but the first one that you did, I believe most people refer to it as the \"near Mir.\" Can you tell about how you first got involved with that mission and some of your first experiences training for it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James D. Wetherbee", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'd love to. It was very interesting for me. At the time that the flight crew was announced to fly on STS-63, I was up in Crystal City, working in Washington, involved in the redesign of the Space Station. At that time it was Space Station Freedom. The flight, of course, STS-63, had already been being planned by the folks down here in Houston and by the folks in Russia.\\n\\n Before we were assigned, I think the Shuttle was intended to approach no closer than 1,000 feet from Mir, and that was agreed to by the Russians and the Americans. The flight directors were able to convince the Russians, after they had that initial agreement, to let the Shuttle go into 400 feet, and then even down to 100 feet.\\n\\n So when the flight crew was announced, when I came on board with my flight crew, we were supposed to go no closer than 100 feet from Mir. The first thing I noticed when I asked about the flight, what our job was going to be, and, of course, it was to test the procedures and the ranging systems, the laser, the handheld laser, the automatic laser, the radar. All of these systems give range and range rate information to the target Mir, in this case and the camera system that was going to optically give us information on the attitude misalignment, by looking at the target. We were going to check out the procedures and the flight profile and the directions that we were approaching.\\n\\n The first thing I noticed was that the target, the visual target that we'd look at, couldn't be used accurately until we got to about 30 feet. So the first thing I said is, \"Well, instead of going to 100 feet, we will get much more if we go in to 30 feet.\" So I first convinced the folks on the American side and they were agreeable to letting us do that, but then the hard part came when my job was to try to convince the Russians to allow us to go into 30 feet. And if you remember, I mean, they had already given up a lot by saying, \"Okay, you can go to 400 instead of 1,000, and then 100 instead of 400,\" so they were not very inclined to let us go any closer than 100.\\n\\n It resulted in a pretty interesting series of meetings and discussions about why we wanted to get so close to their station, that is, of course, a national asset, like our Shuttle. I never really talked to them to see what they were really thinking about, but I'm sure they were looking at some young kid off the streets who was going to suddenly be flying a 100-ton vehicle within 30 [feet] of their Space Station, and they didn't want to have any part of it. It was risky enough for them, for little benefit, since we weren't actually going to dock and transfer any people. We didn't have any docking hardware.\\n\\n We had one discussion in particular with Viktor Blagov, a good friend of mine now, who was their I think he's their number-two flight director over there. He was in charge of the mission at that time. We were over in the Mission Control Center in Moscow, in Leningrad, discussing. He pulled me aside. We had just recently we were there for some meetings, which I forget what they were about, but he pulled me aside after the meetings and said, \"I want to ask you a few questions through an interpreter.\" He wasn't speaking in English. I found out later that he understood English, which I think put me at a little bit of a disadvantage. I didn't understand any Russian, and so when we were talking through our interpreter, he could listen to my English answer and immediately formulate his next question while it was being interpreted, and then he could think of what he wanted to ask and then ask the question. And I couldn't think of my response until the interpreter had translated the Russian into English, and then I immediately had to come back with an appropriate response. So I felt like I was at a little bit of a disadvantage.\\n\\n But he's a man who understands the technical side of things. His job was to balance the risk versus benefit, and although they didn't see much benefit at the time, he wanted to ask me, \"What is the benefit?\" I explained to him that this target that we were going to use could be seen at the plan for Hoot [Robert L.] Gibson, who was going to fly STS-71 a couple of months later, he was going to stop at 30 feet and make that visual correction, based on what he saw, and I said it would be very good if we could get in there and make that kind of an assessment, to see whether or not the target was going to work, and if it didn't, we'd still have time to change things.\\n\\n I don't know that we convinced him that day, but in the next couple of weeks, they finally said, \"Yes, it's okay. You can go to 10 meters,\" was the final thing that we decided, using the metric system, which is a little bit more than 33 feet, I think. I was happy at that point because we were going to get to do a pretty valuable, I thought, piece of test flying.\\n\\n The other thing, I guess, that I thought was pretty interesting, later on, we were in no, I'd better not tell that story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, this is your oral history, so you can choose what you'd like to tell." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James D. Wetherbee", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Apparently the Russians I don't know how it happened, so I'll tell you. The Russians were a little bit concerned because, way back in Apollo-Soyuz and I wasn't around then, due to various reasons which I am not aware, but I think there were some pretty good technical reasons at one of the dockings, not the first one, but the second one, they hit the Soyuz a little a bit harder than they had intended, I think, with the Apollo. The Apollo's a different system than the Shuttle. It has a very high thrust-to-weight compared to the Shuttle. I'm not sure of the specific details, but, anyway, they hit it a little bit harder than they should have.\\n\\n So the Russians we were there that night. We were having a dinner. I guess it was a lunch, and I was with the senior people at RSC Energia, the company that basically owns and operates the Mir. Of course, as is the Russian custom, they were drinking some toasts and people were having a pretty good time. And all of a sudden, the senior person, who at the time, I didn't know, the senior person in the room at the time turned and said, \"I'd like to ask you a question,\" and of course, the whole room got quiet and they all looked at him, this senior Russian official. And he said, \"Tell me. Why did they hit with four times the closing velocity than they should have on Apollo-Soyuz?\"\\n\\n And of course, the rest of the room turned and looked at me to see what my response was going to be, and I couldn't think of anything to say. I wasn't around then, and the Shuttle's a completely different system. The only thing I could think to say was, \"Well, they were just making my life difficult for me,\" and I didn't know what else to say.\\n\\n But the first discussion we had in the TsUP, in the Mission Control Center, and then this discussion at the dinner, made me very aware, if I wasn't already aware, that I now had a 10-meter limit and I was not going to violate that limit by even a single centimeter. I was going to go to 10 meters, 33 feet, and I wasn't going to be one centimeter closer, because I knew both space agencies in both countries were going to be watching as we approached on this flight.\\n\\n Nothing much of note happened during the work-ups, other than we got delayed about five or six months, I think. We had some trouble with the payloads that we were flying in the Spacehab, so they decided to delay our flight, which put us even closer to 71, to the one Hoot Gibson was going to fly, which made it a little bit interesting for us. There was less time to correct any problems if we saw any. But as flights go, it was a lot of fun for me and for the crew to work up and get ready to go fly in space.\\n\\n You can always tell when an astronaut is ready to leave. Everybody always wants to fly in space again, but they don't always want to go through the one year worth of intense training and build-up in preparation for it. I still have a lot of fun doing that and working with the people, so it was a lot of fun getting ready to go fly.\\n\\n We launched, and by the way, I had the first woman pilot at NASA with me, Eileen [M.] Collins. She did a great job, and is probably the nicest person I know, always in good spirits and good humor, and always had a good time during the training and during the flight. We launched on ascent, and as a commander flying with any rookie, you always want to see how they're going to do, and you can tell pretty much when you get in the vehicle that they're going to be okay, and then, of course, during the liftoff, I could hear, the things she was saying were just like we say in the sim, and so I knew she was performing like a veteran instead of a rookie, and that was good.\\n\\n Of course, the first eight and a half minutes of powered flight went pretty well, and I don't think on that flight we had any difficulties, but as soon as the tank came off the vehicle, as soon as the external tank separated, we had a \"jet leak\" message and two \"jet off\" messages, so we had three jet failures, one of them was leaking and two of them failed to operate, and it was pretty disappointing to me, because here for a year we've been training really hard to go do this mission and rendezvous with Mir, and check out the procedures and the systems and the tools that Hoot Gibson was going to need, and we've had a \"jet leak\" message that indicates you don't have enough redundancy to go do the rendezvous. Maybe the leak itself, if you couldn't stop the leak, was going to mean that we probably weren't going to rendezvous.\\n\\n That whole first day, which is a pretty short day on orbit, you only work for, I don't know, five or six hours and then you go to sleep. As the day wore on, I was pretty much convinced that we were not going to be able to rendezvous with Mir, and it was pretty disappointing. You know, we still had other things to do, another series of objectives and another satellite to deploy, but really, I knew the mission was to rendezvous on Mir, and so I was pretty disappointed.\\n\\n The next day and, of course, we continued the rendezvous, the burns that get us closer and closer to Mir. The engineers on the ground did a great job, both Russian and American, in transferring data and really opening up the two space agencies and sharing data and communicating. It was very difficult, and a lot of people on the ground did a lot of tremendous work, a lot of good work to talk and discuss and share data and to get us closer to Mir as the real vehicles were getting closer.\\n\\n By the third day, we still had not cleared the leak, it was still leaking and you could look out the back window and you could see the propellant going up for miles. It kind of goes in a cone-shaped pattern, because there's no atmosphere to attenuate its motion, and it just goes up pretty straight and it just continues, like a snowstorm for five miles up into space.\\n\\n Of course, the issue is whether or not we would contaminate Mir. You wouldn't think it'd be too big a problem, but on the Soyuz vehicle, which is their lifeboat from the Mir Space Station, they have optical sensors that they use to align their platform in preparation for reentering the earth's atmosphere, so they're going to need this thing to bring them back to Earth, and if you contaminate the optical sensor, it could be bad, and that was a risk that I did not want to take.\\n\\n We got the sense from talking to the folks on the ground that the engineers were getting closer and closer to saying, \"Yes, you can do the close approach,\" but the leak wasn't getting any slower, to me, and I got the impression they were going to let us do it. That night before we went to bed we were going to rendezvous the next morning I pulled one of my crew members aside, who was Colonel Vladimir Georgievich Titov, from Russia, who spent over he, at one time, had the world record for the longest time off of the planet, of one year. I pulled him aside and I said, \"You know, if this leak doesn't get any smaller, I will not bring our vehicle close to the Mir, even if they give us a go, because I don't want to cause any problems for the cosmonauts when they're coming back.\" Then we went to sleep and woke up the next morning, and, as luck would have it, the leak slowed down.\\n\\n Now, Eileen was doing a lot of work with the ground to try to isolate the leak, and although she wasn't completely successful in isolating the leak, it did significantly slow down the morning that we woke up to rendezvous. We both looked out the window. Actually, the whole crew, you know, every day we woke up, we'd look out the window and, sure enough, it was less. So as fate would have it, now it really looked like they were going to let us go. Now, they still hadn't given us the official go, and we still had 1,000-foot double around the Mir that we were going to approach. If you stay outside of 1,000 feet, the chances are very slim that you would cause any problem, so we knew we were at least going to 1,000 feet, but to me, that's a failure if you don't get any closer than 1,000.\\n\\n But we continued the approach and still were waiting for the go. We had a different radio system on that flight. We were testing out a new VHF radio that Hoot was going to use and all the crews used, to talk directly with the Mir. You need to have, in the two vehicles, an ability for the crew members to talk to each other, to coordinate things separately from the air-to-ground loop, voice loop, from the station to the ground Control Center in Moscow, and from the orbiter to the Control Center here in Houston.\\n\\n So we had a separate communication directly with Mir, and the reason that ended up being significant is because the ground, the two Mission Control Centers, were coordinating the approach, and they finally had agreed that they were going to let us make the final approach, but Houston didn't tell us right away. We heard from Mir, from the Russian cosmonauts, that they were going to give us a go.\\n\\n In fact, we were being televised, recorded and televised live to the Mission Control Center in Houston, but they couldn't hear our audio. All of a sudden, I saw the rest of my crew suddenly start cheering and jumping up and down and clapping, because they knew we were going to get the go to approach, and they hadn't told us yet, and so they kind of stole their thunder, and I asked the crew to calm down because I knew the Mission Control Center in Houston hadn't given us the go yet.\\n\\n So we all got kind of calm, and then later on, Story Musgrave, who was the capcom, called up and said, \"We think you know this because of the reaction we saw, but you do have a final go to approach to 10 meters,\" and, of course, we simulated the euphoria again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I suppose it was an easy part of that trip to do that again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James D. Wetherbee", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. But I was very relieved, because I knew that the two days' worth of work, or three days' worth of work, which a lot was being done by the ground people, that that was what enabled us to share the data and discuss the leak and be open with each other, which we hadn't really done too much of in the past. You know, the engineers were still kind of wary of each other.\\n\\n As we approached by the way, the previous night, I had asked you know, for months, I was thinking, \"Well, what am I going to say when I get close?\" You know, and you have to say something nice. I was thinking about it for a while, but hadn't really decided what I was going to say until the night before the rendezvous. I figured, \"Well, I guess we're pretty close now. I better get serious about thinking about what to say.\" I decided I wanted to say it once in English and once in Russian, since this was the first time we were going to be close and both countries would be watching, I thought it would be appropriate to say something in Russian. I had been studying a little bit of Russian, but I couldn't translate it well enough, so I asked Volodya, which is a nickname for Titov, to help me translate it, and so I showed him. For the first time I wrote down what I wanted to say, and I showed it to him. I didn't show anyone else on the crew. He translated it on the kneeboard. I wonder what I did with that. I don't remember who I gave that to. Maybe I still have it at home.\\n\\n Anyway, so I practiced it a few times in my head, to make sure I could pronounce the words correctly, and we went to sleep, and then the next morning we woke up and were given the final go to approach. So we did, and, of course, all of the technical things are the most important, and the critical things that we're doing, and as we are approaching on what we call the V-bar, which is the velocity vector of Mir, in other words, its co-altitude, so now the two vehicles are co-altitude relative to the center of the Earth, flying at almost exactly the same speed, 17,500 miles an hour, and we were going 17,500 miles an hour minus three feet per second, or whatever the number is, so we're closing at three feet per second relative velocity. I'm not sure if that's the exact number, but it's something like that.\\n\\n As we came up, we had four different sensors that were telling us, through a computer, what our relative position was. One of them was a handheld laser, which is very similar to the police handheld laser that they use to catch you when you're speeding down the road; one was an automatic laser system in the payload bay of the orbiter, shining at a target on Mir; one of them was the radar out on the side of the vehicle, which at that point had started to be a little bit inaccurate, because it was looking at different targets on Mir and walking around, and so it was giving us different range information, and it was kind of noisy, so it wasn't all that useful; and we had our own human eyes that were looking out the window. We had a little, effectively, a grease mark on the window that didn't move. It's called a COAS, Crew Optical Alignment Sight, which is a point that you look at, that tells you which way the orbiter is pointing.\\n\\n We had those four sensors that were feeding information into a computer to give us the relative state vector, and as we had talked many times on the ground in preparation for this flight, this was our big goal. Our mission objective was to see how these sensors all worked, and as we had prepared, two of them were lying and two of them were telling the truth. I mean, you couldn't have picked a better thing to happen on a test flight, if this is your goal, where you don't have the pressure of really needing to dock, like Hoot was going to have, but we still had a lot of, maybe, self-induced pressure, and plus, you really wanted to make sure, I've already mentioned, I was not going to get one centimeter closer. So our job was to figure out which of the two sensors were lying and which of the two were accurate.\\n\\n I was flying with Mike Foale also, at the time, one of the crew members, whose job it was to play maestro with his computer. He was the guy taking all of the inputs and typing away, and it wasn't very automatic back in those days, even though it was only three or four years ago. He had to manually do a lot of labor on this computer, and I couldn't have picked a better guy to do it on the crew, because he really knows computers.\\n\\n So it was pretty tense there for a while, trying to figure out what the proper sensor was to use, and as we had simulated many times on the ground, we chose the one that is the most reliable, the one that is the least complicated. We chose our human eyeballs, because that's the simplest one and you know it's going to be accurate. We disregarded the other two, chose the two that were agreeing, and then Mike later figured out what was wrong with the other two and was able to clean them up and make them more accurate. So as we approached, we finally had a good feeling about where we were.\\n\\n There's another technical issue with the Shuttle. If you're on the V-bar, co-altitude, because of the orientation of the attitude control jets on the Shuttle, it's always causing you to get closer to the target. If you do nothing, you will eventually get closer and closer and impact, and, in fact, these were the two biggest vehicles that we'd ever rendezvoused in space before. Mike Foale, one time in a meeting when he was bored, on the ground, figured out that with the mass of the two vehicles, he figured out the gravitational attraction between the two, and if we were co-speed and did nothing, we would hit within three hours because of the gravity that was sucking us in.\\n\\n Now, don't get me wrong, that's a very small effect when you're talking about the drag effect on the orbiter and the attitude controls jets, etc. But, nevertheless, the vehicles always want to close on each other, and we had to physically make inputs to the flight control system to keep the vehicles separate.\\n\\n We were only supposed to stay there for ten minutes at the closest point of approach, so we checked out the handling quality of the vehicle and the systems and everything was working pretty well, and we came in to right about our exact distance of a little bit greater than 33 feet. The closest point of approach between structure was 33 feet. The number that was reported in the press was 37 feet, because that was the distance between the laser system and the target on Mir. You had to triangulate, and that's the longer hypotenuse of the triangle. Not that that matters, it was just interesting to see that when we came back it was reported, and still is reported these days, as 37 feet, but it really was 33 feet and not one centimeter closer. We did not get a single inch closer to Mir.\\n\\n Then we backed away, because now I knew I wanted to give this little speech, and it was going to take my attention away from the distance for a couple minutes, a minute or two, and I didn't want to close in there, so I backed it away four or five feet, and stopped it and got all ready to give this little speech. By this time, there's no cameras on us, because I think we just didn't have the radar coverage or something. Mir was blocking or something. So I knew no one was going to be watching me, it was just an audio message, so I was able to cheat and read, just simply read the thing from my cue card, first in English and then in Russian.\\n\\n As I got ready to read, you know, and I kept asking the crew, \"Are they ready? Are they ready?\" and the crew is doing what they do best, which is watching the technical side of things, and they don't care about the political speech I'm going to make. I kept saying, \"Are they ready?\" and they kept looking at me like, \"What is he asking us this for?\" and I finally said, \"All right. Here I go. I'm going to start giving the speech now.\"\\n\\n I keyed the mike and I started talking and just then the capcom, Story Musgrave, started saying something to us. Because of the two-second delay, he didn't realize that I was giving the speech. But I just kept it keyed and kept talking, and then he quickly figured out that I was giving the speech and so he got quiet. I read it first in English, and I was about halfway through the Russian when I hear, from the back, Mike Foale saying, \"Back up! Back up!\" Because we were starting to get close again and we were approaching the limit. We didn't exceed it, but as I was reading this speech in fact, I can't even remember. We'll have to ask him. He may have come around and made one input. I don't remember. Or I keyed it and held the book in one hand and made a couple of inputs while giving the speech.\\n\\n A couple of things I always think about giving that speech. The first is, you know, approaching the vehicle, you're so focused on doing the technical, the test pilot things, evaluating the systems and the handling qualities, but you are just blown away by the sight that you're seeing of that huge, giant Space Station out the window. Ever since I was ten years old and wanted to be an astronaut, I've been watching these science fiction movies of these spaceships that come up next to a big, giant space station, and all of those thoughts came back to me, you know. So you're trying to get that stuff out of your mind because you have a job to do, a technical job to do, but I kept thinking how beautiful the sight looked, how exciting it was to have two countries, and you're helping to bring them closer together, and all that stuff, and yet you're trying to keep that out of your mind, but you can't because it's so awesome-looking, the view out the window. Mir looked so brilliant and white and bright, when you're not looking through the attenuating effects of the atmosphere. Really amazing.\\n\\n But the other thought I always think about is, so then when you give a speech, you know, you might think it would be a pretty important historic moment, but the only thing I was thinking about was making sure I pronounced the Russian correctly, and the only thing my crew was thinking about was, \"Don't let them get any closer,\" so it completely takes away any of the honor of doing it, and the magnitude of the situation is just gone because you cannot screw up up there, and that's all you're really thinking about. But I got done with the speech, and we eventually separated and I said goodbye to the Russians.\\n\\n The other thing that was amazing about the approach was that I had not met the crew members, and now you're I mean, 30 feet is pretty close. It's here to the window over there. So you can see these people through the window. I mean, very clearly. Elena Kondakova held up the little doll cosmonaut, which was pretty neat, and Titov, her country mate, is waving it from our side of the vehicle. And Sasha Viktorenko, the commander, I mean, you could see these people, their eyes, and Dr. Polyakov, who now has the record, was the other crew member.\\n\\n I forgot to mention, when we were down on the ground, discussing whether or not we wanted to get close this was back in the days when we were arguing about how close to get Dr. Polyakov was on board at that time, he was up there, and I think maybe even the other crew members were there. When we were talking to them, they said, \"Why do you want to get this close? This is very difficult for us. Psychologically, this is very hard for us.\" And I can understand their point. They are not in control of the situation, and some kid's coming up with a 100-ton vehicle, doing nothing more than adding risk, and they get no benefit from it. They were saying, \"Why do you want to do this?\"\\n\\n But as we got closer to launch, Titov, one day, when we were down at the Cape, says and he had a great idea he says, \"Why don't we talk to the crew?\" and I said, \"Well, how are you going to do that?\" And he says, \"I know the phone number.\" He calls back from a regular office telephone, and the first time we tried it, we failed, we couldn't get through, couldn't get patched through, but the second time he tried, we were sitting around in an office down in Florida, getting ready to launch, talking to the crew members, flying overhead. So we were able to develop a little bit of a friendship, even though it was by telephone and you couldn't see them.\\n\\n So then when we saw them in person, across 33 feet of cold, dark void of space, waving to them, it was like we were crewmates, even though we weren't on the same vehicle, so it really was a good feeling." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the ten minutes seem to pass quickly?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James D. Wetherbee", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. The ten minutes went by very quickly, because you're thinking all these thoughts, and trying to do the technical side of it. It was very emotional for them. You ought to talk to them, too, because they don't see many human beings in their job, and once in a while, somebody comes up, and we happened to come up and wave to them, and it's pretty moving for them.\\n\\n These are the kind of things that we learned from the Russians, the human side of space flight, the long-duration flights we're not used to, and the human side of it, the emotional feeling side of it, they are teaching us. In fact, Titov one day said to me, \"I notice that the Russians talk very normally on the radio.\" Americans tend to be like fighter pilots. We use a military jargon, a lingo that is very quick and terse, and you use acronyms and you convey a lot of thoughts into a small sentence, and it's a lot of radio silence, and you're doing things and working. Titov said to me, \"Jim, one day you Americans will learn, it is better to talk.\" And they just talk about the weather and how are things down on the planet, and they just go on and on and on. Sure enough, we are learning those kinds of things. Humans need to talk to each other and not just be test pilots all the time. So that was pretty interesting.\\n\\n We flew the mission. A couple days later, we had one more opportunity to talk to the crew of Mir, and so they scheduled a fifteen-minute pass for us to talk to them, and so I started. We had an interpreter on the ground, who was helping us converse. Sasha Viktorenko, the commander, in this fifteen-minute pass that we had, forty minutes later, after starting and talking, he was showing no signs of stopping. He was just talking the whole time. It's human contact. It's emotional, you know. They like being with someone or talking to someone, and I had a lot of work to do. You know, these missions we plan, everything's timelined and choreographed to the last second, and I finally had to tell him, \"Hey, I'm really sorry, but I've got to go back to work,\" and so I finally terminated the conversation.\\n\\n We came back down and landed, and then I started hearing all these other stories from folks, like Mr. [Daniel S.] Goldin, who was in a budget meeting at the time that we approached, and he stopped the meeting and they pulled the curtains back in this conference room and they displayed on the screen the images of the Shuttle and the Mir approaching. He said that moved him so much that he couldn't continue the budget meeting after we separated. He just couldn't go back to boring, mundane things like the budget. And all kinds of stories like that.\\n\\n A lot of Americans, I think, didn't realize that the Russians even had a space station up there at the time, and it had been operating and permanently inhabited for like nine years, and we didn't even know about it in America. So it was good to let people know that the Russians have a space program, I think.\\n\\n As I think about the flight, probably the biggest thing about that flight was the fact that we got people talking to each other, the engineers on the ground discussing the leak, opening up their books and sharing data with each other did a lot to help STS-71, the first docking mission, because then they all were friends and it went along more smoothly.\\n\\n You could've done the docking mission, Hoot could've gone up there and docked and had no trouble if we had never even flown STS-63, but the people on the ground were a lot closer together, and so from that point of view, it was worth flying the mission, I think. It actually was fortuitous that we had the leak, because it forced people to communicate and talk with each other, and it started the however many, nine docking flights after that went more smoothly because we had that initial communication.\\n\\n The other thing I think about, about the flight, was when Hoot was getting ready to launch down at the Cape, I went down and gave the briefing to the guests, the VIP guests who were down there, and I looked out into the audience, and I saw, for the first time on the planet, Elena Kondakova, one of the crewmates. I was introducing the crew of STS-71, who was going to launch, and I mentioned a few things about our flight and how we had met these cosmonauts for the first time, up in outer space, and if it was okay with her, I was going to meet Elena Kondakova for the first time on the planet as soon as I'm done talking here. So that was a pretty interesting experience.\\n\\n Well, I got done and they, of course, had a bunch of cameras there, and so they watched us as she came up to meet me for the first time on the planet, which I'll always remember, meeting her for the second time, but the first time on the planet. So that was pretty interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On your next mission, you actually got to go across and shake the hands of the folks on Mir." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James D. Wetherbee", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. So, STS-86, I was fortunate enough to be selected to fly, and here I'd watched a bunch of my friends you know, I came back from the first mission and I told Hoot, \"It's easy, don't worry. It's easy.\" And he didn't listen to me, you know, because you haven't done it and you're really worried about it, and he did a great job, as did everyone else. And then it came my turn to get ready to dock, and I'm thinking, \"Man, this is going to be hard. I'm not going to be able to do it.\" And it's just something you just can't listen to anybody who says it's easy; you're always going to worry about it.\\n\\n We flew let's see, I'm trying to remember the crew members. I had another rookie, Mike [Michael J.] Bloomfield, who did a great job as a pilot. I flew again with Vladimir Titov. Our job on the second flight was to go rescue Mike Foale, who now was a crew member on Mir, and he was up there for a couple months and had some problems, as you know. He was on board when they had the collision, and there had been the fire when Jerry [J.M.] Linenger was on board several months earlier.\\n\\n So as we got closer to dock on STS-86, there began to be a lot of interest in the media about whether or not we were doing the right thing, whether or not we should well, we certainly should bring Mike Foale home, but should we really leave Dave Wolf up there on Mir. There was a lot of congressional interest. A lot of people were worried about it, thinking we were doing the wrong thing. People were saying, \"No, you shouldn't leave Dave Wolf up there.\"\\n\\n So in the weeks leading up to the flight, normally and I've flown four times now normally, you think about the risk really only a few times. One of them is when you first get selected as an astronaut, but the euphoria far overshadows the risk, so you don't really think about it too much then. The first time you're assigned to a mission, you think about it a little bit, but that passes because you have so much work to do. There may be one or two other isolated instances, like the first time you see the hardware, you may worry a little bit about it.\\n\\n But typically, you worry about the risk in my case, anyway, I worry about it the night before the launch. When you go to sleep, and you have to be able to deal with it. If you can't deal with it, there's no way out. It's too late to say, \"I quit,\" but you're not going to be able to operate effectively unless you can figure out a way to deal with it, and I've chosen a way to do that. I remind myself that this is the only job I've ever wanted to do, and so it makes it easier to deal with the risk, and if anything happens, I'm going to try my best to make the mission a success, and save the vehicle and the crew, but if it doesn't work, this is the only job I've ever wanted to have and so I can live or die with that thought. So then you go to sleep.\\n\\n On this mission, we were somewhat forced to think about it a couple of weeks before launch, and repeatedly we were asked, over and over again, \"Do you think this is too risky? Should we launch? Should we not launch?\" And so it was more of a longer-term thing, you really had to think about the risk. And a lot of people called me. Mr. [Daniel] Goldin, I thought, did a tremendous job. He's the administrator and the man with the responsibility to say yes or no, launch or not. The responsibility is all his, and he can't delegate that responsibility, he can't share it with anyone, it's all his. That's a pretty heavy decision to have resting on your shoulders. And so as we got ready to launch, I thought he handled it pretty well. He had Congress on one side and a lot of other detractors who said, \"No, you shouldn't launch,\" and he's thinking about the benefits and, yes, we should launch.\\n\\n He didn't make the decision until the night before. Of course, he was in a lot of discussions with Mr. [George] Abbey, my current boss here, who has the operational responsibility for carrying out the policies that Mr. Goldin determines, and so Mr. Abbey also has a lot of responsibility on his shoulders, and they talked a lot.\\n\\n Mr. Goldin called us and asked us. He called Dave Wolf and asked, \"Are you ready to go? Tell me honestly,\" and said all of the right things that you want to hear a boss or an administrator say, to allow you to say, \"Yes, I do have a concern,\" if you have any. We didn't have any, and we wanted to launch, and he made the decision the night before, I guess, to launch. So we all appreciate the fact that he made that decision.\\n\\n Let me back up. A week before launch, you know, we start our quarantine period here, and then we go down to the Cape. About three days before liftoff, we were still here in Houston, getting ready to go to the Cape, and it's about two hours before getting in the airplane to go down there, when they called and said I think it was a Monday \"Mir has just lost attitude control,\" and this was the third Monday in a row that they have lost the ability to control their attitude, so they're in free drift, which means if that happens during the rendezvous, you cannot rendezvous and dock with them.\\n\\n So instead of going to the Cape right away, we stopped off at the simulator to figure out how are we going to rendezvous on a space station that doesn't have attitude control. And as we do most things here in NASA, in America, you plan everything out as well as you can, you think about all the contingencies and you work at it and you simulate it until you're tired of simulating, until you perfect the technique. And here it is two hours before we're going to the Cape, three days before we're lifting off, and suddenly we have a whole entire new thing that we're going to do, to figure out how to rendezvous on a station that's rotating.\\n\\n On the one hand, I didn't think they were going to let us do anything. They were just going to say, \"Forget about it, don't worry, if it happens, you'll land and won't dock and the mission's a failure,\" but to the managers’ credit, they allowed us to go into the simulator and work on these procedures for, what do we do if the thing's rotating. We worked at that and did five approaches. The first one we blew, didn't make it. The next four, we did, after we refined the technique.\\n\\n So I was pretty confident that we could do it, but we still hadn't quite so then we got into the Cape and we get there, and I immediately get a phone call this is three or four hours later and they called up and said, \"We really weren't spinning it fast enough,\" so now for the next two or three days before liftoff I'm down there at the Cape, thinking to myself, \"How am I going to rendezvous and dock if it's spinning a little bit faster than it was in the sim?\" And without even doing any simulations, I was thinking, \"Well, how am I going to do it? How am I going to do it?\"\\n\\n Well, I decided, through Titov, that we would call Anatoly [Y.] Solovyev, who's now up on orbit he's the commander on the Mir to talk to him and find out what kind of data can you give us during that situation if you lose attitude control. We had already practiced that technique of talking to them on my first flight, so I was happy that we had that experience. So we called him up and said, \"What are we going to do?\" He said, \"I can give you I'll make a picture, drawing you out the attitude from the Soyuz.\" With that knowledge, we could get a simple spreadsheet computer program to type in, that would tell us what do we type in the orbiter to match the rates of the spinning Mir and then dock.\\n\\n Once we had figured that out, I was able to forget about that whole problem and go to sleep the night before launch, without worrying about that risk anymore, and then if it happened, I knew we had something in our hip pocket that we could use, a technique that would work.\\n\\n And so we launched and, of course, didn't have any problems. But it was one more thing in the work-up for STS-86 that made it interesting, because so many people were talking about the fire, the collision, and now the attitude control problem that made it interesting, and we pretended it was like a rescue mission.\\n\\n It really wasn't. Mike wasn't in any danger, and it really wasn't a rescue mission, but it was fun to think about it that way.\\n\\n So we launched. Mike has some great stories that he could tell you about, the feelings that you have when you're a crew member who's been away from the planet for four months, and you hear that your rescue vehicle, or your transportation vehicle, has now launched and is safely in orbit. Unfortunately, they only told him that we launched. They didn't tell him that we were safely in orbit, so he still had to wait several more hours before they finally said, \"Yes, they're in the proper orbit that they can come and get you.\" But he still was thinking you know, you have to prepare yourself mentally for this, and you don't want to get too psyched too early and then be deeply disappointed, so he wasn't thinking we ever were going to make it, something would happen and we wouldn't come and get him, and he's just preparing himself for the worst.\\n\\n But then on rendezvous day, when we come up oh, the other thing I forgot to mention. The other reason the Russians were very worried about the orbiter coming up and docking was because, just like the Apollo, the Soyuz vehicle that they have all their experience with, and the Progress vehicle, has a tremendously high thrust-to-weight, so as it's rendezvousing, it's moving around a lot. They fire a couple of jets as they're approaching, they're really moving, and it's pretty scary-looking if you see it. Their system is done automatically, and it finally fades it out, and it slams into a docking.\\n\\n Well, you can imagine, that would be pretty difficult if you had a 100-ton vehicle that was doing the same thing. Well, what people overlooked was, a 100-ton vehicle has a very low thrust-to-weight. It's like a big ocean liner coming in, and things are done more slowly. It's a very good system designed by really good engineers, and the handling qualities are perfect in this thing, when you're talking about that kind of a docking.\\n\\n And so on 63, I think a lot of people were surprised at how stable the vehicle looks, how motionless it looks as it's coming in, and it's very controllable. So that was another thing that gave the Russians a lot of confidence on 63, that the rest of these dockings were going to be okay, not like a Soyuz or an Apollo.\\n\\n So anyway, now our vehicle is coming up very slowly and stately, and Mike Foale is watching us get closer, so for the first time he's thinking, \"Well, this is really it. They're really coming to save me, or get me, and this is pretty good.\" And so then you dock. We had talked with Anatoly Solovyev on the radio. We had a new attitude control computer for him and his spaceship, and we were supposed to give it to them on the second day of docked operations, and Anatoly told us, \"No, I don't want to wait till the second day. I want you to give me that computer as soon as we have the handshake ceremony.\"\\n\\n So I decided to go him one better; I decided to give it to him during the handshake ceremony. Titov went down and drew a happy face on the outside of this box, and we opened up the hatch, and I shook hands with him with one hand, and with the other hand, gave him his attitude control computer, and he was so happy to receive that. Then each of the other crew members gave him this big, huge bucket of water that we bring up for them to use.\\n\\n The only other part of that flight that will always stand out in my mind was the night so you dock and you go in and you have the initial press event, where you have the ceremony and the press conference, with all the crew members up on board, and it's staged, and you say things that you've thought about. They're a little bit of fun, in a weird sort of way.\\n\\n But the best time I had was later on that night, there are no cameras now, so no one on the Earth saw this going on. We went across and had a meal with them, a Russian dinner with them, and they were playing a tape, an audio tape, on their great stereo system that they have up there, and it was a song that I'll never forget, and they were playing on the video system a replay of us rendezvousing with them, so I could see our own vehicle coming up to rendezvous, listening to this great music. It was just a weird sensation that I'll never forget, because here I am now, on the Space Station, after having just rendezvoused, so all these memories of when I was a kid came back. It really was neat. Something that I'll never forget.\\n\\n We transferred several tons worth of equipment and water and supplies, and one person to the Mir, Dr. David Wolf, and then we brought Dr. Mike Foale back, and to watch them you know, Mike is very happy and he's trying to contain his glee and his excitement about leaving, because you don't want to offend or upset David Wolf, who's going to be there for a long time now, just to see his face, it's pretty difficult to say goodbye to him. It's difficult, more difficult for him to say goodbye to us, and to watch the hatch close, with him on the other side, but he did a great job for the four months that he was up there.\\n\\n I'll just tell you one more story, and it's Dave Wolf's quote, but I just loved what he said, and it kind of illustrated all of the thoughts that we had leading up to the mission, talking about the risk and everyone asking us about risk, and should we leave him up there. He did a great job of dealing with the risk, both pre-flight and during the flight. But each night he would talk to the ground controllers, the people who were arranging his next day's events and working the experiments with him, coordinating things on the ground. He would close each of his nightly telecoms with them, you know, he'd talk to them for fifteen or twenty minutes, and at the end of every telecom, while we were docked for the six days that we were docked, he'd end his transmission by telling them on the ground, he'd say, \"Well, be careful down there on the ground.\" No, wait. I messed it up. He said, \"Now, be careful down there. You're awfully close to the ground. You don't want to get hurt.\" It was a great way to think about risk. He's up there, floating around in what astronauts tend to think of as a relatively risk-free environment, although there are some risks, but he's telling the people on the ground, \"Don't worry about me. You take care of yourselves, and I'll be okay up here.\" I just thought it was great the way he would say that. \"Be careful down there on the Earth. You're awfully close to the ground. You don't want to get hurt.\" So I've used that quote many, many times.\\n\\n I guess that's all I can think about STS-86. I was honored to have been selected, and it was a great mission that worked, mostly because of the people on both sides of the ocean, down on the ground, who make it work and that's the case with all these missions. It's the people on the ground who make them work, and then we get to have the fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course, on 86, you had an additional international member, is that correct? Because you had Titov and then you had a French crew member?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James D. Wetherbee", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Jean-Loup Chretien, who was the first person outside Russia or America to perform a space walk. He's a French cosmonaut. In fact, he's the chief of the Spationaut Office in France. They call them spacionauts. He flew with us. He had been on Mir before and had flown with Titov before, nine years earlier, and so here he was on Mir for the second time. And so they had some reminiscing to do when they got up on Mir. Jean-Loup did a great job with us.\\n\\n Titov, by the way, showed us the bunkroom that he spent a year off the planet and showed where he signed the wall with his signature, and you can still see it, you know, millions of, billions, maybe, of miles later, here's his name up there, so it was pretty interesting being on board the Mir with cosmonauts who had flown it when it first was up in space, so it was pretty interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I really appreciate your time. What time we had scheduled with you is up, and we don't want to take any more unless you have more to give us, because it's certainly up to you and your schedule." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James D. Wetherbee", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. We thank you and wish you the best of luck. Your job may be finished with Shuttle-Mir, but I am sure that they are full every day doing more for whatever projects you're assigned to next." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James D. Wetherbee", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I'd still love to get back there some day, because I'm not finished with the training part and the flying part. Hopefully, I'll get to go fly again. It's an awful lot of fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We wish you the best of luck. Hope you do, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James D. Wetherbee", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00897", + "metadata": { + "category": "Earth System Science at 20", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/ESS/KayeJA/kayeja.htm", + "original_file_name": "KayeJA_6-24-09.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/ESS/KayeJA/KayeJA_6-24-09.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "Earth System Science at 20 Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Jack A. Kaye", + "location_date": "Washington, DC – 24 June 2009" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Jack A. Kaye" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is June 24, 2009. This oral history is being conducted with Dr. Jack Kaye, who currently serves as Associate Director for Research of the Earth Science Division within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. This interview is being conducted at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., as part of the Earth System Science at 20 Oral History Project, a project to gather experiences from those who have been intimately involved in various efforts in the launch and evolution of the Earth System Science. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Rebecca Wright. Thank you again for joining us this morning. We appreciate it. I’d like to begin by asking you how you got involved in your field of expertise." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m trained as a chemist—I have a PhD in theoretical physical chemistry—and as I was finishing that up, I realized I wanted to work in an area that utilized chemistry to solve problems as opposed to just investigating fundamental chemistry. I’d always been interested in environmental science, especially atmospheric science, and I was able to audit some classes when I was in graduate school. Got exposed to that. Through that, identified a post-doc—they let me change fields—and after that, I was able to get hired on to NASA following the post-doc, and been at NASA over 25 years now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You started working at the [NASA] Goddard Space Flight Center [Greenbelt, Maryland]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My post-doc was at the U.S. Naval Research Lab [NRL, Potomac River, Washington D.C.], but then I joined a little northward migration of some people from the NRL to Goddard, and I started at Goddard in December ’83." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What sort of projects were you working on there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I worked in what’s now considered the Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Branch. I was a chemist working mainly with a bunch of meteorologists and physicists, there really to bring chemical expertise to a multi-disciplinary project. It was called at the time SGCCM, the Stratospheric General Circulation with Chemistry Modeling project, because the idea was to build numerical models of the stratosphere that included chemistry and meteorology." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was this a result of the Clean Air Act?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think it all went back to the fact that NASA had a mandate to study stratospheric ozone. We did a lot of observations, and we also had the modeling effort. So I got involved in looking at satellite observations and especially trying to interpret satellite observations of stratospheric composition and building models to simulate things, to look both ways, to use the models and use the data." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was this what you were working on when you first heard about Earth System Science?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. That’s really how I got into it. I was working in atmospheric chemistry, which was a small discipline of its own or a poor step-cousin of meteorology. But it was a growing field, because the whole ozone issue had made it a moderately hot field. So there were a lot of interesting things to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you think when people started looking at the Earth as an entire system? What did you think of that idea, being a chemist?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For me, chemistry’s a pretty obvious entrée into that world because you can think at the molecular level, and a lot of the things that are of interest really involve chemical reactions that release and take up your trace gases, whether it’s how do things get into the atmosphere from the Earth’s surface; how do things get from the Earth’s atmosphere back into the surface; how are things transformed; how do things change phase? So those are all, in some sense, chemical questions. Then also, since a lot of what we do at NASA is remote sensing; you could sort of look at it as applied spectroscopy, which is also chemical. That’s still a yardstick that I bring to it, since I have really no formal training in disciplines like meteorology or oceanography or geology or anything else. So I tend to default to thinking at a molecular level, but I’ll think about it in terms of the big picture." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you expect would come of the Earth System Science program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a little hard to know. I think that for a long time, we’ve all sort of realized that a fairly holistic view is important because there are interdisciplinary aspects to things, and one needs to look at it. I think we also recognized, especially at NASA, but not exclusively at NASA, that you have to think in terms of the whole planet. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to really look regionally, and you can only go so far if you look in terms of kind of a disciplinary isolation, because so many things are connected to each other from the point of view of science. Of course, the Earth, you’ve got people as well, so when you actually think about Earth System Science, it’s not just sort of a traditional natural science or physical and biological science, but people can have an impact on a regional scale and planetary scale, and one actually has to ultimately recognize the roles of people and the roles that societies play in making decisions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there any pushback from any scientists or any sort of turf wars, like, “Well, this is my field, and I’m not really interested in participating in an integrated look at the Earth?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m sure there was some of that, but actually, one of the things that I think NASA was very good about was building interdisciplinary teams. When I got to Goddard and worked in the branch, I was a chemist; there were probably mainly physicists, not that many meteorologists. But I think that there were a few things that we used to say. “Why do you have a government laboratory?” Well, one of the things is you do things that it’s hard to do in an academic environment, and one of which, at the time I think, was to bring together interdisciplinary teams in ways that might be difficult to sustain in an academic environment.\\n\\n Because I think at the time, my sense is that the universities were a little bit more stove-piped. That the oceanographers didn’t necessarily talk to the meteorologists, and within meteorology, the people who were more chemically oriented, they probably weren’t even in the meteorology departments at the time; they would have been maybe in chemistry departments or some other places. So you had less of that at some other places.\\n\\n But I think at NASA, we were always more receptive to that. It took some time, but I think we probably did a better job than most at a fairly early stage in facilitating that. Of course, I think NASA as an organization, especially if you go out a few years, then really pushed that sort of broader Earth System Science view when others were not doing that so much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about what you think are some of the key decisions or events that have shaped the current thinking or current direction of the Earth System Science." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there were a few things that probably have proven to be important. Some fairly obvious ones, I think. It wasn’t a NASA thing, really, but the [Charles D.] Keeling CO2 [carbon dioxide] measurements that showed changes in the CO2 concentrations and boasts inexorable growth with interesting and fairly repeatable interannual behavior. The whole atmospheric ozone issue became a particularly important one, both because it dealt with the sense that we can change the atmosphere in unexpected ways. That’s one of the first areas, maybe the first area, where a global problem got into the policy arena, with the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole and the fact that it was recognition that the Earth can have some unpleasant surprises for us. But with a good science program, you can unravel them and figure some of these things out pretty quickly. Then when you can get your science lined up well, you actually can impact policy at national and global levels, through the Montreal Protocol and the successive things to that.\\n\\n So I think that’s colored some people’s thinking because in some way, it’s a real success story. The fact that these problems occurred doesn’t represent success, but the fact that a problem was recognized from a scientific point of view, the origin was understood, and then the policies were taken at national and international levels and now are contracted, and we can look in the atmosphere and see the effects of the policy: CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons] amounts leveling and some of the other trace gas amounts have reduced significantly. Compared to, say, climate change, it’s a relatively or a much easier problem, so one has to be careful about extrapolating from that. But I think that was a particular event.\\n\\n I think some other things is that as the satellite data came further along, you got some initial things. The Nimbus-7 satellite that launched in 1978 became a really significant one because that had a lot of Earth System Science. A good chunk of that was atmospheric, but there were some oceanic things, especially that. That really helped one see the fact that one could look at the planet and determine some things, look at variability, and there’s a lot of stuff to explain. So once people had that, that pushed people to do better.\\n\\n There are some other things as well, discoveries that people would make along the way that were similarly unexpected. I think that people would have to sort of look at things and say, “What’s going on here?” Because of my chemistry background, I tend to think more about some of those examples, but like when some work that was done, primarily [by] Jack Fishman at the [NASA] Langley Research Center [Hampton, Virginia], and some people looked at tropospheric ozone and was able to tie that to biomass burning. This is really before we had a lot of satellites to do that, but he worked with what we had. Then we actually did a field campaign designed to investigate that, because people were able to look out over the open ocean and see enhanced levels of pollution and trace that back to biomass burning in Africa and South America.\\n\\n So that was an example of where people could look at things and say, “Hey, you know the stuff that’s going on on land is affecting things in the atmosphere thousands of miles away, but we can actually track this and figure it out.” So that’s a good example, I think, of some of the kinds of scientific discoveries that helped drive things. There are things in other areas that I’m just not as familiar with the early history." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any decisions that you have made personally that have shaped the current direction of Earth System Science?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I was a program manager, I think finding good people, because I did manage a research program, the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling and Analysis Program, for a number of years. I was program scientist for some satellite missions and [Space] Shuttle stuff. I think as people started getting more focused on aerosols, the connection about aerosols and how they could affect climate. I think people had understood, but it’s where they got heated up, and I helped support that process. Other people ran programs; I supported that. I encouraged some of the people working on satellites to look more at tropospheric aerosols. Now, maybe other program managers would have been less supportive of that, maybe not. I can’t assess. But I think the fact that I encouraged the people in TOMS [Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer] and SAGE [Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment] to go and look at tropospheric aerosols, that may be one decision that I made at a relatively early stage back as a program manager.\\n\\n Then when I became what was division director, and that took place in ’99, then I had a little less direct control over things that got done, but more higher-level control, and there were probably some things that I was able to sort of make a few decisions and enable some things to happen, in part because I would hold a small money reserve. So, say, some of the fieldwork that got done, in some sense, if I had chosen to direct my reserves in other areas, they would not have gotten done. I feel that I can take some credit for enabling things to happen that way. So somewhere, all maybe relatively small, but some of the things that if somebody would say, “Look, I’ve got an idea for a field campaign. Can I have some extra money?” and you sort of know, well, if we make it available, good stuff will happen, and if I don’t, most likely it wouldn’t, or it wouldn’t be nearly as good. So there’s some of the things that I can feel that by applying what flexibility I had, [we would] be able to do that.\\n\\n I have been personally also very involved in interagency stuff, so I feel that I’ve, I hope, had an impact in making sure that NASA’s work in Earth System Science was connected to that of our interagency partners, and giving NASA some visibility and credit for what we do. From a personal point of view, there’s some other things that I would take particular pride in—in terms of the fact that NASA works well with the community. We reach out to the university community in terms of the research program that we run, the extramural grants program that we have. We try to provide good solicitation opportunities to people, run a good review process that engages the community.\\n\\n One of the things that I’ve also tried to do is to really make myself available and encourage my staff to be available to help other parts of NASA, especially the education part or the university part, so that when we’re dealing with people and institutions that don’t have significant track record, to help them get connected. So we’ve worked with the EPSCoR program [Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research], with the Minority University Program, to really try to help get them engaged so that we don’t have kind of disconnected programs, where in the rest of NASA will fund somebody through a different gate that they just go off and do their own thing, and it’s unconnected from the rest of the program. That’s one of the things that I’ve tried to do and have encouraged other people to try to do.\\n\\n I think also, we try to send a message, both through my own actions and through those of the people who work for me, that our job is not done until the message is out. And just, well, we’re a science organization, and advancing the state of the science and documenting results in the peer-reviewed literature are obvious things that we need to do and we need to do well. That’s not enough. We have to make sure that people understand more broadly, so we have to engage with the public, engage with the NASA public affairs apparatus, and tell our story— through formal and informal mechanisms." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think have been the greatest accomplishments of the past 20 years in Earth System Science?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There’s any number of things. I think that in some sense, you almost have to try to step back because we’re so engrained in them, I think sometimes we don’t see it. But the fact that we can look at the whole planet and know what’s going on, on a daily basis, and we can see variability, understand the origins, be able to document things in a fairly quantitative way, and in many cases, be able to provide both a pretty good explanation, say, through models that can actually, put the right input in, you get the right output out, and have some predictive capability, that we’re no longer limited by the things that are easy to observe or the places that are easy to observe. We’ve got equivalent levels of data over pretty much the whole planet, whether it’s open oceans, polar regions, places of political instability or limited infrastructure. We’ve got about the same degree of knowledge, and we can make connections between different parts of the world. So 20 years ago, I think, people might ask about atmospheric aerosols. We barely had climatologies. Now we’ve got climatologies, we’ve got vertical distributions, we’ve got information about composition, and you’ve got information about optical properties.\\n\\n Of course, we’ve discovered that things are a lot more complicated than people may have thought. I think one can look at some of the stuff that we do in the oceans: where does photosynthesis take place in the oceans? People, I don’t think, had very good sense of that. We’ve got a much better sense now. We can even begin to provide information about the nature of the photosynthesis, the types of organisms, what’s the relationship between the physical state of the ocean and biological productivity, and now can begin to make connections, some of which I think we’re still actively investigating. But sort of what’s the relationship between nutrient deposition, especially through aerosols, and oceanic productivity. We’ve got the data sets now; they’re letting people look at that. How do aerosols affect precipitation, hurricane formation? These are all questions that people are asking now that we wouldn’t have had the data to address 10 or 20 years ago.\\n\\n So those are some of the things that I see as real successes. I think the fact that we can document what’s going on in the polar regions, look at sea ice extent, ice thickness, changes of ice mass in Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I don’t know how you’d do that if it weren’t for satellites. We joke and say you can’t put enough graduate students out on dogsleds to find these things out. Someone says, “Besides, it would be cruel to the dogs.” Similar things: precipitation over the oceans, the TRMM [Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission] has helped. You’d think we know how much it rains over the oceans, but we’re limited by the ships, how many ships would be out there, and how much measurements would they get. But the satellites can essentially get data every day, day after day after day.\\n\\n From an engineering point of view, I think something else that people tend to take for granted is, after a while, we make the stuff look easy. We’ve had teenage satellites—I think Landsat 5 [Land Remote-Sensing Satellite] is probably 25 years old or something like that, so we’ve got satellites that are old enough to vote, maybe not old enough to drink—but when you think about what they’re doing, which is, for most of them, moving at seven kilometers a second; going around the Earth 16 times a day; the full blast of the Sun, nothing between the satellite and the Sun; and then the dark side of the Earth, coldest, darkest night of space; and then 45 minutes later, back to the full blast of the Sun; and doing that 16 times a day, day after day after day. The engineering aspects of that are really amazing. I’m sure people like me who are sort of lab theorists and technophobes really have very little appreciation for just what an amazing accomplishment that is. That’s also something. I think we’ve made it look pretty easy, and it’s not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, it’s been amazing these past couple of days, just hearing about all of the things that NASA has been involved with and what they’ve learned. What do you think are some of the missed opportunities, as you look back over the past 20 years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m not sure I’d say it’s a missed opportunity. I mean, there’s certain things—we’re always resource-limited. I’ll give you an answer that may be more of a NASA answer than an Earth Systems Science answer, but then maybe we can come back to that. From a point of view of history, this may actually be a really interesting thing for somebody to look at—I’ll give you ideas for your next book or something—which is that we used to do a lot with the Shuttle. In ’94, Earth science had four Shuttle missions. When decisions were made, I think for appropriate reasons, it disconnected the Earth science program from the human spaceflight program, and in fact, mostly the Earth and space science program. I feel that within NASA, we really lost something, because we lost connection between human spaceflight and Earth science or Earth and space science, and in some sense, we’ve never recovered from that.\\n\\n When [Former NASA Administrator] Sean O’Keefe used to talk about “One NASA”—I don’t know how you really build One NASA when you’ve got what one might consider some of the primary science of the agency, Earth and space science, disconnected from their primary platforms, the Shuttle and [International Space] Station. I was involved with both Shuttle and Station. I can understand why we ended up where we did, but it’s a lost opportunity. We’re not on Station; we haven’t been on Shuttle, in part because just we haven’t been able to get to Station, and you need the Shuttle full time to get to the Station. So it may well be, within the constraints, very reasonable decisions. But I think that that’s been a great loss to NASA in that we’ve had this disconnect. I think it also hurts in our ability to communicate to the public, because we promote the human spaceflight so well, and the public just tends to pay attention more. We lost that opportunity, and I think we haven’t really fully figured out how to make the connection between human spaceflight and robotic stuff. So that’s a missed opportunity. It may not be exactly what you’re looking for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not looking for anything in particular." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But in terms of science, there’s probably some things that one would have to think about. For most of these things, you can always get later. If you can’t get them now, you’ll get them later. We may not want to wait 30 years to do the ice caps, sea ice, because maybe it will be gone, or some other things like that. So I think there’s less of an issue there about missed opportunities. I’d have to think some more about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure, sure, and you’ll have the opportunity to edit your transcript. You did mention Shuttle, and that was something I wanted to ask you about. What sort of contributions did Shuttle make towards Earth System Science?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In fact, I’m supposed to write something on that by the end of the month." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s a good opportunity for you then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, 300 words, which means it’s either not that hard or really hard. But there are a couple of things. It gave us access to space, and it let us try some things. So if one looks at some of the things, something like the original work that was done studying carbon monoxide with the MAPS [Measurement of Air Pollution from Satellites] experiment, it gave us a sense of looking at air pollution in regions of the planet that one would never get to. We did that many, many years before any satellite was able to do that. We flew a bunch of things again to get some data early, and the fact that we were able to get some data from the Spacelab missions on atmospheric composition.\\n\\n Then with ’92 through ’94 with the Atlas [Atmospheric Laboratory of Applications and Science] missions, we flew some other things: the Lidar In-space Technology Experiment demonstrated that you could do three-dimensional observations of aerosols in clouds, and that really kind of begat the PICASSO [-CENA] [Pathfinder Instruments for Cloud and Aerosol Spaceborne Observations - Climatologie Etendue des Nuages et des Aerosols] mission.\\n\\n We were able to test some things out from a technology point of view, some of which went places, some of which did not. The Shuttle Laser Altimeter that flew twice I think helped lead to the ill-fated Vegetation Canopy Lidar mission, which ended up getting cancelled, but I think the fact that you could demonstrate from the Shuttle that you could actually look at three-dimensional structure of vegetation. Some of the stuff that was done on Shuttle Radar Topography Mission [SRTM], I’m less familiar with that, and the predecessors. In terms of getting radar data, the SRTM, I think, is a marvelous data set that people will use, especially when we’re allowed to use it and our DoD [Department of Defense] partners don’t make it hard for us to use that. There are some things we could do in terms of calibration. The SSBUV [Shuttle Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet] instrument flew about eight times.\\n\\n Then from a technology demonstration, we had the SOLSE/LORE, the Shuttle Ozone Limb Sounder Experiment and the Limb Ozone Retrieval Experiment. That really helped, I think. Even though we had very limited data, that helped convince the NPOESS [National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System] that a limb scattering technique could be used for ozone profile measurements, and that’s what NPOESS actually was planning on using—before they de-manifested it. So there are a range of things like that that we could do. Of course, Shuttle launched some of our payloads, like UARS [Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite], so that’s a good thing. But the fact that we could get stuff into space multiple times, inclined orbits, do stuff with foreign partners as well, those are all accomplishments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned you do a lot of interagency work. What sort of challenges did you face working with a number of these federal agencies? Can you give some examples?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, one is that there’s many of them, and there’s a number of coordination mechanisms. So there’s time that it takes. The one that we interact most closely with is NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], which has a whole host of issues associated with it. One is that NOAA is a complicated organization, and in many cases, it seems that we have better relationships with the different parts of NOAA than they have with each other. So it’s like you can’t just talk to one person at NOAA, typically, and think that you’re talking to the whole organization. So that becomes a challenge. I think especially in the last administration, they would have these—and there may be some, but this administration, it’s too soon to say—where they would say, “Well, we’re the climate agency,” and they would give the sense of they’re going to do things, and really, it would be very difficult for them to be up to follow things through. Not because their intentions were bad, because they weren’t—the intentions were fine—but budgetarily they weren’t in the position to do all the things that they would aspire to. That, I think, could create some problems.\\n\\n On the other hand, at the working level, we had some incredibly marvelous relationships and could look to a number of the things that we’ve done over the years, and there’s no way that either of us could have done them separately. Like in the stratospheric ozone area, pretty much from the beginning, it was a joint partnership. Some of the first big airborne missions that we did would have NOAA people as the mission scientists, even though it was our airplanes, and a lot of our instruments, a lot of their instruments. So from the beginning, that was really a very joint kind of thing. There might have been some tensions, but they were, relatively speaking, minimal, and I think the people keeping those things going managed to avoid any of the stuff that might be imposed by higher-ups. We’ve maintained some other things, like when we do hurricane field campaigns, those are pretty much always jointly with the Hurricane Research Division, and it’s hard to imagine doing some of these things without them.\\n\\n So it gets complicated, because it’s different from other parts of NASA. I mean, for planetary science, I think we’re pretty much it. In astrophysics, well, they can work with NSF [National Science Foundation] for ground-based stuff and maybe a little bit with DOE [Department of Energy] on dark matter. Heliophysics, well, there’s some ties to NOAA and DoD for space weather. But compared to the other parts of NASA science, we’re much more engaged at the interagency level. We’ve got multiple coordination mechanisms that are not duplicative, but they’re not orthogonal. There’s some overlap between them, and you have to try and figure out sometimes what’s the relationship between this group and that group and that group, and just to limit the time as to how much time we can put into these things.\\n\\n But I think we’ve pretty much set the tone of, let’s try to really engage. We tend to take on leadership roles within the organizations. People end up co-chairing working groups, especially the [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, D.C.] folks. We’ve provided some detailees where it makes sense from Centers to support these interagency things and help make them function well.\\n\\n Now, the [United States] Global Change Research Program—previous administration [President George W. Bush] was the [United States] Climate Change Science Program—we are overwhelmingly the largest contributors in terms of what the agencies identify as their contributions to that program. We were like 55, 60 percent, probably more than that if you go back to the early days. Some of that was because we would count most everything, and a lot of other agencies wouldn’t count things. So if you look at, as I say, in terms of what the agencies identified in the interagency climate program, we’re far and away the largest contributor. But we are the ones bringing new capability to looking at the whole planet and to understanding it, as well. It’s not just the observations, but it’s the science." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think needs to happen in the next 20 years? What sort of decisions do you think need to be made?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From a planetary perspective, there’s major decisions that have to be made about energy, environment, population, development. They all kind of come together. The use of resources and the decisions that we defer will likely create problems. From the point of view of NASA, we can sort of stand back a little bit and say, “It’s not our job to make these decisions. We’re not a policymaking organization; we don’t regulate; we don’t have management responsibilities. But we provide information, and we can inform.” So that’s our role, and in terms of what should governments do about energy and environment, development, population, sustainability—that’s in some sense probably a separate conversation.\\n\\n I think part of my passion is to make sure that we do the best job that we can to provide good information. I do feel that one of the things that we do is this issue of equivalent quality information anywhere in the world. Other agencies have more of a domestic focus, but by definition, most of what we do is global, and it’s likely to remain that way. From the point of view of what we do, the fact that we have as good knowledge over the most remote parts of the planet as we do right here at home, that’s significant.\\n\\n I think the other thing is that we have this commitment to free and open data sharing, and I think we really lead by example in that area. So I think the idea is for the investment that the nation makes on our behalf, we provide data really for the whole world to use, for the scientific community to work on, and then for people who want to put the data to use in as close to real time as they can get it and to inform policy decision-making on all scales, they’ve got the data. We’ll work with them to help make it useful; we’ll engage internationally. That’s something we could probably stand to do a little more of, but sometimes it’s just hard to figure out how to reach out to people. I’d love to do more in developing countries, but sometimes it’s not obvious who you talk to, or that if you talk to one part of the government, you’re actually reaching the whole government. So that’s certainly a big thing for us over the next 20 years.\\n\\n Now, there’s some things that we still are discovering. There’s some things that we can do. A key issue, I think, for us, our partners, and really for the government for which we work is to deal with the area of sustained observations and especially the sustained observations that may not be critical for day-to-day operational forecasting kind of stuff. We’ve got to be able to track the evolution of our planet and the things that drive it and how it’s responding to drivers, external and internal. But how do you keep things going over a period of decades? When does something get too routine for NASA and we should stop it? But what if there’s nobody else there really to pick it up? To what extent are we willing to rely on our international partners for some of that, or do we feel that we have to do that ourselves?\\n\\n Those are some big issues, because maintaining consistent data records—and consistent doesn’t mean identical; I’ll use that in the way of sort of evolutionary sense, that one wants to be able to look at the data that describes some part of the Earth system, and if one sees variation, know that you’re looking at variations in the Earth and not variations in the observing system. That’s a big issue. Gaps make for a problem. Poorly thought-out changes can make for a problem. So doing that right and maintaining the capability that lets you be sure that you got it right is a big deal because it’s a fairly specialized kind of thing. Like you see something unexpected, and then you say, “Well, let’s compare it to the data from 20 years ago.” Somebody’s got to be paying attention to the data from 20 years ago. You may have to go back and reprocess the old data; you may have to try to understand what the difference is.\\n\\n That’s a hard scientific problem. So maintaining the scientific capability to do that, the human capability. We tend to think of science as not very human-oriented, but it actually is, because you’re really dependent on people with a particular set of skills and knowledge. All the while, technology is changing, computing is changing. Somebody says, “Go back and reprocess the stuff from 20 years ago.” But if you haven’t done a good job as a data steward, you might find that your data from 20 years ago is in an almost unreadable format. So there’s that aspect, and as a government, we have to be able to find a way, so that whether it’s us or NOAA or U.S. Geological Survey at some point, that when you need to do the science, the community can access the data and the tools that they need to be able to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like a lot of challenges for the next 20, 30 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and there are some other things, I think. There are some workforce issues. I’m not sure that there’s always as many as some people say, because people say, “Oh, there’s going to be all those retirements, and we’re not going to have anybody.” Well, some of the grants we do, we’re funding one out of six people, so there’s plenty of good people in some areas. There’s probably some particular areas that it’s hard to train, recruit, retain the really good people, and in a time of changing demographics, to make sure that we will continue to attract a workforce. So the changing public demographic is something that we have to think about, and especially in some of these really tough areas. Some of the things are really challenging. It’s not always so obvious where we get the people to do stuff that we really need. There’ll always be some of them. So that’s one challenge." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I think we’ve hit our time today. Is there anything else that you think we should talk about? This is sort of just a general capturing of knowledge about Earth System Science." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack A. Kaye", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The other thing I can say is that there’s some stuff that—especially relative to, you said decisions I had made—sometimes there’ll be some things, too, that is stuff that maybe it’s not at the core, but it is things that you can say, “There’s an opportunity; let’s seize it.” So there’s a couple things that we’ve done. We’ve been sort of dancing around the biodiversity issue: what can we do for biodiversity? A lot of times people think biodiversity is how many different kinds of spiders are there or something. Well, we’re not going to do that from space, but there are some things we can do. So in the past year or two, we’ve had our first focused biodiversity solicitation.\\n\\n In the past, we’ve had little unorganized activities in space archaeology, and we said, “Well, we don’t want to have unorganized activities. Let’s put out a solicitation.” We did that, and we’ve got another one out. So there’s some of these things that at the dollar level are small, but they’re some things where we can say, “Look, we see an opportunity; let’s try to fill that.” Probably if you go back 15 years ago, one of my predecessors, I think, looked at the Land-Cover Land-Use Change Area and said, “I want to have a program in that because we’ve got data from Landsat and some other things,” and he set up a program, and I think we’re doing some really good stuff with that. So that may be one thing we didn’t say that’s worth noting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We thank you very much for your time this morning. We know your schedule is busy." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00135", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2020-019.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Shepard, Steve M. (1986-1989): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2020-019", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2020-019", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Steve M. Shepard served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji from 1986 to 1989 on a public health project. He joined Peace Corps at age 35, after having worked as a medical lab technician. His training was conducted in Fiji and included home stays. Shepard worked as a lab technician, originally on the island of Kadavu, and later at Sigatoka Hospital on the main island of Viti Levu. During his service, there were two military coups. He was arrested by the Fiji military after the first coup for possessing a short-wave radio. Shepard married an Indo-Fijian woman that he met while working at Sigatoka Hospital, and extended his service for an additional year. Interviewed and recorded by Jack Franklin Davies, August 26, 2019. 1 digital audio file.", + "dates_of_materials": "26 August 2019", + "extent": "1 digital file (audio; stereo; 59 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "032. Fiji.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Fiji. Shepard, Steve M. (1986-1989): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Fiji", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2020-019", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2020-019-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/5h78xo7i8d4s8mr8q0rc0ng00uj44mt0.pdf?odc=20231115173700-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/351648aa-07d1-4b67-8878-715906fbcd8b/fd33e1e3-88f3-4227-bfe1-39d485624ecb/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzI3YTVfNzE0MDhmOTQ1MDg1ZmQ5OTFjMzlmN2ZmN2FmOWFiNzM2NjdjOTBhM2YzZTg2ZTZlMTc3NjgyNmMxNWQyOTQ0NF8vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS8zNTE2NDhhYS0wN2QxLTRiNjctODg3OC03MTU5MDZmYmNkOGIvZmQzM2UxZTMtODhmMy00MjI3LWJmZTEtMzlkNDg1NjI0ZWNiL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Seattle, Washington", + "length": "31 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed December 11, 2019, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Steve M. Shepard Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Jack Franklin Davies" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Steve M. Shepard" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:01", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Are we recording? Yes, now it's recording. All right. So to the Kennedy Center, we're going to run this a little bit. We're sitting outside here. I've got the windsock on the microphone, so it shouldn't be a problem. But you can edit out this part of the tape. And we did a little Fiji kava ceremony earlier, but I won't include that since this is Steve's story. OK, so we're ready to go. OK. Hi, my name is Jack Davies. I'm a returned Peace Corps volunteer from the Fiji Islands from 1978 through '80. Today I'm interviewing Steve Shepard, who was also a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji at Sigatoka, and he was a health volunteer at the hospital from 1986 to 1989. How are you doing, Steve?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:42", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm doing good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:43", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I should say ni sa bula vinaka. I got to get a little bit of Fijian in here. So we're in Seattle today, a beautiful day, and recording outside, so hopefully there won't be any distracting sounds. But if there were, it would be just another day in Fiji, wouldn't it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:01:00", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it would." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:01:02", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So tell me about yourself, Steve. Where did you grow up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:01:06", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I grew up in Seattle, in west Seattle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:01:11", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, around this area?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:01:13", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually very close to this area. It just happened when we were looking for a house many years later, when I was about 38 years old, my wife Leela, who I met and married in Fiji, liked this area. Right now where we're sitting, Jack, is about one mile from the Fauntleroy Ferry Dock where I grew up, three blocks from there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:01:34", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's interesting. So I'll bet you've seen this area grow as well. And you were in Fiji at a time between, I'll say, the technological age when they started getting TV and so on. We'll get into that a little bit. But for the moment, let me stay focused on your training. Where did you learn your health sciences?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:01:57", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I learned my health sciences at basically Shoreline Community College and Seattle Community College. I took a course back in 1969, 1970, as a surgical technician, where I'd be passing instruments and sutures, either be sterile and work with the surgeons or be the circulate and essentially do what a circulating nurse does. And then a decade later, I was introduced to a program at Shoreline Community College for medical laboratory technicians, and I needed a year's college basic sciences to get in that program. That was very competitive. There were about 113 people looking at 13 openings, and so I managed to ace and get in the program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:02:45", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you had some experience under your belt. How old were you when you joined?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:02:49", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, when I joined Peace Corps, I was 35." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:02:51", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, goodness." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:02:51", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just turned 35." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:02:52", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, that's a little bit older than the average volunteer. So you trained in science, health sciences, and how did you actually find out about the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:03:03", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I had a friend that was a Dutch citizen that was living here in Seattle, and I was lamenting the fact that I just didn't know what was happening. After six years working as a medical technologist at Swedish Hospital here in Seattle, it didn't feel like that was what I wanted to do the rest of my life. I wanted to help people. I wanted to travel. I wanted to do something that would make a difference to somebody. And the Dutch friend said he knew somebody who'd been a Peace Corps volunteer, set me up with basically an interview with her, and went to a bar in North Seattle and talked to her. And she was very enthusiastic about her Peace Corps history." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:03:42", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was she in Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:03:43", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And no, she was not in Fiji. I believe she was in an African country, but it's been a long time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:03:49", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. So then you approached the Peace Corps and what kind of reaction did you get from them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:03:55", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was positive reaction, at least comfortably positive, and it took me quite a while, although I understand it generally takes people a while. From the time I signed up for Peace Corps, it was just a little over a year before I was finally accepted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:04:12", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And was Fiji your first offer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:04:14", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And at the time I asked about where I'd go and they said, well, we're not a travel agency and Pacific, Asia, we have a lot of different, you could go to Africa. So I said Pacific and Asia would be my preferences and they seemed to focus on that, which included the Caribbean. So when it came down to it, after about nine months, I'd gotten all this stuff out of the way. I was legal, didn't have a criminal record, and had a bona fide divorce. I wasn't running away from any women here. And so they told me that they had three finalist countries. One was Jamaica, one was Belize in Central America, and one was Fiji. And about two months later, I still had heard virtually nothing from Peace Corps. And one day the phone rang and they said, we'd like to invite you to a position in Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:05:06", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice. And did you know anything about Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:05:09", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really knew next to nothing about Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:05:12", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You knew where it was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:05:13", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I probably could not have found it very quickly on a map." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:05:17", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's funny. I think everybody knows Fiji from Fiji Water probably." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:05:24", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Nowadays, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:05:25", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So where did you do your training or staging?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:05:29", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Staging was held in San Francisco in an older hotel in the Tenderloin district. And it was just a bit over a week in early July of 1986. And most of the other people there were volunteers going to Fiji, although they actually flew in two people from Fiji who were on Peace Corps staff there. So I met the Fiji nurse who was name was Wynu Thonganili Walala, and Wynu, who was a very popular lady, gave us our first gamma globulin shots." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:06:04", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, I remember that. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:06:04", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And a couple of other people who had worked. Lau Penarth, an Indian Fijian woman who was married to an Indian man who was in the process of leaving Fiji and going to New York. But she also flew out to San Francisco and talked to us about what to expect. And we even did a few demos of how you would approach somebody if you're in a restaurant where there's very few tables. It's normal in Fiji just to share a table with other people. You just say, may I sit here? And they say, sure, come on. And so we did that kind of thing just to sort of break the ice with some Americans that weren't really used to people being that flexible." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:06:47", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So you had some Fiji food in San Francisco or where?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:06:51", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not in San Francisco. It wasn't until the training continued once we got in country." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:06:58", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:06:58", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And while we had a base in Nadi at the Nadi Hotel, after a week or ten days, we were sent in two different groups up to Ba, which is in northern Viti Levu, the main island, a very hot area. And I stayed with an Indian family, Sada and Savita and their two children, and they helped me learn a little bit of Fiji Hindi it's called. It's similar to Hindi, but it has a Fiji flavor to it. And they also taught me a little bit about how they cooked on their little kerosene stove on the floor, and made quite a few different Indian meals for me while I stayed with them, and went to a couple of Indian related events. And then finished up with Ba and went back to Nadi to the Nadi Hotel for another week or so, where we jumped out to southern part, the southeastern part of Viti Levu in Serua province.\n\nI was sent to a small village called, a Fijian village named Vunibau. And Vunibau was right on the South Pacific Ocean. You could walk out on a beach every morning. We had Peace Corps trainers that had come from Fiji and they helped us learn the language. Fijian guys would talk Fijian, the Indian guys would, and women, would talk Hindi, Fiji Hindi to us. And we just had a good time and learned a lot and sort of crammed both languages, which turned out we didn't need that much later. But I think that having a handle on both languages really helped with the experience, knowing what you're getting into, what people are experiencing, just sort of breaking the ice and feeling a little more like a local, even though you're definitely not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:08:54", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So how long did your training actually last all together?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:08:57", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I believe the training was set to be three months." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:09:01", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Three months, OK. And what were your first impressions then after the training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:09:06", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After the training, I was really enthusiastic. We had been pretty much kept on the western side of the island, except for Vunibau was a little over the border into the eastern side. But I think a lot of people were really interested to see Suva. Suva is the capital of Fiji. And Suva, to the best of my knowledge, is the largest city in the South Pacific, aside from Australia and New Zealand cities. So largest South Pacific city, had a lot of history, and when we finally got there we were able to spend almost five or six weeks. Once we were all given our assignments where we needed to go, I was told that I'd be going to Kadavu Island, which is Fiji's fourth largest island, to the south of Suva, about 90 kilometers way out there in the South Pacific.\n\nSo I got ready by buying a mattress, a full mattress, buying all the things, kitchen utensils, pots and pans, clothing, things that I thought I'd need, including clothespins, for doing my own wash, and was ready to go. And I found out that Peace Corps basically expected us to learn the way things are done locally. And that meant looking in the shipping section of the Fiji Times newspaper, finding when the next boat is going to Kadavu, and going down to the wharf and talking to the people and arranging your own transit on that boat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:10:38", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So other than the initial training, how much support did you get from the Peace Corps office?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:10:43", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were basically given gamma globulin shots I believe every three months, and for that we would need to go to Suva. So I'd say a lot of support. Certainly they had a number we could call at any time if we had a telephone. In Kadavu, that was mostly radio telephone, so a little more difficult. But Peace Corps was really supportive in my opinion." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:11:07", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about monetary support?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:11:09", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was good in that we got a stipend every month and if we found housing that would cost us money, we were given a reasonable stipend for reasonable housing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:11:21", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Do you happen to recall how much that was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:11:24", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For me in Kadavu, I was living in government housing, but I was only in Kadavu from September until December of 1986. So eventually when I ended up going to the Sigatoka Hospital in early '87, I was getting $100 a month for housing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:11:42", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, so that was the local per diem rate, because I recall they put some money aside for us after the service. And I'll ask you what you did with that money later. So at what point did you start your job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:11:54", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I started the job pretty much the same week that I arrived in Kadavu, which probably would have been the last week in September 1986. I remember I booked my passage on a boat called the Land Dolly. Its crew had three Fijian men and three Indian men. It was a small inter- island freighter. And I was told that, hey, there are some people from South Africa going with you. And I thought, this is great. I've never met anybody from South Africa. It was actually a white couple who vowed that they were not going back home to South Africa until apartheid was finished." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:12:35", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, boy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:12:35", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So when we got to Kadavu, they really wanted me to come exploring with them. And I was sort of the nerd that wanted to just, hey, I needed to get started with my project for Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:12:48", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:12:48", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I said goodbye to them and they headed out over the northeast part of the island of Kadavu." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:12:52", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hold that thought for just a moment, because you were there during a couple of coups. What was behind the coup?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:12:58", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the coups were later. But what was behind the coup was multifaceted. But I believe that now most people believe what I did at the time, and that's simply that it was an apartheid against the Indians. The Indians were at the time almost 45% of Fiji's population. These people had been in Fiji since the late 1800s. They had helped Fiji grow. They were the majority of the entrepreneurs in Fiji, the majority of the teachers in the tertiary and colleges." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:13:35", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They were the merchants and businessmen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:13:37", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:13:39", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So how were you affected by the coup?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:13:41", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I was affected in many ways. Several rather unsavory things happened to me. We can discuss that later. But I at the time was very interested in a woman that was a nurse at Sigatoka Hospital." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:13:59", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where you were working, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:13:59", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Where I was every day, yes. And so I immediately was in Suva at the time, actually, I should point out, because Peace Corps had brought me in for a gamma globulin shot and my physical exam. And so it was actually that morning I went to see the contracted Fiji doctor, who was an Australian or New Zealand expatriate. I'm not sure. And she said, oh, are you going to go back? And I said, what? And she said, there was a bloody coup down there, right in Parliament, about a half a mile from where her office was located. And as soon as I got out of her thing, I went directly to the Peace Corps office and they, oh, everybody had sad faces. And this is shocking because the country has been taken over by a military government, and the newly elected prime minister, who was a Fijian man, also a doctor, a physician, had been deposed, arrested, and taken from power. And it was, it was really a shock. I really thought Fiji was going in a better, more improved direction, although we were also encouraged by Peace Corps that we should stay out of politics." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:15:16", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that's for sure. But you mentioned this other gentleman was arrested. What about yourself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:15:24", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was arrested by the Fiji military about a month and a half after the first coup. I had returned from Suva, where Peace Corps had kept all the volunteers that they could safe, because they really didn't know what was going to happen. There were armed soldiers on the streets. People were going through checkpoints with armed soldiers, having your bag searched. Most of the tourist industry collapsed. All the Australian and New Zealand people that were visiting were gone. So it was just a few people. A lot of my Peace Corps friends left. They truly believed that because of the coup that they could not continue on with the job that they were doing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:16:08", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why did you stay?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:16:09", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I stayed because what I was doing, I felt, still helped the people of Fiji in a tiny way and really was pretty much unaffected by that. Second reason is, frankly, I was just curious. It was exciting, although it was scary as heck." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:16:27", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, we kind of glossed over what you were actually doing on the job. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:16:33", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. What I was supposed to be doing was as a medical technologist, medical lab technician. Fiji School of Medicine graduated classes I believe every year. And I was supposed to have a counterpart at Sigatoka Hospital. Instead, there was a nurse who knew some basic laboratory testing, but in fact, it turned out that she really was very poorly trained and was doing things that would actually compromise some of the testing that she was doing. I remember she asked me one time, she was a native Fijian woman, and asked me one time what she thought, what I thought after, before the coup, but after the election of this guy, Timoci Bavadra, who is a Fijian man and had basically taken over after the guy who had been the Prime Minister of Fiji for about 17 years. So I told her, hey, you know, I think that it might be a good thing for Fiji. And she made a face that told me no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:17:37", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:17:37", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She as a Fijian did not believe that Dr. Bavadra was a good choice for Fiji. So very soon after she left and I was the only person in the lab and I learned that nobody was going to replace me. So I went on trying to look at what I could buy for the laboratory if I could get some grants. And it became immediately obvious that any grant proposals that I could write to Australia and New Zealand weren't going to fly because this country was under martial law. It had had a military coup. Australia and New Zealand were very violently staying away from Fiji politics. They didn't believe what was going on was good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:18:21", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow, I'm getting shivers just hearing this. So you stayed in country. You were threatened by the authorities. They released you without charges, I understand." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:18:34", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, we didn't get to that. Actually, Jack, I had come back from an incident with the family that I was staying with. The husband was basically a wife abuser, and I told him that I could not stay. So I packed up my things, called Peace Corps, took a taxi to Suva, which was the most efficient transport for the suitcases I had. And Peace Corps then gave me a choice of either teaching at the Fiji School of Medicine, which I wasn't too interested in, or working at Sigatoka Hospital in the laboratory. And I'd seen Sigatoka city when we first got to Fiji with the Peace Corps, and it was a wonderful, pretty much Indian town. Indian women in saris and salwar kameez, Fijian people intermingling happy with each other. It was paradise. It looked like paradise." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:19:29", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. That's where the international airport is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:19:31", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In Nadi. It's a ways from Sigatoka." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:19:34", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, how far?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:19:35", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it's just down on what's called the Coral Coast, and I chose to go ahead to Sigatoka Hospital. And I think it was, looking back, a really good decision. But you mentioned, Jack, that I had had some problems and, yes, I had. After I went back to Suva from the Indian family that I was living with because of their domestic violence, I had to find a new place to live in Sigatoka, and Peace Corps put me up at a place called the Crow's Nest Resort. I had a room like a tourist until I found a new place to live, which I eventually did. But while I was still living at the Crow's Nest Resort, someone saw my shortwave radio. Someone called the Fiji military and reported that I was somehow listening to news from Australia. After the coup, I should point out that both newspapers and radio stations in Fiji shut down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:20:34", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, they did?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:20:35", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was nothing for several days. All you would hear if you tuned into the radio station was, we are the world, we are the people, over and over. So it was very spooky. And I think that gave me. So I really felt alone at that time. This was a time when Fiji was under martial law. A little bit later there was a curfew. You were not allowed, no one was allowed on the streets if you weren't an armed soldier after 8:00 at night. And I started realizing, my God, no newspapers, no radio. They don't want me to listen to Radio Australia on my shortwave radio, which the soldiers came to my room one day and confiscated and questioned me and actually took me to a checkpoint where they, a temporary headquarters in Sigatoka, and questioned me.\n\nAnd then just as like the Fijian culture goes, after everything is OK, they made yagona, also known as grog, and we sat down with the lieutenant, Sacusa Lalinbalavu was his name. And we drank grog, four or five of us Fijians on the temporary military corps headquarters in Sigatoka. And then they offered to drive me back to my temporary room at the Crow's Nest. Peace Corps was kind of cool when Monday morning the people at the Crow's Nest Resort pointed out that there was an article on the front page of the Fiji Times about a Peace Corps volunteer arrested." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:22:17", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:22:17", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that was not cool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:22:19", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you the only one?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:22:20", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was the only one until I went to Suva for a couple of days. And then we realized that other Peace Corps volunteers were calling in and saying, gosh, you know, we were detained by the military, and showing up in the paper as well. So where I was initially the bad guy for a couple of days, everything changed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:22:41", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Probably just as well they didn't have TV then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:22:43", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:22:46", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. So how long did this coup go on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:22:51", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there really wasn't an end to the coup. But certainly the gravity of the coup and how it sank in with individual people was a long time, Jack. What I saw immediately was where on the western side of Viti Levu, the main island, the Indians and the Fijians were really good friends. They had gone to school together. They had done a lot of things together as families. And the coup eventually polarized these people. It basically, I saw a lot of racism happening. And I remember one time I went to Suva for my gamma globulin shot right after those incidents. Had a friend come running up to my door in the hotel I was staying overnight in saying, Steve, you've got to come to my father's house because they're downtown. They're beating Indians and breaking into the Indian shops." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:23:53", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:23:53", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And she was terrified." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:23:54", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:23:54", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I went to their house and stayed for a while and then made my way back to the Peace Corps office via one street where." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:24:03", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Excuse me, but what did she expect you to do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:24:06", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that. She was a younger woman that was the daughter of a New Zealand expatriate that I also knew. I had met him in Kadavu, met her in Kadavu, and they seemed to be pretty much in the same places from then on that I was in Fiji, just coincidentally. And so basically I think Melody just wanted some reassurance and was terrified, and it was indeed terrifying to see what I saw." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:24:34", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Some moral support then. So there wasn't anything that you actually did to intervene?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:24:39", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, just be some shoulder to cry on, a friend to talk to while all the violence was happening." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:24:46", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your own feelings? Were you scared?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:24:50", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I tend to build a shell around myself, protective layer. And so, yes, I was terrified inside, but I was still functioning okay. Even though almost back to the Peace Corps office, I heard yelling and there were people grabbing big stones and throwing them through the glass fronts of Indian shops. It was hatred. And they were breaking, grabbing stuff, running off with it, all the windows, knocking down doors. And I remember there was a sandwich shop run by some New Zealand expatriates. They were so terrified they said, gosh, you know, we came and we don't want to stay and see this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:25:29", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And were you concerned about your own safety then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:25:32", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes and no, because I felt at that time I had been in country for a little over a year. I had learned the languages and customs enough to feel pretty darn comfortable. This is only my own perception and my own personality how I had blended in. But yes, I was scared. But yes, I kind of felt like nothing really bad was going to happen to me. The real scare was over with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:26:00", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. So you stuck it out. And then what happened? Did you stay with the same job or same location?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:26:06", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I did stay with the same job. I eventually found a small place right on about 50 yards from the South Pacific Ocean, a little tin shack kind of fashioned after a Fijian bure. And I was living in that shack only for about a month and a half. At that time, a Fijian woman was really helpful to me and we started dating. And after that I had gone up to the road to hitchhike one day into town to the hospital. Usually the bus wasn't all that reliable after the coups, and people would often stop if you're just standing on the road. Hey, where are you going? And you want a ride? Sure. But this time there was an Indian man standing on the road and he saw me and he said, where are you from? And I said, oh, from America. He said, where in America? And I said, Seattle. He said, I'm from Seattle. And I thought, oh come on, don't give me that. And he grabbed at his wallet and pulled it out and showed me a Washington State driver's license." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:27:05", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No kidding." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:27:06", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Introduced himself as George Mansingh and he said, my gosh, you've got to come and visit my family, my son and his wife and their daughter are here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:27:16", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And here in Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:27:17", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right here in Korotogo, walking distance from where I was living by the ocean there. So I arranged that weekend to go over and visit. I met Francis Singh, who was half Indian from his father and half Fijian, from the Fijian village on the east side of Viti Levu. And his wife, who was named Terry, and had a daughter named Megan. Terry was an IT professional in Silicon Valley and had met Francis, I think, in Hawaii. And a nice family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:27:51", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh. Excuse me for interrupting. You said you were dating a Fijian girl?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:27:57", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Emma and I went to movies and went out to eat and have lunch and stuff and had a pretty good relationship. Didn't move in together or anything like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:28:08", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, excuse me again. Was this your wife or your future wife?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:28:14", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, this was not my future wife." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:28:16", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. I just wanted to clarify that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:28:19", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So right now in time, we're basically looking at late July, August of 1987. I'd been in country for a year and a quarter and was doing okay, except that I kept having these pesky problems with my bowel. Ouch. Stomach was gurgling. My appetite wasn't really great. I'd go into Suva, talk to Wynu, the Peace Corps nurse, and they did some testing and said, well, you don't have anything. And then the second time they said, well, you have giardia, which is a little parasite that gets in you, gives you a lot of gas and easy to get rid of with a drug called Fasigyn that they gave me. And it didn't get rid of it, at least in my opinion, because I kept having the same symptoms. And eventually they felt, after several trips to Suva and several rounds of testing that were all negative, that it must be all in my head." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:29:18", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:29:18", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And unfortunately, the psychiatrist who they wanted me to see, who was a contracted Kiwi New Zealander from Peace Corps, had left right after the coup saying, my god, Fiji is a powder keg, I'm out of here. So the only other psychiatrist available would be Washington, D.C. So I was packed on a plane with two other volunteers, one who had unfortunately been sexually assaulted in Fiji and one who was actually an Indian woman, but she was raised and living in America. And we all went back on the same flight to Washington, D.C. I was tested again in Washington, D.C., and my gosh, I had all kinds of parasites. I had worms, I had giardia. And so, no, it wasn't all in my head. I definitely needed several courses over about a 15 day period to get rid of that.\n\nAnd meanwhile, I was sort of stuck in Washington, D.C. And I was given a daily stipend, walk around money, and I enjoyed going to the Smithsonian, doing different things. But one morning I remember very fondly that I was thinking about one of the nurses that had actually seen me off at the Sigatoka Hospital. Her name was Leela. And I was also thinking about the book that I had been reading when I arrived in Washington, D.C., at National Airport. It was in Fiji, you learn to read whatever you can get because there aren't a lot of books. But this was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:31:02", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In Fijian language or in English?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:31:03", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:31:05", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:31:05", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably less in Fijian language though. People are not really book people in Fiji. So I had been reading this book about some Nazi thing at the end of World War II, and when I got to my hotel that Peace Corps had arranged for me to go to, I think they rented out a whole floor of an inn in northwestern Washington, D.C. I just crashed out on, I was exhausted. I crashed out with jetlag on the bed and thinking about the book I had just read and asleep. I woke up hearing a very distinct German voice saying, what is this here we have? And it was a German man, an elderly man, probably in his late sixties. He was also a Peace Corps volunteer. His name was Fred Gunsberger. And Fred and I got to know each other. Got to know, in fact, that Fred had been a German soldier during World War II, and my father had been an American soldier during World War II." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:32:09", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, boy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:32:10", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was interesting. But the relationship between Fred Gunsberger and I also included the fact that the new Peace Corps, the Peace Corps director in Fiji, was the same woman he had been under when he was a volunteer in Botswana. Fred was leaving, he was closing his service because he had hypertension. But we went around Washington, D.C., in those few weeks that we had, just like father and son. Fred and I got to be really good friends and it wasn't until Fred was finally had decided to go back as a private individual to Botswana and live out the rest of his life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:32:53", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To Botswana, OK. But you kind of danced around this girl back in Sigatoka." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:33:00", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think that was because I had originally come for, quote unquote, psychiatric reasons to Washington, D.C., until they immediately found out I was full of worms. I did have to leave Washington by having a second visit to a psychiatrist. And that psychiatrist thought it was really interesting when I mentioned that one of the reasons I wanted to go back was not only to finish my Peace Corps service, but also because I was really interested in one of the nurses at Sigatoka Hospital." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:33:31", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me more. What's her name?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:33:34", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So Leela. It was Leela Wati Krishna. A lot of women in Fiji, I even noticed at the hospital, don't use a surname. They just use Leela Wati or some other name that doesn't include the father's name. So at the hospital we'd actually have to put F stroke N as in father's name and then put that as a separate name so we wouldn't call her Leela Krishna. She'd be Leela Wati father's name Krishna. But I was sent back to Fiji. Psychiatrist was really good about that. Told Peace Corps there's nothing wrong with this guy. He just had worms. And on the way back, I had a layover in San Francisco. So I got in touch with Francis Singh, who I had met his father and visited his family in Korotogo. He was now living in Silicon Valley. And so we he took me by Apple Computer and then back to the airport to catch my flight back to Fiji.\n\nAnd back in Fiji, I found out that the home that I had left to another friend named Satish, a local Indian guy, had kind of used it for partying and there had been dogs in there that had defecated and the place was a mess. So I was pretty miffed at Satish and cleaned up the place really well. Got it back to the standards and basically had Francis coming and going, when eventually he announced that he was leaving Fiji. He was going back and I could have the house and all of the things that were in the house. He had planned, when he brought his wife and his stepdaughter, to live there for multiple years. So they had brought a video cassette recorder. They had bought all kinds of American appliances. I had a full size refrigerator. I had a three bedroom house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:35:36", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. So this is modern living compared to the little bure on the beach." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:35:40", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Everything. Yeah. I could still visit that beach because it was only two blocks away, just down the way. But I had a much larger. [tape break]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:35:45", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were living in a nice house, and things were kind of exciting after the coup. Let's go back to your job then. How did things go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:35:58", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, every day I was going to Sigatoka Hospital. Every work day I was expected to show up. And I felt even though it wasn't exactly what Peace Corps thought I would be doing, I was doing something that was helpful and useful and it was allowing me to stay in Fiji and do the other things that I was doing. And of course I did have a warming relationship with this nurse named Leela, and Leela and I started dating. I thought it was interesting because right after Fiji had a second coup. The original one was in May '87. This one was in September of '87." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:36:38", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, same here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:36:38", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Another coup. And we got a different head nurse at Sigatoka Hospital at that time, and this nurse was helping the military a lot. She even gave a lot of the old hospital beds to the military for the guys to stay in. And she, Sister Varra was her name, and she really took a dim view of my dating Leela. We didn't do anything as far as displays of affection on the job. We were both very professional. Although Leela would occasionally, I'd find Leela in the lab waiting for me to tell me something that was going on and just hospital scuttlebutt or whatever. But Sister Varra, the new head nurse at the hospital, sent Leela away from the hospital and assigned her to public health project up the Sigatoka River." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:37:32", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because of you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:37:33", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was apparent to both of us that she didn't want us to be together, or any idea that we were together was not happy for her. So Leela and I, we continued dating on the weekends when she was back down in the valley, Sigatoka Valley, but it was very interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:37:51", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What kind of things did you do? What did you do for fun, hobbies and entertainment and all that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:37:55", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we took a trip to Ovalau, a couple of trips to Nadi prior to that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:38:01", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ovalau was an offshore island?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:38:02", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And Ovalau was a small offshore island. It was where the original government of Fiji was located before it moved to Suva." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:38:10", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:38:10", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But Ovalau had a lot of touristy kind of stuff to do and a lot of Victorian age stuff to see and do. And people that are a little more isolated from the main populace and in the main island. So it was really charming" + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:38:25", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you couldn't have been normal tourists since you spoke the language, understood the culture, and your now fiancée, or was she fiancée at that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:38:33", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, she wasn't yet my fiancée. That didn't happen for a few more months, but it was coming up to second year and I was going to have, my service would have been over. I was going to have to leave Fiji. And I at that point felt that there was enough of a strength in our relationship, my relationship with Leela that I really couldn't leave her alone. And at the time when I did some research, the Fiji government had what I considered kind of a sexist law in that if you're a foreign man and you come and marry somebody in Fiji, you've got to take her away from Fiji. But if you're a foreign woman and you come and marry someone in Fiji, then you can stay with that person in Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:39:23", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:39:24", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it became apparent that I was going to have to do a lot of quick thinking. And over a couple of months I made the decision to propose to Leela. And at that point she brought me home, not until that point, but at that point brought me home to a little shack that she lived in with her family. And her family consisted just of a 19 year old brother and her mother, who was widowed from a road accident her father had." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:39:57", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And were they accepting of you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:39:59", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they were very accepting of me. It was, they were proud to have me in their home, offering me all kinds of things. I think their mom actually gave me the gold necklace that I'm wearing now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:40:12", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, nice. Well, how did your proposal go? Was it done Fiji style, whatever that is?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:40:17", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, I'm not sure what that would have been, so no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:40:22", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Kava, kava." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:40:22", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What I did was just the typical. I found a very nice ring. The duty-free stores had a wonderful selection of jewelry, and I got her an emerald and ruby and diamond engagement ring, and did the traditional down on one knee. And would you marry me?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "00:40:39", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. So what did the wedding look like? Where was it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "00:40:42", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we decided that we'd like to have a traditional Indian wedding. Although traditional Indian weddings tend to be very long, both in Fiji and in India. And so we had the abbreviated version. It probably took about 3 hours or so. A pundit came to marry us, although in Fiji that doesn't legally make you married. So in fact, in July, a month before our marriage, we did have to, Leela and I went to Suva together, and at that point we were sharing a bed together, so that was OK. And we went to a justice of the peace and got married and came back. But in everyone else's eyes we were still not married. It was the Hindu ceremony that was going to mean everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "00:41:31", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "May I ask how your family in this country felt?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "00:41:35", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Really just supportive. My mom couldn't afford to go to Fiji and I couldn't import her there. So my father was having some health problems so he couldn't come." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "00:41:49", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were they accepting of your wife?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "00:41:52", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As near as I can tell, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "00:41:54", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "From a distance." + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "00:41:55", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From a distance, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "00:41:56", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At what point did they meet her?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "00:41:57", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And my father passed away before Leela and I came back to Seattle, where he was. But my mother met Leila in Maui, where I got my first job after we left Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "00:42:11", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "00:42:12", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So that was the initial, the initial shock. And then my mom came another time when we had moved from Maui to the big island in Hawaii, in Hilo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "00:42:23", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So how much longer were you in Fiji after you were married?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "00:42:26", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So almost exactly a year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "00:42:28", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A year, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "00:42:28", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So when I got married, it was pretty close to time to close service." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "00:42:33", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The second year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "00:42:33", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Most other two-year Peace Corps volunteers that I'd gone with were closing their service, and I went to a lot of the workshops. They had some really helpful ones for writing resumes and sending cover letters that ended up in the third year for being very helpful for me. As I mentioned, I had already gotten a job in Maui at Maui Memorial Hospital in the laboratory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "00:42:57", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. So you finished out your two years and then got a one year extension and then moved to Maui. Wow, what a story. Well, what did you do there? So, yeah, what were you doing in Maui and what are you doing now as a consequence of the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "00:43:20", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, at the time, I was living in Maui with Leela, and as I said, I already had a job. So when we arrived, it was basically one of the people with the company, Clinical Labs of Hawaii, met us, bought us lunch, got us accommodations, and helped us find a place to live eventually, which was a little shack out behind a Japanese family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "00:43:46", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think the Peace Corps was helpful in getting you that next job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "00:43:50", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that the end of service program that I had attended after two years gave me a lot of information about sending cover letters and writing a good resume and getting that going. So in that respect, yes. I thought it was interesting. A lot of the cover letters that I sent to other hospitals in Hawaii turned out all to go to Clinical Labs of Hawaii because they had the laboratories and all of the other places." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "00:44:18", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They're trying to pigeonhole you. And Leela, did she get a job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "00:44:22", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And Leela was a real stubborn person. So about working, she basically, from the time she graduated nursing school, she had been in Kadavu about a year before I was sent to Kadavu. She was in Sigatoka. She was all over Fiji as a nurse. And so after I started working at Maui Memorial Hospital, I went to the personnel office or the human resources department and said, gosh, you know, I have this person that's a nurse in Fiji and do you have anything that? They gave me a thing to fill out for her and said, sure, they were really excited about it. And Leela got hired as a, not sure exactly what the title was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "00:45:07", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, so you were husband and wife at that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "00:45:08", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were husband and wife at that. We were married in Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "00:45:12", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. Well, inclined to shift from Fiji to American culture. Did that cause any problems in the workplace working together?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "00:45:20", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, we pretty much had our own hours. Leela ended up having to work some night shift and like that. So it was a bit challenging in the beginning, but she was very proud to be working for an American wage." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "00:45:33", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, Hawaii is a very mixed culture. How were you received there as an interracial culture?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "00:45:40", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm not sure about that, Jack. I sometimes felt everything was good, but I do think there was some friction too. I think I've mentioned that Leela is an Indian that's fairly dark skinned Indian, and I think that people saw that as sometimes not a favorable thing, some of the locals. And especially when we moved to the Big Island of Hawaii, I really felt that Leela was being pigeonholed and I don't think everybody was all that accepting. And so she was really strong and making her way. She immediately was transferred to Hilo Hospital, where I was working in the laboratory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "00:46:24", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because of you, do you think?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "00:46:26", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't think so, no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "00:46:28", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. So it wasn't trying to split you up like the first situation back in Sigatoka?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "00:46:32", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, that was just bizarre." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "00:46:33", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Well, let's fast forward. Here you are in Seattle and she's working and you have, you live in a nice neighborhood. How have you been received as a mixed couple, if that's even an issue?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "00:46:47", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think pretty much it's pretty multicultural in Seattle. Seattle is always, in my opinion, been fairly, fairly multicultural." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "00:46:57", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So do you imagine living here for time to come?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "00:47:01", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so. Leela's family is here now, her mom and her brother. Her mom did pass away a couple of years ago. Her brother married in a Hindu ceremony up in North Seattle, married an Indian woman who had come from Fiji. And they're doing really well now. They have two children. They have a house bigger than ours out in Renton, which is a bit south of Seattle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "00:47:27", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh. And so you don't see yourself leaving this area because she has family now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "00:47:32", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that's the main reason, you picked that up right away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "00:47:35", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, Fijians are very family oriented." + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "00:47:35", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's sort of an anchor, her brother and her are very close." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "00:47:38", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Have you been back to Fiji to visit?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "00:47:41", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Last time we went back to Fiji together was 2005." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "00:47:46", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "00:47:46", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that was a lot of fun. I met a couple of people, one an old friend that I had lived with, and another an old friend that was from the Peace Corps office, right on the street in Suva. Fiji is just a small place where you can be in a country of 750,000 people, but here on the main island, my gosh, how can it be? You just go to Suva, the capital, and you're walking around the street and one day there's two people that, hi, how are you doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "00:48:15", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. So that was 15 years later, after they had TV. Had the country changed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "00:48:20", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "00:48:22", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Or had you changed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "00:48:25", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Both are very definitely true. Fiji, I think, did not positively change because of television. I mean, that Fiji did not change in a positive way. I don't want to get into all the pros and cons. And I haven't lived as a resident since my Peace Corps service ended in 1989. So I'm always sort of a visitor, and I'm a little bit reluctant to start making judgment calls just from a two week visit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "00:48:57", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "00:48:58", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And what Leela's relatives, she has a lot of aunts and uncles in Fiji that she stays in contact with, but and her brother Shadawan also has a lot of old friends. So I get reports all the time. But firsthand, I don't know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "00:49:12", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. How about culture shock? Did you go through any culture shock either in Hawaii or coming back here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "00:49:17", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't believe that I did. And I think Leela also is in a lot of ways like me, that she's a strong person and knows what she wants to do. And I think she was a real trooper about going through stuff pretty well. There were some weird, possibly racist issues in Hawaii and in America, but I think we overcame them fairly fast." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "00:49:39", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, well, just a difference in material issues, everything from cars to supermarkets. Did that have any effect on you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "00:49:47", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it really did make a difference, although I think I'm pretty like a chameleon. I fit in pretty well to a different culture. I found out thanks to Peace Corps and thanks to the people of Fiji for the positive feedback that I got fairly quickly. So once we came back to America, we were in Maui. We saw cars and we saw movies and we saw television and all of the American things. I think that we were kind of expecting it and kind of used to it. I should make a point that Leela did part of her midwife training in New Zealand, and so she'd been out of Fiji, and we had gone for a three week vacation prior to leaving Fiji to Hawaii. That's when I interviewed for the job that I eventually got. So Leela had seen Pearl City and the mall there and Honolulu and Hilo, and so it was pretty, it wasn't all new for her and she was prepared for it.\n\nAnd I think, like a lot of volunteers do, talk about culture shock. But I think the worst shock that I had was realizing that for three years I had been in a cocoon woven by Peace Corps to take care of my every needs, whether it's my every three month gamma globulin shots, my periodic health checks, my medications sent to me on time all the time, my stipend, my money for housing. All taken care of. I had never been in the military before, and I have not since. I've heard from soldiers that's how they live. But for me it was getting away from that sort of cocoon influence and the safety that I had felt from that. That was probably the most painful, and it wasn't all that painful, once we started both getting American wages and we both were gainfully employed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "00:51:43", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And plus you were older at the time. So you were 35 when you went into the Peace Corps. You would be now 38." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "00:51:50", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "38 or 39." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "00:51:50", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. Yeah. So a little bit more mature. And what are you doing these days?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "00:51:55", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So these days, I had been working as medical technologist with a company that basically ate up the old job that I had at Swedish Hospital. They came in when I was gone in Fiji and Hawaii and, and there were a lot of mergers in laboratories all over. It was interesting to me that when I went back to the very same person that I had worked with at Swedish Hospital in the laboratory, that person interviewed me for a new job when Leela and I had just gotten from Hawaii to Seattle. And he said, well, what's to, how do we know that you're not going to just go off and join Peace Corps again? He just was really oblivious to the fact that, you know, I'd done my service. I was back as a regular person. I had given four weeks’ notice, but he thought that he didn't want me back. He didn't want me to work with their team of people anymore." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "00:53:02", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "00:53:02", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I found alternate situation at Pacific Medical Center here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "00:53:05", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And afraid of losing you. OK. Well, I want to ask you. So to try and summarize, um, we've talked about what you did before Peace Corps, what you did during the Peace Corps, what you're doing now and subsequent to Peace Corps. What do you consider to be your biggest accomplishments or successes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "00:53:27", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Really, I think that it was a lot easier to have huge accomplishments when I was in Fiji. So maybe turning the slate a little bit. Having just had our 31st wedding anniversary, August 20th." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "00:53:47", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Congratulations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "00:53:49", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A few weeks ago. That's certainly accomplishment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "00:53:51", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I'd say so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "00:53:52", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We've definitely going through a lot of ups and downs. But we have stayed together and her brother has stayed geographically close to where we are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "00:54:00", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, well, it sounds like you had a lot of relationships in Fiji, I mean, friends and associates and so on. You mixed with a lot of people, Fijians and Indians. What more can you say about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "00:54:12", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think that all in all, learning to live in a different culture. Actually Fiji has two very distinctly different cultures, the Fijian culture, not to be confused with the Fiji Indians, the people whose ancestors had been brought to Fiji to work the cane fields and offered if they worked for ten years they could stay and become citizens and become Fiji citizens. So they. So I think it was really valuable not only to live in the Indian community and have Indian friends, but to live in the Fijian community and have Fijian friends and see the differences and the similarities in both cultures. And to have lived in both of those cultures was just a very, it's a precious memory and it's something that sometimes I can revive a bit if I go back and I have friends still there.\n\nBut it's really helped in a multicultural situation and a multicultural workplace to be able to relate to other people from other parts of the world. I think that it takes the sharp edge off my being an American, quote unquote. I think it's a lot easier to mix with the woman that I worked with as a med tech from Hong Kong and the folks that I knew from Nigeria that were med techs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "00:55:40", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "00:55:40", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it just made everything easier. I wasn't acting like an American that knew all about their country, that I was pushy and I was instead culturally aware that, hey, these people live differently than you do, Steve. And you need to find out a little more about their culture, because even though they're trying to act as American as they can to fit in, they still have something that's very fundamental and very precious to them, and that's their own culture." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "00:56:11", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that's right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "00:56:12", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So respect it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "00:56:13", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And Fiji is communal as well. So very sharing and caring people. Well, we've touched on the three goals of the Peace Corps, which is a technology transfer, and it sounds like you were successful in that department. You went over knowing very little about Fiji and you came back with a great understanding and a wife. That's wonderful. So how do you share all that experience with your neighbors or your colleagues or whomever you might interact on a daily basis?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "00:56:44", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, on a daily basis, it's not really an issue. And I think I've found that when you start talking about your Peace Corps experience, it's often a sort of a foreign concept to a lot of people. They, most people are not really aware that Peace Corps exists or if they are, they've maybe heard some good or bad stories. I remember even in Fiji, I was asked, did your government make you come here? They didn't know that, no, I had given up a good job to go and help people in Fiji in any way that I could. And here in America, again, it's just a foreign concept and people get bored really fast hearing about, yeah, you were in Fiji. So what? It's interesting, in the last few years I've noticed that the awareness of Fiji as a resort location or tourist location has really gone up, and certainly Fiji Water as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "00:57:39", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to say thanks to Fiji Water, huh?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "00:57:42", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very possibly. I'm not sure where the source is that they talk about on the bottle, but." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "00:57:48", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's a nice picture of a waterfall." + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "00:57:51", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "00:57:51", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, let me ask you one more question that I've been pondering. I posed this last night to give you time to think about it. What good did we do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "00:57:59", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What good did we do as Peace Corps Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "00:58:01", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "00:58:02", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think a lot, a lot of people in Fiji would tell me, you know, I used to have three different Peace Corps teachers, they'd call them Peace Corpses." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "00:58:13", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "00:58:15", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And a lot of people had Peace Corps influence in their elementary school and their high school. Even Leela, my wife, the other day I was talking about this interview upcoming and she said, yeah, I had two. My chemistry teacher was a Peace Corps volunteer, and I think it was my language, English teacher." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "00:58:37", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow, that's significant. I'm sorry that she's not here. I would have loved to have met her. And I will come back one day and see her or come to the next reunion. Steve, is there anything else you'd like to add? This has been marvelous talking to you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "00:58:50", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, Jack, thanks a lot. I think the main thing is that marking time. It's been a while and Fiji has changed a lot. And when I was in Fiji we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Peace Corps and I just noticed online that Fiji celebrated its 50th anniversary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "00:59:09", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Fifty now, wow, that's great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "00:59:09", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So." + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "00:59:10", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Well, Steve, thank you very much for your time and all the information and for your service, of course. And please give my regards to your wife." + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "00:59:17", + "speaker": "Steve M. Shepard", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's been my pleasure, Jack. Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "00:59:19", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00178", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FisherAL/fisheral.htm", + "original_file_name": "FisherAL_5-3-11.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FisherAL/FisherAL_5-3-11.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Anna L. Fisher", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 3 May 2011" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Anna L. Fisher" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 3, 2011. This oral history with Dr. Anna Fisher is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is the interviewer, assisted by Sandra Johnson.\\n\\n Thanks again for taking time out of your schedule today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No problem. Thanks for pushing it up a little bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, it’s our pleasure. We’re just happy you’re willing to come in and talk to us.\\n\\n Last time, we talked about your flight, STS-51A, and one of the things we didn’t cover was the fact that you were the first mother in space, and that seemed to be a big deal, at least for the news media. What did you think about all that coverage and the interest in being that first mother in space?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the whole evolution of everything was kind of a very busy time, because here I was, a new mother. Did we talk about that last time, that I was a new mother and I was training for my flight and was a CapCom [Capsule Communicator]? I think we talked about that last time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, we talked about those things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was a very, very busy year. I didn’t really expect people to be all that interested, but I guess they’re always looking for something novel with each Shuttle flight, so I guess that was it. I guess what I found the most interesting was after I got back. There’s an organization in New York City [New York] that gives out Mother of the Year Awards, and I received it that following year after I flew. I guess Susan Lucci was in that group, and there was a governor of Kentucky who was a lady. I don’t remember her name. I just thought it was funny that I got an award for being Mother of the Year when I was really, really busy, and then when I took a seven-year leave of absence, I didn’t get it so I found that always kind of ironic. It was neat. My daughter, who just got married on April second, she always tells me I owe it all to her." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Isn’t that nice of her? That’s too funny." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it was interesting, but I guess the strangest question I was asked was either at my preflight press conference or I think we actually had a press conference in flight, and one European reporter asked me how being the operator of an arm made me a better mother. I thought that was kind of a weird question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think I read you’re the Astromom at that point." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, tell us about the next mission you were assigned to, which I think was supposed to be commanded by Mike [Michael L.] Coats, STS-61H." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wound up being assigned to that flight right after I got back from my flight, and we would have been the flight right after Challenger [STS-51L]. So, initially, right after Challenger, in order to keep the flight control teams proficient, we were supporting a lot of sims [simulations] just to keep everybody proficient after the shock of Challenger. But then it was not certain how long that downtime was going to be, so my husband and I decided we wanted to have our second child, and so I decided to do that. They were kind of mutually exclusive at the time.\\n\\n Also I found out that having two children was way more work than just one, and I just really wanted to enjoy some time with the girls, too, because I knew that there were a lot of people waiting in line to fly on the Shuttle, but there weren’t a lot of people waiting in line to be the mother for Kristin and Kara. I wanted to just enjoy it so I decided to take some time off. I think as I mentioned last time, it wasn’t a conscious effort to say, “I’m going to take X amount of years off.” It was just a year at a time.\\n\\n My oldest daughter, Kristin, was in school and getting into a lot of activities. Plus, we started her in a private school in Houston, so I was involved with all the logistics of getting her back and forth. We just made the decision for our family that that’s what we were going to do for the next couple of years. I really don’t regret that. That time wouldn’t come back to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think it had any sort of impact on your career here at JSC, taking that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I think it definitely did. I definitely would have probably flown at least one more time. When I first came back in ’96, it was like coming back to a totally different office. When I left, you did business by having meetings. You would send out a memo if you were trying to put out an official crew position on whatever issue, and nobody had computers. I think one person, Steve [Steven A.] Hawley, had a computer. When I came back, everybody had a computer; everybody was on e-mail. The way the office worked was just totally different. Pretty much everybody that I worked with, there were a couple exceptions, but for the most part the bulk of the people I worked with were gone. So it took about a year or so to really get back into the office.\\n\\n But the one thing I learned, again, I don’t remember if I mentioned it when we spoke last time, but by the time I came back, there were very few people left in the office that remembered the beginning of the Shuttle Program, and we were just getting really at the beginning of the Space Station Program at that point. I think I was able to provide an insight that they might not otherwise have had. Here we are now in the nineties, and the Shuttle was flying; it was a very proficient and experienced team. Our products, our procedures were all very good, but it wasn’t like that at the beginning of the Shuttle Program. I think the expectations, particularly of some of the earlier Expedition crews, were a little unrealistic. I think I was able to provide a perspective to try to get products that were good, but to also make the other folks in the Astronaut Office realize that the Shuttle was just like this at the beginning. The simulators at the beginning didn’t work, and I can’t tell you the number of times I’d go over for an SMS [Shuttle Mission Simulator] session and it would crash and you’d go back to your office until they fixed it. That hardly ever happens now.\\n\\n I remember when we worked on our procedures for ascent, orbit, and entry. There were three different teams, and you could have almost an identical procedure for ascent, which is almost the exact same procedure for entry, and they would look totally different because different people wrote them. During the downtime for Challenger, that was one of the things we did; we went through the entire Shuttle flight data file [FDF] and tried to make it consistent. So, in a way, that downtime was valuable because I think later crews really benefited from that. The expectation at the beginning of Station was, I think, very unrealistic, and so I think I was able to provide a unique perspective.\\n\\n The other thing that happened at the beginning of Station—because everybody wanted to work on Shuttle, all the new people that were hired were put on working Station, rather than the experienced people. So then it was kind of like a double hit. Not only were you working a new program, which is always difficult, but it was also an international program and we were trying to work with our Russian colleagues as well as the other international partners." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had mentioned something that brought up a question that I had thought of earlier. How has the office changed since you came in in ’78? I understand it was basically a test pilots’ office at that point. Now we have our first female astronaut chief, [Peggy A. Whitson], and she’s a scientist. So can you explain how it’s changed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, it has changed dramatically in some respects. A lot more rules." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, really? Can you explain that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I first came here, you were expected to use good judgment. There weren’t rules for every little thing you did, particularly T-38 flying. More than that, though, just across the board. Either people didn’t use good judgment, which resulted in the rules, but there’s just a lot more regulations, I think, now and things are spelled out a lot more clearly.\\n\\n The people that I first came into the office with were Vietnam pilots who had also been to test pilot school. They also weren’t used to working with women as colleagues. They were used to women in a support role, either as their wives or maybe as secretaries. But the new class of men have grown up with women and are used to women being their colleagues. So that’s a difference.\\n\\n Definitely with the Shuttle flying, it would be more difficult to have a chief of the office who wasn’t a pilot, just because so many of the decisions that the chief of the office has to make required you to be a pilot, and a lot of their things that they do, like being the weather pilot at KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida]. They usually tried very hard to have a mission specialist be the deputy chief so that both views got represented. I think that’s pretty consistent over the entire program. When I first got here it was pretty much all pilots for both the chief and the deputy, but starting probably after Challenger that changed. That’s been pretty consistent that there’d be a pilot who was the chief and a mission specialist who was a deputy.\\n\\n Of course, now with Station, it’s really the Station experience. Particularly those who’ve launched on a Soyuz, since that’s pretty much all that we’re launching on now. So somebody with that kind of experience is in a better position to make the critical decisions that need to be made at that level. The needs in that position changed, which allowed a mission specialist to actually be the head of the office, but it does create a different feel to the office, particularly with the director of FCOD [Flight Crew Operations Directorate] being Janet [L.] Kavandi, a woman. Some of the folks in my office were joking about how women are taking over the world." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that’s true, isn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I remember Judy [Judith A.] Resnik came up with these bright pink bumper stickers that we had made that said, “A Woman’s Place is in the Cockpit,” but we wouldn’t need those anymore, I don’t think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now that you have women in the cockpit.\\n\\n I did want to ask you to talk a little bit about Judy Resnik. I know that you had mentioned you were friends before you came to the office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we didn’t really know each other. She was in the interview group with my husband, who didn’t get selected on that go-around in, I guess, about November. So I actually knew her then through him. Then as it got closer to the announcement, both of us were getting calls from reporters, so we started to realize that something was probably up. And I think the night before when we were expecting the announcement to be issued, we went out to dinner together. The night, when the announcement was made, Bill took us both out to dinner too. Then we’ve just been friends over the years. It was neat sharing that night before and that night after with her." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "She’s seems to be a very special person. When people talk about her, a lot of people say she was their best friend, so she obviously had a lot of friends in the office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, she was great. I was actually good friends with her half-sister, who was an interior decorator who helped me get some stuff for my house and went shopping with me up in Dallas [Texas], so I was really good friends with her, her half-sister." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wanted to ask you about an incident that I read about in the newspaper. I was just curious about your insight. There was an interview done with Judy, and basically the headline was something like “Women’s Lib Didn’t Get Astronaut Where She Was.” Basically someone had asked her did she think that the feminist or women’s liberation movements led to her selection, and she said she thought it was her experiences. So I was curious, from your perspective as a female astronaut, do you think it was your experience or a combination of both?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think Judy was probably focusing more on the fact that she wasn’t selected as a woman but because of her credentials. I think it would be naïve to say that we didn’t benefit from the feminist movement and from women who went before us pushing hard for equal rights.\\n\\n I just saw a very dramatic difference just in the four classes at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] when I was in medical school. When I was a freshman in medical school, the senior class had three or four women. The next class had maybe eight-ish, six to eight. The next class had around ten-ish, and my class had fifteen or sixteen. So just in that four-year period, and I started in ’72, so that other class would have started in like ’68 or ’69, something like that. That was a pretty dramatic difference, I thought, because there really weren’t that many women in medicine at the time. Now I think the classes are pretty much 50-50 so I definitely am grateful to the women who went before us.\\n\\n I do think NASA made a commitment with the ’78 class to select women, so I feel that I definitely had the credentials to be selected, but I feel that being a woman maybe helped a little bit as well in this one case. Whereas many years before being a woman didn’t help you at all. I feel that NASA had made that commitment, and someone with my background, I think that helped, and I’m really grateful to the women who went before us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s an amazing class, what you’ve all done.\\n\\n I did want to ask about the Challenger accident. Where were you when the accident happened?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I know exactly where I was. Jim [James F.] Buchli and I, like I said, that was the time that we were at a robotics training session in the SMS. We were up on the flight deck, and I kept asking, “Is the launch still on?” because we’d been listening to the weather. I didn’t get the impression that our training team or anybody was going to stop, because I kept saying, “Are they going to launch yet? Are they going to launch?”\\n\\n When they came out of the ten-minute hold at nine minutes, I asked them to freeze the sim, and we went down to the conference room to watch it. We were watching it on TV. As soon as it happened, Jim and I looked at each other and said, “We’re going to cancel,” because we knew immediately what the outcome was. So that’s what I was doing. We ran over to the office, and we all tried to find ways to help. I remember that evening we all went out to Ellington [Field, Texas], and we were waiting for the families to come back, to show our support." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you spend much time with any of the families after the accident?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We have a casualty assistant officer assigned to each person, so that person spent the most time with them. Mike [Michael J.] Smith’s family, for example, was a really good friend. We used to water ski together. We both lived on the water. I was really good friends with Dick [Francis R.] Scobee and with Judy, of course. As all the memorials went on, we spent time with their families." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you play any role in the investigation or the recovery of Challenger itself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, because I was still assigned to the crew at that point, so we were trying to keep all the flight controllers proficient in everything. We were the most proficient crew at that point so we spent a lot of our time doing that. Then I was our lead for the flight data file, and, like I said, we had a massive effort to redo all the checklists, review them, make sure they were consistent. So that’s what I was doing post-Challenger." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I also read on your biosheet that you started working some Space Station issues. Can you talk about that a little bit?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We decided to have Kara, and they decided to abolish the crews. They put the [STS]-26 crew in as the Return to Flight with Rick [Frederick H.] Hauck, who was the commander of my flight. All that got shuffled, and we decided to have Kara.\\n\\n So then I think I was on leave for about a year and a half, and I came back and worked part-time, and that’s when I started working some Station things. When I came back and they asked me to work some of the training issues, the first thing I found out was that the international agreements were such that each partner country was going to have training in their country. My initial thought was you put all the simulators here and do all the training here. So then I looked and they said, “Well, you know, that’s not something that we’re going to be able to change. That’s part of the international agreements.”\\n\\n I remember my first comment was, “Well, then you better hire a bunch of divorce attorneys and put them up in the front office, because this is going to be a nightmare for people training.” That was way back. Kara was born in ’89, so it would have been ’91. All the complaints we’re hearing now about how bad the traveling is, I knew that right away, but there was no way to really change that because each country wanted to have its part. I understood that. They wanted to show people in their country that they’re putting money towards the International Space Station, that astronauts were coming there too. You just knew right from the beginning that that was going to be a big issue.\\n\\n I came back and started doing that, but at the time it was still Space Station Freedom. We had not yet entered into the agreements with the Russians. I think it was just the other international partners at the time so it just didn’t seem real. I was really enjoying my time home with the girls. I just said, “If I’m going to come back and work on something, I want it to be real and it’s going to happen.” Because it felt like—and I know a lot of people felt that way: “Design this. Okay, now take some money away, and let’s see what you can do; let’s redesign it now.” It just felt like it was going to be an endless study, and I didn’t feel like that was worth being away from my girls for. I went back onto leave of absence and then, like I said, came back in ’96.\\n\\n So that took about a year, like I said, to kind of get back in the swing of things, and around that time, of course, the ’96 class was selected. Mike [Edward Michael] Fincke, Dan [Daniel C.] Burbank, Peggy [Whitson] was in the ’96 class. I was kind of the deputy—at the time it wasn’t the Space Station Branch—but we just had a technical assistant to the chief who followed that, and it was Tammy [Tamara E.] Jernigan. I think Ellen Ochoa did that and Tom [Thomas D.] Jones. And then I was around enough to where it was obvious it was heading my way. For a while, I didn’t want to. I wanted it to stay more Shuttle focused. Then I finally saw that this new class was coming in, and, like I said, there weren’t the people around who remembered what the early days of the Shuttle were like, so I finally gave in. They made me chief of the Space Station Branch.\\n\\n While that was still evolving, I still remember Dan and Mike, and I don’t know if Peggy was there or Sandy [Sandra H.] Magnus, and I looked at them and said, “You know, in case you haven’t looked at the manifest, all the flights in the outgoing years are building the Space Station. If Space Station doesn’t work, you guys are going to be out of a job so I suggest you work on this and take it very seriously,” and I never had to say another word. At that point we had made the agreement with the Russians.\\n\\n Has somebody talked to you about the Cape Crusaders, as we call them, the people who work at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]? I came up with the idea that we needed something equivalent in Russia. We’ll create the Russian Crusaders. Of course, there’s no real formal way to do that. You use what I call blue-suit diplomacy, you know, go over there, make friends. I just said, “Get in over there however you can and start learning about their hardware. Let’s help them with the procedures.”\\n\\n Originally all the procedures were going to be in English. Poor Dick [Richard C.] Snyder, who’s the head of the ODFCB (the Operations Data File Control Board), I remember going to him and saying, “We’ve got to translate these procedures from Russian to English, because it’s not going to happen any other way.” He hadn’t budgeted for any of that. So we developed a group of folks. Slowly, MOD [Mission Operations Directorate] started sending people over there as well, as that began to develop. In the earliest stages of that, we were just kind of creating that all as it went." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s interesting. I like that, that term “blue-suit diplomacy.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. The other one I’ll say with my girls or if I’m doing something, I’ll say, “Let’s use some Shuttle diplomacy here.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s too funny.\\n\\n Have you been to Russia yourself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. In fact, I went for ten days for a TIM (Technical Interchange Meeting) that they used to have, but way before Expedition 1. Mike Fincke had trained in Russia and was pretty proficient at Russian, and he was, like I said, in the branch. I remember he’d be at meetings and he would whisper in my ear, “Okay, you’re supposed to do a toast now,” or something like that, because Mike is so into etiquette and customs in other countries. I became really good friends with the people that were on that ODF [Operational Data File] Control Board. In fact, I’m still really good friends with Tatiana Matveeva, who’s a flight controller over in Russia, and stay in touch with those folks because it was pretty interesting.\\n\\n I said of those early days that I was ready to go negotiate nuclear arm agreements after learning to negotiate with the Russians about making our displays the same, making our procedures the same. At the time, our office procedure was it’s going to be one station; English is going to be the language. Obviously, we were not even successful in our attempts, but we had noble goals back then to keep the Station from being segmented. Unfortunately, it has evolved that way into pretty much segmented ops right now, although, again, talking with Dan the other day, I think some of the folks who did that early work with the Russians have some ideas of how to try to maybe turn that around a little bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you tell us a little bit about negotiating with the Russians?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I was kind of joking. We would have these ODF Control Board meetings where Tatiana, love her to death, but, oh, my god, was she a difficult negotiator. I mean, you would argue over does a period mean, “and,” or the meanings of the symbols in the procedures. Then they actually had a lady who was the head of all the development of their displays. I’ve forgotten her name now, but they called her the “Dragon Lady.” She had all these young programmers who were computer savvy working for her. Getting her to agree, and our other international partners, that our displays had to have a common look and feel was difficult. The way the international high-level agreements were written for Space Station, and still are, is that each partner could do whatever they wanted in their own module. That would be like when you were in Europe and every time you crossed a border, the money changed, everything changed. That would have been a nightmare on the Station.\\n\\n We had to convince them that the right thing to do was to make the displays look the same and to make our procedures look the same. It wasn’t 100 percent easy with the Europeans and the Japanese, but it was really hard with the Russians. The only way I learned that we were able to make progress is by becoming friends. Like when they were in town in Houston, I had them over for dinners and things like that, and as we became friends and partners, then it was much easier for them to agree.\\n\\n I came to really admire them. When I’d go over to visit, at some points there, some of their flight controllers were not being paid. They were working two and three jobs to make enough money to support their families, and they continued to work in Mission Control without being paid sometimes. You began to realize they believed in space just as much as we do, and I came to respect some of their ways of doing business. I think we formed a nice team and blended.\\n\\n If I look back, actually, on my career, I would have to say, for me, that was probably the most personally rewarding time. I love my flight, that was wonderful, but I think my major contributions to the program were probably during that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think that animosity was because of the Cold War, or were there other reasons behind their mistrust of Americans initially?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it’s just the way their whole society was back then. One of the things that was job security was if you knew a certain area, and you didn’t tell anyone else. Nobody could get rid of you. No, really, I’m not joking. I really think that was part of their mentality, so each little area in training and in procedures had their area of expertise, and they did not like to share it with someone else.\\n\\n Also early on, the Russians had far fewer people than we did to work that program, so I think early on they kind of did a little bit of what we did. Like at the beginning of Space Station, we assigned all of our new people. They wouldn’t send necessarily the correct person over to our meetings. I found out later that Tatiana, she really wasn’t working procedures. She was really a flight controller, but somehow they just picked her probably for her negotiating skills.\\n\\n And then definitely the Cold War atmosphere, some of the pilots that I came in with just thought we were absolutely out of our minds to be partners. I’ll have to be honest, when I first came back, I thought we had lost our minds too. I came to totally reverse that opinion, but when I first heard that we were going to be partners with the Russians, I was shocked. In retrospect, it was a very good decision.\\n\\n The thing that I feel badly about is when they had that big discussion about the two- or three-billion-dollar overrun for the Space Station and a lot of people lost their jobs, I feel that that was very unfair. The decision to become partners with the Russians was made at a much higher level. That wasn’t something made at JSC, it was made as an international agreement. Their rationale was because the Russians already had experience it was going to be cheaper. Well, you don’t have to be too smart to know that it might have been a good move to do that. But that it was going to be cheaper? Just in the one area that I mentioned, we wound up having to translate all the procedures from Russian into English, and we had to pay for it. So to think that this was going to make the Space Station cheaper was a very naïve assumption, but I think it was that two or three billion or whatever it was they say, that overrun, that money was so well spent. Would you rather be building nuclear weapons to defend yourself, or would you rather be making friends and becoming partners with them? So I feel very badly for some of the people who were criticized, some of the early Station Program people, George [W.S.] Abbey, who was the Center Director at the time. I think they took a lot of criticism that was not warranted, because I think we really got our money’s worth, looking at it from a much bigger, broader perspective.\\n\\n One of my favorite memories of that whole time was on one of my trips to Russia. It was in September, and I met my friend Tatiana for dinner and a glass of wine in a little restaurant on Red Square. I was sitting there with her, having a glass of wine and eating. There was a full Moon, and right in the background was the Kremlin and all that stuff that I remembered seeing on TV, on—I guess it was May Day, when you used to see all their soldiers marching and tanks. I don’t know if you remember all that, but I certainly grew up with that Cold War mentality. I just said, “I just cannot believe I’m sitting here at this very same place where all those tanks would roll by, and now we’re partners.” And in such a short period of time.\\n\\n I think the Space Station—when people ask about the science, which I think is wonderful—people got more than their money’s worth. I feel that there may be a lesson to be learned there for the rest of the world, particularly in regards to the Middle East, China, and North Korea. You know, when you work together on these big projects and you start getting people working together one on one and not as this nation with that nation, and you start to have a common goal, a lot of those differences go away. I think that we should perhaps learn from that and use it in other areas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a good summary. You had mentioned that there are segmented ops on Space Station. Can you talk about that a little bit?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. It’s pretty much, as I understand it, and I’m training right now to be an ISS [International Space Station] CapCom, so I’ll probably become a lot more familiar with it as time goes by, but it sounds pretty much as though the Russians are operating their segment and the U.S. is operating our segment. Of course, there is some cross-training, but because the training flows were so long—I mean, the training was just a killer for people. First you were on a backup crew, then you became prime crew and you were basically traveling back and forth between Russia and the U.S. Then as we added other partners, the Japanese and the Europeans, the training was just brutal, and people weren’t willing to do more than one flow.\\n\\n I think it was Piers [J.] Sellers and a couple other folks tried to come up with what we call single flow to launch now. You no longer have dedicated backup crews, so you don’t have to do a backup flow. Then you just take whatever the next crew is going to back up the flight ahead of it if anything occurs. It took a long time for them to negotiate that with the Russians, because the Russian mentality of dedicated backup crews was well ingrained. I’m not quite sure how Piers and all were able to negotiate that. I’m sure it took a lot of talking. So now we have that single flow to launch. It’s implemented, and that has reduced the training time. What it’s also done is there’s only X amount of time, so pretty much the U.S. is focusing on the U.S. side, and the Russians on the Russian side at the specialist level.\\n\\n [William Shepherd] Shep and those guys for Expedition 1, Expedition 2, they felt like they needed to know everything about everything, and as the Station got bigger and bigger, and as I can tell you from just being in the ISS CapCom flow, there’s just too much information. There’s no way you could know everything about every system in every module and ever finish training. You would be training for the rest of your life. They had to come up with some way to get their hands around that, and one of the things they did is they came up with this user, operator, specialist. So every crew, certain people are designated specialists in certain systems and maybe just a user of a particular system. A user is just someone who knows a little bit about it, an operator is someone who can do nominal procedures, and then the specialist is the one that can do the malfunction procedures if there’s a problem. So that’s one way they tried to reduce the training.\\n\\n Also you don’t have many cosmonauts that are specialists on U.S. system, and you don’t have many U.S. astronauts that are specialists on Russian systems. To the extent that I think there’s some concern that the commander is not necessarily as knowledgeable about everything that they need to be, they want to actually try to beef up that kind of training on the others. If you have a U.S. commander, there’s certain things you need to know about the Russian side for an emergency, and vice versa when there’s a Russian commander.\\n\\n It has evolved into much more segmented ops than we naively initially wanted. We initially would think that you would have a crew and the commander would decide who’s going to be doing what. And that’s the other thing. If you want the cosmonauts to do training on a U.S. segment, then you have to negotiate that with them. A commander can’t just decide, “I want Cosmonaut A to be a specialist on the U.S. ECLSS [Environmental Control and Life Support] system.” That all has to be negotiated. So that’s very different than in a Shuttle flight. A commander decided how he was going to allocate his crew and then would go discuss it with the chief of the office and make sure they were in agreement." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Kind of makes things pretty cumbersome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it’s a good learning process now, because if we are going to do international missions to the Moon or to Mars, these kind of issues are going to have to be worked out. A commander will have to be a commander in the true sense. You would not be able to go to Mars and having an international crew without having the Japanese, the Russians, and the Europeans negotiating what their crew members going to do. A commander needs to be able to look at the people he has and the skills they have and distribute them appropriately. I think we’re probably going through this kind of a learning process right now as to how we would do something like that. So it’s all good. It’s going to take a while to work our way through that, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What role did you play in the first couple of Expedition missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was still chief of the branch. We were switching to electronic procedures at the time, although the Russians didn’t want to do that, nor did the early flight directors. So we wound up flying books for the first two Expeditions, which was kind of funny because I knew that was going to happen, but everybody kept trying to insist we would be electronic, which we were eventually forced to do because there’s just, like I said, too much. There’s no way you could fly paper procedures for everything for ISS.\\n\\n So I was involved in how we were going to organize all of that, what we were going to call each system, because we were trying to operate as one station, so we were trying to come up with a Station-wide nomenclature, like CDH for command and data handling, and then have under that the U.S. procedures and the Russian procedures. We tried to force, by the way we organized our procedures and our displays, to make it a one Station across. So those were the kind of things. And, of course, at one point there, our Space Station Branch probably had forty to fifty people, astronauts and contractors, that I was supervising. At one point, we actually had two deputies and me, because there was just so much work to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That must be very different for you, having your medical school background and then becoming a manager." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it was, it was, but that’s one of the things that’s neat about the office. One of the things I really respected is the difference between the mission specialists who came from an academic background and the military. The military, I have to say, does a superb job of raising leaders, because I remember when I was chief of the Space Station Branch, Jeff [Jeffrey S.] Ashby was one of my deputies, and Scott [E.] Parazynski was the other. Scott comes from a similar background to me as a medical doctor, and he was at the time working EVA [Extravehicular Activity] issues—because we were looking ahead and seeing all this EVA work for building the Station. This was before we’d actually even done the first one. It became real apparent that we didn’t have people with the skills to do that in the office. Scott was very busy developing a skills program to put all the astronauts through to get more people with EVA experience before we hit what was called this “wall of EVA” that was headed to us.\\n\\n Jeff Ashby, on the other hand, came from the military, and he was helping work all the technical issues but he also kept reminding me about doing good performance reviews of people, nominating people for various awards that we can. I wasn’t trained to be a manager. In our office, they just put you in places. Having watched a bunch of my military colleagues with their leadership skills and watching Rick Hauck, who was my commander, they just have a certain way of being a leader. I just tried to imitate them. It was very different being in that position. Like I said, I really didn’t want to. At first, I felt very uncomfortable. I didn’t think I had the skills, but then what often happens in our office is they put you in a position and you develop the skills rapidly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had mentioned that you’re training to become an ISS CapCom. How is that different from being a Shuttle CapCom?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m just going to give you one example real fast before I forget, and then I’ll answer that question. I can still remember when Barbara [R.] Morgan came back and was actually a full-fledged astronaut—I guess it’s okay if I talk about people’s names." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, that’s fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She came back and was made a full-fledged astronaut. When everybody received their technical assignments, she was assigned to my branch. I’m sitting here thinking, “Okay, now what?” Not that I had to worry, because Barbara went on to do an absolutely astounding job as a mission specialist, but when we she was first sent down to the branch, I’m going, “What am I going to do?” At that point we were starting to realize we had a big issue with stowage and trash management, so I said that’s what we’ll do.\\n\\n I was sitting there trying to figure out the right jobs for people with their skill sets with where they were in their careers and everything like that. That was also really new to me, figuring out how to manage people and take advantage of their skills and help them with their own personal development.\\n\\n So, anyway, the difference between—did you say Shuttle CapCom and an ISS CapCom?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I was a CapCom it was for STS-9 and it was a very, very different environment. We had all paper procedures, and everything was done by documenting and paper. I’m just in the middle of my flow for ISS training, so I haven’t actually started working on console yet. I’ll probably start doing that in about the July time frame. But just from my exposure to what I’ve seen, it’s just a totally different environment, both in the Shuttle and in Station, because everything is so electronic now. Everything’s available electronically, and you can be in Mission Control and have your laptop there and be doing e-mail and work. When I was a CapCom you were in Mission Control, and there was no way other than by the phone to communicate with other people or do anything about your office job. You were just there. That’s a pretty big difference, actually, because—just like in everything—you can pretty much stay connected no matter what you’re doing.\\n\\n The difference in a Shuttle CapCom and an ISS CapCom is a Shuttle mission is just like a sprint, and ISS, as a CapCom, as a crew, is more like a marathon. When you’re working a Shuttle mission, everything has to be done rapidly. The biggest difference is you’re manned around the clock. You’re there your one week or two weeks, and then that flight is over.\\n\\n So what I’ve seen on the ISS side so far is it’s a much slower process. If the crew asks a question, you might not have the right person there to get an answer right away. The habitability aspects, the stowage aspects, keeping track of where things are, just the sheer amount of knowledge you have to have about the systems, the CapCom flow for ISS systems just scratches the surface just so you’ll be familiar with the vocabulary and generally how the Station is organized. There’s just so much to know. At the same time, other than, I guess, on certain days, like docking days, undocking days, when a Progress is coming or a Soyuz, other than that, it’s a slower pace, I would imagine. That’s just kind of my guess, as opposed to when you’re in the Shuttle environment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Will you be doing sims before you start?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, definitely. Probably start doing those, I guess, in August. I think in July I’ll start sitting with someone else. It’s just real interesting, that process. When I was a CapCom for STS-9, you just went over there and you sat with another astronaut who was there before you, and when they thought you were ready, you were ready. There was no training flow. Being a CapCom was training. That was because you didn’t get in a flow until you were a crew. So getting to be a CapCom or working at SAIL [Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory] or any of those things was your training. Now it’s the other way around. Now you have to have all this other training before you can do that. It’s just kind of interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now you don’t have to be, I understand, an astronaut to be a CapCom. Is that true?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think we just didn’t have enough people to cover everything when we had all the Shuttle flights going and all the ISS crews assigned, and so at some point we picked certain folks from MOD to be CapComs, and they’re super. They were very highly qualified people that have been selected to do that job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And are you working on other projects now?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m actually doing three things. I am working Shuttle flight data file and training, which obviously is trailing down, and I just didn’t figure it was worth giving that to someone else. I know all the people. I’ve been working with them for years and years, and it doesn’t take that much of my time to follow that. For instance, now when the [STS]-134 launch scrubs, I talk to the training manager, say, “Okay, what’s your plan? How is this impacting [STS]-135?” And then I let George [D.] Zamka, who’s our Shuttle chief, know what the plan is, and flight data file, same thing.\\n\\n In fact, we’re getting ready, I think in June, to have our final CPCB (Crew Procedures Change Board), which I’ve been on for many years. That’s what I was doing before I went on my leave of absence, and then I started doing it when I came back as well. So I feel like I’ve been doing it all my life. We want to have our last CPCB, and we’re going to bring back some of the former people, like Dick Snyder and some of those folks. I think by that time Mike [Michael E.] Fossum will be up on the Space Station; he used to be a flight data file rep also. I’m working that.\\n\\n Then, as I said, I’m training to be a CapCom, and then I’m also in the Exploration Branch. I’m working a lot of the Orion or what are we calling it now? Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) displays. In fact, that’s why I had to move this up, because we’re getting our display ready for Innovation Day tomorrow, and we’re trying to decide whether to show the generic cockpit, which we use for commercial crew, or whether to show the Orion cockpit. Some of the managers want to come over and see the two and decide which one we can use, because of proprietary concerns. Lockheed Martin is the contractor for the Orion vehicle, and now we’ve got the commercial crew, those four contractors. All the stuff they do is very proprietary and you have to be really careful that you don’t give away someone’s secrets to someone else when you’re dealing with them. So they’re having some discussion of whether we can show the Orion cockpit or can we show the generic cockpit that we’ve got that doesn’t relate to any specific vehicle. It’s really fun working on the displays. I’ve never done anything like this before, actually programming a little bit, which is unheard of for me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things that we didn’t talk about that I wanted to ask you about was serving on the Astronaut Selection Board. You did that in ’87." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was really interesting. Mike [C. Michael] Foale was in the group that we selected that go-around. It was a very interesting process to go through all that, seeing people’s résumés on paper, and then to finally selecting the few that you were going to interview. We probably interviewed about 150 or 200 folks. I don’t remember exactly how many.\\n\\n It was just interesting to me to when we finally got to that interview process, how when somebody walked in a room, how often I changed my initial impression by the end of the interview, and I can only think of maybe one case where my initial impression changed. It was just kind of interesting for me. It taught me a lesson when I’m in a situation where I’m being evaluated. People make up their minds quickly about what they think about you. It was just really interesting to be on that selection board, a real privilege to see how that’s done. It’s probably a little different now. I know in this last group of folks, they were told that they were picked solely for Station, they weren’t going to fly on Shuttle. I really do think you’re probably looking for maybe slightly different personality type than perhaps for Shuttle missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What kind of people were you looking for?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know that we ever discussed it; we mostly discussed technical requirements. You know, the pilots had to have been to test pilot school, and you needed a certain level of education coming in from the mission specialist side. You couldn’t just be straight out of college, and you had to have an advanced degree or have certain amount of experience in your field before you even were selected. There’s nothing in writing or nothing discussed. You’re just looking for a certain kind of person who can be a good leader and be a good follower, because sometimes you’re going to be leading in this job, sometimes you’re going to be following, and you can’t just pick somebody who just always wants to be a leader. They’re not going to survive. Then just somebody who’s going to work well with all the kinds of people that we have to work with. It’s not something that’s easy to put into words. You just kind of, after a while, know if somebody’s going to fit in well in the office and do a good job or not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did race or gender play any sort of role in your decision? Mae [C.] Jemison, for instance, was in that class." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh that’s right. No. I suspect that the higher-up levels, they really wanted to. They had not up until that time accepted a black female, and I know they probably really wanted her, but they wouldn’t select someone if we didn’t think they were qualified. Given that you had three qualified people or whatever to pick from, that’s when they might come into play there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any concerns? Mike [Richard M.] Mullane talks about in his book that he was bothered by the fact that NASA selected astronauts when there weren’t going to be as many flights after Challenger. Were there any concerns on your part selecting astronauts right after the accident?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, because we didn’t know what the attrition rate would be with the accident. The other thing is—and most people I don’t think realize it—just how much support work the office does and also how long it really takes to be comfortable to be on a Shuttle flight. I think Susan [J.] Helms was probably the only person I can think of who was pretty much selected to a flight straight out of her astronaut candidate flow, which at that time, I think, was about a two-year process, because they had a very different AsCan [Astronaut Candidate] flow. We had no AsCan flow to speak of. They actually went through the 2000-level series of Shuttle courses, which I took as a crew member when I was assigned to a flight. The simulators couldn’t support all of my class going through training and all the early Shuttle crews that were training at the same time, because they kept crashing all the time in the early days.\\n\\n So when they come out of their AsCan flow, they’re definitely at a higher level than we were, because they’ve actually had training in the simulator. What you don’t realize and what I realize now looking back, I worked as a Cape Crusader, I worked at SAIL, I was a CapCom, and being a Cape Crusader gave you an opportunity to see how KSC works. All the Centers are very different and have very different personalities. I could have gone into flight probably without that, but I wouldn’t have realized just how little I really knew. I mean, you can know Shuttle systems, and all that sort of stuff, but it’s way more than that. It’s how does the Cape work, how do things get done there, how are the manifesting decisions made, working with the folks in Building 1 and the people who are in charge from the cargo point of view.\\n\\n I think it certainly takes a couple of years beyond AsCan training to really get an astronaut who is experienced in all that; it probably takes a good minimum three or four years before you’re really at a level where you understand how NASA does business, how to get things done, how to handle things in a proper manner and so forth. I was pretty confident we would solve the problem and that the Shuttle would fly again, and you know that it’s going to take that many years for somebody to get up to a level to really become a useful crew member." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had mentioned to us what you thought was your, basically, greatest contribution to the program. What do you think was your biggest challenge since you’ve been working at NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My personal biggest challenge or you mean with the program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Working at NASA; what do you think was the biggest obstacle or challenge that you had to overcome?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think the hardest thing for me personally—and I don’t really see that changing—is just balancing a demanding job with a family and being able to do both. I don’t see that even changing for some of the women coming after me. Karen [L.] Nyberg, my hat’s off to her. I don’t know how she’s training for an ISS flight, traveling all around the world as you have to do, learning Russian, and having a new baby. That’s a lot on your plate. You need to have a lot of good people in your life to help. So that is the biggest challenge, I think. I think the men in the office, perhaps they didn’t face it as much for Shuttle flights because the traveling wasn’t as extensive and most of the male astronauts had spouses at home that made sure everything was running smoothly. But when it comes to the demands of ISS training, I think both males and females in the office are feeling the effects of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything that you can pass along to them from your experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Each person has to make those priorities for themselves. Having someone that you feel confident with to help you with your children. For example, Susie Galvin took care of Kristin while I was training for my flight, up until Kristin started kindergarten. She was at the wedding on April second, and in my talk I said, “Couldn’t have done it without you.” I mean, literally, I would not have felt comfortable leaving Kristin if I hadn’t known that she was with such a wonderful person. I think Kristin actually benefited from having two of us in her life. Each person has to decide what works for them, and obviously I decided, once I had two children, that I just couldn’t split my time in that many directions.\\n\\n My daughter has just married, I know they’re looking at starting a family in the probably not too distant future, and she has a pretty demanding job. She’s a reporter, and her job could involve a lot of traveling. I don’t even really know what advice to give to her, because it’s just a continuing challenge. I do think our technology today does help a lot. Being able to have Skype and video conferences that does allow you to have a demanding job and be able to be there.\\n\\n We were just talking, you know, the announcement that Paolo [A. Nespoli]’s mother just passed away. I think that’s common knowledge, isn’t it? He’s up on the ISS right now. I’m pretty sure. We got e-mails about it; I think I read about it in the paper. In the past you were totally isolated. I was talking with some of my friends in the office, now you could actually allow someone on ISS to be present for a funeral or memorial with our technology. So that does help a lot, because back in my day, if you went on a trip and you were gone for ten days, like on that trip I made to Russia for ten days, you were gone for ten days. It wasn’t even easy to make a phone call because it was so expensive.\\n\\n And I discovered that when the cat’s away, the mice will play, as I was going through some video, because Kristin was really getting on my case for not converting our HI-8 format to digital format, so I was converting these, and I found them doing things at home that they weren’t supposed to be doing while I was on that trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good thing you found out about it now, not back then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. So many years have gone by, there isn’t any point in getting upset now. But someday I’m going to let them know I saw what they were doing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think we’ve pretty much gone through all my questions, but is there anything that you wanted to add about your class or the Shuttle Program as things start to close out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I just think it’s really sad that such a wonderful vehicle is being retired. I attended Dr. [Christopher C.] Kraft’s ceremony where they named the Mission Control after him. That was really neat to be there for that. He’s one of my heroes, and to listen to Glynn [S.] Lunney and Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz and to hear him speak again, because those were all the people that were in charge when I first started here, so they’re my heroes.\\n\\n To see it end now, it’s really sad, because that vehicle is so wonderful. The teams now are so proficient. The Cape folks just know their systems. When I was at the Cape just before [STS]-133, I spoke with this one gentleman. I wish I could remember his name now. He worked on the tiles since STS-1. I mean, he knows that. He started as just a technician out of high school, wound up, through NASA, going back and getting his engineering degree and then came back. That kind of experience is unbelievable, on one hand.\\n\\n Then on the other hand, like I said, I’m in an office now with a bunch of us that are working Orion. We were talking about how sad it is that the Shuttle’s going to retire, but on the other hand a capsule-type vehicle is just a much safer vehicle over the entire range of speeds. There’s just a much easier capability to save a crew with that kind of a vehicle. It’s not as much fun of a vehicle, but a winged vehicle that lands is always going to be a more fragile vehicle than a capsule. The Shuttle did what it was supposed to do, build the Space Station, and nobody could do that. But it is sad.\\n\\n The other thing that’s sad is with the ending of the Shuttle Program and the confluence of that with our budget and deficit issues, it’s going to be a very hard time for NASA right now. We’re probably going to lose a lot of our support engineers. We’re already seeing several people that worked in the office that have been there since I’ve been there, who have been let go and more are being let go. Then when the last Shuttle flight ends, more of our contractor personnel will be let go.\\n\\n It’s going to be a very, very different environment, actually kind of similar to the environment when I first came here. There was a much heavier NASA involvement and less contractor, although, of course, a contractor was building the Shuttle. The training was still NASA, which now is USA [United Space Alliance]. At the Cape, all the processing was NASA and all that. And it slowly evolved. I’m not sure I understand all that and how that happened, but it evolved to much more contractor level. Quite frankly, I never even noticed if somebody’s NASA or contractor until now, as we’re learning that with all the budget cuts we’re going to lose a lot of folks. Although some people would say that we do have a defined program, I still don’t feel like we really have a defined program forward. Losing a lot of our very skilled workforce, it’s going to be, I think, a very difficult time for NASA over the next couple of years.\\n\\n I remember when I came here, how exciting it was. It was full of unknowns at that point too. We didn’t really know—none of us talked about it, but I’m sure we realized that if the first Shuttle didn’t work, what were they going to do with us? So there was that uncertainty, but you had a defined program that you were working towards. It was just a matter of was that program really going to succeed, and then once it did, from that point forward, it was just the most exciting thing to be a part of.\\n\\n Definitely we have ISS, and the new astronauts are focused on that, but you can’t just have your current program. You have to have a vision forward, and I just think one of the biggest challenges that NASA and other big programs face is that there’s no mechanism to make decisions that span congressional elections and presidential elections. There just has to be a better way to make major decisions that are less political.\\n\\n And I do think NASA—I’ll just speak for NASA now—but this is true of other big programs, military programs, particle accelerator kind of programs, all those kind of really big high-budget kind of things, you just can’t go ahead creating programs and then destroying them. There needs to be some other mechanism for that sort of thing.\\n\\n You were asking about challenges, and I think that is definitely one, to figure out a different way to make your forward plans and then not have those be affected by who the new President is or who the next Congress is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a good point. That has been a big challenge for NASA, building the Space Station, for instance, as you pointed out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that came one vote from being cancelled. One vote saved the Station. And that’s pretty scary. You shouldn’t have one vote saving a major project like that. And I personally feel that the only thing that saved it was the international commitments. I think had we had international commitments with Constellation, then that program might have survived as well, because you can’t just enter into high-level agreements with other nations and then just say, “Oops, sorry, I changed my mind.” That just isn’t the way to do business.\\n\\n As I look now towards what I personally want to do, I certainly hope I get to work in MPCV. I really want to work on that, and I’m actually excited about the commercial crew, would love to be involved in that as well. I don’t think commercial crews should be the only thing we’re doing. We shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket. To be involved with that and to have that succeed, I think that would be wonderful. I think to have people have the chance to go into space, the tourism industry, where they’re talking about space hotels and all, that sounds kind of unrealistic, maybe, but then the same could have been said true of commercial aviation. Fifty years ago, who thought that we’d be all traveling all over the world in matters of hours? I think that’ll be really exciting, so I think there’s an exciting future ahead, but I think it’s going to be a hard couple of years of transition. I hope it’s all going to work out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You hope to fly with one of these commercial interests, since you’ve flown in space before?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would love to. I would love it. I’d like to be able to just go into space and be able to just have fun and not have to work. Go on a vacation in space. Flying on the Shuttle was so much fun, but, boy, you work. You work very hard. Every minute you’re conscious that you’ve got a job to do and you’ve got to perform it, so it’s not like going on a vacation and kicking back and relaxing. It would be so much fun to go into space and be able to do that too.\\n\\n It would be fun to have people who can write and who are artists. Not that we haven’t had that within the astronaut corps, because we certainly have folks like that, but it would be neat for other people who have different outlooks to experience that, so it’ll be fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I thank you very much for your time today. We certainly appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Anna L. Fisher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you. Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00458", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/OConnorBD/oconnorbd.htm", + "original_file_name": "OConnorBD_4-20-06.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/OConnorBD/OConnorBD_4-20-06.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Bryan D. O'Connor", + "location_date": "Washington, DC – 20 April 2006" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Sandra Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Bryan O’Connor" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is April 20th, 2006. This oral history with Bryan O’Connor is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. It is a continuation of his first interview on March 17th, 2004. Sandra Johnson is the interviewer, assisted by Rebecca Wright.\\n\\n I want to thank you for joining us again today. The last time we talked, we ended at the time of the [Space Shuttle] Challenger [STS 51-L] accident, and you were actually on your way to California for a hometown visit. You had stopped in El Paso [Texas] when you heard the news, so if you can start there and talk about what you did immediately after that and some of your duties right after the Challenger." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, of course, when I saw what happened, and they were replaying it on the television in the Operations Building there, I called back home to Houston [Texas] to my office and cancelled my flight plan; revectored my flight plan to go back to Houston. Called out to California and told them I was calling off my visit and went back to Houston.\\n\\n Almost immediately after I got back, I was asked to go directly to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], I think it was by George [W. S.] Abbey, or maybe somebody else, but I think it was George, who was looking for how the [Astronaut] Crew Office could help some of the immediate activities going on.\\n\\n There was a fellow named Lou Ullian from the Range Safety Office at the Kennedy—actually, Air Force side of Cape Canaveral, who was a Shuttle Range Safety person, and who was assigned to the task of trying to see if this was an inadvertent range safety destruct that had just happened to the Shuttle, if somehow the destruct package on the tank or the solid rockets had blown up. So he was doing some analysis, and he also went down to the pier. Shortly after I got there, the next day I got there, I went down to the pier with him to see some of the things that were coming back from the ships that were out collecting debris off the water. That started almost immediately.\\n\\n I remember there was a Coast Guard cutter that came in and had some pieces and parts of the external tank, and one of these ships—and it was on the second or third day, I think—one of these ships actually had a piece of the range safety destruct system from the external tank, intact for about halfway and then ripped up the other half of it. When he looked at that, he could tell that it hadn’t been a destruct. It was damaged due to the tank tearing up or hitting the water, but it hadn’t been an inadvertent destruct. So when he saw that, he realized, “Well, if this one didn’t blow up, then none of them did,” so there was some relief there within a day or two of what wasn’t the cause of the accident.\\n\\n Right after that, if I remember right, I stayed down at the Cape and talked with the people who were working the recovery efforts. They needed somebody to help them set up a place where we could reconstruct the vehicle, and I was assigned the task of working that issue. So I worked with [NASA] KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida]. We had a Project Manager assigned from KSC—I wish I could remember his name now; I can’t—and he and I worked this.\\n\\n Now, the reason I was on it is because I was a trained accident investigator, and people knew that. I had volunteered that, and they said, “Great. He’s been to the accident investigation course. Maybe he can help us set this up.” And that’s what I did for several days. I remember we put tape down on the floor. We got a big room in the Logistics Center. They moved stuff out of the way. As time went on, the need increased for space, and we actually ended up putting some things outside the Logistics Center, like the main engines and some of the other things. But the Orbiter pretty much was reassembled piece by piece over a period of time as the parts and pieces were salvaged out of the water, most of them floating debris, but some, I think was picked up from subsurface.\\n\\n What started off as just a few ships ended up as a big fleet of ships. They had quite an operation there. It was one of the biggest salvage efforts ever is what I heard at the time. They had underwater robotic camera vessels. They had Navy and Coast Guard vessels, unmanned submarine kind of things, and all kinds of stuff that was put into effect. Over a period of time, we were able to rebuild quite a bit of the Orbiter, laying it out on the floor, and in some cases, actually putting it in a vertical structure. Like the forward fuselage, for example, we tried to make a three-dimensional model from the pieces that we recovered there.\\n\\n Again, the idea originally was to see if we could find some smoking gun that would give us a clue as to what the cause was. After a while the rational became what was the effect, because it was through the photography activities that Dan [M.] Germany was heading up down there [in Houston] that they were able to see and put together the story of what happened. It was the photography that showed them the plume coming out of the solid rocket, the smoke right at liftoff, and then the plume as they climbed out. The photography of the breakup and then the pieces falling, they were able to do a lot of good photo analysis of that and put the story together pretty well.\\n\\n But we still wanted to continue with the activity in the Logistics Center to see what the effects were on the various parts of the Orbiter and so on. So that took up my immediate time shortly after the accident happened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How long were you there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Seems to me it was several weeks. Then I remember that two weeks after the—well, actually, it was a few days after the accident, Dick [Richard H.] Truly and the Acting Administrator [William R. Graham] were down at KSC. Again, because I had accident investigation training, they had a discussion about what’s the next steps here. We have the immediate actions going on. What about the mishap investigation procedures, the [mishap] board—should we put a board together—and sort of the process that we had laid out in our policies on major accident investigations.\\n\\n The Acting Administrator, it turned out he was very reluctant to put a board together, a formal board. We had an Accident Investigation Team that was assembling; eventually became under the cognizance of J. R. [James R.] Thompson [Jr.]. We had a bunch of subteams under him, and then he was reporting to Dick Truly. But we never called out a formal board, and I think there was more or less a political feel that this is such high visibility that we know for sure that the Congress or the President or both are going to want to have some sort of independent investigation here, so let’s not make it look like we’re trying to investigate our own mishap here. And that’s why he decided not to do what our policy said, which is to create a [mishap investigation] board. We stopped short of that.\\n\\n Then two weeks after the accident the board, which became known as the Rogers Commission, was in place. It was probably sometime in the middle period, maybe a week later or a week and a half, that the President decided to do it, and they called the people together and assembled the members of that board. But I remember the board itself started officially about two weeks after the accident.\\n\\n At that point, as they began to start their work and the first two or three weeks of their work was more or less organized and trying to get started and figuring out what they wanted to do, it became obvious to Dick Truly that we were going to need a good interface between NASA and that board up at Headquarters, because the board decided to do their investigation in Washington, or at least to have their board centered there. So Dick decided that the thing to do would be to create a mechanism for this external board to get NASA information and to field requests.\\n\\n So he wanted to set up an action center here in Washington. Again, he asked me, “Okay, thanks for doing all that stuff down there at the Cape. Now I need you to come up here and set up an action center.” So I set up for Dick Truly an action center up here [in Washington]. Took about a week or so to get that started, and I’d say by the time that we were six weeks or so after the accident, we had an action center that we had set up.\\n\\n I had a couple of folks that he gave me. We put it in the area of what was called Code M, the Office of Space Flight. They created a room for me, cleared out all the desks and so on. We put a bunch of status boards; very old-fashioned by today’s standard, when I think about it. It was more like World War II’s technology. We had chalkboards. We had a paper tracking system, an IBM [International Business Machine] typewriter in there and so on. It all seemed so ancient by today’s standards, virtually nothing electronic.\\n\\n But it was a tracking system for all the requests that the board had. It was a place where people could come and see what the status of the investigation was. We had telecons [teleconferences] every day where J. R. Thompson would call all his team members and us, and everybody would report in, what they had done, where they were, where they were on the fault tree analysis that we were doing to x out various potential cause factors. I remember the action center became more than just a place where we coordinated between NASA and the blue-ribbon panel. It was also a place where people could come from the [Capitol] Hill or the White House. We had quite a few visitors that came, and Dick Truly would bring them down to the action center to show them where we were in the investigation. So it had to kind of take on that role, too, of publicly accessible communication device.\\n\\n I did that job for some weeks, and then we rotated people. [Admiral Truly] asked that George Abbey continue—George had people available now that were not going to fly anytime soon, so he offered a bunch of high-quality people, and I was replaced by, I think it was, Bonnie [J.] Dunbar, and then she was replaced by Sid [Sidney M.] Gutierrez, and we just had a rotation going of people coming up and manning that action center.\\n\\n So shortly after I was relieved from that, I basically got out of the investigation role and into the “what are we going to do about it” role, and was assigned by George to the Shuttle Program Office.\\n\\n Maybe this is a good time to stop if you’ve got other questions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, actually, that’s the next one I was going to ask you. In March of [19]’86, that’s when you became assistant to Arnie [Arnold D.] Aldrich and you were also the Chairman of NASA’s new Space Flight Safety Panel." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Now, that one came a little later, but early on when we were working with the blue-ribbon panel and then reacting to their report—which was at about six months, I think, their report came out. I had moved. I was relieved of my job on a crew right away. I think they called it [STS] 61-M, which was a mission I was assigned to right after I got back from [STS] 61-B. In fact, before the accident happened I was reassigned. I can’t remember who all the members were, but my officemate, Sally [K.] Ride, and I were both assigned to that same mission, 61-M.\\n\\n Of course, when the accident happened, all that stuff became questionable and we stopped training altogether. I don’t think that mission ever resurrected. It may have with some other name or number, but the crew was totally redone later, and two of us got other assignments. Of course, Sally was assigned to the blue-ribbon panel.\\n\\n My assignment, longer term assignment after the initial things I just told you about, was to go over and be Assistant Program Manager for Ops [Operations] and Safety, I think is what my title was. I was actually assigned to Dick [Richard H.] Kohrs, who was the Deputy Program Director, or by today’s terminology, he was the Program Manager. I was his assistant, and he gave me several tasks to do, including coordinating how we were going to respond to a couple of the major recommendations that came out of the blue-ribbon panel.\\n\\n They had ten recommendations, and one of them had to do with how to respond to the silent safety program recommendation, how to restructure and organize the Safety Program at NASA. Another one—and I had some workings in that. Then the other one was about wheels, tires, brakes, and nose wheel steering. It was all the landing systems. Now, that may sound strange, because that had nothing to do with this accident, but the Challenger blue-ribbon panel saw that, as they were looking at our history on Shuttle, they saw that one of the bigger problems we were addressing technically with that vehicle was landing rollout. We had a series of cases where we had broken up the brakes on rollout by overheating them or overstressing them. We had some concerns about automatic landings. We had some concerns about steering on the runway in cases of a blown tire or something like that. So they chose to recommend that we do something about these things, put more emphasis on it, make some changes and upgrades in that area.\\n\\n I was assigned that action to coordinate, so I spent an awful lot of my time over the next couple of years, really, working on those things. I had the honor and the pleasure of working with Scott Crossfield, who was one of the X-15 guys and early contractor experimental test pilots working with NASA. I think he was a Rockwell, North American Rockwell [Corporation] guy, and had a long history at [NASA] Dryden [Flight Research Center, Edwards, California] as part of that activity in the early days. It turned out he was assigned by the staff of our oversight committee, House Science Committee, to help them with the congressional investigation of the accident.\\n\\n A lot of people forget that we didn’t just have the blue-ribbon panel, Rogers Commission, but we had a no-kidding, formal congressional investigation of that accident, and he was the guy they assigned to do the same thing I got assigned to do for the program, and that is look at the wheels, tires, and brakes, landing rollout issues. So I got the chance to work with him very closely in surveying what it was we were doing at NASA and coming up with a plan on how to address those issues. It was a real treat for me, because he’s a renowned, crotchety old guy that questions everything and is smart as can be; knows everything about aerospace, and I learned a lot from that little detail I had.\\n\\n I’m thinking of that because his picture was in the paper today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s what we heard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. But anyway, that’s pretty much what I was involved with. One of the actions that came out of the blue-ribbon panel was to create a separate Flight Safety Panel, so that was the third thing that I got to work on. I was asked to be the first chair of the Space Flight Safety Panel, and that was our answer to that particular recommendation of the blue-ribbon panel.\\n\\n What we did was we said we’ll have an experienced astronaut chair it. We’ll have a Flight Director from the Johnson Space Center [Houston, Texas, JSC] MOD [Mission Operations Directorate]. We’ll have a Launch Director from Kennedy, and we’ll have a Mission Manager or a Project Manager from [NASA] Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama]. That group of four will be part of the Space Flight Safety Panel for a couple of years, and then they’ll be replaced by someone else.\\n\\n The job of the Space Flight Safety Panel was to be an independent assessment team for the Associate Administrator, for Dick Truly at the time. We had a kind of a dotted line to the Chief of Safety and Mission Assurance for the Agency, but really we were meant to be a special arm and assessment team for Dick Truly at the time. Over time that panel has found itself more or less engaged in independent reviews and assessments, close call investigations, and so on.\\n\\n Of course, I come back now with the job I have, and that panel still exists. It’s got new members, of course, on it, and as recently as a couple of months ago I asked them to go do a close call investigation for me. So I was kind of glad to see that that concept survived all this time, although we’re not using it nearly as much as we did when it first began.\\n\\n It was almost a full-time job for me the first two years. We did audits and assessments and looked at just about everything that was going on that had human flight safety implications. We went around and surveyed people. We worked with the Code Q [Office of Safety and Mission Assurance], which is the old term for this office, to develop the NASA Safety Reporting System, which is still in effect today.\\n\\n That’s the system that people can send in safety issues if they don’t think they can get them handled any other way. It’s kind of a check valve in the system. Their name doesn’t go with it, so it’s an anonymous reporting system. But it turns out—I was checking the other day—that system has been used [over] 650 times since we set it up back in I think it was 1988.\\n\\n So again, I look at that, and I say, “Well, there’s something that we helped establish back then, and it is still finding some use.” So that’s good. I was happy to have been sort of on the front end of something that’s found some use in the agency." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’ve mentioned the landing system, and changes were made after things were looked at. What type of changes were made as far as safety was concerned during that time period?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there were changes on several fronts. One was people. We found that in our safety organization we had not been very good at rotating people in and out, keeping a fresh look in there; that we had stuck people into Safety and Mission Assurance organization too long. So we decided let’s freshen that up every now and then, and let’s allow people to move from Safety and Mission Assurance over to Engineering and Ops, and vice versa. So we established something like that. It was informal. It was just the Center Director’s discretion, and they did it. We got some really good people into Safety and Mission Assurance who might not have otherwise had a chance to do that work.\\n\\n On the products side there were several changes made to the Space Shuttle design. Of course, everybody remembers that we redesigned the solid rocket motors. Not just that one joint that hurt us on Challenger, but we looked at all of the field joints, in the nozzle and all up and down the [field joint] design, and made them redundant. And made some other changes in the solid rockets. That became the long pole in the tent to getting back to Return To Flight was all those mods [modifications] that we made to the solids.\\n\\n We also put an escape system in the Orbiter and changed the escape philosophy for that system to where, for controlled gliding flight, the crew could actually get out; whereas we didn’t have that capability before the accident. So that meant that the crew was now wearing much more bulky equipment and parachutes and survival equipment and rafts and all that, and they also had oxygen available. JSC engineers, in-house, designed what we called the pole, which is an extendable pole that would stick out the hatch in flight, and it would allow crew members to get a vector below the wing.\\n\\n Now, I know a little bit about this one because one of the other jobs I was given was during that time was to co-chair the team that was looking at survival and escape, which was another recommendation that came out of the blue-ribbon panel. A fellow named Al Louviere and I were the co-chairs. He was from Engineering. We had a whole bunch of team members put together to decide how to improve the escape system on the Shuttle.\\n\\n The one we came up with in the end, after looking at a wide variety of things, was this pole bail-out system. Now, it had its limits. Controlled gliding flight was where it was designed for, but I always thought, and still do, that that escape system is better than that; that if we’d have had that system on the Challenger accident, I think there’s a good chance we would have got the crew out, or some of them, anyway, even on that accident, because of the fact that it would have given them a way to jettison the hatch. Even if they didn’t use the pole, they could at least jump out [during the 2 ½ minute fall] and have a parachute and oxygen. Of course, they had none of those things on the Challenger accident. So that was sort of the changes in safety dealing with the product.\\n\\n We also made some changes over time—not immediately, but over time we made some extensive changes to wheels, tires, brakes, and nose wheel steering on the Orbiter. I got a chance to, again, following up on those, I got a chance to go fly a lot of simulation and work with the engineers on gains for the nose wheel steering system, how to use it at higher speed. The thing was designed for nose wheel steering to be used only at the very end of the runway, just to sort of line yourself up in the middle [of the runway] at low speeds; never designed for high speed.\\n\\n But when we had done some work in the simulations, we found that if you blow the tires, especially on a soft runway, or even if you blow one tire, the other one will blow if it happens at high speed, and then you don’t have redundancy. If you blow both tires at high speed, you don’t have the control authority to keep it on the runway. So this was a big Crit-1 [criticality 1] discussion that we had.\\n\\n So over time we made a lot of changes. We got it to where nose wheel steering could be used at higher speed. We improved the brakes so they had a lot more energy and wouldn’t break up and cause the tires to blow at low speed. Then we also put a drag chute in eventually to help slow down the vehicle. So those were some significant changes.\\n\\n Then we changed how we’re organized. One of the recommendations that the Challenger accident board made was that at Headquarters there was no independent safety and mission assurance organization, although they had a safety professional and a quality professional and a reliability professional in the Chief Engineer’s office up here. We had learned from the earlier times at NASA, after the Apollo [1, AS-204] fire, for example, that there needs to be an independence between Safety and Mission Assurance, and Engineering. That independence was pretty much set up at all the Centers, and we had SR&QA [Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance] offices independently reporting to Center Directors at most of our Centers, but up here in Washington we never did that. So one of their recommendations was to create what became Code Q and the office I’m in now. So that was another structural change that was made.\\n\\n The other thing they did was change the way the program reports. When the Challenger accident happened, the Program Manager worked for the Center Director. They thought that there was a slight risk imposed on the program when you have the Center owning and managing a huge multicenter program like that. The case they made was that it could cause communications barriers, a hesitance for one Center’s projects to report to another Center’s Program Office, because of Center-to-Center rivalries and that sort of thing.\\n\\n That was a big part of the investigation when they went to the root cause stuff, and so they recommended that the program be a Headquarters program, and that, although it would stay at Johnson Space Center, the Program Manager would not be beholden to or working for the Center Director, but actually be a Headquarters employee.\\n\\n They did that for quite some time. They actually held that—that’s what I call “host Center” as opposed to “lead Center.” So basically what they said is lead Center is not a good idea; go to host Center. It was a configuration that the DoD [Department of Defense] had gone to in the early eighties, and the blue-ribbon panel thought that was a good idea for us to do. It was also a throwback to how we had done it in Apollo. In Apollo we had host Center. It was basically a Headquarters program hosted at the Johnson Space Center, and they thought that was probably the right way to do things.\\n\\n So that’s a long answer, but it’s several aspects of the safety changes we made after the Challenger accident investigation report came out. A lot of other smaller things, but those were some of the big ones." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your next assignment then after you were Assistant to [Dick Kohrs]? Was that when you became the Deputy Director of Flight Crew Operations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, well, let’s talk about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I was given the job of Deputy to the Director of Flight Crew Operations. At the time that job was held by Don [Donald R.] Puddy, who, as you know, has since passed away. I got a chance to get into a little management job, working a lot of personnel issues, dealing with some policies on flight qualifications, currency requirements for our [airplane] pilots. He had me looking at a lot of what goes on out in the Ellington [Field, Houston, Texas] operations. But the pilots that we had out there flying the [Super] Guppy [cargo aircraft] and the KC-135 [microgravity research aircraft], the T-38 training, and all that stuff, he asked me to kind of work some of those issues.\\n\\n Of course, I wasn’t new to that. I’d been flying a T-38 with them for years, and the Shuttle Training Aircraft. But it did allow me to see more of the management side of that and a broader understanding of how they operate, how their engineering, maintenance, quality structure was set up; then some personnel things about getting new people and replacing Joe [Joseph S.] Algranti. I think he left at that time. He had been the chief out there, and we needed a replacement. So that’s pretty much the kind of things I worked. Some astronaut-related issues, but I think we had someone else up there in Flight Crew Ops that did most of that. Can’t remember who it was now, but mine was a little different.\\n\\n It was interesting, because Don Puddy came from MOD, and there had been a long love-hate relationship between FCOD [Flight Crew Operations Directorate] and MOD in previous years. So here now we were being run by one of the MOD folks, and in a way, I think it was a healing experience for us, because as far as I could tell, we were getting along great [between] Flight Crew Ops and Mission Ops. So I think that was one of the things that Don probably brought to it, even though he wasn’t a pilot, he wasn’t a former astronaut, and he certainly was not George Abbey, who had run FCOD for so long.\\n\\n But he brought a fresh look at things, and I really appreciated how he deferred in certain ways to some of us who had a pilot background [on flying issues]. He didn’t try to get involved with too much of that. If we had a pilot that we needed to review something they had done, he wouldn’t do that. He’d defer to myself, Mike [Michael L.] Coats, some of the other folks that were in the Crew Office for that. I enjoyed working for Don Puddy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During that time period you received your assignment for your next flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, right. In fact, while I was training for that flight, I was in that job. I think I still had that job when I flew. Of course, after I flew that flight, that’s when I left NASA. But I was assigned to STS-40, SLS-1 [Spacelab Life Sciences-1], and began training for that. It turned out it was about two years of training, because we slipped a year while I was there. That mission itself had slipped for many years before I was even assigned to it, and the science crew that was on that flight had been assigned to that mission for quite some time.\\n\\n The NASA people on it were Jim [James P.] Bagian and [Margaret] Rhea Seddon on the science crew, and then Tammy [Tamara E.] Jernigan and Sid Gutierrez and I were assigned as the Orbiter crew. So we got to see that this is a project that’s been going for a long time. These two mission specialists and the three payload specialists, two of which would fly, had known each other and been working with each other and training for many years on this, so it’s kind of an unusual mix of new people and experienced people with each other on that crew." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, tell us some about the training and, since it was a Spacelab Life Sciences mission and the first one, and how the crew integrated since they had been assigned for so long, and how that training went, and especially you coming in as the commander after previously being a pilot, how you managed to bring that crew together as a commander." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was one of the biggest challenges I’d had at NASA was to take on that role of commander of that mission. The technical job of a commander of a mission is a pretty good size pile of work and responsibility and challenge on its own, but here we also had the people-working-together-as-a-team issues that went with this.\\n\\n There were a couple of things about this that made that a little more unusual or difficult, I think, than it might have been otherwise, one of which was that the two payload specialists who were assigned, one of them became physically ineligible for the flight while we were first getting started in our training as a team together. In fact, I think it was shortly after I was assigned to the mission that [Dr.] Bob [Robert W.] Phillips, who was one of the two payload specialists, was medically disqualified from the mission.\\n\\n Then we brought up his backup, Millie [E.] Hughes-Fulford. Drew Gaffney was the other payload specialist. Now, the three of them had been working for years together, but this was a change in role for Millie, and so she had to get a lot more involved than she had been before when she had been the backup. Sometimes I’ve thought that Millie and Drew were like oil and water, and it was a pleasant surprise for me when, seeing how they operated or didn’t operate together in the office or after the training’s done or whatever, to where they would take all that baggage, old concerns with one another’s performance or whatever it was, disagreements about the science, and we’d get into the [simulator], and there was none of that. These two trained like two professionals. Yet when they’d leave the [simulator], it was like the Hatfields and McCoys [feud], you know.\\n\\n That dynamic I had never seen before [on a flight crew], so that was a big challenge for me, because I was a little concerned that maybe that [Dr.] Jekyll and [Mr.] Hyde trick that allowed us to function as a crew and then worry about each other between training periods, I was worried that that might break down sometime, and that maybe we might have a case where we wouldn’t function effectively as a crew, and especially how are we going to operate on orbit if this thing gets to where some of these underlying issues they’ve got with each other bust out when we’re trying to get our job done on orbit. So I was concerned about that the whole time.\\n\\n It was something new for me. I had come from a tradition in the Marine Corps of single-pilot aircraft, not crewed aircraft, so I was probably experiencing some of the things that are normal for bomber pilots or big transport pilots, trying to get crews to work together and that sort of thing. So it was a big learning experience for me.\\n\\n The crew was diverse personality-wise, so even if I had experience in bombers and so on, we had some personality types that I was not all that familiar with from my military career. I didn’t know this at the time, but we had some interesting leadership and communications training that they had set up down there at the time, run by a guy who was an experienced personality profile analyst.\\n\\n He was one of the guys who was in the medical community, very experienced, former Air Force flight surgeon, and trained psychiatrist, who had degrees in psychology and all these other things. He was a guy who really knew a lot about personality profiles. [You may be familiar with the Meyers Briggs personality profile testing.] That wasn’t what he gave, but he gave [us] something like that, and he would use [the results] to help people see how best to communicate with one another, what kind of things drive one personality type versus another.\\n\\n We had a variety of personality types on our crew. He told me that in the military you tend to have two, maybe three personality types, out of the six, which dominate. That kind of helps you figure out how best to [communicate and] operate in that environment. But when you have a crew with such diverse personality types as we had, then that says you’ve got to broaden your understanding. You’ve got to be a little more forgiving of certain things and be more sensitive to other things to communicate properly and to operate as a crew.\\n\\n We got a whole batch of training on that, which, luckily, was available. They were doing all the crews with it. I think it was an experiment to see if that kind of crew coordination and communication training based on personality profiles would make a difference. I don’t know if they’re still doing that down there or not. But I think we were the first crew that went through that, first or second. I found that that was extremely valuable for me as a commander.\\n\\n It’s that type of thing that you see in management training all the time, these kind of things, and that was very valuable, I thought. But that played a lot more of a role for me than it really should have, I think. It was a little bit of a distracter for me, and comparing notes with some of the other crews, they didn’t have nearly the baggage. It could be unique to a case where you’ve had people working for so long together who have such diverse opinions about how certain experiments ought to be done and so on. Some of our other crews, the crew—even the payload crew came together relatively later. They didn’t have five years of working together, and so they didn’t have time to develop some of those mismatches.\\n\\n But, as I said, my concerns were how [are we] going to operate on orbit. When we flew together, [our] crew worked like a well-oiled machine. There was no bad baggage. There was a tremendous amount of respect and professionalism, and it made me real proud of those people that they were able to—and I don’t give myself any credit for this; it was them deciding that they owed it to their country not to let any of that old stuff get in their way. After the mission was over, they probably never spoke to each other again, but they sure did a good job on orbit. We completed 100 percent plus of our objectives, and it was a very full agenda we had. We had over twenty major experiments up there, and they did a great job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you personally have to take part in any of the life sciences experiments?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Sid and I [knew] that one of the things that scientists at NASA like, especially the life scientists, is lots of data points, and that we were going to go up there for nine or ten days, and as long as the Orbiter is behaving, there are not a lot of activities for us, as an Orbiter crew, to do. Tammy Jernigan had already signed up for everything. She was a test subject and an operator, she became part of the science crew, even though she was a member of the Orbiter crew. But she was a scientist herself [by education] and certainly was interested and very engaged in the science training.\\n\\n For us, we couldn’t do a lot of training, because we were doing our own flying-the-Orbiter training and Shuttle Training Aircraft and all that kind of stuff. But we did say that we would make ourselves available for I think it was seventeen of the twenty experiments as test subjects, or guinea pigs.\\n\\n The ones that we bailed out of and were not interested in were the ones we considered to be some small risk to our ability to do our job of flying. They had one or two experiments that dealt with the eyeball, where they would put a little lens on your eye, and there was some risk there that you could scratch your eyeball, and although it was very small, we said, “We don’t need to take that risk.”\\n\\n There was also one of them that was designed to see how far you can go exacerbating your vestibular system before you feel sick and get symptoms of Space Adaptation Syndrome, or space sickness. We clearly were not interested in that. We didn’t want to make ourselves sick and then find that, “Oh, we’ve got to deorbit this afternoon because something has happened,” and not be up to it. But other than that, we did everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You flew before Challenger, and then flying again after Challenger, maybe, if you can for just a moment, compare the differences between flying pre-Challenger and after Challenger." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I guess the big difference was philosophically we thought of ourselves as somewhat akin to a commercial activity pre-Challenger. In fact, on my first mission we delivered three satellites on orbit for paying customers, communications satellites. Nothing to do with science or NASA R&D [research and development] kind of activities; it was strictly payment for services, delivering commercial assets on orbit.\\n\\n After Challenger that was totally gone. That whole concept was gone. It was such an eye-opener for us that this was really a fairly high risk activity. It is not something that we’re ready to be flying passengers on, to be doing commercial activities with, and so on. It’s an R&D activity, and probably will be for a long time.\\n\\n You’ll remember, one of the aspects of that was the Teacher in Space thing got put on hold for a long time after Challenger, and we had a policy that came out of the government after Challenger that said we will only fly Space Shuttles on missions that it’s uniquely qualified to do. If you can fly a payload on something else, like a Titan or a Delta or an Atlas, then that’s where you do it.\\n\\n So that whole philosophy change was there. It showed itself in many ways, in the way we were structured, the way we approached risk assessment, the way we did our flight readiness reviews, the fact that we’re now wearing survival equipment and having a parachute system strapped onto us. The whole thing took us right back to a flight test mentality rather than a Flying Tiger Airline mentality. So I’d say that was the biggest thing that was different about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I read on that flight, also—there was an article that talked about the fact that one of the hatches was padlocked. Do you want to just talk about that for a second? Was that something that was normally done?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, for me it was. We had done that on my first flight—Brewster [H.] Shaw [Jr.] being the commander and me the pilot—padlock on the hatch, the rationale being that you’ve got a couple of people on this flight that you don’t know that well. They’re the “payload specialists.” They’re not career aviators. They haven’t been through all the training we have. We try to make sure they don’t hurt themselves or anybody else. It was a due diligence thing, because, in theory, although it would be tough to do it inadvertently, there was a button and a turn of a knob that could actually open up that hatch, and the hatch was very dangerous, because it was an out-opening hatch.\\n\\n There were probably a lot of good reasons why they did that, one of which might be room in the cabin or whatever, but one of the bad things about that is that the pressure in the cabin will blow that hatch off if the latches aren’t latched. You would like to have a system where the pressure will keep the hatch closed, not open it. But that’s not the way that one was structured. So that was a risk area. Some of the other commanders before had had concerns about that hatch, and so when it came time for my second flight, I ordered up the lock when we were down in quarantine at the Cape and said, “Okay, get that lock and be sure you put that on the hatch, or put it in the vehicle so that when we get up on orbit, we can put it on the hatch.”\\n\\n I could tell from the response when I made that request that this might be a little unusual, but it didn’t hit me too hard, because I didn’t really check to see how often this was done or anything. I pretty much thought that was standard. But the guy did say, “Ooh, are you sure you need that?”\\n\\n I said, “Oh yeah.”\\n\\n “Okay.”\\n\\n So, I got that kind of response, and it put a little question mark in my mind. But we did that. And I remember the two payload specialists, each of them, one at a time, coming in to ask me about that. “Hey, I heard we put a padlock in there. What’s that for?”\\n\\n And I told them, “It’s because we don’t know you guys all that well. It’s due diligence, and I did it last time, and don’t worry about it.” [Laughs] I told each one of them.\\n\\n So they may not have liked that. They probably thought, “Well, this is a fine how-do-you-do. We train for two years together, and they don’t trust us.”\\n\\n Maybe it was a bad judgment. It might have been one of those things if I’d thought more about it, maybe I would have said, “I don’t really need to do this. There’s a potential downside in that it creates concern among the crew about trust and all that.” But I [erred] on the side of due diligence and kept it on there. And I was honest with the two payload specialists. I didn’t try to hide anything or whatever. I just told them, “Yeah, and the NASA members get the combination, but you guys don’t. That’s the way this works.”\\n\\n So I could tell they were a little bit concerned about it. I have to say, though, that in each case, it was kind of funny—this is human nature. Remember I told you they didn’t get along too well with one another? I didn’t say that it was “because of both of you.” I just said, “This is a thing about payload specialists.” I didn’t say, “It’s because of you personally.” I genericized it.\\n\\n And I could tell that each one of them was thinking, and the wheels were turning, “Oh, it must be for that other one.” I didn’t try to dissuade them of that. So if that’s the way they felt good about it, that was fine with me. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And knowing those personality types." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. That was one of the humorous things about it, I guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there anything else about that flight that we haven’t talked about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. One of the other things about that mission was that it allowed me an opportunity to learn a lot more about the human side of space flight than I ever would have learned otherwise. A dedicated life science mission opened my eyes about what actually the scientists worry about with human space flight, and why, and how they address these things. It gave me a much better appreciation for how they do their science and the importance of [multiple] data points, which came in handy for me later when we were negotiating with the Russians on Shuttle-Mir, and I got a chance to see how the equivalent Russian scientists looked at it quite differently.\\n\\n They weren’t big on lots of data points. With the same protocol, the same menus, the same treadmill training protocols and so on, which is what we try to do. Our science community thought that it was important to have statistical relevance before you come out with a finding. The Russians had a different approach, and they said, “We’re going to change everything every time and get data points of one, but lots of them.” From that broader, holistic, experiential thing, they would then make their conclusions. So it was interesting to see those two different approaches.\\n\\n I also got to talk to a lot of people that I wouldn’t have otherwise about what’s actually going on in my body when I’m up there in zero-G [gravity]. Why do I not feel good the first day? What’s happening there? What about my heart? Why does it grow in size and then get back down to a smaller size? They actually took pictures of it shortly after we got up there.\\n\\n One of the crew members was wearing a catheter in his heart during ascent, and they had measurements of the pressure, the venal pressure in the heart, during ascent. That was the first time that had ever happened. There was a lot of engineering to do with that, because we’re supposed to be wearing a pressure suit that you can escape with.\\n\\n So how do you sit in your chair during ascent with a catheter in your heart hooked up to some electronics that goes into the Orbiter’s recording systems, and then be able to bail out or egress from the cabin on the launch pad if you have to very quickly? You wouldn’t have believed the effort and the training and the planning that went into that simple question, and the modifications they made to the hardware and the quick disconnect so you don’t bleed to death and all of that stuff. Very interesting stuff. I never would have had a chance to get involved in those kind of things if I’d have been on a satellite deploy mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also flew jellyfish for the first time, and there were rats on board." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, [NASA] Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] had some animal experiments. Got a chance to work with the Ames people, wonderful folks, looking at animal analogies. There were some cell [experiments] that we were doing up there.\\n\\n The jellyfish was a vestibular experiment. What happens when you take gravity vector away from a little jellyfish, who really needs to know what up and down is? You see pictures of jellyfish in the ocean, and they’re always pulsing up towards the surface, and then they come down, and then pulsing up towards the surface, and they have a sense of which way gravity’s going. Or is there more of a light thing that’s helping them, or do they do this at night?\\n\\n Well, if you take gravity out of the equation, there’s a mathematician in the Science community who can write an equation for everything, and one of the equations would be the equation for the vestibular balance function of a jellyfish. It’s probably got a whole lot of terms in there, and one of them is gravity. So the uniqueness of the Space Shuttle or Space Station is that you can take all these equations for various things that happen in your body, and you can take the G out of there and see what happens. You can’t do that anywhere on Earth, except for maybe a few seconds.\\n\\n So this is one of those. Took the G out, and what did they do? Their equation went bonkers. They did little spirals.\\n\\n So that showed us that G is a powerful piece of their equation, the equation that says why they go up and down. They didn’t do it anymore. They went around in spirals. I’m probably totally violating the entire principle of what’s going on here, but that was my simple pilot’s view of what was happening there. It was kind of fun to watch them, too.\\n\\n The rats was a matter of not testing rats or doing tests on rats, per se, but we had twenty-one rats up there in cages, and we also had a glove box. The idea was to demonstrate the ability to do experiments on animals up there. We didn’t do any experiments, but we transported a rat cage from its stockade of rat cages over to the glove box, and then allowing the rat to get into the glove box, where you could then grab onto the rat with your hands and inject them or whatever you’re going to do.\\n\\n Then we also just verified that the functions of these rat cages were okay; that they were feeding okay, they were growing all right. Of course, they had a whole lot of rats on the ground that were the same vintage rats that were the ground truth rats. One of the things that they did with them was after the flight they checked their bone densities to compare with the bone densities of the rats on the ground, and got some idea of what happens to a floating rat’s leg bones after nine days in orbit. But that was a postflight investigation.\\n\\n So those were the animal experiments as I remember them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had a very successful mission overall for all of the experiments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, they said we got 100 percent plus of what we were supposed to do. There were a couple of experiments that were on the ragged edge of failing, but they made it okay. Because they were the ones where we were collecting data primarily for Carolyn [L.] Huntoon, who was a PI, Primary Investigator, on at least one of our experiments that had to do with what goes on in the blood system, transport of nutrients, and that sort of thing.\\n\\n We had saliva, urine, and blood samples that were collected the whole flight, and, of course, we had to keep them in a refrigerator. We had three refrigerator [freezers] on board. One of them failed outright, and the other two were acting up the whole mission. We had to shut it down and defrost it and then fire it up, and then shut the other one down and defrost it and then fire it up. We had to do this in a way that always gave us one refrigerator freezer to collect all these samples in.\\n\\n It was a design problem. It was a zero-G design issue with the Freon flowing through the coolant tubes and so on in zero-G was not efficient and effective. It worked fine on the ground, but in zero gravity, it didn’t. So that was a case where we almost lost the science, but we did learn about how to do refrigerator freezers because of that experiment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that the first flight that one had been on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that they had had these before. It might have been another model; I’m not sure. I don’t remember. But that was probably one of the bigger threats to our science." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During the last interview you touched briefly on the landing and landing the Orbiter for the first time and how you were lower than you realized you were. Is there anything else about the landing that you’d like to mention?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I just had a feeling of accomplishment after stopping on the runway when I realized—it really hit me that this is what I came here for, was to actually fly. I’m a test pilot. I did a lot of neat things for the last eleven years, but the real reason I came here was to fly the Space Shuttle, and they just now let me do it. [Laughter] Not to downplay the role that I had played on my previous flight, but I didn’t get to land on that one. I was the copilot. This is the one where I got to actually do the landing. I’ve done two thousand landings in the simulator and two thousand more in the Shuttle Training Aircraft, all simulation. This was the real one here, and I just did it, and I feel good about it.\\n\\n Now, of course, I felt funny later when I heard the data, and I had come in lower than I really knew I was. We’d talked to each other in the crew office about that. You know, there might be a perception issue on these longer missions, where when you get down there shortly before landing, where your cues tell you you’re a little higher than you actually are, and we need to take that into account.\\n\\n Of course, some people agreed and said, “I noticed that myself.”\\n\\n Others said, “Well, that didn’t affect me. What affected me was some other thing,” and so on.\\n\\n So I don’t know. I haven’t really followed up on that particular one, but it was something I thought was worth passing on to everybody, that, “Hey, you guys. The data show I came in just a few feet above the threshold. I’m here to tell you I didn’t notice that. Is it just me, or is it the displays or what? Let’s talk about it.”\\n\\n It was when we were getting into the first longer missions. One of the things that we did after that for longer missions than mine, when we get up to fifteen-, sixteen-day missions, was gave the crew a laptop simulator, where they could watch the landing and actually fly through the landing on orbit. Give themselves a little practice. That may have helped with some of that. I don’t know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, at the end of that flight, had you already planned to leave NASA at that point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. As I was coming up on the flight, I didn’t really think a whole lot about it, but I thought that, “Once I’ve done this, then everything is on the table for my next moves. I’m either going to stay here and maybe fly another Shuttle mission, maybe get into management, or go back and do my Marine job,” and so on.\\n\\n One of the things that happened while I was training for this mission was the first Gulf War. That happened before I flew that flight, and it was while I was in training. I noticed that they were calling up a lot of Marine Corps retirees and taking people from desk jobs and putting them into front-line positions; taking reservists and putting them in desk jobs to backfill for the people going overseas and so on.\\n\\n The Marine Corps was a little bit stressed out at the time, and here I am, a Marine officer and a Marine pilot, although I’d been out of the Fleet Marine Force for many years, eleven years. More than that, actually, because I had come from four and half years in the [Naval Air] Systems Command, which is not a frontline unit. That’s a support activity. So the last time I’d been in a real combat [-ready] job had been fourteen years prior. But I’m a Marine Colonel with wings on, and I felt like, “I’m missing out here.”\\n\\n Some people thought I was nuts. “How can you say you’re missing out on something? You’re training to go fly on a Space Shuttle mission.”\\n\\n Yet I had that feeling. I said, “Well, yeah, this is fun and so on, but I feel a little guilty.” It’s an incredibly important mission for the nation, to fly a Space shuttle, and yet I still had a little bit of that other feeling. It’s probably screwed up, but maybe it’s because I was a Marine Corps brat, also. I don’t know.\\n\\n The Marine genes came up and stood at attention and said, “What are you doing for your country?”\\n\\n “I’m flying the Shuttle.”\\n\\n They came back and said, “Is that enough? Some of your people are going overseas here in harm’s way.”\\n\\n I actually called a friend of mine who was a General in the Pentagon during that time, some months before my flight. I said, “I’m kind of tied up right here right now, but if this war is still going on when I get back from my Shuttle flight, sign me up. If you need somebody to sit at a desk in the Pentagon so you can go fly fighters over there, or somebody else, I know that people wouldn’t consider me a candidate to go head up a squadron or a group or something,” which is what my rank would have called for, “because I’ve been gone so long. But I can sure do a lot of other things for you guys that might free up somebody.”\\n\\n He just laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” [he said.] He kind of kidded with me and so on, and I’m sure part of his laughing was the thing I just mentioned, that, “You’re already doing something important. Don’t worry about that. We’ll take care of this.” But the other part might have been, ‘”You’re so uncurrent. You haven’t got a clue what’s going on in the Marine Corps, having been gone this long. You’d be useless to us.” My guess is there was a little of each of those things in [his response].\\n\\n He said, “Don’t worry about it. Just go do your thing. Then if you still want to come back into the Marines when you get back, my guess is this war will be long over by then anyway. But we’d certainly be glad to have you come back. There’s some things you could do with us,” and so on.\\n\\n So I took him up on that, and after I landed—I didn’t really think much about it, because I didn’t want to distract myself with anything. I had enough distraction as it was with my oil and water [crew]. But after the mission was over, within a day or two of landing, I had that feeling that I had done what I had come to do, and I can do some more of it, or I can go back to my normal job of being a test pilot, because the job they said would be open for me was at Patuxent River [Maryland], which is where I had come from, fundamentally, in the test community. They said, “We need somebody to be the Marine Aviation Detachment Commanding Officer down there.”\\n\\n I knew all about that job. It was a job where you’re administratively in charge of about 110 Marines. About 40 of them were test pilots, and 60 really high quality maintenance people that come in there. Everybody there is hand selected, so it’s a really elite group; and that the job itself didn’t take up a whole lot of time, so you could do other things like do some test flying, do instructing at the test pilot school, or whatever. I thought, “Well, that’s a great way to end up my career in the Marine Corps is go finish it up at Patuxent River.”\\n\\n I knew that would be my last tour in the Marines, because we had had a real frank discussion, a bunch of us Marines, in the Astronaut Office a couple of years prior to that, with the head of Marine Corps manpower, a guy named General Gray. We had asked him—and I remember Jack [R.] Lousma was the lead Marine Corps astronaut at the time, and there were several of us there. [We] said, “Well, what are our possibilities after we finish a few years here at NASA and then we come back? What kind of things can we expect? Can we expect to get back into line organization after a while and frontline units? Can we expect to be promoted beyond Colonel?” and so on.\\n\\n He said, “Not a chance. No way. Forget about it. You’re gone too long. They may do that kind of thing in the Air Force and the Navy, but we don’t have enough billets for people like you to take the place of folks who have actually done the regular stair steps, done the schools, done the overseas deployments, done the training, done the war fighting kind of stuff, and then to say that some guy’s going to come in out of nowhere and take those choice General jobs from somebody who’s done all that stuff. It’s just not going to happen while I’m here or while anybody I know of is here.” He was very frank with us. We appreciated that, by the way.\\n\\n But it was kind of in my mind that, “Okay, this will be my last tour in the Marines, and I can’t think of a better place to go than back to the test community.” And that’s what I did, and I did it exactly the forty-sixth day after landing. We owed [NASA] forty-five days after landing. You had to do your Flight Test Report, and they’d carved out forty-five days for that, and they wanted it due that day. So I handed in my Flight Test Report and left and went back to Patuxent River the next day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I think that might be a good place to stop before we get into your next assignment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Bryan O’Connor", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. All right." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00811", + "metadata": { + "category": "Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project 1998 - 1999", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Shuttle-Mir/ThomasASW/thomasasw.htm", + "original_file_name": "ThomasASW_7-22-98.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Shuttle-Mir/ThomasASW/ThomasASW_7-22-98.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas –22 July 1998" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright", + "Carol Butler" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Andrew S.W. Thomas" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We're visiting with Andy Thomas, astronaut with the Shuttle-Mir Program. We are here with the Shuttle-Mir Oral History Program. It's Rebecca Wright, Carol Butler, and Summer Bergen.\\n\\n Thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedule." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure thing. My pleasure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We know that you just got back a few weeks ago. How are you feeling?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's going to be six weeks on Friday. I'm feeling very good, actually. I feel remarkably normal for somebody who's spent 141 days in space. I was a little surprised at the readaptation with gravity was a lot easier than I'd anticipated it to be. I thought there'd be weeks of ongoing problems. I have a few inevitable aches and pains, but otherwise everything's fine. I'm out running and enjoying the lovely weather here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Getting used to the heat?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you'll have to give us your secret. I don't think any of us are used to the heat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, I spent 141 days in a confined space at a constant temperature. It is nice to get outdoors and in the sunshine and just feel it. It really feels good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is that one of the benefits of coming home, to be able to be outside." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. I'd been looking forward to that, too, having the fresh air and being outside, yes. It's a nice feeling." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know you've talked about being up there and having an unnatural environment that does become the norm. Did it take you long to adapt?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. One of the things that surprised me was how quickly I could adapt to that environment. Now, true, it was my second flight. My first flight was two years ago, and it was only ten days. I was surprised, because on this flight I adapted to being at zero gravity psychologically very quickly, and I very quickly learned to function and to accept that environment as the normal environment, and it felt natural. That was what was so strange, is an environment which is fundamentally so unnatural could so quickly feel natural. It was an interesting experience to go through that, and as the flight progressed, of course, you become more blase about it because you have it all the time, and every now and again you have these little reality checks with, \"Wait a minute. I'm weightless. I can float. That's the way I move,\" and you just have to remind yourself that, yes, you are weightless. Of course, another form of reality check was when you would go and look out the window and have this spectacular view, just to remind you of where you really were. It was a great experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any way to describe what you saw out the window?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just a series of amazing sights, breathtaking sights; seeing land masses as land masses as you're accustomed to looking at them on a map, seeing familiar contours, but it's not a map, it's actually the land; seeing the atmosphere and atmospheric effects; seeing storms; seeing day change to night and back to day again forty minutes later; and seeing the different parts of the whole planet over the course of an hour and a half. It's really a unique vantage to have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was the Mir what you expected?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really. Well, it was and it wasn't. I had gone into it expecting that, all right, it's going to be confined and it's going to be crowded, but I have to say when I went in there, it was a bit of a shock just how crowded it was, how much stuff was in there, and that took some getting used to, but you can get used to it. In the early part of the flight, the crew I was with, the Mir-25 crew, when they arrived, and I spent a lot of time to try and tidy things up so that it would be perhaps a little less crowded and the housekeeping organized a little bit better to make it more comfortable. But it is a confining environment. There's no doubt about that. At no time did I feel claustrophobic up there. You don't have that sense at all. There's enough room that you don't feel claustrophobic, but you are aware that it's a confined environment, that you don't have a lot of options of places to go inside this vehicle while you're there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your feelings when you arrived and the first thing you saw out of the Mir was the Shuttle leaving you for those few days that turned into long days?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, by the time the Shuttle left, I was actually glad to see it go, because while the Shuttle is docked at Mir, you're in sort of a no-man's-land. You're partly the Shuttle crew, partly the Mir crew, and you always have an out. You know you could go back with them, in principle. While the Shuttle is there, things are very crowded. You're not able to set things up. You're not able to really move in because it's still there. It's like when you're moving into a new house and the moving truck is still parked outside and you can't get on with what you're doing because the moving van is still there unloading stuff.\\n\\n So although they are my colleagues, I was kind of glad to see the Shuttle go, because it meant I could get on with what I needed to do during that flight. I could unpack all my things. I could set up my home there, which was going to be my home for four and a half months. I could get into a routine of living on this vehicle, because until you get into a day-to-day routine of living and have a comfortable routine that balances your personal needs of recreation with the programmatic needs of work, you're not really living there, and you can't begin to enjoy the environment and establish a stable lifestyle until you do that, until you develop your routine. So I was able to do that after the Shuttle left, so in that sense I was kind of glad to get on with what I was sent up there to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what did you set as your primary focus? I know that everybody has their sets of experiments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I had a repertoire of science experiments and some engineering things to do, but I would have to say, for me, the whole experience, the primary focus for me was the personal experience. I knew this was going to be a very difficult experience. Mike Foale described it as the toughest thing he'd ever done in his life. I could well believe that, and I knew that it's not the kind of experience that everyone can do. Some people wouldn't like it and would not have a good experience. So my personal goal was to make this a good experience for me at a personal level and a professional level. The two go together there. If the personal rewards were there, I knew that I would have no trouble fulfilling the professional and programmatic requirements. So my goal was that I would be able to look back on this in June, after the landing, and say, \"That was a good experience. I'm glad that worked. I made that work, and I'm glad I did it,\" and that was the focus of a lot of my energies during the flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand you took some things that would make you feel comfortable, including Monty Python. Is that what I hear?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I took a lot of recreation items. We have cassettes for music. We had CDs for music, a Walkman to listen to music while you work or while you're exercising. There was a very extensive collection of videos up there, of fairly recent-release movies, plus I took some more with me that had come out. So I had a lot of movies that I could watch. I took quite a number of books up there with me to read at night. I took CD-ROMs like the Monty Python and some others that I used just as entertainment while I was there, because when you're on a vehicle like that, you don't have a lot of options for your recreational activities, but recreation is very important, because that's how you regenerate yourself and keep charged up to get the work done and to fulfill the requirements of the mission under these very trying circumstances. So recreation's extremely important, and you've got to have personal recreation there, something that you are interested in and which you can escape in, because you can't physically escape the environment, but psychologically you can, so you need something to remove yourself from the environment and get regenerated so that you can have a productive flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did it help being the seventh one up there, that you had things that people had left that you could--" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There wasn't that much that people had left, actually. Most of what I took, the books, the CDs, the music was all my personal stuff. They had their own, I think, but it was my personal stuff. I know Shannon Lucid had a lot of books up there, but they were in the Spektr module and inaccessible. So the things I took were mostly for me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were these books that you'd been wanting to read for a long time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Paperbacks mostly, because I wanted low weight, but there were collections of a lot of science fiction, which I took just for the escape value of it. I took some of the classics. I took some Mark Twain because I'd always wanted to read Huckleberry Finn, since it's a landmark book in American literature and it's a very controversial book. I wanted to see what it was about. I'd never read it. Edgar Allen Poe, as well as some books on science and things like that which I've been interested in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find time to have recreation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. We set up a workday that sort of would start at about nine in the morning, and it was a long day; we'd work through till about seven. There'd be a break in the middle of the afternoon for exercise on the treadmill, then clean-up, then lunch. Lunch was late, usually about three, then work through again after that till dinner, which would be at seven or eight, and then in the evening watch a video, perhaps, or read E-mail or write E-mail or read a book. I would usually read a book just before I went to bed, for half an hour before I would turn out the light, same as I do on Earth. And we would do that five days a week, Monday through Friday, that kind of routine. Weekends were--there were still duties you had to do. The nature of the vehicle is such that you can't just stop, but it was a much reduced work level for us. So it was sort of like days off, days of rest, so I used those days for watching movies or reading or something like that.\\n\\n It was funny, you know, up there in that work environment where you get into this routine, you start to look forward to Friday, because Fridays you can start to relax. You know, you're not going anywhere different, you're in the same vehicle, but you still look forward to Friday. And then on Monday, when Monday comes, it's like Monday-morning-itis, \"Here we go again, back to the grind.\" So all of those sort of attributes about day-to-day life here we had up there, which is actually good because it gives it an air of normalcy and comfort to do it that way. So it was kind of interesting that we had that.\\n\\n A recreational aid for me that turned out to be very important was to do something creative. I'd actually taken some guitar music up there, and there was a guitar up there, which I tried to play. Playing a guitar in zero gravity is actually very difficult, because the guitar won't sit in your lab. It turns out it's a lot harder than you might imagine. So I only did that a few times.\\n\\n The most creative recreation I did was to do sketches. I had paper and pencils up there, and I would do sketches of things that I saw out the window or internal views and things like that. Over the twenty weeks I was there, I did a number of these sketches, not many, about twelve, because they take a long time to do, but I found that a very rewarding activity because you can get so involved in it, it distracts you completely from everything else you've been thinking about, and you're thinking creatively, which I like to do, and that turned out to be an immense pleasure during the flight. I would do a sketch on a Saturday, or do some sketching on a Saturday, and I'd find suddenly that hours had passed, and at the end of it I felt just refreshed and ready to go, plus it has given me a personal record of the trip, which is perhaps a little more personal than just a whole series of photographs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it challenging since the scene changed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I'd have to capture the scene on a video or something and freeze-frame it, yes, because out the window it's gone in a heartbeat. You'd have to capture it and then draw it off a screen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would that be something that the public will be able to see at some time, or is that your personal--you'd keep for yourself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, that's personal, I think. The thing is, when you say publicly that you got sketches done on Mir, everyone expects you to be an artist, and they expect real high quality. Well, I'm not an artist. For me these were very good, I was very pleased with them, but that doesn't mean that they're really high quality, plus they are a personal record, but I'm going to frame them and put them up in my house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Have you reviewed them since you've been home?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I've got them at home. They're kind of nice. It's nice to see the date on them and remember the scene and what I was doing when I did them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you do sketches of your roommates?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I did--not do in-cabin sketches. I did sketches of them when they were outside doing EVAs, based on the views that I'd seen watching them do the EVAs. I never did sketches of internal scenes. I was going to do that, but I never got to the point of sketching that. It takes a long time to do a sketch, actually, because you have to compose the subject, which you do by trial and error, and you have to think about the view you want and how the light is going to be, and you compose it, and then you start the sketch proper, perhaps, and there's a lot of details you have to add. It takes a long time. It took me a couple weeks to finish one to the level of detail that I was pleased with, but that was good, because I had plenty of time on my hands. That turned out to be a really rewarding activity.\\n\\n I think the big lesson from that is, if you're going to do a long-duration flight like this, the crewperson does have to have a personal recreation device at his disposal which is something he or she really derives a personal benefit from. NASA can provide tapes and videos and CDs and things like that, but the crewperson needs to think about what they really need for themselves for that time, what hobby is it they can take with them that will give them the recreational needs that they have, because it's really important that you have good recreation for a flight like this to make your off time productive and to get you away, psychologically remove you from the environment, so that you can have productive times during your work, just like here on Earth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Speaking of things that you brought with you, I was reading how you took steel flint from your--" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was actually on my first flight that I took that. Yes, my great-great-grandfather in Australia served on an expedition that was the first expedition to actually cross Australia from south to north over 100 years ago now, 130 years ago, and that was an important expedition because no one knew what was in the center of Australia. They thought it could be an inland sea or--they had no idea. He served on that expedition. So on my first Shuttle flight I took a memento of his on the Shuttle with me sort of as a souvenir." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you see yourself as an explorer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of a kind, we are, because seeking new knowledge is exploration, but I don't see myself in the same league as people who do expeditions like that or like Lewis and Clark and so on, or the people that explored the Antarctic and the Arctic regions, because when they went off on those very courageous journeys, they went by themselves. They planned and everything, had a lot of support, but once they'd gone, they were gone. They were alone. When we do these kinds of flights, it's true we're alone up there but we have radio communications to a huge group of people down here who have a lot of resources to provide assistance in the event something goes wrong, and a lot of guidance about what should be done next. So in that sense we're not alone. So there is a fundamental difference in the approach, although what we do is explorative in nature." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The crew that you were with, how much time and what kind of relationship did you have with them? I know you worked with them up there, but did other parts of the day did you spend--" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Actually, I didn't work with them that much. Most of the work I did was in the Priroda module, which was this module up here, and I was there doing the science program that I was sent up to do, and they were doing work mostly in the base block, which is in this module here. So my science program was sort of a one-person show and I did that.\\n\\n The time we spent together was recreational time and meals. I made a point to share mealtimes with them, because I thought that was important, and it was fun, too, and it gave you some human contact. So we would eat all our meals together and watch videos together after the meals and talk. There is a dining table set up in the base block here, which is the main dining area where the water is, the galley is, and the food is, and so we had meals there and tea breaks and watched videos there. That's where we had the communication systems to the ground, too, so we'd do all our talking to the ground from there. So we spent a lot of time together in the base block socializing and recreating." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you bring special food items as well as bringing recreational items?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. There was an abundance of food up there. I had my choice of American food and Russian food, much more food than I could eat. It was really a good selection of food, actually. The food is largely canned food and rehydratable foods, much like you might use on a camping trip or something like that, and I had more than enough to eat. The Russian foods were really good. The Russian soups were just outstanding, and the Russian juices, fruit juices, were really good. They had a very nice natural taste, and they tasted very fresh, perhaps more so than the American fruit juices, which tend to be a little bit artificial, Tang-type things. So I really enjoyed the food that was available to me.\\n\\n We had Progress vehicles--that's the small vehicle here--that came unmanned and brought supplies up periodically, and two of those arrived while I was there, and in that people would put letters and photographs and things from home in there for me plus treats, like we'd get some fresh fruit, some fresh vegetables, and got a nice big bag of M&Ms, a nice big bag of Oreo cookies, things like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No lasagna?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No lasagna. No lasagna. That came later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What other forms of human contact? I know you used E-mail quite a bit. Was that something you enjoyed doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It turns out E-mail, actually, I think, really is very important, perhaps more important than voice communication. I missed E-mail when it didn't work, and there were quite a few times that it failed, and you really notice it when it's not there because it provides a link to people. You know, it's like getting a letter in the mailbox, something you can sort of hold in your hand and you can reread and prepare a response to. You can relive it. In that sense it's actually sometimes more rewarding to receive an E-mail from home from someone rather than talk to them on a voice contact, which is over in a couple of minutes. So I really enjoyed E-mail very much. I think E-mail is very important for the people on these kinds of missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course, you spent time away from home when you were training in Russia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I was there for a year in preparation for this flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you share some experiences that you went through there, the differences of training from here to there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was actually a fascinating experience. The training all takes place in what they call the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, which is in a small town called Star City, which is outside of Moscow, about an hour outside of Moscow. It was fascinating to go there, because there's so much history there of the space program, the Russian space program. It was just fascinating, being involved in it.\\n\\n It was hard work, though, because all the training I had in the systems that make up the Mir and the Soyuz spacecraft was all in Russian, so I had to spend a lot of time learning some competence in Russian so that I could understand the instructors who would give me the classes in Russian, the technical classes. And then I had to do exams, oral exams, to a board of instructors, in Russian, on these systems, and I can tell you, that was a lot of work. That was a big undertaking to do that all in a year to prepare for flight on this vehicle. I did it. I don't know how I did it, but I did it. [Laughter] But it was really fascinating to do that.\\n\\n The other thing about it, being in Moscow was fascinating, too, because Moscow is a city that's, in some ways, caught between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries in part of its culture, and it's a culture that clearly grew up as an autocratic Communist state. Geographically it's caught between Eastern Europe and the Far East or even the Middle East, and you can see that reflection in their architecture and in some of the clothing and cultural habits. So it was fascinating to just be in that sort of environment and see that aspect to it and to live there for a year and get to know them. It's something that would have been unthinkable ten years ago, to do that, but I got to do it. So it was just an amazing experience, to have that time there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you originally went over there, you had the possibility of flying the course--" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went as a back-up. The plan was I'd stay there a year, and David Wolf would go fly the last increment on Mir and I would come back and do something else. I actually undertook that mostly because I was curious about the Russian environment and so on, not expecting that I would get a flight out of it. But I did. I got to fly when the crew reassignments were made, and I feel very privileged that I was one of the seven people that served on this vehicle. It's just amazing to even contemplate that, actually, in hindsight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how did your family take the announcement that you were going to be gone so far away?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I don't think they minded that so much. I said, \"I'm going to Russia for a year to just be a non-flight training back-up.\"\\n\\n They just sort of thought, \"Well, that's an unusual thing to do, but you're coming back?\"\\n\\n \"Yes, yes, I'll be coming back.\"\\n\\n But I noticed the conversation got decidedly quiet when I announced that crews had been reassigned and that I was, in fact, going to fly on this vehicle. But I think they trusted my judgment and knew that I wasn't going to do anything impetuous or foolhardy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are they concerned because of all the information that had been released of concerns for safety of Mir?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They never vocalized any concerns, but I've noticed that since I've got back they've vocalized a lot of relief that I'm back. I think they trusted my judgment. All the time I was on that vehicle, I felt safe. I never felt threatened. I thought it was a fascinating way to spend four and a half months, and I never felt any sense of impending danger or any problem like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We all get into routines every day, like you mentioned earlier. Was something more than others that you realized that you couldn't do your routine, something that you do every day here, but up there it changed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The thing you notice the most is the lack of options for what you can do. Here you can get in a car and drive up into town or go to a restaurant or go visit a friend or go to a movie or go to the beach, and you have that mobility that provides you a lot of options in what you can do. That's not the case up there. You don't have a lot of options. That's why I talked about recreation being important. You have to exploit the environment for whatever you can to give you as much interesting activities as you can find. So that was the biggest thing, was just not having a lot of options.\\n\\n Of course, I flew with a good crew. I'm lucky I flew with them. I feel they were good guys. But there is only two other people you see the whole time. You don't have a lot of diversity in the people you see over the course of that four-and-a-half-month period." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were with two other crewmembers, other than you were with two Russians. You felt like you were all a crew working together?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Oh, yes, yes. I definitely felt that we were a team up there, and to their credit, I'll say they worked hard to make sure that that was the way everyone felt, and that was what they wanted, too, because, you know, they were in the same environment I was. They had the same needs, and if any one of them had not been sort of integrated as a crew, it would have been tough on them, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course, you left them and they're still there. Have you communicated with them at all since you've been down?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I haven't. Mir is going to be flying over, possibly visible tomorrow night, so it's going to be interesting, the first time I actually get to see it go over now that I'm back. That will be interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was it to look over your shoulder and see that you were flying off in the Shuttle and leaving them behind?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was fascinating, because, you know, I'd spent four and a half months on Mir, but it was inside Mir. I really didn't see the outside of the vehicle. I'd seen it briefly when we first docked, but not a lot. So the fascinating part was that as we pulled away and did a fly-around, I was able for the first time to get to see the outside of what had been my home for twenty weeks. That was really interesting. I'd say, \"Oh, yes, I know that window. I used to look out that window. Oh, is that what that was? I wondered what that thing was.\" And so that was kind of fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your crewmates did go out. You said they had done an EVA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They did five EVAs, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your duties while they were busy on the outside?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Most of the time I was glued to the windows, photographing their activities while they did the work, and also taking care of anything that came up inside the station if something did. There were a few calls from the ground to check a few things while they were outdoors. But, yes, they did thirty hours of EVA, and five of them. They did one series of EVAs to repair a solar array on the Spektr module that had been damaged in the collision, to brace it up, to give it some strength, and the other one was to replace an engine which is out on a boom out here that's used for controlling the attitude of the station. So they came out and climbed up this tall boom that's mounted on the station and replaced this engine. There was quite a lot of work that they did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you envious that they were there and you were inside? Did you want to be out there with them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I would like to have tried it, but I have to say, thirty hours of EVA is hard, hard work. They worked very hard, and they have my respect for that because it was not an easy thing that they did, by any means. I didn't envy the hard work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The experiments that you performed while you were there, will you be able to follow the results once you're home?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I won't be following them, but they're going to be providing me some briefings on them from time to time--I suppose that's following them, isn't it?--and giving me updates on what they find. It's still too early yet. I haven't had feedback from the results yet. It'll be some time before I do, too. There's a fairly complex analysis needed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have a favorite of all the ones that you were working on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I enjoyed them all, because they provided activity, stimulating activity. The biotechnology experiment, growing the cells in the bioreactor, was perhaps the most time-consuming. I'd say that was the one that got most of my attention. That's the one I'm sort of going to be interested to see what the outcome of that was, and it also gave quite a lot of problems during the flight which required a bit of careful work to overcome. So it remains to be seen what the outcome of all that is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At the end of the flight, there was a computer glitch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did that give you little anxious feelings of maybe your flight home was going to be delayed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was a concern. The Shuttle was to launch on a Tuesday, and the Saturday before that, just before I was supposed to give a press conference, the attitude-control computer failed, and I thought it was unbelievably bad timing. After twenty weeks this happens and just before a press conference, because one of the things I was going to say in the press conference was how problem-free the flight had been and so on. It turned out the press conference had to be canceled. But I was concerned that if they didn't have attitude control, which meant that the station would be slowly rotating, it wouldn't be possible to dock the Shuttle to it, in which case they would delay the launch until it did get control back.\\n\\n But they worked very hard to change out the computer and reestablish operations, which they had done within a day, I think, a day and a half, perhaps--yes, a day and a half, and so the Shuttle was launching on time and came on time. But for a while there I was thinking, \"Hmm. Wonder when I'm going to see the Shuttle?\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you see it approaching?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. I saw it first as a point of light out on the horizon, like a bright star. Then you could get binoculars and you could look at it. You could just make out that it was not a star, that it actually was the Shuttle. Then, of course, it came closer and you could see it clearly, and I got some spectacular photos of it just floating around next to us to come up underneath and dock to us. It just got closer and closer, and then at one point you feel the whole station shudder, and you know that they've made contact and have latched on. So it was a great moment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I guess the next great moment was when they opened the hatch?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. At that point I knew I was going home. And we had a good time. We spent time together socializing and saying goodbye and packing up, and after three days closed the hatch, made sure I was on the Shuttle side of it, waved goodbye, and slowly pulled away, and then did the fly-around, when I got to look at my home for the last four months.\\n\\n Perhaps one of the most moving moments, though, was as we drew further and further away, we went into the night side of the planet, and I could see stars, and the running lights of the station were on. You couldn't see the station. All you could see was lights flashing, and they were just going off into the distance, these flashing points of light fading out slowly. That was kind of an emotional moment, because I knew that would be the last time I would see it--ever. And that's been the case, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You rode home with one of the people who were very instrumental in having Mir." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, Valeri Ryumin." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you get a chance to visit, to share any information on the way?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not a lot during the Shuttle flight. He spent a lot of time on Mir while I was doing the transfer of all the bags and things that I'd packed, and it's my understanding he's going to be preparing some kind of report on the Mir for the Russian Space Agency. I would assume, and I certainly hope, that we would get a copy of that, to see what their interpretation of it is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were the last American, probably will be the last American there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Definitely will be, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What makes your mission different than the rest?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was my mission. [Laughter] There were seven people that flew up there. We all had sort of similar science that was undertaken. I think mine was probably the most placid of all of them. The first person, Norm [Norman] Thagard, when he went up there, there were a lot of problems to do with the fact that he was the first, and a lot of the things that you need to sustain yourself I don't think he had. So that must have made it tough for him. I don't think they had the E-mail situation worked out nor the [unclear], things like that. Shannon, when she flew, her flight got extended because of Shuttle problems, actually. So she had to stay up there six months instead of four, and that would have been tough, I think. She has a very good spirit about it, though.\\n\\n And of course, for Jerry's [Linenger] increment, John Blaha flew. He had a fairly benign increment, too, much like mine. For Jerry there was the fire, of course, and for Mike [Foale] there was the depressurization. So they had some exciting times on theirs.\\n\\n David [Wolf] had a number of power failures during his. Mine was fairly placid by comparison, which I think is testimony to the capability of the Russians to restore operations, to bring the system back on line, which I think they did well, because I think they recognized that the world was sort of watching what they do with the station, and that they were on the world stage and needed to prove that they could do it, and they did that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was this your first dealing, working with the Russian partners?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I got to know the Russian culture and mentality reasonably well by spending that year in training beforehand. It sort of gave me a sense of the way they think and the way they approach things and so on, and the Russian engineering, the quality of the Russian engineering." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You've been from Australia to American, Russia to Mir, and now back again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I want to stay at home for a while. [Laughter] Yes, I do. Just before I went to Russia, I bought a small house here, which I moved into, only to have to pack up and go to Russia. So I've only just sort of moved into it again. I want to spend time to turn it from a house into a home and enjoy that. For the whole of my time while I was on Mir and the whole of my time training the year before it, my whole life was scheduled. Each day you'd have a piece of paper telling you what you had to do, where you had to be throughout the whole day, and you had to follow that up with hours and hours of study at night because it was all in Russian. It took a long time to read a twenty-page document, a long time.\\n\\n So I'm looking forward to not having a scheduled life. It still is scheduled, the post-flight activities require that, but I'm looking very much forward to, for a while, having an unscheduled life and be free to do what I wish and come and go and be my own master for a while, and enjoy just building a home, getting back into establishing a home here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You might even have a pet. You certainly couldn't have pets on Mir." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I don't think I want a pet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to ask Carol and Summer if they had a question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you say the Shuttle-Mir Program has accomplished everything it set out to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think so, in spades and more, perhaps. The Shuttle-Mir Program has taken a lot of criticism over the two or three years that this program's been running, particularly last year with the problems that Mir was facing. Perhaps some of those criticisms are justified, but I think you need to step back and look at this program and this collaboration. In fact, if you even go back forty years ago when NASA was formed, NASA was formed because there was a space race and there was competition between Russia and the U.S. in the Cold War, and the role of this agency was to represent the U.S. interests in going into space, and it was definitely in competition with the Russians.\\n\\n Well, the Cold War is over. I think one of the great geopolitical and social events of the twentieth century history will show will be the ending of the Cold War and the peaceful demise of Communism in the Soviet Bloc countries. I think that's just an extraordinary historical event to contemplate. And it is equally amazing that over the course of that, that spirit of competition that existed for forty years has evolved smoothly into a spirit of cooperation, and the Shuttle-Mir Program was the instrument of doing that.\\n\\n I think it's very important that we judge the Shuttle-Mir Program by the standards of today and by the standards of the nineties and by the geopolitical world that exists now and we don't judge this program by the prejudices of the Cold War era, which we all grew up in. Those aren't valid now, and you have to look at this program and say, \"Is this the right thing to do?\" I think the answer is yes. From a purely U.S. point of view, it is the right thing because it serves the interests of the United States to support this program and, in so doing, support the new directions that the Russian society is trying to take. It's very much in our interest to do that and to have access to the technology of these systems, which we didn't have before. That serves the interest of our space program. It serves our interest to help stabilize the economy of Russia, because that's potentially a huge market that we can one day participate with. It stops the technology falling into the wrong kind of hands, because there's lot of bad guys out there that would like to have access to some of this technology. So [from that]..perspective, I think, you have to say that this program of collaboration serves the interests of the United States and is something that should be done. I think, also, on a global point of view and sort of a human point of view, collaboration, as we start to explore space, is the right thing to do, too, because no one nation should have control over space or dominion over space. It should be something that is shared by everybody as an international venture, and that's another reason why this collaboration is the [direction] to go.\\n\\n So those are all the reasons why the Shuttle-Mir Phase One Program was the right direction to go and the Russian collaboration we have is the right direction to go. Just looking at the Phase One Program by itself, though, it provides a lot of benefits, because it's taught us and given us experience on operating and living on a day-to-day basis in an orbiting space station, which we didn't have. It's taught us how to resupply a space station, how to bring crewpersons up, how to change our crews, how to train crews for these missions. It's taught us how to fly a Shuttle up to a space station and dock with it and do all of these exchanges. These are not trivial problems, by any means. So we've learned a lot from doing that, and I think that information is going to be of profound importance as we do the International Space Station. I actually think it's inconceivable to think that we could have even attempted an International Space Station without the Shuttle-Mir lessons-learned program that we have now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I believe a lot of people agree with that. Any more? Do you have anything else that you'd like to add?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. You've heard me talk enough, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We thank you again for taking time and visiting with us, and we wish you luck and lots of rest and free time for yourself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Andrew S.W. Thomas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thanks." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00130", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2020-014.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Clark, Paul (2005-2007): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2020-014", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2020-014", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Paul Clark served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji from 2005 to 2007 in an environmental program. Prior to joining Peace Corps, he served in the U.S. Army and attended graduate school at the University of Montana. His Peace Corps training was conducted in-country and included home stays with local families. Clark's job assignment was in Cuvu and included working with six neighboring villages. He lived with a local family for the first four months of his assignment, and then moved into his own quarters. While in Cuvu he organized the school library, started an environmental club at the school, conducted waste management workshops, and tutored students. He also prepared a brief dictionary of the local dialect for the benefit of future volunteers. Finally, Clark discusses how his Peace Corps experience helped prepare him for his current job with the National Park Service in Alaska. Interviewed and recorded by Jack Franklin Davies, August 12, 2019. 2 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).", + "dates_of_materials": "12 August 2019", + "extent": "2 digital files (audio; stereo; 63 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "032. Fiji.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Fiji. Clark, Paul (2005-2007): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Fiji", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2020-014", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2020-014-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/2v0505tqk8588ry8sfld70ea03563re5.pdf?odc=20231115173707-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/1ca07b9e-ef1e-49cf-a726-c50bf36b0e51/7d2b7ecb-97cc-4ed3-bf2d-a1607455b415/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzI4YTJfYzEwNzgxZjBiMTUwYzg5Nzc0ODJmMDEwNmM4MWMyZjVkZGE2MjMyYzRmMzk3MzNhMjQzOWY0NGI3YWFlYzc3ZV8vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS8xY2EwN2I5ZS1lZjFlLTQ5Y2YtYTcyNi1jNTBiZjM2YjBlNTEvN2QyYjdlY2ItOTdjYy00ZWQzLWJmMmQtYTE2MDc0NTViNDE1L21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Anchorage, Alaska", + "length": "38 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed December 11, 2019, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Paul Clark Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Jack Franklin Davies" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Paul Clark" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:01", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now it is, OK. Testing one, two, three. It looks like it's working. I'll try to fool around with the playback tonight, so whoever is listening to this on the other end at the Kennedy Center, hello. Let's get started. My name is Jack Davies. I'm a returned Peace Corps volunteer from the Fiji Islands from 1978 through '80, which was Group 31. I have the pleasure today of interviewing Paul Clark, who was a volunteer in Fiji from 2005 to 2007. He was an environmental advisor in the Cuvu village, which is actually spelled C-U-V-U. The C is pronounced T-H. Anyhow, that's close to Sigatoka, and I'm going to let Paul take it from there. So how are you doing, Paul?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:43", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hi, Jack. Yeah, I'm doing, I'm doing great. Thanks so much for taking the time up in sunny Anchorage." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:49", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Well, it's my pleasure to be here, and it is a beautiful day today. Anyhow, so how did you hear about the Peace Corps and what got you interested in it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:57", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that's a good question. I guess like lots of momentous decisions I've made in my life, it was just sort of coincidental that someone mentioned Peace Corps to me. So I was finishing up in my active duty time in the Army." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:01:16", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, in the Army." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:01:17", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Which I was an air defense artillery officer down in Fort Bliss, Texas. And so trying to figure out, well, what comes next? And one of my fellow officer friends said, well, you should do the Peace Corps. And I'd certainly heard of the Peace Corps, it's a well-known organization, but I honestly hadn't thought about, hadn't thought about going in. And this was in, I guess, 2003." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:01:46", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:01:47", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I thought about it a little bit and I thought, well, you know, she's right. That sounds really interesting. And so I was also interested in doing graduate school following my time in the Army. So my undergraduate degree's in history, and I had pursued some PhD programs but actually didn't get accepted. So I was thinking, OK, well, what else? And so then started looking at, well, how does, how can we connect grad school as well as its potential for Peace Corps? And so I ended up going to graduate school at the University of Montana. And they were part of the Master's International program that I don't think is running anymore. But it's where the Peace Corps would essentially serve as my research time. So it would be incorporated into the graduate program. And the graduate program was a master's of science in resource conservation. And so that's how it came to be. I applied for graduate school and for the Peace Corps at the same time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:03:04", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, interesting. And the Peace Corps called first?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:03:08", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That is a good question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:03:10", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because I seem to recall waiting quite a while to hear from them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:03:14", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It did take a, it did take a while. Yeah, I think. I think continues to still take. I don't remember the exact timeline." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:03:22", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was Fiji your first offer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:03:24", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Fiji was my first offer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:03:25", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, lucky you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:03:27", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. So I got the call. I had already, in fact. So graduate school must have been first because I was at, I was in Missoula at the University of Montana when I got the call. I think it was already spring semester and so the recruiter or the placement officer said, well, what do you? I've got a place for you. Because as part of the Master's International program, I knew that it would be in the environment field." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:03:58", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:03:59", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was it. I didn't put any preference for location because my Spanish and French skills are pretty basic, so it wouldn't make the cut for the programs that had that language requirement. But other than that, I was wide open." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:04:15", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you do have an aptitude for languages then. Did you learn Fijian?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:04:18", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. I did. Yeah, and it's, um, that was one of my motivations for going into the Peace Corps. I was, I really love languages and love trying to learn them. It's, I have an aptitude for it, I would say. But of course, it's still a challenge." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:04:37", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So before we get too far into Fiji. So what did you do with all your stuff, your personal belongings and everything while you were gone for two years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:04:46", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "While I was gone. Well, I originally grew up in Helena, Montana, so it was only a hundred miles away and I had moved up. I finished active duty service with the Army in 2003, moved stuff back up to Montana, and I think my, uh, I think my dad absorbed it all in his house and some went to my brother. I actually loaned my car to a friend for a couple of years. So, yeah, I didn't have too much still." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:05:22", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like a win win." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:05:23", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was young and pretty young and single and little more than just what could fit in the car." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:05:29", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I want to ask you, did the Army help prepare you for Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:05:34", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes and no. Yes in that you certainly need to learn to adapt. You're going to be flexible to a variety of environments, could be adverse conditions, but pretty flexible and flexible in coming into a situation just trying to understand what's happening there and acclimating." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:06:03", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A little survival training too, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:06:05", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A little bit, a little bit. Not as much as maybe you would hope for. I bet they do more of it now, but I'd say no in that the Army is pretty structured." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:06:18", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:06:20", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And there's the right way to do it and wrong way. Now there is room for creativity and thinking on your feet and all. But then the Peace Corps and especially Fiji and Fiji time, right, was a polar opposite. But I will say that the Fijians that I worked with, especially the indigenous Fijians, really highly respected military service." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:06:51", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:06:51", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so they were actually really confused. How? Why on earth would I have gotten out of the Army? Which is this prestigious occupation that many of them, especially the men, hope to be able to go serve with the British military or others. And here I am, choosing to get out of the Army and to come to Fiji as a Peace Corps volunteer. So that confused them a little bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:07:15", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Uh-huh. Interesting. You mentioned Fiji time. Tell me what that is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:07:20", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it's just the sort of non clock based, much slower pace, you know, I think often general sense of island time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:07:32", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:07:33", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So in Fiji, specifically what I can remember is, it seemed like if I would press and say, well, when is this event going to start? It would either start at 9:00 or at 1:00. And nine o'clock meant sometime in the morning, probably before lunch, and one o'clock meant probably sometime before dinner." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:07:56", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Or maybe tomorrow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:07:57", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And tomorrow was potentially never." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:08:03", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure we would call the coconut wireless." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:08:06", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, indeed, indeed. Among Peace Corps volunteers. Now, of course, in my era we did have email." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:08:14", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:08:14", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we weren't all connected quite like I imagine volunteers are now, but we could go to an internet cafe and actually be in touch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:08:23", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh boy, that's a big difference. Well, I want to hear all about that when we talk about Fiji a little bit more but." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:08:28", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You bet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:08:28", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where did you learn the language? Where was your training held?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:08:31", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So our training was just outside of Suva at, I believe it's called Nandave, and it was a vocational training center for, I can't remember if it's young men and women or just young men." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:08:44", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:08:45", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But we held about, we were there for about two weeks, I believe. And then we went out with host families at a series of villages. And unfortunately, I can't right off the top of my head remember the name of my fantastic village where we did our training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:09:05", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, we should have a map in front of us, but maybe we can reference one later on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:09:09", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:09:11", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, so two weeks and then a village stay. Or several villages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:09:16", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we were each assigned to different villages. There was a group of, I'd say, about five of us in the village. And so there was a language trainer and we learned the standard Fijian or known as the Bauan language. And so that was the, that was our kind of primary schooling. And then our host family, you know, would help with that too. And so I was with a family, with a mother, her adult daughter, and then the daughter's two children." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:09:54", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:09:54", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And all of the, the elder, the grandmother there, she knew some English, but she wouldn't speak it to me. She knew that I was supposed to learn Fijian." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:10:07", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good for her." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:10:09", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the kids, the kids helped. So I would say I had a wonderful family who really took an interest in helping me learn the language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:10:19", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's great. Yeah, nice. So from the language, so you did all your training in country?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:10:27", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, except for a three-day pre-service in Los Angeles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:10:33", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, just staging." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:10:33", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The staging, exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:10:34", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:10:34", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But yes, the rest was in Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:10:36", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you happen to drink kava while you were in the training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:10:40", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, apparently that was definitely a key part of the training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:10:44", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So tell us about kava." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:10:46", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did. So kava, or in Fijian known as yagona, which is made from the roots of a pepper plant. And it was sort of humorously called dirty water, but it kind of looks and kind of tastes like dirty water. But it's, you know, it's common in really across a lot of Pacific islands and Fiji, they get in into the drinking yagona. It's part of just every community." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:11:25", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's kind of like the passport into a village, as I recall," + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:11:27", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It is, it is. It's part of what's called the sevusevu or offering when. So if you're going into a new place, including when we got to our sites and even, you know, when we certainly the ground had already been laid for us to the training, the training villages. But my guess is that there was one of the Fijian Peace Corps staff went in and did a sevusevu where they offer a big bundle of kava and some kind of ceremonial talk goes back and forth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:12:06", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you ever learn the presentation of the kava?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:12:09", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not, not perfectly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:12:11", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because usually the chief would have a spokesperson, but I learned it if you'd like to hear a little bit of Fijian for the record, or would you like to say something?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:12:19", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it's too rusty." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:12:21", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, let's have a little conversation. Ni sa bula, Paul." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:12:26", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sa bula vinaka." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:12:26", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sa vacava tiko? How are you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:12:30", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, sorry, I have some Spanish mixed in there now too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:12:34", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Isn't that how it goes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:12:35", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:12:35", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, let me do this sevusevu, because I should have brought some kava to present to you because I'm here in your office. So let's just pretend that this recorder is some yagona. [speaks Fijian] So that was in the northern island dialect, which probably sounded a little different than what you're used to speaking." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:13:16", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A little bit. But excellent. Well done. Well done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:13:20", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I remembered it over the years, and practiced it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:13:24", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think certainly mine's gotten rusty. But yeah, so I did learn a little bit, but definitely in. And so where I was located in Cuvu village was in western Viti Levu. So the main island, about a little closer between Nadi and Suva." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:13:46", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK. Sigatoka. On the south side, I believe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:13:49", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And just about six miles west, right next to the Shangri- La Fijian Resort. So big, big resort along the coral coast." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:13:58", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:13:59", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the language there is, linguists considered a separate language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:14:04", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do they?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:14:05", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so. So for example, [speaks Fijian], right? I'm full or I'm hungry in the nandrolone dialect is [speaks Fijian]. So it's just, it's just different. Even grammatically, there's some structural differences so that the present tense indicator is at the end of the sentence. So there's enough changes both in the grammar, the lexicon, and just the sounds, the phonics of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:14:45", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have much trouble learning Fijian?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:14:49", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, probably learning well, just because most people's English was better than my Fijian would ever get. So they would typically speak to me in English, and if we were actually doing something official or business as opposed to actually just sort of banter or practicing with the language, mostly it was in English. So it was kind of on my own as more of a hobby. And I, all throughout, I was trying to learn the dialect and actually put together a little tiny dictionary of about three pages of words and phrases for volunteers that were going to follow behind me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:15:37", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:15:38", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the area. But I never got. In retrospect, I wish I would have made more effort to learn the dialect because that's what they could understand the standard Fijian." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:15:48", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's what endears you to the people, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:15:50", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:15:50", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how were you received in the village when you first got there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:15:55", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Definitely, definitely friendly. And we were supposed to have our own housing when we got there at that time, for the Fiji groups at the time, and there was not housing available for me yet. So I stayed with my counterpart's family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:16:16", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Counterpart being somebody else at the office?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:16:20", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, the counterpart is sort of my main coworker, the main person." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:16:28", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Fijian counterpart?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:16:28", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Fijian counterpart, exactly, my main contact in the village. The person that I worked most closely with through the two years. And so, yeah, we definitely had the, certainly had the sevusevu." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:16:45", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm sure you did. How long do you recall staying with him before you did get another place?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:16:50", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was about four months." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:16:54", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:16:54", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that was a, that was a stressor for my time. Just because if I knew all along it was going to be with a host family, then it would have been fine. But the expectation was to have my own space and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:17:08", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, I see." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:17:08", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And in a cross-cultural setting, it's kind of nice to have a home base where you can just kind of decompress and relax. And especially I'm more on the introverted side." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:17:23", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:17:24", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So Fijian culture is not on the introverted side. Really social." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:17:29", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's probably where I picked it up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:17:31", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You might have fit very well. So it's. So that was a point of contention. I actually left my site for a few weeks and was potentially going to move to another site. And they said, OK, no, wait, we've got a place for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:17:50", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:17:51", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And fixed up one of the teacher's quarters at the primary school. So I ended up being living on the just outside of the village on the school grounds." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:18:04", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice. So what would an ordinary day look like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:18:10", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, that's a great question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:18:13", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If there is such a thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:18:13", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There wasn't. Yeah. One day a week there would be community work. And that's, I think, was usually Mondays." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:18:22", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like farming or what?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:18:24", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If it was cutting the grass or clearing the ibulubulu, the cemetery there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:18:32", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:18:32", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it would be kind of whatever the community had going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:18:40", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, so that was one day of the week." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:18:42", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So that was one day. And then like I think a lot of Peace Corps volunteers, I feel like my biggest job was figuring out what my job was supposed to be. And so what I ended up kind of shaping was, since I was at the school and there was certainly a need at the school. Well, teacher was not part of the job description or anything, I just found a need there. So I actually organized the books in the library and started a checkout system and started an environment club for middle schoolers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:19:21", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Middle school. OK, so what ages would that have been?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:19:24", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it would have been. The school was equivalent of like first through eighth grade. So it would, it was primarily 12, 13 year olds." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:19:35", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So sixth, seventh, eighth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:19:36", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:19:38", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As we understand." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:19:38", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. And so that was about. And I worked with the slow English readers as well, just giving them some one-on-one time. And so that equated to about two full days a week. And then really the other days there was nothing standard. There was nothing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:20:00", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Except Sunday maybe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:20:02", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sunday was a day of rest." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:20:03", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And church probably." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:20:04", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And church, absolutely. So I would typically go to the local church, which was Methodist." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:20:15", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Methodist, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:20:15", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then afterwards, we would usually go to someone's house and have a meal and sit and watch some rugby on TV." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:20:24", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's a popular pastime." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:20:26", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Maybe a little different than your experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:20:27", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. You just said TV. Now we didn't have TV back in '78. Do you remember when it came about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:20:34", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:20:35", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But it was there when you got there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:20:36", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was there when I got there and it was primarily, um, people watch movies. So there were DVDs as well. But otherwise it was, Fiji One was the main channel. And then if it was, if it was other programing, kind of Western programing, it mainly came from" + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:20:58", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "BBC?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:20:58", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From New Zealand." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:20:59", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, New Zealand." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:21:00", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "00:21:01", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "New Zealand, Australia, about a thousand miles away each. So you had TV. That means you must have had electricity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "00:21:08", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. I did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "00:21:09", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Lucky guy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "00:21:09", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had electricity and most of the time I had running water." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "00:21:14", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK. And lights I assume, with the electricity?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "00:21:18", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "00:21:19", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "00:21:19", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Light. You know, really pretty, pretty nice housing, I even rented a refrigerator." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "00:21:27", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "00:21:28", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "While I was there, which was my finest luxury, and I don't regret it one day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "00:21:32", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, you probably had lots of visitors. Were you able to keep anything cold in there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "00:21:37", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not, not too bad." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "00:21:39", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm alluding to Fiji beer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "00:21:41", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, little Fiji beer may have been in there occasionally. And then one other time a gecko got in there, which was, I don't know how he got in there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "00:21:50", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A gecko like a little lizard?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "00:21:51", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A little lizard, yeah, yeah. And the poor guy fell out of there all frozen because, yeah, being cold blooded. And then he had to thaw out and I saw him kind of scamper his way back up, back up the wall. But oh, it was nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "00:22:09", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what did you do for fun in your pastime?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "00:22:12", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So you mentioned drinking kava, so there would often be, right, if you just kind of stroll through the village and they'd call out in our dialect, dua na bilo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "00:22:27", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A bilo is a bowl." + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "00:22:28", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One cup. Well, come have one cup of kava and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "00:22:33", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A coconut bowl, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "00:22:34", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly, exactly, about half of a coconut shell. And for whatever reason, you just sort of kind of walk back and forth and don't go in right away and then finally go in and you, gosh, you can sit there for quite a while. So that ended up passing the time quite a bit. I really loved learning the language, and so I absorbed whatever I could by book and by listening to it. But again, that was the standard Fijian, so it was a little harder." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "00:23:08", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember singing or music?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "00:23:13", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mostly at church. And I didn't do. I played the saxophone, but I didn't take the saxophone there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "00:23:20", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's too bad, they would have loved that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "00:23:22", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I bet they would have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "00:23:23", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there a guitar in the village that people played while you're sitting in the circle drinking kava?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "00:23:31", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I feel like I saw more of that when I visited some of the other volunteers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "00:23:37", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK. Because that would have been my story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "00:23:40", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "00:23:41", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Largely related to music." + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "00:23:43", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What a great way to integrate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "00:23:44", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was. It was a good key to the culture. So back to work. So what did you do on a daily basis for work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "00:23:55", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So the school was, and I really struggled with that. I think as Americans we're trained to be productive, to value productivity, to ride that through schooling. That's how you achieve. And the Peace Corps is such an astonishing wakeup call in that regard, because I can't speak for all volunteers, but I sure was not feeling productive. And on a day-to-day basis, usually we know what we need to work on and we go set out to it and we can get it done. And there, it just was difficult to figure it out. What? So, you know, the village did have to request a volunteer, but I think really they only had about two or three months' worth of work that they had in mind. Setting up a waste management workshop and some follow up with some non-profits, some non-governmental organizations, NGOs, that had done some work in the area and so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "00:25:01", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, waste management would be a big deal in the village. What did you have, pit latrines or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "00:25:06", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So they were on a, you know, septic system. So it, really it wasn't a huge issue. It was a, in terms of Fiji, it was a wealthy village because they own the land. The tokatoka, the kinship group, owns the land that the Fijian resort is on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "00:25:29", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh boy, they get some premiums from that, huh?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "00:25:32", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. So it was a little different. So trying to carve out a Peace Corps volunteer generalist at best, right? I didn't know what I was doing in terms of waste management, coming out of school with a history degree and then working for the Army and air defense artillery. So it didn't exactly equate to waste management. So I was kind of trying to get one chapter ahead. And so that took some time. And so we did that. We set up the workshop and then tried to, from that workshop, tried to follow up on some ideas that that these different villages. I mentioned I worked in six or seven villages. And it just didn't, it just didn't end up being that much work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "00:26:22", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, six or seven villages, I can only imagine the coordination and the power structure. How did that work with the chiefs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "00:26:29", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. Well, with Cuvu village being the chiefly village of the whole province, it was the traditionally, right, the most powerful village." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "00:26:43", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And your chief would be the high chief." + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "00:26:44", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly, exactly. And so if the traditional structure came into play, then that was fairly, fairly simple. Easy. You could go talk with the person at the top. From village to village, though, I would work with the rokotuli, which is sort of loosely translated as the village headman. It's kind of a funny way. I love that translation, but kind of the mayor." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "00:27:15", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Well, iliuliu does mean chief so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "00:27:17", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, right. So it's an elected, but an elected position." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "00:27:22", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, well, that's interesting. Yeah. And did he have, did the chief have a mata ni vanua, the spokesman that would generally accompany him on all visits?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "00:27:33", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yeah, that was built into it. And I, you know, I don't think it was ever specifically explained to me. Like there he goes. But being at some of these large, large ceremonies, in fact, when Ratu Mara, former prime minister, when his wife died and she was connected to my village, there was a giant ceremony attended from all over the islands and other countries." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "00:28:11", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many days did that last?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "00:28:12", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The event itself was one day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "00:28:15", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One day. But the gathering, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "00:28:18", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Giant gathering and offering of gifts to the chief, the provincial chief. Yeah, so who exactly that was. And at different events, it would kind of be different people and it's probably who was there, but there was certainly the mata ni vanua role being served." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "00:28:41", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm sure there was. Yeah, I recall a wailing tent from one of the funerals I attended where the women would just go into the tent and the most blood curdling scream would come out of this tent. The men wouldn't go. The men would be sitting there drinking coffee." + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "00:28:55", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They would drink coffee all day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "00:28:57", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While the women wailed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "00:28:58", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. There was, I mean, for, they definitely the big ceremonies or funerals, weddings, first birthdays." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "00:29:09", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And church holidays?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "00:29:11", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Church holidays, around Christmas was very, very big. But they could kind of blend in your mind because most of it was sitting and drinking kava." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "00:29:20", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "00:29:21", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There'd be some nuances to the ceremony. And of course, the words would be different. But the procedure was very similar. But, you know, that was a really neat thing about being in the village while finding work and knowing where I could be valuable. Being, you know, barely being as competent as a two year old in terms of Fijian culture and the local politics and dynamics. So quickly realizing, and I don't think I suffered illusions that I was going to be extremely knowledgeable technically to help out. But while that was a challenge, the benefit was being immersed in the culture. And even though a lot of people in my village went to work six days a week because it was pretty well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "00:30:19", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did they work in the village or outside the village?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "00:30:22", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Outside. So in the various resorts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "00:30:24", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "00:30:26", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because my village was pretty well integrated into the cash economy. And so that makes for an interesting dynamic, right, for a Peace Corps volunteer. So it's not like going into a subsistence setting and figuring out a nice project scope. It's instead trying to figure out what's going to enhance the wellbeing of these communities that, right, they're still immersed in Fijian culture. One foot there, but also one foot in going to work. Going to work every day or six days a week and, you know, having to earn some cash." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "00:31:09", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And who did you report to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "00:31:11", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I reported to a man, so my site supervisor in the village." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "00:31:20", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "00:31:20", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I had a counterpart, a site Fijian counterpart, and then a Fijian supervisor. And so those were the, and they were brothers. So those were the two men who were kind of in charge of putting me to work or keeping me out of trouble. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "00:31:39", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Interesting. OK. Well, so you spent two years there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "00:31:46", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes, I did the two years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "00:31:48", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And do you recall your feelings as you prepared to leave Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "00:31:53", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So leaving Fiji. You know, I think that first, after the first year at the halfway point, I definitely had a little bit of a meltdown. And I think I had not quite shed all of my American values around that productivity. And so you're just wondering, wow, this is stressful, right? Because I'm pretty capable. I'm pretty competent in an American setting. And that's, you know, eye-opening about living a cross-cultural life and being immersed, is you don't feel competent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "00:32:29", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You're kind of starting over." + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "00:32:30", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're starting over. Your jokes aren't funny." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "00:32:34", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Especially in another language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "00:32:35", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In another language. You got to learn so much in the context, and um." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "00:32:42", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have to share one joke with you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "00:32:44", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "00:32:45", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Since the Fijians used to be cannibals, the last guy to get eaten was the missionary, but their biggest insult is, we wouldn't even want to eat you. And I'd say, oh please, just a little bite." + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "00:32:55", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I can see, I bet that was funny the entire time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "00:32:58", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Pretty much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "00:32:59", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so it just, it takes learning that. And so at the one year mark, I don't, I didn't think seriously about leaving, but we started with 34 volunteers in our, at the beginning of training, and we finished at the two year mark, I think, with 24. So it was, you know, pretty decent amount lost. And yeah, I feel like that was maybe because it was so uncertain that I think the sites at this time, because Fiji, the program closed down from '98 to 2001 or 2002." + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "00:33:40", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's right, I forgot about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "00:33:42", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I don't think. I don't know exactly why. I think it might have just been reallocating resources, but then it opened up in I think 2003. So we were the third group after the program reopened. So we were called FRE-3." + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "00:33:58", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Free three?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "00:33:58", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "F-R-E dash 3, Fiji Re-Entry Three." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "00:34:04", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "00:34:04", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Which I think the program has gone back to the more chronological numbers which I think was really great so you had the continuity. So that was really, that was hard for me. And the second year, I guess in a way, I'd say I got it finally. Quit taking myself so seriously, right? Shed that Army command and control that I had been trained to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "00:34:36", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, oh yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "00:34:36", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of moving things forward, of being able to see that progress. And stepping back and saying, let's just, let's just roll with it. What do the folks I'm working with want to work on? I have this little bit of structure at the school. So, great. That made a big difference. So I did know I had at least 15 to 20 hours established, so that second year was just much more relaxing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "00:35:06", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "00:35:08", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so that coming to the end, you know, there was definitely some relief just because it's, for me being immersed in that Fijian culture and that social communal aspect, which is so awesome, so amazing. But hard for someone who doesn't mind some solitude and solo time. So there was definitely a relief. And definitely also real sadness to be leaving these people I'd gotten real close to, including other volunteers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "00:35:49", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "00:35:49", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Such an important network of volunteers and fellow teachers and people I worked with in the village, people in some of the non- governmental organizations. You know, I think moving on from anything is really tough in the sort of the emotional cauldron of Peace Corps. I think that's even more, that's even more powerful. So it was a real mix. And I remember, you know, we talked about drinking quite a bit of kava. So even the last day, a fairly large contingent, probably 10 or so, we actually all came to the airport with me and we sat out on a tiny little strip of grass out in the parking lot and had a couple more tanoas, a couple more bowls." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "00:36:43", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Bowls of grog, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 237, + "timestamp": "00:36:44", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of kava before I went and checked in. So definitely a lot of tears." + }, + { + "turn_id": 238, + "timestamp": "00:36:52", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On both sides, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 239, + "timestamp": "00:36:53", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "On both sides. And so, yeah, hard. But it was also, I'll admit, definitely a sense of relief when I got on that plane. And it was just kind of like, wow, OK. It's just such a powerful experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 240, + "timestamp": "00:37:12", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did they have a nickname for you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 241, + "timestamp": "00:37:15", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, just my name. So Paul in Fijian is Vaula or Paula. So being a biblical name, it's pretty common there too. But it, of course, it sounds like Paula, which takes some getting used to, and the Fijian women, you know, would often singsong-y voice if they were calling out to me as I'm walking down the road. They'd say, Paulaaaaa. And so that still rings in my ear." + }, + { + "turn_id": 242, + "timestamp": "00:37:52", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm getting tingles just hearing that, because that flashed back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 243, + "timestamp": "00:37:55", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In my mind, yeah. Yeah, such truly friendly people. And I would say it's, you know, my experience was, of course, once they get to know you and you get to know them, it becomes more sort of the more universal stand out. Some people don't like you, some people do, and you build some connections." + }, + { + "turn_id": 244, + "timestamp": "00:38:20", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice. So you got on the plane. Where did you fly to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 245, + "timestamp": "00:38:23", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I flew. Let's see, where did I end up flying into? Back into, I believe I went flew into Seattle because, while my home of record was still in Montana, my friend who was borrowing my car lived not too far out of Seattle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 246, + "timestamp": "00:38:45", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He gave you the car back?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 247, + "timestamp": "00:38:47", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He did. He did. It was mostly in one piece. He did a pretty good job taking care of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 248, + "timestamp": "00:38:51", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that sounds very Fijian too, what's yours is yours and what's yours is mine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 249, + "timestamp": "00:38:55", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's exactly right. Ooh, I like your car means I want that car. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 250, + "timestamp": "00:39:01", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Or can I use it? Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 251, + "timestamp": "00:39:02", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so, and it was nice. So I actually stayed with him and his folks for about three days. And I was really glad for that because it was kind of a good transition zone. I really appreciate that they opened up their house for me, just because it's, one, I mean, there's just so much jet lag that you can't quite grasp it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 252, + "timestamp": "00:39:28", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, Fiji is on the international dateline, so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 253, + "timestamp": "00:39:30", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. So there's changes of days involved." + }, + { + "turn_id": 254, + "timestamp": "00:39:34", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, that's right. You lose a day going back. Or you gained one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 255, + "timestamp": "00:39:38", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was kind of as if you flew forever and it only took an hour of clock time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 256, + "timestamp": "00:39:44", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You got back the time you lost when going to Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 257, + "timestamp": "00:39:46", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly, exactly. And then I made my way back to my hometown of Helena, Montana." + }, + { + "turn_id": 258, + "timestamp": "00:39:53", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, so I want to stay with those first three days. Any culture shock?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 259, + "timestamp": "00:40:00", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would, I would say there was definitely a little bit. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 260, + "timestamp": "00:40:04", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Such as?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 261, + "timestamp": "00:40:05", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just the pace of traffic. And a little bit of, say, the availability of everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 262, + "timestamp": "00:40:16", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like groceries?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 263, + "timestamp": "00:40:18", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Groceries, yeah. I mean, I could go into Sigatoka on a weekly basis and there were supermarkets there. So. So I would say not, not immediately, not too huge. And we just didn't do much in those first three days. And then also, you know, going back to Montana, it's pretty low-key too, small, fairly small town. But it, I would say the culture shock just. Perhaps the shock is when you're realizing all of the things that you didn't think about before, and what it means to be an American and what we value about ourselves and having such a contrasting cultural context to be able to compare with. Of that really communal setting to the much more nuclear family and individual base, so I think that's it. I think it was sort of a protracted culture shock. But I had some built-in time. I think I got home in August and I didn't start with graduate school again. So Peace Corps was embedded in my graduate school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 264, + "timestamp": "00:41:37", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At least it wasn't snowing when you got home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 265, + "timestamp": "00:41:39", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it wasn't snowing. It was warm weather. Yeah. So there was quite a bit of time to transition. I didn't have to jump back into hustle bustle or big city life or, so I think that subdued it a little bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 266, + "timestamp": "00:41:59", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what did you do when you got home?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 267, + "timestamp": "00:42:01", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I knew I was going to go back to graduate school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 268, + "timestamp": "00:42:04", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 269, + "timestamp": "00:42:04", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I had one more semester left and I needed to write up my professional paper, which I officially did my research in Fiji. For a long time, I was figuring out, OK, what's it going to be? What's it going to be? And a non-governmental organization did a large project all along that district, and in fact, about five NGOs had done work there in the previous five to 10 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 270, + "timestamp": "00:42:36", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What sort of work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 271, + "timestamp": "00:42:37", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Environmental. Environmental based work. So waste management, coral gardens. So we're right on the coast with a beautiful reef, as you imagine. But a bit of a degraded reef just because there were villages and resorts all along, all along that coast. So trying to revitalize the reef and the fisheries, and some were governance type issues about how to manage, kind of co-manage those resources. And so one needed to have an independent study done to, I think, apply for future funding about their five year project. And what went well, what didn't? Why was that? So I did 20, 25 interviews with Fijians who were involved in the project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 272, + "timestamp": "00:43:33", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK. And that resulted in your paper?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 273, + "timestamp": "00:43:36", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so then I after that, I did that. I wrote up the report for the NGO. That was probably some of my most professional based work that I did there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 274, + "timestamp": "00:43:49", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Dealing with other scientists." + }, + { + "turn_id": 275, + "timestamp": "00:43:50", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. And so I still along the way. And then after that, I was figuring, well, what do I, what am I going to do my research on? Should I do eco-tourism or what? And then after a while, time keeps passing and I'm like, you know, I think I've done my research." + }, + { + "turn_id": 276, + "timestamp": "00:44:06", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like you lived it, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 277, + "timestamp": "00:44:08", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I looked back, going back to those, right, I mean, observation, the experience, and then going back to those 20, 25 interviews. I realized, well, that's a good amount of information." + }, + { + "turn_id": 278, + "timestamp": "00:44:19", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's a lot of data, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 279, + "timestamp": "00:44:20", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And continuing to then expand on what were the challenges that these NGOs, which were, you know, mostly Fijians speaking with Fijians. So what were the challenges? Why did some things not work? Why did most things not work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 280, + "timestamp": "00:44:35", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you come to any conclusions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 281, + "timestamp": "00:44:37", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, in a professional paper, of course, and you've got to finish with more research is needed. But yeah, I did have about 10." + }, + { + "turn_id": 282, + "timestamp": "00:44:45", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 283, + "timestamp": "00:44:45", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And one that that comes to mind, and I think it still applies, is the unreasonable pace of change that's expected in philanthropic giving." + }, + { + "turn_id": 284, + "timestamp": "00:44:59", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me more about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 285, + "timestamp": "00:45:01", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So the expectation is in two to three years, you're going to have a successful project, right? And in a lot of these projects had governance components to them. So behavioral change, structural change tied to the role of women or the role of youth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 286, + "timestamp": "00:45:21", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, cultural change in a chief environment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 287, + "timestamp": "00:45:24", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly, exactly. And to think that that's going to happen, if some of the solutions. Like bringing back, for instance, fish wardens, which is a traditional role in a Fijian village setting. So bringing back traditional fish wardens to monitor the lagoon, the lagoon area, I think it's a pretty, I think it's a pretty cool idea, but it's a, they're in the cash economy now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 288, + "timestamp": "00:45:54", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, you've got to play the game." + }, + { + "turn_id": 289, + "timestamp": "00:45:56", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. So seeing that as a voluntary position. Well, those people who would be fish wardens, really, there's probably some pressure on them to go make money. So that was just a challenge. And just so, I would think it, you know, it probably takes 10 years if you're trying to build leadership and technical capacity at the local level. It's just almost impossible to do in two or three years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 290, + "timestamp": "00:46:30", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You know, it sounds a lot like what you're doing right now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 291, + "timestamp": "00:46:33", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It is. It very much, um." + }, + { + "turn_id": 292, + "timestamp": "00:46:38", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me more about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 293, + "timestamp": "00:46:39", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It very much relates. Yeah. You bet. So my current position is with the National Park Service Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 294, + "timestamp": "00:46:49", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In Alaska." + }, + { + "turn_id": 295, + "timestamp": "00:46:49", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In Alaska. So I'm the program manager for the Alaska Region Program. And Alaska region is just that, it's the state of Alaska. And so our role is to help community led outdoor recreation and conservation projects." + }, + { + "turn_id": 296, + "timestamp": "00:47:06", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Community led." + }, + { + "turn_id": 297, + "timestamp": "00:47:07", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Community led." + }, + { + "turn_id": 298, + "timestamp": "00:47:08", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Non-governmental." + }, + { + "turn_id": 299, + "timestamp": "00:47:08", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Right. They can be governed, they can be governmentally led. But it's the key thing is, it's not the National Park Service. It's not, we're not the leaders of it. So it's very much like Peace Corps in the aspect that we're coming in, that kind of coincidentally for two years often, and working with a community group to plan, design, and construct new trails. And we haven't done too much of it, but do like watershed management plan. It's really up to the community, so they apply for our assistance. Instead of getting money, they get our time. So it's a grant." + }, + { + "turn_id": 300, + "timestamp": "00:47:50", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's kind of like Fiji or Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 301, + "timestamp": "00:47:52", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It is very much so, just like Peace Corps where an organization needs to request hosting a Peace Corps volunteer. Same with the RTCA program. We get applications and then we go work with that project champion out in the community, figure out what she or he wants to do. We try to. And I think I'd be such a better Peace Corps volunteer now having this experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 302, + "timestamp": "00:48:19", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, I have to agree with that. But, you know, it is what it is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 303, + "timestamp": "00:48:22", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's humbling. But I think having that Peace Corps volunteer experience has really helped shape my perspective on how to go in and work with these communities. So we're working with small rural communities in Alaska, um, different tribal communities, one out in St. Paul Island, which is one of the Pribilof Islands in the middle of the Bering Sea." + }, + { + "turn_id": 304, + "timestamp": "00:48:51", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh boy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 305, + "timestamp": "00:48:51", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So a number of, right, the kind of flexibility and adaptability and learning. Learning that local context that we all have to do as Peace Corps volunteers, are some of the key competencies to serving in this kind of community planning role." + }, + { + "turn_id": 306, + "timestamp": "00:49:09", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I met some of the native Alaskans, but at least everybody speaks English, so you've got a little bit more common ground." + }, + { + "turn_id": 307, + "timestamp": "00:49:15", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure, sure. Although in Fiji, that was mostly the case, although they didn't operate between each other in English for the most part." + }, + { + "turn_id": 308, + "timestamp": "00:49:24", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because English was the national language, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 309, + "timestamp": "00:49:26", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 310, + "timestamp": "00:49:26", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the villages maintain their own dialects." + }, + { + "turn_id": 311, + "timestamp": "00:49:29", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. So yeah, it was. So yes, it's different there. But in some Alaska Native communities, you know, it's helped me be able to open my eyes and see, OK, what are the structural differences if I'm working in downtown Anchorage versus if I'm working in Togiak in the Bristol Bay area?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 312, + "timestamp": "00:49:51", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what would be some of those differences?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 313, + "timestamp": "00:49:54", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Communication and the pace, the kind of expectations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 314, + "timestamp": "00:50:00", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Transportation's got to be an issue here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 315, + "timestamp": "00:50:03", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's expensive and, I mean, some of our projects are because transportation is a challenge, so most are using four wheelers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 316, + "timestamp": "00:50:13", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No dog sleds?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 317, + "timestamp": "00:50:18", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not as much, no. Snow machines have pretty much taken their place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 318, + "timestamp": "00:50:22", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So they've gone modern too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 319, + "timestamp": "00:50:24", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 320, + "timestamp": "00:50:25", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And they have TV?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 321, + "timestamp": "00:50:26", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. And I mean, certainly cell phones. I'm behind the times with some of the younger professionals I'm working with out there. They laugh at my iPhone 5." + }, + { + "turn_id": 322, + "timestamp": "00:50:39", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At least not a flip phone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 323, + "timestamp": "00:50:41", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, but yeah, there are so many parallels between I feel like trying to be effective as a Peace Corps volunteer and trying to be effective in providing this technical assistance to community groups that are, you know, they have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 324, + "timestamp": "00:51:02", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The government officials. Yeah, interesting. So why don't we refresh on the three goals of the Peace Corps? First was to learn about another country while being there, which you pretty well explained that. The second goal is coming back here and sharing what you know about Fiji with other people. How have you done that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 325, + "timestamp": "00:51:21", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, good. So part of that was kind of embedded thanks to it being part of my graduate program. So I wrote a, waxed philosophic in my professional paper for a hundred plus pages. But what was, I think, pretty telling for me. So I'll step back. So I also presented to a couple of other college classes and I was a teaching assistant, so I got to. [coughs] Excuse me, sip of water here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 326, + "timestamp": "00:51:52", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I was wondering too, whether you did any recruiting for the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 327, + "timestamp": "00:51:59", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Informally, simply. Never in a paid position or on the university campus." + }, + { + "turn_id": 328, + "timestamp": "00:52:08", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 329, + "timestamp": "00:52:09", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. But I definitely have talked with several people. There's one friend of ours who is in Ecuador now. You know, she certainly came to that decision on her own, but certainly talked with her quite a bit about my experience and what was challenging and what was amazingly rewarding." + }, + { + "turn_id": 330, + "timestamp": "00:52:31", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So on a daily basis, how often might the thought of Fiji even come up? Or daily or how often does it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 331, + "timestamp": "00:52:38", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "How often? I would say it's never too far away. So it's, let's see. I got back in 2007. So it's 12 years, almost exactly 12 years, and it does not seem like that long ago. It was, I think, just such a powerful experience. So it's." + }, + { + "turn_id": 332, + "timestamp": "00:52:59", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like a snapshot in time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 333, + "timestamp": "00:53:01", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It is. So I think it, it really changed who I am, I guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 334, + "timestamp": "00:53:09", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In what way?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 335, + "timestamp": "00:53:11", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think around the cultural, about taking it easy, not taking things too seriously, questioning the focus on achievement and productivity that, you know, I was certainly very driven and got good grades and, you know, successfully found jobs and all. And just to be able to step back from that and, right, not judge myself too much or others. And in, you know, I mean, especially in the current times, there's so much talk about different cultures and clashes and tensions. Experiencing the Peace Corps for me, right? Because it was hard to be, I mean, I guess it's the first time where I was mainly prejudged based on the color of my skin." + }, + { + "turn_id": 336, + "timestamp": "00:54:19", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh. And you were in the minority." + }, + { + "turn_id": 337, + "timestamp": "00:54:21", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I was very much in the minority. And so, you know, after a hundred years of colonization and the post-colonial construct still being strong of the white guy coming in and having all the ideas and having all the money and being in a tourist area. So for those who didn't know I was there, you know, would assume I was a tourist, which makes sense." + }, + { + "turn_id": 338, + "timestamp": "00:54:46", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Or a local European." + }, + { + "turn_id": 339, + "timestamp": "00:54:47", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, right. An I wasn't there for too long in the scheme of things, right? Two years, it feels long to us, but it's a blink of an eye for the folks who are going to live there their whole lives. So, you know, I just think that's something that everyone needs to experience. I really think it would be valuable, because you come to an understanding of, OK, well, here's why they feel that way. Here's some ways that they're right, and there's a lot of ways where they're not right because they don't. They don't know who I am." + }, + { + "turn_id": 340, + "timestamp": "00:55:26", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 341, + "timestamp": "00:55:27", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And just that colonial construct. So the expectation that, well, this guy's got lots of money and, it was tough to work through. I struggled with that because I was, you know, perhaps because I studied the culture a lot being in graduate school before going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 342, + "timestamp": "00:55:46", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, since you've been back, have you gotten any letters from people there or requests for aid or assistance or money or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 343, + "timestamp": "00:55:54", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I got a, I got a love letter. And if you can remember, you don't know anyone's name, like in general. There's a few people, but you're not often, people aren't calling you. They're not saying, hey Jack, hey Paul. And so like, I don't know who the woman is, but I did get a love letter. And then on a much sadder note, I got two messages, some emails, that two of the guys I work closest with died in their mid-forties." + }, + { + "turn_id": 344, + "timestamp": "00:56:26", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. These were Fijians?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 345, + "timestamp": "00:56:27", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Fijians, yeah. So the teacher that I was really close with and my Fijian side counterpart, both died. So that's been, that's, yeah, that's been tough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 346, + "timestamp": "00:56:44", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where did you meet your wife?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 347, + "timestamp": "00:56:45", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Meet my wife? Well, that was here in Alaska." + }, + { + "turn_id": 348, + "timestamp": "00:56:47", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 349, + "timestamp": "00:56:48", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So moved up to Alaska in 2008 as a presidential management fellow. So a federal government program as a way to recruit people finishing up a graduate degree of some sort. And I worked for the Forest Service from 2008 to 2015. And in 2010, through mutual friends, we were introduced." + }, + { + "turn_id": 350, + "timestamp": "00:57:11", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 351, + "timestamp": "00:57:11", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And yeah, late 2010, then got married in 2012." + }, + { + "turn_id": 352, + "timestamp": "00:57:17", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you have children?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 353, + "timestamp": "00:57:18", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We have two children, age six and three." + }, + { + "turn_id": 354, + "timestamp": "00:57:23", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 355, + "timestamp": "00:57:24", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So yeah, quite a, in a sense a quick change for me. I tell you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 356, + "timestamp": "00:57:27", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that's culture shock." + }, + { + "turn_id": 357, + "timestamp": "00:57:29", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That is. That is culture shock." + }, + { + "turn_id": 358, + "timestamp": "00:57:32", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What have you taught the kids about Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 359, + "timestamp": "00:57:34", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 360, + "timestamp": "00:57:36", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do they sit on the floor and eat out of bowls?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 361, + "timestamp": "00:57:39", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they'll definitely have no problem eating with their hands, sitting cross-legged with me on the ground." + }, + { + "turn_id": 362, + "timestamp": "00:57:47", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you let them drink kava?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 363, + "timestamp": "00:57:50", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You bet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 364, + "timestamp": "00:57:50", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 365, + "timestamp": "00:57:51", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 366, + "timestamp": "00:57:51", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Even at this age?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 367, + "timestamp": "00:57:52", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. Yeah, sure. They're not going to drink too much of it because we'll say it's an acquired taste, I guess. And I think maybe you don't even acquire it. You just, you put up with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 368, + "timestamp": "00:58:02", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, it tastes pretty bad." + }, + { + "turn_id": 369, + "timestamp": "00:58:04", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And you drink a lot of it. But I taught him a little [speaks Fijian]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 370, + "timestamp": "00:58:08", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. That's got to be cute." + }, + { + "turn_id": 371, + "timestamp": "00:58:11", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It is, and you can see they're sponges, their pronunciation, right? I'd love to go immerse them in it, and they'd have a great time running around with the." + }, + { + "turn_id": 372, + "timestamp": "00:58:20", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Think you'll ever take them to Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 373, + "timestamp": "00:58:22", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I do. I do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 374, + "timestamp": "00:58:23", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wouldn't that be great. Don't wait too long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 375, + "timestamp": "00:58:28", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it's true. Just, uh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 376, + "timestamp": "00:58:30", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Before they turn into teenagers. I'm sorry." + }, + { + "turn_id": 377, + "timestamp": "00:58:34", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If, especially if we go, my wife actually got a master's degree in New Zealand, so she's got friends in New Zealand and Australia, so we could make a big South Pacific expedition. And I would definitely love to spend some time, but I do want them to be a little older to really have a sense of the experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 378, + "timestamp": "00:58:57", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To appreciate what they're experiencing. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 379, + "timestamp": "00:59:00", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 380, + "timestamp": "00:59:00", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Teenagers might just tune it out and sit there and watch TV the whole time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 381, + "timestamp": "00:59:04", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. Or be like, this is lame, and then only appreciate it. You know, it's going to depend on the person. My older son is extremely social. I've met a lot of interesting and new people at the airport." + }, + { + "turn_id": 382, + "timestamp": "00:59:16", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so they've met Fijians?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 383, + "timestamp": "00:59:18", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. Just anyone. No, I don't think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 384, + "timestamp": "00:59:22", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there a large Fijian community here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 385, + "timestamp": "00:59:25", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not to my knowledge. There's a large Samoan population here and how that got started, I'm not sure, but that especially in the Anchorage area, that Samoan population is pretty substantial." + }, + { + "turn_id": 386, + "timestamp": "00:59:39", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I recall that a lot of the Fijians immigrated to Vancouver rather than Seattle, apparently it was easier to get into Canada." + }, + { + "turn_id": 387, + "timestamp": "00:59:46", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Vancouver? OK. When I was in Fiji, Sacramento seemed to be the most common landing spot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 388, + "timestamp": "00:59:54", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I believe that too. I'm from Sacramento and, yeah, we've hosted a lot of immigrants." + }, + { + "turn_id": 389, + "timestamp": "01:00:00", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's most people would say, oh yes, I have a cousin in Sacramento. Yes, Sacramento, California. And so, yeah, have not. Have not met a Fijian, well, since being in Alaska." + }, + { + "turn_id": 390, + "timestamp": "01:00:21", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK. Might be a little cold for their blood up here. Too cold for me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 391, + "timestamp": "01:00:26", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it could, but Samoa is a pretty similar climate and, you know, they managed. I think it's, I think just with that, I feel like with the communal nature of the culture and similar with someone in Tonga. Probably if a few get settled, it's more likely that more family members and broader kinship groups will come in. So, yeah, Anchorage is, doesn't seem to have been a destination yet for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 392, + "timestamp": "01:00:55", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Well, now that you mentioned it, I've met all kinds of Fijians, Fijians and Fiji Indians. A lot of them drive bus at the airport and so on. And their English is very good and they're very, very friendly people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 393, + "timestamp": "01:01:07", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They sure are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 394, + "timestamp": "01:01:07", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's why they call them the friendly islands." + }, + { + "turn_id": 395, + "timestamp": "01:01:09", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Although I think my, because they are so friendly, friendly up front, that I felt like it was a true sign of respect and to where my language skills had gotten when they said, hmm, you're Fijian skills aren't very good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 396, + "timestamp": "01:01:25", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really, they'd actually say that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 397, + "timestamp": "01:01:26", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They said it, and I felt like, wow, that was the best compliment you could give me!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 398, + "timestamp": "01:01:32", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 399, + "timestamp": "01:01:32", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Instead of [speaks Fijian], right? Oh, you're so, you're so smart. You're so smart in the Fijian language because you said bula. To where they said like, hmm, that sounds, what?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 400, + "timestamp": "01:01:43", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I remember them saying one time, oh, you speak the good pidgin Fijian?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 401, + "timestamp": "01:01:48", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 402, + "timestamp": "01:01:49", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very broken." + }, + { + "turn_id": 403, + "timestamp": "01:01:50", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that's where you knew. That's where you knew that you had made it to level two, at least." + }, + { + "turn_id": 404, + "timestamp": "01:01:55", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. But that's what endeared them to us or vice versa." + }, + { + "turn_id": 405, + "timestamp": "01:01:58", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 406, + "timestamp": "01:01:59", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. Well, what an experience you had many years after I was there. So we talked about how you got into the Peace Corps, what you did there, and what you're doing now. Anything else you'd like to add?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 407, + "timestamp": "01:02:10", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, no, it's so fun. I'm glad I had a little advance notice that I would be talking about it just because it's, as I say, it's like the language is rusty. But I do think about it a lot, and I stay in touch with a core group of volunteers on a very regular basis." + }, + { + "turn_id": 408, + "timestamp": "01:02:36", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many volunteers are around here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 409, + "timestamp": "01:02:38", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, not in this area, just via Facebook, via text messaging. So some of my cohort. There is an RPCV group here in Anchorage." + }, + { + "turn_id": 410, + "timestamp": "01:02:50", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 411, + "timestamp": "01:02:50", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That seems to be pretty active." + }, + { + "turn_id": 412, + "timestamp": "01:02:52", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Well, we're going to have a Peace Corps Fiji reunion in Sacramento one day, and you're more than welcome to join us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 413, + "timestamp": "01:02:58", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would love to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 414, + "timestamp": "01:02:59", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, Paul, it's been very nice talking with you. Thank you, and good luck to you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 415, + "timestamp": "01:03:02", + "speaker": "Paul Clark", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You as well, Jack. Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 416, + "timestamp": "01:03:04", + "speaker": "Jack Franklin Davies", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00594", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/WeitzPJ/weitzpj.htm", + "original_file_name": "WeitzPJ_11-8-00.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/WeitzPJ/WeitzPJ_11-8-00.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Paul J. Weitz", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 8 November 2000" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Carol Butler" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Paul J. Weitz" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is November 8, 2000. This oral history with Paul Weitz is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center [JSC] Oral History Project at the JSC studio. Carol Butler is the interviewer.\\n\\n Thank you for joining us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To begin with, in our previous oral history you did tell us a little bit about your background in the military and how you got interested in aviation, and you indicated it was while you were with the Navy that you heard about the opportunity to get involved with NASA with the space program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Had you had a lot of interest in the space program beforehand? What led you to want to follow that path?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, no, I didn't really, because I felt since I hadn't been to test pilot school, I felt that I probably wasn't qualified. Then I think as I told you in our previous interview, that then I got a message from what was then called the Bureau of Personnel, with the Navy, that said I met the Navy's criteria and would I want to apply. So, no, the answer to your question is, no, I hadn't really thought about it, for that reason." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did your family think about the idea of you becoming an astronaut or applying for the program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, my wife was supportive. My children were too small to have any comprehension of what it meant. Frankly, I didn't really have much awareness or comprehension of what it meant either." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any expectations going into, once you did apply and were accepted, any expectations of what the job would be like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I really didn't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just kind of learned as it went along and fell into place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. It sounded like an interesting, exciting thing to be involved in. Of course, I was very thrilled and honored, frankly, to be selected finally." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That is quite an honor. Very few people get to have that opportunity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Especially then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You came in during the Apollo Program, as the missions were getting under way for Apollo and coming up to speed. You served—you went through the initial period of training, and actually, in our first interview you had talked about some of the aspects of the training that you went through, which included even geology training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you think about all the different parts of—that were going into this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was kind of surprising to me, as far as the breadth of the classroom work that we received, both in geology—of course, we had a lot of field work associated with our geology course, too. But as I mentioned before, orbital mechanics, for example, and spacecraft systems and basic systems such as Apollo software that was being developed at the time. So mainly the thing that was exciting was, we were getting ready to go fly to the Moon, we thought at the time, and that was the main incentive and the most—you know, the goal that we all had that was out there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During Apollo, you were assigned to the support crew for Apollo 12." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And this was your first assignment to a crew related other than the general training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You described a little bit about the duties of the support crew, but what did you specifically do for part of Apollo 12? What were some of the aspects of your involvement with that crew and their training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're asking me to go back a long way. The support crew, more than the flight crews themselves, really weren't that structured as far as what our duties and responsibilities were. Of course, a significant portion of our time was spent both at the [North American Aviation, Inc.] plant, at Downey [California], with the command and service module [CSM], and also at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], once the command and service module was delivered to the Cape, for testing.\\n\\n They said that the Cape kept time in imperial minutes. If they said a test was ready to start in thirty minutes, well, there wasn't enough time, at two o'clock in the morning, there wasn't enough time to go back to crew quarters and try to get a nap, so you'd sit around. It would turn out to be several hours instead of thirty minutes. Not that that's a hit on our friends at the Cape, but that's the way things went in those days.\\n\\n So our primary function then was to serve as stand-ins for the crew, for the flight crew, and we also reviewed some of the test procedures beforehand, some of the in-flight procedures, but mainly the test procedures. We'd review them before we passed them on to the flight crew or the backup crew, depending on how it went with that particular group, for their approval and awareness before we'd run a test. So it was that, primary testing, a little bit of systems understanding, some work in reviewing checklists, what we call desktop reviews, before you get into a trainer or a simulator, to evaluate a procedure.\\n\\n Then the support crew had the primary function as capcom [capsule communicator], too, even though there were more capcoms than [the ] three [people in the] support crew, but, nevertheless, we were involved typically in the most active phases of the mission.\\n\\n That was not a five-word answer, but—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, that's quite all right. That was a very good answer, good description develop—\\n\\n Prior to—you mentioned having served as a capcom for Apollo 12 then. Prior to that, and even after that, during missions, where did you typically find yourself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we were all in the office, everyone, if you weren't assigned to a crew. Everyone had a responsibility. For example, one time—and don't ask me how it fit in with my—I think I probably was working on ALSEP, which was the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, I think, but Apollo 11, the basic scientific equipment that Apollo 11 placed on the Moon surface. We had various technical and operational responsibilities, and those changed, because that was considered by Deke [Donald K. Slayton], who was the head of the FOD [Flight Operations Division] at the time, FCOD [Flight Crew Operations Division], whatever it was called, it was considered part of the broadening of our background experience and understanding of what went on in the system.\\n\\n But when you're assigned to a support crew, that was your total function. You were working for the primary mission commander, and whatever he decided to have you do, you went and did it to the best of your abilities. Usually satisfied Deke, but not always." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talking about the variety of missions and working on the different technical aspects, and you had mentioned earlier that the goal was getting to the Moon and everyone was working toward that, do you recall where you were and what you were thinking when Apollo 11 actually achieved the goal?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When Neil [A. Armstrong] stepped out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I was in the viewing room at mission control. I remember that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It must have been quite a moment for everyone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was, yes, especially because, as I'm sure you're aware, during the LM [Lunar Module] descent they had those alarms come up. It was Steve [Stephen G.] Bales, I think, that recognized what they were and continued the mission to land, because it was very, very close to landing when the mission was in jeopardy. And Pete [Charles Conrad, Jr.] often said Apollo 12, getting ready for 12 before 11 even launched, Pete figured that, in his estimation, he had as good a chance of being the first person on the Moon as Neil did, which came very near to being the case." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. They were certainly doing something that had so many complexities to it and something that had never been done before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Always chances of something happening." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You bet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know what John [H.] Glenn [Jr.] said. He was sitting on that thing that's cracking and hissing and making all these strange noises, built by the lowest bidder." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[Laughter] Yes, I'm sure that's a thought that has crossed many an astronaut's mind, I'm sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You get confidence in it during the testing. The testing is very thorough. The crew office, anyway, has input into the test procedures and what tests are run also. So it's a little overstatement, but it sounds good to the public." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. Well, I'm sure even just embarking on such a new and different—I mean, it's not something that's routine, it's not something that's common, so even given all the testing and you could have very strong faith that everything's going well because you did have such good testing, that there's always that reminder that people don't do this all the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it's true. I don't remember if we talked about it before, but Apollo 12 was struck by lightning during ascent. That was a very hairy time. Fortunately, there were just enough of the basic systems, backup systems, in the spacecraft that kept it going until the crew could react and straighten things out again. You always try to be prepared to cope with something unexpected." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talking about unexpected, the next mission was Apollo 13. You had, again, indicated in your earlier oral history that you worked a type of support for Apollo 13." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was very short-lived. The Astronaut Office had a function then called “Stoney.” That was a KSC acronym. I forget what it stood for, but Stoney was the person who sat on the console at KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] in the launch support room and gave the final countdown to the crew. Basically that's all he did. Plus, I guess, just to keep little fingers busy, he also controlled the elevators in the launch, at the pad. Well, when the crew got off the top and then the guys put them in, closed them up, then they come in, then he positioned remotely some of the elevators for emergency egress. So that was a big job prior to launch. Then, as I say, give the crew the countdown." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was a pretty important task." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was okay. It was better than not doing it, I guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So where were you, then, during Apollo 13 when the accident did happen and the crew had to then move into the lunar module?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When we first understood what was going on, when Jack [John L. Swigert, Jr.] said, \"Houston, we have a problem,\" I don't remember where I was. I know that we assigned a team, Deke [Slayton] assigned a team within the Astronaut Office and, of course, with the flight controllers, too, to figure out what was going on.\\n\\n My function, we directed, as I remember, all the resources of the Astronaut Office except for possibly the [Apollo] 14 or 15 crew toward working this problem, then trying to decide what to do. But to make things like that work, you need to have one person in charge, and I forget who that was, although Ken [Thomas K.] Mattingly [II] did the most work and, I think, had a lot of input into the idea, for example, of using the LM lithium hydroxide canisters in order to get some of the carbon dioxide out of the air. But the rest of us were primarily go-fers. We were just springloaded to go, either call a contractor or anyone that we could, any company or organization that might help. So it really was kind of a mishmash. We were all just running around trying to get things under control." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And everything did come under control eventually, and everyone came together very well to make it all—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We got the crew back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely. And that must have been—must have been quite a moment for everyone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Of course, the main thing was when they jettisoned the LM prior to reentry, and then the reentry started well. But everyone was still hanging on until they came out of blackout." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As the Apollo Program came to a close, originally there had been more missions planned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Twenty." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Twenty." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Through Apollo 20." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Unfortunately, canceled. What were—what was the general thoughts and the general feelings of NASA as that was coming to a close? Of course, Skylab was already being planned and under way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any final thoughts on the Apollo missions and that it had been too short or that it was enough or any general feeling like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we had a parochial point of view. We'd have liked to have seen more missions to the Moon. And at the time, Skylab, as a title and a series of missions, had not been settled on. There was a concept called the Apollo Applications Program [AAP], which included continuing building Saturn Vs and sending both manned and unmanned missions to the Moon, not necessarily to land on the Moon. The whole thing was still conceptual. But there was a big thing to map the entire Moon by putting a mapper in polar orbit around the Moon, so to get the front side, the back side, the whole thing, in preparation for, at the time, as I remember, building a lunar base to support a manned exploration of Mars. That was basically open-ended.\\n\\n Of course, the political environment at the time, canceling the Apollo lunar landings 18, 19, and 20, and AAP, Apollo Applications Program then shrunk down, and finally was called Skylab. So that's what was left. I've been asked this before in an interview by one of NASA's historians. I should have reread that before I came out here, because I wouldn't want to lie or get mixed up or anything. [Butler laughs.] But, gee, I don't remember when the transition occurred in there, but it was very gradual." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's all right. I'm sure we can refer back to that oral history if we need to.\\n\\n Moving into Skylab, you had mentioned in your first oral history about the wet versus dry workshop, and the discussions on that, and some of the tests that were done both at Huntsville and at Houston, using the water tanks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us more about what those tests entailed and what they were looking at?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was a combination. It was more procedures evaluation and hardware evaluation, so that makes it a test, I guess, if you're evaluating hardware, because when it was wet, of course, the workshop launched on one Saturn I and the crew launched on another, and then you had to do an EVA because the S-IVB stage had been a functional propulsive stage. So the primary functions were to make sure that the—of course, the crew didn't do that, they did it from the ground to make sure that all the gases, the oxygen, was dumped out of the workshop. But then primarily since they had feeds to the engine that came out of the hydrogen tank, that went to feed the engines and there were several large plumbing lines, as you could imagine, in the bottom of the stage, so the primary EVA or the water tank testing those and evaluation that was done was the method that we thought we would go about plugging those things because they fed right to the engines and you wouldn't want—and I think it's part of the shutdown procedure, they left some valves open on the engine. So you had to get those things plugged.\\n\\n So that was the primary thrust of the water tank work that we did, plus some of the initial activation. I think the configuration at the time must have included multiple docking adapter on top, which is where a lot of the scientific equipment was. So we also evaluated the procedures for bringing that equipment, boxed equipment, down into the workshop and installing it. So that went on for a couple of years until we finally decided the system was contracted to produce Saturn V, so now if you cancel three Apollo missions plus we always had a spare—I think the spare is the one that's laying out here [on the lawn at JSC]—so you had a Saturn V available, and that made it appropriate and easy to do a dry workshop, which reduced the crew's activation time from about a week down to a couple of days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the Astronaut Office had a preference toward the dry over the wet?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, you bet. You bet, for a couple of things. The less activity you have, frankly, the less chance you have for something going wrong. What we were always concerned about, because we didn't understand at the time what it took in a large volume and weightlessness to handle large heavy equipment boxes, well, we didn't need to do that much with the dry workshop because they were almost all installed in the S-IVB or the workshop at launch. Basically it cut the so-called activation time down from, I don't remember, five or six days, probably, down to a couple of days so we could get on with the business of evaluating the usefulness of people in microgravity sooner.\\n\\n Plus we had another untested thing, so the wet workshop, as I remember, did not launch with the Apollo Telescope Mount on it. That was brought up later. So then we had to develop a procedure and the wherewithal to carry it up on the manned flight, the flight for the first crew, and detach it, remotely fly it over, and dock it. So that was a significant cost then that was avoided, and risk, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Seemingly it ended up all right, although there were a few incidents along the way. But before actually getting to the mission, once you were appointed to the Skylab mission, what did your training entail for that? What processes did you go through?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was the usual. Of course, we had to understand, first off, the main thing was to get up there, so you had to make sure the crew was properly trained in the ascent profile and all the procedures, including your basic and your emergency procedures. Same thing on docking and reentry. But the important thing was just to get up there and get going. So it was every aspect of the mission, and we didn't just focus on ascent for three weeks then and go do something else. The whole thing was interweaved because what we didn't want to is, you wanted to leave Houston to go to the Cape for launch day as current as you could be as a crew, with everything that you're going to be involved with.\\n\\n So the whole thing was kind of a melded, interwoven schedule of training, and a lot of it, of course, the closer you get, the more it's a refresher. It's really verification and in many cases some revisions, improvements, we would like to think, but not always, in procedures, techniques, and experiment operation. So it was every aspect of the mission, which was launch and ascent, which had, of course, no EVA at the time, until the end of the mission for ours, activation, which was getting into the workshop, activating it, setting it up, because some of the equipment that was stowed in a certain way for launch had to withstand a launch environment, which, of course, it didn't on orbit, so we did have to rearrange some of the equipment within the workshop.\\n\\n Then basically we spent a lot of time just becoming familiar with and making sure we understood the procedures for all the so-called experiments we were going to be performing. Now, we did, since there were more than we thought three people could devote training time to, in many cases we had a prime and a backup on some of the experiments. Of course, Joe [Joseph P.] Kerwin, being a physician, was prime on all the medical stuff and I was his backup for some of it and Pete [Conrad] was his backup for the others. Pete, of course, he was the mission commander.\\n\\n We had a thing called Earth Resources Experiments Package, EREP, on there, and I was prime in that. So that meant I went to the Martin [Marietta Corporation] plant outside of Denver, in Littleton [Colorado], and followed the development and testing of those cameras. Jack [R.] Lousma and I primarily were assigned responsibility of following development of the airlock module, which started out—well, anyway, most of the work was done at the McDonnell [Douglas Corporation] factory in St. Louis. So it really was an interweaving, but like some of the stuff, see, Joe Kerwin, for example, had nothing to do with EREP. I was prime on it and Pete was the backup. I can't think of any other specifics, but that was an example." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did training for EREP package entail? Were you given specific things—training on how to recognize certain features on Earth, or were you just given certain time lines of when to take pictures of certain things or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "See, it depended. One of the sensors was pointable, and what you really wanted to do—and don't ask me what the sensor was, because I've forgotten, but we had a telescope up in the MDA [Multiple Docking Adaptor] and you would have to then—I think it had a different magnification, fields of view on it, so the responsibility, when you're operating that one, was to find the site. We called them targets at first, but it was decided, the cold war was still going on, it was a bad term. So we called them sites, which was more appropriate anyway. To recognize the site, even though you had help from the ground. They would say, \"Pitch the telescope up to a certain angle on it and watch, and at umpty-ump time, you should have your test site in view.\" Then you were supposed to center it in the cross hairs and track it. So that was active crew involvement in that, where we had another bank of six Hasselblad cameras that had various wavelength-sensitive films in it, six different film, and that was fixed. It just pointed at the Earth, so all you did with that was start on your watch and you started it, and when it was time, then you turned it off.\\n\\n So there were really two extremes of involvement with it. Most of it was really basically start and stop on a clock." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there times that if you saw something particularly interesting, that you were allowed to just take pictures?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Heavens, no. Except with the handheld cameras. We had typically—we flew 35-millimeter. I'm not sure if we ever flew the 35-millimeter in Apollo or not, but we had some 35-millimeter cameras on Skylab, and, of course, we had our usual 70-millimeter handheld, too. We had motion picture cameras, but they were only for documentation of some mobility, basically some human factors-type things that we did, moving around in zero G, moving large and heavy volumes, equipment. So I think we didn't take any 16-millimeter movies out the window, targets of opportunity, but we had the usual, never enough film. No crew ever has enough film available to use for targets—excuse me, sites of opportunity. So we did take some of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think that's pretty—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But other than that, with EREP, no, because resources were—most of the data were recorded on tape in, I think, one-inch or inch and a quarter, something like that, magnetic tape. And that limited how much data we could take with it.\\n\\n Now, with the Apollo Telescope Mount, looking at the sun, that was primarily—some of that, well, it ran the same as EREP. Some of it was, you just took data on the clock, and others, we had an X-ray monitor, helium alpha, I think. We had a couple of displays on there. You could then point one or more of the instruments at a specific site on the sun to take data." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the experiments or the plans for when you should turn things on and off, did any of that change during the mission as—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Are you kidding? I'm sure it did. I mean, those guys in mission control are very busy. They come on for eight hours. They want to get something done while they're there, rather than just sit around. So, yes. But I overstated a little bit there. Yes, everyone had the accomplishment of the mission primarily, and if they could evaluate, which for some of the experiments you could, and also if the crew would call down and say, \"This didn't seem to work right,\" or, \"We think there's a better way even yet.\" I was primarily responsible for the EREP procedures development, and I found out a lot of things in orbit that I didn't like about that. So we could change some of them. After we bounced it off the ground and they looked at it and evaluated, either desktop or in a trainer, make changes or modifications, you'd either go to procedures, a time line, or perhaps to a setting on the equipment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think you mentioned in the earlier oral history that one of the reasons you found things different is just the difference in working in microgravity versus working on Earth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, in many cases that was so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's the way you do things. In Dr. Kerwin's oral history, he mentioned that you were also responsible—you were the systems expert for the flight as well. Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the workshop, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did those duties entail? I think you mentioned the docking adapter that you were involved with a little bit, the airlock. What other things fell into those areas of responsibilities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, gee whiz. I'd forgotten about the systems stuff, but, yes. And of course, we had the environmental control system, the electrical system, and not much hydraulics. But it was a relatively complicated control panel, because we wanted as much flexibility and adaptability as we could get into it. So I mentioned before Jack Lousma and I, and that was part, even though it controlled systems in a workshop, that was part of the airlock module, so we were involved in the layout, for example, of the control panel and which functions were capable of being crew-enabled or not, you know, crew-activated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I imagine that some of those duties changed a bit after the launch and when you had to then reevaluate how the whole activation was going to go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To a certain extent, yes. Yes, and also we had some trouble, problems early on with our cooling system in the workshop. It tended to freeze up. So, yes, because we didn't have the thermal shield, which is what caused the problem, not by design nor implementation, but because of the loss of the thermal shield. Even though we shaded the top side from the sun, the other sides of the workshop were still colder than they were intended to be by design. And I think we had problems throughout the mission, although we learned to cope with them. Primarily the good folks on the ground learned to cope with them and those problems did diminish both in frequency of occurrence and also in significance. But I think we had to cope with that throughout all three missions, as I remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, it certainly was quite a change to things when the launch did occur and when the shield was ripped off and when the solar panel went and the other one was jammed. Obviously there was quite a time there when everyone was trying to pull together again, almost like Apollo 13, to save the mission and make it all still possible. Your crew was pretty involved with that process, since you had to be the first ones to go up and do some of the repairs. You did tell us about that some in the first oral history, but I was wondering if you could go over it again briefly for us here today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, of course we watched the workshop launch and it went in the clouds. Then we headed back to crew quarters in preparation for going back to Houston, not that day, the next day, as I remember it. The backup crew, our backup crew, which was—let's see. Who was on that? I think it was Rusty Schweickart and Bruce McCandless and Story Musgrave. As far as we were concerned at the time, it was a good launch. And if it's a good launch, then backup crew has nothing more to do, and they were free from quarantine, which we weren't.\\n\\n They were free from quarantine, so some or all of them went into—there was always a round of so-called parties. Some are more party than others at KSC around the launch. So they all headed to town and proceeded to live it up, but we went back to the crew quarters. Then we realized what was going on. Oh, that's right. [Laughter] How soon you forget. We had to stick around because we were supposed to launch the next day. That's why. And we weren't yet aware of what was going on.\\n\\n So, anyway, what was your question?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was just wondering if you could walk us through how—just like you are, talking about leading up to—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. The whole time line. I don't remember when we were notified that there was a problem. I don't remember. It must have been in a couple of hours, because the ground knew it right away, because the electric guys started seeing output from one of the solar wings during ascent, which you shouldn't see, because the thing is supposed to be totally stowed. So it was a little mystifying. Things fell together later.\\n\\n But as I remember, the solar array was made up by several panels, I think five or six different panels of solar electricity machines. They were developing a little more voltage or current or volt as they got out closer to the end of the arm that held the solar array, the wing, and it fit with what we found out to be the case, in that remaining solar array was partially deployed because the arm had come loose and was away from the side, so they were having some sunlight on it. They saw that during ascent, so I'm sure that we were probably hardly back at the crew quarters when we were informed that there was a problem.\\n\\n Well, due to orbital mechanics and rendezvousing with the workshop is our launch opportunities repeated on a five-day interval, so if we didn't launch the next day, we had to wait five more days. So we went back to Houston while things kind of settled out and activities started on first trying to figure out what was wrong with it, then what we understood of what the problem was, was coming up with fixes for that. So we weren't really sure. As I told you before, you know, we knew we were going to launch, even if it was just for a day or two, to take some pictures, fly around, come back, and they'd tell Congress and the public what went wrong. So there were two other crews that were very, very nervous. Their opportunity to go fly a mission may have gone away.\\n\\n Then as we learned more about what the situation was and didn't have a total grasp on what we were going to do to fix it yet, then they slipped our launch another five days, so that we launched eleven days after the workshop. By then things had come together enough that we had what we considered to be a reasonable plan of attack for fixing the situation that was the case.\\n\\n The backup crew was then back in quarantine and they did a lot of the developmental work in the water tank in Houston, as far as Huntsville, the big water tank. We didn't have a big one then. Huntsville had the big one, which is where we did most of our water tank training for Skylab, by the way, at Marshall [Space Flight Center, Alabama]. So they did a lot of the stuff, and then once they developed the procedures, as we understood the problem, then, of course, the people—and I forget what our approach was now to EVA responsibilities, then we would get in the water tank there and go through to make sure we understood the procedure and that it sounded and looked okay to us.\\n\\n We launched with three different applications for shading. We knew by then that the thermal shield was gone, so we launched with—I'm trying to remember if we took additional food. Anyway, there was a lot of stuff tied down in the bottom of the lower equipment bay in the command module with beta cloth line at launch, because we launched, for example, with three different methods, approaches to shading the solar side of the workshop.\\n\\n And I think maybe we launched with some extra food. I don't really remember, because there was a question—we knew how hot it was in the workshop, 140-some degrees, as I remember, but we didn't know what effect it would have on the food, for example. Did the freezer still work? I think we launched with some extra food, but I'm not sure about that.\\n\\n We also then, due to the heat, there was a concern at one time that there was perhaps some noxious or even toxic outgassing from the insulation on the inside of the workshop, which is part of the normal S-IVB, which was considered to be very good for insulation, but was never intended to see those temperatures. So then we launched with an adapter that plugged into—we had an equalization valve in the MDA, so this adapter plugged into this equalization valve and it would then sample the air in the MDA to make sure. It's like ones that used to be used in propeller-driven airplanes to sample for carbon monoxide in the cockpit. We had different sensors, tubes, as I remember. It was a glass tube with some sensitive chemical in it, and if it would change color, then it was bad.\\n\\n But there were no noxious gases in any element of the cluster when we got there, so then we basically opened up the MDA and spent the night once we got through the standup EVA. Did you want to go over that again?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Actually, even before we get there, if it had detected gases, would that have ended the mission there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they had a capability, which the ground had done—see, it had dumped the workshop and repressurized it a couple of times, if there were any bad stuff in the workshop, that they would have got rid of it. So we could have done that some more, but, of course, then you're eating into your reserves and potentially mission lifetime. So I don't remember, but I would guess that was probably going to be a real-time call.\\n\\n And we didn't expect it in the MDA anyway. It didn't overheat. It had its own thermal control system. It was in the same configuration it was designed for, so it was okay. As a matter of fact, in attempt to keep the workshop cooler, as I remember, the temperature in the MDA was about 55 degrees when we got there, so it was quite comfortable." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. Yes, if you could go into the—as you've been going along here, into your standup EVA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, we went up there and saw what the situation was as far as configuration. The entire thermal shield was gone and so was one solar array, except for a piece of the thermal shield that was trapped under the partially deployed wing that remained and a piece of the thermal shield had been wrapped up around and embedded in the top of the wing, which was why it wouldn't deploy.\\n\\n So we tried the standup EVA and we put our helmets and gloves on and depressurized the command module, flew in, and we had this thing called the shepherd's crook, which was what it was shaped like. The intent was to pull out on the bottom of the wing and have it deploy. So, of course, Pete had to drive the command module, and the hatch opened out toward his window, so his field of view was significantly restricted by the hatch.\\n\\n So we opened the hatch and then I stood up in the hatch and Joe Kerwin held onto my ankles, because the hoses in the command module weren't really designed for EVA, so you didn't want to put tension on the hoses for fear of something breaking. Well, that didn't work, and it gave Pete fits because I'd haul on the shepherd's crook on the bottom, and it would pull the command module and the workshop toward each other, and then Pete's trying to keep this thing under control. So he's hosing out a lot of gas.\\n\\n Surprisingly, for something that weighed 100 tons, just by doing that, we were actually moving the workshop also, because we could see—it had cold gas thrusters at the base, and we could see those things firing. So that was moving around, too. So we decided to forego that. It wasn't working.\\n\\n So we had to try Plan B, which was, we had flown a set of basically what amounted to these instruments that tree trimmers use, one of which was a cutter. But we didn't really try it from a different attitude, but from our position at the end of the solar array beam, the angle that you could get with the cutter on that piece of joint from the thermal shield that was embedded in the top, I couldn't put enough force, even with Joe helping, as I remember, on the lanyard to activate the cutters to cut through it. So we had to give up on that.\\n\\n Before then, we had soft-docked, which, in Apollo terminology, you had capture latches and then you retracted the probe to pull you into a hard dock. Well, we had soft-docked and just hung on the capture latches while we ate lunch. It was a late lunch that day. We ate lunch, so we went back then to make a hard dock with the workshop at the end of the MDA. That's when then the capture latches would not function properly. We couldn't get a soft dock.\\n\\n That's when, as I think I said before, close into launch, we were doing some training in Building 5, and one of the trainers came over and he said, \"You know, we've never used this procedure, but you guys might want to know how to retract the probe if you had to so it could be basically gotten out of the way for backup approach to docking.\" So Pete and Joe went through that. I was doing something else, and Pete and Joe went through that. And, sure enough, we had to do that.\\n\\n So that meant suit up again, depressurize the command module, get out the procedure which was in there, and they had to cut some wires, as I remember, manually retract the probe some way. I think we left it in the tunnel just to keep it out of the way, because you didn't want it floating around loose inside. That's when, as I say, old \"Steamboat Willy,\" Pete, he drove in and made a perfect—which is difficult, you know. The probe-and-drogue system, you hook it up and then you retract the probe, and basically that pulled you in and did your alignment so you could then make the—they had twelve latches, called capture latches, that joined the two parts of the tunnel between the two vehicles. He drove in, made a practically perfect hookup, because when we got the hatch out of the way, the command module hatch, and the probe out of the way, then eleven of the twelve capture latches had been made at contact. So all we had to do was manually engage the other one.\\n\\n Then we tested the air in the MDA, went in, looked around. It had been a long day by then, so we went in, looked around, and basically then it was time to eat supper, which was Apollo-type food as opposed to Skylab food was all down in the workshop, and sleep in the command module. I think I'd have to go back and look at the as-flown flight plan. I don't remember where I slept the first night. I slept in the MDA a couple of nights because it was just nicer. The plan in the command module was just stretch out a sleeping bag and you laid under your couch, and that's just not a very neat way to sleep, in my mind. So Joe and Pete stayed—I think they wound up sleeping on top of their couches, and I moved my bag into the MDA and slept there.\\n\\n Then the primary plan for shading the solar side of the workshop was to—it had two scientific airlocks, one on the solar side, one on the anti-solar side—was to extend a so-called parasol from the equipment package, through the solar-side airlock, deploy it like an extendable umbrella, but made up of several sections. First of all, it had the center pole that extended, and then you had four other poles that shaped the rectangular parasol as it went out.\\n\\n So Pete and I went in and did that, and we had to make several trips because you'd overheat in the workshop. We went in in our skivvies first, or nearly to it, and that's when we discovered that the folks who live in the African desert have the right idea, because we wound up wearing trousers, jackets, gloves, the whole thing. We found we could stay in that—it's like Phoenix, it's hot, but it's a dry heat. But still we had to come out occasionally.\\n\\n Then Joe monitored it. He could see, pretty much see the parasol being deployed from the command module. So we extended it up until the four arms were free, and it deployed into its deployed position, and then we pulled it back down until it was so many inches off the side of the workshop, then unscrewed part of the pole that stuck into the workshop, and it was ready. It turned out later, one of the four arms didn't deploy all the way, so it wasn't a rectangular shape and size as originally planned.\\n\\n The ground, as I remember, saw temperatures dropping within an hour in the workshop. Then after a day or two, that's why we spent—because it took a while for it to cool off, and that's why we spent a couple of nights in the command module on the MDA.\\n\\n After a while, after a couple or three days, whatever, we could tell just by feeling the side of the workshop where it was shaded by the parasol, there was a significant subjective difference in the temperature of the inside wall. But we got things under control.\\n\\n Of course, since we still were down—as I remember, the ATM, the Apollo Telescope Mount, generated 55 percent by design of our original electrical capability, so that's all we had. So we were basically using a minimum amount of lighting. I think we didn't have any hot water for a while. No, that couldn't be, because we ate regular meals for the two weeks before we deployed it. But it basically was a conserve of electrical energy. I'm sure that what happened was that the ground reduced some of the experiment operations that were high power users. As I say, lights drew a fair amount—we had a lot of lights—until the EVA at the end of the second week. Pete and Joe were then successful in deploying the solar wing, and then the arrays deployed, and now we're back basically, with some curtailment, but back to near normal operations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was—given the fact that your power levels were so low, what was the motivation for waiting so long before doing that EVA to extend the solar array?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Gee, I don't know. I think you're probably asking the wrong person. I think the main thing was just development of—we shipped some TV photos back, of mainly the flyaround, so the ground had to then dress them up a little bit so they could really understand what was going on. I think basically it just took that long for an appreciation of what the situation was and for, again, the backup crew to get in the water tank and develop procedure, given the tools we had on board, and how do you do an EVA on the side. First off, the question is, can we do an EVA? Okay. The answer is yes. Well, should we do an EVA? And you go through that whole logic process.\\n\\n Then they also shipped up the procedures, as they understand them, a couple three days before they were planning on doing the EVA, and we kind of walked through them in the workshop. We didn't actually suit up, but as far as getting equipment out and talking about taking it up into the airlock, making sure we could get those tree trimmer's tools back outside through the airlock hatch this time and, I think, the whole process until it was agreed by both mission control and Pete that it was time to go do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So this second EVA, then, hadn't been tested on the ground before you guys came up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's correct." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that certainly would be a good reason to take time and make sure it's all going to be safe and have a good chance of succeeding." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You bet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely. You had mentioned on your EVA, this was a chance that hadn't been planned for in the initial schedule for the mission. You weren't scheduled to do an EVA. Did you have a chance to enjoy the opportunity, even though you were trying to save the station at the time? But—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. And then also with Pete's—I whined to Pete, since the original plan when we were planning this flight, was we did one EVA, and that was at the end of the mission because some of the data from the Apollo Telescope Mount were recorded on tape out at the ATM itself. So there was a planned, scheduled EVA at the end of the mission to retrieve those tapes and bring them back. Pete and Joe were scheduled to do that. Then I went and whined to Pete, because Joe had already had an EVA, and all I had was that crummy standup EVA. So how about if I went out with him at the end of the mission? Because the second guy just stayed close to the workshop and operated. We had those extendable booms then to bring the large, bulky equipment back in film canisters, primarily. So there wasn't much to it, really.\\n\\n First I approached Joe, because I didn't want to cut him out of something, and he said, \"Okay, sniveler.\" And then I approached Pete, and Pete said okay. Then the ground agreed. So I did get to do another EVA, but that was a pretty busy one, too. I really didn't have time, not at all on the first one, to enjoy the view. And on the second one, I was watching Pete and he was doing a couple of things. That's when he hit the charger battery regulator module as part of the electrical system, used the old trick, it wasn't functioning properly, so he hit it with a hammer and it worked again.\\n\\n He also had made up a sample of the material of which the parasol was made, and he attached that to a sunny side of what we call the trusswork that supported the ATM, for either the second or third crew to retrieve, just to see what the effects are of exposure to primarily ultraviolet, but sunlight and vacuum did to it. I was watching him and operating those extendable booms, so, as I say, I don't remember having had much of a chance to stand back and enjoy it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your mission did go very successfully, and it kind of went in three phases: your initial phase with getting everything activated and with the low power, then there was the EVA in the middle to extend the boom, and then there was the phase afterwards, where everything was up to as full a power as you were going to be able to get." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ops normal, basically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What—and you've talked a lot about the activation stage of things. Afterwards, how did, or did the day change much as to the way you would go about things or—and could you walk us through how your day would go? Not necessarily a typical day, but just from getting up and then walk through some of the things you would do before turning in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember significant changes. As I say, we had more power available, so we operated more equipment, more experiments. We launched with a schedule of things to accomplish. Then each night the folks, the daily activities planners, would get together and during the night—we had a teleprinter of sorts on board, and then they would send up the detailed schedule for each of us the next day as to what we were supposed to do.\\n\\n That varied from day to day. Although, for example, there was a bicycle ergometer run every day, because each of us subjects did it every three days and we did one person a day. Other things weren't—I think we did EREP passes on each—not each day, but perhaps every second or third day. We did ATM work, solar telescope work, every day. But, you know, I may or may not have been assigned a watch on the ATM control panel on a given day or not. We kind of rotated that around, too.\\n\\n Then we had chores we called housekeeping, which was basically check the wastewater tank, how full was it, switch freshwater tanks if necessary, clean up stuff, vacuum the screens, take the trash off the screens on the recirculating system, because our environmental control system recirculated most of the air in the workshop as opposed to running it through the scrubbers and the chillers and the whole thing. So we could clean up trash and check the wardroom, make sure you didn't have any—liquid floats around in zero G, and sometimes a little drop of gravy would get away from you. So we had Betadine wipes that we could clean up the workshop with to keep it shipshape.\\n\\n Some days we had our individual—we each had a drawer where we kept our food, but there was a large locker in which all the food was stored. So on a given day someone was assigned the task of moving food for the next X days, whatever that was, from the stowage locker down to our wardroom pantry. It basically was just—you know, that combination, the ground had a score sheet of what they wanted to accomplish for the different missions, and they interweaved that with basically your day-to-day activities.\\n\\n Does that answer your question?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, you know, there wasn't any, except for the medical stuff, the bicycle ergometer, there wasn't anything else I remember, and the ATM, those are the only things that were done every day, as I remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like you had enough variety to keep things always interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes, but it's no different from here on Earth. I mean, you don't do the same thing in your house every day. You do different things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you mentioned in the first oral history that you had plenty of time in your free time to look out the window and enjoy the view." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After the EVA, primarily, because we got more accustomed—you know, there was three or four days and we were getting ready to do the EVA, and that was on day fourteen. Now, we'd spent two or three days getting into the workshop and letting things cool down, assessing the effects of the temperature. We had some hand cream on board, for example. At 140 degrees, most of those tubes of hand cream had basically exploded. Of course, they were in a container, fortunately, but they had popped open because of the temperature.\\n\\n What was your last question? I was visualizing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were building up to working—being able to look out the window." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Right. So there was a lot of unexpected stuff in the first two weeks and then it became more routine. We learned how to do things quicker and better. You moved around more rapidly. If you want to get a good example of what it means, you can look at the videotapes from the entry into Spacelab on STS-9. You can see the difference between Owen [K.] Garriott, who did a stint on Skylab, and the folks who hadn't been in weightlessness before, just by their actions and the way they handled themselves when they went into the Spacelab.\\n\\n So we got better and better, but Pete figured that we don't want to overload the second crew as soon as they got up there, so we didn't ask for any extra stuff from the ground. I mean, if we finished a thirty-minute task in ten minutes, we didn't tell them that till later in the day, if ever. I don't remember. Not that we were trying to keep anything from them; it's just that we were trying, as I say, trying to avoid a potential problem with the second crew, which did come to bite us. That's because we were up there—we basically had two weeks of the real mission.\\n\\n The second crew went up for fifty-nine days. They had fifty-nine days to go. They didn't want to be standing around, just killing time. So Al [Alan L.] Bean asked for other things to do, and the ground obligingly sent them up other things to do. But then with the third crew, they forgot that there's a learning curve associated with it, and people got with it and they overloaded the third crew for the first week or two, whenever—what some people call the strike by the crew, which they said, \"We're going to take a day off,\" which at that time they needed. Then they had a conversation with the flight director, and, as I remember, the center director, and things got squared away and it went better from there.\\n\\n So we did have more free time. I spent most, if not all, of my free time looking out the window. I don't remember what Pete and Joe did. I would typically go up—the best windows were in the MDA. Even though they were small, you could always see some of the Earth out one of the windows. So I spent most of my time up there, my free time, which really wasn't a whole lot. You're talking about a cumulative total of somewhere between one and two hours a day.\\n\\n But we did make a point of always—we ate all our meals together as a crew, all three meals, so we would always meet in the wardroom, just to talk things over, see how things were going, because sometimes the guy on the ATM perhaps didn't see the other two guys for three or four hours, half a day, because they were doing something down in the workshop itself and he was up busy at the ATM control panel." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You certainly need that human interaction." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are there lessons learned from—well, you sort of mentioned one here with the time, how you ended up having extra time at the end and how the second crew asked for extra duties and then the third crew kind of got overwhelmed. That's obviously one lesson learned. But other things as well that might be applied from Skylab to the International Space Station?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were things that should have been applied, but haven't been necessarily, just basically certainly the hiatus between ATSP [Apollo Soyuz Test Project] and the beginning, the actual launch of the Shuttle mission and everybody's focused on the first four flights. What did they call those? They had a special name for the first four flights." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On the Shuttle?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I mean for that phase of it. We tended to forget. As we went into [Space Station]\\n\\n Freedom\\n\\n , post flight, during the flight people were taking a lot of notes, recording a lot of information and data, both anecdotal and hard data, and coming up with, I think it was about a twenty-volume—by volume, I mean document that thick, three-eighths of an inch or so, and it was entitled\\n\\n Skylab Lessons Learned\\n\\n . I think there were twenty of those publications.\\n\\n But you could go through them now and find out a lot of things that we're probably going to find on\\n\\n Freedom\\n\\n that weren't applied, and that's just because you get a new crew in. By \"crew,\" I mean everybody who's working on Shuttle and\\n\\n Freedom\\n\\n . Of course,\\n\\n Freedom\\n\\n has been through so many different groups of people and managers and configurations and what have you, it's easy to lose sight of those old lessons. Frankly, everybody thinks they have a better way of doing things anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you have imagined that it would be so much time between Apollo and Skylab and then on to Shuttle and Space Station?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There really wasn't that much time between Apollo 17 and Skylab; 17 launched in December of '71." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "'72." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Was it '72? And then we launched the workshop in May of '73. So, see, from Apollo to Skylab to ASTP wasn't that much. But then after ASTP, when nobody really knew what we were going to do next, AAP was fading at the time, Skylab was kind of hanging on like Space Station has for the last lots of years, and that's when I remember Cocoa Beach [Florida] really was almost a ghost town. I mean, there were businesses, banks, and restaurants and condos that were boarded up, basically, in the last seventies until we really started getting some hardware, some equipment to test at the Cape.\\n\\n So that was a long time. A lot of people left the Astronaut Office, a lot of people left JSC, time to move on because they were just the type of people who wanted to be associated with a program or an undertaking that they thought was challenging. So a lot of people left. Lots of people left the Astronaut Office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have any final thoughts on Skylab or anything you'd like to say that we didn't cover last—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was worth doing. It's unfortunate that they couldn't find a way, a practical way, to keep it in orbit for longer, or that we used a fully functional—didn't use—and I understand the budget considerations, but from a personal point of view, it'd have been nicer to have the backup workshop, which was ready for flight in all respects, in orbit rather than at the Smithsonian. It gives people an appreciation and understanding when they go through that display at the Smithsonian of what that aspect of space flight—now with\\n\\n Freedom\\n\\n in orbit, it gives them perhaps a little better appreciation of what's going on. So, yes, those two things primarily." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If we could pause here for a minute and take a quick break." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Suits me. [Tape change.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We were talking—we came to the end of Skylab and, as we talked about, there was quite a break between Skylab and Shuttle—actually, between ASTP and Shuttle and a lot of changeout of people leaving NASA for various reasons, and a lot of changes just going on within NASA trying to get geared up for Space Shuttle, which was such a different program, such a different vehicle. What were some of your thoughts on the Shuttle itself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Are we ever going to get STS-1 off the ground, basically, because we went through the same thing in Skylab. One time for Skylab we scheduled a launch and we were losing time. I mean, because a month would go by and we were more than a month behind schedule. Of course, it goes up in peaks and it drops off. But it seemed to take half of forever to get STS-1 ready to go. I don't remember now, you can't pin that on any one thing. The new programs, new development, a lot of things had to come together, the SRB [solid rocket boosters], the external tank, the main engines, the Shuttle, the whole thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During this time you were working in the Astronaut Office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned in your earlier oral history that part of the jobs there were training for the astronauts, part of your duties. What did that training entail, since this was such a different vehicle and since there were things still being developed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it's some training, but also so much development, both developing the moving base—we, JSC and NASA, were developing the moving-base simulators that we had in Building 5. All the Apollo simulators were fixed-based; they didn't move. So the crews were involved in that. They were involved in the layout of the crew station, which was a big job then. I remember [F.] Gordon Fullerton had these foam core—foam core is the sandwiched styrofoam—because he had drawings of instrument panels and then you'd put up with push-pins, you know, to lay things out, label it. Just labeling switches can at times be a significant chore, especially in an approach we had in Apollo, for example.\\n\\n Let me give you an example. You could control—at the time, anyway, I don't know if you still can—you could control the lights in the mid-deck on the Shuttle from either the flight deck or down in the mid-deck. So it's just like in your house, two switches. Well, how do you label? Every switch has to be labeled, right? You can't just put \"on\" and \"off.\" At one time, as I remember, they had switches labeled, one position was on/off and the other was off/on. You get focused on some things a little too much sometimes.\\n\\n But I really don't remember much about that. STS-1 launched in 19—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "'81." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "'81. So we went from '74 to '81, seven years, gradually phasing up to that, and I don't remember, it was slow times, basically, and we didn't have a lot of people in the Astronaut Office then, because the first group of so-called Shuttle astronauts was '78, as I remember, were selected then. So it was a few people doing a lot, with a lot of help from mission operations and working together on how systems should operate.\\n\\n You could still get an input into basically what should a given system accomplish. For example, the thermal control, for example, what do you want it to accomplish? Payload bay doors. That was a big thing, because you can't make a successful reentry if they're open. So there a lot of crew involvement went into the design of the actuation system on the doors with the primary goal of closing the darn things.\\n\\n At the time, the radiators deployed when you're on orbit. If you had anything in the bay, if you closed the radiators, then you could puncture a line in your freon system or whatever we used as a coolant. So it was a lot of crew involvement with a relatively few people until about '79, when the '78 group came on board, got through their first year, then were starting to be assigned, given technical assignments. But it really was a mishmash and nothing much comes to mind. It turned out to be the first six crews were assigned somewhere along in there, and I don't even remember when that was or whether we were assigned all at one time or in a couple three installments or what. For whatever reason, that's pretty cloudy in my memory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There certainly was a lot going on at the time, getting everything ready." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, there was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you involved with the ALT test, the [Shuttle] Approach and Landing [Tests]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no, I had nothing to do with ALT. I had forgotten all about ALT, as a matter of fact. Deke [Slayton] was in charge of that. Of course, we had the—I guess there were just two crews that flew the ALT missions. It was [Joe H.] Engle and [Richard H.] Truly and [Fred W.] Haise and [Gordon] Fullerton, as I remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I believe that's correct." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right. That took up a lot of that time prior to the launch of STS-1." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It must have been good to see STS-1 finally come to fly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And go pretty well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course, there was—on the launch there was some question on the tiles that had come off, that they noticed when they turned the cameras on, but everything did go very well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess we don't drop tiles on launch anymore." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It doesn't seem to. I think a variety of things still happen on launches that aren't expected, but tiles seem to be pretty good now, but the tiles, of course, had been one of the big issues leading in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was. It was. As a matter of fact—the center directors kind of run together, too. I don't remember who it was, but JSC basically had a team at the Cape \"helping,\" in quotes, our friends at the Cape get on with both the procedures and the materials before attaching tiles. Kenny [Kenneth S.] Kleinknecht, from JSC, and FOD [Flight Operations Directorate] or Flight Crew Operations [Directorate, FCOD], whatever we were called, you know, we went through that period, too, when mission operations and flight crew operations were combined again, called flight operations. Anyway, from the Astronaut Office, Bob [Robert F.] Overmeyer went to the Cape as Kenny's deputy, as I remember, to work on the problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It certainly was a very different aspect, a completely different way of doing things again for Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During this time frame and as Shuttle was coming on board, somewhere along the way the decision was made to have payload specialists as part of the crew. Do you recall any of the discussions surrounding that and how that came about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, to a certain extent, but I don't remember the timing. Early on, it was considered for a while you would basically have, we thought, two people. Some people referred to them as \"the dumb guys in the front,\" whose only responsibility was to launch, keep the Orbiter running, and fly it back to Earth. They would rotate fairly—perhaps every six months they'd go fly, until they got some time off.\\n\\n At the time it was felt that the best way to get the most bang for the buck, as far as experiment—we call everything experiments, you know, whether it's an evaluation or data-gathering or on-site analysis, whatever—was to ideally—let's say you're going to take up this new astronomical sensor, whatever. It's spectrographic or radio emissions or what have you. And that some guy in Palo Alto [California] had spent from the time he was a graduate student through his ten-year tenure at the university, and he developed this detector. The most reasonable thing to do was to take him up with it, him or her, to take that person up with it, then let them operate it.\\n\\n So that was kind of the basic approach to payload specialists as to why we need them, and each time we flew that package or some version of it, then that person would go fly again. But it wouldn't be a NASA employee. We wouldn't have to keep him. All we did was train him to not touch anything, any switch or any control in Orbiter, you know, that kind of—simplistically that approach.\\n\\n And that's still basically what payload specialists are, although then we had mission specialists, and the concept for that was, well, you have three of these people who have different requirements as far as perhaps pointing or precision of pointing or how much time they need in a given day to take, and you really need a so-called scientific person to be what amounts to the mission commander as far as payload operation is concerned. So that was felt that, for lack of anything else, we called them mission specialists. Because in every other airplane operation, the pilot sits in the left seat. Well, in the Shuttle, the pilot sits in the right seat. Then the guy who's really the pilot is called the commander. The guy who's really the co-pilot is called the pilot. So there you have it.\\n\\n Over time, a lot of that has evolved, where we really basically have a three-person crew for ascent and entry. At least we did six years ago when I left. And the third person, MS-1 [Mission Specialist 1], sits behind but between the two seats and is basically a third set of eyes and a third brain, to help you with any anomalies that may occur during ascent and entry.\\n\\n So that's kind of evolved into—I don't even know how many payload specialists are flying anymore, because they fly a ton of people, none of whom I've ever heard of before anymore. Well, a few I have. We're still flying payload specialists? I guess we are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A few, but not very many anymore. I think John [H.] Glenn [Jr.] was the first one in a while." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He doesn't count." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think they don't fly quite as many as in the early missions, but they do still have them.\\n\\n What did the—your core of astronauts that had come in from Apollo and Skylab, what did you think of this transition into the more scientifically oriented and bringing in people from a variety of different areas? Was it a natural progression or was there some question there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let me back up and clarify my comment on John. John deserved a flight. I didn't mean to put that down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's just that in the sense in which I described it, he wasn't really a payload specialist." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But he wasn't a mission specialist either." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He certainly falls into a unique category, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Yes. So, no, I think it's evolved into a workable and appropriate arrangement as to what we have. Perhaps the commander, the guy in the left front seat, has from that basic approach that I described to you, the commander has more involvement in the conduct of the mission itself than was conceived with the mission specialist-commander approach. So therefore we don't fly those people as often. We don't fly them every three to six months. It's probably good from a certain point of view. It's nice to have—let's just say you took that approach and you only had six crews, front-seaters of commander, pilot, and MS-1. Well, then you may have, for whatever reason, a new system, a new method of operation, whatever, that you really want. Let's say it pertains to one of the abort modes. Well, you need some experienced folks to get involved in an evaluation of a proposed change to an abort mode, whether it's hardware, software procedures, or what have you. So it's nice to have extra crews around those guys." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you anticipate—and this is just conjecture or opinion on your part, but as Space Station gets up and running and they are making more regular trips with the specific idea of going to station, do you think it might progress back to that, having the key flight crews on a more rapid circulation like the three to six months, or do you think it will stay kind of the way it's gone?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know. That's totally up to the center, to JSC, as to what approach they take to that. You really could do that if you know you're going to do an EVA as part of a crew delivery or crew retrieval, crew delivery/crew retrieval mission, and a commander really has to be involved in that. I mean, you could do it if you wanted to, but I don't know if the system will go that way. My guess is, it won't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess it'll all be based on the process of learning and seeing what fits and what's needed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, because the way we're doing it now works, so why change it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If it's not broke, don't fix it, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right, basically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it does seem to work pretty well now.\\n\\n Moving into—toward your mission on Shuttle, you talked about the first crews being assigned somewhere during the process of building up to STS-1 launch. When—approximately at what time did you start fully training as your crew for your mission and what did that entail?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember. I don't remember the time frame. STS-1 launched in '81, but it was originally scheduled around '78 or '79, so we were probably assigned a crew without being anointed as a crew. We were a group of people, myself and Bo [Karol J. Bobko] and Story [Musgrave] and Don [Donald H. Peterson], that were put together [for STS-6] and were told basically to start working together as a group, for whatever reason.\\n\\n Ask me the question again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did your training entail as you did get into it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, of course, we were involved early on. For example, Story Musgrave, who was MS-2 on STS-6, was assigned the primary responsibility from the Astronaut Office to monitor the deployment and retraction mechanism for the payload bay doors that I mentioned. So it really was a mix of working as a crew and still having an office responsibility that was outside what you would normally be doing as an assigned crew. So we eased into that.\\n\\n Then you'd always try to go scam some simulator time if you could, or trainer, or whatever was available, to start working, on the off chance we were going to be assigned as a crew to a mission and get to fly it. But that was an evolutionary type of thing, and I couldn't tell you, when we were announced as a crew to fly STS-6, where that fit into the overall schedule. It turned out to be the first six crews were first assigned as A through F, and we were crew F. Of course, we then assumed the title of \"F Troop,\" which became our theme." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's a good theme. A good theme.\\n\\n How was your crew and the dynamic between all of you? Had you worked very closely together before or did this bring you together more?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had worked with Story more closely before, because he was Joe Kerwin's backup for our Skylab mission, and, of course, we would get together with the backup crew and compare notes and things like that. So, yes, I was quite familiar with Story. I'd worked with him a lot. As far as Bobko and Don Peterson, they had come from the MOL Program, the Air Force. MOL stood for Manned Orbiting Laboratory, as I remember. I don't remember when those guys came on board, frankly. It was sometime. Sometime." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I really wasn't that familiar with those people, with Bo and Don. I think one thing is that Story was a little different, but he had been in the military. Story had been an enlisted Marine, so he had been in the military. And, of course, Bo and Don were former Air Force pilots and were Air Force officers. That's one good thing about flying with military people: they understand chain of command. I'm not saying that everything I said was God, because those guys would go off and we'd have crew discussions, and I think we used a reasonable approach to accommodating different points of view on a certain aspect of getting ready to go fly. But I was glad to have Bo and Don. I mean, they both performed, in my mind, admirably." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any indication beforehand, since you were the commander, did you have any input into your crew assignments or did it all just come at once?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no, no. I mean, the four names were just, \"There they are. This is the F crew.\" It was Weitz, Bobko, Musgrave, and Peterson. So, no. As opposed to in Apollo, I think—it's my understanding that the commanders, once they flew, well, they had to fly before. Typically they flew before being assigned as commander, and they had strong input into crew makeup.\\n\\n For example, Pete Conrad's first flight was with Gordo [L. Gordon] Cooper. After that, Pete's crew was always all Navy. He obviously had a strong input into the crew makeup. Because I wasn't a mission commander; I was the head of this F crew, but if we did fly, then the people were going to fly in these positions. I was going to get to fly. I never did care that much, and I had confidence in the other three guys. [Recording interruption]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We were just talking a little bit about your crew dynamic and how everyone fit together, and talked a little bit about the training. As you came closer to the time for your mission, if you could walk us through the—kind of like you did with Skylab—up through launch and through the mission, just some general thoughts on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, basically, you start out, we were F crew, so we had sixth priority on any trainers or simulators. As you get a crew out of the way, as STS-1 flew, then we all basically—you could get a little more time. So the main thing was to get in the simulators or the trainers and practice the things that you thought you would be going to do, and until you're officially assigned to a mission, you don't really know what your payload is going to be.\\n\\n So the main thing was ascent. We spent the most time early on, on ascent and primarily the abort modes, and we had a fixed-base trainer. It was interactive, but it was still, by NASA definitions, a trainer rather than a simulator. So we'd get in there, the three of us.\\n\\n We basically flew uphill and did entry with a three-person primary crew, so Story was off doing some other things, and I don't remember when we were assigned our payload, which was TDRS-A, Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, the first TDRS. I don't remember the gap between 5 and 6, but through STS-4 we were only two people and had ejection seats in Columbia. Then STS-5 was the first four-person crew, and they were to do the EVA in the cargo bay, nonspecific, but to evaluate the new suits, because it was a totally new design on the pressure suit that we had for Shuttle. Well, they had some suit problems and they didn't do an EVA.\\n\\n So then I was able—we had a five-day mission schedule and were going to deploy the TDRS on the first day, and we had all this other penny ante stuff, as I saw it, to fill up the four days. So when they didn't do their EVA, then we were able to add suit evaluation EVA to our mission, which Don Peterson and Story Musgrave did.\\n\\n But, you know, it's kind of an evolutionary type of thing, much like it was in Skylab, except I didn't have the early-on responsibilities from the office for any—like EREP, I didn't have the equivalent either an Orbiter system, and our Shuttle was designed to carry any mix of payloads, so we didn't really—the so-called scientist astronauts—and I say \"so called\" because they were really more than that. They were involved in crew activities and uphill and downhill stuff to a certain extent.\\n\\n So really it was bagging more simulator and training time as early crews flew, and then getting ready to go do your own mission, which a lot of time was spent basically learning how to land the Orbiter. Bo and I, Bo Bobko and I, spent a significant amount of time in the Shuttle Training airplane that we flew, a modified Gulfstream 2, we flew out at White Sands [Test Facility, New Mexico] out near El Paso [Texas].\\n\\n We also went out to the West Coast and flew T-38s and we flew our entry ground track into Edwards [Air Force Base, California], and a couple of abort ground tracks, too, just to see what they were like. We flew STA [Shuttle Training Aircraft] flights into Edwards, too, because that's where we were landed at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did the STA fly in later comparison to the Shuttle? Was it pretty—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's an excellent simulator. It's an airborne simulator. It's much, much better than the moving-based simulators we have in Building 5, because you're moving. You're not trying to fake yourself out by emulating or simulating accelerations by just moving the fixed base up and down and around. So I think the STA training was invaluable.\\n\\n Also on STS-6 we flew the first rudimentary HUD, Heads-Up Display, which helped in the landing. Other than that, it was all out the window and using your instruments, where with the head-up display you had information depicted on the reflector in the HUD that was a great aid, in my mind, of performing a landing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When it came time for the launch and for the mission, if you could walk us through a little bit of that and how things went and progressed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, our launch was delayed because basically they had, at the time, a requirement to do what we call the flight readiness firing, in which they got the Orbiter out, tanked it up, and lit the main engines and ran them for, I forget, some period of time until they stabilized and the engine folks could look at the data. They had to do, as I remember, two of those on our mission, so we were delayed three or four months from the time—I think we were supposed to originally launch in January, and we didn't go till April.\\n\\n So you're getting ready to go, and then you're not until they change out an engine or did different things. And then you argue about—there was a big argument if you need or want a second FRF [Flight Readiness Firing], because it's money. I mean, that's program costs. So, a lot of discussion on that. Yes, you're just getting closer. I don't remember when [STS-]5 flew. Then, of course, once 5 got out of the way, then we were had first call on the simulators, whatever our training coordinator scheduled for us, with our input, of course, but whatever he was able to get.\\n\\n I don't remember how soon we moved to the Cape. I don't remember before the launch. Then we had a TCDT, Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test. I'm not sure we do those anymore either, with crew involvement. I just don't know. But basically you go down there, you suit up, you go through the whole launch-day process, short of firing the engines. You get into the vehicle, you get strapped in, they get out, they close the hatches, and they leave the pad, the support folks. If the test is a success, then you get out.\\n\\n We had a daytime launch, nothing out of the ordinary on that. We had a daytime entry and landing. Really, you know, it just doesn't—the memories aren't as strong as they were for Skylab. It was more routine, I guess. I had been involved in it from the beginning, watching the evolution of the procedures and the process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's interesting that it would be—that it would seem more routine and yet it was still a new program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, for whatever reason, that's the thought that's left with me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's certainly—you certainly had been very involved with it, so it does make sense that it would be—it's just part of your life and part of your career and your day.\\n\\n The mission did go very well and did get to launch the TDRS. Of course, it later had some problems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Which weren't our doing, of course." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Absolutely. Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The ground did a tremendous job on getting that TDRS up into orbit. They had a main propulsion system failure. But they worked it out.\\n\\n Yes, we did the EVA and the EVA was successful. We learned some things on that. Don and Story did a good job evaluating that. Then we had daytime entry, so we didn't get to see all the sights, the ion wake that folks were later able to see through their top window.\\n\\n We landed on the concrete at Edwards because the lakebeds were wet. Had a lot of rain in California that winter, so I'd almost liken it to there was so much water in the lakebed that landing on the runway was almost like a carrier landing because we were making the approach and flying in over water." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that certainly is slightly different than—\\n\\n How did it all compare to your Skylab flight? Did you find yourself at any points comparing things as you went along?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really. I mean, they were different enough. I was in a different position. It really was an evaluation flight, pretty much a test flight, obviously not the first one, but, nevertheless, it still was, and we flew the first flight on\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n , so it was a vehicle shakedown flight also." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After your mission, you came back and worked again in the Astronaut Office for a little while, but then moved up into the Center Director's Office as deputy center director." + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. This was after the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n accident. I was John's [W. Young] deputy chief of the Astronaut Office. Then there were significant changes made in upper management, especially within Code M. I'm trying to remember what the title was, Code M's title. Manned space flight whatever. And at that time, then, I was offered the opportunity to move into upper management, as I said, as Aaron Cohen's deputy. That would have been '86, late '86." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At that point, did that give you some opportunities to be involved in the recovery process from\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n ?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. I hesitate to call it \"an opportunity,\" but, yes, I was involved in that, but again from an upper-management point of view, the main thrust on that with engineering flight crew and the missions operations folks. I was not involved directly—well, several of us were called to testify before the Rogers Commission. Bob [Robert L.] Crippen was. I remember John, of course, since he was chief of the Astronaut Office, and I was his deputy, so that's why I was called. There were a couple of other folks, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That certainly was a hard time for everyone, for NASA. You told us a little bit about that in your earlier oral history." + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it did take time to bring everything back together. What were some of the changes that—obviously some were made to the vehicle itself, but some of the general changes either around the center or in the way of doing things that you recall being involved with or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really don't remember. I mean, we were involved in so many different aspects. Even after I returned to flight, we were involved. \"We,\" management was involved. It was still a developmental kind of thing. I mean, every flight we flew had some anomaly or anomalies you had to deal with, and then we had the flight readiness reviews at the Cape that I was actively involved in and so was Aaron. But again, it was so broad a spectrum of topics and issues, that I don't remember any single thing that stands out, except, of course, satisfying everyone at JSC and at Marshall that SRBs were really ready and safe to fly again, and a lot of changes made to the SRB assembly process and testing, how you tested the O-rings and what the test criteria were. I mean, everyone was involved in those discussions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had—in your earlier oral history, you had mentioned a little bit about Apollo 1 and the recovery from that and the rebuilding and comparing it with\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n , obviously very different environments at the time, different political situation, different things just even going on within NASA as well as the world. Was there any specific things that you can think of that made those two processes so different or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, see, it was a time of change at headquarters. The person—what was the title for Code M? Office of Space Flight is what it was then. I don't know what it is now. It was Office of Space Flight. And the person who was the director of that office had been tapped and slated to come to JSC as the new center director, because Gerry [Gerald D.] Griffin had decided he was leaving. He announced his retirement. So there were personnel changes in the mill and made public at the time, and then with those changes, I don't remember, but Congress got involved in it.\\n\\n NASA, frankly, as I told you before, NASA just didn't move fast enough. That was the difference between Apollo 1. I mean, the agency immediately appointed an investigative body and they moved out to Downey to look at what occurred, to try to determine the reason for the fire occurring, and basically there was no outside body necessary. And we convinced Congress and our administrator convinced the President or Vice President that it wasn't necessary, where that didn't happen with\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n .\\n\\n The agency, for a combination of reasons, just didn't start soon enough, so Congress and/or the White House decided that something had to be done in order to get on with it and basically to save the program. So they appointed the Rogers Commission to look into it. So the ball was taken out of NASA's court in that case, and we just had to report to this group. It took longer, I think, because it became more political." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It must have been rewarding to an extent, if that's the right word for it, when everything—in 1988, when everything did come back together and the Shuttle got back on line again and flying, with the successes now that have followed. Terrible to build off of such an event, but good that they were able to recover and get back and running.\\n\\n What after that—what did your—as you got back up and running, before you retired, what were some of your duties then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Dan Goldin came in as Administrator, and from his previous experience, he recognized that he needed some help at headquarters, so he called up a couple of people, one of them being Aaron Cohen, director here, and another one, Jerry Hlass, who was director at Stennis, basically to work with him full time, to keep him pointed in the right direction, to answer any questions he may have about the agency, how they operated.\\n\\n So I was off and on, because Aaron would go to Washington and stay there for weeks at a time, and basically was the acting center director without really being anointed as such, and I still communicated with Aaron a lot, because he was still the center director. So my days were primarily taken in that position, unfortunately, dealing with budgets, primarily, as opposed to technical matters, so it really was seeing to the overall function of the center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Eventually you did retire. You changed positions slightly during that time frame, but then you did retire from NASA. Looking back over your career with NASA, you worked with a variety of people who had varying levels of impact probably on you and definitely on the space program. You've mentioned a couple of times, actually, one I'd like to talk about, is Pete Conrad, and hopefully everything's going to go well with the tree-planting ceremony for him tomorrow. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about him as a colleague and a friend and astronaut and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, I really don't know how to respond to that. People always ask me for anecdotes regarding Joe or Pete or Bo, and I don't remember a lot. I mean, we just got on. We got on well, I think again because we were all military, we understood Pete was the commander, he had the final say.\\n\\n A thing I always liked about Pete was that if we had a difference of opinion about something or we thought there was a better way to do something, we'd have discussions with it, and some people in the office would never let go of a topic. If it didn't go their way, they kept ragging it, kind of like a terrier with a rat, I guess. But we'd make our best shots through Pete, typically, and then we'd talk about it and have good, frank discussions with people. Once it was decided, even if it wasn't what the crew wanted to do, we accepted that because that was Pete's way of doing business and we got on with it. So we didn't spend a lot of time rehashing stuff, unless there was good reason.\\n\\n Pete was a good friend. He was sort of a happy-go-lucky character, but that doesn't take anything away from his professionalism and his devotion to duty. He was a very professional person. He didn't have a closed mind on anything. I told you about whining to him about doing an EVA, and also I whined to him about—on Skylab we flew up the first of the manned maneuver units, developmental model, and we were going to fly it around inside the workshop. That was assigned to Pete. Well, even before launch, I whined to Pete about, you know, \"You guys are doing EVA and I don't get to do anything, so let me fly, please, please, please let me fly the manned maneuver unit around in the workshop.\" So without much thought, he said, \"Okay. Why not.\" Of course, they were afraid the batteries had been damaged on the thing, so we didn't get to fly it on our mission anyway, even though subsequent crews did. But that's the kind of person he was. I mean, besides being professional, he didn't get locked into a certain way of doing things and \"That's it. It's never going to change.\"\\n\\n So, you know, other than that, what can I tell you? Not much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are there any other individuals that you worked with, that impacted you personally or you think that made a valuable contribution to the space program that you'd like to mention?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, a name that comes to mind, of course, is Gene Kranz. It evolved I was a capcom and Gene was a flight director, and we didn't have much personal interaction. We had more when I was the deputy chief of the Astronaut Office, and we had more management-type dealings with Gene. Then, of course, in the Shuttle system, and especially when I was Aaron's deputy and Gene was the director of mission operations. I came to have, and still do have, a great admiration for Gene.\\n\\n I'm not putting down any of the other flight directors, because they had a good group of flight directors for Skylab and for STS-6. Those guys are as competent, qualified, and dedicated to their job as any of the flight crews were. You couldn't get by without them. Sometimes you might not hear as much from the ground, but Skylab—well, we didn't have TDRS then, so STS-6 we had long periods of silence when we couldn't talk to them and, of course, they couldn't talk to us.\\n\\n Also Aaron Cohen. I have a great deal of respect for Aaron. He's a very, very competent, dedicated individual." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We've been lucky enough to talk with both Aaron Cohen and Gene Kranz for this project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm sure you have, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was very nice.\\n\\n Looking back over your career again, is there any point that you would consider your greatest challenge, and then in respect also your most significant accomplishment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, nothing really comes to mind. The whole thing is so evolutionary. I mean, there were no divine revelations or breakthroughs that I was personally involved in. I think that's the way the human space flight thing has gone; it's been an evolutionary type of process. I mean, there are milestones. Al [Alan B.] Shepard's flight is one. Apollo 13 is one. STS-1 was another. Apollo 1 fire. Those were more blips. But the whole thing was, in my mind, was more evolutionary and part of a progression. It was pretty much orderly, not without those spikes that I've mentioned. Those were anomalies. It was pretty much orderly, and I like to think that I made some input to some things along the way, but I don't have this thing that I have written down that says \"This was my day, my shining hour.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's quite all right. It certainly was a very unique program to be involved with, and, like you said, there were a lot of challenges and accomplishments along the way for everyone. Would you ever have imagined where your career would lead you, that it would take you through all these—even though you hadn't originally thought of being in the space program, but then when you got in, could you see where you might end up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, because even once—I mean, anyone who says they're going to do this or do that, you know, when they enter college, I mean, look at your own career. Things just don't go—you can't plan it, because things happen along the way. Once you realize that and recognize it, then you just kind of do your best to do the job and perhaps point towards something else you think you might want to do, would like to do better, with conflicting emotions. You have \"the grass is greener\" syndrome and you also have the—which is why some people get killed in airplanes, because they don't eject when they should, from military airplanes, because the cockpit is a very comfortable place, despite all the red lights and problems that you're having. It's not a fear, but a hesitance to enter an unknown arena. So again, I think things just happened. I did the best I could in the job I was assigned and let things happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, it seems to have happened and turned out pretty all right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it did. Yes, I'm—sure. Like we mentioned before, I've been privileged to participate in a great adventure that very, very few, relatively speaking, people have had that privilege." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I've been privileged that you shared with us your experiences. Thank you very much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul J. Weitz", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00500", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SeamansRC/seamansrc.htm", + "original_file_name": "SeamansRC_9-30-98.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SeamansRC/SeamansRC_9-30-98.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Robert C. Seamans", + "location_date": "Beverly, Massachusetts – 30 September 1998" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Michelle Kelly" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Robert C. Seamans" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you very much, Dr. Seamans, for talking with us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm happy to chat with you and discuss the very interesting program that I happened to get involved in, more by chance than by plan, mainly the Apollo Program. Leading up to it were a series of educational experiences and then professional experiences.\\n\\n In brief summary, I went to a private school, Lenox school, and I found there that I had relative ease in my math courses and science courses, and some difficulty with my English and history and things like Latin. But I managed to survive. In college, I went to Harvard [University], and I really had no idea what I wanted to do when I went to college. I took just regular courses my first year, everything from English to math and physics. I found that there was a summer course I could take in surveying. It was tied into what was called the engineering school, engineering science.\\n\\n I had no idea what that was, but I didn't have anything to do that summer, so I went to Squam Lake and took the course. We got out [in the fields and woods] with transits and level lines and all that, and learned how. Almost invariably, a transit, when you set it up, it's on top of an ant hill or something like that and where you have to clear brush to see through to the next marker. But I really enjoyed it. I got to know the head of one of the departments in engineering.\\n\\n So when I went back sophomore year, I took more courses in engineering. Finally, as it turned out with the summer course I'd taken and few other things, I was able to finish Harvard in three years, specializing in the engineering sciences, which included aeronautical engineering and mechanical and civil and mechanical drawing, and took my share of chemistry and a little bit of biology and math.\\n\\n Again, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do next. It just happened at that time that I'd had a series of incidents when I'd been bicycling, for example, in England, and went to the doctor. Just about the time most of my class were going back senior year, I was put in bed. I had to stay in bed for three months. I had rheumatic fever. In those days, you didn't have penicillin and stuff like that to wipe it out. But I was very lucky. By the end of what would have been my senior year, I was hail and hearty again. I could go to my graduation.\\n\\n But I still didn't know what I wanted to do. Because I had been subjected to quite a few doctors and so on, I thought maybe I wanted to go into medicine. So I spent that summer taking some pre-med courses. By the time fall rolled around, I was convinced that I wasn't cut out to be a doctor, but I did believe that I had skills in engineering and I wanted to go back.\\n\\n So at the end of the summer, I enrolled back at Harvard and I'd been taking courses there for two days when a friend of mine said, \"You know, I'm not sure we're in the right place.\" He said, \"I'm going over to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] this afternoon. Want to come along with me?\"\\n\\n So I said, well, I didn't have anything else to do, so why not. I went over to MIT with him and met the dean of admissions….[We] presented to him orally our experiences at Harvard. He said, \"Well, you boys have done awful[ly] well, and I think you can start off here as sophomores.\" At that point, we both stood up to leave, and he said, \"Well, maybe I'm misjudging you. Here are some forms you can fill out and you can go around to the various MIT departments and maybe they'll give you more credit than I'm giving you.\"\\n\\n My friend was absolutely disgusted, and he just left there in a rage. I can't tell you why, but I filled out the form. So I found it great fun. I went around and negotiated the various departments, like English and government. I really had more than the equivalent of some of the courses at MIT. I was starting to build up credits. I finally ended up in aeronautical engineering.\\n\\n The head of the department said, \"Well, with all your background and Harvard degree, why do you want to come over here as an undergraduate?\"\\n\\n I said, \"Well, I wouldn't consider it.\"\\n\\n He said, \"Well, would you want to come here as a graduate student?\"\\n\\n I said, \"That's exactly what I'd like to do.\" I almost made the decision on the spot when he asked me that question.\\n\\n He said, \"Well, that sounds fine to me.\"\\n\\n I said, \"Well, your dean of admissions doesn't seem very enthusiastic about it.\"\\n\\n So he called him on the phone right in front of me and they argued back and forth, and he finally said, \"Well, it's all set. You can come here. Start next Monday.\"\\n\\n It just happened the two colleges had different time scales. I said, \"Well, how long will it take to get a master's degree?\"\\n\\n He said, \"Well, you do have quite a few deficiencies. It may take you as much as three years.\"\\n\\n I said, \"Three years?\"\\n\\n He said, \"Well, there are some specialties here, including instrumentation, and maybe it wouldn't take as much time.\"\\n\\n I said, \"Well, what is instrumentation?\"\\n\\n He said, \"Well, I'm a little vague on that myself. Why don't you go see Dr. Draper.\"\\n\\n And that's exactly what happened. It was just all as innocent as that. It was no great master plan that I had, it just worked out that way.\\n\\n So that fall, I went into Doc Draper's class and I was absolutely enchanted with the intellectual content of what was going on, as well as the professionalism of it, as well as the closeness to the actual workplace. I found that really exciting.\\n\\n …I finished all the course work I had to do in two semesters. That summer, I guess along about the middle of June, the courses stopped the end of May, I thought, I'm going to drop around and see Doc Draper and see what I might do for my master's thesis. He outlined a possibility which sounded pretty interesting. He said, \"You'll get paid. You'll be a research assistant.\"\\n\\n I thought, \"Gee, getting paid!\" Nobody ever paid me a nickel before, [except for] a little tutoring job I had once. I said, \"Well, that would be just fine.\"\\n\\n So I started the following week. It was fascinating, because I had a boss, whose name happened to be Oldfield, so he was called \"Barney,\" because there used to be a racetrack driver called Barney Oldfield. Barney wasn't there very much. Lo and behold, a few weeks later I was informed by Doc Draper that Barney Oldfield was going to be called up into the Army. This is still before Pearl Harbor, but Pearl Harbor was going to happen in December. This was still June, July by then.\\n\\n On the strength of that, I was made an instructor. Doc asked me if I'd be an instructor and help him give his course and so on. You know, things were happening pretty fast. But I said I'd be happy to do that, and so I did.\\n\\n All of a sudden we were at war. I got my degree just about the time the war started. I also got engaged at that time and got married soon afterwards. So things were really piling on. All during the war, I was at MIT. I helped Doc Draper with his course and other graduate courses. At the same time I gave a course in aircraft instruments for the Navy. MIT gave it for the Navy. I had fifty students come in on a Monday and six weeks later they'd leave and then the next group would come on a Monday and six weeks later they'd leave. This happened thirteen times and the war was over. So I got to know that material pretty well.\\n\\n At the same time we were doing work both for the Navy and the Air Force, then the Air Corps, on the technologies, new technologies, that could be used to shoot down enemy airplanes. The Navy wanted to shoot them down from their ships, kamikazes coming in. The Air Force wanted it for air-to-air combat.\\n\\n So when the war was over, I had quite a bit of experience on the deck of carriers, for example, in the middle of winter trying to install equipment in the Atlantic, and going down to Florida for work with the Air Force. Having the fun of working with a colonel who became a senior general officer, named Lee Davis, where we'd go down in a C-45, I guess it was, and he had work to do, so he'd say, \"Look, you fly the plane and I'll sit in the back. I've got some work to do.\" One time when there were a lot of clouds and I thought it would be a lot of fun just to kind of zoom around the clouds, and he called out, \"You know, you don't need to be quite so strenuous with the controls.\" Another time we were going along, and all of a sudden all the bells and whistles went off and I hadn't observed the fact that the tank was running dry. He had to come tearing [forward, the] propel[ler] [had stopped,] and get things all cranked up and get the plane going again.\\n\\n But they were extremely busy times and very exciting times. This was followed by post-war. There were a couple of years after the end of the war before Dr. [Jerome] Hunsaker came to me and said, \"You always thought you might want a doctor's degree.\" By then I was a professor. He said, \"Time's running out when you can go after a degree. You're not supposed to go after a degree when you're forty-five and so on.\" By then I was getting pretty old; I was in my late twenties.\\n\\n So my wife, Gene, and I, had to agonize over that one, because it was obvious it was going to be about two or three years' worth of effort. I felt that if I was going to do it, I didn't want to stop working. I was going to keep working at the same time. We had three young children by then and the question of time with the children and so on. Gene agreed that it was worth doing, and I think we both, before the three years were up, wondered if we'd made a big mistake, but we got through it and our marriage was still intact. So I got the degree.\\n\\n During that same period of time, I had a project where we were automatically flying a pursuit airplane while it was tracking a target, like air-to-combat, only completely automatic. This involved a lot of special tests of all the equipment you have on the plane, as well as the plane itself. I've tried to emphasize that to some extent in the book I wrote, because it was so similar to what we ended up with in the lunar orbit rendezvous with Apollo.\\n\\n Some people were very concerned as to—we an discuss this later, because the White House itself had a big concern about the lunar orbit rendezvous, whether it was going to be safe to have people go down in the capsule and land on the moon and be able to come back. Before they could come back, they had to successfully dock…with another vehicle that was going around the moon. If they didn't dock successfully, they'd had it. But I felt, because I'd been so immersed in this particular kind of maneuver, that that was the least of our worries.\\n\\n Anyway, not long after that, in the early fifties, there was a project that MIT had taken on right after the war to develop equipment for guided missiles. The Navy came to a number of places in the United States—Johns Hopkins [University], MIT, and other places—to make use of what the Germans had done—they were obviously ahead of us with their V-1 and the V-2—but to take it beyond what the Germans had done and incorporate it in our educational program.\\n\\n This started off as, I don't know, maybe as many as ten or eleven different individual projects at MIT—a new wind tunnel, for example, and a new kind of simulator and various things, but it had not been integrated into a common goal. The Navy, in effect, came up and said, \"Where's the missile?\" There wasn't any missile. I was in put in charge of finding a missile.\\n\\n This was a very fortunate thing for me. It was very frustrating, because working with Doc Draper in his lab, his management style was very simple. You put a bunch of people in charge, you designate who the people are, who's in charge, and they go and they do the project. And when it's all over, you disband it. And that's fine, as long as you have a lot of students coming on that join in these projects and so on.\\n\\n But that's not the way the so-called Meteor Project was set up. Taking charge was not an easy matter. [I was] dealing with three different schools, [and] with, I think, seven different departments, with a lot of faculty members. Anybody who thinks they can step in and say they're in charge of professor[s] in different departments [is] crazy. I mean, very difficult management problems. I didn't always handle it very well. I'm afraid I was too trusting [at times and], too demanding [at other times], and I got myself at cross-purposes with some of the people involved.\\n\\n But it was very valuable eventually when I got to NASA, because there you have all these different centers. How do you get something done that involves five or six different centers? How do you get them all to work together?\\n\\n Anyway, at the end of about a third year, we had made some progress and we actually had something you could look at and say, that's the missile and it did work. But the Navy had other programs, as well, and so they canceled the project.\\n\\n Just at that same time, I was getting some feelers from RCA [Radio Corporation of America] to see if I'd like to come and work with them. I went down to Camden, New Jersey, where they were located, and it didn't take me long to figure out that's not where I wanted to work. But there was a highly industrialized, old-fashioned industrial-type operation there. All the engineers were unionized and it was tough. So, I said no.\\n\\n Then they came around and said, well, would I be interested in starting a new laboratory for RCA on [Route] 128 [outside of Boston], or near there. So I did that. That was highly educational to work in a big corporate structure where you have lots of levels and staff at each level and people coming around with suggestions. Things went well enough that RCA decided they were going to put up a permanent building for the work we were doing. By then we had a thousand people working.\\n\\n They wanted me to suggest how the building should be designed. First, we had to find the land and I helped on that. We were working in the Waltham Watch Building then, which they did a very nice job of renovating. But that's still a long way from—we were living right here, in Beverly Farms. It was sort of a long commute. I thought if we could find a place that was nearer Beverly, it would be very nice, and we did. It was on Route 3 and 128, in an area where, at that time, there was nothing industrial going on. You ought to see it today around there. It's wall-to-wall small companies and so on.\\n\\n Anyway, my idea for the right kind of building was an H-shaped building, three-story, and that way you could keep everything more or less close together and you got lots of windows. When headquarters RCA came around, said, \"Here's the design,\" I took a look at it and it was a square. I said, \"Well, you know, I wanted to have an H-shaped building and I wanted three stories. This is one story.\"\\n\\n They said, \"Well, they decided in New York that we're not sure that it's going to be permanent operation, and whatever building we put up, it's got to be readily convertible for a storage warehouse.\" They said, \"You know, it really is an H-shaped building, because you can take the square and take what would be the tips of the H and we just folded them in on themselves and that makes a square.\" Anyway, there were those kind of battles to be fought. The building was constructed and it was an H-shaped building, although it was only one story.\\n\\n …I was driving home from Waltham one day [in 1957] when I heard on the radio about Sputnik. I was upset because I felt there was no reason that we couldn't have done it ourselves first. And I was sort of upset, I guess, because I wasn't involved, and it was the kind of thing that was exciting and I'd liked to have been involved in. I should say that I'd been working for the NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] for quite a few years on some of their committees.\\n\\n NASA was formed, in part, out of the old NACA, National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. I observed that the committees I'd been on were abolished. So I didn't even have that connection with what was going on.\\n\\n [So I was working there in my office one day, when I got a call from [Dr. T.] Keith Glennan, who is the administrator of NASA. This is now 1960.] …I guess it was a June morning in 1960. I guess you could say that the adrenaline kind of went up a little bit and he said, \"We don't know each other, but you know my deputy, Dr. [Hugh L.] Dryden,\" whom I did know at the NACA. He said, \"We were just wondering if you were going to be down here in Washington in the next few days.\"\\n\\n I said, \"Well, I wasn't planning to.\" I was about to say, \"But if you want me, I'll be there,\" when he said, \"Well, could you have dinner with me tonight at the Statler in Boston?\" It's no longer the Statler. I forget what it is called.\\n\\n But anyway, we met and chatted, and after about forty-five minutes of conversation, he hauled a chart out of his pocket, put it down between us, and said, \"Okay, here's the organization of NASA.\" He said, \"Well, what we hope you're interesting in doing is to take over the general manager's job.\" You know, it's one of [those charts] with a lot of boxes and lines. He said, \"I want you to take that job right there,\" and he put his thumb down on the place. He said, \"We don't have jobs like manager. In the government you'd be called…the associate administrator. It would just be myself as administrator and Dr. Dryden as deputy, as your superior.\"\\n\\n Well, it didn't take me very long. I've always had a rule when things like this come along, that I want to take at least a deep breath, and I do that by saying, \"I'm not going to make a change like this without chatting with my wife.\" I really mean that, too, because she's got to think it's going to be good for the family, and good for her, and good for me.\\n\\n So in a few days I called back and said, \"That would be fine.\" I said, \"But I really do have some work to clear up and I'd like to take a vacation before I come down.\" So I actually started on the 1st of September 1960.\\n\\n Then it was a merry ride from there, until [President John F.] Kennedy went before the Congress, in a special State of the Union message in May of '61, and announced that, \"Now is the time to take greater strides. Now is time for this nation,\" and so on, \"to take a leading role in space and we should go to the moon within the decade and safely return.\"\\n\\n But what happened during that relatively short period of time, was what I guess I'd have to say probably the most exciting time of my life, because just to be working for the government was a new experience. I got down there the 1st of September, I was very fortunate to have Keith Glennan as my boss. He had decided ahead of time that I should take about a month, the month of September, to go to all the different centers and take time at each center and see what they're actually doing.\\n\\n He provided somebody named Dick [Richard E.] Horner, who had been my predecessor. He had had the job for a year. Keith told me that he felt they just had to have a general manager for the whole operation. They had gone to Dick Horner, who was then the assistant secretary of the Air Force for research and development, and he agreed to take the job on for only a year.\\n\\n After I took the job on, they had a consulting arrangement with Dick, so he was available to chat with me about turning over the various stones and what we would find in these organizations, in terms of the caliber of the people and the work going on and the state of the laboratories. So that first month was educational.\\n\\n Then pretty soon we were getting into some of the issues for the budget. The election wasn't until November, actually, but right after the election, the budgets were being put together for the following year, even though it was known by then there was going to be a change in administration, that [Richard M.] Nixon was not elected, Kennedy was.\\n\\n So there were two or three very interesting meetings with [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower and Glennan and myself and a fellow named Andy Goodpastor, who was the president's special assistant. There was also one extremely interesting meeting of the Eisenhower Cabinet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What happened?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At that meeting, I was there with Keith so that he could present the NASA budget, which he did, and he took about five minutes, I suppose. He kept it in pretty simple terms. The dollar value came out to be just a tad over a billion dollars. That was followed by the President's science advisor, named [George B.] Kistiakowsky, who was from Harvard, where he was…a professor in chemistry, I [believe]. He presented a study that the President's Science Advisor[y] [Committee], the PSA[C], had carried a study on the desirability and the cost and the feasibility of a man landing on the moon. He presented it in what I would say was a non-enthusiastic, rather cynical way. He said, \"You know, if we were to take on something like this—he didn't quite say \"as silly as this\"—we couldn't do it until the seventies, at least a decade from then.\" He said, \"You know, we can't tell you exactly what it would cost, but it might cost 20 to 40 billion dollars.\"\\n\\n There was sort of sigh…around the table in the Cabinet. Then somebody said, \"If we give those scientists that kind of money to go to the moon, the next thing you know, they're going to want to have that much amount of money, or more, to go to the planets.\"\\n\\n Eisenhower cut in and he said, \"I just wish somebody could tell me what is the best program for the United States that will cost no more than a billion dollars a year.\" And there was discussion of that. Of course, that was very germane to what happened right after Kennedy became President, because when you have a change in administration, you kind of shift everything immediately. There are many, many issues. The President has something like, I don't know how many departments, but I know they grow all the time. I don't know, ten or twelve departments. [There were also] a very large number of independent agencies, of which NASA was one of the largest. You have all kinds of commissions and so on, and there are probably 150 people working directly for the President, and decisions on money don't get made without his approval. So you've got, within the Bureau of the Budget, now the Office of Management and Budget, to help him. Over the years it's been a remarkably effective part of bureaucracy. The taxpayers don't realize it, but that office is all the time doing its best to cut the budget. That's their game.\\n\\n So once Jim [James E.] Webb came in, taking Keith Glennan's place, we were asked by Dave [E.] Bell, who was the head of the bureau, to come over and discuss those changes that we felt that the new administration would want to make immediately, recognizing that it would take probably a year before the president could make or want to make any major change in our budget.\\n\\n So we had originally requested of the Eisenhower administration $1.4 billion. So the easiest thing for us to do was to look over the list of those things that the Eisenhower administration had not included. I don't think we included all of them, but a good number of them we went over and discussed with Dave Bell. His reaction was, \"Well, these are all very interesting.\" He knew Jim Webb. \"These are very interesting, Jim, but, you know, the president's got an awful lot on his plate right now. He doesn't have the time to get into all of this. He's going to want to get into it. This is really important, Jim, but these are things we'll take up next fall in connection with the budget for the following year.\"\\n\\n Then the game is, when you reach that point, if you're the administrator or the secretary of a department, you can say, \"Well, we understand that, but it's really important that a couple of these issues be resolved soon. These are really pressing policy issues and we very much want to meet with the President and discuss them.\"\\n\\n The head of the Bureau has to say, \"Well, I'll set up the meeting.\"\\n\\n Then when you have the meeting in the Cabinet room over at the White House, you obviously get there early and you're sort of standing there, and the director of the budget is there. In our case, I think, Jerry [Jerome B.] Wiesner was there, the science advisor, and [George] McBundy was there, of the [National] Security Council. Since Lyndon [B.] Johnson had been so involved in the space effort, and was about to be made the chairman of the Space Council, he was there. Then there'll be—woosh—and the President comes in and shakes hands around and is introduced. He was introduced to me. We had been classmates, but…he'd met an awful lot of people since he graduated from college, and he did not immediately recognize me.\\n\\n He sat down and we went through our discussion of why we thought certain things ought to be included, ought to be put in as changes, immediately. I had a fair number of meetings with Kennedy in the course of the three years he was President. He loved to just sort of sit there and debate them and turn to somebody and ask them a question. He often had a pencil, he tended to tap his teeth occasionally when they were talking.\\n\\n Glenn Seaborg was chairman of the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission]. I had forgotten that. They wanted to get some money…immediately for a nuclear rocket, for example. Things were sort of being discussed, but they weren't in context, I didn't think. I said, \"If I may, Mr. President, let me just summarize how I think these things fit together. This item here could affect what we might do in space by the year '65,\" and such and such might be [done at a later] date.\\n\\n He said, \"That's fine, Doctor. I'd like that in a memorandum in my office tomorrow morning.\" So I don't know that I put that particular memo in the book or not.\\n\\n But anyway, these were all pretty modest increases and they did not include, which we had requested of Eisenhower, and which we requested of Kennedy, in asking for the supplemental funds, anything more for Apollo, or anything more for manned flight beyond the Mercury Program that was then going on. That's an important part of it all. It was for, I don't know, something like, it seems like a lot of money now, when I think about it, but it was only for something like 120 million dollars or something like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was just to supplement the Apollo Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That would be a supplemental, which went in and it was approved [but none of the funds were for Apollo].\\n\\n I forgot to say that when we were still arguing, Keith Glennan was still arguing, in the Eisenhower administration, for increases in the Eisenhower budget, we were dealing with somebody called Maurice [H.] Stans, who was head of the Bureau of the Budget. There were two things that we wanted to put in, sort of in desperation at the end. One was 10 million dollars for communication satellites. We finally got the Eisenhower administration to put it in the budget, but we also had to show a reimbursable item for 10 million. The idea was that we, as an agency, would help put such a satellite in orbit, but it would be completely financed and paid for by a private outfit. It turned out, later on, that AT&T did just that. But we wanted to have some money in there so that we could develop such satellites ourselves.\\n\\n We also wanted to have—Keith wanted to have 50 million dollars that the administrator could use with some degree of flexibility. Well, Stans just laughed at that, and he finally agreed to the 10 million. Keith said, \"Well, I don't really understand how you're making these decisions.\"\\n\\n Maurice Stans said, \"It's very simple. I want a bargain basement program for space.\" Which, of course, [was in line]…with Eisenhower’s view.\\n\\n The way the things started with the Kennedy administration were really in that [same] mode. It didn't appear that there was going to be any very major change in our [manned space] activity, at least for a year's time.\\n\\n Then in March, when [Yuri] Gagarin went into orbit, all hell broke loose. I mean, [the Soviets] got tremendous world publicity. Sputnik got a lot of world publicity. Whether the Soviets had planned it or not, to this day nobody really quite knows, but when they found out the impact this had, then they played on it. Then they [took] another step [by] putting a dog in space, [and] they went around the moon and took a picture of the back side of the moon. Then when they finally put a man up there, that blew everybody's mind.\\n\\n And here we were, supposedly the most advanced scientific and technical country in the world, and…the Russians had been looked at as something backward, although obviously accomplished in mathematics. All of a sudden…they were pulling off these missions. The Soviets showed that the world was changing, and the great Communist countries were now ahead and were advancing much more rapidly, and that we in the United States were…dead in the water when it came to \"progress.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there intelligence on the American side that you were aware of, or was the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] aware?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's a very good question. I think the answer is that the intelligence we had that early—that is, '60, '61—was very meager." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know the Bay of Pigs [Crisis] happened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had the U-2 flying. By then, of course, Gary Powers had been shot down. The U-2 was able to overfly Russia before it was shot down. We were picking up information from around the perimeter of the Soviet Union, from aircraft that were flying with electronic snoopers aboard. Also we had ability to track some of their missile firings on the eastern part of the Soviet Union. There's a great peninsula there called Kamchatka. They were launching from there and we [had] ships…at sea and [recorded] what they were doing. But as to what their intentions were, and what they were going to do in space, it was, at that time, very meager.\\n\\n Before I left NASA, we were starting to get really good overhead photography of their launch facilities. We could see that they were building a new great big booster. They clearly had, we believed, a lunar program. Although it wasn't until the year 1992, I guess, that we finally got the information on what they were planning, the specifics of what they were planning to do.\\n\\n So it was never terribly satisfactory. …What we believed, [was] oftentimes…based on information that was very highly classified. We couldn't use that data. There were several reasons for wanting to keep it very, very secret. If we gave too much away, it would make them realize what we knew and how we were getting it and make it more difficult for us to get it in the future. That was one thing.\\n\\n Also, we knew they were gathering information on us, because we started to, as time went on, track their satellites and realize when they were taking pictures of us. But it was more advantageous, really, to us than it was to them. All they had to do was have the Russian ambassador of the United States buy\\n\\n Aviation Week\\n\\n and so on, and mail that over, and they'd find out quite a bit about what was going on. So we didn't want this game to stop, but we were getting a lot. If we were too public about it, we could embarrass the Soviet, we felt. It was better just to keep it…clandestine.\\n\\n Anyway, after Gagarin landed safely, and was idolized in the Soviet Union, came to the Kremlin and given the Order of Lenin, and you name it, the first thing that happened was the Congress wanted to have a special hearing the following day, I think, or two days later. They took over the main caucus room of the house. They had Dr. Dryden…and Jim Webb. I was in the background. Just the two of them, you know, beating them over the head. \"Why are we behind?\" \"Why don't we do more?\" \"Why aren't we working twenty-four hours a day?\" Of course, the answer was, or parts of it, Congress hadn't given us the money to do it.\\n\\n Soon thereafter, I think it was about two days later, I was testifying with George [M.] Low, on Apollo, and [the question arose] why weren't we doing more on Apollo. I [attempted] to defend the Kennedy decisions and [noted] that Kennedy had provided funds for the big booster, which [was] need[ed], but that they had not put more money into Apollo because they were interested in getting more information on Mercury and our success there. George Low was doing the detailed testifying.\\n\\n Then Congressman King, from Utah—I guess he was from Salt Lake City—quoted from the Bible. It's a quote, and I've looked it up and it really is there. But I forget now, it's somewhere in the Old Testament. It's about a couple of kings who are at war with each other. One of them goes out to do battle and he's got 5,000 men, but he hasn't done a very good job of reconnaissance. He doesn't realize that he's about to go out in a field against 10,000 men, and he's going to get clobbered. He said, \"Isn't that the situation we're here in space? We don't seem to know exactly what the Russians are going to do.\"\\n\\n \"We keep going down and we do battle and we keep losing and losing.\" He said, \"Isn't it true that the Russians are going to go to the moon in 1967, which will be the fiftieth anniversary of the Red Revolution?\"\\n\\n I said, \"Well, I'm not privy to their planning, so I can't answer that question.\"\\n\\n He said, \"There you are. There you are, you people. You're going into battle and you don't know what your enemy is doing.\" Then he said, \"Could we go to the moon in '67?\"\\n\\n Well, right after the election, we didn't know what the Kennedy administration would want to do, but we started carrying out some detailed studies of what would really be involved, detailed studies. We put the pieces together. Every one of the things that needed to be done seemed to be doable. We'd come up with an estimate of what it would take in dollars. I think it was around twelve or 13 billion dollars. So I knew that.\\n\\n At the same time I knew that it was highly controversial…You don't want to…get out ahead of the President when you're [testifying]. He's got to make his mind up what he wants to do, and then you go up and present what the President's program is and defend it. So I tried very hard not to be too specific about it. But he finally got me to say that, yes, I thought that it certainly is going to be doable to land on the moon. Then the question of, \"Well, could you do it in '67?\"\\n\\n I kept saying, \"Well, you know, this depends on the level of effort, which means dollars. This is something that it seems to me that has to be decided by basically the people in this country. Do they want to really make this kind of an effort or not? Obviously, the decision-makers on this are you here in the Congress and the President, and he's reviewing these possibilities.\"\\n\\n \"But do you think it's possible to go to the moon in '67?\" He also said, \"How much would it cost?\"\\n\\n So I finally ended up saying that I thought that it was conceivable that with sufficient effort, we might be able to go to the moon in '67. To my surprise, when the hearing was over, I went outside and [found a substantial number of] TV cameras and microphones…[I was asked to] repeat the statement that I made inside.\\n\\n I went tearing back—I'm just a country boy from New England, and all of a sudden this is pretty spectacular stuff. I went to Jim Webb's office and said, \"You know, I may have made a big mistake. Here's what I did.\"\\n\\n Not long after that, he got a memorandum from Kenny [Kenneth] O'Donnell, who worked directly with Kennedy, saying that they questioned some of my testimony and whether I was being loyal to the President and so on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wanted to ask you, people for centuries have been thinking about man going to the moon, but where did the actual idea come up that we might be able to do that in our space program, that you actually went to undertake studies of how to get there and how much it would cost and what the deadlines could be, or the schedule would be? How did that all come about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it came about before I got there, first of all. Keith Glennan carried out a planning exercise, that Jim Webb didn't carry out afterwards. But Keith felt that there should be some kind of an agenda. When you put down all the things that you could do, remember this is the beginning of NASA. By the time NASA came along, I mean, [Sputnik] had already gone into orbit. So then the question is, well, what more do you want to put in orbit? The question is, you're going to get bigger and bigger rockets to put them up there. It's pretty obvious that at some point you could put a man up there.\\n\\n Then, okay, once you get him up going around in orbit, where do you want to go next? You go higher altitudes, see more of the Earth. The moon isn't really very far away—250,000 miles. So you say, well, you could probably go up and take a look at the moon, or you could even go around the moon. Then it's not too far from that to extrapolate and say, well, maybe while we're up there, we could land.\\n\\n This had all been on the planning agenda that the Eisenhower administration had put together, and it just said that landing on the moon was post-1970. It didn't say it would be 1970, just sometime after. You know, Jules Verne talked about it, and several of our comic strips were about going to the moon. Somebody once tried to write a paper on the whole subject, as to what extent science fiction influenced our planning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It must have been interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know, I sort of forget what the answer was. It probably helped prepare people's minds for the possibility. I remember going up—to this day I can describe it. [My wife and] I used to like to walk in the evening around Georgetown and get some exercise. That's where we lived…Eight blocks, up a hill [from] where we lived…[was] Montrose Park, and, believe it or not, it was a full moon [the] night [after I testified]. I walked up there with my wife. All of a sudden I looked up at the moon and thought, you know, are you crazy or not, saying that we're going to put people right there? The thing is, you might be able to [go there]...When you took it step by step, every step seemed to be [feasible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Who started with those studies? Do you know who the various people were and what they actually studied?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That'd be a good thing to track down. I had several assistants. One of them was a guy named Don [Donald H. Heaton]—he was a colonel, and I had him chair one of the studies. Another one was a guy named Bill [William A.] Fleming, who was also an assistant, and I had him carry out [another].\\n\\n I know that the people at the Marshall [Space Flight] Center under Wernher von Braun did some studies. Some studies were carried out by what became the Johnson [Space] Center, but at that time was still part of Langley down in Virginia. There were a thousand people working on the Mercury Program. It was called the Space Task Group, headed by Bob [Robert R.] Gilruth. They did some of these studies.\\n\\n When I went down to Langley, that's when I first met John [C.] Houbolt. In the month of September, when I was looking around, John had a sort of a typical NACA kind of a discussion where you get a number of thirty-by-forty charts and somebody with a grease pencil would put stuff on, draw some circles and made some models of airplanes or spaceships or whatever, and describes it. That's when he first described to me this lunar orbit rendezvous idea. So that by the time Gagarin flew, there was already quite a bit of discussion going on within NASA about the possibility of landing on the moon. It was not suddenly a new thought that came out at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were discussions then undertaken with the President? Do you know it was even brought to the President's attention?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. It's a good question. I think it's important to say that when you ask me a question like that, I know either what people told me that was going on or what I observed myself. But there's always a lot of things going on that I, even today, may not be aware of. [Prior to Gagarin’s missions, Mr. Webb, Dr. Dryden and I had had a brief discussion with the President about the cost and timing of a lunar landing.] I hear stories about the President inviting a newspaper columnist into his office, and right after the Gagarin flight [his saying], \"Well, I guess we're going to the moon.\"\\n\\n But as far as I knew, the first thing that happened was, Kennedy wrote a memorandum to the Vice President, as head of the Space Council [that] said, \"I want you to advise me on what steps we ought to take as a result of the Gagarin flight.\" It implied, or maybe it said directly, \"The country is sick of having the Russians keep doing things ahead of us. How can we at least get even with them?\" \"Get even\" in the sense of pull up even. \"Do we need to be building bigger rockets? Should we consider a space station? Should we consider going to the moon?\"\\n\\n Then the first thing Johnson did was to pick some people who were well known, like Wernher von Braun and Benny [Bernard] Schriever, General Schriever, head of the ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile] Program, and Jim Webb. He'd get them altogether and sit around a table and say, \"Okay. Let's just chat about this thing.\" But he soon found he wasn't going to get anywhere by just that approach. So he finally wrote a letter to [Robert S.] McNamara, Secretary of Defense, and Jim Webb, and he said, \"Look, whatever we decide to do, between the two of you it's going to be done. I want your ideas on what we ought to do. I want them on a certain date.\" The date was the 8th of May, which was the day he was going to leave on his first trip to Southeast Asia.\\n\\n Well, a meeting was set up that was going to be Jim Webb, Hugh Dryden, myself, and a guy named Abe [Abraham] Hyatt, who was in charge of planning for NASA. We were going to go to McNamara's office, he being the senior person, and it was going to be him and Roz Gilpatrick [phonetic], who was his deputy, and, I think, Harold Brown and John Rubel, who were in the engineering side of the Department of Defense. That was going to be on a Saturday morning.\\n\\n Well, by almost sheer coincidence, on Friday, the day before, Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.] went into semi-orbital flight. That really changed things around. It immediately showed the new administration that NASA did have [operational] capability. It immediately showed that even [a mission] a lot simpler than Gagarin[’s] had tremendous import, because it was reflected around the world. Almost immediately everybody was excited, pleased. [Everybody included,]…the Europeans and [Asians as well as Americans].\\n\\n By Monday, of course, Alan became an instant hero and he came to the White House…[where he received an award from the President]. He went up and he spoke to a special message to the Congress. The Vice President [Lyndon B. Johnson] had a chance to sit in the back of a car with his arm around Alan and ride up the hill. It was big.\\n\\n So with that going on in the public arena, [we] had the meeting at the Pentagon. Hugh Dryden went down for the launching and was still down there, so there was just three of us…from NASA. McNamara said, typical McNamara, he said, \"Jim, the thing to do is, we both lay our cards down and see what we think ought to be done. And you go first.\"\\n\\n Jim had to expose [our ideas] before they exposed [theirs]…Jim gave a little discourse on…a number of…[important possibilities] but [he said] the most important was to decide what we wanted to do about manned flight. We, NASA, recommended that the President go to Congress and say that there should be a manned lunar landing program.\\n\\n McNamara said, \"Well, I don't know, Jim. The Russians are clearly moving along very rapidly with their space program. Are you sure if we do that, that before we even get started, they're going to go and land on the moon? Shouldn't we, as an objective, have a man landing on a planet?\"\\n\\n Well, at that, I mean, I couldn't believe a sensible person would say something like that. I said, \"But we're not even close to being able to consider going to a planet. I mean, that [mission takes] a year and a half out, [and] a year and a half back. We don't have the knowledge.\" I also said I did not believe that the Russians, the Soviets then, could go immediately and land on the moon. We said we thought they could go fly around the moon, but not land on the moon.\\n\\n Well, he sort of bought that and then we got into a lot of detail on it. Then McNamara said, \"Well, we have written the response to Johnson's letter to us in a report form. Why don't Bob Seamans and John Rubel take a look at it together. John Rubel wrote the report. Jim, you and I can sign it after they've gone over it, and we'll submit it on Monday.\"\\n\\n So I stayed [in the Pentagon] and Jim Webb [returned to NASA]. I read this report and I thought it was terrible, for a lot of reasons we don't need to go into here. I guess, out of deference to John Rubel and so on, I'd just as soon not have it say it was terrible; I think it had some deficiencies in it.\\n\\n So I stayed over there, I spent time at the Pentagon with John Rubel, rewriting. We actually worked off and on, at least, until Jim Webb could join us on Sunday at around ten o'clock in the evening. I'd talked to him on the phone. He was busy planning the reception for the Shepard family and all the things that go into something as elaborate as welcoming a hero. I told him, first when I called him, I said, \"This is terrible. We've got to start from scratch.\"\\n\\n He said, \"I agreed with McNamara, we're going to go with that report, subject to any changes you can talk him into.\"\\n\\n So he came over at ten o'clock and I'd talked to him a few times up to that [time]. He said, \"Well, John, I understand you got this report and it's in pretty good shape now. Why don't we just sort of go over it again.\"\\n\\n So he went and he was masterful in getting some changes inserted that I hadn't been able to get in. We finally finished at two in the morning, and it had to be typed. I went over at eight o'clock and picked it up and got McNamara's signature and Webb's signature, and we submitted it to the Vice President. That's really the basic document for going to the moon.\\n\\n There was a special luncheon given at the State Department by Johnson for Alan Shepard and his family. He had the envelope in his hand that was the same envelope that I knew I'd delivered [earlier in the day]. When the [luncheon] was over, he said, \"Well, I'm going to be going over to see the President on a few matters and then I'm going to be taking a trip for a while.\"\\n\\n So that was still on the 8th, and the President went up to the Congress—I can't remember the exact date, the 23rd, was it? Or somewhere in there. And [space] wasn't the only [issue] that Kennedy was going to discuss.\\n\\n But we received, maybe a week [earlier], the draft that had been put together by [Ted] Sorensen for the speech that Kennedy was going to make. There were some wonderful words in there, I think poetic. But it did say that he recommended that we go to the moon by the year 1967. Even though our planning…indicated that that [date] might be possible, we felt it was very unwise to stick the neck of the United States out that far.\\n\\n So I was there when Jim Webb called Sorensen, and Sorensen said, \"Okay. What do you recommend? I'm not sure what changes. What do you recommend?\"\\n\\n Jim said, \"Well, within the decade.\"\\n\\n So the President did agree to make that change. But he…wanted to keep it '67, because he'd still be, hopefully, President…The supposition was he [w]ould [be]…reelected." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How is the Department of Defense involved in the decision to go to the moon? You mentioned you had been working with John Rubel and you had come up and drafted this policy memoranda." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were involved in the way I've just described. A great deal depended on the Department of Defense. First of all, they had the operation going down at Cape Canaveral. We weren't sure we were going to launch from there, but it appeared that we wanted to make use of those assets and all the down-range tracking stations…\\n\\n Already on the Mercury Program we were making use of the Atlas missile, converting that to a launch vehicle. We already were using the Redstone Army missile. That was used in Alan Shepard's flight. As time went on, we used even more of their assets. For example, the so-called long-haul and intent on going to the moon was on acquiring the additional land that we'd need and of doing a great deal of construction at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]. At the Cape, the government ended up buying 85,000 acres of land, for example—Merritt Island—and building the vertical assembly building and all that.\\n\\n …We first had to decide whether we were going to keep the Space Task Group at Langley Field, or whether we were going to move it. We finally decided, yes, we're going to move it, and we moved it to Houston. [We] had to acquire the land there and [we] had to build the center. [We had] to test all this stuff. We eventually decided to test it in Mississippi. But a tremendous amount of construction work. We didn't have the capability in NASA to build [one of] the largest building in the world, the vertical assembly building. Of course, it wasn't the largest, but the next largest. But a big building. We felt that the only organization that could possibly do it was the [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers. So again, part of the Department of Defense managed the construction program. Did a tremendous job.\\n\\n I forgot to say that all the recovery of the astronauts from the ocean. That's a good question. As time went on, McNamara became more restive about this and felt that they weren't getting enough back, and that we should pay them for it. [Our spending] was said to be enormous…it got up to, the maximum year, I guess, it was 5.9 billion. But here's the Department of Defense with, I don't know, let's see, when I joined the Department of Defense in '69, I think it was 75 to 80 billion dollars. I mean, they had a lot greater resources. So our trying to get the money to reimburse them was going to be a horror story, and we didn't actually end up doing it.\\n\\n So what were they getting? Well, the same technology they used in space was used for ICBMs. In the beginning, the space program benefited from the military, but as time went on, it was expected that there would be advances in the space program that would have some major implication to national defense. That really did happen. I mean, the Department of Defense couldn't operate today without satellites. Some they developed themselves, but a lot of the developments have come from the NASA program. That's a good question, though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell me a little bit about the work between the Department of Defense and NASA, and how it was working with the Department of Defense?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The relations between NASA and the Department of Defense, of course, they were very complex. You have to…start with the way it was before NASA was formed. The NACA, National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, was a very unique organization. It was started in 1915 and…it was…[a] laboratory run by the government to help any arm of government that needed help, as well as all commercial ventures of whatever type, be [they] airlines, or aircraft companies, or whatever. It was to be done not on a pay basis. It was going to be done by the NACA doing what they felt to be appropriate on the basis of the needs, as they saw them, for the industry and for the Department of Defense.\\n\\n So they built up wind tunnels and so on. It turned out to be an ideal way to operate, because you had really good people working for the NACA, who worked there not for the dollars, obviously, but because they had the equipment, the wind tunnels, and so on, that weren't available anywhere else. So [they] had the [satisfaction] of doing really advanced research work.\\n\\n So that was part of our heritage, and that still continued, to some extent, in the NASA era. You had other relationships where there had to be dollars involved. For example, when it came time to put up a communication satellites, for example, from, say, Cape Canaveral for a private company, how is that going to be paid for? The Department of Defense—and I suppose this is, in part, McNamara, with his business background—felt the government ought to be paid back on a total cost basis. How much did it cost the build the facility? Wanted to pay for amortizing the facility over time and so on.\\n\\n We at NASA felt that what we were doing was for the future of the country, that as long as we, the government, broke even on it, that that was the way to go. So we said that anybody who came in, be it NASA or be it a company, ought to pay for all of the readily identifiable incremental costs. Now, we didn't want to make it an accountant's nightmare, but obviously it takes people and there were supplies that were needed and fuel and so on, and whoever was using the Air Force facility ought to pay for that. This kept getting pushed back and forth and back and forth. But anyway, that was another one of the relationships, you might say, with the Department of Defense.\\n\\n Then, of course…when suddenly NASA, instead of using a few facilities at Cape Canaveral, was buying right next door, across the river, I guess it's the Indian River, from Cape Canaveral, Merritt Island, 85,000 acres of land. How are we, NASA, going to tie in with the Department of Defense? Were we both going to have photographic laboratories, for example? That's a simple example. Were we going to operate tracking stations down range that our satellites and launch vehicles are going over separate from the Department of Defense or are we going to do it together?\\n\\n We had a large number of studies that were carried out. I never did get a hold of all the studies that were carried out, but the first one was, where should NASA[’s] launch…[facilities be located for the lunar mission]? Should we stick with that area? This was before we decided to go to Merritt Island. We carried out a joint study with the Department of Defense.\\n\\n By then Lee Davis, who was the guy that I used to fly down to Florida with, was a three-star general in charge of the Atlantic missile range, so we set up a study with the NASA people and with him and his people. We looked at taking over Cumberland Island, Georgia. We looked at operating from Christmas Island in the Pacific. We looked at Hawaii. We looked at seven different places from which we might carry out the lunar landing.\\n\\n The decision was made that there was enough—I don't like the word—infrastructure there at Cape Canaveral, we ought to make use of it and grow it, but we needed more land.\\n\\n Then we got into discussion of something like range safety. Every time you have [a vehicle] that takes off, it can go wild. It can go in the wrong direction. It could come down in Miami, for example. So somebody has to sit there and decide when you blow it up. Was that going to be NASA, NASA flights, and the Department of Defense or Department of Defense? We decided when it came to the safety of the operation from that standpoint, that would be the Defense Department's responsibility. Now, they had to obviously recognize that you don't get arbitrary when you've got men aboard, astronauts aboard.\\n\\n So [we] had all kinds of protocols to work out as to what the safety officer would have—what information he'd have before he pressed the button to blow something up. There were a fair number of times whe[n] this happened, by the way—not with men aboard, I'm glad to say. But that's pretty important. So there were many agreements that were signed, and a very large number of them were signed by John Rubel and myself during this period.\\n\\n By the time I got there, of course, the arrangements had already been worked out with the Department of Defense for recovery of the astronauts. It was decided that the landings would all be in the water. People have always wondered about that, because the Russians landed on land. Well, it was a simple matter. From where the Russians took off, they had to go 5,000 miles before they got to the ocean. If they had to abort a flight, they couldn't wait to go 5,000 miles, so they had to have a capability of coming down on land.\\n\\n On the other hand, when [the U.S. vehicles] took off, we immediately were going to go above water, so we had to have water recovery, at least. In those early days, there was insufficient capability on both sides to have the capability to do both. So we went with water recovery and they went with land recovery.\\n\\n Then [we] got not only into the willingness of the Department of Defense to assign astronauts, but how about the issue of assigning key people to come and help run the program? In other words, to give somebody a tour of duty, who was in the military, to work for NASA, and how would that be done? It was decided that, again, this was in the first administration, that, yes, that would be done. When they came over, they would wear civilian clothes, for example. That's an issue: should they wear civilian clothes or not? They came over, in effect, as civilians, even though they might be—we didn't have any four-star. We had a couple of three-star generals, and admirals, and so on. Colonels and majors and so on.\\n\\n Now, this became more acute when George [E.] Mueller came in. He immediately saw things that were needed. One of them was more competent managers. We had tried to recruit, but it turned out to be very difficult to recruit civilians to come and work on this program at a senior level. So we had to use a number of subterfuges. One was to get AT&T to set up something called Bell Com, non-profit. That's a story in itself.\\n\\n Then George, when he came in, he not only saw the need, but I remember he came to me and he had the names of, I think, as many as possibly twenty-five officers that he wanted to have transferred. These were really top officers, including Sam Phillips, who was a general officer then and became a four-star general.\\n\\n Well, I should also say that was the Department of Defense, it is not a homogeneous entity. Some of the things that would be worked out would be with, say, the Air Force. In the case I just mentioned, fortuitously the vice chief of staff of the Air Force…the guy whose nickname was \"Bozo,\" his [last] name was McKee…he was a good friend of Jim Webb. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't have gotten, I believe, all twenty-five of those officers, but we got them all. [It was] very important to have that number of really competent managers.\\n\\n Let's see, I've already mentioned earlier the whole relationship with the Corps of Engineers, absolutely essential that we had that. More recently, say, in connection with the Space Station, I chaired one committee about eight years ago. I was on the more recent committee on what ought to be done about the Space Station. One of the issues is management. I [knew NASA needed]…individuals from the Corps of Engineers to help. You can't do it now because the law is set up that they cannot…provide people who will be paid by NASA, to work on a NASA project, [and] at the same time…keep the billet open to bring in somebody else, in their organization, to do what these people had been doing. The way the rules have evolved over time, that's not possible. So it means that the Corps of Engineers couldn't, in effect, afford today to do what they did for us back in those days.\\n\\n Then there were joint studies that were carried out. For example, there was what was called a Large Launch Vehicle Study, a big study to make sure that the large vehicles that were developing, the Saturns and so on, would be compatible with what the Department of Defense might want to do in the future, and to…see what might be done to make it compatible, if it wasn't.\\n\\n One of the things that came out of that was the whole Titan Project. The Titan…that we used for Gemini, came out of that study. …When we went ahead with the Gemini Project with Titan, the Titan was still being developed. It was being developed as a launch vehicle, and to make sure that what was being done was compatible with the NASA needs, a special [group] was set up, called the Gemini Launch Vehicle [Committee]. …Brock [Brockway] McMillan, who was the Under Secretary of the Air Force, and I, were co-chairmen of it, and in the course of that development got into some real technical problems that had to be resolved.\\n\\n There were a myriad of other things that were going on—the special studies in aerodynamics and in materials and electronics. What was it called? The AACB, the Aeronautics and Astronautics Coordinating Board, I think it was, there was a board, and then there were a whole bunch of panels in all these technical areas. I ended up as the co-chairman… This [committee reviewed] the myriad of things that were going on.\\n\\n So when you ask about the relationship, maybe I've named 60 or 70 percent of it. But it just had to be just an awful lot of joint activity and support." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think this was intentionally done by President Eisenhower?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it's good once in a while to look at the legislation that was passed by the Senate. You had Lyndon Johnson and you had John McCormick in the House. It's a wonderful piece of legislation, really. It states quite clearly that [there are] going to [be] two programs: you're going to have one for the peaceful uses of space and one for national security. Once you make the decision that you're going to have this civilian open program, then…the two programs have to be very closely coordinated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is that how the lunar landing mission was undertaken as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Every project practically that NASA had, including the lunar landing—maybe that's a little strong. But I was going to say, had to involve, to some extent, an interaction between the two organizations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think that it was widely discussed to join the military and NASA activities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. It was wide[ly discussed], because it had to be. I don't see how it could have been done any other way. It would have been foolhardy to try to have a program that would [have been completely separate]—although some people were bothered by the fact that some of the astronauts were military. Some people felt that they should resign their commissions. Something as stupid as that. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I want to go back a little bit when you were talking about President Kennedy's decision to actually go to the moon and you received part of his speech to Congress. What happened to NASA after that? Was there a buzz within NASA? How did people within the organization feel once they realized, \"Oh, wow, we're going to go to the moon\"? From what I understand, there was a mixed reaction of shock and surprise, but it seemed as if, at least, within NASA headquarters, it was pretty widely known that this was going to happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk a little bit about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I'm just trying to think a little bit. Somewhat strangely, Eisenhower did approve our going ahead with what was called the Saturn 1. So, the Marshall Center, which managed it, went for contracts. It was during the period when we didn't have an administrator that they came in, Marshall came into headquarters to say they wanted to pick the Chrysler Company to go ahead and manage it.\\n\\n I remember the difficulty of trying to work without having an administrator at that point. Jim Webb hadn't arrived. He didn't arrive for about six weeks. They had a hard time finding anybody to take the job, because it was a real question of whether the new administration would want to continue with the Eisenhower legacy or not. I remember discussing this, was it possibly going to absorb NASA in[to] the Department of Defense. Jerry Weisner, who became president later of MIT, but was a prominent person at MIT, was made the President's science advisor. He was put in charge of carrying out a study of how far we were behind in ballistic missiles, for example, which Kennedy had…run on, and how badly [NASA was] managing [the] space program, which Kennedy had…[been told].\\n\\n It was sort of a devastating report and very uncomplimentary to Hugh Dryden, for example, talking about the need to bring new blood in and kind of get on with these older people running things the way they have in the past. So that was [an] upsetting…time.\\n\\n Then we had trouble getting—see, we didn't really have to get the White House approval, but we certainly did have to let them know about it. I remember going over there on a snowy day and trying to get in to see somebody to explain what was going on.\\n\\n So where were we? We were talking about the transition, and Kennedy really getting involved.\\n\\n I think the truth of the matter is that except for the report and everything that Jerry Weisner put together, on the part of Kennedy himself and Dave Bell and McBundy, I think they always wished that some of this would go away. They had a lot on their plate right at the start, Bay of Pigs being one of them… They didn't want to be bothered by it all. Then all of a sudden, world events sweep them up in it and they were forced to make some decisions.\\n\\n The decisions came a lot easier from a political standpoint when they saw how immensely—we had some new heroes. We had John [H.] Glenn [Jr.], we had Shepard. I would hate to say that politicians would use people, but it didn't hurt having a photograph taken of yourself and John Glenn. All the congressmen were trying to find ways to get astronauts to go to watermelon festivals in South Carolina, for example. Jim Webb had to fight this. I mean, you couldn't have our astronauts going all over the landscape. Their jobs were not just sitting in the cockpit and flying once. They had to help prepare [the] cockpit ahead of time. They had major assignments. They set up something called \"A week in a barrel,\" or maybe it was a couple of weeks, whe[n] an astronaut would come to Washington and be available for whatever the Congress wanted to do. They hated it. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you think of any particularly funny stories?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There must be an awful lot of them. They loved to be seen with their arm around John Glenn, a picture they'd send to their constituents. Everybody was excited about it.\\n\\n Things changed in the White House. People like Jerry Weisner and McBundy weren't terribly enthusiastic about it. They were…non-political. Jerry Weisner kept saying there's a tendency for the politicians to confuse, first of all, engineering and science. I always got introduced as a scientist from NASA, and for a while I'd try to disabuse people, \"I'm not a scientist, I'm an engineer.\" But it was a waste of time to try to worry about it. The political forces would tend to say, \"Well, we're going to go to the moon for scientific purposes.\" Jerry would just go bananas at that. He said, \"If we want to do science, we could get a lot more out of our science if we spent the money here on Earth,\" on, I don't know, you name it, but for scientific purposes, bigger accelerators and things like that. So he [made] Kennedy realize that the decisions were really…geopolitical in nature… But as it turned out there was a lot of science, too, good science, that came out of going to the moon. Have you seen the series—what's the name of the guy that was in \"Apollo 13\"?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tom Hanks' \"From [the Earth] to the Moon.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Tom Hanks. It's a great series. I never heard of [Andrew] Chaikin before. He lives in Cambridge. So I looked him up and I've had a good time being with him. I think he wrote a great book. But it really is telling about the space program, really from what the astronauts did. It doesn't get into what we're discussing here.\\n\\n I didn't answer your question. So I guess the atmosphere somewhat mirrored what I've described. I mean, I think some of the people, NACA types, they were very concerned that what was going on would overwhelm the work that we were doing over in aero[nautics] that everybody would be so focused on going to the moon, that everything else would suffer. Jim Webb himself was concerned about this. He said, \"This has got to fit in with everything we're doing. I don't want people to go around NASA who have [‘Apollo’] written on their foreheads... We're all involved, but it's going to be done in such a way that everything else is attended to as well.\"\\n\\n There was a famous meeting we had with the President whe[n] [D.] Brainerd Holmes had said that if he could get 400 million more in a supplemental, that we could go to the moon in '66 rather than '67. When he brought this to me, I said, \"That's absurd. I mean, our budget's already gone from…Eisenhower[’s one billion]…up to 3.7 and it's going to go up to five-something next year. …We can't use [another 400 million] properly.\"\\n\\n But it got out in\\n\\n Time\\n\\n magazine that Brainerd Holmes was being held back in the space program. So the White House called a meeting where this was discussed. The first part of [the meeting established] that it was politically unwise to…try to get a supplemental. Well, Kennedy said, \"Okay, if that's the case, you've got other monies, Jim. Why don't you transfer 400 million from your other programs?\"\\n\\n Jim said, \"Well, if you do that, you're going to hurt this and…this and…this.\"\\n\\n Kennedy said, \"Well, why are we going into space anyway, Jim? I'm not sure I see eye to eye with you on this.\"\\n\\n Jim said—what are the exact words he used? He said, \"We're looking for preeminence in space across the board. We're not just going to the moon.\"\\n\\n Kennedy said, \"Well, Jim, I'm just not sure I understand what you're saying. I want a letter tomorrow morning that gives me your views on this.\"\\n\\n So that's the kind of thing that people were so afraid of at NASA. But not everybody. I mean, the Von Braun types, Werner would say, \"This is what I've been talking about all along, all my articles in\\n\\n Popular Science\\n\\n and\\n\\n Collier's Magazine\\n\\n . This a wedding with a future. We're going to go for it now. This is wonderful.\"\\n\\n The Bob Gilruths and so on said, \"My God, here we are, we haven't even gone in orbit yet. We've got our hands so full now, how can we possibly do anything as stupid as this?\" Not as stupid. \"How can we take on this tremendous job when we're so overloaded today?\" That was another reaction to that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you personally feel about it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I thought it was great. [Laughter] I guess I thought it was great, in part because I felt we'd been struggling ever since I…got to NASA, about what our goals really were. We certainly weren't really in tune with Eisenhower's views, and all of a sudden it was clear and simple. There couldn't be a simpler objective to subscribe than going and landing on the moon. I certainly understood the other issues, but I felt this was going to be exciting. I was delighted to be part of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely. Well, why don't we maybe wrap up here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert C. Seamans", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All right." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00031", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2017-017.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Baker, Anne (1984-1986): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2017-017", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2017-017", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Anne Baker served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji from 1984 to 1986. She then worked as a Peace Corps trainer from 1986 to 1987, and later joined the staff of the National Peace Corps Association. In Fiji, she was a math and science teacher at a secondary school in Lomaivuna. The main lesson Baker learned from this experience is that instruction needs to be made relevant to the students' lives. This insight inspired her lifelong career in global education. Interviewed and recorded by Evelyn Ganzglass, December 20, 2016. 2 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).", + "dates_of_materials": "20 December 2016", + "extent": "2 digital files (audio; stereo; 69 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "032. Fiji.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Fiji. Baker, Anne (1984-1986): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Fiji", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2017-017", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2017-017-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/u7bortb7362p2867v6x2sju22couh11k.pdf?odc=20231115174311-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/dcc35c6f-57df-4e36-92b1-9303668ca6c2/849a13bd-1aac-4af8-b836-d06206c04ce0/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzJhMzZfZDNiZTFmMjJhMWFmZGQ1YzYwODVhNTk1MTYwYmRiYmM0Y2Q0NTFjNDkwMzAwM2Q4ZDkzYWNiMzRkYmM1ZDRlYl8vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS9kY2MzNWM2Zi01N2RmLTRlMzYtOTJiMS05MzAzNjY4Y2E2YzIvODQ5YTEzYmQtMWFhYy00YWY4LWI4MzYtZDA2MjA2YzA0Y2UwL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Washington, D.C.", + "length": "37 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed March 8, 2017, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Anne Baker Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Evelyn Ganzglass" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Anne Baker" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:01", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is Evelyn Ganzglass. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Somalia from 1966 to 1968. And I'm interviewing Anne Baker, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Fiji from 1985 to 1986, actually end of '84 to '86, I guess. And then a trainer also in Fiji from 1986 to 1987. Anne, why did you join the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:36", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I get asked that a lot. Every time I answer it, I think it's roughly the same answer, but sometimes it varies. Yeah, when I grew up, my grandparents actually were world travelers, and after they retired, they started traveling the world. And every year they would come back with these amazing stories and photos. And, you know, it just really got my curiosity going at this. They had incredible trips and they made incredible relationships with people. They would stay in touch years later. They would be, of course, not emailing. There wasn't email in those days, but you know, it was calling and writing letters with people they'd met all over the world. So that kind of got me thinking from, you know, that I would like at some point to do more travel and all that. And then there was a, um, I guess, actually one of our our trips as a family. We were in Central America and we were in El Salvador and we stayed at this hotel school and there was a Peace Corps volunteer there. And that didn't, really didn't, I think that just put a little seed in my brain.\n\nAnd then in college, a recruiter came by one time and I went to an event. So just little events here and there have made me think about Peace Corps. And after college, I was a physics major in college and I started working in industry, which is what you do when you're a physics major and went on and started taking some courses for master's degree and all that. And it just, sitting in a lab all day and industry. And I said, there's got to be something better, than better than this. You know, I like being around people and not just sitting in a lab and also just. I was working at General Electric at the time in the lighting business group. I said there's got to be something better than perfecting the light bulb, you know. And I was talking with some friends and a friend of mine said, well, I. You know, I mentioned Peace Corps, and he actually had an application and he'd been holding on to it for a while and had hadn't filled it out. He said, eh, it's just not the right time. He said, here, you want this? And I said, sure. So I took it, I filled it out cold, never talked to a recruiter, never, nothing, just sent it in.\n\nAnd of course, Peace Corps looked at it and said, physics! They had requests for physics teachers, and they just didn't have people with the skills of physics. So as soon as they saw physics, I think they just, I literally was on the plane within three months, which is a really quick turnaround. They'd never heard of me before until I filled this out and sent it in. And they did the interview over the phone and checked all my references and did all that stuff that, you know, and three months is probably about the fastest they could turn it around. But that was also the timing. They said it would either be in Africa or the South Pacific, which is where their requests were for physics teachers. And timing wise of when I sent it in, they had a program leaving that fall for Fiji.\n\nI talked with a college friend of mine. Her boyfriend had served in Tonga. And I had talked to him and he said, you know, he loved the Pacific. Peace Corps said, which would you prefer, Asia, I mean, Pacific or Africa? I said, it doesn't matter to me, but I have a friend who served in the Pacific. They loved it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:03:47", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So why not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:03:48", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then got the thing in the mail, it said Fiji. And I said, great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:03:53", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you quit your job and hopped on a plane?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:03:56", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Quit my job. I hopped on a plane and off to Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:03:59", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And by this time, all the training was overseas, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:04:03", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was in country, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:04:04", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So talk a little bit about the training. How did you meet the people here or are you virtually flew by yourself or did the whole group fly together?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:04:12", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had our staging at that time was five days in San Francisco, so started meeting people at the airport. Because when you look at the baggage claim and you see people with these big duffel bags and things. Like, OK, I think I know where you're headed. So it didn't take long for us to find all each other. And of course, we were all together for five days in San Francisco, and then we flew all together to Fiji. And so the training was all in country. Fiji has two main cultures, the Fijian culture and the Indian culture. There were a lot of Indians in Fiji because they originally came as indentured laborers in the sugarcane plantations, and then they stayed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:04:59", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And when was that, when did they come?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:05:01", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, they came in the 1850s, 1860s. So they'd been there for generations, most of them. And so we had part of our training was in, the cultural language training was in a Fijian village and then part of it was in an Indian settlement. So we had about two weeks in each of those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:05:24", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Indian settlement. You used settlement and village. What's the difference?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:05:28", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Now those were the terms that that Peace Corps was using and that generally in use in Fiji at the time. A village, a true village in the Fijian sense will have a certain structure to it. Will have a community center, will have a church. It will have, you know, just even the layout of the village. It's all kind of contained in one community. Whereas a settlement doesn't necessarily have, you know, it may not have a church, it may not have a community center. It's more, I think it also reflected the feeling at the time that, you know, Indians were there to settle. I mean, they were settled in their." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:06:17", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Temporary?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:06:17", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Temporary. It kind of. Right after I left Fiji was the first coup and the coup was because of the Indian-Fijian tension actually. Mostly, well, mostly the military felt that the Indians were taking over Fiji and they just had elections and the Fijian was prime minister. But he pointed an Indian deputy, half the government was Indian, which reflected the population, but that made the military a little nervous. And so they staged a coup and overthrew the government. And so this was all right after I left. But you could sense some of the tension. You know, the Indians were, I'm vastly stereotyping here, but you know, a lot of them did run the businesses.\n\nI mean, even in my community, which was actually it was a farming community of about two hundred farms about an hour and a half or two hours by bus from the capital. And it had been established since the 1960s. And about, I'd say, about 85 percent of the population was Fijian, about 10 percent was Indian, and about five percent was Rotuman, which is, Rotuma is another Polynesian culture. I think it's Polynesian. Yeah. Fijians. Fiji is Melanesian, but Rotundo is more of Polynesian culture, and the island is way north of Fiji, but geographically it's way far away. Politically, it somehow got lumped into Fiji. So but in our community, as I mentioned, you know, 85, about 85 percent Fijian. The shop was run by the Indian family, and so and that was in a lot of places. The economy was run probably more by Indians than the Fijians." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:08:25", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very much the case in Uganda." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:08:26", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:08:27", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very similar to a lot of other places." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:08:30", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yep, yep. Yep." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:08:33", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So I diverted you. So you were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:08:37", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So training, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:08:38", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were in training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:08:39", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I was in training. So two weeks in a Fijian, living with a Fijian family in the village, learning the culture and a little bit of the language. And then shifting gears and doing two weeks with an Indian family, again learning the culture and the language, which is kind of a Fiji version of Hindi. And then off to summer school. We essentially taught summer school for six weeks. So and that was our technical training. And for a lot of us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:09:18", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And that was in the capital?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:09:20", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was just outside the capital." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:09:22", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what is the capital?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:09:23", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Capital is Suva." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:09:25", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Suva." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:09:26", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the town next to Suva is Nausori and there's a teachers college there, and there's also high school there. So we were at Nausori Teachers College for about six weeks where we did our technical training. And since a lot of us had never taught before, they taught us to teach and they taught us how to teach in Fiji. So, you know, learning about the education system and how to teach in Fiji, and then put it to use in our crash course in teaching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:09:56", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you teach in high school or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:09:58", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "High school. Yep." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:10:00", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you had your training and then where were you stationed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:10:08", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I was stationed in a place called Lomaivuna. That's L-O- M-A-I-V-U-N-A." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:10:16", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:10:18", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As I see you're writing it down there. As I mentioned, it's about an hour and a half, two hour bus ride out of the capital on a good day. And the school had just gone from being a junior secondary school to a full secondary school, so had just added form six, which is the equivalent of the 12th grade. And so I was brought out there to teach physics and mathematics in form six and physical science in form five. So, the high school level.\n\nJust before we finished our training, one of the worst cyclones to hit Fiji in years hit and we were in a direct hit and that was the night before our swearing in. And so they actually canceled our swearing in party and just came to us at the staging site, our training site, and swore us in there, and then Peace Corps staff all left. And most of us had to continue staying there because there was another cyclone coming the next day. And another one coming two days after that. The third one actually changed course and didn't hit Fiji, but the two were back to back and the worst ones they'd seen in a long time. So we were stuck at the training site on our own for a few days before we could get to our site." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:11:46", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But not extensive damage?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:11:48", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, there was a lot of damage. Yeah, yeah. Part of the reason I couldn't get to my site. I actually literally couldn't get to my site because there were two bridges that the bus had to go over to get to my site. And any rain basically, the bridges were flooded and you couldn't get past. So it took, it was about five days I think before we could get." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:12:09", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So a cyclone is basically a hurricane." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:12:11", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's a hurricane. Yeah, they call it a tropical. Yeah, it's called a tropical cyclone there, but it's a hurricane." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:12:16", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Same. Same wind, same water?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:12:18", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Same wind, same rain, same damage. Same. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:12:21", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:12:22", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it goes the opposite direction, though, because it's a southern hemisphere, so it spins the opposite direction." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:12:27", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But when you're in the middle of it, it probably doesn't matter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:12:30", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. No. And we actually literally did. The eye came right overhead." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:12:33", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:12:34", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. So that was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:12:36", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So eventually you got." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:12:37", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Eventually got out there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:12:38", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. And then talk a little bit about the town you were in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:12:42", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It wasn't a town, so this was unusual." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:12:46", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, you were in a village?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:12:47", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it wasn't a village either." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:12:48", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:12:48", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This is what was so unusual about it, because it wasn't that set community that you have in a village or in a settlement. It was a farming community with two hundred farms divided into nine sectors and in the middle of it there was an agricultural station. And then about a kilometer away was the school. And there were actually a couple of Peace Corps volunteers right by the agricultural station. They were working in fisheries, and I knew them, certainly knew them well, and we visited every once in a while. But we didn't cross paths otherwise while we were working, because they were off in different villages around the area and I was basically at the school. So the school had, uh, there was a primary school and then there was a secondary school right next to it. And then the housing, most of the teachers lived right at the school. So I had a house right in the school compound.\n\nAnd probably about, I don't know, maybe 300 students, 200 to 300 students, 250, 300 students, something like that, in the high school. I had two streams, as they called it, of physical science in form five, so 11th grade, and each one had about 30, 35 students. And then, in the sixth form, 12th grade, I did, I taught both their physics and math and there was just one class and it was 24 students in that class. I'm trying to remember if it was different. Now I'm trying to remember if it was different first year and second year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:14:20", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That doesn't seem so large." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:14:20", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It isn't, no. Because the school had just added that form six. And the way Fiji, the education system worked in Fiji at the time is a lot of it was actually based on the New Zealand system. So they had exams they took at the end of form four, form five, and form six, and you have to pass those exams in order to get on to the next level. So overall in Fiji, the form five pass rate at the time was about 50 percent. And the form six pass rate, which they called a university entrance exam, which is interesting, because there's only one really one university in Fiji, but the university entrance exam form six, the pass rate nationally was something like 25, 30 percent. And so students would sometimes just repeat the year if they didn't, if they didn't pass, or otherwise they would just go back to the farm or whatever." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:15:26", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was their knowledge compared to American students at that level? Was it a good school system do you think?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:15:35", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a pretty good school system, but it was a New Zealand school system, so that was one of the things that I think I struggled with. First of all, well, I struggled the first year just because I was a new teacher. I think anywhere, whether it's here in the U.S. or in another country, the first year of teaching is just really hard. So but I learned a lot that first year too, you know. I thought, oh, my students are really getting this, and then their, you know, would get their exam results and they were, you know, not as good as I'd wanted them to be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:16:04", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you were teaching in Fiji?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:16:07", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Teaching in Fiji, but in English.\n\nOh, you were teaching in English?\n\nYeah. It's a former British colony. In fact, the students were punished if they were not speaking in English in school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:16:17", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh. I thought you were teaching physics in Fijian." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:16:20", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh gosh, no, that would be weird. I'm not sure that they even have the vocabulary for all that. There's no need for the some of the physics terms in Fijian, there's no need for it. So. But that was one of my challenges. And that's actually why the second year I really found it really interesting and the students did a lot better too. And I did a lot better because I learned to figure out, OK, what's applicable to them? How do I make this? Because what do they need this physics for? They didn't really. A lot of it. Some of it, yes, they need. Some of it on a day-to-day basis they don't need. And again, this was based on a New Zealand system. So the New Zealand physics curriculum, there are certain things that were on there. I said they really don't need it. Why do they need to know this nuclear physics? I mean, come on. So I." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:17:10", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Other than passing the exam?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:17:11", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Other than passing the exams. So but then my decision was, well, OK, I'm going to take that out. But now they're not starting at 100, they're starting at 95. You know, a pass was a 50. So they're, you know, they literally just had to get the majority of the exams. So they had to get a 50 to pass. But so I was making a conscious decision to say I'm going to lower that upper limit, because they don't need that, but then they'll have a better understanding of what the other parts that they can apply and they can use in their daily life. But that was the challenge is, how do I make this applicable to them in their daily life? And the school built a new science lab while I was there, so it was beautiful new building. No equipment, no supplies really. You had a very limited budget, which they asked me to figure out what to get. So we did get some supplies for other things.\n\nFor most of it, I just had to figure out, well, what's, how can I demonstrate this? So you're looking at wave motion, for example, and I went, OK. There's a little pond out here and there's a little pool of water. All right. Let's look at, you know, dropping things in the water, the wave patterns, and let's put something in there and see it refract around that barrier and things like that. So just trying to get them to use what's already there. Or looking at, you know, how motors and generators work. Luckily, the school had one. It didn't always work, or they didn't always have the fuel for it. But they had a generator. So to be able to then take them, you know, crowd the whole bunch of students around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:18:48", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you figured all of that out. Did you have training or was there a teacher who came out, a supervisor who came out and helped you with your teaching?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:18:59", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really. That's what training was all about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:19:01", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But just the initial training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:19:03", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Initial training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:19:03", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You didn't have anybody come out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:19:04", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:19:06", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "See, we had somebody who came and visited us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:19:09", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no, we didn't have anybody coming out. And they also didn't really have textbooks. All they had, well, in the form six in particular, form five, they did have some, but in form six, the textbook quote unquote was literally a book called Notes and Examples. And that's all it was, was notes and examples. OK, here's the topic, and here's a couple of notes and a couple of examples and then some exercises to do. And that was it. So no written text, no explanation. And the students were pretty much, I mean, they were rote learners. You know, they would write down word for word everything you wrote on the board. But if you said something, they won't just take notes and write it, they'll only copy what you write on the board.\n\nSo all of my, when I was teaching all of this, I had to literally write things in full sentences on the blackboard and they would copy it down. And I still kick myself. What I should have done at the end of that is I should have, you know, gotten one of my students’ notebooks, because I could have published a textbook. I wrote a textbook, essentially, because they would just copy literally everything that I wrote down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:20:30", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So is that the New Zealand school system, is that Fiji, or what is that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:20:34", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's more Fiji, that they just copy. They didn't, I don't think they were trained in how do you take notes. That's just the way they." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:20:42", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Maybe that's how the Fijian teachers learned and just transmitted that way of learning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:20:49", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they also, their expectation was that students would bring their notebooks to the teachers and have them check it and sign it, saying that they checked it and they have all the notes and everything they were supposed to have. So that kind of reinforces that idea of, OK, you've got to write down everything the teacher writes down and make sure you get that down. But I don't. They never really. Yeah, it wasn't expected for them to listen and take notes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:21:12", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And were the exams just regurgitation of all of that? Or did they have to do some more creative things?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:21:23", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, probably most of it was more a regurgitation of a lot of that. And the, well, for form five and form six, the only thing that mattered was how they did in the exam at the end of the year. So I could give them quizzes and tests and things during the year. It didn't mean anything to them, other than it's practice for the end of the year. So one of the things that that I did, and I really have mixed feelings about all this, you know, because they needed to pass the exam. So a lot you're just teaching to the test. But me personally, I want them to understand how they can actually use this. So for example, we do a lab and we have to, whether it's, you know, whatever it's on, whether it's on, you know, mechanics or electricity or whatever. And we set it up as a lab and they work on it and then they have to write it up.\n\nWell, they're not going to write a lab report for the exam, but I would have them write a lab report. And again, this is not things on the exam, but you know, have them thinking about what are the things that are that are sources of potential error. So you look at, OK, we have, we're looking at the motion of something on a track or whatever. Well, we don't have a nice frictionless track, so there's got to be some friction in there. Or maybe we didn't set it up straight, you know? So thinking about what are the things that could influence why this may or may not come out perfectly the way you want it to. They're not going to put that in the exam, but I want them to know that and think about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:23:08", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:23:08", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For life, right. So that they understand, here are some of the other things that are influencing this, whether it's in physics or whether it's in something else, just being able to think outside the box a little bit. So there were things like that that I did because I felt it was just really important that they know how to do things like that. And then at the same time, teaching to the test. Each one of the exams in physics, they had a, they were given one sheet of standard equations, so they had to memorize and that they just had these standard equations that came as part of the exam. And we had covered them all over the course of the year, and I assumed that they remembered what they all were. And then I realized that they didn't necessarily remember. So my second year, that's another thing we did is constantly go back and just remind them, OK, what is this equation? What is it stand for or how do you use it? You know, what are the letters in that equation stand for, you know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:24:09", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you learned a lot about teaching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:24:11", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I learned a lot about teaching and I learned a lot about physics." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:24:16", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:24:17", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because as an undergrad and majoring in physics, sure, I could solve the equations and, you know, write down these numbers. What do they mean? And so coming back and having that experience in Fiji really helped me better understand how the physics worked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:24:37", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's why they have kids, in a lot of schools the older kids teach the younger kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:24:44", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:24:44", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it's exactly for that reason." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:24:47", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The best way to learn something is to teach it. Right. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:24:51", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mean, even having to explain it in a simple way is really hard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:24:55", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And even just the simple example of how a generator works. Sure, I could explain it and I read it in the book and I understand, but then I'd actually never gone and physically started a generator. And so I did. And that's what they relied on in the community. That's the only way they had electricity was to have the generator. And so I was like, oh, OK. They talked about it. I've never actually done it myself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:25:19", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And now you know how to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:25:20", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Now I know it. It was like, wow. So I learned a lot about the physics, just having to teach it to the students." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:25:26", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So talk a little bit about the farming community, trying to use the right word, that you lived in. What kind of a house did you live in? Who were your neighbors?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:25:42", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, first, the farming community, because the school compound was a part of that, was in one of the sectors of this. Again, it was about 200 farms and nine sectors. And each sector had, actually each sector did have a church. So in that sense, it was kind of like a village, but not really. And the sectors would kind of do things on their own. And then once a month, they would all come together, generally around church. The Fijians are a very Christian community so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:26:16", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Missionaries got there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:26:16", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yeah, missionaries got there. So the farming was started actually in this community was started in the '60s as a banana plantation. Or maybe it was even started earlier than that. But in the sixties at some point, something came through, some, whether it was a pest or a disease or something came through and essentially wiped out the banana trees. So they shifted to one of the, well, they did a lot of the basic crops for that. They would then take to the market in the capital on the weekends. So basic, you know, eggplant, and the taro root is a staple in the Fijian diet, and the cassava root, beans. I mean, any sort of vegetable type things that they would grow there. But then the other crop that they actually grew for export was ginger." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:27:16", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:27:17", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, and I think of that every time I go to the store and I buy ginger. Like, that could be coming from Lomaivuna. So they're basically, they're a little above subsistence farmers, I mean, because they would take their crop into the market in the weekend and sell a lot in the capital. But then when you have a cyclone come through and it throws everything into a tizzy. And in my second year there, there was actually really heavy rains. One day I was in my classroom and they came around that, they didn't have, you know, a PA system, the way they came around and make announcements is somebody would write in the notebook, here's the announcement and they'd put all the teachers' names and they'd pick a student to walk around and the teacher would have to read it and then initially that they read it, you know, and that's how they got messages around to all the classrooms.\n\nSo one day one of these comes around, they said, school's closing at noon because of the weather. It came out over the radio. And I'm like, it's this bright, sunny day like today. So obviously there was a big something coming. So we closed the school at noon. The students all went home. I stayed to catch up on some things at the school. I mean, the school is only a three minute walk from my house. You could see my house from the school. And mid-afternoon it started to rain and then it got heavier and heavier. And by the time I wanted to go home at like four or five o'clock, the little footpath with the little plank over a tiny little stream was completely submerged and I couldn't get to my house. So I had to go all the way around another way to get to my house. By the middle of the night, it was like up under the floorboard of the house next to me. And so basically just horrendous flooding, which closed all the roads for a month." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:29:14", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:29:14", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And submerged a lot of the crops and everything, submerged the generator, of course. Because the generator was in, for some reason, the lowest part of the community, that never flooded except in something like this. So we had no generator for probably three or four months. But it flooded the crops. And so, you know, there was, it created real hardship, because first of all, they couldn't sell the crops and they also couldn't eat, because they were eating their, people had to rely on their own crops to eat as well. And since the roads were closed, the shop, you know, slowly all the staples were sold. You know, no sugar, flour." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:29:53", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what happened?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:29:54", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, uh, I mean, somehow people made it through. At one point." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:30:00", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you have food?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:30:04", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I had some, I had a couple of things in cans basically, but there was no refrigeration. So I mean, I had some things or like, you know, pasta or something that none of them ate pasta, but I would sometimes go to the capital and get something like that where I could boil it if I had to. Of course, then they ran out of kerosene after a while too. My neighbors were really good too. They would often just share some of what they had with me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:30:33", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So it was really very tight for everybody." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:30:36", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was very tight for everybody. At one point, they did come and bring some supplies by helicopter. The entire country had one helicopter. And this is a country with somewhere between three and six hundred islands, depending upon what you define as an island and the tide at the time. About a hundred of those islands are inhabited. But they had one helicopter, so they came up at one point and brought some supplies by helicopter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:31:09", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And was school open?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:31:11", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "School closed for one day and then it was a weekend, and then it opened the next Monday. A lot of the students were absent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:31:20", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because they couldn't get there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:31:21", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They couldn't get there. There were some students that came by bus and the busses weren't running for a month. The roads were literally washed away or the bridges were underwater and all that so. And some students came. One of the more amazing stories was actually that, I think it was that first Monday, was teaching in the first period class and partway into the class a student came to the door. He was late, late for school, and he had to stop. And they were very, very polite, very formal. You know, he had to ask permission to come into the class and all this, you know, so, you know, madam, can I come in? And so I started to think about it and I said, wait a minute. How did you get to school? Because he was one who took the bus every day. And I said, how'd you get to school? And he said, I walked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:32:10", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:32:11", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I said, How long did it take you? He said about three hours." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:32:17", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And three hours to go home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:32:18", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But no, he stayed. He stayed with somebody until Friday, and then he walked home for the weekend, essentially. The amazing thing about this kid, he and his sister were actually both supported at the school by Save the Children." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:32:35", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:32:35", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, his father was sickly, couldn't really work on the farm. They couldn't afford the school fees. School fees were not a lot, but they couldn't afford any of that, and Save the Children actually was great. They would come out a couple of times a year, just check attendance records, making sure they were actually in school and all that. But he was an incredibly hard worker. I mean, that just highlighted to me that he was walking that far to come to school. School was so important to him. And it was that, that's right. The previous week was actually, it was Peace Corps' 25th anniversary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:33:14", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:33:15", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So in Fiji, we had a poster contest for our students. Um, happiness is a world at peace, I think was the theme. So invited students from all over the country to make their poster that reflected that theme. So he worked really hard on his and made this beautiful poster. I think somebody lent him the money, whatever, to take the bus into the capital and turn in his poster. And he turned in his poster and then the rains hit. And so he actually was stuck in the capital for, well, you know, to get home from there and then to come in. Long story short, he won the contest, and the grand prize was a trip to Australia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:34:02", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:34:02", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And here's a kid who had just barely even been out of the, off the farm, won a trip to Australia. It was a trip for two, so he had to have somebody with them, and he invited one of the teachers who had a brother living in Australia. So they had a place to stay, and all the teachers and students contributed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:34:22", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How exciting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:34:22", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Contributed some money so he could go. And then so he, and he went on that year, he passed his exams. I think his dream was to be an architect or something, and I always wondered what happened to that kid." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:34:33", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to ask whether you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:34:34", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know. I don't know. I have to go back. But I mean, that's the amazing thing is, there are a lot of those kids have a story like that. That one just kind of stands out, I think, because of when he walked into school after the big storm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:34:51", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you, have you stayed in touch with any of the students or teachers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:34:57", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I try. Not very. I haven't been very good at it. Well, they never were a letter writing culture or they didn't really have telephones even. The closest telephone when I was there was just down the road at the AG station and then the second year they did get a telephone at the school, but there was nobody to call. Nobody had phones, really, and they would, you know, occasionally write letters. But when I left, I wrote lots of letters and I got some back, but not really very many. Of course, this is the days before email." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:35:32", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:35:35", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Occasionally I'll get an email. I was in touch for a while with one of the teachers who emigrated to New Zealand later. So I got some emails, but kind of lost touch with that. And every once in a while, I'll, you know, somebody will find me on Facebook or somewhere and I'll get an email out of the blue." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:35:53", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How would you characterize the Fiji culture?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:36:00", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, characterize the Fiji culture. It's, um, it is very community oriented, I mean, I guess if you have that, you hear that phrase, it takes a village. I mean, that is very, that is very much the Fijian culture. What's yours is mine. You know, a lot of it's communal. Occasionally I would ask students to come help me and, you know, with my garden, which I try, I'm a terrible gardener, but I try. You know, I'm in a farming community. I've got to try growing some food. You know, I tried it, and it was, I think my eggplant produced one eggplant. You know, it was about the size of a quarter and it was tiny. But you know, I'd occasionally hire students to help me with that or something. And then. And they didn't really want to be paid, but I'd give them a T- shirt or something. Well, then I would see that T-shirt on about six different kids over the next few weeks. They just, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:36:57", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Shared." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:36:58", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Everything just gets shared. And it's actually, there's a term for it. Fijians call it kerekere. And so, you know, if you see something and you want it, just say, oh, kerekere, can I borrow something or other? Or I would never say to somebody, oh, you know, I really like that necklace. It's really pretty. You know, because they would be expected to take it off and give it to you, which made it. This is one reason why a lot of the shops were actually run by the Indians because they, you know, they expected to be paid. You could put things on credit and then, you know, pay it at the end of a month or something. But some of the Fijians would try to have a shop and people would say, well, kerekere, I just need a little bit of sugar, you know. And then they would just give, end up giving out a lot of the things without getting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:37:43", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Getting paid." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:37:43", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Getting paid for it. So it just wasn't, it wasn't their culture. You know, if somebody needs something. Somebody needs something. They will give it to them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:37:52", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's really nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:37:54", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it's wonderful, you know, so if, you know, occasionally I would get sick or I'd get, you know, maybe get a sore throat or a cold or something, you know? And the neighbors would all bring me food and all take care of me. And actually, I never really had to worry about lunch at school. You know, I'd lived at the school compound, but it would take me, you know, two or three minutes to walk home. But if I only had a half an hour for lunch, how could I go home and cook something up fresh? Because, you know, you don't just keep a loaf of bread on hand. If you don't eat it in the first day, it molds. And you can't just cook up something and then eat it for one, especially just one person. But others of the teachers would cook up, you know, of course, for a whole family or whatever. So people always, the first year, one of the other teachers, just the first day she just gave me what they call a roti parcel. The roti is the bread that the, the flatbread that the Indians use as a staple of their meals. And they would take the curry and just roll it up in the roti. And they called it a roti parcel. So one year, the first year, the chemistry teacher, who was an Indian woman, she just said, I'm just going to bring you your lunch every day. And she just every day gave me a roti parcel, you know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:39:10", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:39:10", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then the second year, one of the other teachers at the school, she also had her brother and sister and they had a whole family, so she would cook for them anyway. And she said, you're just coming for lunch every day. And they also had some of the Fijian women in the community would come in and cook lunch for whatever students could pay for it. And it was only, you know, maybe 10, 20 cents. So there was always something there, but just incredibly generous. It's kind of interesting because it's, on the one hand, is generous. On the other hand, it's like, well, you have something and I'm just going to use it, you know. So it's kind of an interesting dichotomy there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:39:51", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which is hard for an American, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:39:52", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's hard for an American, right. Because it's." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:39:55", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's mine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:39:55", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's mine. That's right. I worked hard for that. That's mine. I like that, and you can't just have it. So getting used to that idea is interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "00:40:04", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you talked about that communal attitude, did that extend to Indians among the Fijians and Indians as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "00:40:14", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, not so much. Not as much. To some extent, but not as much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "00:40:22", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So that's among the Fijians. And then the Indians had their own community." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "00:40:26", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, right. And out where I was because it was primarily a Fijian community, the Indian families, most of them spoke Fijian. But the Fijian families usually didn't speak Hindi. And some of the, some of them would speak English, not the older generation, but the younger generation, because they had to speak it in school. So it was interesting. I'd go to the shop and my Hindi wasn't that great. My Fijian was better than my Hindi. The shopkeeper was Indian, but the two of us would communicate in Fijian." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "00:41:07", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You need some language, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "00:41:09", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You need something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "00:41:10", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, right. And he didn't speak English?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "00:41:12", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, he did not speak English. No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "00:41:15", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So did you get to travel around the country?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "00:41:18", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. I used my vacation time to travel within the country. Some people, some of the Peace Corps volunteers, would go to Australia and New Zealand because it's so close, over their school holidays or whatever. I waited until after I finished to do that. And I used the time to travel around. I mean, there are a hundred islands that are inhabited. And so there's, it's quite a spread." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "00:41:44", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How far apart are those islands?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "00:41:47", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some are right next to each other and, you know, within sight and a short boat ride away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "00:41:53", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And people go back and forth all the time? Or did they really stick to their island?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "00:41:57", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Pretty much stuck to their island. But it's spread out over a pretty large area. I was on the main island and the main island is about the size of the Big Island of Hawaii." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "00:42:10", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So pretty good size." + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "00:42:12", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Pretty good size. And the that was the largest island, that and the second largest island. And then you go down to the third one, there's a huge gap then. I mean, so the two big islands, a handful of smaller fairly substantial islands, and then a lot of tiny, tiny islands." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "00:42:31", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So people are pretty isolated on those islands I guess?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "00:42:35", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "People on those islands are pretty isolated. Yeah. I could go into the capital by bus and, you know, on a Saturday morning, I could go in and do my shopping and come home that day. Quite often I would go in and I would do my shopping and then I'd stay with a friend and, you know, go to a movie and get some food, you know, get some protein because I was eating mostly vegetarian at my site, mostly because it was just more practical. And also without refrigeration, you know, how do you get a tiny piece of meat and cook it up just for one? And the meat, meat and fish and all that. You'd think there'd be a lot of really good fish in Fiji, but there was no real fish market at the time with, you know, ice and all that to keep them fresh. So I'd see the boats coming in with fish, but they were sitting out in the hot sun and, you know, I didn't really trust it. And again, how do I get a fish just for one?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "00:43:31", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How big was the capital, or is the capital?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "00:43:37", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The capital at the time was, I think, what was the population, like 30,000 or something?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "00:43:42", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, little." + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "00:43:43", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's little. I mean, the whole country had 750,000, if that's it. So actually maybe it was more than that in the capital. I'm terrible with numbers like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "00:43:52", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But not a big place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "00:43:53", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not a big place, no. I mean, there was a university there and there was, you know, there was some embassies and all that. So it was, I mean, it's fairly good size. So it's got to be bigger than that then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "00:44:07", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "00:44:07", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Whatever." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "00:44:08", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Whatever." + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "00:44:09", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But pretty much, you know, whatever I needed, I had to go to the capital to get it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "00:44:14", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you went from island to island, was it culturally different or pretty much the same?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "00:44:23", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh. Mostly the same. There were some variations from island to island, um, but not real significant. Culturally pretty much the same. It's interesting, though, there is one island and there was a Peace Corps volunteer stationed there. Again, during training they teach you the Fijian and the Hindi, and then he gets this assignment and he's going to this other island called Rabi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "00:44:50", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh yeah, you mentioned it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "00:44:51", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, that's Rotuma." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "00:44:52", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "00:44:53", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was a different one. But the Rabi is an island that is, gosh, what's the, I can't even remember what country it is right now. Anyhow, the Banaban culture, pretty sure that's what it is. Anyhow, there it's from a totally different part of the Pacific, but their island was essentially mined to death of with phosphates. That's another issue in some of the Pacific. So that these other countries, the U.S. included, had gone in and mined the phosphates. And then they just totally, the island became unlivable. They had to have a place to live, so they relocated them. They found an island in Fiji and they just basically. So here in the middle of Fiji, is this totally different language, culture, people, everything on this one island." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "00:45:46", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, so they're, where they came from?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "00:45:49", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Where they came from." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "00:45:50", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And they were relocated?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "00:45:51", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Relocated to this island in the middle of Fiji. So you have issues like that in the Pacific. One of the other issues at the time was trying to get the Pacific, or Fiji at least, to be a nuclear free zone. I don't know if you remember the, uh, shoot, what's the? What's the name of the organization that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "00:46:20", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Greenpeace?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "00:46:20", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Greenpeace, thank you. Yes. Greenpeace had a boat, the Rainbow Warrior, that was going around the Pacific, you know, and somebody bombed it in Auckland and it sunk and it killed a couple of people, whatever. And so there were just a lot of, that was when I was there in Fiji. And there's just a lot of anti-nuclear things that. I have a t- shirt, I think I still have the T-shirt that says something like, you know, um, you know, test it in Paris, something in London, things in Washington, but keep our Pacific nuclear free. And of course, climate change is going to be, that's an issue right now that's really becoming very big in Fiji. A lot of these islands." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "00:47:05", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Aren't going to make it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "00:47:06", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They're only a couple of feet above sea level. So the sea level goes up, the island's gone. They're already having problems with some of the islands because the saltwater is leaching into the water tables. So it's already becoming very salty." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "00:47:23", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what are they thinking about doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "00:47:28", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, yeah. Well, a lot of those little islands, they'll just have to abandon the islands and they'll have to find somewhere else to live. I mean, the main island is huge. And so that part of climate change won't be a factor. You know, severe weather is another factor. The biggest tropical cyclone I think anywhere hit Fiji last year, a tropical cyclone Winston." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "00:47:53", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So they're right in the." + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "00:47:54", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They're right in that path. In fact, right now, I was reading this morning in my email some, there's heavy flooding in Fiji right now. It's really affecting things. But there was literally one island last year in the tropical cyclone that just pretty much got flattened. I mean, everything just wiped out. All the trees are stripped of all the leaves. Buildings were all flattened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "00:48:14", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what does that do for people who get wiped out all the time? How do they think about that? Well, how do you think about it now that you've lived in a place like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "00:48:24", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I know. I mean, they're resilient. I mean, they're used to having storms come and they deal with it. I think it is getting worse. But it was. It's interesting. I did a one of my, um uh, one of the people in my training group was actually an architect, and she taught at the Fiji Institute of Technology and taught architecture. And she was studying housing and she still studies housing and all that, actually. But so it's interesting to hear from her perspective as we sometimes went to some of these villages to look at how the houses are constructed. And they did construct the houses to withstand, to some extent, the hurricanes. So and at that time, when there were deaths due to the hurricane, if it wasn't due to flooding or something like that, it's quite often it was due to something I think that was, you know, the houses that weren't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "00:49:28", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Built the right way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "00:49:28", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Built the right way. So, you know, they'd be in a church or something and the cement wall would collapse. Or one of the biggest problems, every house, pretty much every house had a tin roof." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "00:49:39", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "00:49:39", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I can remember sitting in my house during a hurricane and hearing my roof starting to peel off. And a lot of these roofs would just peel off and then they're just flying knives, really. I mean, these big pieces of sheet metal are just flying across, you know, that's a huge danger. But in the interior, a lot of the houses, either they're made from, if they're made from woven bamboo, the sides are woven bamboo that the wind just goes right through it, you know, so it doesn't. I mean, it works for Fiji." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "00:50:10", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It doesn't collapse. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "00:50:11", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It wouldn't work here, obviously, the cold and everything else. But in there it worked because the wind just kind of went right through it. The roofs were thatched and they were constructed in a way that, and this is what I was told at least, even if the, even if the building collapsed, the roof would stay intact and keep you safe underneath it. It'd be kind of hard to get out, but eventually you could. But so they were really designed to be appropriate for that climate and that culture. Whereas, you know, the houses that then they were started building and my house was a wooden house on a platform with a tin roof and my water came from the rain. So there was a water tank on the side of the house and the gutters would just drain into there and, you know, the toilet outside. But yeah, it wasn't great for that climate.\n\nYou get hurricanes and, again, the roof could peel off. But when it rained, it made it challenging. I could hear. We were right by kind of a, I guess you'd call it tropical jungle, pretty dense. You could hear the rain coming. And it was, first of all, when it rained, it was a really hard rain and you could hear it coming. So if I could hear it coming through the trees, and if I was teaching, I would know that I had, you know, OK, I've got a few seconds here. I would say, OK, you know, quick, do problems one, two and three on this page or whatever. Because as soon as it hit the building, it got too loud on the tin roof, because you couldn't hear a thing. And then it got so dark and they didn't have lights on at the school during the day. There's no reason to keep the lights on otherwise. So made it interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "00:52:06", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Here's a skill you learned, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "00:52:08", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's a skill I learned. Also made it really hot. You know, it's really and you get it. You get the sun on one of those tin roofs. It's just, it was pretty brutal. But so, you know, and like I guess reflecting on some of that is it's interesting that, you know, they thought this was their advancing and this is the way you've got to do things. You've got to build things out of wood and concrete instead of. But that doesn't necessarily work as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "00:52:39", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So let's just. So you then traveled to Australia and New Zealand on the way home, and I know you're now at the National Peace Corps Association." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "00:52:51", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "00:52:52", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talk a little bit about the path from Fiji to that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "00:52:58", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Path from Fiji to that. Well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "00:53:00", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it a straight line?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "00:53:04", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, not exactly. But it wasn't that not straight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "00:53:09", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK." + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "00:53:09", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, I came back in, uh, when was it? After I finished my travels, I spent a month in New Zealand, a month in Australia, came back through Fiji, and then kind of took my time getting home. So I got home in like May, April, May of 1987, and I realized in. Well, when I left for Peace Corps, I mentioned earlier I was at General Electric. I actually technically was on a leave of absence. I talked them into a leave of absence so that if I decide to come back to it, I could. And but I decided that was just not right for me, but I love the teaching. And so I decided that's, I wanted to shift gears and go into teaching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "00:54:04", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Physics?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "00:54:04", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Teaching physics. Physics or mathematics or physical science. Any of that. Well, more physics than the math. But I wasn't certified, so I couldn't really apply for the public schools. And actually I went home to Cleveland, which is where I was born and raised, and Cleveland school system was actually, there were articles in the paper that they were desperate for physics teachers because they couldn't find anyone. I was like, great, here I am. I've got a couple of years teaching experience, blah blah. Not certified, so they wouldn't touch me. So I figured, well, at that point it was early summer, you know, the school year's starting in a couple of months. I put in application with an independent school placement service and say, well, OK, if I can get a job with an independent school, I'll teach. And if I don't have a job by September, then I'll work on my certification.\n\nAnd mid-August I got a call for an interview with a school where they had, um, a teacher had abruptly resigned just before the school year started, and so they needed a math teacher. And so I was, I flew out there for an interview. They offered me a job on the spot. I said, let me think about it. And they said, well, not too long because we got to, we got to make sure we have somebody in two weeks to start school. So I said, well, at least let me fly home, you know, I'll think about it on the plane." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "00:55:33", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "00:55:34", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This is in Rhode Island. So I went home and I accepted the job and moved there and stayed there for nine years. And along the way, I went and got my master's degree in international education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And so I was teaching just math there, but also doing a lot with the students in terms of international and intercultural understanding. You know, the other teachers knew that I had been in Peace Corps, and they kind of encouraged me to help do that, and that's third goal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "00:56:11", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Third goal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "00:56:11", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Third goal. And so after a number of years there, I wanted to do more than just teaching in one school. And so I left the school, started job hunting, came to D.C. It was actually right when National Peace Corps Association got a grant to start their global teaching at Global Educators Network." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "00:56:39", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "00:56:39", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I got hired to start that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "00:56:41", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What is that? I don't know what that is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "00:56:42", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, and it's, it actually, we're phasing that aspect of it out now, but it was designed as a resource and a network for primarily returned Peace Corps volunteers who come back from Peace Corps and they go into teaching. And how do you bring more of that intercultural and international understanding into the classroom? We quickly realized it's not just our RPCVs, it could be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "00:57:10", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Anybody." + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "00:57:11", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Anybody. So we became essentially a resource for teachers who needed more support and training and materials for bringing that international understanding into the classroom, into the curriculum. All grade levels, all subject areas. So it's not just, OK, in social studies today, we're going to talk about this and boom, we're done. But how do you infuse it into your math class? How do you infuse it into your physical education class? How do you infuse it into all different subject matters? I mean, this is 20 years ago, and this is something that wasn't done much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "00:57:47", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is it done much now?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "00:57:49", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yeah, definitely. It's a lot more, which is one of the reasons we're kind of phasing it out from NPCA, because there are so many other organizations that are doing it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "00:57:57", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "00:57:57", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There's a lot. In fact, there's almost so much that now it's the opposite problem. How do the teachers kind of wade through all this and figure out what's going to work best for them? So, yeah, so I was NPCA, brought on to do that, and really develop our global education program. And so now, as I mentioned, there are so many other organizations that are doing it that we're focusing now on what's really key to our mission. It's not really working with other educators. And also Peace Corps has their worldwide schools program, too. So there are a lot of resources already there, but focusing now on how can we help like our affiliate groups do more third goal and global education. How do they infuse that into their work? And of course, NPCA is just doing a lot, a lot more in other directions as well.\n\nSo my role there has evolved from the Global Teach Net program to then I became the director of global education, and then director of global education and technology, and then global education and programs, and then eventually was asked to be the vice president. So I've had the role of vice president for quite a while now, but all those other pieces are still there underneath it. It just." + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "00:59:23", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You just keep changing titles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "00:59:25", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I just keep changing titles, and there's not much more they could do with this title. So but still doing a lot of the same type of things, but really focusing on my job there is to focus now on, um, I work with our affiliate groups. We have 162 affiliated groups that are scattered around the country and around the world, and so how do we help those groups carry out the third goal? How do we help them be stronger? So it's really how do we help our community thrive? So individuals and our affiliate groups. That's one of our three goals. Our second is to help Peace Corps be its best, and that's primarily through our advocacy program. And then how can we continue that development impact? So, you know, how can our community continue to make a difference around the world? And uh.\n\nSo, yeah, my job at NPCA now is mostly around the affiliate groups and some of our program areas. We have a travel program now where we take returned volunteers or members of our community to other countries to really see things from a Peace Corps perspective, a Peace Corps lens. So I work on that program and a lot of also just general office type things, finance and governance and things like that aren't as sexy. But." + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "01:00:55", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you're talking clearly a lot about the third goal, but from your personal experience, talk, reflect a little bit about goal one and two." + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "01:01:06", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "01:01:09", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think you provided real assistance to the country? Did you get more out of it than what you put in? All those questions people always ask." + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "01:01:21", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, well, I definitely got a lot out of it, and I think they did too. And actually my students the second year. The first year, as I mentioned earlier, the exam results were kind of on par with the rest of the country. Nothing very spectacular. But I learned a lot of things and I taught much better the second year. And second year, they actually did really well. And especially in the form six, where the national pass rate was like, you know, 25 percent something like that. I think our students had 50 percent pass rate and I was told that we had like the number four school in the country for the pass rate of that form six that year. And I think a couple of my students did go on to get scholarships at the university. And there's only one university, University of the South Pacific. But there's also a Fiji Institute of Technology, and there's a couple of, a number of other sort of technical programs. So my students did very well in that regard and they're, from what I hear, that they've. I think I did a good job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "01:02:36", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were a good teacher." + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "01:02:37", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it sounds like, it sounds like I must have been a good teacher. I did something right. But I also feel like, you know, you can't just be isolated and just one teacher. And then the next year, when you leave, it can't all fall apart. So I think I put some systems in place that helped them to continue to do well, I hope. There was a Peace Corps volunteer that had followed me. I was one of a string of Peace Corps volunteers at the school, but they also hadn't had a female at the school for a while. So in terms of goal two, I think that's the area I think where they really learned more about Americans and American women in particular. They at one point told me, you know, women don't live alone out here. I'm like, well, I do, you know.\n\nI had to adapt in certain ways. I did have, um. They did. I did have somebody come and visit me one night and want to come in and I'm like, no, I'm not letting you in. And that's when they said, well, women don't live alone out here. I said, well, how am I going to make this work? You know, I really want to make this work. And Peace Corps actually came out and looked at the school to make sure I was safe and secure. And the school is like, we have to take care of her because." + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "01:03:50", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was this teacher, another teacher?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "01:03:52", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I think somebody from the community. Anyway, then I looked at my neighbor and she had a house the same size of mine. And it was she and her husband and four kids and then a niece from the nearby village and another cousin from some, you know, so like eight people living there. And so after a while, I said, this is silly. You know, one of the, at least some of them can come down and sleep here at night, and that's what they did. Two of the girls would come down at night and just sleep there and then that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "01:04:20", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you had company." + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "01:04:21", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I had some company. Yeah. And we actually didn't do that the second year. But the first year it was actually OK I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "01:04:31", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, they got to know you better. And you got to know them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 237, + "timestamp": "01:04:34", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And what I was up against too is, what do they know about American women? They didn't have TV at that time in Fiji. They do now, and they've got a couple channels." + }, + { + "turn_id": 238, + "timestamp": "01:04:49", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are you thinking that's good or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 239, + "timestamp": "01:04:50", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yeah, I mean, they had television sets because that's what they had, the videos. So the videos would be these horrible American movies or TV shows or whatever. So what did they know about women? Well, the show that they had they watched the most was Dallas. So certainly well all the women are sleeping around and they all carry guns, you know? It's like, well, no, sorry, that's not how it really works. So, yeah, trying to combat the stereotypes, but they didn't have a whole lot to go on in terms of, you know, what are, what's it like? You know, so yeah. So I think I helped in some regard in the second goal as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 240, + "timestamp": "01:05:31", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's interesting because you're a woman, especially." + }, + { + "turn_id": 241, + "timestamp": "01:05:33", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially because I was a woman." + }, + { + "turn_id": 242, + "timestamp": "01:05:37", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, anything else you'd like to say? We're about out of time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 243, + "timestamp": "01:05:45", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Well, it went by quickly because, you know, I love talking about my Peace Corps experience and thank you for the opportunity to kind of reminisce and think about it. I mean, I think it's, uh, it is a wonderful program. You know, I'm grateful that the community that we have at NPCA is working real hard to make sure Peace Corps thrives. And I hope more people have the opportunity to do Peace Corps. It's a life changing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 244, + "timestamp": "01:06:15", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For everybody." + }, + { + "turn_id": 245, + "timestamp": "01:06:16", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For everybody, it's life changing. I actually started the trend, the Peace Corps trend in my family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 246, + "timestamp": "01:06:23", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 247, + "timestamp": "01:06:24", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I came back. When I came back in '87, my stepsister was applying to Peace Corps. She went to Guatemala, where she met her now husband, who was also Peace Corps Guatemala. And when I moved to D.C., through the Friends of Fiji, our affiliate group, I met my now life partner, who also served as an Indian man in Fiji, which is interesting, post-coup. So, yeah, he had a very interesting experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 248, + "timestamp": "01:06:53", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'd love to interview him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 249, + "timestamp": "01:06:56", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were doing the same thing. We were both teaching physics and math." + }, + { + "turn_id": 250, + "timestamp": "01:06:59", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 251, + "timestamp": "01:06:59", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I was in the interior in a Fijian community. He was on the coast in an Indian community. And of course, as an Indian man after the first coup, after the coups. Interesting experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 252, + "timestamp": "01:07:09", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I'm sure. Very different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 253, + "timestamp": "01:07:11", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very different. And then in 2001, my father and stepmother, after they retired, went off to Peace Corps as a couple and served in Romania. And now my niece is serving, the daughter of the two Guatemalan RPCVs who got married. Their daughter is now in Peace Corps right now in Namibia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 254, + "timestamp": "01:07:36", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That is amazing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 255, + "timestamp": "01:07:37", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Teaching, well, she will be teaching. The school year hasn't started yet, but she will be teaching math." + }, + { + "turn_id": 256, + "timestamp": "01:07:41", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, but so many of you in your family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 257, + "timestamp": "01:07:42", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So many of us in our family. Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 258, + "timestamp": "01:07:44", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So there's a military tradition and then there is a Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 259, + "timestamp": "01:07:48", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In our family, it's definitely the Peace Corps tradition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 260, + "timestamp": "01:07:52", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I'd love to talk to your parents about seniors going into the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 261, + "timestamp": "01:07:57", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. Well, my father passed away a couple of years ago, but my stepmother is going strong. And yeah, they, in fact, my dad used to go all the time to the recruiting events and talk about being a senior in Peace Corps. I mean, they made some amazing lifelong friendships. I mean, she gets phone calls all the time from their friends in Romania, and they email all the time. And she hasn't been back recently, but she went back, probably, you know, three or four times to visit in Romania. And I think that's actually pretty cool that five of their seven grandkids got to visit them in Peace Corps. You know, how cool is that to go visit grandma and grandpa in Peace Corps, you know? The only two that didn't get there was just they were just too young to make a trip like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 262, + "timestamp": "01:08:44", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's wonderful. That's great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 263, + "timestamp": "01:08:46", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 264, + "timestamp": "01:08:47", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, a good tradition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 265, + "timestamp": "01:08:48", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It is. It is a good tradition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 266, + "timestamp": "01:08:50", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So thank you for the interview." + }, + { + "turn_id": 267, + "timestamp": "01:08:52", + "speaker": "Anne Baker", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00636", + "metadata": { + "category": "Orion Program Oral History Project 2016", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Orion/WilsonSB/wilsonsb.htm", + "original_file_name": "WilsonSB_7-8-16.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Orion/WilsonSB/WilsonSB_7-8-16.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Orion Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Scott B. Wilson", + "location_date": "Kennedy Space Center, Florida – 8 July 2016" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Scott B. Wilson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is July 8th, 2016. This interview with Scott Wilson is being conducted for the NASA Johnson Space Center Orion Oral History Project. Mr. Wilson is speaking with us today by telephone from the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.\\n\\n Thanks again for taking some time out of your very busy schedule to talk with us. Certainly appreciate it. I read through your transcript, and last time you talked about the launch of EFT-1 [Exploration Flight Test 1] and your feelings on seeing the culmination of all those years of hard work. I wonder if you’d talk about the landing and the problems with the uprighting system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, good question. When you launch something like that and you build something for the first time you’re really worried. You know you’ve done everything you can to try to do it right, but you’re not sure. You’re always worried about the thing you might have forgot or something that you might have thought you designed well that didn’t work.\\n\\n I think I mentioned before I don’t think it’s possible to hold your breath for four hours, but I think a lot of us felt like we did until we saw the big parachutes come out and begin to settle down over the water. It was a great feeling to see that. Of course when we settled into the water and landed, we had some of the uprighting bags that didn’t fully inflate or a couple that did inflate and then deflated. We’d had some problems with the systems that pressurize those early in the production flow, and we’d worked through those changes, so we were pretty confident we got it right, but I wasn’t sure when we saw that.\\n\\n Two things went through my mind probably. One was thinking back to the earlier problems we had and trying to figure out did we not do something right. As it turned out, the problems we ended up seeing there during landing were a different cause than the earlier problems we saw. I think we did do our fix right, but we clearly had some more design things to work on to improve it for EM-1 [Exploration Mission 1].\\n\\n The second thing that went through my mind is holy cow, if we just got through throwing something 3,000 miles into space and around the planet and sending it back through the fires of reentry and landed, and all we had a problem with was a couple uprighting bags not fully inflating, that’s pretty amazing for a first flight too. While it was an issue and one we’ve corrected since for EM-1, to me the fact that that was the only problem we really had in that mission was outstanding for the first time we’ve built a human-rated spacecraft in half a century basically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any other lessons learned though from EFT-1 that will be applied to EM-1?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I think there’s quite a few. That was the whole purpose for trying to do that test flight. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about whether doing a test flight ahead of the SLS [Space Launch System] rocket made sense or not. Of course we decided that it did. Getting that early data from EFT-1 has really helped us with EM-1 planning. Not even sure where to start, there’s so many. A lot of the things we learned from the instrumentation on the vehicle, from the stresses and loads that it saw during flight, helped us to reduce quite a bit of weight. For instance we’ve got 400, 500 pounds out of just some of the metallic components of the pressure vessel alone since EFT based on some of that data.\\n\\n The heat shield was something we learned about. It’s an ablative heat shield. In EFT we had what we called a monolithic heat shield. It was a five-meter-diameter heat shield that had a piece of honeycomb over the top of it with individual cells all filled with Avcoat, which is the ablator that we use. During some of our early testing what we saw was because it’s one big giant piece, five meters in diameter, as things heat and cool in the structure we were seeing some cracking of the Avcoat that we had to do repairs on prior to the mission.\\n\\n We did those repairs, we flew the mission, and we were happy to see that the repairs worked successfully, but it really led us into thinking about whether we want to change the design for EM-1. Of course what we have now, rather than that big monolithic five-meter-diameter block of Avcoat, are smaller blocks of Avcoat that we bond to the heat shield for EM-1. We do that very similar to the way you do tiles on backshells, or the way [Space] Shuttle did tiles. These blocks will help us really address that cracking and stress issues we had with temperatures. That was a big thing we learned.\\n\\n Of course the CMUS [Crew Module Uprighting] System we redesigned. We found where there’s some chafing as those bags deploy and have redesigned that system as well. Those are some of the things I can think of off the top of my head. Big mass reductions based on the data, and heat shield was probably a big one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You said something that I thought was interesting. You decided that it was a good idea to move forward with the test flight before the SLS was ready. Can you talk about some of the pros and cons that were being tossed out for both sides?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I think any time you decide to fly something and build a vehicle there’s costs associated with it. Of course there’s resource demands too. Some of the negatives were the cost of inserting that flight in there before SLS took away from some of the budget we might have had available to do development on the EM-1 vehicle itself. Of course when you have resources and people working designs for EFT they’re not necessarily working all the follow-on vehicle stuff. Those were the downsides.\\n\\n What we decided is if we could make EFT as close to what we thought EM-1 was going to be at the time, with the exception being those systems that you need for a crewed vehicle or unique to SLS, then we could still learn a lot, and we could also use that data to help us with EM-1 design going forward. If we could balance that, then it would be a good idea.\\n\\n Of course you do the test flights to learn things. We knew we’d learn stuff. We weren’t exactly sure what you’d learn, but that’s the nature of test flight. So, for all those reasons we felt it was important to do that and get the early data and then feed that into the design so that we had a better vehicle and a more mature vehicle when we did put it on SLS. Of course that was the approach we took, and in hindsight it turned out to be a good approach. I think some of the things I previously mentioned were big lessons learned that we got from it. It’s really helped us to mature the vehicle that we’re building today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you guys capture those lessons learned and then disseminate those throughout the program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Another good question. I can talk specifically in the production area, which is my area. We actually started a lessons learned capture while we were still building EFT. We figured with the folks working on it, it was the best time to understand things. We learned about what we planned to do versus how reality really worked out was while we were doing it and it was fresh in our mind.\\n\\n In production we actually started that process about halfway through the EFT-1 build. We had a person we assigned here to go basically work with everybody from the technicians to the CPEs [Certified Project Engineers] to the engineering team and really capture the things as they occurred or shortly afterwards. We continued that process all the way up through the mission and through recovery and then of course getting the vehicle back here and doing disassembly work.\\n\\n We actually went and captured that in a document. We did several hundred interviews with technicians and engineers and manufacturing engineers, captured the themes out of that, and then put them into a lessons learned document. We were very adamant about making sure that document wasn’t just some volume of data that goes on a shelf somewhere that doesn’t get looked at. We actually used that when we went back through the Orion CDR [Critical Design Review]. We used those things we learned as criteria to evaluate the design that we had matured for EM-1 and EM-2 as we looked through CDR. We really made sure a lot of those lessons learned were actually captured, and designs were updated, or processes were updated to take advantage of those.\\n\\n I’m really happy to say—I don’t remember the exact number—but nearly all of those have been captured. Probably a simple example to understand this is the heat shield installation, for instance. We had several hundred fasteners with very tight tolerances to be able to put a heat shield on the vehicle in the original EFT design. It was extremely challenging for the team to try to figure out how to take this very eloquent design solution but actually manufacture it and build the vehicle that way.\\n\\n As a result, in EM-1 now we only have a handful, I think it’s 20 to 30 fasteners with much less tight tolerances on it. It’s a very easy way to assemble that now. That’s one simple example to get your arms around about how we’ve improved, how those lessons learned fed in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s quite an effort. How many people were working on capturing those lessons learned?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Like most things in Orion, we don’t have a lot of folks to do that. We really had one lead for it. Then of course lots of folks provided fractions of their time to provide the data that went into that study. Really just one person leading it. Again this is the production part of it. There were other efforts in the other CAMs, but just one lead and a lot of slices of technicians’ time and engineers’ time to go feed that process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did everyone sit down and do an interview or were they just asked maybe to type up a memo and share their lessons learned?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I think not everybody in the program went and did it, but what we did is we tried to make sure we interviewed all the key folks who had a role in the build. There was a very specific effort to go down, talk to the technicians on the floor, and solicit those inputs. Then almost everybody who had a comment or had some thoughts for lessons learned was interviewed in it. Again I can’t remember the exact number of folks but there were many. They ranged from technicians working on something like the heat shield installation or those fasteners, all the way to manufacturing engineers who were trying to put the processes together, to the design engineers who were designing the heat shield for instance." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many total people work in production?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "On the NASA side of it, on the nonprime side, we have between 24 and 30, depending on the time phasing. On the contractor side between Lockheed and ASRC [(Arctic Slope Regional Corporation) Federal], who’s Lockheed’s support for technician labor, there’s about 250 or so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s not a very big labor force, when you think about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it’s not, but we’ve learned a lot I think as we’ve gone forward. One of the things we looked at early on when we set up the factory and decided how to staff was the Shuttle workforce and what little data we had on the Apollo workforce. Shuttle was fresh in everybody’s mind. It was good and bad. Shuttle employed a lot more people, but as it ramped down a lot of those people were looking for future work, and so we were able to pick up a lot of the best of the best from Shuttle.\\n\\n What we did in Orion is we tried to design—we learned a lot since Shuttle—we tried to design a vehicle that took less people to assemble. For good or bad, we’ve got a much smaller team, but it’s a much more efficient team with an easier vehicle I think to assemble now. It has different capabilities than Shuttle, but we’ve tried to design it smartly to take less people to process and build." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Along those same lines I’ve read that the capsule is supposed to be reusable. That was how Shuttle was sold. Reusability was going to cut cost and we would be able to fly into space much more cheaply. Can you talk about that reusability and the vehicle itself here and some of those challenges it poses and if that’s been able to help you cut cost in any way?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s a great question, one we get a lot. We started off with this—I think at the time we didn’t know it, but it was a relatively simple question. Should it be reusable or should it be disposable? What made more sense?\\n\\n As we looked into it, it’s not really as simple as we thought it was. It’s really an incremental approach we took to it. We looked at it from a cost perspective. Some things make a lot of sense to reuse, and some things make a lot of sense to just buy a new piece or build a new piece for it. We ended up actually coming up with a mixed mode for reusability where some things may take you so much effort to disassemble the vehicle, get the part out, recertify it that it costs you too much, where the new part might be half the cost. Or there’s other places where the equipment is such high value, like avionics for instance, that it makes more sense to reuse it because the labor cost to take it out and recertify it is much lower than to rebuild.\\n\\n The model we actually have right now where we don’t use for instance the primary structure currently because the labor we believe is going to take more labor cost to recertify that, but we do use all the avionics boxes for instance. Now we are trying to use the data from both EFT and EM-1 and EM-2 to be able to also certify the structure for reuse ultimately too.\\n\\n I think in the end what you’ll see is it won’t be completely reusable, it won’t be completely disposable, it’ll be the right mix for the cost." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I thought it was fascinating how there have been so many studies done talking about Shuttle, and how it was sold this way, but it ended up of course not being as efficient as people said it was going to be. I just thought that was curious. I wondered what the thinking was behind that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was exactly what we went into. I think coming out of Apollo, which was mostly disposable, after a mission we’d send it to museums. I think people at the time said, “Hey, we got to figure out how not to do that. Let’s make it reusable.”\\n\\n The preliminary look at Shuttle said, “Yes, that makes a lot of sense, it’ll be more like an aircraft.” But of course as you get into the space environment, things are a lot less forgiving, and it ended up driving a lot more inspection and disassembly. Those labor costs quickly grew also.\\n\\n We were fortunate in our timing of having data on the Apollo method and on the reusable method from Shuttle and being able to try to find the right balance to thread the needle between the two." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wonder if you could talk about NASA’s international partners and the agreement that led to that partnership for the Service Module." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Another great question. In the original plans we had back in Constellation and even in early MPCV [Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle] we were building a fully U.S. vehicle. Then over time as we looked at the [International] Space Station [ISS] model and the benefits that international partners brought to the table in Space Station, we began to think about whether that made some sense for us on Orion as well.\\n\\n We got into some discussions with ESA, the European Space Agency, on it. I think most people recall—or maybe they don’t—back in Station the way we trade services between countries is in terms of barter. We don’t actually exchange money between the countries, we exchange services. Those services have a value. We keep a balance sheet for how much value each partner is bringing to the table and which country owes which country services in return.\\n\\n Coming out of Station and the Shuttle flights we were providing, there was some services essentially on the debit sheet that the Europeans owed the U.S., and so we started talking about ways that maybe that made sense to bring on an international partner. We of course did partner with ESA, and ESA brought in their prime contractor, Airbus, to support it. Today we have them as a full partner to provide a major chunk of the Service Module, a piece that we call the ESM, or European Service Module. It’s primarily based on their experience with in-space propulsion, so it has the main part of the Service Module which includes all the tanks and propulsion systems and solar arrays.\\n\\n EM-1 will be our first vehicle where we actually use the European Service Module. We’re already working with that team at Plum Brook Station [Sandusky, Ohio] now to do testing of their structural test article. They have basically a mockup of that Service Module that we’re putting through environmental tests. It’s been a good model not only for the technical side of the vehicle testing we do but also for how we have this international team work together, and the processes that we put in place, and the way the people work together.\\n\\n Very shortly in the early 2017 timeframe, we’ll have the European Service Module arrive here at Kennedy, and we’ll begin to integrate that with the rest of the vehicle. It’s an exciting time to go from the stand-alone Constellation model, as we’ve matured into a different U.S. model, and then now an international team. It’s exciting and I think it’s got a lot of opportunity for all of us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any changes that needed to be made to the Orion vehicle as a result of choosing a different provider for that Service Module?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were some. I think probably the biggest changes were when you try to define the interfaces between something, when it’s completely U.S.-built all by the same manufacturer you can be more integrated between the pieces if that makes sense. When I talk about the pieces, the Service Module itself has this central piece that we now call the European Service Module. It has an upper piece that integrates with the Crew Module called the CMA or Crew Module Adapter, and it has fairings and a spacecraft adapter that integrates to the rocket.\\n\\n What we ended up having to do as we tried to carve out this European piece of it, we tried to simplify those interfaces and put them in the right places so we could do a little more stand-alone work in the U.S., a little more stand-alone work in Europe. The simpler that interface was, the easier that partnership would be from a technical perspective. In doing that, we made some changes to the CMA and to the spacecraft adapter at the lower end to be able to integrate the two together. I think that’s probably the main things we did with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Have you seen any challenges or issues working with ESA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think any time you bring in a new partner there’s challenges in how you work together. I think that’s the biggest part of it. I think EFT was a great pathfinder, I think I mentioned earlier, for us in terms of how you build a vehicle. We had a lot of things we had to learn just in terms of how you receive parts, how you put things together. Things we learned like I mentioned with the heat shield and how you produce those.\\n\\n We had a lot of time to use EFT as not just a pathfinder for the spacecraft itself but for the processes and the teams and the people. We got through that. Now with the Europeans that’s one new aspect to the team that we’re bringing in. I think there’ll always be challenges when you bring in a new team. They’re not unique to international partners, I don’t think. I think it’s just as you bring in a new group of people, a new supplier for such a large part of the spacecraft, there’s challenges in just how do we work together and how do we plan all that stuff.\\n\\n But just like EFT, I think by the time we get through the early parts of EM-1 we’ll have figured that out. I think it’ll be very smooth for us. There are the obvious challenges when you’re working with a partner who’s in a different country or that far away, working remotely: how you share data back and forth, how the teams work together; the different approaches that different countries or different contractors in different countries, the way they approach problems and their processes trying to integrate between the two.\\n\\n Then of course there’s the export control law in International Traffic in Arms [Regulations] or ITAR law that we have here in the U.S. that limits what we can and can’t export or talk about with foreign nationals too. We’ve had to do a lot of work with the [U.S.] State Department and export control to be able to work through the right things and transfer information in the right way. That tends to slow us down some, but of course those laws are there for a reason, to protect U.S. interests as well. Those are probably the biggest challenges." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "ISS has a number of partners. Do you see Orion expanding and including more international partners since this is an effort really to explore deep space and we might bring on say the Russians or the Chinese at some point, if we’re allowed to work with them? Do you see that being a possibility?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s a great question. I think you have to think about Orion in the bigger context of exploration. Exploration is going to take a lot of assets both in space and on the ground to be able to really explore places we want to go and for the missions we eventually—when I say we now, we humans—want to go to. I’m not sure more partners specifically for Orion, but I certainly see opportunities as we go forward to do exploration. There’s other aspects of things we’ll need. We’ll need landers. We’ll need in-space propulsion systems. We’ll need habitats and relay systems. I think all those provide places for the international community to participate as well in the larger mission.\\n\\n If I could use my crystal ball to look forward, I’d be very surprised if 50 years from now we didn’t have much more of an international presence there, working together and sharing resources. When you do these things it’s a big challenge for one country to do it alone. Doing it together I think we accomplish quite a bit more as humans than we could trying to do it individually." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you could, looking back over your time with Orion. What do you think was your most significant challenge during your years there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I got to pick just one, huh?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You can identify several if there are several." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m just joking. I think for me personally, well, any time you design something new there’s a huge host of challenges of how you design things and your trades and how you balance cost, schedule, and budgets from a programmatic perspective. There’s all those things at a big global program level. Specific to the production area that I’ve led up here, I think the biggest challenge was also our biggest plus also.\\n\\n We had a clean sheet of paper to design the factory and the processes and to figure out how you build spacecraft. It’s both a blessing and a curse. We didn’t really have a blueprint to just pick up and start following. We had to create it, which was hard, but by us getting to create it, we were able to make it as efficient as we could make it for ourselves. I think that was the biggest challenge.\\n\\n The way that manifested itself, early on it was how do you build the factories, what do the factories look like, where are they. Of course we gravitated our primary big manufacturing in New Orleans [Louisiana] at MAF [Michoud Assembly Facility] and assembly operations and test at Kennedy. Then of course where do we do large-scale environmental tests? We’ve gravitated to Plum Brook Station for that. But, all those things originally weren’t really defined for us, and so we had to figure that out and try to make the best balance for what made sense technically but of course what fit cost and schedule constraints as well.\\n\\n Early on, once we picked the locations, it was a lot of building work, facility type work to build those factories and build the test capabilities. The O&C [Operations and Checkout Building] was a building built in the ’60s for Apollo, hadn’t really had significant mods [modifications] done to it since then. It did support Space Station and Shuttle, but from a large-scale perspective it needed a significant amount of work to bring it back up to where you could process today’s type of spacecraft.\\n\\n We put quite a bit of time and many years into building that and making it the right facility, doing a lot of benchmarking with other companies and other factories around the world to see what kind of features we should build in.\\n\\n Of course similar type things happened at the portions of MAF that we use for Orion. At Plum Brook we had to go figure out how to build test facilities all in a single place to be able to test large-scale spacecraft like Orion, but also we sized that for lunar landers, or at the time in Constellation what were landers of any kind, which was really our driving case for how big things are.\\n\\n When you look at a place like Plum Brook, we had to do things that nobody’s really done in the world before. We had to build a vibration table that was large enough to shake a lunar lander at the huge size and mass that that takes. We had to build an acoustic test facility there that, when you looked at size and volume of sound, was about eight times greater than anybody in the world had ever produced.\\n\\n Any time you’re doing things that are first time biggest in the world kind of things, there’s tremendous challenges to do it, and to do it in a way that made sense from programmatic, cost, schedule, and risk-benefit too. Those were our early challenges.\\n\\n When we got through all that, I think we thought we were all set, probably a little naively. Then we started building our first vehicles. Of course we had lots of challenges there of how do you do that. What kind of processes do you need? Where do we get our workforce? How do we train them? All those kind of things that went into it.\\n\\n I think EFT as I mentioned earlier was a big driver in helping us wring that out. I think that brings us to today where we’re building EM-1. I think we’ve wrung out a lot of the facility things that we had early on. We’ve wrung out how do you build the vehicles. I think now what we’re trying to bring into is how do you build full-scale Service Modules, and do that in partnership with our European partners.\\n\\n Then of course how do we begin to move from the test flight regime of EFT, EM-1 into our crewed phase in EM-2? I think our big challenges beyond there will be okay, now we’ve learned, we’ve gone through the development, we’ve fielded a system that we know works. How do we move into more of a steady-state production phase to produce those vehicles and to produce them at a cost that’s feasible for the Agency? That’s a really really long-winded answer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s very detailed, we appreciate those kind of details. Conversely, what do you think is your most significant contribution to EFT-1?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I got to think it’s very similar to what I probably just described. I was in a really unique place I think when we first started talking about exploration. I think I mentioned earlier in the interviews previously I was at [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, DC] when we started to figure out the early requirements for it. I think the work we did there and the early trade studies we did that set the requirement set for what Orion needs to do was a big part of it.\\n\\n We may not have realized it at the time, but what we set was requirements for a vehicle that’s really got a lot of capability. As missions have changed and evolved over time, as the program has changed through early exploration to Constellation to where we are today, the capabilities of the vehicle that we defined in those early requirements still provide the vehicle that can meet all those mission parameters. I think that was one thing to me that was very important. I think that was probably the contribution that I think helped us get to where we are today.\\n\\n Of course the other one is from a production standpoint. Starting with a clean sheet of paper and trying to make all the decisions we have, to try to put in place all the infrastructure and the ability to build and manufacture vehicles has been a big part. I’m pretty proud of both of those. When I say proud, as you know, it’s a team of folks. We’ve got an outstanding team of people that’s really pulled through to do all that work. It’s really rewarding to see it where it is today, going back to when we were looking at pieces of paper and trying to write shall statements for what the thing should do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you identify some of those folks who’ve made significant contributions that you haven’t talked about or maybe who you’d like to mention?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I think there was a requirements team we had at Headquarters. I’ll probably have to dust off, because I don’t want to forget folks. But we started early under Admiral [Craig E.] Steidle and there was a team from across the country in different Centers participating in that. I know we had folks like Scott [D.] Altman and Brent [W.] Jett out of the Flight Crew Office. We had Mike [Michael F.] Lembeck was assigned at Headquarters at the time helping oversee some of those requirements efforts as our direct supervisor under Admiral Steidle.\\n\\n I’m trying to remember. Bret [G.] Drake, Jim Gefery, and Terry [O.] Tri were up there out of JSC. Ed [Edward J.] Stanton was out of [NASA] Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] at the time. Warren [I.] Wiley was out of KSC. Wayne [L.] Peterson from JSC. Those are some of the folks off the top of my head. Don [Donald E.] Shick was out of Langley I believe it was. It was a relatively small team working requirements early on.\\n\\n Then of course when we started up production here, I started as the JSC person to lead production, but we formed the team out of Kennedy early on to help us with a lot of those facility activities. Glenn [C.] Chin was brought on as my Deputy at the time and Glenn still remains here in that position, has done a great job. I’m trying to think. Mike [Michael J.] See out of Johnson was in the original T&V group, the Test and Verification group, but eventually came into production as well and helped us quite a bit with our test capabilities. And Rafael Garcia as well.\\n\\n Ed Stanton, who I mentioned from Headquarters, actually ended up moving from Ames. I think he went to JSC and then to Kennedy, and we brought him in on the team here as well. So it’s quite a few people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’ve got quite a lot of people who made significant contributions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I forget if I said it before too, but I’ve talked about the team that we’ve got that have helped support it. I think early on Skip [Caris A.] Hatfield I think did a nice job forming up the program for us really and getting us going, and then played a very significant role in the startup of all that and was actually who had hired me in at the time.\\n\\n Eventually Mark [S.] Geyer took over and I think Mark as the NASA Orion Program Manager and Cleon Lacefield, who was the Lockheed Program Manager at the time, they served a very critical role—they were at the helm when we went through the transition from Constellation to where we are now. I think the fact that Orion came through that in the way that we did was a huge testament to Mark and Cleon’s leadership in that timeframe. It was a time of extreme turmoil I think for all of us in the program as we talked about before. They did a couple things that I think were really significant that allowed us to move forward.\\n\\n One of the things Mark was adamant about was we are still required by law to spend money wisely and to do the best we can in this program even while we’re being canceled. He drove that hard with the team to do the best we could and really set a steady path for us so that we could put our heads down and concentrate on getting there and doing good work. I think that helped the team tremendously. It also helped us produce some very valuable things like the pad abort test and of course the early parts of EFT.\\n\\n I think Mark and Cleon both also helped a lot in trying to show our stakeholders the versatility of the Orion design, of what we were building, and how it applied to this new thing called MPCV. I think they both did that in the way that they could from both the government and contractor perspective that really helped us come through the other side and helped our stakeholders understand the value in what we were doing. I think those are two folks I’d give a tremendous amount of credit to for where we are today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Along those same lines Mark Geyer has said that the Orion Program has learned to persevere. Would you agree with that statement?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I absolutely would. Trying to think of how to put it. There’s so many ways that that’s true. On the surface you could say we’ve learned to persevere going through Constellation and then eventually the turmoil that brought us to MPCV and where we are today. That’s the top story. But I think the way we did that is through many many changes at the lower levels.\\n\\n When Constellation was canceled it really forced us to evaluate how we do things and all of our processes. We’ve learned to be very adaptive and really question the processes we have. Are we doing this process blindly because we’ve always done it? Or are we doing it because it really provides value to what we’re doing? By thinking of things that way we’ve really become much much more efficient than I think we were in the early days. That’s part of this “trying to persevere.” When you have tough times you can either fold up your hands and walk away and say, “We can’t do it,” or you can try to adapt and do the best you can to do great things with what you’ve got. It’s something Mark really set the tone for, and it’s something that I think has become part of the culture of Orion." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you give an example of one of those processes that you looked at and thought well, yes, we’ve always done things this way, but if this is too costly or it’s not going to work with the schedule, and how you applied some of those lessons learned and made a change and it’s worked out to become much more efficient and just as effective as in the past?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’ll give a little bit of a global answer to it and see if this helps. A lot of times, maybe early on, we relied a lot on Shuttle processes for instance. Shuttle had a board and then they had a preboard that would help make decisions and they had these other working groups underneath. Sometimes there’s some decisions you need to go through that kind of process for. We were probably using that early on for many of our decisions.\\n\\n Then later on as we began to question that, what we tried to do is change from the model where all the decisions go through this very rigorous board structure to what things should go through it, and what levels should other decisions be made at. There was a big effort where we tried to push decision making to the lowest level that made sense but also to make sure we had checks and balances on that and to make sure that we had what we called reclama paths if somebody disagrees there.\\n\\n That’s a very simple process example, but when you go through the amount of decisions that are made just on a daily basis within a program that saves quite a bit of people’s time and it still allows a decision to be made. You could argue a lot of cases it’s made better because it’s made by the smart technical folks where it made sense and where it doesn’t make sense those things would be rolled up. Really pushing that decision making to the lowest level with checks and balances and a reclama path has allowed us to do a lot more with a lot less people and resources. That’s one example." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I think we’ve exhausted our questions. We’ve actually come in a little under time. I wondered if there was anything else that perhaps Sandra [Johnson] didn’t cover last time or you wanted to talk about today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I can’t think of anything other than just I know I told Sandra this, but I just very very much appreciate that your office is doing this and taking the interest to do it. As somebody who ever since I was a little kid loved space, and reading the things from the early days of space and wishing there had been more of this kind of stuff written down then that I could have learned from, I think this is going to be great.\\n\\n Hopefully as you pull all this together from the whole program this will be a wealth of knowledge for people in the future. Learning how we thought, the decisions we made, and some of the decisions we’re making today hopefully will be good things people capitalize on. Some of them may be things people look back on and question, “Why did you do that?” Because maybe it doesn’t pan out. This will really give that perspective I think to folks and help make people doing what we’re doing in the future better at it. Long-winded way of saying thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s our pleasure. I certainly thank you for taking time today, and I know you guys are busy and don’t want to eat up all of your day. Thank you very much for sitting down with us and sharing your experiences, anecdotes, and lessons learned. We sure appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Scott B. Wilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Great, well, thanks again, and have a great weekend." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00057", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/BoltonJC/boltonjc.htm", + "original_file_name": "BoltonJC_3-21-19.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/BoltonJC/BoltonJC_3-21-19.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Janine C. Bolton", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 21 March 2019" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "Sandra Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Janine C. Bolton" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is March 21st, 2019. This interview with Janine Bolton is being conducted at the Johnson Space Center for the JSC Oral History Project. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Sandra Johnson. Thanks again for coming by and agreeing to sit in the hot seat. I’m teasing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We haven’t captured a lot about library services at JSC, but I wanted to start by capturing some basic history about your life. I wondered if you could give us a brief overview of your education and experience before you came here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I got my undergrad at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia [Pennsylvania], which at the time was a small women’s Catholic college. They’re coed now, which I’m still not sure I’m happy about. While I was going there I was a lit major, and I was trying to figure out, “What’s my career going to be?” I didn’t think I’d be a writer, and I didn’t plan to teach. It was like, “Okay, what am I going to do with the rest of my life?”\\n\\n I had an experience with one of the librarians, when I was working on my honors thesis, and she just thoroughly impressed me. I thought, “Oh, I’ll be a librarian. That’s cool.” Then I discovered I couldn’t just graduate with a bachelor’s and be a librarian, I needed a master’s. I don’t think a lot of people are aware that to be considered a professional librarian requires a master’s in library science [MLS], although now sometimes they call it master’s in library and information sciences, MLIS. We were more basic back then.\\n\\n I went straight from undergrad to my master’s program, which was at the time fairly unusual. A lot of library students are returning students who have worked and then decided on a career in librarianship later in their career. I was fairly young compared to my classmates. I did become good friends with another woman in my program, Sharon Halprin. She and I ended up rooming together towards the end of the program. When we graduated she was engaged at the time to somebody who was a chemical engineer, and he had gotten a job in the Houston, Texas, area working at one of the chemical companies, so she moved to Houston, and through word of mouth found a job working as a reference librarian at JSC.\\n\\n Meanwhile I graduated, and I got a temporary job at Penn State University Harrisburg campus, which was very similar to UH [University of Houston]-Clear Lake [Texas]. It was all upper division graduate students. I had a six-month temporary position there, and my plan was to stay in academic libraries. I wasn’t thinking about going into special libraries. My plan was sticking with university libraries.\\n\\n Since it was temporary, I was looking for another job the entire time I was working there. I went to University of Maryland [College Park] for my graduate degree." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to ask you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s where I got my grad degree. That’s the other thing, there aren’t a lot of MLS programs across the country. When I graduated college, what was geographically closest: Drexel University [Philadelphia] had an MLS program, University of Maryland. I think Catholic University [of America, Washington, DC] had an MLS program, University of Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania]. There weren’t that many programs right close to where I grew up, which was in the Philadelphia area, Havertown. I knew if I went to Drexel I’d have to live at home, which I didn’t want to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We all understand that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I ended up at University of Maryland. The whole time I’m working at Penn State I’m looking for another job. I was coming up on the six months, and they still needed me. They were going to hire, but they hadn’t done it yet. For any of you who are familiar with academia, which I like to call macadamia, it takes them forever to hire. It is quite a process.\\n\\n I was extended, I think, another full six months, and in the first six months I was there I hadn’t really gotten much in the way of [interviews]. I think I had done a few telephone interviews for a permanent position, but I don’t think I ended up doing any in-person interviews. My time was extended, so I started applying again. Having six months of experience was extremely appealing to a lot of universities looking for an intro librarian.\\n\\n I actually ended up interviewing at University of Virginia [Charlottesville], University of Pittsburgh, someplace outside of Philadelphia, I can’t remember now. Oh, University of North Carolina [UNC]-Chapel Hill. This was in the fall at this point. It was October or something like that. Sharon and I were keeping up with each other. She calls me one night and she’s like, “Janine, do you have any interest in working at JSC?”\\n\\n It was like, “That wasn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking university.” I was like, “Well.” That was back when people had actual money and they would fly you out for interviews, which doesn’t happen anymore. I was like, “Well, it’ll get me a free trip out to see you, so sure, I’ll interview.”\\n\\n I flew out there. I did all these interviews within like a three-week span. It was just one after another. I was becoming a professional interviewee at this point. When I interviewed at University of Pittsburgh, they thought I had already gotten a job. They told me I was the most relaxed candidate they’d ever seen. I’m like, “It’s only because I’m doing these twice a week.” I interviewed at JSC, and I was waiting to hear back from people. I got a job offer from University of North Carolina and I was talking to them, negotiating with them, and I was really excited about that job.\\n\\n Academia versus special [libraries]—all my academic interviews were full-day interviews, eight-hour interviews. I had to give presentations to show I could do bibliographic instruction. Do they ever ask their professors to do that? Probably not, but the intro librarian being offered $24K has to do a presentation to prove you can do instruction.\\n\\n You’re doing a presentation. You’re meeting with all these different committees and groups, having lunch. It’s just a full-on affair all day. Also you’re meeting people who you will never work with. I remember at University of Virginia, they put you in a room with the law librarians. The law library is not underneath the director of libraries at University of Virginia; it’s under the head of the law school. Same with their business library, but they put you in a room with the business librarians. You’re never going to work with these people. You’re not under the same management structure. Why do you have to interview with them? It was funny, because I did those sessions. The woman who was escorting me around, she’s like, “How was that?”\\n\\n I was like, “It’s all right.”\\n\\n She’s like, “We’re trying to get rid of that portion, because they don’t care how they treat you, because you’re never going to work with them.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They’re not going to see you again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I came out here for my interview at JSC. I think tops maybe it was two hours, and that probably included lunch. I met only the Library staff, that’s the only people that I met. I also met Bill [William A.] Larsen. I interviewed with Bill Larsen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We weren’t under IRD [Information Resources Directorate] at the time. We were under Center Ops [Operations]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s another question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We were under Center Ops. Bill Larsen, I don’t know what his position was at the time, I can’t remember. He wasn’t directly over the libraries. Donna [K.] McAllister was directly over the libraries, and I think Donna reported to Bill. At that time NASA was much more free with their thoughts about who should be hired, who should be fired, which of course does not happen anymore. Frankly, it didn’t happen much longer after I came on board. At the time, NASA was involved in the hiring process even though they should not have been. Yes. Interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That is. What year was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was ’92, because I think I started working here officially in January of ’93. I met with the staff of the Library. I met Bill Larsen. I think we had lunch. Sharon, I think, ended up having to go out of town. I don’t even think Sharon was here. I think I got to see her that night, but she wasn’t there for the interview process.\\n\\n I’m used to these all day long, meet everybody and their brother, do a presentation. This thing was just like nothing. I was like, “Oh, wow, all right.” I had done the interview. Then shortly after that I got the job offer from the University of North Carolina. I’m talking to them; I hadn’t accepted it yet. I get a call that I got the job at JSC.\\n\\n It was like, “All right, now what?” I decided to go with JSC. Believe it or not, they were offering more money. Not like anything that was going to make me rich, but it was more money, and I had a friend here. If I ended up at University of North Carolina, I didn’t know anybody, and it wasn’t like I could go home on the weekends. It didn’t really matter that North Carolina was closer to Pennsylvania. It still wasn’t going to get me home on a regular basis, so it was like why not go where I actually know somebody. That’s why I ended up here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a fascinating story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the meantime, Sharon and her fiance called it kaputs. Sharon and I ended up getting an apartment together. We were both working as reference librarians in the Main Library at JSC.\\n\\n Shortly after I got here, I don’t know, within like two or three months, there was quite a bit of turnover. I think by the fifth month, I was the senior librarian. Sharon had become our TM. Sharon got switched over to NASA and was the Technical Monitor over the Library. She and I were sharing an apartment. That was interesting. The contractor at the time was Hernandez [Engineering]. I felt like I had a glass ceiling because I was rooming with the TM. I think they were convinced I was telling the TM things that were going on, which I was not.\\n\\n Sharon and I had a year lease. At the end of the year she had met somebody new, I had met my future husband, so we had moved in with our respective people. That’s how I ended up here. I ended up staying here because my husband was a Shuttle flight controller. I thought this was going to be a stepping-stone job. I thought I was going to be here for like two years. I thought I’d come in, get some experience underneath me, and move on.\\n\\n Again, I think I was thinking I would end up in an academic library. Although I have to say, having spent a year at Penn State Harrisburg and then coming here, I much preferred the type of library work I was doing here over what I was doing in an academic library. I thought this was going to be a two-year thing, stepping-stone to something else. Met my husband, he was a Shuttle flight controller. You can only do that in one place, when it existed. Here I am, 26 years later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You brought up something that I thought was interesting, and that’s the fact that you were very interested in academic libraries, but you really enjoyed the type of work you were doing here. I wonder if you could talk about what sort of work you were doing, and how that differed from the type of work you were doing at Penn State and you would have done at UNC." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The big difference is working in a university library, you’re really there for instruction. When somebody comes in and they’re looking to research something, you don’t do the research for them. You show them the tools that are available, you show them how to use those tools, and you send them on their way. You end up just repeating yourself a lot. They might be using different databases. Somebody getting their history degree and somebody getting an engineering degree aren’t going to be using the same databases, but databases all operate the same way for the most part, so your day is very repetitive. “Here’s how you do this. Here’s how you do that. Good luck to you.”\\n\\n What I loved about here was people would come in and ask for help, and we would do the research for them. It’s changed a lot from when I started. At the time that I started, the databases that existed, especially for NASA documents, were extremely difficult to use. They were all command-driven. Unless a customer wanted to learn the commands, it was not worth their time. We knew the commands; we knew how to use the database. We would do a reference interview, figure out what they needed, and then we would do the research for them, provide results for them to pick and choose from. It was always interesting because it was always changing. I eventually moved over into the Medical Library, and I really enjoyed doing the research over there, found that really fascinating.\\n\\n You also know that the work that you’re doing is going towards actual work. When you’re helping a student, they’re working on a paper. Nobody’s life is probably going to be changed over their term paper. I remember I got a request one time. I think this was when we were first starting to build the Space Station. They had a solar array that would not unfurl. It was stuck on some type of wire or something like that. They needed to know what kind of metal their tool needed to be made of to be able to cut this wire. We did the research and figured it out and gave it to them. You know the work you’re doing has real-world—out of this world—results, which is really cool.\\n\\n I really liked the fact that we were doing the research for people. When I started in librarianship there were electronic databases. Most of them were on CD-ROM." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to ask you about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually they might even have been disk, and then CD-ROM, and then online. There was still a lot of print indexes getting used at the time. As we’ve gotten further and further into the digital age, they’ve made the databases and tools easier and easier for the end user to use. The database system I used for NASA research when I started was called RECON. Like I said, it was command-driven.\\n\\n It’s been updated many many times since I’ve been here, and of course now you can just search it from your desktop. They’ve made it very user-friendly, sort of. It’s actually kind of awful now. That’s the interesting thing for me as a librarian. I would much rather be able to search by command. I have much more control over the searching. In their attempts to make systems easier for the end user—when they started developing systems easier for the end user, usually the command system was still available." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you explain what you mean by command system? I’m not really sure what that means." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When you would search on subject terms you would use the word S for search. Then you would have your subject terms. I can’t remember if you could use or, and, and not, or you had to use plus signs or minus signs. Then you would create sets. You would search a term. It would come back, and it would label it set one. Then you’d search something else, and it would label it set two. Then you could start combining your sets. You’d be like SS set one set two. You would be in a blank screen.\\n\\n Whereas now when you’re in a database there’s always a keyword search box and then maybe there’s some stuff on the side that’s like, “choose your publication year, choose your language.” There’s things all over the screen for you to enter your search terms, for you to refine your search. Back then you were just looking at a blank screen, and you were typing in what fields you wanted to search.\\n\\n If you wanted to search for something in the title it’d be like S and then you’d put in a word slash TI, meaning you wanted to search the title field. Each field had a different code that you would use to indicate that’s the field you wanted to look in.\\n\\n What’s really interesting to me, a piece of NASA history, RECON was developed sometime in the ’60s. I think it was probably one of the first indexing systems for documents for research. Through technology transfer, a company called DIALOG took the software behind RECON and developed a system called DIALOG. I took an entire semester in library school on how to use DIALOG, to learn the commands. DIALOG was command-driven, because it was based on RECON.\\n\\n When I started working here, because I knew DIALOG, I knew how to use RECON. It’s just interesting. DIALOG was huge. When I was in library school that was the tool for librarians. Typically, because things were on disk or things were on CDs, you could only search one database at a time. With DIALOG, it was an online system, command-driven, and you could search up to 20 databases at the same time. It was a very unique tool at the time. It was a class everybody took getting their master’s in library sciences in the early ’90s probably through the mid ’90s. It was a major library tool. It all came from NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. I did not know that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It still exists. DIALOG still exists. It’s not the powerhouse it was at one time, because again they’ve gotten away from the command stuff. They want to give the end user the opportunity to do their own searching. Even DIALOG has gotten away from command searching. My heart still hurts that I can’t use commands in what RECON is now called, NTRS. That’s the current version of it, NASA Technical Reports Server. It is not command-driven at all. There’s no way for you to do it with commands." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like it was DOS [disk operating systems]-based because of the command structure. Like you said, NTRS is GUI [graphical user] interface. That’s what it looks like, it’s the difference." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because the commands, that’s typical with DOS." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, a lot of the databases now, you still can do command searching, but it’s hidden." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I had no idea. I’ve never heard of such a thing as command." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. It’s different in each one. Knowing what the different commands are for each one is a challenge. Because we’ve made it easier and easier for the end user, over time now we don’t get people coming to the Library asking us to do research anymore. It’s very rare, but when I started that was all we did. It was continuous, all the time. It was like that up until probably the end of the ’90s.\\n\\n It’s sort of a chicken-and-the-egg thing. Our budget has been cut over time. It’s like, “All right, are we getting less requests for research?” [But it’s] not just budget cuts. When they moved us, when we did that whole UH-Clear Lake partnership, a lot of people thought the Library closed and there wasn’t a Library anymore. So it’s kind of like, “All right, are we not seeing people because they’re doing their own research?” That’s definitely part of it for sure. “Are we not seeing people because they don’t realize that the Library is still here? Are they unaware that there’s a librarian who can do research for them?” So it’s definitely changed a lot over time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are you benchmarking against the other Field Centers to see if there are similarities? [NASA] Glenn [Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio], they have that beautiful new Library that they put all that money into." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it’s [NASA] Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is it Goddard?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I thought Glenn also had a new Library." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think Glenn does too, but Goddard’s is getting a lot of kudos. That’s really interesting, because frankly they were going to kind of like they did with us, get rid of the physical collection and be virtual. Goddard is a Research Center with a capital R. A lot of their scientists were extremely unhappy, but it was moving forward. They had weeded huge portions of their book collection. They had a huge book collection. Then they did an assessment of the building.\\n\\n Part of the reason they wanted to do this [was] because—like they did with us—they wanted to take the Library space. They discovered part of the reason that building was built was for the Library. There were other things in Goddard’s Library, but part of the reason that building was built was for the Library. The shelving in the Library was actually support for the building. You could not take the shelving out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s like the Library is fighting back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. So they’re like, “All right, well, we can’t get rid of the space because we can’t use it for anything else.” They had done all this massive weeding. They had to bring it back even after they had deleted the records out of the catalog. They still don’t have as much shelf space as they had before, because there were sections of the Library that had regular freestanding shelving that was gone. They reimagined the space, made it a collaboration space, but they still had shelving because they couldn’t take it out.\\n\\n They also discovered the way the floors were, that space was meant to be used as a library. You were never meant to have a whole lot of people for a long period of time. If you had set up cubicles and you had tons of people and they were there eight hours a day, the floor loads for the Library could not handle that. So again, they couldn’t use it for staffing. It was meant to have tables. It was meant to have carrels where people would come in and they’d go. It wasn’t meant to be used as office space. Their architecture saved them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’d think somebody would have researched that before they started getting rid of stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You would think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we’re very much in touch with the other libraries across the Agency. There was an organization called Unilibrary that existed among the Research Center libraries, again with a capital R, like Glenn Research Center, those groups.\\n\\n I think around ’98, they opened up Unilibrary to all the Center libraries, not just the research libraries. JSC at that time joined the Unilibrary group. At some point a couple years after we changed the name to NISA, which stands for the NASA Information Services Alliance. At the time that we did that we were basically told that NASA managers did not want to hear library. That was just no good. We came up with NISA, didn’t have the word library in it, because that was considered archaic, it was considered physical spaces. There were all these problems associated with the term library, so we got away from that.\\n\\n I’ve been involved in NISA since ’98. We have monthly telecon ViTS [video teleconferencing services]. Once a year we get together for a face-to-face meeting. Different Centers will host it. We keep up with each other, we can benchmark, we do share statistics. We share a lot of information with each other. We have been trying for a very long time now—the libraries are kind of unusual. We don’t belong to a program at NASA. Some of the libraries are in Center Ops, some are in IRD.\\n\\n There is nobody at high management level that oversees all the libraries at NASA. If something is going wrong, if they want to get rid of the physical collection of the Goddard Library, there’s nobody at a high Agency level who can work on our behalf when these kinds of decisions are made. When budget cuts are made to the libraries, that’s something handled in house at each individual Center. There is no overarching program that is keeping an eye on that and has any concern about that.\\n\\n NISA as an organization has been trying for years to get what we’ve called a champion, some organization that would adopt us. We finally met with success last year and Bob [Robert S.] Sherouse, who is at [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, DC] and is in [the Office of Strategic Infrastructure], he is now the program manager for the Agency libraries. They have changed our name, we’re no longer NISA. I can’t remember what we’re called. I haven’t adjusted to it. It’s only been a couple months. Library is back in it again.\\n\\n It was funny because there’s a working group, and the working group consists of a couple of the civil servant librarians. There’s not that many civil servant librarians across the Agency. It includes a couple of the civil servant librarians, and it also includes a representative from, I think, the NASA Engineering Network and the Chief Scientist’s Office, which I’m really excited about. I’m really happy about [it]. These budget cut decisions get made by the library’s home organization, but the home organization is frequently not a library customer. They can make these cuts without any outcry, because the customers don’t know it’s happening until after it’s happened. Having the Chief Scientist involved in what’s going on at the libraries at an Agency level, having the engineering group involved, I think is very positive. I’m hoping it turns out to be very positive. This is all very new.\\n\\n Bob has been our program manager for a year. We had our face-to-face last April. We were told on the first day of the face-to-face that this had happened, this decision had been made, and Bob was at the face-to-face. None of us had ever heard of him before. We had no idea this was happening. It was interesting. He does not have a library background, but he’s very willing to learn. I know he’s been taking in a lot of information, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens. So we’re back to being a library organization." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Twenty years later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I forget how we got started on this conversation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s okay, it’s all good information. Your comments spawned a whole bunch of questions for me. One being, so no library. One thing that I find that’s very interesting, you mentioned of course information science at the beginning, but you’re not really always referred to as a library, you’re the Scientific and Technical Information Center. I wonder if you would talk about that and where the name came from and how that works with the Library. We call you the Library, because we know you as the Library, but that’s not what you’re referred to. You’re referred to as the STIC." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "STI Center, Scientific and Technical Information Center. When I started working here in ’93, I don’t know when the decision was made to start calling the Library the STI Center. I don’t think it was too long before I started working in the Library. It’s always been a source of confusion, because you would try answering the phone and saying, “Hi, this is Janine, STI Center.”\\n\\n “Oh, I was trying to reach the Library.”\\n\\n “Okay, yes, you’ve reached the Library.”\\n\\n People know what a library is. They don’t necessarily know what the STI Center is. I think that was a management choice to use that term, so we tried. Day in, day out, we refer to ourselves as the Library.\\n\\n It’s also gotten very confusing because there is a Scientific and Technical Information Program. There is an STI Program with a capital P. This organization is responsible for capturing NASA’s knowledge in terms of papers, technical memos, special publications. The STI Program is responsible for trying to capture publications written by NASA workers, contractors, grantees. There’s a process that people go through—the DAA [document availability authorization] process—which is supposed to clear the papers for general consumption. They get put into NTRS. The STI Program was responsible for RECON. They’re responsible for NTRS. They’re the ones that maintain it, update it. That’s where you find NASA formal series documents.\\n\\n The libraries work hand in hand with the STI Program because the STI Program is taking in the information, and the libraries are the ones who are turning around and making sure customers know where they can go to get the information. You would think the libraries would fall under the STI Program, but they do not. There is an STI manager at JSC. She is also in IRD but she is in a different office. I’m in IC [mail code for Customer Engagement and Multimedia Services Office], and she’s in IB [mail code for the Management Integration Office] I think. So we’re not even under the same hierarchy. Yes, we’re both in IRD, but we’re in separate parts of IRD. Because we use the term STI Center, sometimes that gets confusing. “You’re part of the STI Program?”\\n\\n “No.”\\n\\n Here’s my take on it. Here’s the way I try to see it to make sense for at least me. I consider the STI Center at JSC to include all of the JSC libraries, because there’s a Main Library, there’s a Medical Library, and there is also an ISS Program Library. As far as I’m concerned the STI Center includes all three of those libraries, our two multimedia repositories, which is the Still Imagery Repository and the Moving Imagery Repository, and the History Office. I’m the supervisor over all those areas. So I have decided that is what—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s your domain." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. That is what the STI Center is. I frequently will answer the phone and say, “Library.” I don’t answer the phone and say, “STI Center,” but my signature on my e-mail says STI Center supervisor. I don’t use it a lot. I do not use that phrase a lot. It’s very confusing for people. They understand what a library is. They understand what a history office is. I’m guessing they sort of understand what a repository is, although I’m sure sometimes people are like, “What’s the difference between a library and a repository?” Frankly I’m not sure I totally understand. I sort of do.\\n\\n I don’t know the exact history. I do think it started shortly before I started working there. I don’t think it’s something that’s ever really taken hold." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s just interesting to me to have that title, and I don’t know if it’s because NASA is so technologically focused that that’s something that they thought, “Ooh, instead of library what we really need [is],” and they love acronyms." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Maybe people think they can go read novels or something in there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also mentioned something that I was thinking about earlier. JSC is an Ops Center. You mentioned all the Research Centers that banded together and then allowed you to come in a little bit later. Are there differences in terms of the libraries as a result?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My feeling is, generally speaking, the research libraries are better funded than the libraries at the Operational Centers. Now I say that with an asterisk. Some are better funded than others. But generally speaking the Research Centers, their libraries tend to get more funding than the Operational Centers, which I find aggravating to a certain degree. There’s a lot of research that goes on here. No, we are not considered a Research Center with capital R. But when you look at Space and Life [Sciences]—well, they were Space and Life Sciences when I was over there forever. I forget what they’re called now, but anyway SA [current mail code for Human Health and Performance Directorate]. There is a ton of research going on at SA, and it’s real peer-reviewed grant-moneyed research. They are the ones who are responsible for the health of the astronaut corps. They’re almost like academia, publish or perish kind of thing, bringing in grant money, writing articles.\\n\\n We have an Engineering Directorate, and they’re doing research too. They have to figure out how to get these people into space. We may not have research in the name of our institution, but we certainly do research. I think [NASA] Kennedy [Space Center, Florida, KSC] fares even worse than JSC does in terms of funding and being seen as an Operational Center and not a Research Center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Before we turned on the recorder you said that you were a supervisor at the Medical Library in ’98. So you worked your way up pretty quickly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I started in ’93. I was over in the Main Library for a year, maybe two. I became the medical librarian, and I was over in the Medical Library again for like a year, something like that. They pulled me back over to the Main Library maybe around ’96. Actually this was towards the end of a contract. I don’t know if it was the Hernandez contract. It must have been the Hernandez contract.\\n\\n They pulled me back over. They basically put me over technical services, and Sylvia Hu over the public services. Public services is research and reference. Technical services is cataloging, interlibrary loan. She and I were joint co-supervisors for a very short period of time, a couple months, not very long. When I came on board in ’93 Sylvia was out on maternity leave, and she decided she didn’t want to come back, so she left.\\n\\n Eight months later—that’s why at four months I was a senior librarian, because Sylvia had resigned. Then Sharon was moved up to TM. This other woman Carol Hoover, who was a reference librarian, got moved over to EDCC [Engineering Drawing Control Center] or someplace else. The next thing you know, I was the senior librarian. I was like, “Oh my God.” I was so ignorant of NASA when I came here. It’s embarrassing how ignorant I was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think everybody in a humanities background [was]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Here I was the senior librarian. Fortunately, Sylvia came back. Thank God. Sylvia came back like eight months after she left, so she was over in the Main Library, and I ended up going over to the Medical Library. Then we were both back and both jointly overseeing towards the end of the contract. When the contract transitioned to another company, that company decided, rightly, that the Library should only have one supervisor. Sylvia was the right person for that.\\n\\n Sylvia was supervisor, and a year after she became supervisor, if I remember correctly, she wanted them to guarantee her that she would be retained as supervisor through the next contract transition or something like that. Something you can never guarantee. She wasn’t satisfied with that and so she left and took a job with—what was the big company in Houston that Dick Cheney was—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Halliburton?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think she went to work for Halliburton. I think she was one of the last people out the door because she did records management for them. It was either Halliburton or what was the big financial company that went down the tubes that we had a stadium named after?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Enron." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was Enron. She was one of the last people out the door. She decided to leave, and here I am. I’m thinking, “Oh, they’re going to come to me.” I didn’t want to be supervisor. My husband and I had been married for a couple years at this point. We were ready to start a family. This was not on my radar. Sure enough, Mike Smith came and wanted me to be supervisor. I really didn’t want to do it. But I knew that if I didn’t do it, we would have to hire somebody from outside and I would be training them.\\n\\n It’s like, “Well, at this point let me just do the job.” We went through a period where there was a lot of turnover, and again I was the senior librarian. There wasn’t anybody there with as much experience. I had been there four, five years at this point, and all the other librarians were fairly new. I took the job as supervisor while I’m trying to get pregnant, thinking, “Well, it could take a long time. It does sometimes.”\\n\\n No. I think I became supervisor in February, and in March I was pregnant. I went along and the whole time thinking to myself, “I am not going to want to do this once I have a child. I still most likely want to work, but I’m just not sure if being supervisor is what I want.”\\n\\n I let management know at some point during the pregnancy that this was my plan. We had two women working in the Library at the time who at that point, with a couple more months, had enough history that they could probably take over at the end of my pregnancy. Mike chose one of them, Jane Hultberg, to be supervisor after I went out on maternity leave.\\n\\n Part of the reason I didn’t want to become supervisor was I wanted to go back to the Medical Library. I loved the Medical Library. At that point the Main Library was transitioning away from you doing the research for people, but the Medical Library, you were still doing the research for people. It was cool stuff, and I wanted to get back there.\\n\\n I had a master plan. No. It just worked out that when I was pregnant, I went out on maternity leave. At the time the Medical Library, the librarian position was a part-time position. The woman working there, she worked part-time in the Medical Library and the other half in the Main Library, so she split her time between the two. It was perfect after I came back from maternity leave. I also didn’t want to work full-time. I became the medical librarian and Jan was able to be full-time over in the Main Library, which let’s face it, it’s much easier to be in one place. She went over to the Main Library. I became the medical librarian. I think I was working 30 hours a week, so it wasn’t straight-up 20-hour-per-week, but it was perfect as a new mother. I was there. I was at the Medical Library for 15 years and very happy.\\n\\n Then around that time the supervisor for the STI Center, she moved on to another job. I still didn’t want to be supervisor. She even asked me. She was like, “Janine, would you do this?”\\n\\n I’m like, “No, I don’t want to do it.”\\n\\n Part of the reason I was saying no was frankly I was looking for another job. Between the furlough that happened several years ago and also budget cuts in the Medical Library, I was unhappy. My husband and I both worked at NASA, all our eggs were in one basket, and that furlough that went for a whole two and a half weeks, it was just kind of—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, exactly. I was just thinking, “I don’t like this. This is not comfortable.” For the first time since I had started working there, I looked for another job. I did my resume, was sending it out, doing interviews. I felt really confident about a particular job, so I kept saying, “No, I don’t want to be supervisor,” because I was really hoping this other job would come through.\\n\\n The other job didn’t come through. Christa [George] was about to leave. I think it was her final two weeks or something when I got notification that I didn’t get this other job. It was like, “Here I am in this situation. Christa is about to be gone. We’re going to have to hire somebody from outside. Who’s going to have to train them? I’m going to have to train them.” I was just like, “All right, here we go again.” I agreed to be the supervisor.\\n\\n Both times, it was with great reluctance. Didn’t stick the first time, which I was okay with, which was my choice. Even at the time Mike Smith offered to allow me to continue to be supervisor part-time, and I was just like, “I can’t do that, that’s not fair. I can’t have all these people working full-time, and here I am just coming in and out whenever the heck I feel like it. That’s not right.” I did have the opportunity to stay on as supervisor back in ’98, but I just didn’t feel like that was the right thing to do. So 2015 is when I became supervisor for the second time, reluctantly, and here I am four years later. I’m surprised, because I continued to look for a job, in all honesty.\\n\\n I gave it up for a while, because I wouldn’t have felt right if I had gotten a job. I had said I would do this, and I wouldn’t have felt right. But I thought I need to at least keep my foot wet. When you haven’t interviewed for a job in like 20 years it’s really nerve-racking. It was like, “I need to stay on top of this just for my own career, my own personal growth.” But I haven’t interviewed. I haven’t sent out a resume in a very long time. I think I’m here till the end." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think we’re all sort of here till the end. I feel like I’m hanging on like that little kitty cat poster." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hanging on like the cat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There’s a lot of great things about working here, and those things are more important to me than other things. There’s a lot of flexibility in the schedule, which I really appreciate. My husband, he works out here. It’s an easy commute. He spends a lot of time going to KSC. I can go with him sometimes, because I can telecommute. It’s not something I can do all the time but it’s certainly something I can do sometimes. They allow for it.\\n\\n It’s NASA, and, well, people think it’s cool. Sometimes you remember it’s cool. It has its moments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It does." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It does. I usually think about that when I have visitors or when the tram comes by and everybody’s waving at me, and they’re so excited. This is really cool to be here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Think about the people you’ve actually met. It’s amazing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, there’s a lot. It is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was teaching my son to drive, and I thought well, bring him out here on a weekend." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that’s a great idea." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was perfect, because you’ve got regular streets. You’ve got stop signs. You’ve got streetlights, but there’s nobody here. It’s a very safe environment. I brought him out here a couple times when he was learning how to drive. The trams of course are still going. He’s like, “What’s it like to work someplace where people visit?” It’s cool sometimes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It is cool when you think about it. I’ve had so many people tell me that they want my job. I’m like, “Well, I’m not giving it up.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There’s one. No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Exactly, better come up with a new job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "New career plan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Exactly, I’ll let you know when I’m done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When I’m through you can have it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’ve hardly hit on any of the topics, but I did want to ask you one question. Then I guess we’ll meet with John [Uri]. That’s becoming a medical librarian, because that is such a very specific career. Were you reading medical journals, or did you just pick it up the way you picked up NASA things around here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I technically don’t have a medical background. My mother is nurse, but that’s like saying I slept in a Holiday Inn last night. That doesn’t mean I really know anything. I did work in a hospital when I was in college. I was what they called at the time a unit clerk, which was basically the secretary for a floor.\\n\\n Of course clinical medical hospital settings can be very different than a research setting. I’d like to say I was familiar with some of the terminology, and some of that is kind of true. I know oncology is cancer. But yes, I pretty much just picked it up on the job. I found it interesting, which always helps, not having any kind of science or engineering background.\\n\\n What’s important for me as a librarian is that I understand the databases that are appropriate for the subject. That I knew from my schooling, from working, how a database works. Most databases, they may work differently, but you know what they’re capable of. I know I can search by title. Let me figure out how to do it in this one. It might be different than in another one. Or wildcards, okay, this one is a question mark, sometimes it’s an asterisk. But you know you can truncate. It’s just a matter of going into the help and figuring out what symbol you’re going to use to truncate. I know how to search a database. I know what databases to search. I know how to conduct a reference interview.\\n\\n What I’ve always found helpful, especially for areas that I’m finding difficult finding information in, is if I can find anything and give it to the customer and be like, “Is there something in here that stands out that’s like, ‘That’s exactly what I need’?” Because I can take that and look at the subject headings and change my search based on it. If I can find them just one thing that works that helps me expand.\\n\\n It’s funny. You do start to learn the terminology. Someone will come to me and want to know how vision is affected in weightlessness. They don’t realize how many different terms there are for weightless and not just terms. You would use weightlessness. You would use microgravity. You would use Space Shuttle, because the Space Shuttle happens in weightlessness.\\n\\n They understand what they need, and sure, they can do a Google search or something like that, but they’re probably going to find a very [small number of publications]. They may not realize that maybe instead of weightlessness they really should be using microgravity or vice versa, depending on which system you’re searching.\\n\\n You learn these things on the job. No medical background. Haven’t studied up on it. Just pick it up. If I’m having trouble finding anything I can say to the customer, “Look, do you have a paper on this topic that’s really what you’re looking for?” Again, I can take that. I can look at the subject headings. I can look at all the fields and figure out how to try and get the search going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you want to ask Janine a question? We’ve got about five minutes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. One thing, it’s a quick answer probably. Do you know if the other libraries at the other NASA Centers or librarians or managers, however you want to think of yourself, do they have archives or the repositories and like you have us, and then the different repositories and the multiple libraries? Do they have that kind of situation too? Or is this something that JSC is kind of unique in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think JSC is pretty unique that way. I do think at Glenn there’s something associated with the Library. It’s the Education Center or something like that, I think, but I don’t know if the manager is over that. We all do wear a lot of hats generally speaking.\\n\\n I do know some of the other Centers have more than one library. But I don’t think there’s many of them. [NASA] Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] has a Life Sciences Library. KSC used to have a Medical Library in addition to their Main Library but they don’t have it anymore. I don’t know when that went away.\\n\\n I think I’m the only one that’s involved in multimedia. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who’s involved in multimedia. Now I think at Goddard the Archives is under the library manager. Here it is not. The Archives is separate. There is some odd structuring at the different Centers. I think I’m the only supervisor that has as many organizations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It is different. The other thing, the Library or what you work with, how does it work with groups like under SMA [Safety and Mission Assurance] now? They are collecting all the knowledge. They’re putting everything into Goldfire. Do you have a relationship with them when they’re doing that? I’m sure there’s other areas, like everybody here seems like they want to collect their own stuff and they want to keep it, so that they decide on what database type interface they want. Do you have access to all of those so that you can help with that? Or how is that relationship?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We used to have a better relationship with the Knowledge Management group because at one time the taxonomist was also under the STI Center supervisor. When the taxonomist was part of the Library, I think we were more connected to the Knowledge Management group, all the Goldfire stuff.\\n\\n Based on that previous relationship I know people in Knowledge Management like David Meza. I haven’t seen anything lately. Any time I would see something going on I would try to be involved. David has come to me in the past. When the Goldfire reps came before they agreed to license with them, David involved me in that.\\n\\n We’re not as connected with them. It would probably be better if we were more connected with them, but I think it’s hard because we’re in separate organizations. I think we both respect each other’s areas and have interest in each other’s areas—[it’s an] out of sight out of mind sort of situation. I don’t think there’s anything intentional there. Yes, that’s always a relationship that I would like to better develop. But I’m one person, and I’ve got a lot of areas I’m responsible for.\\n\\n We were part of a telecon yesterday, the NISA group, with some database system that basically—the Knowledge Management, they’re kind of interested in numerical data capture. This system is more about capturing the research, the paper research. It’s a system. I don’t remember what it was called. The Glenn librarians work with it, use it. The Glenn librarians have a really interesting relationship with the small business, the SBIR [Small Business Innovation Research], the business outreach group at Glenn. They work very closely with them trying to help them find industry that would benefit from Glenn products and also industries that could potentially help partner with Glenn for products. They’re using this tool a lot with that, because it helps you see relationships, and what universities, what industries are working on. I don’t know, 737s not exploding. The libraries just found out about it yesterday.\\n\\n This company is obviously talking to a lot of organizations at NASA, because NASA is getting at this point where innovation, partnering with outside universities and industries is very important. This is the kind of tool that would help lead NASA as an organization figure out who is being innovative, who they should be working with, who’s working on the same kind of stuff that we’re working on, and how can we work with them.\\n\\n I wish I could remember the name of the product, but it was a knowledge management, knowledge capture: analyzing, figuring out who to work with. I thought of David when I was listening to this. I was like, “I wonder if he’d be interested in this.” Yes, he does cross my mind and there are times when I’m thinking, “Oh, he might find this interesting.” I hope he thinks the same thing. In the past he has contacted me when he thought something would be useful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It just seems like everybody has their own little territory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We call them silos. Everybody’s got their own silo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If everything could be connected, it would just make so much more sense." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For decades every once in a while we will hear from down on high that they want a database that would give them everything that NASA has." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The easy button." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good luck with that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we’ve been through this process many many times where we’ve tried to do this. Everybody has their silos, and it’s really hard to break it down. Some of these systems we have control over, other systems we don’t have control over. Then you get inundated. It’s like, “Okay, well, you got everything now. Now what are you going to do? Because it’s way too much.” Corporate knowledge, the longer you’re here, the more aware you are of people’s different silos. You can’t get away from the importance of corporate knowledge because so long as those silos exist, you need to have people who know where they are, who knows who’s responsible for them, who can help you access them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s very true. We should probably end because I hear John scratching around there. Thank you. I will send you a note and we’ll have more time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Janine C. Bolton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "nprc-oral-histories-00003", + "metadata": { + "interviewee_name": "Charles Pellegrini", + "description": "\"So if somebody's record was destroyed, nobody ever thought, 'well, there's no hope for you.'”", + "file_url": "https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/nprc-fire/charles-pellegrini-oral-history-final.pdf", + "collection_url": "https://www.archives.gov/about/history/nprc-oral-histories", + "original_file_name": "charles-pellegrini-oral-history-final.pdf", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04 22:30:07", + "publisher": "U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION", + "date": "May 16, 2023" + }, + "broad_source": "nara", + "collection": "nprc_oral_histories", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Jessie Kratz" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Charlie Pellegrini" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you for participating in the National Archives Oral History Project documenting the 1973 National Personnel Records Center Fire, its impact on the National Archives, and what it was like to work at NPRC. My name is Jessie Kratz, and I am the Historian of the National Archives. Today is May 16, 2023, and I’m speaking with Charlie Pellegrini. Thank you, Charlie, for joining me today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was hoping you could start by providing a brief overview of your career at the National Archives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. I began at the National Archives at the Civilian Personnel Records Center in March of 1974. Well, April of ‘74, actually, which was like eight months after the fire at the other building. I was located in the civilian personnel records building. And in just a few months, in August of 1974, I accepted the position of management analyst. And most of my career of 30 years was either as a management analyst or a supervisory management analyst. I did have a couple of periods of time when I was a supervisory archives specialist, when I was the acting chief of the Navy Reference Branch and also chief of the General Reference Branch. The Navy Reference Branch was at 9700 Page Avenue and serviced requests for a variety of records relating to Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard personnel. The General Reference Branch was at 111 Winnebago Street and serviced a variety of non-personnel records such as IRS tax returns, USPS money orders, and records of depression-era agencies. So we had two locations in St. Louis, basically one that housed civilian records and then one that housed military records. But I spent most of my career at the one that housed military records. As I said, I was a management analyst, then eventually became the supervisory management analyst, and then the chief of the management system staff, where we had a staff of about 20 people that were management analysts, management assistants, a budget analyst, trainees, and also people that did the training for the center. So I retired in April of 2004, and during my 30 years I spent a lot of time on a lot of different projects with a lot of different people. But my main responsibilities always included coordinating the release of information from personnel and medical records, coordinating actions for problematic legal demands and complaints, and doing non-routine FOIA and Privacy Act requests. I was also the Information Security Manager and Top Secret Control Manager. I had a staff of about 13 to 15 people, management analysts, management assistants, and budget analysts. So in a nutshell, that’s my career." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, great. What brought you to the National Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was discharged from the Air Force in 1969, and from ‘69 to ‘74, I attended college and also worked a number of part-time jobs. But I was looking for something more permanent. I had gotten married, we had a child, and I was looking for something where I could make a career. And I was familiar with the National Personnel Records Center. I’ve seen the building hundreds of times driving by, and I knew in general what kind of work they did there. So that led me to apply for a job. And as I said, I got the job and I started at the Civilian Personnel Records Center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So you were already in the area in St. Louis—I know you weren’t working for the National Archives, but were you around when the fire happened?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was certainly aware of the fire. It was the biggest news going. So, I was certainly aware of the fire. And I don't know, maybe it even attracted my attention more as far as applying for a job there. But yes, I lived in the area, and I was certainly aware of the fire. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So you came to the Military Personnel Records Center about a year after the fire?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, about eight months. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Eight months after the fire. Can you talk about what it was like in the building?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as I said, I started at the Civilian Personnel Records Center and we were more or less drying out records for the military center at that point. So you always had the odor of the records, the burnt records, and also some of the chemicals they put on the records. So that was ever-present. And then the other thing that was, I guess, something that I knew right away from working at the Civilian Personnel Records Center was we were anxiously looking through all of our holdings to see what might be available and useful to people who had lost their records. When I transferred out to the Military Personnel Records Center, it was still a building that was in, well, construction. I mean, there was still a lot of very visible damage, and there was the smell of the records, and the smell of the building. A lot of people who had done a lot of work right after the fire itself had many stories to tell about what they had to go through to move records and get records down to safety, more or less, after the fire. So, yeah, it was just something that was ever-present. I had a friend that did key punching of records, and she had to hold the records while she did that and said she would just go home and say, “I just want to get cleaned up, take a shower, get my clothes off. Just because it’s everywhere, all over me.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. So before you moved to the military building, were you involved with the fire or recovery documents when you were at the Civilian Personnel Records Center?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not the actual military records that were destroyed. Just a few months after I came on board I was involved in a project where we processed military pay records, basically final pay documents, pertaining to veterans that were getting discharged, and this is a record of their final pay. So just a few months after I came on board, I got involved in running a project where we would start screening those records. And since they had a name and service number on the pay records, they would be extremely useful as far as verifying a person had military service, in addition to the other information available on those pay records, like the date they were discharged, and if they had an honorable discharge or not. Or, how much mustering-out pay they were entitled to, which would indicate if they served overseas or not overseas, or how long they served. Also information about their home address, things like that. So anyway, I was involved in the initial setup of that project and the final pay vouchers got to be one of the biggest collections of records we had initially that we were able to use to verify military service." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Then you moved over to the building in Overland? Right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s correct. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your duties when you got there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My duties were a management analyst and I was still involved with the payroll project. That kind of moved with me or I moved with it. But this time I had somebody that was actually on the floor doing it. I didn’t do that every day, but I had somebody that was doing that, a guy named Eric Voelz, and he had a group of what we call summer hires. So mainly college students. And he had that project. He was running that, and I was actually in charge of that. But that was one of my major duties. And then my other duties were just what management analysts do or did at that time. We researched the procedures and then made sure we were processing the work in the most efficient way and then produced a written document that was a directive for our people to follow. Also, I did time and motion studies for standards when we were trying to set up standards for how many cases an individual employee should do every day. I was on a group of people who did the standards project. So, it was a lot of different management analyst type stuff, you know, mainly researching and then writing, but also running that payroll project until we finally got it not done, but pretty much automatic. It just ran by itself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. When you mentioned the payroll project, what other sorts of records would you consult?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as far as verifying military information, we had microfilmed morning reports. Morning reports were quite valuable. Morning reports for a unit show if something happened to a person. In other words, it wouldn’t show every person in a unit every day but if a person was wounded or killed in action or went on leave or was promoted or anything like that. When something happens to that person, that would usually go on the morning report. So they were extremely helpful to verify things. And then also we had X-rays when an individual went into the military. There was an X-ray taken, a chest X-ray, and when they were discharged, a chest X-ray was taken. So these X-rays were also in our holdings, and we used those to come up with some information where we could verify maybe a date of entrance or a date of separation, things like that. We also eventually came up with something called the SGO file, which was the Surgeon General’s Office file. And these records were statistics—there was no name, but there were service numbers for most of them. But statistics based on hospitalizations, injuries, things like that. So eventually we had one of the management analysts, a woman by the name of Diane Rademacher, work on a project where she took the data that was in this file and made it useful to us as far as searching. And it gave us the service number and then we could cross match the service number to a name and the Surgeon General’s office files were extremely useful for providing proof to veterans that they were actually wounded or injured, you know, things like that that would provide veterans benefits to them eventually. So things like that were extremely useful to the veteran, and to us for that matter. But we had oh, gee, there’s no shortage of things we came up with. We had cards that showed awards that individuals earned during their military service, so you could search these cards and come up with a name and then more or less verify something that the veteran was trying to prove. We got VA [Veterans Administration] records that were extremely useful, obviously, since the VA had many records for individuals who had military service and related records for individuals. And then we went to the state Adjutant General offices to see if some individuals registered with the state for some sort of benefit or just registered because they thought they should. So we could go to states and get information from them. So there’s a great many different types of records that we called “alternate records.” They weren't the actual military service records, but they were records that we came up with or that we found or that somebody told us, “Hey, we have this.” And eventually you can verify military service, you can verify injuries, wounds, things like that. You can verify training. So if somebody's record was destroyed, nobody ever thought, “well, there's no hope for you.” You know, there were a lot of options out there, I’ll put it that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. So can you talk about some of the challenges you faced with working with a particular set of records?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the biggest challenge is, of course, how much information is somebody giving you in order to find the record you’re looking for or the records you’re looking for. So many times, especially when you’re dealing with next of kin or maybe some sort of agency that’s trying to work on behalf of the veteran, they may not know the information you need. I worked on a project maybe in the last 10 or so years of my career where we were dealing with people that were in a group called “War Babes.” They were children who were fathered by American servicemen, primarily in Great Britain during World War II. And they obviously realized that the aging population of World War II veterans was going away, and if possible they would try to contact them or just get verification of who their father was. But in many cases the information they had was something like, “Tom Smith who was in the Air Force,” which just was a challenge. You know, we’d need to know maybe the full name, a service number, maybe the place where the person came from. In other words, where they lived before they were in the military. So that’s one example where we tried to work with those people. But a lot of times even the veteran himself, if he was aged or infirmed or something, maybe the information provided to us just wasn’t enough to locate a record. So I think the biggest challenge was how much information you got from the requester so that you could satisfy the request." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So I know this is very hard to do but could you describe a typical day for you in the early years and then maybe towards the end of your career?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yeah, I worked with a group of other management analysts in my early career, and we were all, I guess, about the same age, about the same education level. So in other words, it was an environment where you were working with people who had the same interest in it. If they needed help, you’d give it to them, of course. And vice-versa. So I thought maybe the biggest thing that I would say about the beginning of my career is I thought, well, this is the right place to work. This is the place where I could get something done and do something that’s valued and means something. And I think I always had the feeling that everybody thought pretty much the same—you’re there doing the job and you tried to do the job as well as you can. So as far as that working arrangement in the office, I thought that was a good one. And then when you went out and tried to get some information from the operations, the people that were actually searching for the records or writing responses, things like that, you tried to explain what you were doing and they understood that everybody was going to be helpful and trying to help you. So that was the feeling I had when I started up. And then when I got later in my career, and I truthfully have to say that it was pretty much the same way—I had a staff of management analysts and management assistants, and they were all trying to do the right thing as far as I was concerned. And you know, every time I gave somebody an assignment, I said, “if somebody comes back at you and says, no, we don’t want to do this, or you just can't move past an obstacle, let me know.” And I can’t remember very many times when anybody ever had to come back and go, “oh, no, I can't do this because somebody is saying this doesn’t need to be done or they won't give me what I need.” Things like that. So I think in general, at both the beginning and ending of my career where I thought I could get something done. And I thought the people I worked with wanted to get something done, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's great. I saw this nice photo of you and John Carver when you retired in the staff newsletter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s my partner in crime there. We’ve been together for a lot of years, and I still talk to him a lot during the week. And so anyway, so it was the same way with several other people that I work with, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. It sounds like you had good rapport with a lot of staff there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, and that makes for a happy day when you go to work. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Well, because you are working in a unique building and circumstances as compared to the rest of the National Archives, did the Archives or GSA, I guess, at that time, provide any special training for staff?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t recall that. I do recall that GSA—we were then a part of GSA until about ‘85. Anyway, I do recall the GSA was just as dedicated, you might say, to get it done and to get things moved and to get things fixed. And so I think that as far as the National Archives, again, I don’t recall anything in specific because these records were still not part of the National Archives. They were still owned by the military services. So we had liaison officers for all the military services. So if we had questions or problems or stuff like that, many times we would go to the liaison office just because, as I said, those records didn’t belong to us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. I’m glad you brought that up. So the records belonged to DoD, and we were basically taking care of them in the records center there. When did discussions begin about making these permanent records, and were you involved with that at all?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, those discussions started well before I retired. So I’d say in the 1990s, that I recall, where we would have staff meetings with people that came from our central office and were talking about that. And I remember even being asked a question, “what do you think? How many years after somebody is discharged?” That type of thing. So I think that was a given because obviously the earlier military records were already in the National Archives and were accessible because they were in the National Archives. I think it was a natural thing to assume. And I remember conversations came up about it a few times. But anyway, at least in the 1990s, I remember those conversations and you knew it was going to go that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Did you notice any changes on how the NPRC was managed after the National Archives got independence from GSA in 1985?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s a hard one. I think we always had a lot of contact with our central office and I always had a lot of contact with the General Counsel’s office, things like that. But people that actually worked in the Archives in Washington, some of the people on our staff certainly had contact with them, discussing specific records. So we did have a fair amount of contact before and after. I think it was just a continuation, or at least what I recall was just a continuation of that. We always had pretty good rapport with everybody in our central office. And as I said, I had pretty good rapport with people in the General Counsel’s office. And I know we had people on our staff that dealt with archivists quite a bit. So, I don’t think it was a huge change, but it was, I don't know, maybe we just felt a little bit more like we can call up people and ask them rather than have to worry about not calling them up or something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. So, what role did technology play over the course of your career with regard to the problems of these records?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Right. Yeah. We didn’t have a lot of things available in the 1970s. But then as technology opened up, then all of a sudden you had a computer on your desk and you could query the registry system right where you were sitting. The registry system, which held record location information for our records, would show if we had something for a certain individual. So if you’re talking on the phone and you’re asked if a record was available, you could look it up immediately and see what type of record or records we held. It could be an actual record or maybe it was a payroll record or some other kind of record. So the technology certainly made it a lot easier for people to locate information and then answer questions. At least it certainly did for me, that’s for sure. But for everyone else, too. But then we just got more of the records that we used to have to search manually, and if we could get them into a computer system we could just put in a name or service number or whatever and come up with an answer right there. So yeah, technology made a difference, especially through the 2000s or the ‘70s through the ‘90s. Yes, it made a huge difference in everybody’s job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. So you mentioned that you had to work with other federal agencies quite a bit. So when there were changes within those agencies when there was change in the Presidential administration? Did that have any impact or was it pretty much seamless?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know. I mean, obviously we dealt with the Veterans Administration and they had a vested interest in us coming up with answers. And as administrations changed and as people in charge in the central office, every once in a while you would say, “Oh, well, we used to deal with somebody and now we have somebody else that’s not as helpful.” But overall, the federal agencies that we dealt with, no matter when we were talking about during these 30 years I worked, they understood that you were trying to help somebody. It was a veteran. And they tried to come up with what you needed. So I found that in state agencies and I found that in federal agencies. So I know things change. And as I said, sometimes it wasn’t as easy to get an answer as it used to be. But again, that’s just normal, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. So what policies and procedures were put in place after the fire? And then how did those change over the years and evolve?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. You know, after the fire, we came up with a lot of procedures that were for an emergency—this is how we’re going to do this right now. And as time went by and things smoothed out, those procedures changed. It wasn’t an emergency type of situation anymore. So yeah, there were quite a few things that changed as far as how we handled records. How much work we had to do on a particular case until we just couldn’t find anything at all. How people actually went to work every day and in their office, their surroundings. I don’t know how clean they were, how efficient they were, things like that. So things change, but again that fire was a huge disaster at any time, but we couldn’t leave that building. Everything that we had and dealt with was in that building. So the procedures that we had at first as far as personnel and as far as procedures, things like that, may have accommodated the emergency situation. But as time went on, everything kind of smoothed out and I don’t know how long you would say that would take. I mean, at least maybe 10 years longer until everything was running pretty smoothly, and we knew what we’re doing. The place was cleaned up. The building was the way it was supposed to be. So it may have taken that long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So I would like to give a visual on the building since it was very large and you lost the whole top floor of it. Can you describe the building where the fire occurred, and where your offices were, and then maybe some of the other organizations that were also in the building?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the building is huge. I can’t remember, it’s 720 or 730 feet long or something. And it is a big imposing building. And really it’s a kind of a box. That’s the way it was built, as far as I know. Was built like a box. And it’s just glass windows and aluminum and there’s a portico or entrance, things like that. But basically it’s just a huge box. It’s not exactly square, but a huge, tall box. And when that top floor burned and eventually had to be torn down it’s still a large box, there’s no doubt about it. And for staff offices we had people ranging throughout the building searching for records, but most of the office space was on one side of the building. Most of the offices or at least the management offices and also the different branches were in one area of the building there. And then there was a separate, attached building where a cafeteria was. And some of the liaison officers also had their offices in the other area. I mean, it was attached; it wasn't detached. By the way, we also had an officers’ club in the other separate part of the building, which was always amazing. So, anyway, after the fire and after—I don’t remember how long it took to take down the entire sixth floor, but after that, the building was still just a big building. And we had escalators going up to different floors and elevators going up to different floors for people hauling records up and down and obviously stairways, too. But anyway, it was quite an imposing building. There’s no doubt about that. Eventually the Army Reserve Personnel Center was co-located with us, and they eventually built a new building right next to the original building, which again, was a pretty imposing building too. But that building is, I think, now used by the Department of Agriculture, I’m not sure. But anyway when the Army Reserve Personnel Center moved into their own building, we got more room for staff and for other things. So that was welcome, to say the least." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You might not know this, but do you have a sense of how many staff members we had working in the building when you started?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I think there’s a couple thousand." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And those were not just National Archives or GSA, but other agencies as well, or just GSA and the National Archives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it probably was the other people included, too, I think. Liaison officers and some of the people from the Army Reserve Personnel Center. But I think I think, yeah, it was at least a couple thousand people working there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what was the culture like working there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there was, you know, it was a military culture, I think, because in the 1970s, many individuals who worked there had been in the military, and then you were co-located there with the Army Reserve. So I think it was that kind of situation. I know we went to military retirement ceremonies and when we had some kind of event, maybe our people would have a fashion show for something, and the military officers would come in their dress uniforms. So to me, it seemed that way. It seemed more military. And of course, it was the Military Personnel Records Center, but it seemed more military than civilian. And officers and enlisted men were in uniform. And you dealt with those people most days and you saw them in the parking lot and you saw them in the cafeteria. So, yeah, I think that’s what I would say." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Can you talk a little bit about the aspects of your work that you enjoyed the most?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think the aspect I enjoyed the most was being able to get something done to help somebody out. I think a lot of times you go through with jobs and you just you go, well, I’m toiling away here, but I don’t know what good it does. But I think almost every day when I went to work, even if some attorney was yelling at me on the phone or somebody was irate about our procedures or our results and, you know, things like that, the bottom line was, every day I kind of thought, well, I could help somebody out. I could straighten this out for him or somebody on our staff wrote a letter that took care of that situation. So, I think that’s basically what I felt. I always thought if you're a federal employee and you’re in a job where your job is to help people, then you should help people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. My favorite part of the job is also helping people. Good. Good. Hopefully all of us feel that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, no, it’s an important thing. And truthfully, when you talk to other people and certainly not everybody feels that way. You know, it’s just I think it’s a good feeling. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, do you have any experiences that were particularly memorable during your time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, gee. You know, as I told you I had worked on this project trying to help people locate their fathers. That War Babe thing. And by the way, the War Babes sued the National Archives and they said we weren’t giving the information that we should under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And in many cases we weren’t giving the FOIA information that we should have. So eventually the attorney who was handling the case came and talked to me and the director and a couple of other people, and I was given the job of coordinating and getting it done. And because of that responsibility, I was subsequently invited to attend conferences in the Netherlands. So I made a couple trips to the Netherlands and helped people out with their searches, anything that you could do under the Freedom of Information Act, anyway. I made a couple trips there, and then I also went on a couple trips to Germany and Italy because one of my staff was a retired sergeant major and he had gone on a trip to Italy and Germany for a Retiree Appreciation Day for many of the veterans that were living overseas. And he sort of said, “well, why don’t you go next year?” So I did. But that was on 9/11. So, talk about a memorable experience. So I was in Vicenza, Italy, and I tried to get into the airborne infantry base there in Vicenza, Italy. And they had us open our bags and unpack our bags there on the ground more or less, to show them we weren’t carrying anything. After eventually getting onto the base, there were no flights going back to the United States, no aircraft flying. So we ended up spending over a week there. But the people were very good and treated us well. And it was a memorable experience. But as I said, planning a trip and then 9/11 occurs wasn’t the best plan. So that didn’t turn out too good. But yeah, through the years, many people thank my staff, thank the Center, thank me personally for things that we had helped them with. And I think that just more or less solidifies in your mind that, well, I did the best I could and people were helped and that’s what we're supposed to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you mentioned that the War Babes sued the National Archives. How was that resolved?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was resolved, basically, when their attorney who was the lead in the case, came here to the Center and spoke to us and basically said you’re supposed to be providing at least information under the Freedom of Information Act. And there wasn’t anything I could argue about on that. And that’s when I was more or less put in charge of receiving all of those requests and then making sure that when we send back an answer, we either had a legitimate reason for not finding a record or we provided everything that we could provide." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you mentioned working with some FOIA requests. Did people or organizations make FOIA requests for information about the fire itself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I don’t recall those, to tell you the truth. You know, they certainly sent us Freedom of Information Act requests about individual veterans. Those are the kind we get. But as far as a fire, not that I recall. I mean, it was covered extensively in newspapers. And I guess if there would have been an internet, then there would have been—I know there were theories about how it started and who started it, things like that. But I guess if there would have been an internet, there would have been a lot more of that type of traffic, you know? Yeah. But anyway, none that I recall answering. I’m not saying somebody didn’t get that type of request, but not the type of thing that I remembered answering or getting involved with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. Yeah. I’m very interested in the kinds of FOIA requests that the National Archives get because we get lots, and they are varied." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, right. But most of ours obviously relate to military personnel, sometimes just to try to locate them. Other times to try to find out if the story they’re telling is actually the true story. You know, things like that. So, yeah, we get a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests. Obviously we had a list of things that we could give out of a record, and that’s what we stuck with: name, serial number, date of birth, dates of service, rank, when they got discharged, assignments, education, place of separation, and place of entry. So it was standard information that we had a listing and if it was available, we had to give it. If it wasn’t available because the record was destroyed, we would just say, “no, not available.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And at this time, were you dealing mostly with letter requests through the mail or phone requests or both?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, mainly letter requests, yeah. Right. If somebody called us up, the first thing we would say was, did you send in a request? So, yes, we certainly depended on the mail and the mail coming in and the response going out was in the mail. Sometimes people would come personally and want to search their own record possibly, or a record of somebody who had given them permission. But then we had what we called a research room, and the research room attendant would handle that. But yeah, I’d say 90 percent would be mailed-in requests, certainly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And there was a research room in the same building?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, there was. And basically it related to people who were either given, in other words, they ran a business or else somebody had given them permission to review their record. And there were people who wanted to come in themselves and review their record. So it wasn’t like immediate service. In other words, it might take some time to locate a record. So many of them would phone in and go, “how do I do this or that type of thing?” And then we’d have a research room where they could come when the record was actually available for them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think is the most important impact that this fire had on the National Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think one of the most important impacts is first you had to have sprinklers in the record center. That’d be a biggie. But secondly, I think, the records that were destroyed—and there’s been other destruction of records throughout the history of the United States and also other places in the world—but I think the lesson learned was you don’t just throw up your hands and walk away and say, well, that’s all gone. In this case, we had many, many, many options and everybody immediately thought of the options and located those options, and it was a success. So I think the lesson would be when you have a disaster then what next? Well, what next is what really counts because you have to go find out what happened. How do we prevent it? How do we take care of the people who were affected? So I think the National Archives and GSA and other federal agencies did a good job with that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. So looking back at the totality of your career, though, how do you view your time at the National Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had an enjoyable 30 years in the federal government, and I think I did more good than harm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember your last day at the Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I do. Yes, I do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you feel?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it was just, you know, a real change in life because, as I said, I had lots of friends there and we were always close. And one of my closest friends, John Carver and I, we were both retiring on the same day. And we had a big blowout party. But anyway, I remember I cleaned out my desk and they had a bag and a few things that people had given me, little souvenirs and stuff. And every time I left work, I always told one of the secretaries there by the door where I left, I always said, “I’m off.” And every time she just laughed and went, “yeah,” or something like that. So this time I said that and I think she may have started crying. So, she wasn’t laughing that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Have you been to the new building?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, I’ve been there for retirement parties, things like that. And I’ve also been over to the cave where they moved civilian records over in Illinois. So yeah, I’ve been to both locations. Scott Levins at the military building and Kim Gentile at the cave location were always kind enough to invite me and other retired people to go to ceremonies and things like that, you know, the official opening of the building, and as I said, retirements. So yes, I’ve certainly been to both new locations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think about the caves?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, it’s a fascinating place, really. Tell you the truth, I know it’s a proven technology if you want to use the word technology. But I just think it’s amazing. And every time I go over there, I’m amazed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very impressive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Both buildings are, both locations now are impressive as far as where the old places used to be. The Civilian Personnel Records Center is now sort of like a warehouse transfer point for trucks. And it’s still there. And for the Military Personnel Records Center, I don’t if that building is even occupied by many people. There was talk about taking it down and things like that. But I don’t know what the plan is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think that there was a reporter trying to ask some questions, and I know GSA still owns it, so they wanted to take the elevator that goes to nowhere, I guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think it goes that far anymore. But yes, that’s interesting. Yeah, I think there were some problems with asbestos in that building. So I don’t know what’s going to end up there eventually. Taking that huge building down will be problematic. I’ll put it that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything about the fire that we didn’t cover that you wanted to share? Or the aftermath?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really. As I said, I came on board about eight months after the fire. So people who worked there before, during, and after, especially right there at 9700 Page might obviously have different memories, different feelings about things. You know, when I finally got out there after the fire, things were just different. And I talked to people, guys who were there during and after. And yeah, my experiences weren’t exactly the same." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. We’re trying to interview a wide range of people who worked there after the fire in various positions. So, we’re talking to some of your former colleagues." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, hopefully that list I gave you would give you some people to talk to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s very helpful. We’ve reached out to many of them and almost everyone is going to participate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s good. And as I said, they'll have different experiences than I did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. But it was an important event, a big event. And lots of people at the National Archives have played quite a major role in helping these veterans. So it’s an important story to tell. And we have been telling it, but now it’s the 50th anniversary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My worry was there was so much done about the fire itself and it was my feeling that, yes, that was obviously a disaster and a significant disaster in the history of the United States. But I think it’s also very significant what happened afterwards and how things went so that we could verify military service. Now, I know that World War II veterans are few and far between anymore and the same way is going with Korea. So I don’t know how many requests they receive for those types of records anymore, but that’s a dwindling number, I’m sure. But still, it’s still there. The history is still there. Those people’s stories are still there. I think that’s all important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. I really appreciate our staff’s commitment to the veterans. You’re right. We could have just washed our hands of it. But we’ve made this commitment to make sure the veterans are getting their records, and we’re still being impacted by the fire today, which is amazing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Certainly. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. Well, are there any other stories or anecdotes you want to share? It doesn't have to be fire related; it can be about your time at the National Archives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charlie Pellegrini", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "None that I could tell where somebody would record it, though. [laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jessie Kratz", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I’ll stop the recording now." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00691", + "metadata": { + "category": "Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office Oral History Project 2012 - 2013", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/C3PO/ThompsonDW/thompsondw.htm", + "original_file_name": "ThompsonDW_6-3-13.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/C3PO/ThompsonDW/ThompsonDW_6-3-13.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "David W. Thompson", + "location_date": "Dulles, Virginia – 13 June 2013" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright", + "Rebecca Hackler" + ], + "respondents": [ + "David W. Thompson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is June 3, 2013. This oral history interview is being conducted with David Thompson at the Headquarters of the Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Virginia for Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office History Project. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Rebecca Hackler. Mr. Thompson is the founder, Chairman, CEO [Chief Executive Officer], and President of Orbital.\\n\\n Thanks again for taking time out of your schedule. We appreciate you sitting down and talking with us about the COTS [Commercial Orbital Transportation Services] program. We’d like for you to start by providing us with just a brief background of how you started the Orbital Sciences Corporation, and how you got involved with the COTS program at NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good morning, Rebecca. Orbital was founded in 1982 by two friends and me. The idea for the company went back four or five years earlier than that, to the late 1970s. I don’t think there was a specific day that I could point to where the idea emerged fully formed, but I was thinking about at least some of the fragments of the idea back in 1977 or ’78, when I was either in graduate school or working at the [NASA] Marshall Space Flight Center [Huntsville, Alabama] as a young engineer.\\n\\n There were a couple of other developments taking place in the space industry about that time that informed some of my thinking. Probably the one that was most relevant was a German company that was started about 1976. Their name translated into English as Orbital Transport and Rockets, Incorporated. The German abbreviation was OTRAG [Orbital Transport und Raketen AG].\\n\\n I believe that was really the first time that there was a serious startup effort made to create a new company that was going to focus on space transportation. It was written up in Aviation Week [& Space Technology magazine], and I remember reading about it as a graduate student and thinking, “That’s kind of interesting.” Probably about 1978 the idea occurred to me that it would be fun to have a rocket company. Now in those days there weren’t very many, in fact there were almost no precedents that one could look at. It’s not like saying, “It would be nice to start a hardware store.” You could see hardware stores existed. You may or may not be successful if you wanted to create a hardware store, but at least there was ample evidence that it was possible to do. This was not true for rocket companies.\\n\\n In 1980 another kind of proof emerged when the Europeans formed Arianespace [SA] to market and operate the Ariane family of rockets. All these things eventually converged after I had left NASA, went to business school, and met a couple of other guys that had some similar interests. We ended up doing a study for NASA in late 1980 and early 1981 to try to identify nontraditional customers that might make use of the Space Shuttle, which was approaching its first flight about that time.\\n\\n The emphasis in this was on materials, research, and manufacturing in the low gravity or microgravity environment, low-[Earth] orbit. Although we couldn’t add a lot to the understanding of what it would take to get that kind of industrial application off the ground, we did decide that there were some niche opportunities, in particular in regard to transfer vehicles that could be used in conjunction with the Space Shuttle to boost satellites into higher energy orbits than those that the Shuttle itself could reach. And that one day, we would like to perhaps start a company to design and build such things.\\n\\n The three of us graduated from business school in 1981. We didn’t immediately start a company, but after staying in touch and corresponding on the ideas over the course of about a year, we finally decided in the spring of 1982 to start Orbital. The initial project that we were going to undertake was to design, build, and market a Space Shuttle-based transfer vehicle for boosting commercial satellites into geostationary orbit. That’s how the company came about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your hopes at that time? What were your expectations as you were entering that field?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The original idea for the company was limited to launch systems, and other launch-related products. Our aspirations were limited, simply to starting a company that could raise enough capital to overcome the financial barriers to entry that existed in the industry, and to assemble a sufficiently knowledgeable and credible team that could actually implement the project so that customers would feel comfortable in buying a fairly expensive product from a small company, entrusting their satellites to the performance of that product. The early years were all focused around developing a single product and getting it through testing and into production, and building up a base of initial customers to use that product. That consumed pretty much all of our energy and our capital for the first three to four years of the company’s development.\\n\\n A little less than four years after the company was started we had substantially completed development of that first product. We were working on some designs for a second, related product. We had had some success in winning orders from one of the commercial communication satellite builders on the one hand, and from NASA itself on the other hand for a limited initial production run of these vehicles.\\n\\n In January of 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger [STS 51-L] accident occurred, and that really changed the whole market environment for our product. For a few years things were very uncertain, and we had to—more quickly than we otherwise would’ve done so—broaden our product line. In a way that turned out to be a good thing. It forced us to really rethink the company’s basic strategy such that by the late 1980s we had shifted our focus to probably a more informed, and maybe a little more sophisticated strategy, that we’ve pretty much pursued for the last 25 years.\\n\\n We focus on developing and building small- and medium-class satellites and launch vehicles, which initially served somewhat limited niche markets, but those markets have grown, in general, faster than the industry as a whole. Then we try to compete in those areas on the basis of being able to develop and build systems on shorter schedules and for lower costs than most of our competitors are able to. That’s how we evolved during our first six or eight years in business, back through the end of the 1980s." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you first hear about NASA’s intention to move toward these commercial partnerships, and what was your interest when you learned about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Going back to the earliest days of our company, in the period 1982 through 1984, there was a major initiative that NASA undertook to enter into a variety of nontraditional partnerships with American companies. We benefited from that, and many other companies also participated in a range of projects that covered everything from advancing the technology of commercial satellite communications and broadcasting systems, to in-orbit platforms for research and other applications. Some of those ultimately succeeded and others fell by the wayside, but there was a flurry of early cooperative ventures in the 1980s between NASA and private companies.\\n\\n Fast forward to about 10 years ago, sometime around 2003 or 2004—the International Space Station had not been completed but it was pretty clear that it was on a path to completion. We had a permanent human presence in space beginning in 2000. It occurred to us, even before NASA announced the COTS program, that there might be a business opportunity in providing logistics services for cargo and other forms of delivery to and return from the Space Station. We started working, probably in 2003, on some early concepts to do that.\\n\\n It was around 2005 that NASA announced that it was going to enter into one or more cooperative research and development programs under what became the COTS initiative. There was a large group of companies that were interested in that, and many submitted proposals in late 2005, for what ultimately turned out to be two major Space Act Agreements. Our proposal was not one of the ones selected at that time.\\n\\n We ended up working with one of the companies that was selected, Rocketplane Kistler—I think it was mostly during 2007—to see if we could help them implement their proposed approach to Space Station cargo delivery. It eventually became clear to us that there was a mismatch between the ambitions they had and the capital that was likely to be available to them. Not long after we parted ways with them, they had pretty much exhausted their ability to keep going and NASA had to terminate that cooperative agreement and re-solicit interest in a second COTS partnership.\\n\\n We made a proposal on that in late 2007, and were selected in early 2008 to implement this approach, which was different than the one that we had proposed a couple of years earlier. There were certain aspects of that original approach that we changed, given feedback from NASA as to what they liked and what they didn’t like. The new launch vehicle that we were proposing to develop was a constant between the two, but the spacecraft approach to delivering the cargo changed between the first and second proposals. By February of 2008 we had signed a cooperative research and development agreement that took the form of a Space Act Agreement, and off we went." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you’re still going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right. We hope to complete the remaining work under the COTS agreement at the end of the summer, probably in either August or September." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In your approach, you chose to develop only Capabilities A and B, for [unpressurized and pressurized] cargo [delivery and disposal]. Can you share with us why your company chose not to pursue the option to do return cargo, as well as the possible crew option?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Our view was based on balancing the expected investment that we would have to make, over and above the funding that NASA was providing, with the anticipated near- and mid-term demand for logistics support to the Space Station. Basically we concluded that returning intact cargo was not likely to be a large part of the overall traffic model, and the incremental cost of implementing that was high enough that we probably wouldn’t see a good return on that incremental investment.\\n\\n We also concluded that human transportation was an even more difficult undertaking, and would be something that we could pursue in the future but we didn’t want to commit to doing in the beginning. In our proposed approach we focused on delivering both pressurized and unpressurized cargo, and disposing of unneeded things from the Space Station with the same system, but not actually returning intact cargo or sending up crew members." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Another decision that your company made was to use more of an international collaboration for its spacecraft. Could you share the philosophy of pulling these proven systems together, and why you went that way instead of creating a whole new venture?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The approach we took in regards to both the launch vehicle and the spacecraft portions of our COTS system reflected the general model that we’ve used for a long time in developing a range of other spacecraft and launch vehicle products. We have a supply base that, although it is primarily domestic, there are certain cases where we buy components or subsystems from non-U.S. suppliers when we think they provide the best products in their class.\\n\\n In the case of our COTS spacecraft, which we call Cygnus, we found an example of that for the Pressurized Cargo Module in Thales Alenia [Space], which is based in Italy. That portion of Thales has, over the last 25 or 30 years, designed and built a pretty wide array of human-rated, pressurized modules that have been used in a variety of programs, starting with SpaceLab back in the late ’70s, that was accommodated on a variety of Shuttle missions. Then with the commercial venture SpaceHab [Inc.] in the ’80s and ’90s, they built that hardware.\\n\\n On the European side, they contributed pretty much all of the non-U.S., non-Russian pressurized modules on the International Space Station. Since human-rated spacecraft represent a new challenge for us, we thought in that area—which was the pressurized module that for perhaps weeks at a time would be an integral part of the Space Station—we wanted to work with a supplier that had a lot of prior experience. They’ve done a very good job for us.\\n\\n Otherwise on the spacecraft—although we do have some international components, for instance we use parts of the same proximity communication systems that JAXA [Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency] has developed for the HTV [H-II Transfer Vehicle]—otherwise most of the components on the spacecraft follow our existing supply chain practices for a variety of other satellites.\\n\\n On the launch vehicle side it was a little different story. We saw an opportunity for fairly low-cost development and production of the first stage of our new Antares rocket by working with Yuzhnoye [Design Bureau], which is based in Ukraine. They have designed, and together with their manufacturing affiliate, Yuzhmash [A.M. Makarov Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant], manufactured the launch vehicle tanks and structures that are used in a variety of non-U.S. rockets, most prominently the Zenit [rocket] system that has both a ground-launched as well as a sea-launched variant. The design of our system evolved to the point that it could be built using a lot of the same design approaches, and the tooling and test equipment that they already had in place for the Zenit program, which would save money. That worked out well too.\\n\\n The other major international component of our launch vehicle is the first stage rocket engines. On the current version of Antares we use two AJ-26 engines that we buy directly from Aerojet in the U.S. But in turn Aerojet, in the past, purchased what are called NK-33 engines from a Russian engine builder called Kuznetsov [Design Bureau], sometimes referred to as SNTK. They’re one of the two main rocket engine builders in Russia, and have produced engines for the Soyuz rocket and others since the 1950s. That worked out a little less easily than we expected. One of the two big development challenges that we encountered centered around the main engines, which we really had to struggle with from mid-2010 through mid-2012, during that two-year period." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Another partnership that you developed as part of this overall program is with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport [MARS]. Would you explain to us why Orbital felt that was a value to not only this project, but also to your future projects, to become part of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Wallops Island [Virginia] launch site is one that Orbital has used for 20 years or so for a variety of smaller rockets. Back in 2008, when we were embarking on the development of the Antares vehicle—which is a bigger, medium-class launch vehicle, bigger than things we had done before—we were seeking an anchor customer commitment to buy the first set of production units. It turned out that the COTS agreement and the follow-on CRS [Commercial Resupply Services] contract provided that initial demand.\\n\\n It was clear that the first launch site that we needed to establish was one that would allow us to reach a mid-inclination orbit, because that’s where the Space Station operates. That in turn quickly narrowed the options to either Wallops Island on the coast of Virginia, or Cape Canaveral at the [NASA] Kennedy Space Center in Florida.\\n\\n We had a competition between the commercial operators at both sites, MARS in the case of Virginia, and Space Florida in the case of Cape Canaveral. They both made good proposals, but we ultimately selected Wallops because, at the time, the business proposal that they put forward was viewed as somewhat better than the proposal that Space Florida made. There were some other factors that gave advantages to one or the other that tended to about balance out. We probably could’ve made either site work, but we ended up selecting Wallops Island on the basis of what was viewed as a lower investment cost to us to develop that site.\\n\\n Now it turned out, in retrospect, that both Orbital and MARS seriously underestimated the difficulty of creating, sort of from a green field, a brand new, medium-class launch complex of a type that could handle a vehicle like Antares. In fact, the cost came in about three times higher than the original estimate that MARS made, and it took about two years longer than the original schedule that had been proposed.\\n\\n As a result, we ended up having to advance a substantial amount of funding to the state of Virginia. Because it operates on a two-year budget, by 2010 it had exhausted the initial commitment that we all thought was going to be adequate to fund the infrastructure development. To keep the project on track from mid-2010 to mid-2012, Orbital advanced about $45 million in funding to MARS. Had we not done that, the work would’ve either stopped or slowed down, and we still would be waiting for the launch base to be ready.\\n\\n NASA also contributed to developing some of the facilities that we use there, particularly the vehicle assembly building, which is on a modest scale functionally equivalent to the VAB [Vehicle Assembly Building] at the Cape. It’s much smaller. NASA did a good job bringing their part of the infrastructure online, on time, in 2011. The real difficulty was in the launch pad and the associated liquid fueling and pressurization systems. That just ended up being much more difficult than we originally expected.\\n\\n Fortunately, we stuck with it and supplemented the MARS team with a sizeable group of Orbital engineers who went down to Wallops Island in 2011 and helped MARS and its contractors push through the final work that was substantially completed in the fall of last year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand that part of the COTS program overall was to help companies that may need additional expertise to develop this new spacecraft. Can you share with us the relationship that Orbital had with NASA? Especially the Project Executive, Bruce [A.] Manners. Do you feel like Orbital has benefited from expertise coming from the NASA partnership?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it’s been a different kind of relationship than what we’ve typically had with NASA in more traditional contracts, where we design and build a science satellite or produce an existing commercial launch vehicle for a NASA mission. In this case, NASA was pretty responsive to the needs we had for specialized technical know-how that we generally didn’t have, as it related to either human rating our system, or in the case of the launch vehicle and the launch complex, to equipment or expertise that was beyond things that we had experienced in the past.\\n\\n For instance, we had a problem that came up about this time last year, in the summer of 2012. It was a piece of equipment in the launch complex itself, which is used to chill the liquid oxygen that is the oxidizer on our launch vehicle, and also liquid helium that we use in pressurization of certain launch vehicle systems to a super-cold level. Colder than just the normal boiling point of, say, oxygen. The cooler we had purchased just wasn’t efficient enough, and NASA was able to find a used model, I think from [NASA] Stennis [Space Center, Mississippi]. They got that up to us and sent a small team along with it to help us install it and check it out, and that worked out really well.\\n\\n There were numerous other cases where, beyond the program office and its engineering support at JSC, that other parts of NASA helped. The Marshall Space Flight Center, the Stennis Center, and Kennedy Space Center all contributed. Of course, the launch complex itself at Wallops was implemented by the guys there [NASA Wallops Flight Facility]. We had roughly half of the field center network within the Agency at one time or another, providing know-how or surplus equipment to our work, which made a big difference." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It seems like this has been more of a partnership." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was. The management team within the COTS program office in Houston was also very helpful in helping us work through various kinds of problems that came up. I think they set the tone. It’s been a great relationship now for five years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Rebecca, do you want to ask a couple questions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. Following up on the progression of the COTS work, the COTS budget was augmented for fiscal year ’11, and you were able to add some additional milestones for risk reduction. Can you talk a little bit about that process? Not only the milestones you added, but also how you found out about the funding and decided how to apply it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, okay. I’m not sure I remember exactly how we found out about it. Within our agreement, the effect was to increase the funding available to NASA to apply to our Space Act Agreement from about $180 million—which is where it started back in 2008—to about $290 million. It was an increase of about $110 million. Those are not exact figures, but probably accurate to the nearest $5 million.\\n\\n In our case, the primary use of those additional funds was to pay for a test flight of the new Antares rocket, which was not part of the original COTS program. Originally, because NASA’s funding was limited to about $180 million we didn’t think there was enough government or private money available to do a test flight of the rocket prior to the demonstration flight to the Space Station, so we were going to do all of that at once. The first flight of the rocket was also going to be the first flight of the Cygnus spacecraft, and the first time we went all the way to the Space Station.\\n\\n When the additional funds became available in fiscal year 2011, the logical thing for us to do was to distribute the risk a little bit and take care of the launch vehicle first flight separately. Our view then, and now, was that the highest risk of our approach really was related to developing and demonstrating the design of a new medium-class rocket, so we applied virtually all of the funds to the test flight that we carried out back in April of this year.\\n\\n Now that the COTS work has nearly been completed, the final tallies of investments are roughly as follows. NASA invested approximately $350 million in our COTS agreement and related activities. The $350 million is the sum of $290 million that we received under the COTS Space Act Agreement, and my estimate of about another $60 million in facilities and technical support across those various centers over a five year period. So we received, on average, $10 or $12 million a year of in-kind support and facility construction, principally at Wallops. That isn’t dedicated to just what we’re doing, but we are the first user of those facilities.\\n\\n So NASA put in, over a five-plus-year period, about $350 million. Orbital has invested about $580 million over that same period, and MARS, the Virginia state agency that runs the commercial spaceport at Wallops, has invested about $70 million. The sum of those, within $10 million either way, is just about an even billion dollars. That’s been over about a six-year period." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Since we’re talking about the finances—as you are very aware, rocket development is very risky and a very high-cost venture. You talked about Rocketplane Kistler and their Space Act Agreement being terminated because they didn’t have enough financing. Going back to the beginning of your business, how did you manage to find investors and customers, and get the financing to get this startup venture going?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was probably the biggest single problem that we had to solve. It was, I think, the most important reason why the concept of a private rocket company back in the late ’70s and early ’80s was so novel. Then, as now, the amount of capital required to carry out research and development, and to construct facilities, and to buy production equipment to actually create a new launch vehicle—it takes a lot of capital. Given the industry structure that existed then—and it hasn’t fundamentally changed today—where there aren’t hundreds of customers, there are dozens of customers for such systems. The risk that a customer takes to its either business or government programs by launching a satellite on a relatively new rocket from a brand new supplier is pretty high. It’s a tough problem.\\n\\n Orbital used just about every form of financing that was available during the ’80s and ’90s. We quickly exhausted the capacity of seed capital and traditional venture capital sources, which in those days viewed $10 million as a pretty large venture investment. That would not be the case today, with both a bigger venture capital sector and with the inflation of 30 years. Ten million dollars of venture capital in the early ’80s was a lot of venture capital to go into a company.\\n\\n We also relied on a financing structure known as a research and development [R&D] limited partnership. In fact, in 1983 and 1984 we used what was, up to that time, one of the largest R&D limited partnerships that had ever been done to fund most of the development work on our first product. But even that wasn’t enough, so we used some vendor financing, and a limited amount of debt financing. As a private company without much of a track record, bank debt was pretty much unavailable, but in the late ’80s as we built up a contract backlog and some assets that could secure the debt, we were able to tap the debt markets to a limited degree.\\n\\n By 1990, as we had gone some distance towards the R&D funding of our second major product, the Pegasus rocket, we went public. We needed to broaden our access to capital, and private sources were pretty well tapped out. Following an IPO [Initial Public Offering] in 1990, we did several follow-on public offerings in ’91 and ’93. Then a variety of other financings later on in the second half of the 1990s, when high-yield debt was accessible to the company and widely available.\\n\\n Over the course of our first 20 years in business, we raised about a billion and a quarter dollars in capital from these different sources. Fortunately, over the last 10 years we haven’t had to raise any new capital, which is a whole lot better position to be in. One of the big barriers to entry for new space-related companies is—probably not a billion dollars, but to do anything meaningful is a couple hundred million dollars, as a threshold of entrance to this sector." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thirty years later, you’re still around. That’s pretty impressive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had a lot of smart and dedicated people, and we also had more good luck than bad. I don’t want to underestimate the importance of good fortune." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the course of the COTS competition, what sort of questions did NASA ask about your financing? What sort of discussions or negotiations took place?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Rebecca, I don’t remember much about that. I know you’re going to talk a little later to Antonio [L.] Elias, who was more directly involved. To some extent, NASA was maybe a little more sensitive to that because of the problems that they’d had earlier with Rocketplane Kistler. When we were proposing in late 2007 and selected in early 2008, we had a couple hundred million dollars of cash on our balance sheet. We were generating an annual free cash flow of, depending on the year, say $60 to $80 million, and we had untapped bank credit lines of $150 million more.\\n\\n So there’s no question that we had the financial resources to do the project, even though the project turned out to cost a fair amount more than we originally thought. It hasn’t suffered at all from lack of capital, we’ve funded all the things that needed to be done. It’s had an adverse impact over the last couple of years on our free cash flow, but we expected that would be the case.\\n\\n The company still has a couple hundred million dollars of cash. We would’ve had more had we not done this, but on the other hand, having done it, we’ve now got a new medium-class launch vehicle, together with a site to launch it from, and a new spacecraft in our product line that together should generate a good bit of growth for the company over the next few decades.\\n\\n Launch vehicles in particular have a pretty long life cycle. One of the challenging things is that they’re hard to develop and they’re expensive to develop. One of the good things is that if you can develop them and get them into reliable service, the product cycle from that point on can easily be 25 years, maybe longer. We’re in the late phase of the investment period, and hopefully in a year or two we’ll be in the early years of the return period." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Part of that return is through the Commercial Resupply Services contract administered by the ISS [International Space Station] Program Office. One thing I’m curious about—the Round 2 COTS competition and the CRS contract award took place within a very close time period. Were you already planning on submitting a proposal for the CRS contract before the COTS Round 2 competition came up? How did you keep those two competitions separate?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The proposal for the second round of COTS went in late 2007, and the selection was made in February of 2008. Then it was about eight or nine months later, in the fall of 2008, that the proposals went in on the CRS program. The selections there were made right at the end of the year, late December 2008. So they were fairly close in time, separated by less than a year.\\n\\n We had the expectation that there would be an opportunity to take what we were developing under the COTS program and apply it to an operational program at the time we did the COTS work. But I don’t think CRS, at that point, had been completely defined in terms of its duration or the magnitude of cargo delivery. It was defined pretty soon thereafter, so in bidding COTS we anticipated—without complete definition of what CRS was going to be—that there would be an opportunity almost right away for the first operational use of the system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The last question I have before I turn it back over to Rebecca Wright—you’ve had some sort of relationship with NASA from the very beginning of this venture. How has that relationship evolved and changed over the past few decades?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Our NASA business in 2013—it probably won’t be an all-time high, because if we go way back there were probably years where it was more than this—but it’ll be at a peak, at least of the last 10 or 15 years, in terms of the percentage of our business that derives from work for NASA. Either directly, in contracts like CRS, or indirectly, in scientific satellites that we build for other institutions that NASA funds.\\n\\n We do quite a bit of work in the science programs that NASA implements through principal investigators at universities and research labs—as well as NASA Centers, but more often than not at universities or affiliated research labs—where they’re the prime contractors and we are a major subcontractor in building a scientific spacecraft. This year about 15 percent of our total revenue will come from work we do directly or indirectly in the NASA science programs across all of the major areas: astrophysics, heliophysics, Earth science, and planetary exploration. And about 25 percent will come from the human spaceflight activities of NASA, most of that revolving around COTS and CRS. The sum of the two, about 40 percent of our business, will come directly or indirectly from NASA.\\n\\n That’s a little higher percentage than what we’ve typically seen. Probably the average of the last 10 years is more like 30 to 35 [percent] of our business has been with NASA. This year 25 percent of our business will be with commercial satellite operators, and the other remaining 35 percent will be with defense and other national security customers.\\n\\n NASA was one of our first two customers back in the mid-1980s, pre-Challenger, and there were years in the late ’80s where NASA was probably 80 percent of our revenue. There were years in the ’90s where it was probably 20 percent of our revenue, so now we’re somewhere in the middle at about 40 percent. But on a more diverse set of programs, from Space Station logistics to small astrophysics satellites.\\n\\n The relationship varies depending on the nature of the product we’re selling and how direct the connection might be. If we’re selling an astrophysics satellite to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge], which in turn is implementing an exoplanet mission for NASA, we’re one step removed. If, on the other hand, we’re doing the CRS program for Johnson, we’re in a direct relationship. In some cases, if we’re selling a rocket—for instance later this month one of our Pegasus rockets will launch a solar physics satellite for NASA—that relationship is a direct contract between KSC and Orbital. Back three or four months ago, one of the satellites we built for [NASA] Goddard Space Flight Center [Greenbelt, Maryland], Landsat 8, was launched. That was another case of a direct relationship.\\n\\n Those latter examples tend to be relatively mature products. The Pegasus launch vehicle made its first launch 23 years ago, and this will be its 45th launch coming up. It’s a fairly mature product, and the nature of the relationship reflects that. It’s a fairly standard product, and it’s purchased on a fixed-price basis and sold more or less the same way we’d sell it to any other customer, whether it’s a government agency or a private satellite operator. Some of the other systems that we’re building are the first of their kind, so the contracts reflect that, and the amount of technical interaction tends to be more frequent.\\n\\n On CRS it’s been a bit of a new experience on both sides. On the one hand, the CRS program is structured fundamentally as a service NASA is purchasing for cargo delivery, as opposed to a product they’re buying. They’re doing that on a fixed-price basis, which normally implies a lower level of interaction. But at the same time, the service is delivered through a system that has to be human-rated and will become part of the Space Station for extended periods, so it has to meet many of the human safety standards that NASA uses for any kind of activity involving astronauts. I think that’s actually worked fairly smoothly because we had the predecessor work on COTS that paved the way to how that was all going to work.\\n\\n We have 14 or 15 active programs with NASA today, maybe more than that. We run the scientific sounding rocket program for NASA, which is a pretty active program. We launch a sounding research rocket for either an internal scientist or an external researcher every couple weeks. We launch small-class rockets a couple times a year. We build—more right now, and for the last 10 years—probably more scientific satellites for the agency than any other outside company. And now we’re involved in the Space Station Program, so it’s a pretty wide array of things that we do for NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How is it different working with the COTS team under a Space Act Agreement, as opposed to some of your other contractor arrangements?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the case of COTS, it’s fundamentally our responsibility to define how the system is going to operate and to set the technical standards for how it’s going to be designed, built, and tested, subject to the safety constraints that are imposed for any vehicle approaching or operating in conjunction with the Space Station. We have a lot more autonomy to make technical decisions than we might ordinarily have if we were building a satellite that at the end of the contract was going to be delivered to NASA for NASA to operate for 10 years.\\n\\n On the other hand, the expertise that exists in human spaceflight is primarily within NASA, so we have often found ourselves—I gave a couple examples earlier, and there are others that could be cited—asking for NASA’s advice or assistance in a number of matters. The technical interaction has probably been about as intense as it would be in a traditional relationship, but NASA has been more of an advisor than in a position to mandate a certain design choice—as long as we’re operating within the safety standards that exist.\\n\\n It’s been different, but I think it’s been a good relationship. We’d recommend its use in future activities where the circumstances are aligned. It probably isn’t going to be the right thing to do in all cases, but in general the Space Act Agreement approach as it relates to COTS has been a successful one from our standpoint. NASA has leveraged its investment by roughly a factor of two. The $350 million that NASA invested resulted in a total investment of about a billion dollars, so almost a two-to-one leverage.\\n\\n What NASA and Orbital, and our customers in the future have obtained from all this is not only a system that can supply the Space Station, but also, in the separate elements, a new medium-class launch vehicle that can be used by both commercial and government satellites; a world-class launch complex at Wallops Island, way beyond what was there before; and a new spacecraft that can be the basis of not just cargo delivery to the Space Station, but things like satellite servicing in the future. Many of the technical capabilities required to rendezvous with and operate in close proximity to the Station are the same ones that you would need if you wanted to rendezvous with and carry out some level of servicing of either a commercial or a government satellite. So I think it’s been a pretty effective mechanism for NASA to get those new products." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you for your time. We know you’re busy, and we appreciate you finding time for us this morning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David W. Thompson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You bet. I hope this is helpful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you, very much so." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00009", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2016-010.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Davidson, Michael (1964-1966): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2016-010", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2016-010", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Michael Davidson served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya from 1964 to 1966 as a land settlement officer. He joined after graduating from law school, and trained at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee with the Kenya I group. Davidson was assigned to the Kipipiri settlement scheme in the Kinangop Plateau region of Kenya. Settlement schemes were designed to foster a peaceful transfer of farmland from European colonialists to native Kenyans after the country's recent independence. As a land settlement officer, he helped administer the property and provided agricultural, health, and veterinary support to the local farmers. After the first year, Davidson transferred to another settlement scheme as a cooperative aide. After the Peace Corps, he worked as a civil rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and as legal counsel for the U.S. Senate. Interviewed and recorded by Evelyn Ganzglass, November 11, 2015. 1 digital audio file.", + "dates_of_materials": "11 November 2015", + "extent": "1 digital file (audio; stereo; 73 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "046. Kenya.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Kenya. Davidson, Michael (1964-1966): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Kenya", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2016-010", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2016-010-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/b8d63cu1153la5w80rppy2ul23fv3yno.pdf?odc=20231115173809-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/88edc39a-bf58-47ea-8c18-497d98d9923f/062a4284-fd50-4d29-bc46-306276e01083/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzJjMzhfMDAxY2RlNDI4OTM3YzJjMDFiMzU3MDQwZjEzNzZlMmY4NGFkMTYxNmQ3MzQ1YzQwN2ZhYzg0MzQ2MjdlM2IxMV8vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS84OGVkYzM5YS1iZjU4LTQ3ZWEtOGMxOC00OTdkOThkOTkyM2YvMDYyYTQyODQtZmQ1MC00ZDI5LWJjNDYtMzA2Mjc2ZTAxMDgzL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Washington, D.C.", + "length": "27 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed February 2, 2016, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Michael Davidson Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Evelyn Ganzglass" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Michael Davidson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:00", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Should do it. Today is November 11th, 2015. My name is Evelyn Ganzglass, and I'm interviewing Michael Davidson, who was a volunteer in Kenya from 1964 to 1966, and he was involved in land settlement. So with that little introduction, I think we should probably start the interview. Most of the interviews start with just a little background about who you are and what you're doing now. And then we turn back to what were you doing before Peace Corps and then talk about Peace Corps. So why don't you start with a very brief summary of what you've become since Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:54", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, my name is Michael Davidson, and I'm very happy to sit down with my neighbor, Evelyn Ganzglass, with whom and with her husband Marty shared the Peace Corps experience in Kenya, an early Peace Corps experience in Kenya. I was in, well, they were in Somalia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:01:21", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Somalia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:01:21", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I was in Kenya. So I gather you'd like just a bit of biography." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:01:27", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just, just about you're now retired, but you've done? A little bit about your family. And then we'll just go back to before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:01:39", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ah. Well, I'll just do it briefly chronologically from after the Peace Corps, and then we'll pick up going, you know, into the Peace Corps. I had finished law school immediately prior to going into, to the Peace Corps. And there was a colleague in the, in the project, Donald Aiken, who also finished law school. Most of the volunteers were recently out of their undergraduate studies. Some, you know, some had gone on to do some other things, but most of them were recent undergraduates. But Don and I had gone to law school. When I came back, my first legal job was with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. So I was a civil rights lawyer for a period of years in the late 1960s and early 1970s.\n\nI then taught law at the State University of New York in Buffalo, principally in a clinical program in which I worked with students on the actual practice of the law. My wife, Karen, and I and our two young children moved down to Washington, D.C., in 1977, where I first spent a couple of years doing judicial administration work at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. I was its chief staff counsel. And then in 1979, I began what ended up to be a substantially long career with some breaks in the Congress and, you know, principally in the United States Senate.\n\nAnd I served as the Senate legal counsel from 1979 to 1995, where I represented the Senate as a whole and its committees and members in separation of powers litigation conflicts with the Executive branch, assisted investigatory committees, worked on impeachment matters, and Senatorial ethics matters. And we were in court all over the country, including some number of cases in the United States Supreme Court. From 1995, following a change of political control in the Senate, although I had worked under both Republican and Democratic leaders up to that time, I did leave the Senate.\n\nI spent a number of years undertaking projects at the Aspen Institute at Brookings and sort of similar undertakings. Did some litigation in the course of that on separation of powers issues. And then went back to the Congress in 2002, worked as general counsel to a joint inquiry of two intelligence committees looking into the response of the intelligence community to the matters preceding 9/11 and then following 9/11. And then in 2003 began with the Senate Intelligence Committee, first as minority counsel, and then after a change of political control and as a result of the 2006 elections, as its general counsel from 2007 to 2011, after which I retired, which was then the second time from federal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:05:51", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not so good at that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:05:53", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Federal service. And in the last couple of years, I've both enjoyed retirement and for three years, including this past spring semester, taught at Georgetown University a seminar in the government department on national security and the Constitution. Two of those years I had the pleasure of co-teaching with Charlie Savage of the New York Times, who's just published a book called Power Wars, which everyone should read. And, uh, my wife and I, Karen, divide our time between D.C. and Colorado. One of our children lives in Colorado and we've got some grandchildren there. That's our son Jesse and our granddaughter and grandson are out there. And then our daughter Kate now is in Portland, where she's the Oregon Public Broadcasting host for All Things Considered." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:07:06", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And we hear her all of the time on the radio. So clearly an illustrious career. Let's go back to, you said before Peace Corps you had just graduated from law school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:07:20", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:07:20", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why did you decide to go into the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:07:25", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the one thing I, I knew as I approached the end of law school is that I didn't want to start with whatever that path may have been in the practice of law here in the United States, and that I did want some experience that had the potential of taking me elsewhere. And I started on two tracks. I put in an application to be a military lawyer and for some reason chose the Air Force and went off to Stewart Air Force Base, living in New York at the time, to be interviewed there. And so I was on that track.\n\nAnd then I had seen an announcement about a Peace Corps program for lawyers that was to be in Malawi. And it sounded quite intriguing. It was a program, as I now recall the description, in which lawyers would sit in rural settings with elders and sort of take down traditional methods of resolving disputes which had been passed down orally from sometimes long ago. And the thought was to have this project in which that would be recorded in some way. And that seemed to me to be an interesting thing to do. So I inquired about that.\n\nAnd then fairly soon after making that inquiry, the Peace Corps reached out and said, oh, we've got this program that we're starting in Kenya, and it would be the first project in Kenya. So Peace Corps numbers its projects, this was Kenya I. A little overstatement in that the Kenya II was an education program. And I just from my own recollections think of them as quite together. We flew to the Kenya together and interacted there. But the land settlement program was Kenya I.\n\nAnd I subsequently learned that in the formation of the program, the planning had begun sometime prior to 1964, the Peace Corps had developed a plan to do some particular recruiting for that program. I'd love to see the Peace Corps document that describes it. But, you know, but I've been told about it, and perhaps it's in the archives somewhere. And in any event, there was some effort to recruit for this program. And as I understood it and as it seemed natural once having been engaged in it, this was a somewhat unusual Peace Corps program. So if I could take a moment, let me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:11:14", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell. That's." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:11:15", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let me, let me talk about that. Kenya attained its independence in 1963, and it was independence following a struggle. There was an armed rebellion in Kenya, known as Mau Mau. But, you know, may have had other, you know, other names within, within Kenya. But there was a period of armed rebellion. And a good deal of the struggle, of course, was for political independence and the great values that go with, with that. There was also a significant economic aspect to it.\n\nEuropeans from much earlier in the, in the 20th century had settled in the highlands of, uh, of Kenya, lands that went from maybe the high 4,000 and 5,000 foot elevation to seven or 8,000 feet. Temperate. Both the climate and the land allowed for the development of cash crops which were exported to Europe.\n\nAnd there was a settler presence and a settler kind of. The land that European settled was land which when occupied by Europeans impeded the sort of natural extensions of African settlement. The African population, as populations around the world and particularly in the Third World, were increased in the course of the 20th century. And people were hemmed into lands which were limited and exclusive for African settlement and barred from settling in the European areas. There were, it was an African presence because people labored on these European farms." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:14:03", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But they owned them before?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:14:06", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the anthropologists have their understanding of, of history. To some great extent it was, as I always understood it, a matter of impeding natural growth, you know, rather than necessarily intensive settlement themselves. So, uh. It's a good historical question, but I'd always seen it and understood it as an impediment to natural growth, then producing intense overpopulation in African areas.\n\nIn any event, part and parcel of independence, the various parties, Kenyatta in Kenya, the British government, the world more generally through, um, through the World Bank understood that there needed to be a transition in the highlands and that a peaceful transition would involve not the seizing of European land, but its acquisition through loans provided by the United Kingdom and by the World Bank, essentially buying out many European settlers. Some of whom then moved to Rhodesia and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:15:51", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Started all over again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:15:53", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right. Or South Africa. Some of them went to Australia and some number of them who remained in, in Kenya. You know, both finding areas in which they would continue as farmers or became engaged in other parts of the agricultural economy or work for the government in the transition in the settlement program. This gets us to the Peace Corps program. The original concept of the transition. Loans coming in from UK and the World Bank. European land being purchased. African farmers being settled, but settled in a more intense way than the area had been lived on under European farming.\n\nYou know, a 500 acre farm being divided into, let's say, 100 different plots. Some land set aside for community centers. Some land for schools, but more people occupying the land than prior to that. The government would provide an arrangement. And the arrangement was settlement schemes. I describe this as a land settlement program. There were settlement schemes. And established an administration of those schemes in which schemes would be run administratively via settlement officer with a staff of agricultural, veterinary health, and co- operative officers. And the provision of the administrative services was initially planned for a couple of years. Decisions were made that that was short.\n\nSo one idea for the Peace Corps program was to allow for a continuation, to bring in volunteers who first working with existing ceremonial officers, many of whom at the beginning were former European farmers themselves, to assist in a transition in which African settlement officers would come on. But that there would be some period of transition. And that the Peace Corps program would then evolve into a more traditional Peace Corps program of providing advice, working with cooperatives and, uh, and the organization of people to provide services for themselves. The, uh.\n\nAnd that description I hope, if it was clear enough, it underscores the uniqueness or the difference of this kind of program, because our group of 30 to 40 volunteers, as we came on and became settlement officers, in fact were taking part in a program as government administrators. And that's not a usual." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:20:00", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:20:04", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, role for volunteers to play. And presented a set of issues that we're thinking about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:20:11", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So were you, were you spread throughout, thinly spread throughout this area or were you concentrated in the bigger communities, bigger towns? Or how did that work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:20:27", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Volunteers were dispersed to different parts of the highlands, some in the west, some in the central part of the country. There were at least a couple of volunteers who were closer to Nairobi. But basically we were away from Nairobi. I spent my first year on a settlement scheme called Kipipiri which was in the Kinangops, and the Kinangops form the eastern wall of the Rift Valley, going one. To get to Kipipiri, one would go down into the, to the Rift. I would go up to a town which at that time had a military base at Gilgil and then up the escarpment to Kipipiri.\n\nAnd on the, on the east side was the Aberdares. So the Aberdares were this wonderful mountain range. And on other side of the Aberdares, you were also in the highlands but on the Mount Kenya side of it. I would look to the, to the Rift Valley to the west and the Aberdares to the, to the east. And this was all a couple of hours from Nairobi, going generally north and a little west of Nairobi.\n\nThe settlement scheme had about 500 farm plots, so 500 farm families. There was a nascent town center, quite rudimentary butcher shop. The police headquarters was there, and we were all issued motorcycles. All the excitement and danger that goes with, and the early accidents in the, you know, in the Peace Corps. It was some minutes away from where I was living to the town center. Just down, down the road, a very short walk was, there was a school. And I used to value my time talking to the teachers and talking to the students. Um.\n\nFor the first couple of months, I, I worked with initially a European settlement officer, um, who had farmed up there. Very soon he moved out, was given a new assignment in the, in the Ministry of Land Settlement. There was an African officer appointed and then he was reassigned. And by May I became the settlement officer, which I served as until the end of, of the year near when I was transferred to a settlement scheme on the other side of the Aberdares and worked as a cooperative aide." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:24:16", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. So were, how were you prepared for that by the Peace Corps? Or should I say, were are you prepared for that by the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:24:25", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I must have been carefully selected as having grown up in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn in east, east, east New York, part of Brooklyn, where my grandmother, my mother's mother, lived. She lived across from the last dairy in Brooklyn, which the poor cows were only taken out once a year. And that was, that was my only glimpse of agriculture." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:24:58", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, I meant the legal aspects of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:25:05", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh. Now there were legal aspects, but we weren't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:25:09", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, so it wasn't mostly a legal issue. So what did you actually do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:25:14", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay, um. Well, I'll tell you about the training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:25:19", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:25:21", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The training was the University of Wisconsin, and we were in Milwaukee. It was a branch of the university in Milwaukee. We were basically housed at a YMCA. And this wonderful program with a very strong language component was conducted there. And there were several trips to Madison where the main campus of the University of Wisconsin is and an agriculture school. So we had some introduction, but basically, uh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:26:08", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You weren't an aggie as a result." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:26:11", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We, uh, we brought whatever we brought as liberal arts students and I had a legal background and I tried to think of legal issues when I was there and, and. And how to bring that aspect of thinking to what I would do. But even there, what I found myself inclined to do and was engaged from time to time in responding to the legal concerns of settlers, um, boundary disputes with neighbors. There's a certain amount of precipitousness to this entire affair. People were brought in, they indicated 500 acres might be divided and, uh, and you'd have, you know, multiple plots there. And the government had clearly the mark of the boundaries of these individual plots and made some sketch of them.\n\nAnd people found themselves in need, sometimes in conflict, you know, resolving these matters. And my, and my own inclination, you know, and I'm sure many, many of my colleagues had the same, is not to try to deal with this in a Western way, but to find ways of engaging community elders and in traditional methods of resolving disputes so that. That the people whose disputes were being resolved had some feeling that it connected to their traditions and therefore were, you know, acceptable. And the traditions would often try to find some way in which there's not a clear winner and loser, but a resolution to disputes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:28:38", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So the disputes were mostly among Kenyans as opposed to settlers, I mean, the African Kenyans as opposed to the settlers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:28:47", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that's right. I think, you know, the settlers had moved." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:28:50", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They had moved on by then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:28:51", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They, they had moved on. I mean, there were certainly individuals, this is 1965 and 1966, um, who had very recently been in the forest as fighters. And there were individuals who themselves were working out the transition from rebellion to working in a world in which the farms were theirs. But they were also marketing to national cooperatives that may have been controlled, still controlled, by expatriates. You know, many of them may have become citizens, but they came from the European society and the European economy.\n\nAnd then people had to figure out a relationship and both volunteers had to figure out a relationship and people had to figure out a relationship to them. You know, in the background of there had been a serious conflict. And it was important to understand that background at all times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:30:24", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Had there been a lot of violence at the beginning when the settlers were being moved out? The way you talk about it, it sounds like it was such a peaceful transition. My guess is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:30:38", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the rebellion itself was extraordinarily violent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:30:42", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Violent, but after, after independence?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:30:47", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't think so. Although, um. So I think the, you know, accurate historical answer might involve a bit of research about whether, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:31:03", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you didn't feel it? You didn't encounter it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:31:06", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't, I didn't encounter. And I can relate a narrative, you know, just a story. Sometime in the fall of, of 1965. One night, deep into the night. I don't know whether it was 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. There was a rap on my door. And I had a pet, a dog. And, you know, I was realizing that the dog was, uh, you know, aware that there are people outside. And as I went to the door and there were, you know, two armed askari policeman. And I said hello. And they said that they had come to protect me. And I said, well, what's the, what's, what's the problem? And they referred to events in Rhodesia.\n\nWhat had happened was the Ian Smith government in the southern part of Rhodesia had declared a UDI, unilateral declaration of independence. And Rhodesia was going to be a white holdout from the change that was occurring everywhere else. And, and soon this had emanated from somewhere in Nairobi. Police were sent out to protect people in the countryside. The Europeans, Peace Corps, and the like, or at least in some locations. And so I said fine and the policeman, who both had rifles, came in and spent the night.\n\nAnd the next morning, bid them goodbye and went out and I spoke to some neighbors, Kikuyu settlers. And I asked them about this. And people had radios and they'd been following events. And they said, oh, don't worry about that. We fought for ours and in Rhodesia people will fight for theirs. And we're not, we're not mixing the two." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:33:58", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:33:59", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The two events. But I tell that as, you know, some indication there was a mindfulness that there are old feelings and maybe something might have, you know, evoked something from that. So I was protected for one night." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:34:18", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you are also very young. I mean, now in retrospect, at the time, I guess we didn't think we were as young. But you were very young. Was that a factor in how people respected you or not? Because traditionally, it would be, as you said, the elders who have these roles of responsibility." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:34:40", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that's what you call a good question. I don't, uh. I don't have a present recollection of thinking of age as an issue, partly because I was older than the other volunteers. I had spent three years in law school. But, um." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:35:03", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So clearly it wasn't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:35:04", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I was, I was aware that I didn't have agricultural experience, I didn't have veterinary experience, um, and I certainly didn't, didn't want to convey knowledge that I had knowledge that I didn't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:35:32", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:35:32", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the challenges were to work with people to organize the provision of assistance. And even when I was serving as a settlement officer, I did see that the development of the role of the cooperative societies was the preeminent aspect of this. So that, that was to me the organization that could be picked up and continued on. And it had its challenges. Definitely had its challenges." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:36:07", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you communicate with people, in English or was your?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:36:13", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Basically Swahili." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:36:14", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your Swahili was good enough to be able to communicate?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:36:17", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it's sadly in the, in the graveyard of other languages in my head. But it, um, our training was very good. Fortunately Swahili, um, the language in which the sounds are very familiar sounds to an English speaking person. Kikuyu, on the other hand, the tone of language, and I didn't learn much Kikuyu, and it was far more challenging. But Swahili was a language that I was quite comfortable working in. In terms of dealing with other government administrators, and Settlement was an organization which was settlement officers and they were grouped together and there were regional officers and so forth. A good deal that could be in English, and English was a significant language of government at the time. But on the schemes it was Swahili." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:37:33", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. So you've talked a lot about your, the job, and little bit about the preparation. Can you talk a little bit about just the personal relationships with, whether it was with Kenyans or other Peace Corps volunteers? Do you still have friends from that time? Have you kept in touch? Or how did, you know, how did you live on a daily basis or with others?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:38:01", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were other Peace Corps volunteers in the Kinangop, but the closest may have been 20 to, 20 minutes to 30 minutes, you know, by motorcycle. Um. And we did get together and we had some interesting meetings as a group. Let me tell you about that as we go on. But daily life, um, I, I moved into a European farmhouse. There were very plush European farmhouses. This was a far more basic one, but nice. And I guess part of, you know, part of the dilemma was, in fact, did hire someone to help in the house and prepare meals.\n\nMy days were long days. I'd get out in the morning and come back late in the day. And generally, except when I traveled, there was someone else who may have been within half an hour. Or we could get together and go on trips together with other, you know, other volunteers. Life was on the settlement scheme. Peace Corps supplied us with a footlocker of books. I had the pleasure, you know, of giving some number away. You know, kids would come by and ask for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:40:00", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Books?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:40:00", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A book, you know, to spend a little time talking in English. And they'd ask, and I was happy to give them away. But then there were others that I, I would work, work through. You know, daily life, um, was not one with either other Peace Corps volunteers or with Europeans.\n\nI did some writing when I got back, and it exists in little chapters of things. And I think right now they're boxed just as a part of a question, you know, which is, uh, maybe you have a box like that at home? And, you know, I had ended up with a box of things and it included things that I had written. And, you know, my father was a great saver. So he saved letters home, uh, and I, I'd like to think I have a fairly good memory, you know. But the reality is that I got to look at the letters just a couple of years ago and sit down and transcribe them. Before them, a lot of detail would be gone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:41:28", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You did a lot of other things in between." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:41:30", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I did a lot of things. And I guess a bunch of time has, um, has passed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:41:40", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you think?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:41:42", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It might be helpful for this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:41:45", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. Read something. That would be wonderful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:41:49", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I put together a couple of pages for a 50th anniversary gathering of, at the Kenya Embassy, of Kenya projects, ours, two that had been 50 years, and then volunteers from other projects over, well, over time. And I. And I read to. So I took part in, you know, together with a colleague who lives here in Washington, in actually making a presentation. And I actually, although you can't see it from your sound device, I brought part of a stack of these." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:42:44", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thin." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:42:44", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thin blue air grams. And I read a little from, from two of them. And the first that I read, these are two different letters. And this is to tell you the contrast. So we got to our settlement schemes sometime in January of 1964. And on February 22nd, I wrote a letter home which described the poor operations of a dip. A dip is a construct in which water is mixed with an insecticide and cows are led into the dip. So they're drenched in this application that will kill ticks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:43:48", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:43:48", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A farmer loses, whether you're a European farmer and you lose a cow. If you're out, then you have many cows. You don't want to lose cows, and the Europeans used dips. Absolutely devastating if you're an African farmer and you have one cow and you're in debt to the government for, you know, the purchase of that, of that cow. And I began in this part of it, which tells my parents, at any rate, the dip hasn't been operating properly. I describe the dip. There's no permanent water system for the dip. The previous European owner had carted water by tractor. The settlement department had maintained the dip for a while, but then had stopped maintaining it without fully convincing the cooperative that it should maintain it and the level of the dip of the tank fell. The tank itself was in a state of disrepair and several cows were stricken with anaplasmosis, a tick- borne disease.\n\nBut last week I think that I finally convinced enough people that the repair and maintenance of the dip was the affair of the cooperative society. And last Thursday and Friday we engaged in self- help projects. In Swahili, harambee. Repairing the dip, building a crash pen for a rinderpest inoculation campaign, and laying down pipe for a permanent water system. We haven't completed the piping yet. Hope to do so this week, but we fill the dip by hand so we can dip tomorrow. All in all, the progress on this one problem has been encouraging.\n\nAnd then at this gathering, I read from a letter two weeks after. And I said, I'm going through a period of serious consideration and reconsideration about the best approach to my job. I think that I said in an earlier letter that I had a feeling of optimism, albeit mild, about my job and the prospects for progress here. Things are not so clear anymore and I have to adjust myself to this reality. For example, I wrote to you that I had encouraged a self-help project installing a permanent water system to a cow dip. Well, that project remains as it was at that time I wrote to you, half completed. I could get a few men and go out and complete the project myself. However, that's not the idea." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:46:32", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A lesson for life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:46:35", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right. You have projects completed and projects half." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:46:39", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So did it ever get completed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:46:44", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, I looked for that. I like to think that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:46:50", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That it did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:46:52", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And maybe I'll imagine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:46:56", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, this is probably inappropriate for an interview, but I'll put in a plug for Peace Corps Writers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:47:03", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:47:03", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There is a group of any Peace, former Peace Corps volunteer can publish through Peace Corps Writers. And if you've been writing things, you might think about that in your spare time, whether it's short stories or just a memoir or reminiscences. There's a lot of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:47:23", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You have a distinguished Peace Corps writer in the family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:47:24", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I do. So we can talk about that offline. You talked about your parents, writing your parents. Did you have other contact with them or what was their reaction to what was going on overseas?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:47:42", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:47:42", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Or even your going in to start with?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:47:48", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They, uh, they were very supportive. This is the time in the, in the Peace Corps in which very few parents traveled to where volunteers were. I was just with a filmmaker that's gathering here in Washington, her name is Alana DeJoseph, who's setting out to do a documentary about Peace Corps. And one of the things that Alana described is that as Peace Corps aged in time, more people had family travel there. So there were more videos of volunteers. And I think maybe there were a couple of family visits that basically just communicated by, by letter. Um.\n\nI had in the course of that correspondence only one unhappy exchange of my parents. I tried to be a pretty good letter writer, uh, better at the beginning than, than much later. That sometime in the course of the first year, through some combination of having traveled and whatever, having not turned to it. I think I'd let three weeks go by. And toward the end of that, Peace Corps doctor shows up and says your mother is concerned. You haven't written. So I got on my motorcycle and drove down to this little town which had the military base, that had got a the military base. Maybe it was the post office that had a phone. And sought to explain to my mother that relax, I'm in good shape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:50:21", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You called her up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:50:21", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:50:22", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did she contact Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:50:26", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She, my mother was uninhibited. I'm sure she." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:50:31", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "She found a way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:50:32", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She found a way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:50:35", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So before we started the interview, you talked about travel before, after, during. Talk a little bit about travel in Kenya or neighboring countries." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:50:48", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. Uh, we. Sort of close, oh, maybe it was eight or nine months into our time in-country, we did gather volunteers, some number of volunteers together, climbed Mount Kenya, and then spend some time on the coast. The climb up Mount Kenya was from the Kenyan side. Most people, at least at that time, would climb from the Tanzanian side. The Kenya side was a bit more rustic going, going up.\n\nAnd one of the things that I recounted about that trip, one of the absolutely strongest memories is, first we got to to a hut at 15,000 feet. We'd stayed in a cave going up for two nights and in caves because it was more rustic on the, on the Kenya side. Then you get to a point where there was a corrugated metal shed, and it's probably a little plusher now than it was then, where people would stay waiting for midnight or 1:00 in the morning when the scree would be frozen. Otherwise." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:52:28", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What is the scree?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:52:29", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Scree is gravel, broken gravel. And it's harder during the day. But when it's loose, it's a little bit like a treadmill. And then climb it. I didn't get to the room at, uh, at dawn. The night going up was maybe one of the worst nights that I've ever spent, the altitude and wooziness and so forth. And then get to the room and look at the sunrise and inhabit. The very strongest memory of this is coming back down and experiencing. I probably have been overdramatic in describing this. The creation of life. You start and there's no life at 19,000 feet, and then you see a little bit of moss and then maybe a little tuft of grass. And then there's an insect and, uh, and then there's a little rodent moving around. And then there's an elephant. Yes, you go from the very littlest of life to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:53:54", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's wonderful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:53:55", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I did that. Um. Had a wonderful trip with a, two Peace Corps volunteers and a friend who was teaching in, not a Peace Corps program but another program, into northern Uganda in which we spent, among other things, nights at missions along the way. And I was actually, I was fascinated by the mission experience. The missionaries who lived and translated the Bible into some dialect that it had not yet been translated into.\n\nAnd I told, just at a Peace Corps gathering, I told the story about being out there with these couple of friends, and our Land Rover broke down and we didn't know what to do. And we were way out. Then over the horizon comes this figure and it approaches and you get to make it out. A tall, lanky guy and he's got a blanket and is carrying a spear. And is closer and closer and finally comes. And maybe we had a few words in Swahili, and then he broke out into English. It turned out that he had served in the British Army as a mechanic. Crawls under." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:56:02", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was a Kikuyu man?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:56:03", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it wasn't Kikuyu in this area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:56:07", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But he was a Kenyan, a native?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:56:10", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was living in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:56:11", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, Uganda, I'm sorry." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:56:13", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But he was living in Uganda and we'll call it a Maasai related tribe, it probably wasn't Maasai, but in that family of people. And with whatever he had, I don't know, the tip of his spear or some tool that we had, fixed our Land Rover. And of course, we thank him profusely. And then he heads off and he's gone over the horizon and we were saved. And I told that story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:56:51", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:56:51", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That type of sharing of cross-cultural experiences. You just don't know who it is that you're going to meet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:56:58", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:56:59", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What experiences that individual might have, might have had. And it was very true." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:57:05", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's a lovely story. Yeah. And then you went to Ethiopia on vacation once, is that it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:57:11", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. You know, again, a, uh, this was with a Peace Corps buddy. We went up. We flew to Addis and then continued, continued north, ended up very close to the front lines with Eritrea at the time. Went to a place called Keren." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:57:44", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:57:46", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My wife is Karen, K-A-R-E-N." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:57:47", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "K-E-R-E-N." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:57:49", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right, K-E. And pop, pop artillery in the distance. So that was 1966 and it was the front line." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:58:04", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Way before Eritrean independence." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:58:07", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:58:07", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thirty years of war there as well. So thinking back about, well, you talked, I guess, about coming back. Um. You closed out your experience in Kenya and then how was the transition back, back home? Did you travel in Europe on the way back or come straight back? What did you do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:58:33", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I think the second year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:58:35", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:58:36", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We'll leave that for another year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:58:38", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Another interview." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:58:39", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Another interview. Um. Traveled to South Africa. First went down to Dar es Salaam by train and then got on a plane to then, uh, then it was Salisbury. And I spent some time in Rhodesia and into Johannesburg, where I hooked up with a Peace Corps friend who flew down from Kenya. And that's another absolutely vivid recollection, Johannesburg in 1966. Um. Kind of downtown Johannesburg. And there, you know, there I see the four signs, white women, white men, African women, African men for restrooms and, you know, four different, four different sides. Um.\n\nWe spent some, some time. I had hoped, actually, to get on a freighter going up from Cape Town up the west coast, um, but didn't make those connections. So went back to Johannesburg and flew to, uh, Lagos. We arrived late at night. And I look out on the tarmac there as the plane is landing. There are soldiers all over the place. And it was the start of the civil war with Biafra. And I'm getting off the plane. Hadn't made no plans at all. You just, just arrive. And look out at the airport. And there was someone I knew, who was then the Peace Corps doctor in, um, in Nigeria. And we had worked together at a summer camp in New York State." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "01:01:20", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's amazing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "01:01:21", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so he took me off to a safe house as this civil war began. My travels in Nigeria were then limited. Since then having gone over, our deputy administrator in Kenya had been an original Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana and was now the country director. And then I think at some point I did pick up a, uh, a letter which indicated that my draft board wanted to see me on some date in November and that accelerated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "01:02:08", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Trip home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "01:02:13", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Trip home, yeah. The draft board ultimately decided it wasn't interested in me and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "01:02:17", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were too old at that point. Or maybe not?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "01:02:21", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "01:02:24", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "26 was the magic year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "01:02:27", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I was, uh, I was just past 26. But gave, actually gave some further thought to going in as a JAG officer. And thinking about all that and, um, someone I shared with a couple of law students an apartment with in Chicago was then at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And so I went up, had lunch, met people, and within weeks I was a civil rights lawyer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "01:03:00", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. So just looking back at, at your experience, uh, you know, three goals of Peace Corps. To provide assistance as requested, to promote better understanding of the U.S., and to promote better understanding of the world by Americans. How do you think your Peace Corps experience or your life since then has, has met those, those three goals?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "01:03:31", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What's it, one is providing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "01:03:33", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The first one is helping the country. The second one is helping people in the other, in the country understand the U.S. And the third is bringing the message of Peace Corps in the world back to the U.S. Do you have any thoughts about your experience and, and how, you know, how your experience met those three goals?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "01:04:02", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there's always the risk of wishfulness in thinking about that. I understand the questions. Uh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "01:04:13", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's okay to say no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "01:04:15", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no, I understand the questions. I'd like to think that this was helpful. You know, my personal experience, the experiences of our group, a very talented group of, uh, of colleagues in this program. I think that one has to think about these things, not in terms of providing some immediate path for, for people. Um. Maybe, maybe like the story that I told about, about the day you work on something, doesn't quite work out. You hope that it does, it does work out. Maybe. Maybe there's some help provided in somehow shortening the experience of self-learning so that people work on solutions and move a little more quickly to solutions because someone's been there by their side trying to encourage them to do that.\n\nIn the long run, people figure these things out, you know, for themselves. I kind of like to think that, uh, and this is particularly with schoolchildren. I was not in an education program, but I did spend a lot of time with kids who'd sort of float in and out and, um, by the lawn and they'd bring their soccer ball and there and. Something resonated with, with them. Everything, you know, whether you're in an education program or not, some interaction with, you know, with young people.\n\nOn coming back I quickly got involved in a set of domestic issues, but, um. And this is something that I've recently been describing to people. One of the early matters that I worked on at the Legal Defense Fund was in 1967. So I came back from the Peace Corps in late 1966. And by December, I was at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And in the summer of 1967, American cities erupted. Um. And the major disturbance in Newark, New Jersey, and others. A significant one in Detroit, but also around, around the country.\n\nOne of the focal points of the Newark conflict concerned the location of the plans to locate a sprawling medical campus in the heart of the central ward of Newark, displacing thousands upon thousands of people. And the state had had plans for a suburban campus. And they just were going to take the suburban design and spacious low density spread out and put it in the middle of Newark. And there were no plans for the replacement of people and no plans to integrate or coordinate a medical facility. And good medical facilities are needed in the life of the community in terms of the medical services provided and the employment at the medical center.\n\nThe Legal Defense Fund was asked to represent community groups with respect to that state plan, which would have a big component of federal assistance, and that, uh, that became my responsibility. And we, uh, decided that going to court as the first thing was not a good plan, wasn't a good plan legally. And we needed to have various efforts to try and resolve the matter of representing people in the administrative proceedings with federal agencies and with the state before thinking about litigation. And this got us to file an administrative complaint, an administrative complaint rather than a court complaint. And the administrative complaint led to a series of negotiations with the state. And on the side of these negotiations, the federal government and the city of Newark.\n\nNow the Peace Corps connection to this was, um. NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the best legal office in the country, truly. The Brown against Board of Education litigation campaign was a brilliant court-based campaign. But we were also now at a point where community groups, and this was an urban setting in the north, wanted legal assistance, wanted to keep the focus on the community speaking and being at the forefront in resolving its problems. And so you develop the relationship with these community groups of being a legal advisor and being with people as I developed their approach to negotiations and, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "01:11:12", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds familiar." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "01:11:13", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Being at negotiations to, you know, to deal with legal issues as a variable but to keep the focus on the community. And generally at the time and since I've thought of that in connection with my Peace Corps experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "01:11:33", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So Peace Corps trained you to, to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "01:11:38", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it helped develop that, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "01:11:40", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It helped develop that. That's really a nice story. So I think we're going to close it out. One last question. Have you stayed, it sounds like you've stayed involved with a Kenya group of volunteers? Have you been active in that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "01:11:57", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, not in a formal way. We've gotten together a couple of times and. And a couple of dear friends are, you know, from that, you know, from that experience. And we had a small group together a couple of weeks ago to talk with the filmmaker I mentioned, Alana DeJoseph, who's got a project that anyone listening to this tape should, should know is a great project, to do a documentary history of it. But anyway, it was an occasion to talk about our experiences." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "01:12:47", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. So thank you. This was a really interesting experience. I've known you for many years but didn't know all of this background, so I'm so glad we did this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "01:12:57", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, the things neighbors keep from each other." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "01:12:59", + "speaker": "Evelyn Ganzglass", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Exactly. Exactly. So thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "01:13:02", + "speaker": "Michael Davidson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome. Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00168", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FuquaD/fuquad.htm", + "original_file_name": "FuquaD_8-11-99.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FuquaD/FuquaD_8-11-99.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Don Fuqua", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 11 August 1999" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Catherine Harwood" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Don Fuqua" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. I will start with those basic questions. I’ll start by saying that it’s August 11th, 1999. (I hope it’s August 11th.) And we’re at the Johnson Space Center in Florida, and I’m Catherine Harwood interviewing Don Fuqua. And I’m going to start with those background questions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We’re actually in Texas, though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did I say Johnson Space Center in Florida? I meant, Johnson Space Center in [Houston] Texas. Thank you! Moved the Johnson Space Center. See, I was going to ask you about the politics—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—when they wanted to move the Johnson Space Center. But we’ll get to that. Some background on your childhood in terms of where you grew up in Florida and the path that kind of led you to start your political career in the Florida House of Representatives, the State House." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was born in Jacksonville; and my father was working with the A&P Tea Company at that time as a store manager. He had come from Alabama, but things were tough back in the ’20s because of the Depression—late ’20s. And he left the farm and came to Jacksonville and got a job with them, and became a manager of one of their stores. And when I was about 5 years old, he decided—I also had a younger brother come along about that time. And he decided that Jacksonville was too big a town to raise two boys in, so he’d go back to the farm and things were getting a little better then. And so, we moved…over in West Florida…[to] a little town called Altha (A-l-t-h-a). It’s about an hour west of Tallahassee; it’s just off Interstate 10 now, just south of it.\\n\\n A farming area and where my mother had [been] born and raised there. And then, of course, I…did the usual things in high school. Played football and other sports, and played in band. It was a very small high school. My senior year in high school, I was elected State President of the Future Farmers of America…and it got me to travel around the State; and I became interested in politics during that course. I enrolled in 1951 at the University of Florida [Gainesville, Florida] and had a good time there for a couple of years, and then the Korean War came along. And I decided that probably I was going to get drafted or get kicked out of school, so I volunteered for the Army and served 2 years in the Army and wound up in the Medical Corps in the Army as an enlisted man. Came back.\\n\\n [I] finished up school…and got married. Went back to the farm and I started taking over our business in dairying and farming… And then a year after I was back, in ’58, I ran for the State legislature and was elected. I was the youngest person there. I was 23 years old and—when I was elected. And then 4 years after that, there—because of the ’60 Census in 1962…four new [Congressional] districts were created in Florida. And one of them was in our area; and I debated about whether or not I should run; and I decided that if I didn’t run, that some character would probably get elected and stay in there for 25 or 30 years and I’d never have a chance to. So, we were in the process of selling the dairy business…which…made less demands on [our] family [business] at the time… So, I ran and was elected and was the youngest member of Congress in the 88th Congress… We were sworn in, in ’63, I was then 29 years old.\\n\\n Agriculture was very important in our district, but we had a member on the Agricultural Committee. And during the campaign, while I was in the legislature, I had a couple of visits down to the Cape. They had invited State legislators down; and I became very fascinated with what was going on there in the early days of Atlas Program and the Vanguard and the Redstone. And then when John [H.] Glenn [Jr.] was going to make his first flight, a friend of mine in the State legislature said, “Let’s go down and see that flight.” So, we went down. And, of course, it didn’t go; and then it got rescheduled. And I’m in the process of running for Congress during this time, and we went back down to see it, and it didn’t go off.\\n\\n On February the 20th, 1962, (John Glenn and I have talked about this before), I’m having a big kick-off for my campaign. That’s the first day that you file your papers officially to put your name on the ballot. We were having a big fund-raising kickoff at a restaurant in Tallahassee at that time; and lo and behold, that’s the day that Glenn’s flight went off. He disrupted my whole entry into politics—or to Congressional politics at that time, because everybody was at the radio or television trying to see what was happening. Was he still alive? And so forth.\\n\\n So, I get to Washington. And there were some vacancies on the then-called Science and Astronautics Committee. And I was fascinated by—even though my background had been in agricultural economics, I was fascinated by this program. And it was something that I thought had a lot of potential; and so, I asked to get on the committee…and then was placed on then-called the Manned Spaceflight Subcommittee. And there, I became more and more interested. Of course, the committee’s jurisdiction was much broader than just space.\\n\\n It had a lot of science and so forth, and I had universities in my district; and it made a very good fit. Even though I had no space dollars or no space facility in my district, it was a wonderful learning experience to be there; and, by osmosis (I guess), I learned a lot about science, science policy, space policy, and, of course, the space program. And then the Apollo Program…had just been announced. We were still in the end of the Mercury Program, getting ready to move into the Gemini Program. And so, it was a very fascinating experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let me fill in a couple of dates from some things you mentioned in that. When you were in the Army Medical Corps, did—were you stationed anywhere? Were you sent somewhere?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, oh, yes. I bounced around to a lot of different places. … After I finished basic training at Fort Jackson [South Carolina], they had openings in the—in the 8th Infantry Division Band, so they asked—I did an audition, got in the band, and had a great time there. And then, of course, the Korean War was getting over. I think when they heard I was coming…they decided to have the Armistice. But, the Korean War was over; so, the Army was downsizing.\\n\\n I was probably not a person who was going to make a career out of music; and so, I…got [transferred] into [the Medical Corps]… They thought that I might make a good medical technician or a bedpan jockey. And so, I went to training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, and then to Fort Benning [Georgia], and then wound up in Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver to spend the rest of my [tour]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What rank did you achieve? What rank did you—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I wound up a corporal. I later, while I was in college, got in the Army Reserves and got a commission. And then retired as a Army captain. But—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What year were you married?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "…The first time, I was married in ’55 and we had two children. That’s the only two children that I have. That marriage ended in about ’73; and then in ’76 I married my present wife. She had three children. All of them at different points lived with us. And we have five wonderful children together; and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—We are very, very happily married.\\n\\n She was a political wife, one that enjoyed going out and doing things. And being gone a lot in my early political career probably led to the separation between [my first wife and myself] or the drifting apart. But she was a wonderful lady. But we had different…paths. She was a homemaker. But that was an unfortunate thing that takes its toll among many, many people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The—you mentioned that—you’re degreed in Agricultural Economics. Anything from that background that you could see as you reflect on the years that you spent focusing so heavily on funding in the space program? Anything translate over?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, a lot of it. Like in remote sensing that—and in communications. You look at farming today. It’s totally different than when I was growing up on a farm. One, it’s—you have air-conditioned tractors and so forth. But you use a lot of space technology in that and in many other facets. Farming has become very scientifically oriented, and taking advantage of a lot of things. So, there—yes, there was a lot of spill-over of things, and how plants grow and disease resistance. A lot of the things that…the space program has helped move along." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, the House committee. You mentioned how you got on those committees, that at the time there were vacancies and you just basically expressed an interest. When you got on the committee in terms of the timing of things in conjunction with NASA programs that were going on, what do you recall that—things that you did on the committee that related to Project Gemini? Let’s start with Gemini." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the Gemini Program was already under way… The program had started several years earlier [and] it was very important to the Apollo Program. One, we had to learn how to rendezvous and dock. The other was extravehicular activity [EVA]; how would we—how would that happen and be accomplished?\\n\\n I have to tell you a funny story. One of the early meetings, and they both are deceased now unfortunately, but we had an extra capsule—a Mercury capsule. And the chairman of the subcommittee at that time was Congressman Olin [E.] Teague, who was from Texas. A wonderful guy and a great friend of mine, and I learned a lot from Tiger Teague, as he was called. (And he didn’t get that name lightly!) As a matter of fact, the auditorium here is named after him as it should have been. He was later chairman of the committee, and I succeeded him. I…followed him, I was a chair of the subcommittee when he moved on to be committee chairman.\\n\\n Anyhow, he called us over to a meeting…with [Virgil I.] Gus Grissom and Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.]. And they wanted to fly that last Mercury capsule and do an EVA. And…it sounded like a good idea. Why waste the capsule? [We] already had it… So, we took it up with the NASA people; and, of course, they were incensed that they had even suggested that! That we had to move on to—first of all, they weren’t sure about the getting in and out of capsule with—and whether the spacesuit they had would even stop a meteorite or some type of—of penetration that might come along. And the second, they said, “We’ve got to save the money and put it into the Gemini Program where we’ll do some of these things. We can’t do that.” That was one of my first encounters with Al Shepard and Gus Grissom. But they were willing to take the risk." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They thought they could your all’s support—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—and that would influence NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And after we listened to NASA’s side, we decided that it was probably not the best idea either. But they were gung-ho and willing to go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that you were sworn in, in January of ’63. Obviously in ’63, you know, Kennedy has—had made his speech about going to the Moon in ’61 (I believe). May of ’61. So, that mandate was out there. And then in ’63, obviously, the assassination happens. Do you remember, you know, what your thoughts were at the time? And what you thought it would do to the space program and to that mandate? And what you anticipated? And then the reality of what happened? If you would reflect on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, of course, I had been invited with Kennedy to come down to Texas. They were going by San Antonio, and he was going to dedicate the Aerospace Medicine—Medical Center there in San Antonio. And I had something [going on and] I could not make the trip, so I could very well have been with him that day in Dallas, but I was in Washington. I had gone to lunch. And I came back and somebody in my office said, “There’s a rumor on the radio” (somebody had a radio in their office) “that the President had been shot.” And so, off the House floor there were two ticker machines, an AP [Associated Press] and a UPI [United Press International] machine, the old kind of noise-making machines, the ones with yellow paper and so forth. And I said, “Well, gee, I’ll run over there and I’ll get the latest information.”\\n\\n So I’m over there, and then I notice that right off the House floor (this is just off the House floor; the House was not in session that day), but down at the end of the hall was the Speaker’s office. And I noticed a gathering of people coming—coming down there. And a Catholic priest came up—I don’t know where he came from or who he was—and we were reading and they were giving the running detail of what was happening over the wire service [about] Kennedy. …I would tear this off and take it down to the Speaker’s office; and I didn’t go in, because they had the Republican leader was there and the Whip and all the hierarchy of the House leadership. I would just hand it through the door and go back and get some more, so I was a kind of a runner.\\n\\n And it was a very devastating thing. Kennedy…inspired of me in one thing, in going to Washington. I had met him in 1960, when he was down at the University of Florida for…[the] have annual Blue Key Banquet dinner, and he was [the] speaker. That’s when he was getting ready to run; and then-Senator George [A.] Smathers had brought him there to speak. And I was at several events with him, spoke to him, and became very inspired; and then the next year, I was active in his campaign.\\n\\n It was a very devastating thing. But I felt like that he had made the commitment and that we would go through with it. And President [Lyndon B.] Johnson had—then President Johnson had reaffirmed that, “We will go through with this program.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you—when you all were overseeing, you know, the funding of Apollo—and many people say that that program really taught NASA how to play the politics of space, that, you know, you learned that—and there’s always been, to this day, that debate between the big programs and do they kill off the little science programs? But that Apollo became, you know—it’s proof of the political will of the country and also what you can do when you’re willing to spend a lot of money. I mean, what do you remember about the political bite—fights over Apollo? And was it the sense that they had a blank check from you guys? Or what do you remember about—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I don’t think it was a blank check. But Jim [James E.] Webb was the Administrator of NASA at that time, been appointed by Kennedy. He had been budget director under [President Harry S.] Truman. He knew his way around Washington and was probably one of the most political savvy government officials that I’ve ever run into before or since. And Jim Webb was a master. Of course he’d been director of the budget, is now Office of Management and Budget (been the Bureau of the Budget back then)… He knew the ins and outs of government. He knew a lot of people. [There were] a lot of…political leaders that were very much supportive of this program. Of course you had Vice President then and President Johnson. Bob [Robert S.] Kerr from Oklahoma. You had Clint Anderson from New Mexico. And in the House, people like Olin Teague and others that were very strong supporters of the program. And it was a bipartisan support.\\n\\n But, no, the budget—what they recommended, Webb had always put the budget numbers up there so you could get a cut, you’d look good, and still they’d have enough money to proceed with whatever they needed to do. He was a master." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there a fight or an issue from Apollo—Project Apollo—that stands out in your mind as something that you individually, like, fought for or against or, you know, anything from Apollo stand out in your mind?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there were a lot of issues with Apollo. I think that, one of the first, and then I was kind of on the sidelines…but—at the beginning, they didn’t know how they were going to the Moon! Whether to have a direct ascent to the—to the Moon or—or do this complicated rendezvous and—and then go into lunar orbit and then land and come back. And all this was very, very complex.\\n\\n And then there were some programs, not knowing whether or not you could do rendezvous and dock. And some of the early episodes in the Gemini Program were somewhat less than successful. In the Agena Program, I know Neil [A.] Armstrong (and I don’t remember all the others that were involved in that) that had a very, almost tragic experience with docking. Well, you had to do this to do the way they finally decided to do it. The [Wernher] von Braun’s of the world were saying, “Let’s build the biggest rocket ever and we’ll go straight there and you don’t have to go through all of this.” Then there were others that were saying, “No, we need to go through this more complex situation,” which sounded too complex to a simple mind like myself.\\n\\n But, then there was another program called the Ranger Program, which was going in and crash land on the Moon. Was this Swiss cheese? Was it quicksand? What—what are we putting these people into? And trying to determine what the surface of the Moon was like. But there was a big construction facilities going on then, building of the Johnson Space Center.\\n\\n I remember when…coming here and this was nothing but a pasture. The Kennedy Space Center. [They] had to build [the] Vertical Assembly Building and all the launch pads, and all the things associated with that. The—get the [river] canals [dug deep enough]. To…[get the spacecraft] from [Marshall Space Flight Center] Huntsville [Alabama]…down to Michoud [Assembly Facility, New Orleans, Louisiana], there was a tremendous amount of construction work going on at that time. And we were trying to keep our hands and arms around that it didn’t get out of hand.\\n\\n And then one of the things that I recall that appeared to me was going to be the limiting factor and the—and the lowest of technology was the crawler that was going out to the [launch pad at the] Cape. They had all types of problems with the—one, with the magnitude of this crawler and the great big cleats that it had. It weighed like 200 lbs a piece or something like that. And they couldn’t find a surface that it could crawl on. They thought it could crawl on the earth; it was chewing up the earth. They put concrete down; it chewed up the concrete. Now they finally came up with this idea of putting river gravel in a trench and it could crawl on that. But it looked like we’d have all this thing built and couldn’t get it to the launch pad.\\n\\n In the meantime, we were having a lot of problems with some of the launches. The reliability of launches. There were a series of concerns going on, none of which I was the major problem-solver. I think we were all—all of us were amateurs. We were having to rely on the best advice that we could get and then try to use the best judgment you had as to what was going on! …Of course, NASA had a great deal of credibility; and you would have to trust the expert that this could be solved. But there were a lot of problems.\\n\\n I remember one was in the pogo-ing of the Titan… The Titan that was launching the Gemini, and they had a lot of pogo-ing going on, where one end was trying to move faster than the other part. There was a tremendous amount of anxiety, I think all along, about this program. Yet we…still—had support for it.\\n\\n There were those who were opposed to it. Kind of the Flat Earth Society, that were opposed to any type of [manned] space exploration. And, why were you—why were we exploring it? Because it was there! And just like we’d climb mountains and we’d swim oceans and get in a bathtub and try to go across the Atlantic or something. So, it was—and I was a more of a junior member of the committee, so I’m trying to (as President Bush says) “be prudent,” and try to understand and make contributions where I thought that I could. But I thought it was still a very worthwhile program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The Apollo 1 fire. Do you remember that in an active way? I mean, did you play any role in the investigation that you recall?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When the fire happened, NASA impaneled a review board, and then the Manned Spaceflight Subcommittee, which I was a member, and we invited some other members, but I was a member of it, we reviewed their findings. And I shall never forget—of course, I knew all three of the astronauts and remember that cold, January day at Arlington Cemetery where we buried two. And it made a very, very deep impression on me that, you know, maybe we’d better rethink this thing. I never lost confidence that we should not go; I felt like we should go. But sitting on the [Congressional] review panel, and [reviewing what] NASA had done. All we were doing was trying to satisfy ourselves that they had looked under every stone, had gone to every length to try to understand what [caused the fire].\\n\\n The press was very, very determined that there be some head on a platter and that there were people trying to cover up. We were trying to make sure that there was not a cover-up. And I was satisfied that there was not. That the truth had been realized [in] what had happened. It was unfortunate. And methods were changed. But it almost brought the program to a screeching halt. It almost stopped the program in its tracks.\\n\\n And we kept thinking, “What if we have another accident like this?” You know, “What will it—what will it do?” And it’s—it would be—at that time, we felt like it would be very, very tragic. I mean, not for the—in addition to the people involved, but also for the whole program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What you had brought up an issue in your last answer about the massive construction that was going on around the country. And some would say that one part of the politics of NASA is spreading out the wealth and, you know—you could supposedly can get a chart that shows the NASA dollars spent in every Congressional district and what you need to lobby on space issues. But take us back and recall in your mind what politics do you recall? What political discussions do you recall about deciding where Centers would be built? You know, some would argue that the Johnson Space Center should have never been built. It would have just been cheaper and wiser and, you know—with Challenger, even, the issue was brought up of, “What if the communications hadn’t been so spread out? That they’d just been right there training at the Kennedy Space Center.” So, recall what you can from the time about the decisions and the politics that went into spreading it out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, at the time, I was on the committee about the time they decided to move the training from…Langley and Kennedy to the Johnson Center and, of course, I was concerned about that. Later in life and understanding (and probably a few more gray hairs on my head), I realize the wisdom of the politics of it. You can’t have it all concentrated in one area. And it needs to be spread out to broaden the political base.\\n\\n And of course, at that time, the Apollo Program was really a creature of the Cold War. We were not going to stand and let the Soviets be the first to plant the Red flag on the Moon! And we were in this race with them, and that was one of the underlying support mechanisms for this program, even though it was not discussed as openly. But it was one of the major things. So, I think spreading it around [was good]. We had a lot of the contractor base in between St. Louis and the West Coast, and particularly California, the Los Angeles area.\\n\\n I thought the Kennedy Center, then Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, was pretty secure because of all the infrastructure that they had built there, and there wasn’t a lot of other places where you—near the equator and on the east side of the country with an ocean between you where debris could land and so forth. So, the Kennedy Center, I thought, was pretty secure as a launch facility. There could be debates, but I think it was a wise decision to spread it around. And I also—it didn’t take me very long to realize that, and I tried to explain that to some of my Florida colleagues that, you know, “You could lose the whole ball of wax, and let’s don’t rock the boat too much.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "“We can complain about it, but don’t, you know—let’s don’t have anybody take us too seriously.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—did you go to many of the Apollo launches, especially Apollo 11?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Every one of them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Every one of them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The only one I missed was Apollo 12—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—and I was about 60 miles away when that happened, because I was in the middle of a campaign and I was having to campaign at that time. But I went to every one other than that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And your thoughts, as someone who has had, you know, worked kind of behind the scenes and in front of the scenes to fund this program? Your thoughts when we left for the Moon and when you actually saw those fuzzy images that we all watched of Neil and Buzz walking on the Moon? What did you think? And was it all—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had tears in my eyes. Tears in my eyes that it had happened. Went to every launch. One of the things we were fortunate: we got to know the astronauts and talk to them and—before their launch and after their launch. And they were human beings, and they had a humorous side. They were—in addition to being wonderful human beings, they were very competitive. One of the things that Mr. Teague emphasized that…and tried to have was a back-door communications with the astronauts.\\n\\n Are you happy with safety procedures? Are you happy with the training? Do you think you’re getting adequate training? Do you think that they’re short-sighting you on safety? And most of them were, you know, they never had any complaints. There was only one. One time we were meeting with them and these were very quiet meetings, no NASA people were there. Just the—." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "These weren’t like subcommittee hearings?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, no, no, no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "These were private—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, this was backroom meetings. Mr. Teague would call and say, “I’ve got so-and-so and so-and-so coming by the office. Come down here a minute.” And so, we’d come by. We’d—off the record. One of the things that came up one time (and I don’t remember who it was) said, “You know, we’re—we’ve got these training airplanes but there’s not enough of them. And every time we go somewhere for a public appearance or we go to California, we’ve got to catch an airplane and fly at government rates in the coach class. And we’ve got to fly to California. We’ve got to get back, and so forth. Why can’t we do two things? Why can’t we get our flight hours in, keep our flight hours up, and we can use the airplanes to go do these things?”\\n\\n And Mr. Teague said, “It sounds like a good idea to me.” So, we put money in the budget to buy more T-38s. And in effect talked to NASA and said, “Hey, let these guys fly these airplanes.” And so, that happened. That was one of the good things that came from that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How long did those informal meetings with the astronauts carry on through the program? I mean, are they still going on today that you think?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know about today. But when I was chair and I remember the Shuttle was one of the programs that started under me and completed under me. And I remember we were down here, we were getting ready for the first Shuttle mission. And we had a meeting with John [W.] Young and Bob [Robert L.] Crippen; I think Dick [Richard H.] Truly and Joe [H.] Engle were the backup crew. We were down here for a hearing. We asked to talk to them, and we went into some closet somewhere here and—or we told NASA we wanted to talk to them. And we kept it up.\\n\\n And I used to go down before a launch and have either breakfast or dinner with the crew, and we would talk privately if they had concerns. Sometimes they did have concerns. And just before Challenger, one of them expressed some concern to me about what was going on at the Cape, and I had become very alarmed about that at that time to my own self, that there was a lot of laxity going on in the preparation of the Shuttles for the launch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we will explore that in much greater detail, because I am going to focus the majority on the Shuttle—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—since that is really your program. But let’s finish up with Apollo. You know, the Apollo Program is winding down. Were you surprised at how quickly the American public lost interest?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I didn’t—I didn’t realize the magnitude of that devastation. I remember going to a Goddard dinner about ’73 or ’[7]4; they had it in [the] Washington Hilton Hotel. It’s a great, big—big room, seat 2,000/2,500 people. And they only had about half—about a third of the room, in the middle part. The other part was closed off. And I thought to myself—and that was kind of a judge of how contractors and people were viewing the programs, and I said, “Gee, I can’t believe how small a crowd we have here this year! This is tragic!” And that time I was—in ’72 I became chair of the Manned Spaceflight Subcommittee. And that a lean period.\\n\\n We had Skylab getting ready to fly. And we had the ASTP [Apollo-Soyuz Test Project]—the joint Soviet mission—and that was it! The Shuttle was starting to come along, but it was going to be a long time before anything. And people after Apollo 17 and the last flight, people said, “Oh gee, you know, it was so routine. We’ve been there, done that.” And nothing seemed to really excite people. Plus we didn’t have a lot of scientific missions. It was just kind of a hiatus in space.\\n\\n We had a lot of things on the drawing board. I remember in 19—I think in 1974 or something first hearing about the Hubble telescope. It was 1990, I think, when it was launched! But it was a very troubling time here. We’d had the resignation of President [Richard M.] Nixon. We had the energy crisis. Gas lines. It was the aftermath of Vietnam. There was just a lot of dissention, and people didn’t care! And it really bothered me. And I looked at my job then as chair of the subcommittee, as “You know, I got to sell this program if I believe in it. And I got to sell it to my colleagues.”\\n\\n So, a thing that Mr. Teague did, and—not original with me, is try to get my colleagues to come out and see. Take them to the Cape. Show them what’s going on there. Bring them here and show them. Take them to a contractor. Show them what some of the things that they’re doing, so they have a better understanding about what we’re talking about. It is real things. And I’ve been to so many contractors, you know, I could almost give the tour!\\n\\n But—and they wouldn’t go unless I would go. So, I kept going back and back and back and back. But we did, every Spring—or not every Spring. Right after the first of the year. About the time the budget came out, we’d start a tour. And maybe for 2 or 3 weekends, we would go out and tour various facilities. Try to get an understanding of what was going on, what their problems were, and what they planned to do with the money. And I don’t know if they still do that or not. I don’t think they do. But we did back then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Probably not to that extent. You mentioned the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Was it hard for you to believe that that—you know, you mentioned the Cold War fueling the race to get to the Moon, fueling Apollo. And then to think that Apollo’s last hurrah would be this joining up with the former enemy in space." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your reflections on that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I remember talking to Mr. Teague about that. We were down [in the House gym] and Mr. Teague was a great paddleball player, and I like to play paddleball. And even though he had a disability with his foot from World War 2, he was a mean paddleball player and wore a big old built-up shoe and would step on your foot and have your toenails black…! But anyhow, we’d been down in the gym and we were just getting through taking a shower, and he was asking about, “You heard about what Nixon has announced—that he’s going to announce—about this joint venture with the Soviets?” And I said, “You got to be kidding!” He said, “No.” I said, “Did he talk to you about it?” He said, “Hell no, he didn’t talk to me about it!” I said, “I can’t believe this.”\\n\\n And my first thought was, “What if we get up to the night before launch and somebody maybe throws an egg on the front steps of the Russian Embassy here or on our embassy in Moscow and the whole thing…is called off?” It was so—our relations were so precarious at that time, “How are we going to be sure this thing’s ever going to happen? What about the language and all this stuff?”\\n\\n And I was still concerned about that up until the time, even after talking with Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford and some meetings with [Alexei A.] Leonov the Russian, I felt a little better about it. But it happened. And I had a lot of concern that, you know, some little incident could blow up or the Russians invade somebody or we would do something that would irritate the Soviets and the whole thing would be called off. But to the credit of the leaders of both countries at that time and to NASA and the Soviet Space Agency, it did come off. And, you know, I think it was a good thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You know, the early—let’s turn to Shuttle. The early politics of Shuttle obviously kind of took part during Apollo. Do you remember the early debate, and many would say the Shuttle is the most political space vehicle that we’ve ever had in terms of politics and budget defining what it finally wound up to be. Talk about the early days and the promises that were made, you know. Fifty-five flights a year! And, what went into selling it that some would say, even at the time—some of the people selling it knew that wasn’t realistic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, one of the people that first talked to me about that was Wernher von Braun. And he was saying that, “You know, we threw away all this. We can keep all of it. We can bring it back. We can reuse it. And the more we use it, the more inexpensive it is. And the space program will be [an] ongoing thing. We will have uses for it,” and so forth. And he was also a great salesman.\\n\\n And then the officialdom at NASA—the Administrator and [others]—were, you know—had these wonderful projections and so forth. I thought it made sense. I’ll tell you why. The Apollo Program was a program and an end in itself. It was never planned to go beyond the Moon. Once we landed on the Moon, there was no more use for Apollo. But what do we do? It was an end program, and I understand that. I understand the politics of that and what President Kennedy was trying to do, and I still applaud that. But the Shuttle was something that would be an ongoing program.\\n\\n You could adapt it. You could use it for—as a means to and from space. And I guess we—and I included—put all or more of our eggs in one basket than…we should have at that particular time. But the economics of the Shuttle, we were going to build 7, 8, or 10 of them and fly them. And it would be so routine, it would be like flying an airplane. And the pilots would have, you know, hats on, scrambled eggs on their bills, like airline pilots. And that’s the way it would operate. You’d turn it around real quickly.\\n\\n Well, it didn’t take long to realize that it took longer to turn that thing around than it did. And it was still very expensive to put up and so forth. And I still think it was the right way to go at the time. These programs are [like] the old saying, you have to crawl before you walk and you walk before you run. And this is a stepping stone. I think we will eventually have something like a [Lockheed Martin] VentureStar or something that will go and come, whether it’s manned or unmanned. And I think at some point you’ll have—something will have to be manned, depending on what we do.\\n\\n But ultimately, if our next goal is to try to get to Mars, we’ll have to have something. And in the meantime, we’ve got routine access to and from space. So, I still think the Shuttle is—it’s the only thing we’ve got, and I think it’s the best thing we’ve got right now. And I don’t see anything in the immediate future that’s going to take its place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you recall about the, you know—the folks who so opposed it, like [Senators] Walter [F.] Mondale, Bill [William] Proxmire? Any specific recollections that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—of the arguments—." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "With [Rep.] Bella [Savitzky] Abzug." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn’t think they had very…[much space activity] going on in Wisconsin and Minnesota and in downtown Manhattan. I think some people have to be opposed to things, and I’ve debated Proxmire [several] times on this issue, and I didn’t think he had very, very strong arguments. I don’t think Walter Mondale had very strong arguments about this. But I think, by and large, we did, [and] the Cold War was still going on. We knew that, [or] had reason to believe that the Soviets were working on a similar type vehicle, which they were. And that, did we want to grant them this access that we didn’t have? And even the Air Force had some interest in this [in] the early days… Or until they had to put up some money, they [lost some of their] interest in it.\\n\\n The [Congressional] votes were still pretty good. Every year I would look at the vote to see how we were [doing] as a kind of a thermometer of how we were doing, and it kept getting better. And that was—I was very pleased at that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When Nixon, who really was not a big Shuttle supporter (many would say that he was cost-conscious and, I’ve read, not real imaginative about space), he just pretty much saw the Shuttle as a political device. This is a way to keep NASA afloat. Give them the Shuttle. But don’t fund it very well. Don’t fund it, maybe, the way they want to have it funded. I mean, do you think that that kind of doomed it from the beginning? I mean, I’m just—I’m curious about at what point in the political process did you secretly know in your heart of hearts that what was being promised really could never happen with what Nixon agreed to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, a lot of it—NASA came along with some innovative ways to do testing. We did concurrency. And that was a high-risk poker game. That means that you…postponed the test till the end. And if it works, it’s fine. You’re brilliant. But if it doesn’t work and you’ve got to go back and redesign something, you’ve really got some serious problems.\\n\\n And of course, the big leading thing on the Shuttle—or I think two of the leading things on the Shuttle: one was the main engine. And that was the first contract that was let. Everybody recognized that was going to be a very, very high-risk proposition. And the other was the tile. How do you develop this lightweight, ablative tile that can protect the Shuttle as it comes back in to Earth? Most of the other stuff was like an airplane—the cockpit, all the other things. I guess the thing I was concerned about was “Will it fly?” And I—everybody kept telling you, “Oh yeah, it will. It will fly. You can fly a bathtub, you know, if you angle it right.”\\n\\n But I was never worried about the wings breaking off because we knew how to build those kind of structures. The engine and the tile, and getting the tile fitted on there correctly. And of course, it turned out to be a very, very and still is a very expensive process. But they’ve made a lot of improvements. But I felt that we did have to keep the program alive. One of the things we did, too—it was one of my insistence on this…in order to sell it—is that…we put language in the bill that you had to use existing facilities to the maximum extent possible.\\n\\n My experience with engineers, and I love engineers, but they want to [develop] their own new play toy. And we didn’t have to put the new infrastructure in at KSC. I mean, we had the other stuff. We could use the VAB [vehicle assembly building]; that was tall enough. And we could use the—modify the launch pads. We didn’t have to go rebuild launch pads; you’d just modify them. We could do some of the work at Michoud. We didn’t have to go build a new facility for that. They could use Stennis [Space Center, Mississippi] for testing the main engines. We didn’t have to go build new facilities. Johnson could be utilized. Huntsville could be utilized. There were some that thought, you know, we needed to go just mothball these and go build new things.\\n\\n This was very attractive to Congress, too, to say, “We’re going to use, to the maximum extent possible, all the existing facilities that we have. It’s not going to be a whole new building program. May be modifications, but we can utilize that.” And then the—of course the Vietnam War was winding down. There was a lot of unemployment in California. A lot of engineers laid off. And there were a lot of people concerned about that. Where are we going as a country? And I think the Shuttle was one of the things that came along about that time to fill some of that void. At Cape Canaveral, there were tremendous layoffs of people. At Huntsville, and somewhat here at Johnson.\\n\\n But in California, the—they weren’t building the airplanes like they were before… [There] was [high] unemployment there. And this was—[employment] people look at their pocketbook, and members of Congress look at their pocketbook. And Nixon…played games with you, but he never really followed up and vetoed the bill… And we tried to stay within the—in the limits of what we had and the program stretched out some and caused some overruns. And we had some problems with that later on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned the engines. And actually that contract was—when you look at the timeline, it was—the contract was actually awarded before the Shuttle was actually approved. And it went to California; and at the time, I understand from what I’ve read, that that was just a huge political fight that really upset Pratt [&] Whitney and their contingent, you know, in New England and that area. And that they were just mad! And, in a way, that was one of the most political decisions, to send—do you remember the politics of the time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. NASA had talked to us and said, “You know, this is going to be the longest lead time item that we have. It’s going to take the most development.” They chose who they thought was the best company at that time. Or had the best proposal. And they chose Rocketdyne [Division of Rockwell International] . And Pratt did protest—Pratt did have concerns about it. But there are protest processes you can go through, and they did protest (if I’m not mistaken)." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think they did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And there’s a process that that [you go] through. And in the meantime, [NASA] did go to court or got permission to go ahead and proceed while the protest was being resolved. And the protest was resolved in the favor of Rocketdyne and upheld the decision that NASA had made. I don’t know how—I don’t think Nixon called NASA and said, “Give this to this company.” Those are all very tough decisions to make, and they put together teams of experts to evaluate these. And you have to basically trust what they say.\\n\\n And then there were some other concerns about it, if I’m not mistaken, on the solids and what—whether to go with this type of a configuration or another type of configuration. And I think it was probably Aerojet [General Corp.] that was the other, if I’m not mistaken; and Thiokol [Chemical Corp.] prevailed. We tried to stay out of those things and leave it to the professionals to make the judgment, unless there was some real obvious hanky-pank going on. But I never found that. I always felt like NASA was very upbeat and up front about how they did these things. Because they knew they had a hot potato on their hand, and they’d better be able to justify it in the end after great scrutiny." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But do you think politics factored in as long as it—you know, if they could justify it and there was a political consideration, I mean—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there was also—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—you—you’re enough of a politician to—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—know that you can’t eliminate the politics though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they had these source evaluation teams that went in and looked at these. The other you could’ve been—and we sat through the briefings that the companies had on how the Shuttle would look and the different—they had Boeing [Company] and Lockheed [Aircraft Corp.] and—and Rockwell and General Dynamics [Corp.] and I forgot who all else giving briefings. I remember, we were in Los Angeles, sitting in a motel conference room. We wouldn’t even go to a government facility. We were there at an independent place and a very private meeting where they were going over why they felt like their configuration was better.\\n\\n Well, it was very confusing to a layman like me. They all looked pretty good! But it wound up with a kind of a combination of a couple of them. And of course, Rockwell had—or North American [Aviation, Inc.] then had done the command module for the Apollo Program. And McDonnell Douglas was involved. I felt rather comfortable and I think most members of Congress felt comfortable that they had justified their decision. It was—some designs were probably better than others, and we all knew that that was not going to be the final design." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall, I mean, you know, part of the debate that always comes up with Shuttle and any of the manned programs is with scientists, and that contingent of scientists who say these big programs—and there’s evidence of them killing smaller programs that can’t exist because the big program, you know, it keeps NASA afloat but it kills off some smaller things. And do you recall scientists—even from the days of Apollo there were scientists who didn’t like Apollo because they would rather you spend the money on, just launch some robots on some unmanned rockets. I mean, any recollections that you have of—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—and tell me some of those stories." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, in the early days, you had people like Dr. Jim Van Allen from Iowa State, who [discovered] the Van Allen radiation belt, were very much opposed to manned spaceflight. And a number of other people. And then you had JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California], which was basically in the unmanned program anyhow, and that was a NASA contract Center. And there was some controversy among them.\\n\\n When I became chairman of the full committee in 1979, I made a very conscientious effort to reach out to the science community and say, “Listen, we’ve got the Shuttle Program; but also, I’m very interested in science. Now we don’t have an unlimited amount of money, but let’s see if we can’t come up with some of the best science programs and I’ll fight for you! I will lead a fight.” And we had one of those. One was the Galileo Program. (Then it was called the Jupiter Orbiter Probe, I think it was the name of it.) And the Appropriations Committee in the House had eliminated the funds for it. We had authorized it.\\n\\n This was in the early days of the program. We also had Hubble telescope was coming along. And so, I met with the scientific community and I said, “You know, I don’t like to take on the Appropriations Committee. That’s not a very good venue to make friends and influence people with. But if you will give me some help, I will take them on, and I’ll put my reputation on the line, and we’ll fight to get this money restored.” There was always a certain amount of tension between the Appropriations Committee and the authorizing committee. This is a—this House Science Committee was the authorizing committee; and then the Appropriations Committee really writes the check.\\n\\n So…we were supposed to set the policy and they were supposed to make sure that the money was spent in what they could spend that year and so forth. So, the Appropriations Committee decided to eliminate the funding. The Science Committee said, “Get me some support.” …Members of Congress [started] coming up [to me] on the floor…asking, “What is the Fuqua Amendment going to do on this?” from people that never expressed any interest in the space program. And I started explaining it to them…and I said, “It’s evident that [we] could get some…grass root support. I’ll take them on!”\\n\\n So, we did. And we won. And I thought that was a—I put myself where I told them I would do, and I would…I would fight for them. And I think there was always some conflict, but we also had some meetings that said, “Listen, we’re in this together. You can’t have one without the other. You—if we don’t have a manned program…there may not even be a science program. So, I think you need to rethink that.” And I think we had a general (not everybody), but—I think we had a general meeting of the minds. But I think it is a very delicate situation.\\n\\n I remember talking to Senator [Barbara Ann] Mikulski one time after she became chair of the Senate Subcommittee. And she said, “How did you balance all of these things?” And I said, “Well, I had a lot of universities in my district. I had Florida State University and Florida A&M University and the University of Florida. And,” I said, “if you talked to the biologists, they’re the most important people in the world. They keep the body functioning and so forth. If you talked to the chemists, they’d say, ‘We’re the most important people in the world. We are the only ones that understand all these other things.’ And if you talk to the engineer, he’d say, ‘These are immaterial; we’re the ones that build things and make it work.’ And then if you talk to the physicists, they say, ‘We’re the only ones that have the big picture. We’re the only people that understand all of these facets.’ Then you talk to somebody else and then somebody says, ‘If you can’t communicate, English is the most important thing’ or language.” I said, “They’re all important. And you just have to use your common judgment as to how [to balance] these things—and if you talk to a university president, he’ll tell you the same thing. He gets conflicts from everybody. So, you have to try to balance these out. It’s not an easy—there’s no formula.”\\n\\n But I tried very hard to do that. And I think we succeeded. We had some good science programs. Unfortunately, they didn’t happen while I was still in Congress! But they ultimately happened. And very worthwhile programs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How are we for tape changes? Okay. In terms of the Shuttle, was there a point early on in those heated debates that you thought—did you ever have a thought that maybe this won’t get approved? Or maybe this won’t go through? In any—." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m an eternal optimist. And our chief antagonist in the House was Bella Abzug. And she was a great lady in her field, but she didn’t know very much about space and science. And it would—it played well in New York in among her constituents; and you have to go to New York and—to the Bowery and Chinatown and some of those to understand the people that she was representing. But Bella—if you have to have an opponent, Bella was probably as good a one as you could have in this issue. Now, if you were talking about women’s rights and some other issues, that would—that was her forte. But this was not necessarily that.\\n\\n So—and there were no other real big antagonist, no people of statute, I mean, that kind of statute to take us on. So, we won rather handily in the House. But we had to be very careful we didn’t ask for too much; and we—and we didn’t—we never got the budget cut when we got to the floor. And we had good bipartisan support, too.\\n\\n The ranking Republican on the committee was a gentleman named [Edward Lawrence] Larry Winn [Jr.] from Kansas. And Larry was—we never took a bill to the floor that we weren’t in total agreement with. And he could bring the Republicans along, and I could bring the Democrats along. So, we had pretty bipartisan—very good bipartisan support." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about the Shuttle’s design, though, being a product of compromise? Budget compromise, Air Force compromise? You know, the Air Force getting their support and then them, they—you know, they put all their eggs on the Shuttle and saying, “Okay, well, then it’s got to be designed to carry the satellites that we want it to carry.” And those things fundamentally changing the design of the Shuttle. Were you aware of those pressures at the time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, particularly the cargo bay was designed to meet the Air Force requirements. And you had to have a cargo bay of some size. So, I didn’t find that to be—it was certainly better to design those things in at the beginning rather than later and say, “Oops! We need to go back and modify this.”\\n\\n That was one—I think was one of the major design changes. Not design changes but requirements. And then that had to fit what the lift capability would be and so forth. And then what orbits you would go to and so forth. But I think it turned out to be very good. We were able then to take big payloads or numerous payloads in the cargo bay, and I don’t think it really has limited the effectiveness of the Shuttle at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about, though, those decisions? I mean, hindsight is always 20/20. But after Challenger (and we’ll get into Challenger more in detail, cause we haven’t even gotten you to reflect on the first Shuttle flight yet), but the politics of those decisions then almost later being criticized in some way for saying, “How could we ever have, you know, sat up there on Capitol Hill and thought we can just launch everything on the Shuttle and phase out unmanned rockets?” You know, later people would say, “Oh, how shortsighted!” But, you know, some of the people probably criticizing were people who supported the decisions at the time. I mean—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, politics is an interesting subject. And it’s always…whose ox is being gored. You had people that made unmanned vehicles. They didn’t want to go out of business, and they wanted a market for their vehicle; so, you had them stirring the pot. You had others that, I think, had legitimate concerns that if we have a problem with this (and I don’t think we really focused on that there would ever be a major problem with the Shuttle). We had multitudes of them. We never had any problem with the Saturn Program.\\n\\n We all thought that our understanding of how to build big, complex devices or launch vehicles, that we pretty well understand that. And we have testing before launch and so forth that reveal if there’s any anomalies or things that might go wrong. So, we can depend on this. But if a company or an agency has been spending so much money to develop a launch vehicle that can do unmanned vehicles, naturally they want to protect that investment. And I don’t blame them!\\n\\n So, you come up with arguments to support your position. Now in politics you have to—as in life, you have to decide: What should we do? What is the right thing to do? It seemed to me at that time (and I’m one to publicly confess that I was in error) is that, “Why do we need to support all this other infrastructure? If we need more flights we can get on Shuttle, the more we can reduce the cost; and we don’t have to have a whole stable of these unmanned vehicles that we really don’t need. We can accomplish all of this on the Space Shuttle.”\\n\\n And I think then—well, now, we’ve been able to reduce the cost of launch considerably, and I think it can still be reduced even more. But at that time, we had tremendous standing armies that, both contractor people and government people here and at the Cape and all over, standing, watching each other do nothing. And I don’t mean that critically. I mean that we were overstaffed and we didn’t have the proper management; and that was not really one of the main concerns at that particular time. But we were trying to figure out how do you get this cost down, keep it safe?\\n\\n And I think, ultimately…that has happened. But those are very tough, tough decisions to make. And on occasion in life, you make a bad call. And I think we probably should have kept some of the others, in retrospect, until we could do a better job and have more reliability…but get the cost down on launches." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When the Shuttle finally flew, your reaction to seeing it lift off and you’d seen all those Saturn launches, so it probably wasn’t nearly as loud or as impressive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the most exciting, I think, to me was when the Shuttle came off the back of the 747 out at Edwards [Air Force Base, California]. I was there. We had a contingent of members of Congress. I’d seen videos of how this would happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are you talking about the test flights?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The test flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If that bugger didn’t come off of there right or it took the tail end of the 747 off or wouldn’t fly or come in on a dead stick landing, I’m used to flying in airplanes with engines to power it in. And I’d heard all this stuff and I wanted to believe them, but I wanted to see it first. And so, I was there with Congressman Winn. We were out at Edwards; and I remember that morning, both of us, when that thing came off successfully and landed, we hugged each other. I had been telling people, “They tell me it’ll work.” And that was probably the most apprehensive—as apprehensive as the first launch—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—and—because it did fly, it landed like it was supposed to. I first thought they had not put the wheels down; they’d forgot to do that. And I couldn’t believe it. “Oh no!” Well, they put them down (I think) in the last 5 seconds or something like that. And I was standing—[with] Jim [Dr. James C.] Fletcher…who had been NASA Administrator before. (This was his first tour; he was—before his second tour.) And he was there and he’s hollering, “Wheels! Wheels! Wheels!” as if they could hear him. But I felt the same way. But I had been briefed about that.\\n\\n But Larry and I—we both had tears in our eyes and we hugged each other. You know, gee, you know, well, it worked. And we’re lay people. We’re not engineers. We have to take the word of all the smart people around here that tell you that all this is going to work. That was one.\\n\\n The other was getting the three engines to work. We had a time getting those engines to work! And I remember (it’s kind of a funny story): It was a cold January day and we were at Stennis Test Center…in Mississippi. It was a cold day and I had a cowboy hat because the wind was blowing; it was a cold January day. Wind blowing. And we went down there…and I was wearing that cowboy hat, and that was the first time we had a full three-engine test that was successful. And that was a major—that was another major concern: “Is this engine going to be able to work, all three of them at the same time?”\\n\\n So, then they had a—it was like in February…we had a test at the Cape. It was a cold day, and we were up on top of the VAB… And I wore that cowboy hat that day, and the test went great!\\n\\n So, we get to April; it’s getting warm in Florida then. Everybody’s telling me, “You’ve got to wear that cowboy hat.” It’s a wool western hat; and I had that hat on, and of course, perspiration’s coming down my face and I’m sweating—not only because of the heat but also because of whether that flight’s going off or not. And it was successful. I wore that hat up until, oh, the last few flights that—as a—just a good luck charm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mean, even to this day?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I retired. I still have the hat! But I haven’t worn it. Someone suggested I take it back to wear it for the John Glenn flight last year, but I didn’t." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a little warm then, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was a little warm. When the Shuttle first, you know, flew that first time and then, as you said, how soon after that—I mean, you know, after four flights, it’s declared operational. But operational then was not what you all had envisioned it being back in the ’70s when the political fighting and the budget. I mean, how soon did you realize, “Boy, this is not going to get down to, you know, $50 a pound. This is not going to get down to a flight a week.” I mean, when did that realization come?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think along about that time it occurred to me that this is—we’re still dealing with a very hostile environment. It was called space. And it will never be routine. I think that was wishful thinking on a lot of parts. I was not one of those who early advocated that that was even ever going to happen. But, I think I realized, and a lot of other people, that this is, still have a very precarious situation here. Turning it around, getting it [ready] and the amount of time it’s taking to turn the Shuttle around. The complexities of the systems. Even then, they were old. The computers and so forth were not the latest computers. The redundancy of test and so forth. All of that led me to believe that this is still a very complex thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You just thought, “Okay, it may cost more than we expected but it’s still worth fighting for?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I think it was. It had the flexibility that we could go up and retrieve satellites, bring them back, put satellites out, test them, then release them. I thought then, and I still think, that that has a great deal of appeal. Now if you want to look at the cost for commercial [space], and as we’ve gone the other way, [they are] building bigger satellites. The method then was big, big satellites; and it was not only in that. I remember in the energy field, we (the Science Committee) were dealing a lot with nuclear power plants at that time. The big theme then was to build…power plants [at] about 100 to 200/300 MW plants, and then they were going to build like 1500 M[W] plants. And the scale-up was just too big. And when a 1500 M[W] plant goes down, you can shut down the whole State of Texas!\\n\\n They rethought this and said, “Hey, why don’t we build smaller so you just plug them in? If one goes down, you don’t blow out the whole system.” And the same thing with big space projects. I think [NASA Administrator] Dan [Daniel S.] Goldin has done a great job in faster, cheaper. Every program, you take Galileo, Hubble, all those big programs were over $1B, including the early Mars mission, Viking. And if something happens, you’ve lost not only 10 years of a researcher’s and developer’s time, but you’ve lost a lot of money.\\n\\n So, I think [they have] gone back and in the commercial area, which I think has a tremendous potential… It’s just now taking off, and it is the fastest growing part of the whole aerospace industry, commercial space. Then I think you’ve got to look at low-cost launch and low-cost birds. If something happens to it, jettison it, put another one up. And you don’t need the complexity of some of those.\\n\\n But back at that time, that was the predominant thinking. That we could build all these big, complex devices. And I think they’ve rethought that now. So, it’s still, for bigger programs and others, the Shuttle is still, I think…can be very supportive for those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The—I want to mention one thing that’s a reference. That according to the historian who wrote this up, they mentioned the space tug, but they also said that the last reference they could get to the space tug is from 1973. And they’re wondering what became of this project. Do you recall the space tug? And I think they mentioned a meeting that you had with someone about the space tug (I think it was George [M.] Low) talking about the space tug. And I’m wondering what happened to it? Did it kind of transition into the inertial upper stage [IUS], which could get the big payloads up there but not bring them back? I mean, what was this—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, as I recall, they were talking about something that would be like a tugboat. Take it from the mother ship and take it to a certain place, and then drop it off and come back. And you could retrieve it. Or you could jettison it. But I think the IUS finally was the winner, which was an Air Force program and one of their contributions. And that became a very expensive program… And as I recall, it was to be a small vehicle that would take something out to geosynchronous orbit, leave it, and come back; and you could—the tug would be reusable. You could bring it back and—\\n\\n Then there’s some concern about: what kind of fuel would it have in there? And did you want to land with that type of fuel onboard a Shuttle? There were a lot of safety concerns about that. And probably, as I recall (and I don’t remember the exact figures), it was going to be very expensive to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall what killed it or—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were looking at a throwaway-type smaller vehicle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mean, do you recall, like, there being a conscious decision to kill the space tug? Or did it just kind of—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I don’t think it was ever authorized. I think it was one of those proposals, and you get a lot of proposals. Some better than others. There was also another vehicle, smaller than the IUS, that could take objects out to geosynchronous or something of that type. And I don’t remember who built it now. I remember it was…not a—very big, and you could stack things on to take care of whatever the payload you were trying to put out there. But I think it was probably too expensive to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The Shuttle’s flying. And I’m just curious. Talk about politics in space: [Senator Edwin Jacob] Jake Garn and [Rep. Clarence William] Bill Nelson. Do you recall the politics behind them lobbying to fly? And let’s start with Jake Garn, because he was first. I mean, do you remember what your first reaction was when you heard he wanted to go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let me say Jake Garn and Bill Nelson are both very dear friends of mine. I like them both. Yes, I was aware of what was going on. And [James M.] Jim Beggs, who was the NASA Administrator at the time, and I expressed to Jim my thoughts. And they’re still my thoughts today.\\n\\n I said, “Jim, I don’t want to go. Even if you told me I could go, I don’t want to go. And I’ll tell you why. I don’t think I have any business being there. This is still a very hostile environment. I’m not even sure you ought to have the Teacher In Space Program going. But I’ve got a full-time job being a member of Congress and these other guys do, too. And I don’t thing you’ve got the time to devote to proper training when you’ve got a whole cadre of astronauts that are professionals in this business, mission specialists, and so forth; and I don’t think I ought to bump somebody to go take a ride in space. I would love to! I’d give my right arm to go, but I don’t think I have any business doing that. And that’s my position. I’m not going to raise hell about this, and I’m not going around and make speeches about this. But that’s just my personal feeling.” And it had nothing to do with Jake and Bill; and they’re both good friends then; they’re good friends now. But that was my position on it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But they got to go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They got to go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In fact, right after Bill Nelson’s flight, obviously, the darkest day for the Shuttle Program certainly. Very soon after that, the Challenger disaster. Were you at that launch?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had gone down on Friday for the launch. I think the launch was going to be—either Thursday or Friday. I think the launch was going Friday or Saturday, I’m not sure. And I was flying with [Michael J.] Mike Smith, flying some approach shots that night. John Young was along. This was on the Shuttle trainer. And you could see the weather coming in. And so, it was obvious that [there is] not going to be a launch. I think the launch was the next day; I’m not sure. The next afternoon or something like that.\\n\\n So, when we realized—and then after we got back on the ground, we…landed probably around 9:30, 10:00 at night…out at the Shuttle landing strip. And I think, talking to George [W. S.] Abbey or somebody at that time, I said, “You know, we’re probably not going to be able to launch.” And I had a group of—members of Congress down there with me. And so, we decided that probably it would be better to go on back. We had a Air Force plane…down there. And…I had something on Monday (I don’t remember what it was) back in Washington. So, I was not going to be able to stay. So…the next day, we went on back.\\n\\n I’m watching this in my office on Monday. They’re trying to launch again. And… [A.] Scott Crossfield, who worked on the committee staff—Scott was a former test pilot for North American and was the first guy to do twice the speed of sound and the first guy to do three times the speed of sound. He was a test pilot. And he…worked aeronautical programs for the committee. Scott’s in there briefing me about this program. And I’m watching the closed-circuit TV.\\n\\n I’d been hearing—there had been several things that happened before then. A wrench was left in, I think—in the Nelson flight. Left in an engine. And there had been some sloppy things going on that I was very concerned about, that people had gotten lax and not paying attention. Well, this day, while Scott was in there trying to brief me and I’m watching this closed-circuit TV, somebody had wrung a bolt off on the door hatch and they couldn’t get it open. …They have a little auxiliary (like a doctor’s) box that [they have]—a doctor carries around. They had a little emergency kit there. They had a power tool in there, and the battery was dead on the power tool.\\n\\n So, they had to…send somebody from over there, over to the industrial area to get a new tool and drive back. And in the meantime, the weather had come in, so they scrubbed the launch that day. I am livid! And the only person that I could take this out on was poor Scott Crossfield. He didn’t have anything to do with it, but he’s having to listen to my tirade. And I’m calling people. I’m saying, “You know, this—if somebody had wrung the bolt off, you’re supposed to sign for it. Somebody, you know, that this is done. And that was just so out of procedure!”\\n\\n I’m livid that this is going on. I just couldn’t believe this! And I’m calling to find, you know, what in the hell is going on down there? And so, the next day, I am in there with another meeting going on with the director of the committee staff, and we see this when they launch. And I knew immediately that, you know, there was a serious problem.\\n\\n I had been down there and had dinner with them. …We had been…in Japan at a meeting. I was coming back through Hawaii; and they had just turned on a new telescope there in Mauna Kea, the National Science Foundation. And I had been up to there and they had given me some photographs of Halley’s comet. And so, I’m there talking to…Ellison [S.] Onizuka, who was on the flight and is from Hawaii…and from the big island of Hawaii, where this telescope [is] located. So, I’m telling him about it; and he said, “Well, that’s one of the things I’m going to be doing, is looking at Halley’s comet and making some pictures of it.” He said, “Could I—have you got the pictures with you?” And I said, “Well, they’re down in the car in my briefcase.”\\n\\n So, I ran back down and got the pictures. There were about three or four pictures of Halley’s comet. The first pictures they’d made of Halley’s comet! And so, I gave them to him; and he said, “I’m going to take them with me, and I’ll give them back to you when I get back. I want to see—compare what I see with what’s here.” And so, you know, I knew all of them. I didn’t know [Sharon Christa] Chrissy McAuliffe or—or Mike [Gregory B.] Jarvis very well, but I knew all of the others and had been up flying and so forth. It was a sad, sad experience.\\n\\n It shouldn’t have happened. And if you’d have made a long list (and I had) of all the things that could go wrong (and I had done that), that would have never been on the list. I was always worried about the main engines. And that was—when that thing hit MECO (main engine cutoff), it was a relief to me. And that was not one of the things I was—on my list of worries." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you—do you recall, you know, the committee’s appointed and the investigation process starts, and obviously there was some Congressional oversight also going on at the same time. But do you recall when you first became aware of, you know, the memos and the O-ring issue? I mean, when did you become aware of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, when it was going on. President Reagan appointed an investigating panel. And he appointed former Secretary of State [William P.] Bill Rogers and he’d been former Attorney General. There was a tremendous amount of clamoring in Congress that, “We’ve got to go and investigate this.” And in the Senate, Senator [Ernest F.] Hollings was chair of that subcommittee, and he was chomping at the bits. And I talked to Bill Rogers, the chairman of the President’s Commission, and I said, “You know, I’m under tremendous pressure. And at some point, we’re going to have to do something.”\\n\\n So, we talked about it. He said, “I don’t think it’s productive to have two investigations going on at the same time.” I said, “I agree. One, they were going to put them under oath and we’d be putting them under oath. And it—we could jeopardize…the thoroughness.” And he had the more facilities to do a more thorough investigation than we did.\\n\\n And so, I talked to the ranking Republican at that time, and—which was Congressman [Manuel] Lujan [Jr.] from New Mexico. And I said, “You know, let’s meet with Rogers and see what we can do to try to keep this thing under wraps. And then when he gets through, then we’ll have Rogers come up. That’s the way we did it…when we had the Apollo fire.” And I said, “We’ll—then we’ll have Rogers come up and give his presentation. We’ll grill the witnesses. We can do whatever we want to do.” In the meantime [that’s what] we did.\\n\\n And then Rogers would come up and we didn’t want—he didn’t want the press there. We didn’t want to have a formal hearing. But we would meet in my office, unofficially, and I would invite the senior Republicans and Democrats on the committee, and particularly the one that dealt with the Shuttle Program; and he would give us a briefing of what was going on and so forth. So, that’s when we first heard about the O-ring and some of the memos.\\n\\n I was aware that there were some communication problems going on of who’s in charge. Who says no/no-go on a launch? And it was very evident. And then some of the laxity that had gone on before there. I was down there with one of the astronauts, and I won’t reveal his name because he’s still active. But he was driving me out there one day or one night, and he was saying, “You know, there’s been a lot of morale problems out here now.” And I started inquiring about what was he hearing. And this was with the workers out there at the Cape. And so, I became [aware] and that was two or three launches before the…Challenger accident. Anyhow, we did that.\\n\\n In the meantime, I had planned to announce at the 1st of March that—or the 1st of February that I was not going to run again for Congress. And I had talked to some people that I was seriously considering that. When the Challenger accident happened, I said, you know, “I can’t do that. You know, I can’t—I don’t want it to appear that I’m not running or that I had something to do with it or I’m getting out or something of that type. I don’t have to answer those kind of questions. And so,” I said, “I’m going to wait a while.”\\n\\n So…I said, “I need to do it soon, because we have a primary in September and I need to make some kind of announcement pretty soon so people can run for my seat.” So, I postponed it to—into March. In the meantime, as soon as I announced, the headhunter came to see me about some jobs. One of them was the AIA (the Aerospace Industries Association)…becoming their president. That was 10 days after I announced that I was not going to run again. In the meantime, Rogers was winding up with—or the committee was still going on. But they were coming along.\\n\\n So, I had had some informal talks with AIA about taking over their presidency. And so, that was in addition to some other job offers that I had. But that was about the only one I was really interested in. …That was to happen when my term ended—to remove any conflict of interest because the companies that were involved in the Space Shuttle were members of the Aerospace Industries Association. So, when we got ready to have…our review of the Rogers committee findings, I had reclused myself from chairing the hearings.\\n\\n So, I turned it over to a man who was going to be the next chairman, [Robert A.] Bob Roe from New Jersey, who was the ranking person on the committee. And Bob actually conducted the hearings. I made sure that I didn’t have anything to do with that, that might cause any feeling that I was being unfair or overly fair or prejudiced toward one of the companies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember, though, what your thoughts were when you know, many people have expressed it as such that, and you mentioned this earlier, about you—NASA would come to you with budgets but you assumed the safety." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You know, every—and I’ve heard people say, too, and even some of the media at the time saying, you know, the real—what upset people so much was this perception that NASA was the one agency that was above the backroom politics and the smoke-filled room and cutting deals. That they seemed somehow above that. And that what came out made people question that. And you think, “Oh no, not them, too!” I mean, what—that was one reaction. Did your reaction have some of that in it, or what?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think—I remember when NASA was created. I was in there at the creation, almost, of NASA. And it was a group of young engineers with a mission, and it was a new agency. There was such vibrance and challenges that—and people were so young. I remember going to launches and I wondered if some of the launch directors and engineers even shaved every day! You know, were they old enough to do that? Now you go to a launch they’re old gray-haired guys there. But then it was so young.\\n\\n And you go back and look at some of the pictures of the people; and, gee, how young they were back then with tremendous responsibilities! I remember when George Low was a young man in—here at the Johnson Center and I was very impressed with him. And Joe [Joseph F.] Shea and a lot of other people that were around at that time; and Rocco [A.] Petrone and people back in that vintage.\\n\\n But then NASA grew older and more bureaucratic. And that happens sometime when you do it. Nobody really challenged them because, after all, they were king of the hill! They had been successful. They had put a man on the Moon and successfully brought him back. They had done all these challenging things! So, who was I to run out and say, “NASA, you don’t know what you’re doing.” But I was getting the feeling, before the Challenger accident, that there was a blasé attitude starting to develop about safety. Now none of the crew talked to me about that, because I had private conversations with them. “Do you feel comfortable and so forth?” Yeah, everybody did. I’m not even sure they were aware of some of these things with the O-rings and the weather—and the temperature and the—and so forth.\\n\\n And were we really trying to find out what caused these things to happen in previous flights? But I was more concerned about wrenches left in the engine and the things of that type, which just blew my mind that those kind of things could go on! So, I was concerned, as I said previously. I was—one of the astronauts was driving me out to the Cape and we were going by, and he just started, matter-of-factly, mentioning this thing to me. And I became concerned about that and made some inquiries about it. And they were having some labor problems or contract problems at that time. And I thought, well, maybe that’s part of it. There was a lot of overtime going in at that time. But I couldn’t believe!\\n\\n And then when had the door handle problem, when—and then not having the proper tools! That’s just lax. And I became even more concerned then about, you know, “What’s going on?” And unfortunately, we had the accident. It wasn’t related to any of those matters. But it was a—and it’s something would have probably have happened sooner or later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did—you know, there’s a committee that was primarily oversight of the budget but that goes to other things. I mean, Congressional committees can pretty much do what they decide to do. What kind of—and I know you left Congress. But what do you see as checks and balances? I mean, is there anything that you think your committee could have had in place to uncover things like that? And is some of that there now? Do you think that there’s more, you know, oversight? I mean, you can’t know about secret memos and—but what did you see as a politician? I mean, you obviously search your soul and say, “What could we do?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, when—you’re kind of like a fireman or a doctor in an emergency room. When there’s an emergency, you know, you try to find out what the problem is and try to take care of it. Back in the early days of the Shuttle—well, not in early days. But as it was going into production, NASA comes in and says, you know, “We’ve got so much for the Shuttle,” and “Is that enough money?” “Oh yeah, that’s plenty of money.” “How much carryover have you got from last year?” And you’re going through all the routine questions you ask.\\n\\n You automatically ask them. You come to Johnson and say, “How much did you ask Headquarters for?” You routinely get those numbers. “How much?” to Kennedy. “How much did you ask for?” “Contractor, how much did you ask for?” and then you look at the final budget, and you say, “Well, they cut you $300M. What impact is that going to have?”\\n\\n Well, NASA comes in and says, “Everything is okay.” Contractor comes in and says, “Everything’s okay.” And then about—that’s in, like, March. Then about June, they come to me and tell me that, “We’ve got a little cost overrun problem.” “What?!” “Yup, we’ve got a cost overrun problem.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And this is June of what year?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, this is probably in…the late ’70s, early ’80s. And I said, “What?!” “Yeah, we’ve got a little cost overrun on the Shuttle.” And so, I said, “What happened since you came in here in March and told me everything was okay? And now, 3 months later, you’ve got this tremendous overrun.” “Well, we just found out about it.” “Yeah, um-hmm. I believe in Santa Claus, too.” So, we…[have] got to go to the floor to get this money and my reputation’s on the line, and I have to explain it to all the other 434 members of the House why I told them everything was okay earlier. So, we put a—we started an investigation of our own. “What happened?”\\n\\n And we found out that—and it was primarily [at] Rockwell that was having the problem, that when something happened on the [plant] floor it was about 6 [to 9] months before it ever wound its way back to NASA [Headquarters]. It was actually 9 months before it ever wound its way back to NASA. So, this problem had been festering down there and…[the process] not letting it get back to NASA.\\n\\n So, we held some hearings on that. “What is going on?” And then we had them institute a procedure that if something happened on the floor, there was a red flag went up and somebody, somewhere up the line was supposed to say, “What’s going on?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is when the Shuttle’s being built?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Cause I have written down that there—in 1979, they asked for supplemental funding." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well that was probably the year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And—that was probably." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also did it in 1990—1980." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think they did it real close together there, asked for more and then more." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. We had a major problem. And yet they came in ’79 and said, “Everything’s okay.” I mean, it—at the early hearings in like February or March. So, we went back, reviewed those. Now safety had not—we kept asking about safety, you know. “Is this okay?” And, “Do you feel comfortable with all of these things?” That’s tough for a Congressional committee to find out those kind of things. And even if we’d have had a—why would we have had an investigation in the first place?\\n\\n First of all, you usually have an investigation to try to find out why something happened. It’s usually after the fact. We did have, as I said, open communication with the astronauts. Any time they felt uncomfortable about something or some procedure, we had one when they were trying to put an Agena in the Shuttle bay as a tug-type thing. And what happens if you bring that back, if you have to make an emergency landing. What do you do about all the fuel in there? There was some cockamamie idea that you could vent the fuel out the back end of the Shuttle. And I remember sitting over here in one of the hotels with three of the astronauts that had some concerns about that.\\n\\n And I took their concerns to heart, and we went back and worked the problem. But the fact of the matter is, on what happened to the Challenger, I think it was a culmination of things that—poor decision-making process, who can call off a launch or who can say go/no-go? And they had a committee doing it, and nobody had a final authority in it. And there were some questions raised by that. I talked to a number of people about—off the record about the process that they went through in trying to make some of these—the decision-making process at that time on launch and whether to launch or not to launch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about the Rogers Commission spreading the blame around and even saying, “Hey, there’s some blame that can be on Congress as well for funding it the way it was funded and maybe setting up,” as we said, “all the eggs are in one basket.” And was there added pressure? I mean, they—you know, they mentioned the media, too. You know, the pressure of saying—the media making fun if you delay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A lot of pressure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You know, pressure all the way around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mean, you know, to this day you ask whether there’s an important visitor at a Shuttle launch or you’re trying to launch because, you know, Hillary Clinton’s there. You know, that kind of thing gets asked to this day. But what about the role of Congress? I mean, do you see a role of the political process? And let’s take it out of the context for me, if you could, of the broader thing. I mean, I know there’s a lot of other influences and you’ve talked about a lot of those. But just the political part of it. And what role do you think that played?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Congress is in a tough job, trying to—because of the staff. We have—NASA, when they would come in with a budget, would probably have 25 people there with just the controller. I didn’t even have a—one number-cruncher on my subcommittee. And they could bamboozle us with numbers so fast it would make your head swim! I finally got a number-cruncher on the committee, and I had one against an army of people!\\n\\n It’s very, very difficult to get back down after you get from the major numbers back to the sub-numbers and the sub-numbers way back down, how you can shift money around and so forth. It’s very tough for Congress to compete against the expertise and the people that NASA have. So, you’re at a disadvantage and you have to have a common trust between the two. That they’re being square with you.\\n\\n And I think you shouldn’t be in an adversarial situation, where they’re afraid to come and talk to you about it. Say, “Hey, we’ve got a safety problem here, and we need to talk to you.” Now we did have some discussions about safety concerns early on, about radio transmissions that could jam the communications to the Shuttle and things of that type. But it—the committee staff, probably for the whole NASA budget, probably there are only 6 or 8 people. And look how many people NASA have! Or just at the Johnson Space Center here. So, it’s very difficult to think you can outsmart them.\\n\\n But there has to be a common trust. And I think we’ve had a good relationship with NASA, not always that they’ve been happy and maybe there’s also a concern, too, that Congress meddles too much. My feeling was that we were not there to micromanage NASA. That’s what they’re hired to do. They’re professional people. I couldn’t go in and tell a Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz that, “Hey, Gene, you can’t launch today.” Or whoever was the program manager that, you know, “You can’t do that.” I have no expertise to do that.\\n\\n But I think you have to—we are there to try to set overall policy and to try to make sure that the public interest is carried out. You have to have faith that they’re servants of the people. They’re spending the money as wisely as they can. We may differ on that. But with a big budget like that, I don’t think Congress should try to micromanage what you’re doing.\\n\\n You’re trying to say, “We have a space policy. Our policy is to do this: We’re going to launch Space Shuttles. We’re going to carry programs in.” I can’t tell him how to build a Hubble telescope or how to operate one of their sophisticated missions. That’s what their expertise is doing. So, I don’t think Congress is necessarily capable of getting into what an O-ring—now, if you find out about it, you say, “Hey, I’ve heard,” and you pick up these things. You get—NASA employees would write me letters sometimes about—saying—a lot of it was somebody lollygagging at the water machine too long or something of that type.\\n\\n But sometimes you get letters that something is going on. I always tried to check them out. Sometimes I found out it was probably the person was disgruntled or something of that type. But I always tried to check them. I didn’t get that many letters, but sometimes you’d get anonymous letters from people that—and they have a way of letting their local Congressman know that something’s going wrong. We had staff. We’d check into those things. Most of the time they were, maybe, exaggerated or not of the magnitude that we [worried about]. But you have to have a common trust, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, did you feel that common trust was violated? I mean, in some way you had to think—I mean, some of the testimony had to just be gut-wrenching for you. I mean, and—for many people, to think some of it that they knew, and some of them were even arrogant. I mean, some of those middle managers. I mean, you had to feel that trust was violated. And then I know you left Congress, but did—do you feel that it’s been rebuilt?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it has. I think the—there’s been a more keen awareness. I think we have [learned] you can never let down. That’s a constant problem [of] safety and making sure that, you know, somebody’s life is at stake here. Not only their life but also the whole program.\\n\\n What did I feel? Betrayed? No, not really. I don’t think senior management at NASA knew all that. I think they were shocked at what was going on. I think that management has got to make sure that they have an operating environment that, instead of punishing somebody for reporting something, they’d almost reward them for saying, you know, “You need to let us know this.”\\n\\n When I got into industry, I found that a lot of people doing things they shouldn’t be doing because they thought they were benefiting the company. They were harming the company! And people started going through training programs, ethics programs and [the like]. “What is ethical and what is not?” And I went to some of those to see what they were—what they were teaching. I was very impressed.\\n\\n I don’t think anybody was doing anything illegal. I think it was—it can always be a miscommunication or a misinterpretation, or my idea may not jibe with your idea of how we do this. But there has to be a system in place that employees feel like they can go somewhere and not be penalized or punished for discussing, openly, you know, “This manager and this manager have a different view of this, and it’s very serious. How do we resolve these differences?” And I think it’s very important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Okay, I’ll let them change tapes. And then we’ll—\\n\\n VOICE OFF CAMERA: Okay. We’re rolling.\n\nWe had talked about Challenger and you were saying that—but even before the accident you’d made the decision to leave Congress—you felt you’d—you’ve been there long enough—and to move into this position. Tell me about the AIA and what you saw your role there and how—did that role, in some way—do you think you still, obviously, played a role—and you—I guess you retired from that group last December of 1998. But how in that role did you still have a role in serving America’s space programs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, of course the Aerospace Industries Association is the premier trade group of all the major manufacturers in the aerospace business. We have about 50 to 60 companies (depending on whose merger and so forth is taking place); and it’s a CEO [Chief Executive Officer] organization. So, you’re dealing with the CEOs of the group that make everything in the aerospace business plus space as well as military systems, commercial airplanes, commercial satellites, all of them. And about… $170B industry.\\n\\n I always had good relations with the NASA Administrator. Kind of a funny thing. I never knew where the NASA Administrator’s office was. I knew it was down at NASA Headquarters, but usually he came to see me. And after I left Congress, I realized how my role had changed and I went to see him on bended knee.\\n\\n But I’ve had very good relations with the NASA Administrators, and most of them I had known in the past. Dan Goldin when he was at TRW [Inc.]. And the—usually they used me as a kind of an interface. Rather than talk to 15 CEOs about an issue, many times they used me as the intermediary. And then President Bush appointed me to the [Norman R.] Augustine Commission [Presidential Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program (1992)] that reviewed the space program. I’ve been on a number of committees.\\n\\n I was on the NASA advisory committee for a while. A very interesting experience from having been in Congress and then in industry, and looking at it from a different perspective. So, I’ve had a very close working—but not as close a relationship as I had when I was in Congress, because I don’t review all their budgets and programs and so forth. But I’ve had an opportunity to work with NASA on particular—several committees that Dan has asked me to serve on (Dan Goldin). And he has called me many times for advice and how should he do something? Or give him my 2 cents’ worth. And so, we’ve had a very, very good relationship. So, I feel like I’ve been—it still hasn’t left my system. And I hope it never does!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you consider yourself an expert on the politics of space? I mean, obviously. And how do you—if you have to sum up for somebody “the politics of space” and what that phrase has come to mean over the years—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, anybody that’d tell you they’re an expert in politics is probably not telling you the truth because I’m not sure there’s anybody that’s [an] expert in politics. It’s a kind of trial-and-error. But I think I somewhat understand the system, and I can—it doesn’t take you too long. Some of the issues are still the same. Some of the players are the same. But it’s—I’m not sure I’m an expert in that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You very quickly became involved with the Challenge Center—Challenger Center very early on in its existence. Why? Why did that appeal to you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I knew all the wives. And I was down here right after the accident happened. I’m sitting in June Scobee’s house. (Dick [Francis R. Scobee] was the commander.) …My wife and I were here, and we had known them, and the next thing I know, the cat’s crawling in my lap. And she said, “You’re the only person that that cat has crawled in their lap except Dick Scobee.” And I’m not even a big cat fan. But the cat was crawling around.\\n\\n And, of course, I knew the wives as well as their husbands and felt, you know, it was kind of like a family. And we talked about a lot of people were trying to do memorials and build a rock monument or something of that type. And we talked about something that they would like, and we decided, you know, why don’t we do something living rather than build a stone monument that birds rest on? And they came up with the—with a lot of help, with the idea of the Challenger Centers.\\n\\n And I was involved from day one in helping them get that going. I’ve been on the Board. I’ve been treasurer of it and still on the Board now. And I think it’s a wonderful, wonderful idea and a great tribute to a group of wonderful Americans." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How do you think that the Challenger Center and what it stands for helps further America’s space program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, bringing young kids in, in a informative age and giving them the opportunity to fly a space mission. When you go back (and I’ve done this quite a bit in education; I’ve been very interested in education and particularly in science and math and engineering), and I’ve done this to kids or people that—that have [got] their doctorate degree; and go back and ask individually, “What inspired you to do that?” It was either “a parent” or “a teacher” or somebody in their life inspired them to do that.\\n\\n And if you’re exposed to this, one of the things we need more kids to do is to study more math and science. And when kids get at a certain age when they’re making those decisions, now they may want to play soccer or they may want to play in a band. They may be interested in a boy or a girl. They may have a lot of other competing interest out there. And if we can somehow spark the imagination of these young people that, “Yes, gee, if I want to be an astronaut, you know, I’d better learn math and science.” Or, “If I want to be an engineer or a physicist or somebody.” …I think it’s a great way to inspire young kids to go into science and math." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Also, Space Day, which I take it the organization—the IAI—AIA was involved in creating Space Day, correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Correct." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how do you see that? I mean, how has it grown since its inception? How do you think it reflects the space program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it’s—I think it’s a great way to stop and say, you know, “What are we—can we do?” And we still have to promote an awareness of what space is—what space is and the importance of it. There was a great article (I think) in Parade magazine last week about the importance of space and what it can do. (Maybe it wasn’t Parade. It was—maybe it was one of the other papers. I’m not sure.) Some of the things that we’ve learned from space. And I think people—there’s a new generation.\\n\\n A new generation’s coming along all the time. And I think it’s a continuous trying to remind people the importance of it. And I think most people, most Americans, feel like that…yes, they want America to be the premier country in space and space exploration and what we could learn from it medically, exploring other planets. Is there water on the Moon? Or is there water on Mars? We are an exploring country. We have people trying to fly higher all the time or go faster, whether ground or in the air. We—we’re climbing mountains.\\n\\n My wife’s sister climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. You know, it’s a—it’s there. And she’s not even a mountain climber! But we have those [people] that want to do that. And exploration is something that I think we have to—we have to get people inspired about. Remind them what it’s all about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, the next big mountain (so to speak) for NASA is Space Station. Think back to when Space Station first came up before your committee, what you envisioned it could be. What was your level of support for it? And—versus what it’s now appearing it’s going to be?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I thought it was a—Space Station was then and now is a logical extension of the Space Shuttle. We can still use the Space Shuttle to go to and from, service it. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not an end in its own like the Apollo Program where you went and it was over, and there’s nothing else to do unless you wanted to rediscover the Moon. Further, there’s nothing wrong with that. But this is a further extension of what the Space Shuttle can do. And, yes, it came up; and…we authorized this back in the ’80s when Ronald Reagan was still President.\\n\\n Of course, it’s gone through a lot of configurations that have been better. I think the early ones were too complex. They’ve tried to simplify them, and I think it’s a lot better now than it was back then. And it looked like it’s going to, with all things happening right—it’s going to come into fruition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you think that we’d be teaming up with the Russians?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mean, could you have ever envisioned that for Space Station?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I felt all along that if we had a Space Station, if there was a Space Station, that it would have to be an International Space Station. I didn’t think the United States could afford to do a whole Space Station by itself. I questioned whether the—how much—the amount the Russians would be involved. (Of course, this was back in the ’80s when the Cold War was still on.) But I did envision the Europeans and the Japanese and some other countries being involved. Canadians being involved. And I think it’s—I think it’s great!\\n\\n I think science has transcended political boundaries for many, many decades. And I think it’s a—it’s important that we try to do things together, and that something of this magnitude certainly lends itself to an international opportunity rather than just one country or one small group of countries going on their own." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I want to have you reflect a little bit on some people and on some institutions that kind of factor into your career in politics and space. And we’ll start with some of the NASA Administrators. Jim Fletcher. Just your thoughts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Wonderful, wonderful man. He was there twice and was, I think, a great guy. He was a little bit naïve about the political process; but when you went and talked to him and tried to explain it to [him], he was very—he was a very quick learner and could—and would very well respond. And he was a wonderful person. Had a great credibility." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Bob [Robert A.] Frosch, who followed him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Bob came there as, I think, somewhat also naïve about the process…and came there more as a scientist and not familiar with this—with the manned program but more as an oceanographer. But he did a good job in a very troubling time at NASA when—when we were having some budget problems. Things were not going well. But…Bob was a good guy. We got along very well. I can��t say that with every member of the committee, though. But we got along fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "James Beggs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Jim was a great guy. Unfortunately, his career was tarnished by something he was later exonerated for. But he understood the political process. He was tough as nails and made a great contribution to NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Bill [William R.] Graham being in place. I mean, some people have said, too, that changeover from, you know, Beggs, who was this fearless leader type, to Bill Graham that you had—it was almost like, you know, the planets collided at the time that Challenger happened to have all—everything in its worst possible scenario. I mean, did you agree with that? Or—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Bill Graham was certainly a different type person than Jim Beggs or a lot of the others. And he came out of the—out of the black world." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Meaning the spy world or—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The spy world. And, of course, he and Beggs did not get along at all! But he was President Reagan’s choice for that job. And I got along with Graham very well. I think he was—he was a brilliant scientist. I think maybe a little bit out of his element in—as being a NASA Administrator." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In what way? Management skills? Politics?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think management, and not understanding the political process as he had from his previous life. He later went on to be the President’s Science Advisor. And I think in that he did a great job. And that was more in his—more in his element. I don’t think he’d really managed big programs and a lot of people. And NASA sometimes gets a little—gets a little unwieldy to manage. And I think it was probably a little bit over his element in that as far as the management style." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Bob [Robert R.] Gilruth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Bob Gilruth, you know, really brought the Johnson Space Center into fruition. One of the early pioneers at Langley, and was a wonderful guy. Tough but a great guy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about Christopher [C.] Kraft?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Chris was another very interesting guy. I probably knew—well, I knew Chris better than I did Bob Gilruth. Chris was a tough—was a tough cookie. Smart and ran the Johnson Center and a lot of other places with a pretty iron hand. But Chris was always (I think) a—you never questioned where—you never questioned where he stood. He was a great advocate of the program and a good manager. And I think a good person at that time to run this Center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Some of your political colleagues, I noticed that in one of the listings of—the committee listings, someone who’s on the committee with you who has now gone on to be (I don’t want to say) a NASA opponent, but he certainly makes his feelings known is [Frank James] Sensenbrenner [Jr.]. And I noticed he was on a committee with you back then. Your thoughts on James Sensenbrenner." + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think Jim is a strong supporter of the space program. I think he and Dan have probably had some disagreements. And they patched them up. Jim has been very concerned about the funding for the Space Station, as he should be. As chairman of the committee, I don’t—I think he’s looking at this as, “Let’s don’t get our necks so far out and get it chopped off if the Russians do not live up to their commitment.” And he’s got some legitimate concerns there. And Dan is caught in the middle, trying to support the Administration and the Vice President, who has been somewhat the focal point for the Administration on this as well as Dan.\\n\\n And with Jim a member of the—member of the Republican party, a different party. But Jim is a supporter of the space program. And…he sees his job as requiring him to do these things. And I think…he’s raising some good questions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And do you think that that is your all’s role? I mean, in terms of the politics of it? That you all walk that line? And you’ve mentioned things that you’ve brought up that you questioned and were maybe critical of that—was it possible to be a supporter and also be, you know, a “contrarian” sometimes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we all have our different ways of doing things. And Jim Sensenbrenner and I are—don’t see things totally the same way. But recognizing that, I think his intentions are good. Now, I think he is, in his role as chairman of the committee—has legitimate concerns about getting ourselves involved in a program as deeply as we are with some partners that maybe are not carrying their full share of the load, or the one that they are expected to. And that’s legitimate concern! And I don’t fault him for that.\\n\\n That’s not trying to micromanage NASA. That’s not trying to tell you how to build it. It’s saying, “These are policy issues. And these are concerns that I have. And I have to answer to my colleagues, because they depend on me, as a committee chairman, to represent to them the facts as I understand them and how we are engaged in this. And are—will—are we wasting our taxpayers’ money on some folly that the Russians may pull the plug on?” That’s a legitimate concern! And I think Jim is exercising his responsibilities in raising some of those questions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In terms of institutions, the press, the media, and its role in the coverage of space and what you think that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think the media, in many times, can be very fickle. I think generally they’ve been very supportive of the space program; but then, once you have a launch or two, then they never show up unless something bad is happening. And that—unfortunately bad news is—makes news and not good news.\\n\\n And I cite the time when the Skylab was going to fall and all the major press, particularly the TV networks, wanted to know where I was going to be when it happened in case it hit Chicago or New York; and then stick a microphone in my face and say, you know, “Congressman, explain how this happened?” And I asked the question before then, I say, “Well, what happens if it lands in the middle of the ocean?” And they say, “Well, we don’t care where you are. We won’t be coming by for an interview.” So, I said, “To heck with you!” (A little stronger than that.)" + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, that feeling that bad news is news and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—good news is not news." + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I think generally the press is—has been very supportive of the space program. And they still break in for launches and so forth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The—when you reflect back on your committee work, what did you see as some of the most fun of being on that committee? Some of the most fun projects that you think you got to be involved with and oversee? Fun and fascinating, I guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think when programs are successful. Like when the first time the Shuttle came off the back of that 747 out at Edwards, it was a very big relief and it was fun that it happened.\\n\\n When the first landing or first launch and landing of the Shuttle was a fascinating experience. We took a group down to Florida. We came by Houston…watched from Mission Control, and then went on out to Edwards and saw them come in. And it was fascinating that it, you know—it all worked well.\\n\\n The same as when the lunar landing, and all the flights leading up to that, that were successful! And you see things that you work on for years, like a Hubble telescope, and what wonderful science—they’ve rewritten textbooks at what has happened from that. And to think back, “Gee, you know, I was part of that.” I didn’t design it. But I helped get the funding for it. And many other things.\\n\\n The things that are happening now with—I’m sitting in the airport yesterday coming here, and I’m looking around. Probably a fourth of the people are talking on cell phones and a few years ago, that wasn’t possible. So, you know, even in the telecommunications business this is—this has been fascinating! And I always like things looking to the future rather than to worry about sins we did in the past. And that was one of the things I enjoyed on the committee, the space versus, like, working on some of the nuclear programs where we were worrying about cleanup of some project that happened back in the ’40s and ’50s. I’d much rather look to the future than go back—than look back over my shoulder." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were some of the most challenging or frustrating parts of being on the committee?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, dealing with changing times and changing budgets and when programs—usually around Christmas and the holidays, when everybody’s quiet and they’re probably with their families, is when the White House would come out with some announcement they’re canceling a program or cutting it back or funding is not going to happen. I guess those were some of the more frustrating times. And then frustrating times when the Agency or NASA comes in and said, “Oops! We’ve got a major problem here.”\\n\\n And I tried to have a relationship with them that, you know, “If you’ll let me in on the [problems] at the beginning, maybe we can work through these things. But don’t bring me surprises. I don’t like surprises. Let me know ahead of time, and maybe we can, you know, work together on this. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to get lynched because of some discrepancy.”\\n\\n But cost overruns? They were always very troubling. They come in with a program that is utopia. And then you find out later that, “Oops, we’ve got some problems with it. It costed a lot more. We’ve got technical problems we didn’t realize we had.” “Why? Didn’t you check this all out?” I’ve been down that road. Been there, done that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Finally, any stories that stand out as, you know, particularly interesting or funny or just challenging? Or things that need to be remembered that maybe took place in some of those back rooms that we don’t know about, cause no one’s ever asked you about them? Any of those stories that stand out in your mind that are—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I talked about my good friend Larry Wynn, who was a Republican. Larry had been an athlete in high school and unfortunately had a mishap in a motorboat and lost his—one of his legs. And so, he had an artificial leg that came up to about halfway up his—up his leg. One day we were in Johnson Space Center up in the 9th floor, I think, in a big conference room with—and Chris Kraft was up giving us a briefing. And Larry was listening to this briefing about something, and he had a little penknife he was cleaning his fingernails with. And something was said that caused him to make a comment; and he took this knife and jammed it in his leg!\\n\\n Of course it was the wooden part, and it was standing up there just kind of vibrating in this leg. And everybody in the room looked down and said, “This must be the toughest SOB I’ve ever seen in my life!” or something. But it was, of course, in his wooden leg. And, of course, I think Chris and all the NASA brass that were there almost fainted when this happened; and then he pulled it back out of his leg and went on. But the expression on their faces when that happened! And Larry was a great jokester anyhow. But he really—that was a really “I gotcha!” We have laughed about that.\\n\\n There’s a lot of funny stories. Some of them probably the statute of limitations hasn’t run out yet! But a lot of great stories that happened back during the course of hearings and meetings and so forth. But—and another one was with Wernher von Braun. We had flown down to New Orleans. We were going out to Michoud the next day, and we were staying in downtown New Orleans. And we had gotten in about 9 or 10 o’clock that night (I guess it was). We’d flown from Huntsville down. And so, von Braun and I were going out to get a drink; and he was telling me about a bar that had a swing in there of a lady that was swinging on the bar. It was down on Bourbon Street.\\n\\n He had just been on the cover of Time magazine, like, 2 or 3 weeks before that. So, he was well known. (Nobody knew who I was!) But we must have gone in 20 bars and had a drink looking for this particular person. And finally after about the 10th one, I guess, we found the one that he was talking about and had a drink there and went back. And we got back in bed probably about 2 o’clock in the morning. But he was quite an interesting person. I enjoyed him. He was a great—he was a great person to testify, because he was such outgoing person, and such imagination.\\n\\n I’m very fascinated in getting to know people like that. And many other of the pioneers in the space business. It was—it’s been a very interesting life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any conversations that you can recall directly with President Nixon about the Shuttle Program? I mean, do you know what his feelings were about it? His personal feelings about the Shuttle? Was he a reluctant supporter?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think I ever talked to him about it. Mr. Teague may have, because they came to Congress together. My relations with President Nixon were very, very few. He was not that kind of outgoing person and was very stiff. Other Presidents (Kennedy and Johnson) were very—Johnson was a very gregarious person. Vice President [Hubert H.] Humphrey [Jr.], when he was Vice President, had been a big supporter of the space program, was chairman of the Space Council! And President [James E.] Carter and President Reagan and President Bush, all of them had very warm relations with—about the space program and so forth.\\n\\n I’d served in the House with George Bush, and so I knew him, and we had many occasions at the White House when the President would honor some of the astronauts. I remember that he honored the first crew of the Shuttle and had a…big lunch there at the White House out under a tent… It was a very nice thing. And then President Bush, when it was the—I guess the…20th anniversary (I guess) of the Apollo landing, he had a ceremony there at the White House, and I was invited to be there.\\n\\n And so…I’ve had a lot of great times at the White House and with the Presidents and so forth. Not too much [with] President Kennedy. I’d met him several times before and right after I was elected. But President Johnson had a lot of conversations about the space program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, thank you very much for sharing your recollections and memories with us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Don Fuqua", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Catherine Harwood", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you. Okay!" + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "oral-history-at-the-national-archives-00028", + "metadata": { + "interviewee_name": "John Constance", + "description": "John Constance, whose storied NARA career spanned 35 years from 1972 to 2007, begins his interview describing his internship in the Office of the Archivist when the National Archives was still part of the General Services Administration (GSA). He then joined the agency’s National Audiovisual Center, which was responsible for marketing and distributing educational films to the public. John discusses the training received and his surprise run-ins with the rich and the famous. He then talks about his transition to Director of Policy and Program Analysis and eventually to Director of Congressional and Public Affairs. Along the way, he covers NARA’s independence from GSA; the agency’s first Inspector General; advocating for and obtaining agency appropriations; the financing of Archives II; fielding questions from Capitol Hill and the press; building personal relationships with Congress; working with the Kennedy family; and his appointment to the Senior Executive Service.", + "file_url": "https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/john-constance-oral-history-interview.pdf", + "collection_url": "https://www.archives.gov/about/history/oral-history-at-the-national-archives", + "original_file_name": "john-constance-oral-history-interview.pdf", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04 22:30:15", + "publisher": "U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION", + "date": "October 6, 2023" + }, + "broad_source": "nara", + "collection": "oral_history_at_the_national_archives", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Stephanie Reynolds" + ], + "respondents": [ + "John Constance" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Welcome back. This is part four of an oral history with John Constance. Today is Friday, October 6th, 2023. And I just wanted to give a short recap from our last session. We talked about, or you talked about, the combining of Public Affairs with Congressional Affairs into one office. You mentioned fielding questions from Capitol Hill and the press, the public affairs website, financing the construction of AII, and getting agency appropriations, in general, for—you named several drivers for our appropriations that are probably still very current today: ERA funding, the preservation of records, and the construction and maintenance of buildings. And then you also talked about bringing some of those appropriations committee staff and some members of Congress around to National Archives facilities around the country and giving them a show-and-tell and \"this is why we need the money and this is why it's important to you and you should care,\" and then also working alongside the Kennedy family—and especially Ted Kennedy—and then being in the room when they took out some of the assassination artifacts for analysis and, you know, what an experience that was for you to be in that room. So that's kind of a recap of some of the topics that we talked about last time. Do you have anything in mind that you want to go over again or something else that you want to talk about in regards to those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I mean, I've thought about this. I'm doing some fundraising right now for a nonprofit, and I'm starting to feel a little bit of the pressure again of coming up and meeting funding goals that I had kind of put aside after retirement. And I'm starting to feel some of that again. And I would only say that I felt a very, very personal responsibility in Congressional Affairs to figure out a way for us to get the money that we needed. I mean, I think everything that we did, whether it was the tours and the visits and the, you know, the information that we would provide, everything was focused on getting the money. And I felt fortunate. I think some of my colleagues in the world of congressional affairs in larger agencies were not a part of the full run-up, shall I say, or the development of the budget. And therefore, they were kind of handed something to go and advocate for. I always felt fortunate at the National Archives that the Archivists that I worked for always ensured the fact that I was part of the discussions regarding budgeting from the very beginning. So I had heard all the background. I had heard all the debate internally as to what the priorities were going to be. And while I didn't set those priorities by a long shot, I was in the room when those priorities were set. And so I had a very, very good underpinning, shall we say, of information for the advocacy that I then got to do for the budget, and other people fought for the budget to the administration, to the President's people and the administration at OMB and whatever. That was kind of on a separate track. But the way it works in the real world is that no matter what the President recommends in his budget, we were somewhat independent players to go to the Hill and advocate, in many cases, for more money than was even in the President's budget. So you had to be careful about the way you handled it. But we were talking to people on the Hill that were really advocates of the Archives program, which I think we worked on, ensuring that over the years. And so we were generally in friendly territory on our committees, which was good. But anyway, I always felt a personal responsibility and a personal goal of seeing that we got as much money as we possibly could for the programs, for the agency. And that was kind of the orientation of the job no matter what function we were performing. That was really the ultimate goal. So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mhm. So even though you weren't setting the priorities, I mean, you were still able to advocate for and help us get more appropriations for the agency. And you're working with congressional members and committees. What do you think was key in forging some of those successful relationships?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I think at some level—and I don't know whether this is the case today. In fact, I've been scratching my head recently regarding Congress and what it is today. But when I was up there advocating for the Archives, I ran into a lot of people that had a respect for history. I ran into a lot of people that had a respect for tradition, and I ran into a lot of people that understood the importance of preserving the past. As I jokingly said to you, I think at one point, that what you're trying to convey to them is you are preserving their legacy as well. I mean, they see themselves as key actors on the stage of American democracy. And by preserving their records and the materials about the agencies that they are working with and working for, you know, we achieve goals that put a good light on them as well. But I think it's very, very hard to come to Washington as a member of Congress and be sworn into the chamber and stand there on the House floor or the Senate floor and not have a sense of everything that's come before. And we really, really worked hard on that. When new members would come, we would have, as I think I said, orientation for them at the Archives, where we showed them really what we did. And once they understood what we did, the reason for it and the need for it became pretty evident. So for the most part, I would say the majority of people that I worked with over the years had a—even if they didn't have an interest in history—they had a respect for it and that really was the key." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Interesting. Okay. Do you have any lessons learned from your time as the Director of Congressional and Public Affairs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. You know, I think the most important thing, as in a lot of things in life, you work on skills and you work on this and you work on this ability and that ability. It really all came down to relationships. I mean, it all came down to very personal relationships with people. And if you're interested in people, and you're interested in their lives—you know, I would typically go up there with the sense that I was calling on friends. I think that becomes very, very important. I had at least one Archivist of the United States, whose name I will not mention, who left one meeting once scratching his head about the interchange that we had with a staffer up there who said, \"No, I'm not going to get you this number [SHOWS LEVEL WITH HAND]. We're going to try to get you this number [MOVES HAND UPWARD].\" And he just couldn't wrap his head around how in the world it was that they were as welcoming and as willing to work with us as they were. And I remember in the car going back to the agency saying, \"They like us. They like me. They like our mission. We have a great relationship with them. And at the end of the day, you know, they want to support the mission. And they also, the next time they see us, they want us to be happy.\" That sounds so simple and simplistic, but I think it is about relationships, and it is about, you know—they knew that if there was something negative at the Archives, if there were something that was going to make them or their boss look bad, I would be the first one on the phone with them to tell them, \"Boy, we really screwed up, and here you go. This is going to be embarrassing. It's going to be in the press. This is our answer. This is what we're doing to fix it.\" Whatever, as well as telling them, \"Boy, this is a success we just had, and this is really a breakthrough, and this is wonderful, and, you know, I want your boss to come down. I want you all to be in the photograph when we celebrate this,\" whatever this was. And so it's both sides. And they always knew that I was going to be an honest broker. And, I think, that was the key." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So relationships, kind of building rapport with them, and building trust, it sounds like." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I might have told you this story, but I had a cousin that was in the banking business, and I always remember that he required his tellers at the bank to know the names of every dog that came into the bank with their owner. This was in a posh area of Carmel, California. And, again, if you do that and you're not interested in dogs and you're not interested in people, it's kind of fake. But if you really are interested in people, and you go in and say, \"How's your daughter doing at Clemson?\" or \"How's your dad doing? You said that he was in ill health, and is he getting better?\" I mean, if you're faking that, you can see it 400-miles away. If you are interested in people, it comes across as genuine. And you develop a friendship over the years. And so, you know, that was something that was probably the most enjoyable part of the job as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm. Okay. Yeah, just getting to know them as people and their families and making those friendships." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like, so you were kind of the point person when something would come out, say, for example, like in the media? Like they may hear that an agency deleted their email or somebody's using a private server or private email for government business and things like that. Classified records. So were you the one that was the point person that handled those questions, those cases?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, the information about those, I would handle it as a first point of contact. I mean, what my goal was, was to always get the subject expert to touch base with the staff person, because the subject expert was also the one that knew the issue with the most granularity and also what we were going to do about a particular issue or a particular violation or the theft of documents, which was, you know, a lot of times. Those were the things often that got the biggest press. I mean, the press might not understand the Archives, but they do understand someone stealing something from the government or from . . . yeah. And so in those cases, the inevitable cases that would come up, you know, I would be the point person, but I would quickly try to transition to the people who ran the search room or who were responsible for the records management program that had been violated or whatever. Because I never, internally, wanted people to think that I thought I knew more than they did, which frankly, I never knew more than they did. They were doing their job, their task. They've been professionally trained to do it, and they were doing it 10 hours a day. I was coming in as the messenger, and so . . . One of the biggest battles I think I had with the Archivists of the United States over the years was my feeling of the need to get negative information to the Hill very quickly. And a lot of times, the Archivists would say, \"Well, we don't know what we're going to do. You know, we haven't investigated this enough.\" And my point always was, \"Well, yeah, but it's going to be public possibly before we are prepared for it to be public. And the Congressman or the Senator is going to get a phone call from the press and say, 'What do you think about this?' Well, if we have gotten in touch with them early, and I have gotten a subject person in touch with them early to say, 'We know we've got a problem. We're going to fix it. And this is the timeline on which we're going to fix it,'\" then, you know, you basically have created a space of time for you to work in, because if a Congressman was caught flat-footed on something, then suddenly they were the ones in control of the timetable and not us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Okay. You're kind of a point person, and then you turn into more of a facilitator, in a way, and getting that subject matter expert involved." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. Exactly. And again, it also helped preserve my relationship with the folks on the Hill from the standpoint that I wanted to get them the best information possible. And they knew that they were going to get that. One of the things that I learned over the years is that there are some archivists who can—how should I put it?—describe what they do with a very, very good ability to explain. There are other archivists that can't. And one of the things that I was constantly doing was trying to assess which ones were the ones that I wanted to put in front of the Congress and which ones I was—I was ultimately also the broker with the press, and my Public Affairs director, Susan Cooper, for many years, she and I were trying to figure out, okay, we need to tell this story. Who do we want to put in front of the camera to tell the story? An awful lot of the Kennedy assassination interest in the country and the people in the country who were, you know, everything from the conspiracy folks to the people who were genuinely interested in that being released. They wanted to talk, once again, to the expert and thank God, I mean, we had in Steve Tilley, who was the custodian of all those of the Warren Commission and all those records. We had a guy that not only knew everything inside out, but, as we say in the business, the camera just loved the guy. He was very good on his feet. He was very good. And he was very diplomatic and extremely knowledgeable. So we had him, and I could list dozens of other people that we went to over the years in various areas of the Archives that could really tell the story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I could see that it would be good to get the right person in front of the camera to tell the story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you want to talk about any other high-profile cases that you had to deal with in any fashion while you were the director? I don't know. I had a few things listed here, like access to Presidential papers, preservation of electronic records, theft of national treasures. Anything that you want to speak about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I mean, we certainly had all of those. I mean, I would say that one of the things is the preservation of electronic records. Unfortunately, we were in the same subcommittee that had oversight over the Treasury Department and the IRS [Internal Revenue Service]. And one of the things that was a very large challenge for us as we were entering into the whole funding of the ERA, the whole thing came right after there had been some very large and very public screw-ups—for lack of a better term—by the IRS with their electronic systems and their electronic recordkeeping. And the IRS had dumped a whole lot of money into some systems that turned out just not to work and became obsolete in a short period of time, and it put the Congress—it put our subcommittee in a bad light. So on the heels of that, in terms of their failure, here we are coming in and asking for in the neighborhood of a half-a-billion dollars for the development of the ERA system. And I can tell you, to say that they were wary of entering into a funding relationship on a large system would be the understatement of the year. And so a lot of it was a negotiation with them to come up with a way that we could get the money, but they would feel comfortable. This drove people in the agency just nuts, but the only way that we could get the money was with an agreement. The GAO would come in and really do a parallel audit as we were spending the money. I mean, GAO was very regularly onsite. In fact, they had, in the early days of ERA, office space in the building kind of right next to us. And our subcommittee staff and the subcommittee were adamant that they wanted eyeballs that were reportable to the Congress—GAO being their investigatory arm. They wanted to be sure that they had that kind of oversight. And that was the only way we were going to get the money. And so we said, \"Okay.\" GAO . . . they were scratching their heads, because their expertise is coming in after a project or after something has been done and, you know, investigating and auditing then. One of the things that I told our people is, \"Look, if this screws up, GAO has got money in the game as well. I mean, they're looking out for themselves just like we're looking out for ourselves. So with them in the room, we have a new kind of credibility in terms of the moves we're making and the way we're spending the money.\" So, GAO had a pretty sophisticated group that just looked at IT systems, and they were the ones that basically camped in with us. So that was really, I mean, that was the way that that was accomplished. And eventually, as I think I mentioned earlier, when Lockheed got the contract, then all of a sudden I had all of the horsepower of Lockheed Martin and their lobby organization working alongside of me in order to ensure the money kept coming and the money kept flowing. They had a corporate interest in that at that point. And as is the case with weapons systems and a lot of things not quite as noble as ERA, in my humble opinion, that's what they do. They know how to get the train on track and continue the money flow for the development of those systems. And that also worked to our advantage at the Archives for ERA. So . . . I think, obviously, a lot of the document theft issues over the years—the whole Sandy Berger fiasco, the much smaller but still no less aggravating disappearance of records over the years— was difficult. And I won't go into details on this because some of these people are—I think they're good people, and they've been punished, and they've paid their dues. But the thing that was the most aggravating, I think, to most people in the Archives was when employees would be associated with the theft of archival materials. And there have been some high-profile ones of those over the years as well. And those are even more difficult, because no matter what you try to do in the search rooms and no matter what you try to do with the interaction of the public, if you have a member of the staff who has fallen in love with a certain document, group of documents, or a category of records, and takes them away, they have numerous opportunities to do that, you know, undetected and undeterred. And those were, oftentimes, the most difficult and the most hurtful, I think, to people in the agency. And I had a couple of those to deal with as well in my tenure. So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In your position as the director, then, were you doing the same thing? Were you talking with the media and getting those subject matter experts or whoever in there to sort of explain or smooth over what was happening?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. And, again [LAUGHS], a lot of times you were dealing with the inexplicable. I mean, a lot of times with something like that, you were staring at this and staring into the abyss, and they would say, \"Well, so what are you going to do about it?\" And again, there's some of those things that just are not answerable. Fortunately, they were very, very rare. And that's one of the things that you tried to explain to people, but from a staffing standpoint, you know, it's difficult in business. You always have the checks and balances associated with not one person handling the money, but more than one person handling the money and signing off and all the approvals and sign- offs having to do with petty cash or whatever it is in a business. In the Archives, by virtue of how thinly we are spread, ofttimes, I mean, it's one person by themselves in the stacks. I mean, it's not somebody with somebody looking over their shoulder. It is one individual. And we are an organization that truly relies on the integrity of every individual to do the right thing, particularly given the fact—and again, this was a matter of even when things aren't explicable in terms of why they happen, things like the fact that we do not have an item-level control over textual archives. We know that that box contains these files, but what specifically is in each one of those files? We don't know that. And so if there happened to be an Abraham Lincoln signature that somebody came across, or if there happened to be a piece of Confederate money that was part of a serial set and invaluable, and if there was something that was very unique, we did not have an inventory that said, \"Oh, here it was, and it's not there anymore. And so who had access or contact to it?\" So when you don't have that item-level inventory, it's very difficult to do that. So again, I have the highest respect not just for the National Archives, but for—in spite of what we're talking about right now—for all the people that work there, because by and large, 99.9 percent of the people that I worked with in my career loved history, loved archives, loved who we were and loved working for the agency. And when you had the occasional rogue, it was tough. It was tough for everybody. And once again, if you've established a relationship with people on Capitol Hill, and you go in, and you express true regret and true angst and true heartbreak over these things, they get that, too. You know, that's the other side of those kinds of personal relationships is when I or one of my colleagues would go up there and say, \"Boy. I mean, this is bad. This is really, really bad.\" And one of the things that I might have mentioned earlier was that, back in the day, when you were relying on if somebody took a document—if they take a document, and they want to take it home, and they want to put it in a desk drawer, and they just want to keep it—that has always been a problem. But if they want to monetize it, if they want to take it and sell it or get money for it—back in the day, you really relied on just a handful of really good rare document dealers. That was the name of the game. They were the people, the guys in Boston or Philadelphia or New York or Los Angeles. There were a handful of people where the top dollar came from if you walked in the door and said, \"I got a signature. I got . . .\" whatever. They had an integrity where they would pick up the phone and call us and say, \"Hey, I think we got something that's yours here. It looks like a federal document to me. It certainly looks like the chain of custody on this at some point came through you guys. And I got a guy here who is coming back tomorrow and wants to sell it to me.\" So that would bring us into a scramble to kind of try to figure that out. And oftentimes, those things ended well in terms of getting both the document recovered and also the punishment meted out. What changed all that, of course, was the internet and eBay, where somebody could put a document on eBay, and maybe they would not get top dollar for it, but they would get a lot of money for it so quickly that you couldn't keep up with it. And so consequently, that really became something that was damaging. Eventually, both our IG shop as well as some third- party sleuths in the history world caught on to this and were regularly reviewing eBay and regularly reviewing all that. And so that, in those cases, was what we went to the Hill and said, \"Here's the solution. Here's what we're doing is trying to be out there shopping right along with everybody else so that if something comes up that looks like ours, we'll be able to get in the game and get the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] involved early on as to the fact that this is federal property.\" So anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Huh. Interesting how technology has changed and how that changed our processes both externally and internally." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That person-to-person commerce that eBay created, while very convenient if you're dealing in stolen goods, is also very problematic. And so that was that. But just in summary regarding all of that, again, I thought the responsibility was always first and foremost, to be honest. I mean, once you lose your integrity, you can never get it back with people. And so always, always being honest in terms of what we were thinking and what we were trying to do was really the key. And in turn, that would help us be put in circumstances and situations by the folks on Capitol Hill that would enable us to be successful. And, you know, they respected that. I'll tell this brief story—one case where Senator Stevens of Alaska staff reached out to us and said, \"You know, we're going to Alaska for the 100th, for the centennial, of the Alaska Gold Rush, and we are taking with us a delegation from the U.S. Postal Service. We're going to be doing first-day covers, stamps that are associated with the centennial.\" And they asked me, \"Do you happen to have any records that would be helpful to that effort, records that you could take color facsimiles of and, for example, present to local officials in Alaska as part of this effort?\" And we said, or I said, \"Let me check with the experts.\" And so I went back and sure enough, within 24 hours, we had identified a number of territorial records and things that we had that we were pretty certain that were not existing in public libraries or local archives within Alaska, and that would be something from which we could make color facsimiles and present to local officials. And so I went back. I had some samples, and I pitched this to Senator Stevens' staff, and they said, \"Oh, my gosh. This is exactly what we're looking for.\" And so they arranged charter transportation for the Archivist of the United States and I to go to Alaska to do a multiple-city tour associated with this centennial, to present these things to local officials, and to be part of just this joyful celebration in Alaska. And Senator Stevens, who really was a hands-on politician—I mean, I'll never forget. We went to Nome, Alaska, and we sat there, and we watched this long line of Native Alaskans out the door at a restaurant called Fat Freddy's. And there sat Senator Stevens, along with his staff. And these people came in one at a time and told him about some problem that they were having with the federal government, some issue of the U.S. mail or Social Security or whatever. He listened to every single person for an hour and a half and then would turn to his staff, and they would solve these problems one at a time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The rest of the story is that we established a very personal relationship with Senator Stevens—not an easy guy to get to know. And the Archivist established a very good relationship with him. Wind the clock forward about a year, and I went to a hearing and in a nighttime kind of cabal where our Senate appropriations subcommittee was looking for a big chunk of money to be shifted from one agency to the other, our Electronic [Records] Archives money went away. And I'm sitting there at a hearing, a bill markup, the next morning, and I pick up on the fact that there's a line item on this chairman's mark that's missing. And what's missing is all of our ERA money. Well, there were two people on the subcommittee: the chairman at that time—Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama—and the vice chair was Barbara Mikulski. The ranking member was Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, someone who I thought we had had a pretty decent relationship with. But obviously, she was willing that night to cut a deal and to cut us out. So I ran out the door, called the office and told the Archivist that we had a problem and suggested that he get on the phone to Ted Stevens. Ted was going to be opening the Senate that morning. He was President pro tempore of the Senate at that time, and he was going to gavel the Senate in at 10:00 a.m. that morning. This hearing, this markup, had been at 9:00 a.m. And so Governor Carlin got on the phone and was able to get Ted Stevens in his car as Stevens was going to the Hill. John basically explained to the Senator what had happened and Stevens said, \"Don't worry about it.\" He said, \"The bill is going to come up this afternoon before the full appropriations committee. By the time the bill comes up, your problem is going to be taken care of.\" Well, so that afternoon, I go to the full committee markup and, all of a sudden, I get a progression, and I mean a progression of Senate staffers from both the subcommittee and the full committee seeking me out and apologizing for what had happened. They all conveyed the fact that Senator Stevens was extremely angry that this had all come down. They assured me that the money had been restored to the bill. And they wanted me to get back to John Carlin with sincere apologies for the fact that our money was wiped out in a nighttime deal on this bill. And I mean, I'll never forget that. And again, if you draw a line back to how we established that relationship with Senator Stevens, it was the wonderful Hill staff who I was calling on that thought of us and said, \"Hey, you know, here's an opportunity in Alaska where you can spend five days with us, you know, one-on-one with the Senator.\" And it was really through that then that you wind it forward a year or so and boom, there we are needing a favor at the 11th hour and getting it. So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, my gosh. What a story. Transitioning a little bit. . . . I'm not sure if this is at the same time or at some point towards the end of your career, but you were appointed to the Senior Executive Service [SES]. And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit, maybe the process and some of the pros and cons for becoming an SESer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it was really when I took over Public Affairs as well as Congressional Affairs. The job got larger, and it paralleled with an awful lot of colleagues in other agencies, other independent agencies, that wore both hats and they were typically SES. So I went to the Archivist—again, John Carlin at that time—and I said, \"You know, I'd like to explore this and, you know, no harm, no foul. Can I look into it?\" And he said, \"Yeah, sure. Go ahead.\" So I looked into it. I got the information from our personnel shop. They in turn got the information from the Office of Personnel Management. And this process started. Essentially, what I had to do was write a pretty lengthy justification. They had a number of categories, and I don't remember now what the categories were, but it was managing change and, you know, a variety of things that really paralleled all agencies. And I had to write like I hadn't written since I had been in graduate school. I had to write these long, long justifications. And again, that exercise was—while I kind of railed at the process—I understood that they were forcing anybody who was going to apply to become a member of the SES, they were forcing you into kind of an intellectual exercise that really helped prepare you for the wider responsibility or the bigger responsibility. And, you know, I will be honest with you. I don't remember. . . . Each agency had a certain fixed number of SES slots. And my recollection is that the agency itself had to recommend my appointment to both the White House and the Office of Personnel Management, as I recall. And then, you know, you wait to see, and you get the word. I don't remember getting the word, but I do remember being sworn in at the White House. Judge Roy Lamberth was the federal judge that swore us in, and the swearing-in was in the Indian Treaty Room at the White House. It was pretty cool. I mean, it really was one of those days in my career that I fondly remember and think to myself, \"Boy, something special is happening today: One—going to the White House, and two—having a federal judge swear you in for the SES.\" And it was good. I mean, and again, a lot of people just associate it with the pay aspect of it. That certainly helped, and it certainly helped in my retirement. But just the honor of being part of that community was good. And then there were training opportunities and things that I was able to take advantage of that were just for the SES. And that was fun as well. So, you know, that was clearly a good moment as I think back on it. Thanks for that question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I had no idea that you would be sworn in at the White House and that each agency had a certain number that they could appoint. Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they had a very nice reception for us. The reception included these little White House cocktail napkins. I think I might still have some of those here at the house. [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Well, that was a big moment. Of course! [LAUGHS] Speaking of the White House, did you notice any differences when there's been a change in Presidential administrations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In my career, the answer was no, because each White House had the common sense to let the records management folks in the Office of Administration and the Office of Records Management within the White House really take charge. I mean, they understood the continuity of that expertise. All administrations in my career were usually very open to having the Archives come in and provide advice and training. The Archivist of the United States, being a nonpolitical appointment, facilitated that. And there was always this openness in that. Once again, I'm sure there are people that had that specific responsibility in the Archives that would probably answer this question differently. But as someone who is looking at it from a distance in terms of how it impacted me with any battles with the White House or any, you know—no. And that was what was so disappointing, certainly with the Trump administration and all the very high-profile things that have come out of that lack of understanding or lack of respect or lack of . . . \"Lack\" is a good [LAUGHS] . . . Just cover the waterfront with that term. Everything that has come as a result of that, up to and including federal felony charges, I think, like a lot of things that had become very routine and should have been routine through the years were no longer routine in the Trump administration. And that has been the result. So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So over the last four sessions that we've had, we've covered a lot of ground. What do you think are your most, like, proud moments or your favorite accomplishments throughout your time at the National Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would say groundbreakings, plural. Certainly Archives II. That day was very, very special for me and my colleagues. I mean, and there were many, many, many people whose hard work made that day possible. And I'll never forget that. I still, in my library here, have photographs of that day and, in fact, a souvenir paperweight that's somewhere here on my desk. Jim Megronigle, Adrienne Thomas, Michele Pacifico, and others should have their names engraved on that building. I was a bit-player by comparison, but certainly played a role. When we opened a new building for the Georgia regional archives . . . I mean, that was great in that there had been a lot of hard work associated with that. By virtue of the way that Presidential Libraries are at least initially funded, those were not things that—I mean, they are funded by their foundations—so while the ribbon cuttings of Presidential Libraries were always a very fun social event, for us in terms of any individual sense of accomplishment, that was different. And I would say that, you know, the day that I retired from the Archives, they had a reception for me in the Archivist's conference room and—I'm going to try to say this without getting choked up, but that might be too much to ask—I looked around that room at colleagues internal to the Archives that I had been honest with and worked side-by-side with all those years, people on Capitol Hill that came when they didn't have to, but came to the reception in numbers that, to me, were significant, and having my family there that had kind of seen the other side of this up to and including my daughter Brittany, my younger daughter, who was then getting ready to go to law school. She was the one I took to Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, who disgustingly said at the dinner table one night to the family, \"All Dad does is talk for a living.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[LAUGHS] But she got to see a room full of people that I did talk to for a living over the years that had enough respect for me and what I had done that they came out that day. Yeah, those are the ones that stand out and all of the small moments that people reached out and thanked me every year for a number of years. It was a battle to keep NHPRC in business, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. They would get zero funding, and we would fight and fight and fight, and we'd get them funded again. And every year, I mean, those folks at NHPRC never, ever failed to say thank you. And they were there that day as well and gave me a gift recognizing that. So that was a real poignant kind of moment in my life, in my career, and one that I'll really cherish. So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. It must feel very nice to know that you were appreciated that much, that that many people turned out and gave you their thanks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, exactly. You know, you can get carried away. The first thing I said that day when everybody had said all the nice things about me, and I looked at this room full of smiling faces, I got up to the podium and said, \"I'm announcing today my candidacy for President of the United States.\" [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course you did. [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I thought, \"Whoa! Hold on a second. I've [LAUGHS] gotten a bit carried away.\" So, anyway . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[LAUGHS] That's awesome. So you retired from the National Archives, but then you went into the private sector, correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yeah, semi. The organization that I worked for was Legal Services Corporation, and they are a government corporation, a nonprofit. They're set up very similarly to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB. And Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS [Public Broadcasting Service] are kind of, you know—they get federal money, but they're a nonprofit. The structure is somewhat the same. And I went to work for them as their public affairs and congressional affairs guy, able to call on a lot of the same people. And I euphemistically said as I was retiring, that I had worked for 35 years for an agency that preserves the United States Constitution, and I was going to work now for legal aid, seeing that low-income people have the ability to get counsel in the courts. And now I was going to work for an organization that tries to make the U.S. Constitution work for everybody. And that, for me, was the connection. A lot of the subject matter was different. I had to learn the subject matter quickly, but the skills were the same. In fact, one of the people that I called on regularly in the appropriations committee was the one that picked up the phone when he heard I was interested in possibly retiring and saying, \"I'll tell you the people that need your help, and that is the Legal Services Corporation.\" He said that they've just lost their congressional affairs guy, and he said, \"Call this guy, and ask him about the job.\" And so once again, because of my relationships with people on the Hill, they looked out for me as I was retiring and suggested this job, which turned out to be a good five years. I really enjoyed that, and I learned a whole lot more. I met hundreds and hundreds of new people in that job, and I can proudly say I took them to their high-water mark of appropriations. We got them $420 million for appropriations in the year before I left, and it was the highest appropriation that they had had in their modern era. So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I felt really, really good about that as well. And again, I made some new friends on the Hill by virtue of some different committee assignments. But when you have a network like that, people would, unsolicited by me, call the new people I was calling on Capitol Hill to tell them, “This guy is a good guy. You know, he's honest. You can believe what he says,” you know, whatever. So, they really paid that forward for me. And that was something again. I regularly stay in touch through Facebook and my blog and other means with all of those people. And on the rare occasion I get back to Washington now, I go see them. And all those folks on the Hill from both my Archives years and my Legal Services Corporation years are still friends." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's great. Is there something or someone that you miss most about NARA, about your time there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, one of the people I've thought a whole lot about the last couple of years is Deb Wall. Debra was a very young staffer when I first met her, and she worked for a guy named John Scroggins, who I'd worked for also. And just to see her career advance through the years and then take over the positions of Deputy and then Acting Archivist of the United States in maybe the most challenging year of the Archives' modern history, and the way she handled it, and the honest way that she was the broker for that whole year. Very impressive. And I've stayed in touch with Deb, and that's been just great to see that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The guy that I recommended for the job, John Hamilton, head of Congressional Affairs, he's still there. And Shawn Morton and Kate Slaugh, who I hired and who worked for me in Congressional Affairs, are still there. They are good people. So it's very nice to see that continuity. An agency like the Archives needs that continuity. They don't need one guy like me in there for too long, but they need people who've kind of learned in the vineyard and, you know, continue the legacy. That's very important to a place like the Archives. And one of the things about archivists and one of the things about people who like history, they hate change. [LAUGHS] So consequently, they're so averse to change. The benefit of that is that you get people who don't want to move, who don't want to, you know, they certainly want more money and they want to move up in their career, but they look around at the landscape and they say, \"Well, who's doing what we do?\" And the answer is nobody. And so it's like, this is a nice place to be, you know? I mean, if you're a walrus, you want to be in the water, you know. You want to be up north where it's cold. They look around and say, \"Well, I'm a walrus. I don't want to go to Miami Beach. You know, I like it right where I am.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So consequently, it works out well for everybody. And the people that it worked for the best are the people that are the least likely to understand and the least likely to say thank you, and that's the American public. That's stuff that's—you have to carry your “attaboys” along with you in an agency like the Archives because, unfortunately, the pats on the back are, I think, sadly few and far between. But you all do very, very good work and important work. And that's why everybody kind of stays in place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of long-timers with the agency, for sure. Yeah. Well, believe it or not, I've run out of my questions. But was there anything that we haven't covered that you would like to talk about or any words of wisdom or anything that you wanted to add to the interview?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I just want to thank you and thank the History Office, and the fact that the agency has this program of oral histories says a lot about the National Archives. And from what I know of you and your leader, Jessie Kratz, I mean, you got the absolute right people doing it, and you've got them doing it for the right reasons. And because you're in an agency that understands the past is prologue, it's a good thing to do this. And I just want to end by congratulating you and your colleagues for your patience and your preparation and your time, because I've genuinely enjoyed it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good, because I've really enjoyed it too. So I'm glad that you enjoyed it also, that it wasn't just a long exercise that you were putting yourself through. So this has just been wonderful. It's been so interesting over these past four sessions, and I appreciate you taking the time out to do this, even though, you know, you're traveling around the world and whatever you're doing, a lot of other other projects that you have going on. So I appreciate you taking the time out to talk with me about everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Stephanie, it's been a genuine pleasure to meet you. And I will [CROSS- TALKING]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you. Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're another person whose career I will now follow. So congratulations. Yeah. And congratulations Archives to have somebody like you in this role. So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, thank you. Well, hey, I'm going to stop the recording now, okay? And then I just want you to hang on just for a second, okay?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00268", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-MR-2013-004-003.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Rozell, Donald Gale (1962-1964): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-MR-2013-004-003", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-MR-2013-004-003", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Donald Gale Rozell served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia from 1962 to 1964 (Bolivia II). He left college to join and had prior experience speaking Spanish. His training was held in Puerto Rico and Vermont. Upon his arrival in Bolivia, Rozell was supposed to work at the agricultural experiment station in General Saavedra rebuilding engines, but discovered that the project was impossible due to a lack of parts. Instead, he filled his time with a variety of other jobs including working with the Heifer Project for pigs; working with 4-H; helping the local Maryknoll priest with children's programming; and organizing the U.S. Information Service (USIS) library in Santa Cruz. After completing his Peace Corps term, Rozell obtained degrees in agricultural economics and spent 25 years working with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) overseas. He says that the Peace Corps definitely influenced his career choice and gave him an appreciation for other cultures. Interviewed and recorded by Sharleen Hirschi Simpson, June 19, 2012. 1 tape.", + "dates_of_materials": "19 June 2012", + "extent": "1 audio cassette (mono; 30 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "009. Bolivia.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Bolivia. Rozell, Donald Gale (1962-1964): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Bolivia", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "MR-2013-004", + "transcript": "RPCV-MR-2013-004-003-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/b0h1ox5ssfds1vt7pai06565mu0ige67.pdf?odc=20231115173813-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/a3d6cf98-ceea-4874-aa6f-619b79c8fec1/37def5c8-9638-41e1-8d24-5283044cdb96/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzFmM2NfYTk0NjM1Nzg5MTc4YzVjYjIyOWIxNjkxNTBiOTM2NzEwOTNkZDNlMTczN2VkOTI0ODI0YTJjN2E0NWY5NmMzMF8vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS9hM2Q2Y2Y5OC1jZWVhLTQ4NzQtYWE2Zi02MTliNzljOGZlYzEvMzdkZWY1YzgtOTYzOC00MWUxLThkMjQtNTI4MzA0NGNkYjk2L21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Branson, Missouri", + "length": "14 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed April 5, 2013, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Donald Gale Rozell Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Donald Gale Rozell" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:02", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is June 19, 2012, and this is Sharleen Hirschi Simpson interviewing Donald Gale Rozell, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia, went to Bolivia II project, from 1962 to 1964. OK, why don't you tell me a little bit about the first year that, you know, the year before you were going to go in? What made you decide to go into the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:35", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Kennedy was the new president and we heard about his announcement on the news and it was exciting and a friend of mine, Esmail Rosheen, was my roommate at San Diego State and he applied and was accepted into Colombia I. And I applied a week later and ended up in Bolivia II. Wasn't much time in between the time we applied, neither one of us had graduated. We still had, we were still undergraduates. But once we got accepted, we were fired up and ready to go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:01:15", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, so did you do? So basically you joined Peace Corps because of the Kennedy call?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:01:26", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, well, I mean, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:01:28", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you wanted to be out doing something?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:01:30", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that and we had been working on my Spanish some over the years at San Diego State. We were close to the border. So Will and I, Orvano, another friend of mine. We’d go down to Mexico and hang out for the weekend or a week and practice our Spanish and stay up all night and drink and have a good time. And so the idea of going to Latin America suited me fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:02:01", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, so what did your family think when you decided to do that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:02:11", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can't remember. I was estranged from my dad at the time. I can't remember him having any comment. Otherwise, my mom was kind of excited about it. My brother, you know, nobody had any much to say when I was the baby of the family and pretty much did whatever I wanted to do. And they thought it was a good idea. I was the only one who was finishing college, so I guess Mom was a little concerned that I hadn’t finished, but I told her I’d do it when I got back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:02:48", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So when you apply, did you ask for any specific country or any place you wanted to go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:02:53", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I might have asked for Colombia because my buddy was going to Colombia, or at least maybe I didn't even know when I submitted the application, but I would have liked to have gone to Colombia. But yeah, I got Bolivia I've ever heard of Bolivia before, I doubt I doubt that I had, although I’d taken a lot of Latin American history at the time, so anyway, Bolivia didn't make any difference to me. One place is as good as another. I don't know if I would have wanted to go to Africa or I was, well, Latin America was what I was interested in, so I never thought about those other places until I went and ended up as a recruiter for Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:03:42", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, well, and so you were invited to join the Bolivia II project?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:03:51", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, invited to join Bolivia II, and we showed up at Arizona State University in Tempe in June 1962 and started the training program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:04:02", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you do anything special to get ready to go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:04:06", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I quit my job and I don't remember how I got to Arizona because I lived in the desert down in Southern California. I was in San Diego and I don't remember how we got over there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:04:25", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know they sent me a ticket." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:04:28", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Airline ticket?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Airline ticket from Salt Lake City. So, for all you know, they might have, you might have flown." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From where? They would have gone into Los Angeles. Was almost as far away as Arizona. I lived halfway between Los Angeles and Arizona." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:04:46", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, so let's talk about the training. What did you think of the training process? What exact things did you experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:04:54", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I enjoyed most of the training, especially the general studies type of stuff and the cultural stuff. The language for me was a lot harder. I was not and never have been a good linguist like other people in the group, including you. But so the language part, the hours of language, that taxed me a little bit. And probably they had some doubts about sending me because of my poor ability to learn Spanish. So subsequently the State Department sent me back to language school three times and I finally tested out at fairly high in the State Department, but it took years. In fact, I didn't really start learning Spanish until I got a girlfriend in Bolivia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, that happens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Marcella, do you remember Marcella?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:05:54", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Did you decide, did you find that the training was useful for your Peace Corps service?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:06:02", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I enjoyed it. I mean, especially I was young and in those days and I enjoyed the Outward Bound and I enjoyed the travel associated with it. You’d get tired some. And I think it would have been a lot easier for me if I had been a better language student because I was the biggest part of it. But I enjoyed the training and I especially enjoyed Puerto Rico, where it was a fun time in Puerto Rico. I think the group pretty much all got along well. We didn't really have any big issues among ourselves. And the only real trauma came, I think, in Puerto Rico when they started cutting people and we all lost a few friends that we never saw again after that. And I think at that time, too, I started losing a little respect for some of the, some of the administrative people for Peace Corps. And I think up until then, I never questioned them, but I think after that, then I started losing respect for specifically one person who I thought was incapable of judging us as potential volunteers. And yet he was sitting there on that committee and I thought he was an idiot, basically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:07:38", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, there were a number of people who." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:07:40", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know who I'm talking about too?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:07:44", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think so. Ok, so all right, we did have an extended training period. I mean, I don't think there's been a group since then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:07:55", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Six months." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:07:56", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Who ended up training so long because of all these things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:08:00", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But the fact is, did we go home and then come back and that's when they're extended it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And after that, I didn't train much. I had a good you know, I went up to Vermont, which had never been in Vermont and fall in Vermont was just absolutely gorgeous. And I was from a place where I've never seen before like that. And I liked to read and sit in the windows of that big house and read a book." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:08:35", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was kind of like a vacation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:08:37", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Vacation. Yeah. And then what’d they do, send us down to Miami, put us up there for a week or two?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:08:41", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You know, we were in Miami, we met in Miami. And then that was the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis speech, the Kennedy put up or shut up speech to Khrushchev. And then they sent us to Vermont. From Vermont, we went directly to Bolivia by way of Miami, you can't get out of it going south." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:09:04", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, you know, as long as kind of you get tired of being trained on that. Yeah. And we were both enjoying the trip down. I still remember fondly the trip down to La Paz flying on a 707. It was the largest prop plane at the time, don’t remember what it was, but it was the largest prop plane. We landed in Peru and I remember getting a shoeshine and talking to somebody in Spanish at the shoeshine. And then we landed up in La Paz and you knew you were in trouble when the airline stewardesses all stood with oxygen masks at the door when they let us off. And that was quite a sight. And then I remember going to the palace for a reception with Paz Estenssoro, and I have pictures of that. And that was really interesting and La Paz was fascinating, but I'm just just happy I didn't stay up there. I've been back two or three times to La Paz, it hasn’t changed. That trip from La Paz down to Cochabamba was a fascinating trip. I drove one of the jeeps and it was from this road that was really scary. Remember that? It was a frightening road." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:10:42", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Terrible. I'm afraid of heights so it was like a nightmare." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:10:45", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I mean, it was really something. And those roads were barely passable in parts and we all made it down. And then when you get into Cochabamba, the valley, it starts to lighten up and you see all the growth and the vegetation. And it's really quite a pleasant surprise. I guess we stayed there a while. I don’t remember driving to Santa Cruz, but few of us went down there. I guess we drove." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:11:14", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, we drove it. We were there just a few days. I think it was Thanksgiving when we got there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And we went down there" + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And we got to, you know, drive down to Santa Cruz. So when you got to where you were going to be, what, tell me about that experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:11:37", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In terms of the job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:11:39", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. Well, what were you supposed to do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:11:45", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was kind of funny. I was supposed to be on the experiment station. And who was with, who was I out there with?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Jim Herberger? No?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, Jim Herberger was there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Norm Coble." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Norm was there, yeah. And a kid that stuttered." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:12:03", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, Peter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:12:05", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Peter Roycraft and Peter and I shared a house, a little house out there, or half a house. I forget what Peter's job was, but he was actually an agronomist or something you can actually do. That was a political scientist. I didn't know how to do anything. But they sent me out there to be my counterpart was to be the maintenance man at the experiment station and the job the best I could describe it, was to rebuild and get functional, the engines that had been left at the experiment station as part of the Point Four program. The Point Four program put a lot of money in the experiment stations and schools, and they gave them equipment and as soon as the machines broke down, everything else broke down with it. The concept was that they'd send these guys out to work and they didn't have any parts or the machinery. So that was essentially in the end, there was no job and so I spent the rest of my time making up jobs and making sure that I kept myself scarce from any authority figures that were trying to make me accountable for some work effort, and I had a wonderful time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:13:37", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what kind of things did you do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:13:40", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Norm and I did a Heifer Project thing through and with the Baptists or somebody had it, but we would distribute pigs and then you get two back and distribute two more. We did that. But with pigs, they progressed so fast that by the second generation we gave that up. But then we never got any more purebred animals after that. It was, that was the difficulty with that program, was getting them into the country. They were donated. Worked at 4H. Went to a 4H camp. In terms of a legitimate job, I just didn't do much of anything. I visited a lot with other volunteers, traveled a lot. At one point I went up, I had 100 dollars in my pocket and got a gift or something. And I went to Colombia by land to visit my buddy up in Pasto in Nariño Province. And that was quite an adventure, traveling by bus and hitchhike, and railroad. And you got all the way up there and got all the way to Bogota. I was broke and I borrowed money from the Peace Corps director in Bogota to come back to Bolivia in time to just get back. Before I was found, I had a vacation or something. I guess we all did at some point. So part of it was vacation. But I got back so I didn’t get in trouble for going, I don’t think I did. I took a boat across Lake Titicaca and that was fun. I met lots of really nice people. I hung out with a guy named Mumford Bruns and then a rancher whose first name was Rene. I can't remember his last name, out of General Saavedra. They had a big cattle ranch. And so sometimes when Rene or Munford wasn't there, I'd go to the cattle ranch and take care of it for them. Did you ever come out? Do you remember Rene?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:15:49", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don't think so. I met people out on where the colonies were, you know, the Okinawan colonies, and I didn't I don't think I ever met those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:16:04", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some pretty big cattle ranch. So Mumford and I hung out together a lot. Then I worked, I helped a Marian priest, Jim Fitzgerald, who was a priest in Saavedra, and he also came out to Mineros. I’d help him with the kids, or do different things with him. You know, I like to say that I didn't have a job. They forgot to give me a good job and I didn't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:16:40", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, they did that with a lot of people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:16:43", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was too much effort for them to recreate your job somehow. And some of the people that were in charge of that stuff didn't know what they were doing anyway. And so it was best just to leave it alone, not complain and get on with your life and have a good time and, you know, enjoy the place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:17:02", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you can you think of any memorable events that happened while you were there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:17:10", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Memorable events? Well, carnival. I got involved with the carnival and a combasa in Santa Cruz with guys, gals my own age, and they just accepted me like I was part of the family. And I mean, it was a ball. It was seven days. Yeah, eleven days or something. And we partied. We had parties going every day, some place. That was my first experience with that. And it was it was fascinating and a lot of fun and a lot of nice kids. And that was year I was hanging out with guys my own age and gals my own age. And it was pretty much the elite class in Santa Cruz, the youth and beautiful women and good dancers and good food. And I was in their homes and it was really very interesting, very nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:18:15", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And, uh, where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:18:20", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was living in Santa Cruz and that was another job I made. I got a job organizing the USIS library. So I was helping organize that and I did some English teaching, but not much. And I was living in Santa Cruz and I heard it on the radio in Spanish. And they kept repeating it, as they would a news notice like that and repeating it. And my mind refused to hear what it was saying. And finally it came through what they were saying. And I ran out to find some other Americans who knew about it and heard about it and that when I. That was quite a thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:18:59", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was pretty traumatic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:19:01", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was pretty traumatic. Yeah, it was traumatic for me. And then there was a guy down there, he was in Bolivia III or something. His name was Reese. And I remember seeing him and I was kind of just shocked. And I said and he says he said something like, so what? I just looked at him and I said, you’re an idiot, you know. I never dealt with him again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:19:28", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I remember him, he was. That would not surprise me, that comment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:19:33", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Something like that, I mean, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:19:36", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, so it sounds like you had a really varied experience down there and a lot of different things that you did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:19:46", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, you probably remember things I did that I don't remember, but, you know, because I hung out with you guys as much as anybody, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:19:56", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. Yeah, well, I remember the carnival in Santa Cruz, you know, blue paint." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Water fights." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:20:05", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh my. So at the end of all this, what do you think, what did you take away from it, that that experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:20:17", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it ended up affecting a whole career because I've now been since then, I've been overseas for 25 years. I ended up in the Foreign Service." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:20:30", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So it was really a life changing experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:20:31", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you want something that's good for me, it really affected, you know, which direction I went. And I think it was just, you know, piqued my interest. I know that I became motivated to go back to school and to get a graduate education because I felt when I was in the Peace Corps that I really, as a young person down there, I didn't have anything to offer them. And I said, if I'm going to go back overseas and a career in any way, I need to prepare myself so that I have some skills that will make a contribution to the country that I'm in, because in the Peace Corps, I didn't have any skills make. So they'll relax and move, you know, do no harm. You know, I really believed it and for the most part tried to live by it. So I didn't do any harm, but I didn't do any good either. But when I went back, I went back to school with some motivation to learn skills and ended up with a Ph.D. in agricultural economics and got hired back, after three year tour in Vietnam, and then some time off to get rid of a wife, and etc. I went back to grad school, went back to work for USAID, and then went directly back overseas and stayed a whole career with AID over there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:22:02", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So tell me a little bit, when you got out of Peace Corps, you went to Vietnam, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:22:08", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went first of all, I went back to school and finished my degree, my undergraduate degree. Finished in ‘65 and got a job with USAID in ‘65. So I had a degree plus Peace Corps experience. They hired me in ‘65 to go to Vietnam. And there was some draft issues involved at the time because I was still single. But I went back to Washington and I recruited people for Vietnam, for USAID, had also recruited people from Peace Corps. And then I went to Vietnam and I was in Guangdong province for three years, and I left right after Tet ‘68." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:22:53", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what kinds of things, were you working with farmers there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:22:56", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, refugees and farmers. Big programs, lots of responsibility. Very difficult situation. And it was a nasty area that I was in and, you know, I was lucky to get out of there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:23:16", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, so talk about what you think you got out of the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:23:27", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, certainly an appreciation for other cultures, I think, you know, growing up in California and growing up in a community that was half was 50 percent was Mexican-American. I grew up with that culture, but really didn't. You don't learn to appreciate them as much until I went to Latin America and then I developed a real love of Latin people and and that stayed with me. And but I think, you know, in terms of Bolivia itself, you know, Bolivia pretty much a basket case, except, I mean, it's got pockets of real wealth and be able to create it. But because of its large indigenous population and it's you know, it's always going to be one of the basket cases. And there are several that have served in Africa the same way, you know. Difficult to just see how they're going to, you know, really move, but I've been back a couple of times and, you know, Santa Cruz itself is a booming metropolis, you know, but Mineros where we were, Saavedra, nothing. Mineros. You know, in fact, the road bypassed Saavedra died a slow death when the road went around it because they paved it out so far. And Mineros, they put a sugarcane factory out there. Lots of drug dealers, you know, not a good start, you know, difficult." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:25:17", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So one of the things that the goals of the Peace Corps was to provide technical assistance was requested to promote a better understanding of the U.S. and to promote better understanding of other peoples by Americans. So of those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:25:34", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, two of them, I think we did all right on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:25:36", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The better understanding of the U.S. and better understanding of other peoples by Americans?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:25:43", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think we did pretty good there. I think on the technical assistance side, but there are you know, there are real exceptions to that. Some people, you know, really provided excellent technical services, you guys that were nurses or, you know, had skills to offer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:26:02", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I figured out years ago that I was prepared to do the job they wanted me to do. Fifteen years later, I was prepared to do it, but there I just did the best I could. OK, so tell me?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:26:17", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Do you remember taking that jeep tonight with that lady to the hospital in Santa Cruz? She was pregnant, had the baby. Didn’t we come and pick you up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:26:27", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, I don't remember. I think I was already in Santa Cruz. Maybe then because I went to Santa Cruz." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:26:33", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had a harrowing trip all the way in with a lady having a baby in the back of the jeep. And we got her in there. Lunelle was in there, Myrtis was in there. But she was a teacher at that school, and then we just pushed her in at like the swinging doors of the emergency room and like two minuets later this nurse comes out and hands me this baby. She assumed it was mine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:27:07", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh well! So tell me a little bit about the kinds of things you did after you got out. You said you worked for the USAID for 25 years. And were you doing economic development?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:27:20", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. When I first started out we were programing. Well, the first assignment that I had after this, after Vietnam, but it was Costa Rica and there we were doing alternative crops and trying to diversify away from bananas and coffee and very successfully started growing every kind of spice known. And it's quite an industry now in Costa Rica. And that was started really by the guy that I went to work for down there. He was a he was a horticulturalist and he started that project. He pushed it forward. But what we ended up doing is employees of AID were writing the documents that move the money. So we did a lot of analysis of the economy, a lot of analysis of the of the implementation capabilities of the government, and then trying to plug in where we could use our technical assistance or scholarships to train people to implement those programs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:28:36", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think you could have done that job without the Peace Corps experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:28:41", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, well, yeah, I could’ve but probably. I don't know. I just. Yeah, I mean, Peace Corps and I didn't think and by the time I got back there is a PhD and I was rather analytical, you know, in terms of data and the scope of what I was the ability to analyze problems and to develop solutions for them was much, much different. I think as a volunteer, I wouldn't have had a clue." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:29:13", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, no, no, no. But I'm thinking later on in your career that where you ended up spending so much time overseas, if being in the Peace Corps had facilitated your being able to get take that trajectory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:29:29", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, probably started as you had empathy for the people you were working for, but you had to have that or you wouldn't have been in that business pretty much. I don’t know if Peace Corps even had that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:29:44", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, so do you have any other things that you want to want to mention?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:29:49", + "speaker": "Donald Gale Rozell", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I think that's good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:29:51", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, I think we're just about to the end then. I'll stop this." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00555", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/StoneBR/stonebr.htm", + "original_file_name": "StoneBR_10-31-06.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/StoneBR/StoneBR_10-31-06.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Brock R. Stone", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 31 October 2006" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Sandra Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Brock Stone" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is October 31st, 2006. This is the second interview with Randy Stone, and is being conducted in Houston, Texas, for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Sandra Johnson, assisted by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.\\n\\n I want to thank you for joining us again today to talk to us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome. It’s good to be here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good. I want to start today—the last time we talked, we were still in Landing and Recovery, and I just wanted to get some more background information. If you could, share with us some details about the relationship between NASA and DoD [Department of Defense] during those recovery operations, and how that relationship worked, and what the protocol was while you were on the ship." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Without the DoD, NASA would have been unable to do the recovery of spacecraft at sea. Clearly we needed the help of the Navy to provide the ships and helicopters and the Air Force to provide the long-range search-and-rescue aircraft. Because of the uncertainties of the early launches, we actually strung ships out across the ocean to accommodate any of the potential aborts that may occur during ascent. So there were a lot of involvement with the Navy, and in some cases, the Merchant Marine, when there weren’t Navy ships that we could schedule—could not schedule underneath the flight path of the vehicle; we would look to see where merchant ships were, and have arrangements if we needed to use one of those ships as an emergency recovery vehicle.\\n\\n We had a very strong working relationship with the Air Force and the Navy. We actually had a number of liaison officers within Landing and Recovery to help us with the DoD interface. Without that it would have been just hugely complicated. Because of the presidential directive to go to the Moon, we had a lot of resources from the DoD that were easily obtainable, even though in the early stages of Apollo, we were involved in the Vietnam War and there was a lot of other things that the military was doing with their ships and aircraft.\\n\\n But it was a big logistical effort to schedule all these things for a flight, and then if the flight slipped, you kept rescheduling and rescheduling, and oftentimes one ship that was available for the flight the first time, if it slipped, was not available, and some other ship had to be substituted. For the primary recovery ships, they did commit those for an extended period of time, so we were never surprised with the primary recovery ship. Once they made the commitment to commit that ship to recovering the vehicle, then it stayed that way even if we had multiple slips.\\n\\n But it was a very good working relationship, and it was very interesting to see the cooperation, even on the lesser ships that many of us served on, that were really probably never going to see an Apollo Command Module, because of the low probability that they would be used, but they went through their drills and their training with as much enthusiasm as the primary recovery ship.\\n\\n NASA provided all of the training to the DoD, both the Air Force Pararescue men that would jump into the water if the spacecraft did not land close to a ship. They provided the first response to safe the spacecraft and make sure that it had the flotation devices installed and was safe to just bob around out there until a ship got to them. And we did all the training for the Navy dive teams. Typically we used the Underwater Demolition Team [UDT] divers as our primary rescue swimmers on board the ships, or at least the primary recovery ships. We did all the training for them; taught them how to use the flotation collars and the special rafts and the special procedures, when we were coming back from the Moon, to help quarantine the crew.\\n\\n So NASA engineers, we built the training manuals and delivered them to the DoD, and then followed up and went out and helped them train. Oftentimes we delivered a boilerplate spacecraft for them to practice with, to take out of the water and put on the deck of the ship, and show them where the hazardous areas on the spacecraft were and that sort of thing.\\n\\n So that was the relationship. It was a huge team and a huge team effort. On an aircraft carrier primary recovery ship, we would have upwards of thirty to forty NASA folks on board on the primary recovery ships in support of the recovery of the spacecraft, training of the swimmers, training of the ship’s complement for handling the spacecraft, bringing it on board, and running the Quarantine Facility." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How early would you go out on a primary recovery ship before the actual splashdown?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We would typically train at least once with the dive teams before we ever deployed the ship. It depended oftentimes on how far the ship had to go from whatever port it was at to the landing site. But it could be anywhere from one to three weeks prior to the predicted launch time that the ship would set sail, and then we’d stop and do training en route to the recovery zone. So it really depended where the ship was coming from, how far it had to go, on how much earlier you deployed. Typically we deployed with a ship about two weeks before launch; got to the ship, and then depending on how far it would go, we might do some of our training in port before it would sail." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the protocol on the ship, especially during that training time and then during the actual mission? You mentioned that you had thirty to forty NASA people on the primary recovery ship, and then you had the Navy and who answered to who on that ship. How did that relationship work and who directed that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The NASA team had a team leader, and he dealt with the senior officers of the ship. All of the NASA team, whether there were two of us on a secondary ship or thirty of us on a primary ship, would be treated as an officer, in that our quarters would be in officers’ country. We dined in the officers’ mess. But clearly we operated within the protocol of the military chain of command. They tried to stay out of our way when we were doing something that was very specific to our job and didn’t involve military people. But when we were working as a team, we went through the normal chain of command; with the swimmers. Our senior training person would work with the officer in charge of the swimmers. So it was a very regimented way of dealing in a military environment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned last time it was the same ship for Apollo 11 and then again with [Apollo] 12. Did you work with the same divers and the same personnel?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did on [Apollo] 11 and 12. It was the same UDT team that recovered the spacecraft, so, of course, the second time it was easier. It was the same deck officer that was responsible for our accommodations in the hangar deck, and it was the same captain of the ship. It was Captain [Carl J.] Seiberlich on 11 and 12. He just recently passed away, and some of the folks that were on Apollo 11 and 12 actually went to his memorial service at Arlington [National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So the relationship while you were working with the DoD personnel, obviously you got close to them, living in close quarters for two or three weeks at a time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and oftentimes we made friends that became lifelong friends from those events. I still keep track of a couple of the young officers that were on board ship when I was. Of course, they’re not young anymore. They’re in their sixties just like I am." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Being from Texas, when you first started in Landing and Recovery, was this the first time you were exposed to being on ships and boats and that sort of thing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had been on small boats. I’d been out in the Gulf [of Mexico] fishing often with my father. But I had never been on a large ship at all, and so it was just a great adventure for a twenty-three-year-old." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I just wanted to ask a question about when you first joined NASA. There was something in some of the research [about] qualification tests for recovery engineers. Back in the late sixties when you joined, you went to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth [Texas] for a high-altitude chamber qualification test?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, by the time I came on board in 1967, we had an altitude chamber here at NASA. It had been installed at NASA. So I didn’t go to the one at Carswell. I did my altitude chamber runs here at JSC [Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas].\\n\\n But the early folks did, and that was just to—when we were going to fly on military aircraft, there was a requirement to understand high altitude or relatively high altitude hypoxia event, if you had a depressurization of the aircraft. It’s not like an airliner where the little oxygen mask flips down. You had to take some specific action to get to where there was a walk-around bottle to breathe, or you were going to be unconscious when they got down to altitude. Of course, you’d probably revive. But we all went through that training, because we were going to be flying on military aircraft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you’d like, let’s move on to Apollo 13 and talk about your assignment for that mission and if you were on a ship, and, then, of course, after the accident and what role you played during that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was still a part of the Mobile Quarantine Facility team on Apollo 13. I was one of the folks who was going to operate the outside of the trailer. I believe Buddy [Ralph H.] Culbertson was the engineer that was going to run the trailer from the inside and be in quarantine with the crew. We deployed out of Hawaii with the Quarantine Facility, and I believe that was the USS\\n\\n New Orleans\\n\\n that we were on for that flight. We sailed into the South Pacific, and the period of time before Apollo 13 launched, we were going through our normal training exercises with the Navy divers.\\n\\n This was a different dive team, a different helicopter team, so there was some amount of restart on the training that we had to do. And we were getting to know a new ship, understanding its idiosyncrasies on using its power and making sure the trailer operated well in that shipboard environment.\\n\\n Once Apollo 13 launched, it felt just like a normal flight. The daily routine on a Navy ship, until it comes time to work on the recovery, there’s four highlights of the day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the movie. Just looking back at it, most of us don’t remember exactly what we were doing when unless it’s a major event, and Apollo 13, when it was declared in danger, was one of those events where you remember exactly where you were. For us on board the ship, we were way out in the Pacific Ocean and several times zones away from Houston.\\n\\n So we were eating dinner, or had finished dinner and were in a movie in the wardroom when the captain of the ship called all the NASA people to the CIC, the Command Information Center, where we did all of our briefings and things, and we were told that there was a problem. A movie as bad as this one was you would never remember, but the name of the movie was\\n\\n The Green Slime\\n\\n , and to this day I remember the movie. I actually bought a copy of it. I found a copy of it in a video store several years ago, and I said, “Well, I probably will never watch it, but this is a really good souvenir,” so I’ve got it with my Apollo 13 stuff. So that’s what I was doing when we were told.\\n\\n Of course, we felt quite helpless, being so far away. We couldn’t participate in any of the planning to get them home safely. The only thing we could do is work with the Recovery Control Center back in Houston to make sure that we were positioning the ship resources and the aircraft resources in the most optimum place for return. Of course, for a couple of days when they were outbound and were going to go around the Moon, it was really unknown what part of the ocean they were going to land in, because they’d had some trajectory disturbances with the explosion of the oxygen tank, and they had been unable to do the precision tweak burns that we do to be right on target to land close to the ship, just because everything was turned off in the Command Module.\\n\\n But in the two days coming back, where they were really getting good radar tracking, we could determine better where they were going to land. We repositioned the ship and the aircraft assets to be in what we hoped was the most optimum place for Apollo 13. And then we were just as nervous as everybody else, probably more so, because we couldn’t contribute in the [Mission Operations] Control Center. So we were just waiting.\\n\\n The morning that Apollo 13 reentered, we actually, on board the ship—if you saw the movie, there was a long period of time where they didn’t hear. We actually saw the spacecraft and the chutes before the Control Center got the crew on the radio. We were trying to tell them we had them in sight, but the communications delays—I don’t know whether we got to them before they really got radio voice with the crew or not, but it was close, because we were trying to tell them we saw them with three good chutes. But that was just an amazing feeling to see this spacecraft float down, and we got to it with the swimmers, and clearly the crew was physically and emotionally spent.\\n\\n They recovered very quickly once we got them on board the ship. Fred [W.] Haise [Jr.] was the crewman that had suffered the most. He actually was ill by the time he got back, suffering from an infection, and he went straight to sick bay. But the other two crewman, [James A.] Lovell [Jr.] and [John L.] Swigert [Jr.], within thirty minutes they were bouncing around on the hangar deck, looking at the spacecraft, and they actually had dinner with the officers that night and we had a big celebration. Fred didn’t feel like coming, so he was still in sick bay. But the other two guys were doing great.\\n\\n But being part of the quarantine team, we really didn’t have anything to do since they didn’t go to the Moon, other than help the other guys with the spacecraft deactivation and the work that we normally do to make the spacecraft safe to take back to shore. We did provide all of the personal com [communications] for the crews. They did get to talk to the President, like they did on [Apollo] 11 and 12, and then we set up personal com for them so they could talk to their families through our communications gear in the quarantine trailer. It gave them a private place to go and to be able to talk to their families." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was quite an experience to see firsthand." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it was. It certainly was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After Apollo 13, what was your assignment on 14? Were you again on the prime ship?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I actually was not. I did not go out anymore after Apollo 13. I started a transition to the world of flight control. I had moved into the Flight Control Division and had begun training as a Guidance Officer for the follow-on Apollo missions. By the time the program was cancelled, I had served two planning shifts, or off shifts, in the Control Center as a Guidance Officer.\\n\\n So I did not go out anymore after Apollo 13 on a recovery ship, though I did get deployed on Apollo 14, associated with a scientific experiment where the Ames Research Center [Moffett Field, California] was doing a study on supersonic shock waves in near-space environment. So we actually went out and got underneath the flight path of the Saturn V on [Apollo] 14. When it got up very, very high, we were trying to measure the shock waves that were being generated at very, very high altitudes.\\n\\n We were on an oceangoing tugboat called the USS\\n\\n Grasp\\n\\n . It’s interesting, because I saw a thing on the Discovery Channel the other day. The USS\\n\\n Grasp\\n\\n is still in existence as an oceangoing tugboat for the Navy.\\n\\n But that’s where I was for the launch of Apollo 14 is about forty miles offshore, watching this thing fly overhead, being real quiet so we could listen for shock waves with these real sensitive microphones. That is the only Apollo launch that I ever got to see was Apollo 14, because 15 and 16 and 17, I was training in the Control Center and was unable to go to a launch down at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What brought about this transition to Guidance Officer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was clear that we had done all of the prep work for doing recoveries at sea, so the need for the design and the test groups was rapidly falling off. So instead of a hundred people, we needed about thirty to forty people to deploy on the ships, and we didn’t need the other organizations in that division.\\n\\n The division was actually disbanded, and they started moving the people into other disciplines. About forty people stayed on to fly out the rest of the Apollo Program, and then, of course, we did Skylab and ASTP [Apollo-Soyuz Test Project], but it was this smaller group of people. So the division had been disbanded, and it actually became a branch in the Flight Control Division to finish flying out the use of the Apollo Command Module.\\n\\n Because of my background in aero [aerospace], I was really anxious to get on with something that was more aligned with my education, and the guidance position in the Control Center was a good place to be. It was just kind of a random selection. I thought it would be good, and so did they, and they were shorthanded, so that’s how I started down my path as a Flight Controller." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you will, talk about that early training as a Guidance Officer and what that entailed, and, as you said, you were involved in the planning shifts, and those last Apollo flights." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The training program was becoming more and more sophisticated as we went farther and farther into the program. It started out, a lot of it was just you worked on the system, became an expert, and you kind of learned as you went in the Control Center. By the time I started the process, they did have a number of training manuals that were designed for the specific positions in the Control Center. I went through that self-training using the manuals, and then I started doing simulations with an experienced Guidance Officer, learning how to use the tools in the Control Center and learning the spacecraft better and better. So it was really an on-the-job training and working in that area, building procedures and working on malfunction procedures that we kept doing right up until the last Apollo Command Module flew. I’ll bet we redid and got smarter every flight, and redid procedures nearly every cycle. So that was how we went through the training process.\\n\\n I guess one of the funny stories that I like to tell people, typically the training path for a Flight Controller is to start in the back room, where they’re responsible for looking at a specific data screen, learning everything there is about the discipline, and consulting with a senior Flight Controller in the front room that actually talks to the Flight Director and is the primary interface. But my boss called me in and said, “Hey, we want you to start training, and we’ve decided that you probably aren’t smart enough to be in the back room, so we’re going to make you a front-room operator.”\\n\\n I did have the ability to communicate fairly well, and that was kind of a leg up on some people. I had the ability to look at lots of data and boil it down. So I got the opportunity. They had plenty of back-room people in the guidance area that truly did not want to go to the front room. They just wanted to be the data folks and the analysis folks, and so in the guidance area they were actually shorthanded for people that could take it, boil it down, and talk to somebody else about the problems and the solutions.\\n\\n So I got an opportunity that a lot of people didn’t get to have, where I didn’t go through that two or three years of training in the back room. And it may not have been an opportunity. It may have been, “Hey, I got shortchanged in my training.” But it finally all worked out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you will, just talk about that position in the Control Room itself, and where you were located and who you worked with during those missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, the Guidance Officer was part of the “trench”, and I’m sure you’ve had Flight Dynamics Officers, FIDOs, and other people that were in the trench talk about the tradition of the trench where, hey, we were the guys that were really in charge and knew it all. So there was a little bit of rivalry from the front row, which was the trench, and the folks up in the back of the room.\\n\\n The Guidance Officer was the person that actually commanded the Command Module computer and uploaded state vectors and burn targets and that sort of thing. Things that the Flight Dynamics Officer computed, we were responsible for getting on board, making sure it was in the computer properly and cycling proper in the computer. The Guidance Officer was responsible for all of the onboard computer system for the Apollo Command Module, and so it kind of spanned a lot of positions, because the computer operated the engines and actually ran the guidance software. It kind of cut across all the various systems. So it was a great place to learn about the spacecraft and to be a part of that.\\n\\n The last two flights, because my training was moving along okay, but I wasn’t ready to be the guy that flew launch or the guy that was responsible for configuring the spacecraft to return or go to the Moon or that sort of thing. I did a lot of shifts at night when the flight crew was asleep. But it was a great experience to be part of the history of the Control Center and learning more and more about the discipline. Because even though we weren’t going to go to the Moon again after Apollo 17, the Command Module was going to be the principal transport vehicle to orbit for Skylab and then the Apollo-Soyuz Project.\\n\\n After Apollo I became one of the Guidance Officers that did ascents, that did rendezvous in Skylab, and then I was the lead Guidance Officer that did all of the flight integration work for that position for the Apollo-Soyuz Project. So it was a great transition from riding ships to being in the Control Center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you will, go ahead and discuss a little bit about the Skylab missions and the simulations and how you trained for that, and your duties during those missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. The first Skylab launch was an unmanned launch, and, of course, since there wasn’t a Command Module, we weren’t there. But that put up the lab and started the process.\\n\\n One of the things that NASA had never done, leading up to Skylab, was continuous operations in space, and so we had a lot to learn about twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, forever and ever type operations. There were going to be some of us that were going to do those things all the time, and then there were going to be some of us, like Guidance Officers, that we operated the Command Module up through rendezvous, and up through power-down once it got attached to Skylab. Then once a week we came in, and the crew powered everything up, and we looked at the ship, and then they powered it down, and we went away.\\n\\n So the guidance position was really a cool position in Skylab, because we weren’t there seven days a week. We were there once a week. We were there when they did EVAs, Extravehicular Activities, going outside, because we had the Command Module powered up as an emergency lifeboat if something happened while you were doing that. Anytime there was a critical operation, we powered the spacecraft up, and a couple of times we actually used the Command Module to reorient the Space Station to desaturate its CMGs [Control Moment Gyros], the big rotating gyroscopes that they use to hold its position. So we came in just for special events.\\n\\n Unfortunately, a lot of those special events were Christmas, New Year’s, Thanksgiving. So I think the guys that were there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, scheduled these special events so the other guys who had it so good had to come in on holidays.\\n\\n On the first manned mission, it was the first launch that I participated in as a Guidance Officer. I did that with Ken [Kenneth W.] Russell. He was the lead on that flight, and then I actually took over after we had begun the rendezvous to finish the rendezvous with Skylab. Then the next two manned parts of the Skylab mission, I was the Guidance Officer for ascent and entry for those missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Before the launch of the first Skylab, it was almost delayed because of some of the software, and they had to speed up that development. Do you have any memories of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did have some involvement in the Skylab software. Most of that Skylab software development was a Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama] activity, not a JSC activity. But we had a number of interfaces between the Command Module software and the Station for flight control system. So we did a lot of simulating working those interfaces when they were trying to speed up the development. But I was not a part of that development team at all, other than the fact that we simmed with it and figured out what wasn’t working and what was working." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any involvement during SMEAT [Skylab Medical Experiments Altitude Test]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, none at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that you would be there for the rendezvous and then you would go away and then come back every once in a while. What were you doing in between, on those times when you weren’t on duty in the Control Center?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Typical office work; following the mission and then working on planning for the next mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything about Skylab that you’d like to mention that we haven’t talked about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was interesting, quite interesting for me. I had gotten married just before we started Skylab. My wife worked at NASA, and she was one of the teleprinter operators for Skylab, the person that put together the messages and shipped them up. Skylab was the first mission that we had that we had like a teleprinter. It was not as good as a fax machine, but it was how we communicated with data, written word, with the crew. It always seemed like we were—when I was doing shift work in the Control Center on the Command Module, she was always on a different shift, and so several weeks in a row we’d kind of pass in the night as we were working odd shifts. It made me absolutely certain I did not want to be a shift worker forever, for long period of times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, it could be a little difficult on a marriage even after you’ve been married a while." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right. That’s right. But I guess the two most memorable things was the first manned flight with Pete [Charles Peter] Conrad [Jr.] and the work they did to save the Skylab vehicle, because it was wounded seriously during the ascent, losing one of the solar arrays. Without the incredible design team on the ground that built the solar heat shield and the work of Pete and his crew to get all that installed, we would not have had a Skylab mission. It was an amazing engineering feat, both on the ground and in space, to make all that happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you stay in that area? I think you said you stayed in it for Apollo-Soyuz, also. What were your duties during that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, when we were getting ready for Apollo-Soyuz, it was an interesting challenge. Obviously, we knew how to operate the Apollo Command Module, but we were going to have to interface with the Apollo-Soyuz docking module. We were going to have to rendezvous and dock with a Russian spacecraft. So the procedures and the interfaces that we had to develop with our Russian counterparts were extensive and really made that flight complicated from the standpoint that there was a language barrier; there was kind of a distrust of each other. We certainly didn’t trust them. They certainly didn’t trust us. And in the Russian culture, you have to build that one-on-one trust before you can get anything done technically, and that was a big challenge.\\n\\n We had a number of Russians come here, and a number of us went to Moscow [Russia]. I did not have a direct counterpart on the Russian flight control team, so I never went to Moscow during ASTP. But I helped build all of the procedures that we were going to use to interface with them when we rendezvoused and docked. So there was a lot of iteration of changing procedures and building procedures and simulating with the Russians to get to the point that it was really safe to fly the Apollo-Soyuz mission.\\n\\n I was the Guidance Officer for the launch of the Command Module going to dock with the Soyuz, and I was also on console for the docking with the Soyuz spacecraft. So it was neat to be part of history. Then it just seemed like, “Boy, this is hard work, working with the Russians.” And “I hope we don’t ever have to do it again,” was kind of my thought. Little did we know that here nearly twenty years later we would be building an International Space Station with the Russians, and that interface that we built back in Apollo-Soyuz was very, very important.\\n\\n We’ll talk about it when we get to Space Station, but some of the people that in Russia that the Americans worked with on Apollo-Soyuz were the same people that we worked with at the beginning of Space Station. Russian engineers in their space program seldom ever change positions. They did the same thing their entire career. If they were a structures guy, they were a structures guy forever. If they were a Flight Director for Apollo-Soyuz, they were still a Flight Director when we got to flying Space Station. So it was very interesting. Many of the names I recognized when I started working Space Station, and yea, verily, they were the same people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that some of the Russians came here, and you didn’t have a direct counterpart, but you did have dealings with as far as some interaction?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some interaction, but for me not very much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were on console when the actual docking took place. Can you just describe that time for us?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. You know, Apollo-Soyuz, the crew was a pretty unique crew. General [Thomas P.] Stafford was the commander. “Deke” [Donald K.] Slayton was the Command Module pilot for docking, and Vance [D.] Brand was the Command Module pilot for deorbit and entry. So everybody was going to get to do something, so it was an interesting cockpit management, I’m sure, for General Stafford and the crew, because here are three experienced crewmen, and even though it was Deke Slayton’s first and only flight, Deke was probably the most experienced astronaut of the bunch. He had trained and trained and trained and trained, and had been head of the Astronaut Office. So he was just as much a commander of the vehicle and people as General Stafford, so I’m sure that was an interesting interplay.\\n\\n But Deke was the Command Module pilot that did the rendezvous and docking and actually flying the ship right up close. Watching the docking, the Russian hardware really expected a small amount of delta V to force it together for us to dock to it, and looking at the final phases, comparing it to the way we fly a Shuttle up to the Space Station today, it looked pretty scary, because the closing velocities, though not high, were definitely you could see them coming together much more rapid than you see in a Shuttle docking. I think Deke was always afraid he was going to bounce off and not make a good interface, so right at the last minute he kind of punched it, and it was a fairly significant whack.\\n\\n Those of us in the Control Center that were looking at the velocities kind of took a big gulp, and we were really relieved when the crew said they had capture and the latches were latching. We were wondering if something was going to be broken. But, it was completely within the acceptable parameters of it, it was just on the high end, and there was a pretty good bump. If you talk to them today, the crewmen that are still with us, they’ll tell you it was a pretty good bump when they docked.\\n\\n But it was exciting to dock with a Russian spacecraft and know that it was—this was one of those things that isn’t going to happen very often, especially with our relationship with the Russians at the time. Of course, it’s gotten much better over the years, but then there was a lot of tension, and we knew it was something historical, the beginning of something that might change the world someday." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After Apollo-Soyuz, did you stay in the same section during that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went to a group that we started working on Shuttle things, Orbiter things, and the group I was in was a Flight Test Group. We were just kind of struggling to figure out what to do next to get ready. Those of us that had some Landing and Recovery background—and aero background—were in this Flight Test Group that was to figure out what flight test was going to look like for the Shuttle. So we benchmarked some of the big aircraft programs, and B-70 was one of them, the B-52 Flight Test Program, because they were big aircraft, complex aircraft, looking at those flight test programs. We built kind of a “straw-man,” here’s what you’ve got to do to test the Orbiter as an aerodynamic vehicle, not as a spacecraft.\\n\\n So I worked on that for, I guess, about a year, and then it was clear that my background as a Guidance Officer and onboard computer systems might have a better place working in the flight control area for Shuttle on the flight software and the flight computer system. I joined a group that became the Data Processing System Group, and the DPS—the acronym for it was the DPS Officer that was going to be responsible in the Control Center. I went back to work for Ken Russell, who was my mentor in becoming a Guidance Officer and showing me the ways of the flight control world.\\n\\n I got heavily involved in the development of the Shuttle software, the flight control software, and the computer system. It was a very unique computer system, in that it had four computers running together in parallel, and then everything divided up between these four computers so you had redundancy for every major thing on the spacecraft that the computers were controlling. So I was on the design team that was trying to help IBM [International Business Machine, Inc.] learn how to run computers in sync and do the same thing at the same time, talk back and forth, and so I worked on that for a number of years until we got close enough that, yea, verily, we’re really going to fly on Orbiter.\\n\\n Then we started building displays to be able to look at the computer system on board the Orbiter. And because of the complexity of the system and the way everything on the Orbiter was tied together through the general-purpose computers, you became—because you were working on the data system—you became somewhat of an expert on everybody else’s system, the propulsion system, the reaction control system, the environmental system. Because all of these things fed inputs into the computers and were being talked back and forth in this redundant set. So it was a wonderful time of systems engineering on figuring out how this was really going to work.\\n\\n We had some really, really good programmers that had put all this stuff together, but making it work was an ops problem, and we spent several years building the display so you could see into the computer system, see all of the systems and subsystems, and how it played together. And then how does the crew interface with all of this without it being so overwhelming that their workload is too high to be safe? That was a real challenge, because this was the first time we had so much data in one place we were actually overwhelming the flight crews with data. So that was an interesting time, turning data into information on displays and working the crew interface for the Shuttle cockpit.\\n\\n Then once that all kind of started coming together and it was clear we had to establish some leads to get ready to fly the first flight, I was assigned as the lead to do ascent for the data processing system. Darrell [E.] Stamper was assigned the lead to do all the entry things. Then he and I were just going to—STS-1, the first Shuttle mission, was going to be a short mission, and we were just going to leapfrog each other. I’d work a ten-hour shift and go away and then come back and do the next planning shift, and then he’d take over and do entry. So it was only a fifty-some-hour mission, so there were only two of us that they did have a planning shift guy in there someplace or a second-shift guy. Now, I don’t remember who it is at this point.\\n\\n But getting ready to fly the first ascent and getting ready to fly the first entry was arduous. The simulator didn’t work very good in the beginning, and we’d fly part of an ascent, and the simulator would break. We’d fly a full ascent, and then we’d debate for two hours whether it flew it right and we were getting the right data and the flight dynamics were right and this, that, and the other. So the early simulations for the first flight of the Orbiter were difficult, because you didn’t get much accomplished in an eight- or ten-hour day.\\n\\n But by the time we got that working smoothly, and before we launched the Space Shuttle the very first time, those of us on the ascent did over a thousand ascent runs. So we had seen what we thought was just about every kind of failure that you could imagine and knew how to deal with it. So we were fairly confident we knew how to operate the vehicle. We weren’t real confident what the vehicle was going to do for real during ascent. So as we got closer and closer to flight, and the simulations ran better and better and had higher and higher fidelity, we started realizing that there are a lot of things that can go wrong that will keep you from getting to orbit.\\n\\n But by the time we got there, we felt like we were extremely, extremely well trained, probably better trained than any other team in the history of the program, at least in the number of sims [simulations] and the number of different failures that we had seen and dealt with during our training period. And that, what I’ve just talked about, spans a number of years, the development of the software, the learning how to operate the software, building the simulation capability, and then starting to train.\\n\\n The Mission Control Center was way more sophisticated than it was in the early Apollo days, but it was still very difficult to reconfigure and get new displays into it. So the set of displays we flew for STS-1 started being installed in the Control Center probably a year and a half, two years before we actually flew. During that period of time we learned so much about the system that for STS-2 and [STS-]3 and [STS-]4 there were going to be lots of changes to these displays in the Control Center.\\n\\n So the Control Center being not very flexible, we’d fly one mission on one floor; get ready to fly the next mission on another floor. So we had two separate software systems, two separate hardware systems. So the way the Control Center was configured was really a boon for us, because we could get ready to fly in one FCR [Flight Control Room] while we’re working on the next flight in the other Flight Control Room.\\n\\n But by the time we got to STS-1 we figured we knew just about everything there was to know about the software and how it was going to react; pretty naïve, I might add. But when we started counting down for the first mission, I had a number of people in my back room, Jerry Canori [phonetic], Bill [William E.] Lychwick, and a couple of others, that were in training that were very, very knowledgeable of the Shuttle primary and backup software systems.\\n\\n As we came up on the time in the count that the spacecraft needed to go to flight mode—it had been in a preflight mode in the computers up to this point, for the whole countdown, the hours and hours and hours of countdown. But at t-minus-twenty minutes we had to reconfigure the spacecraft to a flight configuration, in that we took these four synchronized computers and transitioned them into flight mode. And we transitioned the fifth computer, which was the backup computer, which was completely independent software, into flight mode, and those two computer systems actually talked to share data.\\n\\n When we came out of the t-minus-twenty-minute hold, we had four good primary computers, but the backup computer couldn’t see two of the flight control strings in the vehicle. Clearly it was unacceptable to fly your first flight when the two systems didn’t match, and then the debate started to rage about, “Can we back out of this and see if it was just some funky phenomenon? We’ll transition again, and if everything’s okay, can we launch?”\\n\\n My back room was analyzing the data, and Jerry Canori [phonetic] came up. Everybody thought there was something wrong with the backup machine, and he was my backup flight computer specialist. The other guy that was back there, Jim Hill [phonetic], a guy with a huge amount of experience, even then, he is still a Flight Controller in the Control Center, getting ready to fly his last flight. He’s nearly seventy years old; I guess he is seventy years old. But they came to me on the loop and said, “There is nothing wrong with the backup. The problem is with the primary computer system. It’s not sending data.”\\n\\n Well, everything is still raging in the Control Center and down at the Cape. All of the IBM experts are looking, and this can’t happen. So we all decided that we were going to go back into the prelaunch mode, which was called OPS-9, and we transitioned everything back to\\n\\n OPS-9. The computers all looked good, and I’m thinking, “Man, if we come out of this hold and it works, am I go to fly?”\\n\\n I’ve talked to my back room, and Jerry Canori [phonetic] and Jim Hill [phonetic] and Bill Lychwick all said, “We don’t understand it. We don’t want to fly today.” And we don’t know what the Cape is going to do, because we’d been counting down. We’d tried launch, and the first flight had slipped and slipped and slipped. So it was really on everybody’s mind that today was a good day to go fly. Beautiful weather.\\n\\n But I made a decision with the help of the folks in the back room that it is not the right day to go fly. So I got on the flight loop and told Neil [B.] Hutchinson, who was the Flight Director. I said, “Flight, I don’t care what happens when we come out of the t-minus-nine-minute hold. DPS is no go for launch.” And man, you could have heard a pin drop in that room. I mean, it went from a lot of buzz to quiet.\\n\\n The Flight Director asked me, “Are you sure you are no go for launch?”\\n\\n I said, “Yes, sir. We do not understand what happened here. If it works this next time, I can’t guarantee it’s going to work through ascent, and I can’t guarantee it’s going to work when we bring these computers back alive to do entry. I am no go for launch.”\\n\\n He says, “Boy, I’m sure glad you are no go for launch, because I was, and I didn’t have a good reason.” [Laughs]\\n\\n So we did come out and thank goodness, we didn’t have to make that hard decision, because it still was a problem. The computers still didn’t match up. But that has always been my claim to fame is I was the guy that was no go for launch on STS-1 before we ever found out if it was okay or was going to work when we came out of the hold again. And truly, I believe that was a turning point in my decision-making process where I was confident enough to say no in an environment when everybody else wanted to say yes.\\n\\n Shortly after that and after we flew STS-1 successfully—and it took several days to figure out what was wrong with it, and it was, by the way, the primary computer system, just like Jerry Canori [phonetic] said. It was a timing problem that was in the computers. When you brought them up from the mass memory and started them, one in six hundred times or something you’re going to get this funny timing problem, and it wouldn’t work with the backup machine. IBM fixed it, and we never had the problem again after the first flight. Once we understood it, we were prepared to just recycle the machines and move forward on the next attempt. But after that first flight IBM fixed the flaw in the software so it couldn’t happen, and we moved on.\\n\\n But Dr. [Christopher C.] Kraft, after we landed, came down and told me that the ascent call I made being no go for launch was the right one, and if I hadn’t of done it, he was going to come down and slap me around. So I was really glad I had done that. And about three weeks later I got selected to be a Flight Director, so it was kind of an event that was scary at the time, but it actually probably benefited my career as much as anything I had done to that point, as far as recognition was concerned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After that flight, and if three weeks later you were selected to be a Flight Director, did you continue working in the data processing system for the following flights?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did for two more flights. For STS-2 and [STS-]3 I did the entry. Darrell Stamper and I flip-flopped. He did ascent on [STS-]2 and I did entry on flight 2. Then we flip-flopped again, and I did ascent on [STS-]3 and he did entry on 3. By that time we had enough other DPS people trained for the front room. We had people working the other shifts, and they were ready.\\n\\n But I had started already training for the Flight Director position and running what they called Flight Techniques meetings before I ever finished my DPS tour of duty, and was actually, on STS-4, one of the assigned Flight Directors to do what we today—or then—called Team 4. If something happened during the flight, this fourth team would activate with all of the right experts to try to give the on-console flight control team some support. So, flight 3 I was a DPS. Flight 4, I was actually a Flight Director, and I actually flew my first shift as a Flight Director on STS-6, two flights later.\\n\\n The training program for the Flight Director then was not very regimented. It was mainly based on your previous history of getting ready to be an operator, and then on-the-job training in this Flight Techniques environment was part of your training ground. Today the Flight Director training syllabus is very well documented and has about a six-month flow before you’re ready to really sim and get ready for your first flight. In the early Shuttle days we transitioned very quickly from a Flight Controller to a Flight Director. From STS-4, where I had my first taste of getting ready for a flight, to STS-6 was only several months, six or seven months, so it wasn’t a lot of training time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What exactly were the Flight Techniques meetings?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Flight Techniques, because every flight was a new flight. Everything we put in the payload bay was something new we’d never done before. So we had to go through an analysis of, one, whatever the payload was we were going to do, how we were going to operate it; what impacts it would have on the Orbiter.\\n\\n Flight 4 was interesting. We had a DoD payload in the bay, and we’re doing some remote manipulator arm testing and some flight testing on the payload bay doors, exposing them to different attitudes with respect to the sun to look at the physical warping of the Orbiter because of heating. So the Flight Techniques for STS-4 were divided into this payload bay door activity, this DoD payload activity, which had to be operated at the secret level and you couldn’t talk about it.\\n\\n So we had two kinds of Flight Techniques. We had the test Flight Techniques, where everybody could be there. We had the Defense Department Flight Techniques, where we’re going to operate their payload. Then we had the Flight Techniques where we were going to do the testing with the RMS [Remote Manipulator System]. We were still trying to understand the characteristics of the Orbiter at that time and do payload operations, so it was a great learning ground for everybody.\\n\\n We had to build the procedures. We had to understand what these thermal things were going to do to the doors. We had to understand what we were doing with the arm and the loads we were putting on the arm. Very little was known about this arm, using it in space. We’d done a lot of simulations on the ground.\\n\\n So it was a real flight test program, and that’s what Flight Techniques did. It pulled all the procedures together. It made sure that we had identified all the things they ought to analyze. We had looked at the analysis, and we weren’t doing anything dangerous. We knew how to recover from things.\\n\\n We knew we were actually going to put the spacecraft in a position where you could not close the doors, potentially, because there was enough warp that they wouldn’t close, and we wanted to demonstrate that you could warp it and then unwarp it by going to a different attitude, and yea, verily, that all came to pass, and yea, verily, it wouldn’t close. When we did one of the door tests, it actually hung up, and we had to stop and reopen the doors and reorient the spacecraft to get it out of the banana shape into a straight shape so the doors would close.\\n\\n That’s the kind of things we did in Flight Techniques." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Before we go on to the first flight, the STS-6 flight, where you were on the first shift, at the end of Apollo and then Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz, the Center itself was going through a lot of transition and getting ready for Shuttle. In the late seventies there were a lot of layoffs and those RIFs [reduction in force]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Lots of turmoil." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Lots of things going on. If you can, share some of your memories of that time period as far as the Center was concerned, and the morale at the Center at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Those of us in Flight Control Division felt like that we had really been somewhat protected from the RIFs because of the formal training program that Gene [Eugene F.] Krantz had put into place; that because of the intensive training programs to get you to the point where you were a Flight Controller, it made you less susceptible to being RIFed, because you had some valuable tools that were costly to re-create later. So our morale was pretty good, in that we believed that we were part of the core that was going to go forward, though you could see around us some people getting RIFed and that’s a very uncomfortable thing.\\n\\n In fact, when the Landing and Recovery Division was shutting down, they actually went through a RIF and a gentleman in another area that got RIFed was going to bump my position, and I would have been the one that went out the door. Because he had the seniority and the educational background, he could have taken my job. As it turns out, he decided to retire, and I didn’t get RIFed. So I went through that for a real short period of time, that kind of uncertainty.\\n\\n But transition from the excitement of Apollo to the little bit lesser activity of Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz—not that they weren’t really great programs to work on, but they weren’t bigger than life, like going to the Moon. That transition down was difficult for a lot of people, and at that time a lot of people actually left and went to other industries, because they saw it as a better future. I have a number of friends that left at the end of Apollo and worked in the oil patch here, in the chemical industry, the rest of their careers.\\n\\n So I felt very fortunate that I was on a career path that actually transitioned relatively smoothly from the shutdown of Apollo to Skylab to Apollo-Soyuz, and then I was in the big middle of getting Shuttle ready to go from the software standpoint. So I know all that stuff was going on around me, but I felt very, very secure as long as we didn’t lose the funding to build the Orbiters." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There were a number of other changes going on. For one thing, the [19]’78 class of astronauts came through, and for the first time there were women and minorities involved there, and also women were starting to show up in Flight Control. Do you have any memories of that time period and those transitions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, of course, the women starting to show up in Flight Control started to happen at the tail end of Apollo. We didn’t have any front room operators, but we did have some back room people that transitioned in. We had some front room operators in Skylab, a limited number of women. But by the time we finished Apollo-Soyuz and we were getting ready to go for the first flight of the Space Shuttle, there were women popping up in all of the different disciplines in Flight Control.\\n\\n Most people, most of the Flight Controllers that I know, especially the ones my age, thought that was great. There was no competitive thing going on. We were just glad that women now felt comfortable sticking to the engineering curriculum and going out into what had once been almost completely a man’s world. No women graduated my engineering class in 1967, zero. So I thought it was a good thing. And, of course, the women astronauts that they selected were outstanding individuals, easy to work with, as capable as anybody that had come before them in their own disciplines.\\n\\n So that transition, to me, did not cause any problem. It probably caused more difficulty in the astronaut corps itself than it did outside in the other disciplines, because the astronaut corps at that time was still almost 100 percent fighter pilots, and “women didn’t belong in the cockpit” type folks. I mean, it changed. There’s still probably some strain there a little bit, but that transition has gone as well as one could expect, I guess.\\n\\n But I guess my claim to fame on women in the Control Center, I was the first Flight Director that had more than one woman on his flight control team on a given shift, and that was on STS-6. I actually had three women in the Control Center on the front room flight control team for that flight, so it was kind of unique. Mimi [Cheevon B.] Lau was my Flight Activities Officer, and that was the first time we’d had a woman in that key position of FAO in the Control Center. I didn’t think anything about it, but it got quite a bit of notoriety at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All the Flight Directors got to pick a color. What was your color and what was the reason behind picking it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, by the time I became a Flight Director, there weren’t a lot of good colors left. We had one of the historians of NASA, Bob [Robert D.] Legler. I don’t know whether you know Bob, but if you haven’t had him come through on the oral history, you really need to have him do that. He was kind of the local historian. He sent out a note to us new Flight Directors. “Here are all the colors that have been used, and here are all of the other options that you may have.”\\n\\n Well, he called me up personally, and he says, “You need to be infrared flight.” I thought about it a minute, and the acronym, IR, IR flight, I decided that wasn’t good. Fuchsia didn’t sound like a good color. The good [University of Texas, Austin, Texas] Longhorn Pete [M. Peter] Frank had already taken orange, and, you know, red was gone. White was gone. Black was gone. Green was gone. The primary colors were all used, and so as I’m looking through the list, I decided on amber, and probably for no other reason than it sounded okay.\\n\\n I didn’t want to be yellow flight. That one has never been used, by the way. I don’t think there’s a yellow flight. I don’t think so. It implies unpleasant things. But amber just seemed like it was still a color, and it didn’t have any connotation that I was worried about. So I picked amber flight, so that was my team name. Then after that people started picking rocks and stars and stuff, so we’ve gotten away from the colors by necessity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You just ran out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just ran out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, speaking of running out, I think we’re going to need to change our tape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Brock Stone", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All right." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00668", + "metadata": { + "category": "Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office Oral History Project 2012 - 2013", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/C3PO/CulbertsonFL/culbertsonfl.htm", + "original_file_name": "CulbertsonFL_3-24-98.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Shuttle-Mir/CulbertsonFL/CulbertsonFL_3-24-98.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 24 March 1998" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Mark Davison" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Frank L. Culbertson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good morning. Today's interview is between Mr. Frank Culbertson, Program Manager for the Shuttle-Mir Program, and it's 24th of March, and we're in Mr. Culbertson's office here in Building 1. Good morning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good morning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The first question is, tell us a little bit about the position that you held when you got started in the program and what your responsibilities are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When we started the program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you started in the program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, my first exposure to the program was back in 1992, when we first began working with the Russians. I was involved working with Dick [Richard O.] Covey and Steve Nagel in the astronaut office in dealing with some of the issues that were starting to come up, and making some plans for how we would work together in the future.\\n\\n My first trip to Russia was in January of 1993 as a part of the Operations Working Group, to go over and start planning the rendezvous and docking of the shuttle and the Mir. Then I was involved in training for my most recent mission in September of '93, so I was out of it for a little while.\\n\\n But a few months after I came back from that mission, I was asked to head up the JSC Russian Project Office, which began activities in May of 1994. I worked in that position for a few months until the Phase 1 office was established, led by Tommy Holloway, and I was named as his deputy in the summer of 1994. I guess my first official activities began in about September of that year with the Team Zero meeting in Moscow and activities with the Russians.\\n\\n I just continued from there. I continued as the deputy for the program through August of 1995, when Tommy was named as the shuttle program director and I was the acting director for Phase 1 for a while. Then I was director by the end of that year, and I've been in that position since then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You talked about your shuttle flight. Do you think that background, or the work you did in space station, prepared you for this job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Definitely. Yes. I wasn't prepared for everything, and it's hard to find somebody who knows everything about a job they're going into, I guess. I had a lot of things to learn about NASA management and bureaucracy. But in terms of the operational side and understanding the shuttle and the objectives of the station, I had a pretty good grounding in that, but there's always more to learn, and I certainly did. I had a little bit of experience with international operations, both from the [US] Navy and from my [Space Station] Freedom days, and had studied a little bit of Russian prior to working with this program. So I had a little bit of background that helped." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned your Navy experience. How were your Cold War impressions and culture differences overcome to make the shuttle-Mir program feasible?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know if I had prejudices necessarily. I had been trained to do certain things in the Navy, and it was quite a feeling the first time I stood in Red Square or was inside the walls of the Kremlin on my first trip. That was an amazing transition from what I had been trained to do for a long time. But as I said, I had a little bit of training in the Russian language, I'd studied it a year at the [US] Naval Academy, because I felt like it might come in handy some day. Since those guys were designated as our enemy at the time, I thought it was important to learn as much about them as I could, and I actually studied a good bit about the Russian people during that time.\\n\\n So I wasn't unfamiliar with life over there, at least from what I'd read, and had always been optimistic that the Cold War wouldn't last forever, and felt like we always had a lot in common at the basic human level. So I wasn't really surprised by our ability to work together, and I wasn't too surprised by some of our differences, but they still were surprises. I saw in a lot of our people the need to overcome some prejudices and the difficulty it was for some people, and still is, I think, for some. You grow up with a certain attitude or certain feeling and it's difficult to change that when you get into a new situation for some folks. Others are more flexible." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it easier for you to relate to the cosmonauts, being an astronaut, and a lot of them were former fighter pilots like yourself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was pretty easy in a lot of ways. There was a little bit of checking each other out, you know, when you first met, to see who you were and what your background was and how good you were, but that's normal in that world. But I found there to be a lot of mutual professional respect for each other and the ability to communicate about things. A lot of common experiences." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So was that helpful in the Russian negotiations, or did you have to kind of develop a style for negotiating with the Russians?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was helpful to a certain extent with some people, like General [Yuri] Glaskov or [Nikolai M.] Budarin or [Anatoly Y.] Solovyev, folks who were cosmonauts. But the majority of people we worked with were not cosmonauts. Their cosmonauts typically do not rise in management as frequently as ours, plus they don't have as many as we have astronauts. So there were a few people in key positions that I hit it off with real well, but I also had to learn a lot about negotiating internationally with the Russians specifically in dealing with all levels of management and all types of people. It's not unlike any similar job on this side; it's just in a different language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They seemed to enjoy negotiating. Did you come to that level where you enjoy doing it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I enjoy it also, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Who was involved in bringing Phase 1 together, if we go back to the history at whatever level it might be, the congressional level, executive level, whatever you'd like to talk about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was busy training for a flight and was involved in other jobs when the actual negotiations were going on, so I wasn't involved in the international trips or in the contract negotiations or any of that. There were some other folks who did a very good job on all that. But what I saw, I was involved in a lot of the early meetings and tag-ups and discussions on this side of where we're going and how many flights are we going to do and things like that, although I didn't necessarily make any of the decisions, but I was part of the discussions, or observed a lot of the discussions.\\n\\n My impression initially was there was tension between the shuttle program and the space station program over who owned this, this in-between program, this Phase 1 program. I thought Tommy Holloway did a really good job of pulling together a compromise position in between the two programs that established a program office, a framework of working groups with which to negotiate and work the issues, and some of it was based on the Apollo-Soyuz experience which some of the people had been a part of, particularly on the Russian side. Some of it was just good common sense.\\n\\n Tommy put together this package and had it signed by all the appropriate people so that everybody bought into, \"This is the way we're going to manage this program. This is the way it's going to exist.\" And he was able to establish a budget for it, a schedule, and everything, and I thought that that was the real foundation of our success, was that early work Tommy did in that area. A lot of other people worked in it, too, but Tommy's the one who finally pulled it all together and was named the director of the program. Folks like Jim Gardner, Brian O'Connor, Steve Grissom, people like that all contributed greatly, and I think were major players in getting it going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that Tommy Holloway established a budget for the program in the beginning. Did that come out of station money or shuttle money, or is it separate? Do you care to talk about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think the answer is yes to both. I guess the money was eventually counted under the station budget, with a $2.1 billion cap that we operate under each year. But I believe it initially came from the shuttle budget, but I don't really know the ins and outs of all that. Tommy can probably give you a better feel for how he mechanized that. But I thought it was very well done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think the turning point that prompted the MOU (memo of understanding) between U.S. and Russia to cooperate in space were you directly involved? Would it be sought from -" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, obviously the change in government in Russia and the end of Communism made a huge difference. It opened doors. Space was one area that we quickly stepped through the door on, because we already had the Apollo-Soyuz experience, we already had some common research and exchange of information going on particularly in the medical research area. We had some common work already going on. We had always wanted to share information, and this was sort of an enabling function or an enabling factor that we could now go ahead and do it. I'm not sure that many of us thought much about the foreign policy aspects of it. That was at a much higher level that those negotiations were done.\\n\\n But space was an easy way for both countries to step forward and work together, because we already had international space station, what at that time was Freedom, in the works. Bringing the Russians in with all their expertise as the other leading space power made a lot of sense at the time. They had a lot of capability, but they were severely underfunded. I mean, their budget had been cut to the bone. They were barely able to maintain Mir operations and had cut every other program they had going.\\n\\n There was obviously a feeling that if we helped them get through this period in space, that they would put more of their emphasis in that area than maybe in weapons or exported weapons. I understand that rationale, but I think preserving what they had done for the previous thirty years was also very important, because without that, that all would have been lost to history and it would have been an interesting and incredible series of accomplishments, but nothing following it if we'd let the whole thing collapse. A lot of talented people, a lot of hardware, a lot of experience would have just gone down the drain. So I think it's very good that we put the money and effort into working together in Phase 1 so that their program did continue to exist and they're able now to start to bring it back up, to participate as partners in ISS [International Space Station]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The Russian people seem to be very proud of their culture and their space accomplishments. Did you find that that was hard for them to let someone come and help them financially? How do you think they dealt with that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To a certain extent that was hard at some levels. There were some people who were very realistic and understood this was the only way that they were going to continue in the business. There were also people who did resent the fact that they couldn't continue doing this on their own. And I don't blame them. It's kind of human nature. They had accomplished a lot, and they accomplished a lot with always meager resources to a certain extent. They're very good at innovation, very good at solving problems and surviving difficult times, and that's been proven by the fact that the country survived all that it has in the last thousand years.\\n\\n But I think it was difficult for them to be put in a position of contracting with us for goods and services, if you will. I think that they had to change their mind-set on things and make a shift to a different way of doing business with the rest of the world. Some of them were very aggressive about it and some of them were very withdrawn about it, so I saw all sorts, just as I saw a lot of different approaches on this side, too.\\n\\n I think eventually we've evolved to the point where we realize that it's to our mutual benefit to work together, that it's more than just a contract between us to execute Phase 1; it's a development of a partnership and a relationship that will carry forward into the foreseeable future, the contract between the U.S. Government and the Russian Government, which is a vehicle with which to enable that all to happen, and a lot more happened on both sides than just the content of the contract itself. So we got more than our money's worth and so did they out of Phase 1, I believe. I think it was a very inexpensive investment for what we're going to see as a product in the future and our ability to work together, and the fact that we were able to continue both programs in a very robust and aggressive fashion." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were the initial goals of Phase 1 and who is responsible for accomplishing these?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the initial goals that were set forth in the management plan that Tommy put out were four. The first one, as initially stated, was to learn to work with the Russians, but we changed that to learn to work with each other. I think that's a significant change. You have to make sure that when you write things down like this, that you think about it, because people do react to that and they do set their attitude based on the way you write these kind of things. So I think it was important that people realize we were not only teaching each other, but observing each other and learning from each other, and that both sides had a lot to offer. It wasn't just a one-way street by any means, and I think we've proven that over and over.\\n\\n The second stated goal was to mitigate risk for the international space station, and we are always looking for ways to do that; to try out hardware that was going to be used on ISS; develop procedures that were going to be used; to react to the situations that arose and develop processes to respond to them. Again, we've got more than we bargained for in that, particularly in dealing with some of the contingencies that came up, such things as the fire, the depressurization. All that was not planned, of course, but certainly taught us a lot about what could happen during the ISS.\\n\\n You could probably take most of the things that happened during the course of the Phase 1 program and predict that each of them will happen in one form or another during the fifteen or so years of ISS life, including arguing about when it should end and how good the station is after ten years. All that's going to happen. So hopefully enough of the people who experienced that will still be around to deal with it appropriately.\\n\\n The third goal was to conduct long-duration studies for the U.S. side, the first opportunity we'd had to do that since Skylab, of course. We broke the Skylab record on the very first mission and we've continued to have four- to six-month missions. It's been a real good experience for us, and I think, again, a lot of the benefits were unforeseen.\\n\\n One of the interesting discussions I've had with people in Congress and other critics of the space program, they appear to want a cookbook answer to a cookbook question before we ever execute anything. Of course, if you already have the answer, why go execute it? I think the benefit of the space program is the unexpected. The real benefit is the unexpected spinoffs, the unexpected products and benefits that we've seen as a result of stretching our capabilities by going into space. You can't say, \"I'm going to go into space, and because of that, life's going to be better on Earth,\" in detail. You can say that in general. You can't say how it's going to be better, but I can guarantee you that as long as we continue pushing the boundaries, pushing the frontiers, we will benefit from it and we'll be surprised by how we'll benefit.\\n\\n And the same thing's been true in Phase 1. We thought we'd be looking at how the human body responded, and we have been, of course, and we've been gathering data on people living in space for a long period of time. Some of the data the Russians already had; some they didn't. We have different ways of gathering information than they do, and they've not been able to share everything with us from the past, don't document it the same way. But we've also learned a lot about the psychological aspects of people being on a station for that period of time. You'd think we'd already know all that because we send people out to sea on submarines and send people to Antarctica, and we've done all that, but it's still a different environment and we have to keep relearning these things, and you've got a different group of people doing it.\\n\\n So that aspect has been eye opening, as well as the effect on the people on the ground who are supporting these missions, and what it takes to support these missions from a ground controller standpoint. That, again, is an unexpected lesson learned that I think we're going to have to work on very hard to ensure that we don't burn out our people both in orbit and on the ground, and that we don't neglect them, and that we provide them with sufficient support that they'll want to keep doing this job over and over and over, because it's harder than we thought it would be.\\n\\n Mir operations and life was hard. A lot of people have said it's the hardest thing they've ever done. I congratulate them on that. I hope they feel good about it. I think people should, at some point in their life, do something that's really hard and feel good about it, feel like they've accomplished something. If doing it in the space program is where they get to, then I think that's great. But what we've learned, and my prediction is, the ISS is going to be even harder for a lot of reasons that people don't understand yet until you've been involved in Phase 1. So this next ten years is going to be really, really fascinating and the story is going to be even more interesting than the one you're telling here, I think.\\n\\n The fourth goal was to conduct a science research program, and I took a lot of heat from the scientists periodically because they said, \"We're last priority,\" and I said, \"No, you're fourth priority.\" We have lots of others that don't get stated as clearly, but still, during the research program, it was a high priority. Because that takes so much time and effort on the part of the crew members and the ground support people, it appears to be the main thing that we're doing, and it gets a lot of attention. If it goes well, it gets a good bit of attention. If it goes poorly, it gets a heck of a lot of attention and people feel like they're failing if one of the research experiments doesn't work. But you have to keep it in perspective.\\n\\n We did have a very well thought out and, in most cases, very well executed research program that provided, I think, a lot of good data. Some of it will be used in ISS; some of it will be used for the benefit of people on the ground, just as pure research. A lot of it, however, will be development of better research for ISS, because you're now having a chance to operate the equipment for months at a time rather than days at a time on the shuttle. You have a chance to see what kind of pieces of hardware really support you well and which ones are critical. On a shuttle flight, for instance, a payload computer is crit three or worse, and if it breaks, nobody I mean, people care, but it doesn't affect the success of the mission. However, if you have a critical payload computer on the station and it breaks, then you're out of business for the next six months, and that's a major disaster. So you have to change the criticality and the reliability of the hardware that supports the science, not just the infrastructure of the vehicle itself. It's easy to say, for instance, on the shuttle that they be used, which you need for landing, for crit one, but as long as you can land the shuttle safely, you can come back and repair anything that breaks in the payload area and you're not going to worry too much about it, other than the person who spent years preparing for that experiment. But if it's something that's going to support you for months, then you're going to take a different outlook, and we're changing the paradigm on that for the research community. So it's been good in that area, too.\\n\\n The other important thing that people should remember is that anytime we have the opportunity to conduct research on any platform, whether it's at sea, in Antarctica, in space, we do it. As a nation, we tend to do that if you have a good program set up. So you have two things: one is the ability to establish the outpost, the ability to build a platform that goes to sea or it goes into space, the ability to operate it, and all the things you have to learn to make that happen successfully and safely; and then you have laid over that what do you do productively while you're there. The two are different and they should support each other, but you shouldn't confuse them when you're evaluating the success of a program or the plans for building something. They're two totally separate areas that you need to concentrate on, and a lot of people at NASA understand that, but a lot of people outside don't.\\n\\n When we fly something for a university as an experiment, we're susceptible to the ability of that university to build this experiment and conduct that research. However, once it flies on the shuttle or on the station, it becomes a NASA experiment and we get identified with it. So it has to be a synergistic relationship. But we still can conduct safe and successful missions without that research, but you couldn't do that research without the ability to operate this vehicle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To follow up on the science and research, the payloads are used to fly on the shuttle, like you said, and they had to adapt to the Mir environment and now they're going to have to adapt to the ISS. How did they transition from that and what lessons learned can we bring to the space station on the operations and how they get payloads ready for flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there are several aspects to that. One is the fact that we were dealing with a Russian vehicle with payloads carried up on American space shuttle, and operated by both Russians and Americans, so we had to worry about not only transport of the shuttle but operation on the Mir, transport to the Mir, existence on the Mir.\\n\\n The Russians have different safety standards than we do. Some are more stringent, some are less. We had to work out a way to carry and operate each other's equipment, particularly in the payload area, that had some growing pains, and we still don't have it all as smooth as I would like to see it. I'd like to see a safety and certification and acceptance testing program that will take any piece of hardware from any country that's operating on the station and accept it based on the certification that comes along with it for any vehicle. We're not there yet.\\n\\n We're working towards that, and that has to be the goal, or the overhead is just too hard. You can't send it through your own safety and certification program, send it through the next country's that you've got to [unclear], and then the next country that owns the module. I mean, you just can't do that for the long term. So we're working on ways to standardize that. ISS has come a long way in that area, and I think they're pretty close to it, but we learned in the Phase 1 program that the reality and mechanics of doing that are different than the documentation, because you're still dealing with people who have to sign their name to a piece of paper that says, \"Yes, this thing will operate safely and won't hurt anybody in orbit.\" And people take that very seriously, so they're reluctant to take other people's word if they don't know the system and don't know the pedigree of the certificate that comes with a piece of hardware. So we've got to work that out.\\n\\n The other thing is, as I mentioned earlier, the difference between a short-duration and a long-duration mission on operating hardware. A lot of the hardware that we took to the Mir was originally certified for use on the shuttle and had a guaranteed life of a month, let's say. A lot of it the research program accepted and flew on the Mir with that certification, hoping that it would last a long longer than a month, but not necessarily a guarantee. Most things did, of course, but others didn't, so we had to learn what was robust and what wasn't, how important reliability was in the research area, just as it is already in the operational area.\\n\\n So you start to identify what are your critical lab components, for example centrifuge, computers, glove box, things like that, that you have to use on multiple experiments. They've got to work every time, and you need sufficient redundancy and reliability so that you can count on them, because a lot of experiments don't start till halfway through the mission, for instance. And if you've already broken the glove box and this one is relying on the glove box, then you're not even going to start it. So you have to sort out what's really important in your core hardware.\\n\\n We learned on the computers, for instance, that on a shuttle flight we don't see it too often, but there's an anomaly called a single-event upset, where you're hit by a cosmic ray somewhere in the computer's core, and it can wipe out a program or shut down the computer. You have to reboot it or it can totally disable it. It's a random event, and there's a statistical frequency, but because the shuttle flights are so short, we rarely saw it on orbit.\\n\\n However, on the Mir, we had a component called a PCMCIA card that goes in the side of a laptop that turned out to be extremely susceptible to cosmic ray or single-event upsets, and it became a consumable, because this is where our programs were located for booting up the computers for the different experiments. So you put in the appropriate card for the experiment you were doing, then bring the computer online, and it would gather the data and store it. But if the card didn't work right, you didn't get your program up and you couldn't start the experiment. Those cards eventually became consumables, because they might last three days, they might last three months; it was unpredictable. But they weren't hard enough to withstand the cosmic rays. We eventually got hardened versions. They are available; we just didn't know we needed them. But it took a while to overcome that problem and to come up with a better solution. Now, that's going to be, I don't think, a problem on ISS if people remember their lessons learned, but it's something we would have run into eventually if we had not one this on Phase 1.\\n\\n Communications and data transfer, the ability to do that and the way you schedule it, the way you sort it, the way you compress it, that's all been something we've been improving on over time, that they're going to have to work on on ISS in terms of bandwidth and satellite availability for COM and sharing of resources to send things like email down and data files. We all now have a databank on that, how it works and how it doesn't work, and I'm sure the operators will be much better for having experienced it now than learning it the hard way in ISS.\\n\\n Experiment management and the number of experiments you have on board. We learned from the very beginning that, first of all, you want to keep the people busy while they're up there, because psychologically it's not good to be bored if you're stuck in a can. We've learned that from submariners to POWs. You need something to do as humans. So you need some experiments that are kind of long term, like Shannon [Lucid] had her greenhouse where she was growing the wheat, and she tended it every day. She looked forward to that, and that was a good changing experiment that she could report on and experience and participate in. John Blaha had his bioreactor which required daily attention.\\n\\n Each flight has had something like that, each mission. So you need a mix of those kind of experiments with the little short bursts of high activity where you might just go gather data for a few days or do some work on an experiment and then put it away and be done with it. So you get both the long-term continuity and variety of starting and stopping new experiments, and you need a good mix of those on an increment to keep it interesting and to help keep the crew productive, because that's a part of the whole formula that you have to factor in.\\n\\n You also need standby experiments, because if you've got one of these shorter ones that you take out of the box and you start it up or it doesn't start or it doesn't work the way it was expected to, and you're just going to have to fold it up and put it away, you need something. Let's say you were planning on working on that for three weeks. You need something to fill that time. So we need backup experiments on board. We call them below the line. If they don't get done, no loss, but if they do get done, it's a bonus. If something breaks and they fill in for it, then you've still got a good full mission.\\n\\n So our way of scorekeeping had to change. What's 100 percent accomplishment, 100 percent success on a six-month increment? You can't really say that before the flight, what 100 percent is going to be. You kind of have to go back afterwards and say, \"This was an A+ flight,\" or, \"We lost everything on this one.\" And a lot of it has to do with did you use the crew members' time efficiently and effectively. That's something you really can't say until after the mission's over.\\n\\n But you have to have the ability to be flexible, to respond, and to fix things while they're on orbit. We found that some of the experiments would initially not go so well, but then if a little care and feeding on orbit or some time spent by the people on the ground analyzing it and evaluating the data, you'd come back to it later and start it over again with a different approach, reprogram the computer, whatever it took, and be responsive to it and get a lot more out of it than you would have on a shuttle flight, for instance, where you say, \"It's not going to work. Close it up. Take it home.\"\\n\\n We need to make sure that our people are trained. Most of them kind of have this bent anyway, but they need to be trained to fix things, to be inquisitive and innovative about repair jobs, and also be able to recognize when something needs repair. I've told folks that we probably ought to just send our people off to shop class for a couple of weeks and then put them in a diesel submarine for a couple of weeks under the ocean and make them keep that thing running, and then they'll be pretty well prepared for station. It'll seem easy then.\\n\\n It's clear people need to have some ability to conduct in-flight maintenance. For all the shuttle astronauts who are jealous of the IFM specialists on the crew because they got to play with the tools, now it's a chance for everybody to be familiar with the tools and to conduct repair. It's not just on the payloads, of course, but it's also on the systems, because sometimes things break in a way you don't expect and you don't have the cookbook procedure or the ready spare part to get it going again. So I think that kind of experience for our people and that kind of attitude, that they're Mr. and Ms. Fix-It while they're up there, is important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do they need to be as mechanical as Jerry Ross in rebuilding his car in his garage or somewhere in between?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It can be somewhere in between, but somebody like Jerry would be ideal. [C. Michael] Mike Foale, for instance, was really good mechanically, plus on the computer, he could reprogram the computers when they needed to be fixed. So he was very handy to have up there. Dave Wolf is not only a medical doctor, but a mechanical engineer out of Purdue [University], and an inventor, so he was very good at working on things and keeping them running. So folks like that, I think, are going to be very valuable on ISS, and we need to identify who they are and make sure we have a mix of them. You don't want one crew with all that kind of people fighting over the toolbox, and another crew with nobody who even knows what a wrench is. Nobody's that bad. But, you know, doesn't have an inclination to do that kind of work and get their hands dirty. You need a mix on each crew, and that will kind of sort itself out, but we, as management, need to look at that carefully, too. [William Shephard] Shep, by the way, is going to be ideal. Shep rebuilds his house every couple of months, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did the payload community respond after we had the depressurization of the module and you had to get new experiments up there for that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They responded very well. Obviously they had lost a lot and there was a lot of disappointment, but they turned to right away and came up with a new plan, both to capitalize on what was still available. Most of their stuff was in the Spektr when they shut it down, plus Mike's personal stuff. But they came up with a plan that got the most out of what they had remaining. They scrambled and put together some spare parts and some backup experiment and put it on the next Progress that went up, so they were able to regain some of the experiments. Then, of course, they had to replan the next couple of increments because of the loss of Spektr, and they had to come up with a new plan for them, too, and put either replacement experiments on the shuttle or plan a whole new program. They did both, and I thought they were very responsive to the situation, which is typical of people here at NASA.\\n\\n I mean, we joke about it sometimes. We need a small emergency every now and then to keep our people going because they deal better with crisis management than planning. That's not totally true, but people get really excited when they've got anything from the Apollo 13-type scenario to a computer crisis on orbit and you've got to reprogram it. That's what people really like doing here, responding to a problem and solving it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When we look at the physical aspects of payloads, we're looking nowadays, in the shuttle and the Mir program, we're looking at locker-size-type payloads. Originally station was looking at rack-size payloads, and they've had to change their mind-set to go to the drawer or locker-type payloads. Do you think that's a good adjustment? How are we going to do glove boxes and furnaces, the larger ones?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think you'll see a mix of both. I think the mid-deck size or locker size is a real good way to go if you can, because they are more easily interchanged, more easily worked on. You don't have as much invested in them if they go bad, and you can refly them later. It does limit what you can do in some cases, though I've found people are extremely innovative about it. Everybody comes in and says, \"I want a whole rack to do this,\" and you say, \"You only have one or two lockers.\" \"Okay, I'll fit it into there.\" They figure out ways. And with miniaturization nowadays and automation, it's pretty incredible what we can accomplish.\\n\\n I think there will be a place for some rack-size either facilities or experiments, because eventually I think we'll evolve to fairly big science up there, but I don't' think we should be overly ambitious at the beginning. I think we should be patient and give the station a chance to mature and operators a chance to mature and the procedures a chance to mature so that once we do invest in really big science and large racks, whatever, then we've got everything else pretty well in hand.\\n\\n That's another thing we've learned in Phase 1, is that the aggressive, energetic, \"can do\" spirit of going after a shuttle flight and getting everything done right on schedule and getting it accomplished per the book is great for shuttle operations, for airplane-type operations. But one thing that aviators who are in the Navy learn the hard way, when they first go to sea on a carrier, is it takes a lot of patience to operate a ship. We're used to yanking an airplane around the sky, and if you're going to maneuver a ship around, you've got to be very patient. You put in the ten degrees of rudder, then nothing happens, so you wait a little while. That's kind of the same way in a station program. You put in ten degrees of rudder, in program direction nothing happens, and then you wait a little while, then it will start slowly changing.\\n\\n Same thing is true on an emergency, even. There are a few things in a station environment that you've got to immediately jump to and do something about real quickly. Those few things are readily identified, everybody knows what they are, and they're trained to take care of them, like a fire or depressurization. Almost everything else, you go, \"Darn. It broke,\" and as long as you're still breathing and you've still got a way to escape, then there's really no need to panic or to get excited about it. You just say, \"Okay, ground. This broke. What do you want to do? Do you want to work on this or you want to leave it for now and come back to it in a few days?\"\\n\\n And so we've had to learn a more patient way of operating in space and on the ground than we're used to on the shuttle, because the shuttle flight is very limited, and when something breaks on a shuttle flight, I mean, MCC brings in the cavalry and you work on it really aggressively. And that's the way we train in our sims, so people are used to doing that, because you have got to be able to land before you run out of consumables, and you've got to land in the same vehicle that's got the problem. Not true on station. You're not going to land in the same vehicle. You're not going to ever bring it back, at least not with people in it, and your life is extremely long. We carry at least thirty days of consumables on the Mir. ISS is planning to have ninety days of consumables, so you've got at least that long to respond to any non-life-threatening problem. And it's hard for some folks to slow down to that pace.\\n\\n I remember in my early flight training they taught us that sometimes the best thing to do is sit on your hands, get your hands off the stick, don't do anything, because the airplane will take care of itself, unless you know exactly what you're doing. Sometimes the best thing in station operations is just to sit on your hands and make sure you understand the situation thoroughly before you do something that's irreversible, because you can make it worse real easily by overreacting or acting too hastily." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You talked about the different planning templates, the shuttle planning everything down to the hour and every move that you make, compared to the Mir, which is very relaxed, and you might say, okay, this is what you're going to do today. Do you think international space station is going to end up somewhere in the middle there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it will tend more towards the more relaxed. Mir is not quite as relaxed as you may have described. Particularly the Russian crew is given a fairly strenuous schedule each day, and they tend to work mostly to that schedule with a lot of other stuff thrown in. So it's pretty long and hard days for the folks up there.\\n\\n We've had a lot of input from people who have flown, that they'd like to have more flexibility to do the planning themselves, and if we went with the easy CAP concept on the shuttle, the CAP was a correctivity plan, and that plans you out day by day. We eventually evolved to the point where you had a small section that was called easy CAP, that said you don't have to do this per any schedule; just get it done sometime today. But it was usually a few things like clean some filters or something like that.\\n\\n I think that a lot of the people who've flown Mir would like to see almost the entire schedule be that flexible, in that you say, \"Okay, we want you to accomplish this experiment, this experiment, this repair. Hit this milestone,\" whatever. \"And tell us you've done it.\" And that would be sort of the extreme but ideal situation from a crew member's perspective.\\n\\n Now, the reality is you've got people on the ground who are standing by to support you, to communicate with you when you're doing an experiment, to back you up, so you have to coordinate all that, too. So you need at least a block of time in which you know you're going to be operating that.\\n\\n There may be other constraints, such as power usage, thermal constraints, things like that, that have to fit in, so you can't be totally flexible. You've got to share resources and apportion resources in a logical way, particularly when they're limited. But there's certainly going to be a different mode of operating than we've been used to on the shuttle, and people are going to have to manage their own time to a certain extent, which some people like and some people hate.\\n\\n So we're going to learn as we go, but we've already learned a lot on Mir. We agree with a lot of the ways the Russians do business; we disagree with some of them. So we're going to end up someplace in the middle between the two systems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What difficulties were experienced in integrating the American and the Russian space programs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought we only had an hour. (laughter)" + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Top five." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were lots of difficulties. Some were major, some were minor. I think they add to the measure of success of the program. They're not an indication of failures, necessarily; they're an indication of the difference approaches we all took to both space flight and culture and growing up.\\n\\n Probably the most difficult initial challenge was the language and being able to communicate clearly. Some of it was easy because there are a lot of technical terms that the roots are essentially the same in both languages, particularly the space program. But that could also be confusing because something that you think sounds like a word you're used to using might have the same root but have a totally different meaning in Russian. I'm trying to think of an example of that, and I will before we finish all the interviews. But that happened not infrequently.\\n\\n For instance, the word for \"efficiency\" in Russian is \"efectivny,\" and there's a difference between \"efficiency\" and \"effectiveness.\" So that sometimes, I was afraid, was either misunderstood by the interpreters or by the people on both sides of the table, and occasionally caused a little confusion in minor ways. There were others." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I remember one when we were in station was \"command and control,\" how we viewed command and control was completely different from how they viewed command and control." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And, of course, communication difficulties branch out and ripple out into lots of other areas. Other difficulties, of course, were in hardware area, just integrating our hardware, though, again, that's an area where people can come in and solve concrete problems and reach a solution that's a lot easier to achieve than something more abstract such as command and control or operational philosophy. Hardware was an area where I think we had a lot of successes. There were a lot of challenges, still are, particularly when it comes to safety certification and structural analysis, things like that. But we've reached a point that we can at least operate on common ground in most of those areas.\\n\\n An early challenge, of course, was building the docking module and making it compatible with both the shuttle and the Mir. That particular piece of hardware and that flight, I think, are frequently overlooked in their significance, because there was no crew exchange, not that much cargo was carried up other than the docking module, but that really was the first station assembly flight and the first time that we had the docking on 71, which was the Russian mechanism on the shuttle, which was a challenge itself. But the docking module was a big piece of hardware that could end up on either one. There were a lot of contingencies associated with it. It had to be manipulated by the arm and it all had to go very well, and you had to dock with this thing sticking out the payload bay. So to me that was a good example of overcoming a lot of the hardware and operational differences between the two countries.\\n\\n Other difficulties were just getting our people into Russia and getting them out occasionally. The Russian Government is not and I hesitate to say this is not as integrated as ours is, and I'm not trying to use our government as a good example necessarily, but they're even worse in terms of the different departments talking to each other, the different ministries. Just because we had an agreement at the governmental level with the Russian Space Agency that we would be able to send people and hardware in and out freely didn't mean the foreign ministry agreed with that or the Customs agents agreed with that. We still had to overcome those obstacles.\\n\\n The Russian port of entry is not user-friendly yet. It's getting a little better, but it's still very difficult. Long lines, a lot of bureaucracy. I mean, you've got to go through Customs going out of Russia, not just going in, unlike the U.S. So it was somewhat of a shock to a lot of our people, how difficult it was to get in and out of the country. Of course, it's a lot easier than it was in the Communist days, and for people who went earlier in the program, it's a lot easier now than it was.\\n\\n Also, living over there was extremely difficult for a lot of people. Some people were pretty adventurous and saw it as the equivalent of a camping trip and just kind of rolled with the punches, and whatever came was fine. Other people who were more used to our typical American style of life had some difficulty with the Russian apartment living versus living in houses around here. The lack of common goods and services, particularly in the early years, there were a lot of shortages of things that we took for granted. Heat, for instance, was centrally controlled wherever you lived, and you didn't control either the temperature or the fact that it was on and off. The government decided when the heat was going to come on in the fall, so you were kind of at the mercy of somebody else.\\n\\n That lack of control, personal freedom and control, was difficult for some folks to deal with initially. We went through a lot of culture shock, I believe, in the early months and years. And it's still difficult for people, because housing is expensive. There seems to be a shortage of what we would consider adequate housing. And getting around Moscow is still somewhat difficult until you learn the system. It's not like here where you can just go jump in your car and drive down to the convenience store and pick up a bottle of milk. It's more of an ordeal to do something like that, though, again, that's getting better, too. But that was a real difficult early challenge.\\n\\n There were other challenges that were not because of the fact that we were dealing with Russia, but just because we were doing something new that we had not done in a long time and NASA had never done, folks in the military were used to deployments and being away from family, and the difficulty of having to move things back and forth overseas and the long trips, but people in NASA had not done much of that except in the early days when they were sending people to the tracking stations all around the world. Even that was just for the missions, primarily, except for the people who set them up.\\n\\n So we had a lot of people who thought they were going to spend their whole lives in Houston and were comfortable here, who all of a sudden had to either go spend three to six months in Russia away from their families or move their families over there and figure out how to do all that. We, back here, had to figure out how better to support people who were traveling frequently or who were deployed overseas. It took a while to do that. It was clear to some of us what needed to be done, but until you get the whole institution to buy into it, you're really pushing a rope to try to get the responsiveness you need when people are deployed overseas.\\n\\n I think some of the early stories of this program will focus on those kind of difficulties, and when people tell anecdotes, I think that's what you'll hear about, is the difficult adjustment to that kind of life. It's hard, when you're overseas and things are not going well back here, like the car breaks down or the washer and dryer break, or whatever. I made twenty trips to Russia, and every appliance in my house is new, because they all knew when I lifted off from Intercontinental, and broke as soon as I was airborne. I mean, the car would die. We have a new refrigerator, new washer, dryer, hot water heater, air-conditioner, you name it. If I went to Russia, something broke. And I don't think it was arranged." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Some appliance dealer's real happy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. But it happened to everybody. It's hard to plan for these kind of trips and have everything in order if you're not in a career path that's like the military where you are trained and supported in making sure everything's in order. I mean, simple things like power of attorney for the family, and making sure the bank accounts are correct, and all that stuff. Even if you're just gone for three weeks, you've still got to think about those things.\\n\\n The core institutions here, the organizations like FCOD and MOD and engineering, who were sending people overseas, had never had to deal with that with their people before. Programs generally work with the technical side of things and the budget side, and the people are handled by the institutions. Phase 1 was a little bit unique, because since nobody had any infrastructure of understanding of a lot of what we were doing, we ended up kind of doing it all, and with an extremely small staff. I think there's thirteen civil servants on the staff. At that time the shuttle had about 150. They're down less than 100 now. The station has over 300. So we felt kind of caught in the middle, and being asked to do a lot with a little, but people turned to and got it done. We had some contractors helping.\\n\\n But, still, we were expected to take care of the personnel side of things because we were unique and it was Phase 1 related. A lot of things fell to the Phase 1 office that I hope will be done better by the institutions in the future. That's one of my goals, is to try to migrate functions to the proper places around the center and around the agency. And we're working on that now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you ever set up any kind of ombudsman-type program similar to what the military has?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, by coincidence, my wife is trying to set that up. She's been very active on the flight crew side, trying to help them with that. I want to evolve that into all the institutions. That's exactly what we need, is an ombudsman-type program. It's an evolving thing. It's hard to get people into that mode if they don't know what it is, but we'll get there. I want to see it done for all organizations and not just the flight crew who are training and on orbit, but for the people who are supporting ground operations in Moscow, who are doing engineering activities, Star City training, whatever." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned different aspects of the crew. Can you talk a little bit about crew selection on the shuttle-Mir, on the station? Should it be a committee that's involved? What parameters do they use?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There is a bilateral committee now for station that works the Russian and American crew selection. I'm not sure how sophisticated they are yet on their ability to select crews and to match them up, because we're still a little bit limited in who's available and who's qualified. Soyuz is limited a little bit because of size. There are other factors that are constraining us.\\n\\n In shuttle-Mir, I'd say we were not sophisticated at all. We took whoever was volunteering, and FCOD chose the ones they thought would do the best in that environment, and then they put them in a list and we flew them in order. We had to make some changes because of early Soyuz limitations. We sent one guy over who was, it turns out, too tall. They thought they could make modifications and they couldn't. Then we sent one person over who was too short for a while until they finally agreed to make some modifications, but then she ended up not flying anyway because of EVA suit limitations. So that's another lesson learned that we experienced, that I think will be very valuable if it ever happens in ISS, changing out a crew member and how to make that happen. Again, that was done very well by everybody.\\n\\n But as far as selection goes, I think we need, at the very initial selection of people under the astronaut office and into the critical flight controller, flight director positions, we need to think carefully about the type of people we're getting and how they would adapt to this type of operation versus the shuttle operation. And there are ways to do that.\\n\\n You don't want to be too restrictive, because you want to get really good people into those positions, but once you've selected them, you need to think about what do we do to support them better, to make sure that they are psychologically, mentally, emotionally prepared, and their families are prepared, to deal with what's coming. Those are the kind of tools that we're trying to identify and ways to make it easier. You can't just hand somebody a piece of paper and say, \"Okay, you're assigned to this flight. Go off and do it and make it happen, and ask for whatever you need.\" It's not that simple. It's a lot more complicated, a lot more intrusive, has a longer-term effect on you than a shuttle flight. It's easy to name a shuttle crew and tell the commander, \"Put the crew together however you want. Make them all work. Feed back to the training system what you need, whether it's going well or not, and put together a new mission.\" And a good commander will do that, and the system responds to that. Of course, the same thing goes for flight control teams for the shuttle.\\n\\n But for long-duration flight, first of all, once we launch that first increment, the mission has begun and it will not end until we bring that ISS down. It will be a continuous mission. It's a different way of looking at things than we have in the past, a different level of responsibility for people, different anxieties, different needs. Also, with the shuttle flight there's a finite end and you know that as it ramps up and the training gets hard, certainly you're going to go fly, it's going to be a lot of fun, a lot of work, but a lot of fun, and at the end of it, it'll be over and you can go off and do your post flight and get ready for your next mission.\\n\\n Station, it's kind of like it just lasts forever. And even after you've flown, the physical effects of it will last a long time. There will probably be emotional, psychological effects that may or may not last, depending on how you deal with the isolation and the family separation. There will be experiments that will want to continue gathering data on you for long periods of time. So the mission is not just the four to six months you're on orbit; it's years. That's a totally different way of looking at things, so we have to select people and train people who can do this. It's going to be a challenge. Like I said, it's going to be harder than people think and it's going to be harder than Phase 1.\\n\\n The Russians already had a station and a system in place to take care of all this, and we sometimes fit poorly, but we fit. And they helped guide us on occasion or pushed us on occasion, but they already had a system going. ISS is going to be different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were the safety and operational risks involved in the program, and how did the benefits outweigh the risks?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There are always risks in space flight, and that's something that we all accept in this business. You incur different risks on the Mir than you did on shuttle. A lot of them I don't think we really understood at the very beginning of the program. We understand them pretty well now. The risks are acceptable based on what we're accomplishing in benefits to the program and the fact that you always have a Soyuz as a way home, and the Soyuz we see as very reliable and always has been.\\n\\n Each Soyuz is no more than six months old while it's up there, even though people talk about how old the Mir is. Age was a factor that I think people looked at early on, but did not see as a major risk in the base block. Two of the modules are less than three years old, which is not very old by station standards. So you've got a mix up there.\\n\\n But we learned as we went and as we were given more insight into the Russian hardware and the way they operate, some of the good and the bad. They had some design flaws in there that they will not repeat and we will not repeat on ISS, such as an outward-opening airlock hatch or bimetal contact on thermal control loops, and some of the integrated systems, things like that. It was an early design, and you learn as you go.\\n\\n I think they had anticipated the Mir lasting for ten years or more, but there was a period of time when they had very little infrastructure support to make sure that that happened in a good way, so they were kind of operating on a shoe string for a while, which affected their ability to respond to problems like ethylene alcohol leaks in the depressurization. They've recovered very well. The Mir is extremely capable right now, probably in better shape than it's ever been, more volume, more power, more thermal capability, so it's operating very well. But it is old and it is taking a lot of maintenance.\\n\\n Initially the agreement was we would assure the safety of any cosmonauts on the shuttle and they would accept that, and they would ensure the safety of any astronauts on the Mir or the Soyuz and we would accept that. We did that pretty much on faith. They knew what they were doing, we knew what we were doing, and we didn't require a lot of justification or documentation of risk factors or redundancy or things like that. We tried to get some understanding of it and they did of us, too, and they asked some good questions, like, \"Why don't you wear stiffer boots if you have to bail out? Won't the crew break their ankle if they come down on land?\" That's a good question and we didn't have a good answer for it.\\n\\n There are other things on the Mir side that we had questions about, and we evolved into more of a partnership, more of an integrated working relationship than what we initially had, which was kind of, \"You have your part and we have our part, and you'll trust us and vice versa.\"\\n\\n Particularly when they had the fire, the ethylene alcohol leaks and the depressurization, we started looking more closely at why did these things happen. What were the risks if they reoccurred, and how could they be handled safely? And we did a lot of reviews both internally and jointly with the Russians. I believe we have a good understanding of what the risks are based on that and the debriefs of the crew members. In general, the crew members have said that the things they bring up are mainly comfort items, which affects them psychologically, which, of course, the ability to operate, and they're not minor, but still they're not life-threatening necessarily or mission-success-threatening, though that could be a factor.\\n\\n The structure appears to be sound based on all our people who have been up there and looked at it. In fact, our analysis shows that it could withstand another Progress collision and still be okay. Not that we would want to test that. But a pretty robust piece of hardware.\\n\\n The Soyuz is always available and in an acceptable amount of time. It's hard to envision anything happening so fast, so catastrophically, that you couldn't get to the Soyuz in time to get away unless it were almost an overwhelmingly catastrophic situation, which the Soyuz isn't going to do you any good in anyway, like a mile-wide meteor hitting you, something like that.\\n\\n So most of our people up there have felt very comfortable that they could get home if necessary. They may not able to save the station, but they could get home, and they could do this. They have great confidence in the Soyuz, and our experts all feel the same way and I feel the same way.\\n\\n So the questions that were asked about the risks were good. I didn't appreciate the attitude of some of the people towards the space flight that we had to put up with, but this is America and everybody has a right to their own opinion and free speech. But that's part of the job and part of the learning experience in justifying what we do, and I think we should justify it and we should be able to justify it from both a risk standpoint and a benefit standpoint.\\n\\n The benefits are immense, and I've tried to cover some of those in our discussion. The benefit of evaluating the risks and being able to do that is a big one. The benefit of figuring out a way to keep the station going in adversity is something that I hope we are learning. It was very discouraging to me when there seemed to be so many people in the media and Congress who just wanted to walk away from everything when it got tough. That's certainly an easy way out and you certainly guarantee that nobody's going to die in a plane crash if they don't fly, but you don't accomplish much by staying on the ground if you want to accomplish things in space. This was an excellent way for us to learn from people who've been doing it a long time. It was a satisfactory, if not pristine, vehicle to be in, and we were able to conduct operations and conduct science, and we could do it safely.\\n\\n The benefits, again, were often unexpected and it was very hard to say, \"If we do this, this, and this, you're going to see this, this, and this benefit.\" You can say, \"We're going to accomplish this and this if nothing breaks and things go well,\" but the benefit is TBD in many cases. Plus when things happen that you can't plan, such as depressurization, and you learn from that, what price do you put on that? We're far better off in ISS and operationally having experienced the fire and the collision and the depressurization than we would have been otherwise, but you can't put a price tag on that because you can't plan it.\\n\\n It's like most of the improvements to aircraft travel nowadays due to accidents that occur to somebody. Particularly in the safety area, in survivability and landing capability, all that is increased because somebody had a problem, and probably because somebody died. If you don't learn from those things, then you're not paying attention, and that's what we do in this business, we pay attention to what happened. If it was a close call, we identify it as a close call, and probably sometimes you just go, \"Whew, that was a close call.\" But you ought to go in there and dig and figure out why that happened and how you're going to keep it from happening in the future.\\n\\n If you look at the history of the shuttle program, even before Challenger we had an incredible number of close calls, what I would consider close calls. Some people might say we were really lucky that some of these didn't turn into disasters earlier. I think the reason they didn't turn into disasters is for two reasons: one, we had an excellent design, with sufficient redundancy, and redundancy worked; and we had really good people who could respond to the unexpected and react accordingly, appropriately. For instance, the engine shut down on STS-51F, I believe it was, and that could have been a [unclear] very easily. And who knows how that would have turned out. But what's her name?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Jenny Stines?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Jenny saw what was happening with the sensors and took the appropriate action and saved the vehicle. You couldn't have planned for that, but that was a close call. It could have been a disaster. But should we have stopped flying because that occurred and we hadn't foreseen it? Did anybody vote for that then? No, I don't think so. But this is part of space flight, and that's the rationale for continuing. As long as you know what happened and you know how you're going to do your best to prevent it in the future, and if it reoccurs, how you're going to react, then you're doing the appropriate things. If you stick your head in the sand and say, \"Boy, that was a close call. Hope it never happens again,\" then we're not doing our job, not being very professional.\\n\\n It's hard for people to accept that things are going to go wrong in space. I really worry that if something doesn't fit on ISS and we have to bring it back, or if the crew's up there for a while and something breaks that we didn't foresee, didn't work right, there's going to be too many people who are too vocal, just throwing their hands up and saying, \"It's not worth the effort. It's too hard.\" And they won't be in NASA or in our contractor team, I don't think, but they'll be out there, and some of them have a lot of noise to make to get attention. I just don't think that's a good example to set to our people or our children, to say that if things get tough, we walk away from it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You have to learn from your failures." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right. And I could go into a long philosophical discussion about why society is the way it is, because too many people walk away from their problems rather than dealing with them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Maybe another tape and another interview." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Maybe so. Next life. But I think that's, again, a benefit of Phase 1, is relearning what types of problems we can deal with, and how to deal with them, and the fact that they are going to occur, and that you have to persevere. It is worth it. We continue to learn new things. We are not going to go back to the moon or Mars if we don't build a station successfully and operate it successfully, not in our generation or the next one even. This is something we need to do to get back out into space.\\n\\n The Apollo program was kind of like the Scandinavians coming to North America early on and then getting a little bit out of it and not really capitalizing on it until other Europeans came later and began to settle it. There was, what, 200 years in between those two events? It's already been a generation since we went to the moon, or more. The last landing on the moon was twenty-five years ago, twenty-six now, almost. It's incredible, to look at it from our time span, that we haven't done more, but looking back on it in history, it will probably seem pretty normal, because once we go again, we'll be there to stay. Mir and ISS are going to be the stepping stones that will enable us to do that, because people have been in space to stay on those vehicles, not just to go for short trips. It's getting there to stay that's important. If you do research while you're there, then you're maximizing your effectiveness, and you should be doing research, but the main thing is to get there and stay there. Who knows what the benefits will be. Look how hard it was to live in this country when people first arrived from Europe and other places. It was tough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Space is a frontier. You've just got to keep reminding people of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right. And I think too many people believe too much of what they see on TV, that it's like studio space, and it's a great place to float around in. In fact, we make it look too easy. But I wouldn't have it any other way. When the drama enters, people occasionally realize there are real lives at stake and maybe it's not worth it, but it is. And it's not a piece of cake; it's very, very hard to fly in space." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think that the Russians would have been so willing to change if they hadn't had the international exposure when these incidents happened the fire and depressurization?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That certainly was, I think, an important factor, the fact that people now are looking at them through an open window rather than a closed door. They were not able to control the amount of information that went out or the types of information that went out. That was a new environment for them, particularly when things were going poorly and they were under a lot of scrutiny. I think that they learned a lot about how the rest of the world operates and how they're going to need to operate in the future through these whole experiences. So I think it was a growth experience for them and a shift in their mind-set on how to deal with these kind of problems.\\n\\n We also spent a lot of time with them on saying, \"This is the way we deal with a problem like this.\" They have a similar system of investigation and evaluation; it's just not as open, nor is the structure the same way ours is. We now realize we need a common way of doing this, because when an event occurs on ISS not if but when an event occurs on ISS, we're going to need to jointly evaluate it with all the partners that are involved in it, so that we reach a conclusion and solution that's satisfactory to everybody concerned, and that there's enough rigor in it and discipline and depth that you know you've got the right answer and that you're going to be able to fix it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We talked a lot about operations. We haven't really touched on training and engineering. What was the Russia philosophy for training and engineering?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You could spend a long time on both those subjects. Their training philosophy is more oral than ours. We tend to now work with a lot of printed material, computer-aided education. I started grade school in the fifties, and they seem to have a similar philosophy to what I was exposed to when I first started in education a lot of lectures, a lot of memorization, a lot of tests. So they'll have a lecturer talk to you about the systems and they show you a few pictures and a mockup of some sort. Then you have an oral test of what you've learned, and practical test, but a lot of it's done verbally rather than written. Our people were frustrated because there wasn't enough reading material to study beforehand. There was some, but most of what you got, you had to get out of the lectures.\\n\\n So they have a different approach to education than we do, and a lot of it's grounded in their own educational system. You tend to repeat what you learn, the way you learned as you came through grade school, high school, and college. So the cultural differences really come out in a situation like that.\\n\\n The impression of a lot of our people, particularly initially, was that it was not very efficient, that we could come in here, clean house, and do all this in a couple of days and everybody would be thoroughly trained. The Russians, for their own reasons, and I think a lot of it based on practical experience, didn't agree with that, still don't agree with that. They still believe that you need a certain amount of this type of training to be really ready to do what we're asking you to do.\\n\\n I saw a note just recently from Dave Wolf, who, in retrospect, says, \"Maybe that was the right way to do it. It made me learn the systems in a different way than I would have otherwise. It made me think about them rather than just read about them, and it made me exercise the language and the jargon.\" Because you're not dealing just with the Russian language versus the English language; it's like when you first come to NASA. I mean, how many of us understood the first lecture we sat through at NASA? I mean, it was like a totally new language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A different set of acronyms." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely. And Russian space language is different than Russian. So anybody coming into that kind of a program has got to learn the glossary of the language. It's like going to med school. Those men and women spend hours and hours memorizing all the glossary at med school, and it's kind of the same thing in the space program. You can't afford to have the wrong term in use when a life is in your hands.\\n\\n I could go on a long time about the training and stuff. It would probably be better to talk to folks who went through it themselves, to get the meat of that. Some things were very similar. They do survival training like we do, for kind of the same reasons. I think that they put different stresses on their people who are in training to evaluate their readiness to fly and to prepare them for difficult situations, differently than we do. It's not always obvious to us that that's what they're doing. We think, \"Why in the world do you want to do this pressure chamber test? I know how to get through this. It's not a big deal.\" My theory is that there was something else in the original plan as to why they do that. Some of the Russians who are executing may not even remember why, because they've been doing it for thirty years, but I think it was a psychological stress on folks to do things in this particular way. And that's not all bad when you're getting ready for a difficult mission like this.\\n\\n Americans are always saying, \"Well, why do I have to do it that way? You've got to tie this to some training objectives that's going to tie to some mission objective. I don't want to waste my time with all this other abstract stuff.\" So it's difficult for people to be patient with that.\\n\\n I had a little bit of experience with that when I was at the Naval Academy, because a lot of the stuff they did to us was pure crap, in our opinion, when we first started out. It seemed so trivial. Why memorize all this stuff and regurgitate it all the time? Until I realized, when you're in combat, you don't have time to read anything; you've got to have it all memorized and you've got to know what you're doing and you've got to know what it means, and you've got to be able to respond instantly when somebody asks you a question or tells you to do something. And that's more the Russian training philosophy.\\n\\n So it may seem trivial, but a lot of these things are steeped in what seems to be tradition, but actually experience, that this is the kind of person and the kind of performance that you want to get the job done best. When you start diluting that too much or lopping things off without some thought as to why they were there in the first place, you might lop off an appendage that keeps bleeding and you can't stop it. But you may not notice it for a while. So we have to be very careful about judging too harshly what somebody else has been doing for a long period of time, and what seems like either ridiculous traditions or cultural isolation may really have valid rationale behind it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How will the operational experience from the shuttle-Mir program benefit the international space program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, in dozens of ways.\\n\\n Basic engineering, of course, is engineering and analysis and structure and electrical engineering is pretty much the same on both sides. The educational systems are excellent on both sides. But once you get operational or out in the field, we have different ways of doing our engineering, different ways of developing hardware, different ways of testing it and analyzing it. We, of course, have gone into more of a computer-oriented system of engineering where we do a lot of analysis, a lot of studies. A lot of our work is done on paper, where the Russians are still and with good reasons, I think in the mode of doing more testing than analysis. They do plenty of analysis and they have a pretty good predictability on their testing, but they will test a piece of hardware to ensure that it will operate in the envelope that they want it to operate in. So they're not surprised, or rarely surprised.\\n\\n For instance, before they launch any module to space, they repressurize it in a vacuum chamber down at M____, right before launch, to make sure everything is good after they've done all the modifications and loading of it and everything. We were not planning on doing that. I think we will now, on ISS. But, for example, we don't put the shuttle in a vacuum chamber before every flight, and a lot of the components. So it's a different approach, and I think combining the two approaches is going to benefit all of us, and people are learning what's best from both sides, and using each other's tools. So I think we're evolving into a better way of doing business.\\n\\n We tended to have a lot more computers, a lot more sophistication in that area than they did. A good example is, early on when I'd go to a review over there if you go to a review here, you see a lot of viewgraphs and people cranking through their presentation. I don't know if you remember in grade school, we had a lot of roll-up charts all around the classroom, and when you'd study some part of the world, the teacher would pull down this roll-up chart and you'd look at it. When I was in college, any presentations you made, you generally made these big huge charts on either butcher paper or on a roll-up thing, and that's how you showed your graphs and your diagrams and all. And they still do that. That's still the way they present information, on big roll-up charts.\\n\\n So, somebody works very hard in draftsmanship and mechanical drawing and they put out really good charts to give you a lot of information, but they're not the computer-generated ones and they're not viewgraphs, though they're starting to evolve into that. But when we first got there, there were almost no viewgraphs or computers at the individual level. Occasionally a company would own a few, but it was not a common piece of hardware or way of presenting information. That makes it seem more strange to us as we go back and forth to each other's country, because you're not used to seeing things you're used to, in a format you're used to.\\n\\n But from a basic engineering standpoint, we found the folks on both sides to be very cooperative, to work together very well, to communicate very well, and to accomplish great things. The orbital docking system led by Dave Hamilton and his group was a great example of two groups getting together and resolving their differences early on and coming up with a piece of hardware that worked. It's worked extremely well. The docking module itself, with Don Noah and that group, is also very good. So at the engineering level, the folks like working together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think in some of the early interviews, when the Russians agreed to build the docking module, they said they could do it in a remarkable amount of time, and NASA said, \"You can't do it that quick in Russia.\" \"Sure we can.\" It kind of shocked them. I thought that was interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have rarely found them to be wrong on estimates like that. Their only unknown nowadays seems to be money and people resources, which is tied to money. The docking module they finished on time, on cost. FTB was finished on time, on cost. We paid for it. Service module they don't have the money. It's behind. Spektr and Priroda, once they figured out the funding situation, they didn't launch them when we told them we wanted them launched, but they ended up launching them when they said they were going to launch them, based on the way the money and everything flowed in.\\n\\n They knew how their system worked and they knew what they were doing, and they make good estimates. We didn't always believe them, because we didn't want to believe them. We wanted Spektr up there in February. They said, \"It's not going to go till May. Okay. If you want to say February, say February, but it's not going till May.\" It went at the end of May. And same thing for Priroda. They were very realistic about what they could do, based on the resources they had.\\n\\n Now, you could argue all day about the prioritization of resources and whether more money should have come to this or that, but once they were given their allotment by the government, they said, \"This is the way it's going to be. If you can change something, have at it.\"\\n\\n Operational things we've learned from Mir? In addition to the top-level ones I mentioned already, I think we've learned you can go into a lot more detail about communication priority and communication capability. The Russians actually are being fairly innovative in looking at new ways of improving communications. They know that's a limitation on the Mir. In fact, they're working with space [unclear] on an INOCET [phonetic] type system that would provide basically cell phone and fax capability from orbit, which we don't really we have it in a different form.\\n\\n Being able to apportion the communications capability, to plan them, you know, a lot of us have heard the story that on Skylab the crew got so irritated with the ground, they just shut off communications for a while, and that's, I think, because they had limited com capability and you had to plan it around AOS at the ground sites. There was no TDRS in those days. You couldn't just call when you wanted to talk to somebody. So you'd come AOS and I see this on the Russia side you'd come AOS, you've a whole bunch of stuff you've got to tell the crew, you've been saving up. They've got a whole bunch of stuff they want to tell you, or maybe they don't want to talk to you at all. But to be in sync both data-wise and emotionally is really, really difficult. It's like being gone on a long trip. You come back in the house, the kids and the spouse have all this stuff they've been saving up to tell you. You're tired, you've got stuff you've been wanting to tell them or not tell them, and you just want to relax. To get that in sync every single time you walk in the door, even from just a day at work, is extremely difficult.\\n\\n And it's the same problem when you're dealing with limited com, because if you come up on the com pass and say, \"Okay, we're here, blah, blah, blah,\" you start talking about everything, and they say, \"Wait a minute. This broke while you weren't looking. So start over.\" Or the crew will start telling you something and the ground will say, \"Wait. We've got a solution for you. We've been working on it.\" It's really a telephone game. The Russians call it a telephone game. So you've got to be careful about that.\\n\\n Some of our ops leads who did most of the talking, along with the flight surgeons, to our crew members learned how to do it very well. They would come in very relaxed at the beginning of a com pass, not jump right into some kind of set agenda. They would come in as positive as they could and then react to the crew members' mood, to try to fit in with them. If they didn't get everything said or done, you wait till the next time. So, again, it gets back to this American impetuosity and haste to get everything done. \"Look, I've got this whole list of things. I've got to say it all in ten minutes. I'm going to talk really fast.\" \"But wait. I wanted you to listen to me.\" There will always be another com pass. You can wait. So you have to learn how to structure the com and how to treat it as a resource, not just as a convenience.\\n\\n The same thing is going to be true on ISS, because despite the fact that we have continuous TDRS coverage, we're not going to have continuous TDRS availability, as you probably well know. So I think we're going to have to learn to be a little smarter about it in that regard, too.\\n\\n The other side of the coin is something we've seen on the shuttle, where if you call them every time you think of something to tell them or ask them, the crew is going to be in the middle of something, and if you don't have them on video, you don't know what they're doing. If you keep interrupting them, you're going to end up with a Skylab type of situation, or like one of our space lab missions. \"We're not robots up here. Leave us alone. Let us finish the job you gave us. Quit bugging us.\" And we've all experienced that before, one way or another." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You talked about communications. I think one of the lessons learned at space station, the ISS did, was they came up with early com. It wasn't originally in the design, and they saw how the shuttle-Mir program was going, and they said, \"We need to be able to have this capability.\" They developed it in house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it needs to be there when you need it, and you need to discipline yourself to use it appropriately. It's like any other very valuable tool. You can't treat it lightly or abuse it, but you sure want it available when it's necessary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things that some of the crew reports talk about was private communication lines, whether it was medical or with their family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's critical. It's critical for somebody in an isolated situation. People have survived without it. When I first started to go to sea in the Navy, other than letters, which are very highly valued, I had no way of communicating privately with my family. If you called somebody on the radio, everybody's listening. If you called on the ham, the whole world listens. Same thing is true on the Mir right now. Even email is dubious in terms of its privacy, though it helps. So that's going to be an essential part of the mission, that has to be maintained. We're pretty good with it on the shuttle because of our encryption capability. Mir, if it has it, we haven't been allowed to use it. So that's something that will be a part of ISS. I understand it's a hardship for the folks that are doing the Mir program, and we've tried to mitigate that as much as we can." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did the increment teams develop with the different crew rotation? You had an ops lead, like you mentioned before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's a good question and an interesting evolution. To go back a little bit in time, when space and life sciences was running space lab missions, they were treated as a separate part of the operation during the mission itself and had their own line of communication, their own CAPCOM, and generally they would use backup payload specialists to communicate with the crew during that time. Well, I found out part way through Norm's mission, I said, \"Why don't you have someone designated as the CAPCOM to talk to the crew?\" They said, \"Well, we thought Bonnie, as the backup, was going to be our CAPCOM.\" I said, \"But she was training for STS-71.\" \"Oh, yeah, I guess you're right.\" And so they didn't think about the fact she's have to come back for training and wouldn't be available to talk to Norm about all the particulars of the mission. So they were kind of winging it.\\n\\n The flight surgeons were ending up doing most of the communication. Fortunately, we had two of the best guys in the world, Dave Ward and Mike Barratt, who just were incredible in their capabilities to learn the Russian language, practice medicine, and do all the operational and training things that needed to be done. I mean, these guys were just amazing. Without their ability, we'd have had a really hard time on the first mission. I mean, they deserve all the recognition you can give them in terms of performance.\\n\\n We realized that that wasn't going to work for the long term, and we needed to get a flight surgeon out of the ops business, not because they couldn't do it, but because it just was too much crossover. We needed to designate somebody to talk to the crew. At that time Tommy asked MOD to provide to Rick Nygren's group, who was managing the mission from a research standpoint, what we ended up calling an ops lead, to act as both the CAPCOM and a leader of the team from an operational standpoint. I designated some people. Bill Gerstenmaier was the first one. Again, a tremendously capable individual who really threw his whole heart and soul into it and did a great job, and established some procedures that have carried forth.\\n\\n The program's been expanded and improved on since then, but basically what we evolved to was a team of people that are together from early training through the mission, through the post flight, and that's the crew member, the flight surgeon, and the ops lead. Our goal was to have those three people become a good solid team and stick together through training, know the mission very well, and be able to execute it together. And that ended up working out in the long run. It was some hardship on folks because it's hard to stick with a mission like that, especially if you're not the crew member, but people did it, and I think we're going to need some kind of similar concept for ISS. It will be a different look, but you'll need somewhat the same thing.\\n\\n The crew needs somebody to be their spokesperson when they're going through training and when they're on orbit, who understands what they're going through, what the difficulties are, what they're thinking, how they approach problems, things like that. We had one mission where we didn't really have that because the ops lead didn't work out, and we didn't have a good solid team. It made it harder for the crew member, harder for the team, too. And you need to start that way back in training.\\n\\n At least on the shuttle missions I was on, on my last one, between the commander and the lead flight director, we started to establish the same relationship where we knew what each other were thinking and involved each other in the things we were doing. I think you'll need that same type of relationship for the increments, and even tighter, for a shuttle mission, though you'll need some backup capabilities and interchangeabilities just because of reality. People are going to get sick or plans will change or whatever." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We have time for one more question here. What do you feel is your most significant contribution to the Phase 1 program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To the Phase 1 program or of the Phase 1 program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your personal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My personal contribution. [Pauses]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You don't have to be modest." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm trying to think of anything. It was a team effort, obviously, and a lot of people contributed a heck of a lot. What I hope I did was identify, acknowledged, and enabled the people who did have talent to do these kinds of things, to go do their job, and not get in their way. I think that one of the things I was able to do, not through any special talent, because I just happened to be the person in the place at the time, but because I really believed in the program and figured out how to communicate about it, was the ability to explain to the outside world what was going on through the most difficult times. I think I was reasonably effective at that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very effective." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frank L. Culbertson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Keeping the uproar down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Davison", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you. It's been very enlightening." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00558", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SjobergSA/sjobergsa.htm", + "original_file_name": "SjobergSA_7-8-97.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SjobergSA/SjobergSA_7-8-97.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "location_date": "Seabrook, Texas – 8 July 1997" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Doyle McDonald" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Sigurd A. Sjoberg" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mr. Sjoberg, I’d just like to ask you how you came to work for NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] and what year that began?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well I came to work for NASA in 1942 [Sjoberg began working with NACA in 1942. NACA was incorporated into the newly formed NASA in 1958]. It was the year I had just gotten out of college with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering. I had planned to follow that line of work for a long time. With NASA, of course everybody who studies aeronautical engineering gets to know NASA through their technical work throughout their education. A lot of NASA reports you use, that you’re required to use. That’s the way I had heard about NASA and became familiar with their work. They were interviewing at many different colleges in 1942, the year I got out of school. And I went to work for them that way. I interviewed for them that year and I worked there until I retired." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your first job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first job I had was at Langley Field in Virginia in the Flight Research Division. And that was a lot of fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were you doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was working on stability control work of airplanes. Not long before that NASA had built up some criteria for flying qualities for airplanes. And that was a hard job in that one of our main jobs in that Flight Research Division was to set out the flying quality of a whole different bunch of types of airplanes. It was just about all of the airplanes that flew in the World War II. We were busy with those at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then after the war, what were you doing after the war?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well I continued working. At the time I had a couple of interruptions, I left Langley in, I think it was, 1946. I went to back work for the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica California for a year. Then I went back to Langley working in the same division. And it was about 1947 I was asked to go out to Edwards Air Force Base to use a project in flight testing. One of the X airplanes, the D-558 Phase II. We were out there for about a year while we did that. Then I went back again to Langley." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And when did you leave Langley? You went back in the same division?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The same division, Flight Research work. I left Langley again, not until 1962 when the group that was formed at Langley, called the Space Task Group [STG]. That group was the nucleus of us now at the Johnson Space Center. NASA started the Johnson Space Center [originally named Manned Spacecraft Center] in Houston in 1962." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your initial jobs here? Where did you first work when you came to Houston in 1962?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had a job…I worked in…I’ll try to remember the names. I worked for the Flight Operations Division when I came to Houston. Their job of course was to do all of the planning of the space flights. And that’s where I spent most of my time in Houston working in Flight Operations. Of course, I had to. The first control center we used for manned space flight was at Cape Kennedy [Cape Canaveral, Florida later renamed Kennedy Space Center]. Then we moved to Houston. The decision was made to have that center in Houston. Well from 1942 on for several years, it was designed and implemented. Then, it came into use in 1944. I think it was in 19…The control center in Houston was first used in ‘44 or ‘45 [Houston Mission Control was first used in 1965 with Gemini III and IV]. I think it was in ’44, but I’m not absolutely sure about that. You can check on that easily. Then about…I’m trying to remember. It was the Flight Research Division, really, that controlled the flight control activity through all of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights. I think it was 1972 that Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] was made Director of the Center and he asked me to be his deputy. So that’s when I moved from Flight Control to _____________." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Going back to Mercury, when you were still stationed officially, at Langely, you did work on the Control Center in Mercury on the Cape?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I never really worked there. I never did have a job there. I spent some time there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, what were you doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Learning about space flight. You see, this was new to us too. We spent a lot of time there developing the procedures and the mission rules, all that kind of thing, that goes into each flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I also understand that in Gemini, you were a part of the Gemini Planning Organization." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I worked from Gemini 2 through all of the flights. It was a busy time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you remember about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What I remember most about it were the people involved. A bunch I thought were just outstanding people. Chris Kraft was probably the most outstanding. Of course, Max [Maxime A. Faget] did an awful lot of work on the space craft in those days getting central ideas. That was very interesting, very satisfying work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any particular missions stand out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Gemini program’s most outstanding mission…well, they were all very interesting. There were new things on every flight. Should have written them down then because I’m awfully confused now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you see as the major accomplishments that came out of the Gemini Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The experience of manned space flight and how to operate. How they can be designed. I don’t think we could have gone to the moon without it, without that background." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As you transitioned from Gemini to Apollo, how do you see that flight operations changed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think there were a great deal of changes in flight operations. I think what we learned from Gemini we applied for Apollo, it was a good background for that. But, I didn’t see any changes. There were a lot of new things to work on from Gemini to Apollo because of the distances involved. After all, on Gemini, we were always on earth orbit so you could return relatively quickly. Once you commit to a lunar flight there are only so many days before you can get back to earth. That was mostly with planning the flights and so on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After the early flights the decision was made to send Apollo 8 to the moon. Were you surprised by that decision?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Not nearly as surprised as the decision being made shortly after. One of the early Apollo flights [actually Alan B. Shepard's\\n\\n Freedom 7\\n\\n Mercury flight in 1961] it was, Mr. [President John F.] Kennedy announced that we were going to the moon. That was a lot more surprising." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was that news received? Let’s talk about that for a second." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think all of us were floored. It was such a change, such a challenge. It was such a surprise." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did your team think you could accomplish it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well after, I suppose, after working for a couple of years, you’re in a lot better position to judge. Most people thought at that time they could just work to get it done. I don’t think that the immediate reaction was “That’s good, we can go do it.” The more you do, the more you’ve got confidence in something like that because you learn how to do things. You don’t get caught and slow down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How do you see, did you see any changes in program management structure and interactions between centers as programs developed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Could you repeat that please?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As the programs moved from Kennedy to what is now Johnson Space Center and became much larger did you see other changes besides engineering changes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. The program became a lot broader in terms of public interest. Education. Certainly in the early days of the space program had a big effect on technical education and became a lot more, it got a lot higher priority, I think, at most of the technical schools around the country. I think more people became interested in technical subjects. It was a lot of priority on that because…as for me, the only aspect would be the mission associated with space flight. The public affairs associated with it, all these changed greatly. Nothing was the same anymore." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What would be some examples? What are some examples of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I gave you one—education. Certainly, you can see that nobody paid any attention to space medicine starting out in the program but now it has a lot of attention. It had something to do with, I’m sure, a big influence on the computer industry that was getting going at that time. There were many others that you can think of that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were the differences in flight operations in the Gemini and Apollo era when the vast computing powers that these machines give us were not available?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Would you repeat that please?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. I mean, you can’t find a person today that barely knows what a slide rule is. We didn’t have the big computers in those days that could perform all of these calculations. Could you just describe how the operations were accomplished?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s a good question. I think one thing that, it took a lot more people to develop a program for the computers and so on, and do a lot more testing. That’s a good question. I’d probably have to find a computer expert to talk to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As the political climate changed during the Apollo missions and Apollo became less important apparently to the nation, was that visible to you working in the program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, sure it was. Because it affected your money and what you could do, what you couldn’t do. Because really, in the Apollo program every year at budget time, in the latter years of Apollo, it was a real rat race trying to figure out how you were going to get things done without enough money. At the end of it, it was quite dismal that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You said when Dr. Kraft became head of the center and he asked you to be his deputy, it was one of those times, wasn’t it?\n\nWell, it was…the last few years of the Apollo program, I think it was in 1971 or ‘72, well things were good then. It wasn’t many years after that, that money became scarce.\n\nBy that time you were in the program, you had been cut off as the program manager?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I had been working for Dr. Kraft at that time. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did Dr. Kraft and you focus on during those first years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well we just continued the Apollo program. It was pretty well laid out at that time. Continued pretty much on the path I think it was going for a while." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, then? It was the last Apollo flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nineteen seventy…I think if you consider ASTP [Apollo-Soyuz Test Project] that was 1975." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we did one for the Skylab program. When was that? About’76 or ’77? ’78, maybe [The Skylab flights were in 1973-1974]. That was something different because it was a long duration associated with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In Skylab, were you involved in the decision to go with the dry workshop?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If I wasn’t, I should’ve been. I can’t remember exactly and direct…although I probably endorsed the decision when it was made. I don’t remember who would’ve done it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "With Space Station coming on line soon and working with Mir, this is the first time since the Skylab days that flight operations had involved long duration flights. What do you see as changes in the ways either that the Center operated or flight operations were conducted because of the long duration flights?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think that there have been any drastic changes outright. Well, why don’t you interview George Abbey?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That does bring me to a couple of questions. In your career there were certainly a number of people that either influenced you greatly or which you think were the people who made a great and vast difference in the space program. Who would be those people on your list?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Number one was Chris [Christopher C. Kraft, Jr.]. Not only did he have the technical ability, but he was what I call a real leader. He inspired people and developed the whole concept of flight control. He led as a flight director and I think he did an outstanding people job. It’s not what many people could have done. I think that Max [Maxime A. Faget] was outstanding. Some of the people I may mention, you may not even know. Bill Tindall [Howard W. Tindall, Jr.] was excellent. He was a _______________ and techniques. In the program office, I think Aaron Cohen, who you probably don’t know, was a real good young man. In the flight house, Glynn [S.] Lunney was outstanding. Arnie [Arnold] Aldrich, as far as I know, he’s still at Headquarters. I don’t know if you know him or not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think he’s gone now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz has certainly done a good job for us. A real good job from a flight control standpoint. George M. Low is _________, certainly an outstanding man. Dr. [Robert R.] Gilruth was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When NASA was going to the moon, there was definitely this national mandate behind the human space flight program. The whole country was behind it. As that moved, as Apollo came to an end and moved into the shuttle and now into the 1990’s, that mandate doesn’t seem to be there. Why do you think that is?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was inevitable. I mean, going to the moon was such a feat, that a lot of other things seem rather mundane after that to a lot of people. It’s still effective. The whole space flight program has affected the civilization of the world. I think one of the first things people want is to do it the first time once and that’s basically it. I’d like to ask you that question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure, after we’re finished. How would you recommend that NASA handle this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Given the things…" + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, given that you can only do it first once and that some people believe that the relevance is no longer there. What would you recommend?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m not sure that it makes a hell of a lot of difference. I think that the world will go on and I think that we’ll want to learn things, we’re going to want to discover things. That’s still a major goal of the civilization of the world. I think it will continue to be. And then you’re saying of course, that a lot of people don’t think that you need a program at all. You can say that about most everything. Save money, save money and save money. Then what do you do? I don’t know if that’s an answer or not, but that seems to be the way that it is. There’s not much NASA or anyone else can do about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The recent contract with United Space Alliance doing parts of the shuttle program, Mr. [Daniel] Goldin is pushing toward privatizing some of these functions. How do you see that push?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think it’s plain and simple. Try to save money, do it a little cheaper. I don’t get much of a thrill out of that. I don’t think that we better, I don’t think so. I don’t think it will be as good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You do, or you do not?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I do not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why is that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You won’t get that far without getting as many dedicated people as NASA has. You just won’t." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As the Space Station is being constructed over the next few years, as you mentioned, with the new push in space medicine, where do you think NASA should adjust its funds beyond that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m not sure that I understand your question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In addition to Space Station, where do you think NASA should be placing an emphasis?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I suppose what they ought to do is research in the things that space flight can do for you. Or the environment that you can create, that kind of thing. And exploration, I think, is the ultimate thing, but they kind of go hand in hand. After all, the inevitable thing that you’re looking for here is, I guess, are there any other people on the planets somewhere, or something like that. So, I think it is, anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of all the tasks or positions which you’ve held in NASA, which one means the most to you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was being the Deputy Director. I got a lot of satisfaction from that. I think I did some good. I was working for an outstanding man, then too. That always makes it nice. [???In memory of???] George [W. S.] Abbey." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why do you have to do that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about Mr. Abbey." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What do you want to know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know if I know that much about him. He’s a good friend. He likes to catch salmon. He’s got a good friend up in Seattle or Westport, Washington who is a sports fisherman. He likes to get up to Seattle to see him. Well, I’ll tell you about George Abbey, but you can talk to him and ask him yourself. He’ll tell you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don’t think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This area was nice when I first moved here you know. Not many places to live when I first got here, around. Lots. Johnny [John H.] Glenn [Jr.] lived half a block over here. Wally [Walter M.] Schirra [Jr.] was next door. And next door to him was [Virgil I. “Gus”] Grissom. Next door to Glenn was [M. Scott] Carpenter. [L. Gordon] Cooper [Jr.] lived across the lake here. Deke [Donald K. Slayton] lived over in Friendswood. And Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.] lived in town. So it was full of them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doyle McDonald", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was it like living in the neighborhood with astronauts?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sigurd A. Sjoberg", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn’t notice any difference. Lights, cars and you would always have a crowd of people around of course. TV people and so on. Aside from that, you’d have some buses coming and driving through watching the houses. Tours once in a while." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00468", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/PippenDL/pippendl.htm", + "original_file_name": "PippenDL_1-22-03.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/PippenDL/PippenDL_1-22-03.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "David L. Pippen", + "location_date": "Las Cruces, New Mexico – 22 January 2003" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright", + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "Sandra Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "David L. Pippen" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is January 22nd, 2003. This oral history with Dave Pippen is being conducted in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal and Sandra Johnson.\\n\\n We thank you again for coming today to spend some time with us and for this project. We’d like to start out by asking you, when you were growing up, what type of interest did you have in engineering?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, when I was growing up, I was raised on a dry-land farm where we couldn’t raise many crops due to the weather. We tried to raise cotton, grain sorghums, and things like that. Our crops were mostly those that provided feed for the few cattle that my parents raised. It was just too hot and there was little rain during the summer months to successfully raise anything. My Dad farmed, raised cattle, drove a school bus, and worked at an automobile service station in Cisco, Texas, which is a very small town in Central Texas. My Mom was a homemaker, supervised the school lunchrooms, and raised calves obtained from my Granddad’s Dairy. So I didn’t know what an “engineer” was, except those that drove trains. But I was always interested in building airplane models and everything mechanical. I was one boy among five sisters, and my Dad was uneducated so I didn’t have any external influence outside of farm and dairy life—and we lived way out from the town on the farm and our contacts were mostly neighbors who were farmers and ranchers.\\n\\n When I reached high school age, I worked for my uncle and my granddad who owned a dairy, so I would get up early in the morning I mean like three, four o’clock, before school, ride on the back of the little pickup truck and deliver milk, one quart at a time, all through the little town of Cisco [Texas]. I was paid five dollars a week and was considered one of the richest kids in school.\\n\\n I was a football player and basketball player and ran track. I knew of no engineers, as we are called today, in that town! You just didn’t hear that word, “engineer” except associated with trains. I worked as a farm kid and a dairyman and roofer and all that kind of stuff that was available in the area. My sister talked me into joining the military after graduating from college. I’ve jumped way ahead here. After college and when I got into the military, I got into guided missiles, and the electronics part just fascinated me. I had a degree in mathematics, but electronics just fascinated me. And, from then on, I began to understand what engineering was about and worked as an engineer even though my degree was in math\\n\\n In the military I received a direct commission, in May 1959, having been promoted from a U.S. Army private to a lieutenant. I was sent to Huntsville, Alabama, as part of my initial training as a guided missile officer, and that was in the Sputnik [satellite] days. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-1\\n\\n .) This was kind of exciting. I can vividly remember being on the square in Huntsville, Alabama, when it was a small place and hearing the announcement, “The [Department of the Navy, Vanguard rocket] exploded,” and how sad I was because we were trying to catch up with the Russians in space exploration. I really became interested in electronics and missiles and those sorts of things while in the army Guided Missile School at Huntsville, Alabama.\\n\\n Then, after graduating from that school, I wanted to get back to New Mexico where I was previously stationed as a private, or at least get close to my home state of Texas. So I wrote Colonel Redmon at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, and said, “I want to come back.” As I previously mentioned I was now an officer after having received a direct commission in the Army, as a 2nd lieutenant. When I was a private, I saw on the bulletin board an announcement with the headline, “Be an officer,” and I said to myself, “Well, that beats this enlisted man status.” And I applied, and got that direct commission. On the date the commission took effect, I just took off my PFC [Private First Class] stripe and pinned on my gold bar. It really shocked the noncommissioned officers who had been ordering me around for several months.\\n\\n After Officer’s boot camp in Aberdeen, Maryland, and following guided missile school in Huntsville, Alabama, I was assigned to the White Sands Missile Range [WSMR, New Mexico]. At White Sands Missile Range, I was involved in testing guided missile systems as an officer. When I got through with that, that is, when my time was up in the military, WSMR hired me as a civilian in the same position I held in the military. I did vibration testing and shock testing, and all kinds of laboratory oriented testing on guided missile systems including the Lacrosse surface-to-surface and Hawk surface-to-air guided missiles.\\n\\n And then NASA came to town. Space activities just kind of intrigued me. That’s when I went to work for NASA. It was at the time when the Little Joe II test vehicle and the launch escape system for the Apollo [command module] were being developed at the White Sands Missile Range," + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did someone tell you that there was an opening over at the test facility with NASA, or did you just apply?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "NASA’s arrival was well known by all the employees at White Sands. White Sands Missile Range is not a very large place, and when NASA came, everyone knew NASA’s mission, and they made it known that they were looking for people. In fact, I believe they were a little desperate. Well, they were desperate enough to hire me! And I say that because I was in test engineering, but I didn’t have a degree in engineering. I was—quote—a mathematician—end quote—by college degree but I had never worked in the math field. I didn’t have my master’s degree then in electrical engineering.\\n\\n So I just walked over to where NASA was recruiting and the guy’s name who interviewed me was Oscar Tarango. I remember Oscar well because he was a good boss. We talked about the job and its responsibilities, and he found out what we were doing in the lab where I worked at WSMR, and it was the same type of tasks that NASA needed to have done. He hired me on the spot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the work atmosphere like at the test facility at that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Are you talking about the NASA WSMR Site?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was really hectic. NASA and the prime contractors worked as a team in completing the testing. The work was performed at WSMR’s Launch Complex [LC] 36, which was located north of the main post. As I remember, LC 36 consisted of a Vehicle Assembly Building called the VAB, several house trailers for personnel offices, and a launch pad with a gantry. Initial work was done in the VAB on the individual components of the system, that is, the Little Joe II booster and attitude control system, launch escape system, and Apollo command module.\\n\\n (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-2\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-3\\n\\n , and\\n\\n Photo A-4\\n\\n ) Once all the preliminary assembly and individual checkouts were performed, these components were then assembled on the launch pad. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-5\\n\\n .)\\n\\n The launch escape system sat on top of the Apollo command module, and its goal was to pull [if the main engines or anything went awry] the Apollo command module from the booster. The launch escape system would separate from the command module a little bit later on, and then the Apollo command module would come floating down by parachute and land. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-6\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-7\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-8\\n\\n and\\n\\n Photo A-9\\n\\n .)\\n\\n One mission called BP23A tested the launch escape system’s separation capability without the booster system, which simulated a booster failure at launch. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-10\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-11\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-12\\n\\n , and\\n\\n Photo A-13\\n\\n .)\\n\\n Well, what we were trying to do with all this testing was to make sure that that launch escape system would work at different angles from the launch attitude if the main engine went off course—they called these angles, High-Q abort positions, where the system underwent higher than normal dynamic pressure. These tests verified that the system would work under all those abnormal stress conditions that could be expected should a launch failure occur. As I mentioned before, we worked as a team with prime contractors. We had North American [Aviation, Inc., now Boeing North American] who was responsible for the launch escape system, and we had General Dynamics [Corporation] who was responsible for the Little Joe II test vehicle. The personnel from these companies would build these systems at their respective plants and then ship them to WSMR. We, NASA, would put them all together with the prime contractors and test them. You’d work twelve, fifteen hours a day. Even sometimes we didn’t go home while the launch was imminent, and then once the launch occurred all WSMR activities would just stop. Then you had to kind of tread water until the next WSMR test. During these lulls, I was authorized to work on my Master’s degree in electrical engineering. So, that’s the way it was, and it lasted about two years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were some of your first duties during those first two years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I first started to work, I was one of the several engineers in the Electrical [Systems] Branch, and what we would do is, since I had ties back with the White Sands Missile Range’s Guidance and Control Laboratory, which I came from, knew all the people there, and we needed to test several Little Joe II guidance components. So I interfaced the autopilot with the lab equipment and those kinds of things, and we would test them. One of the things that comes to mind is, we would test for what they call infant mortality. When you build something new, the likelihood of it failing early within a statistically established time is very—if it’s going to fail, it’s very high. So you run it a certain number of hours just after it has been manufactured, and the number that sticks in my mind, which I don’t know if this is it, is about sixty hours for the particular components we were testing. I think we ran them about sixty hours. And if they survived the sixty hours, statistics indicated that it would be safe to launch it, that is, it would function correctly during the several minutes of the launch and flight. So that was primarily my job during pre-launch activities. We had a little branch of about five or six electrical engineers, and I was promoted to head that group. We would pre-check the vehicle and then launch it, and then, of course, get all that launch data. I wasn’t involved in the data analysis, but it was my job to get the vehicle ready to launch as far as the electronic systems in the Little Joe II and the launch escape system itself, were concerned" + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you share with us some of the details of the pre-check procedures and how you developed those procedures?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s one thing NASA is good at, is developing paperwork. And I can remember, we had all these different groups, and in those days money was no object. That changed in Shuttle, but I tell you, after [President John F.] Kennedy made the proclamation, “We’re going to get to the Moon in ten years,” or whatever that was, we had money to burn, so we could buy anything we wanted, or at least nearly anything we wanted, certainly everything we needed. And if we needed one, we’d buy two, because we couldn’t afford to have a component break and not have a replacement. So we had all that stuff to write test procedures for.\\n\\n So we would develop—we would lay out, “Well, here’s the way the system’s going to work. This is the way it works.” So then we would lay out a process by which we would check all of those systems. We’d put the systems together. We’d test them separately, and we’d do some lab tests, and go out on the launch pad, and check them out individually, then put it all together, and then we’d test it out as a system, perform the dry runs as we called them. We’d have a couple of dry runs before we’d launch, and then we would go into a fairly long step-by-step countdown to launch. .\\n\\n We had, a little mini operations room there but nothing like at JSC. There were Operations Directors or OD’s, and they’d take over once the launch sequence started they would carry this through, and then we engineers would just monitor the instruments on the panels. So my people, the electrical engineers, would be in there watching all their stuff, everybody on headsets. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-14\\n\\n .)\\n\\n In those days, it wasn’t like it is now—it’s really easy today in electronics since reliability has greatly improved, but in those days, things would quit for no apparent reason. It was tough to keep things going. But everybody was really dedicated and gung-ho.\\n\\n The attitude in the space program in those days was exciting, because we had a well-defined mission. We had a goal. I don’t guess I can remember anybody complaining about having to work long hours. We didn’t get paid overtime. We just worked till it was done. So that’s what we did. We’d check out individual systems, we’d go to the laboratory, do the infant mortality and those kinds of tests, take it out into the field, do the functional checks, put it together, and all of this time we’re developing the procedures, step-by-step procedures. And if you ever had a problem, you’d have to get contractor and NASA quality assurance involved.\\n\\n There were people everywhere. We had about at least three times more people than we needed to do the task. You had to get three or four NASA people [involved] for every task. Then we’d have to get the three or four contractor counterparts involved, and also your supervisor. And all of these had to sign these papers even if they may have no idea about the specific things listed in the document they were to sign. They had test preparations sheets or TPSs for each activity, and discrepancy records for things that failed. The paperwork was really rough to keep up with, and when you think about not having word processors, you did it all either by hand, or if you could talk someone into typing it, which it seemed you never had time to do. There would be carbon copies, two or three layers, and Quality Assurance [QA] always kept the top and best copy for the record, and we’d be reading off of those third-generation carbon copies. Safety would have to have a copy, and QA would have to have a [copy] and the engineering would have to have a [copy], but we got through it, and it was very successful. Every minor change required the paper to be “redlined.” The redlines were changes written on the original document and had to have initials from the same folks who initially signed the paper. And, of course, we always thought that QA was more interested in dotting the “I”s and crossing the “T”s than technical content." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you share with us some of the problems that were detected as you were going through some of those check procedures?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There’re two that come to mind. One of them was on the autopilot system. We were doing this infant mortality testing, and as I recall, we were a little bit behind schedule, and everybody was pressuring us, especially the non-technical people, to shorten the test cycle. And we were working around the clock. In fact, I can remember having hurt my back some way, and I couldn’t hardly move, but we were there to launch a “bird.” I spent three days, just catnapping between tests, trying to get all of those autopilots tested and get the minimum number of run time hours.\\n\\n I’ll say sixty hours, but I’m not sure of that. But as we approached this statistical “hours” that said it was going to be good for the flight, we got more and more pressure from the operations directors to quit testing early, say, at forty hours into the test, and then after fifty hours and so forth. By the time we got to fifty-five hours into test, we were behind schedule for the launch, and the pressure was tremendous. I was kind of an obstinate fellow, and I said, “You don’t want to do that,” and kept on and kept on, and I wouldn’t ever shorten the test cycle—and I had the signature authority to allow the testing to stop. I would never sign that waiver.\\n\\n And [at] fifty-nine hours into the test, the autopilot failed. If they had launched the vehicle, if they had launched that thing when they wanted to, it would’ve been a multimillion-dollar failure and it might have thrown the whole Apollo program into a schedule loss that we couldn’t have tolerated. But I remember that incident well.\\n\\n Another one I remember was, I had large college class ring on my ring finger. When you work with electronics things, you develop a whole lot more intuition than you do theory, if you’re good. And I’m not saying I’m really all that good, but I had a lot of intuition, and I didn’t have a degree in electrical engineering at that point. I was a mathematician, but I had worked in electrical engineering for the DoD for the Department of Defense, for White Sands Missile Range in the lab, and I was very—pretty good in electronics. I’d been to a very good school in electronics through the Department of the Army, when I was a second lieutenant in the Army.\\n\\n We were testing this autopilot, and we were running it through its pre-checks. The autopilot system just didn’t seem intuitively right, but everything met specs [specifications]. But they’d give it a command, and I could just sense that when the fins would go over into position, they wouldn’t go over and lock in position. They’d go over and they’d shake a little bit. Nobody paid any attention to that. And I said, “Man, that’s just not right.”\\n\\n So the vehicle was on the stand, the test stand, and we were running through these checkouts, just right before we were going into the final countdown and the fins were all just about, oh, about seven feet above my head, and you could touch them as you reached up. As I mentioned before, I had a class ring, which has since worn out, a large college class ring. I had authority to go around that vehicle, but, boy, you didn’t do anything to the vehicle that wasn’t written down and approved by all those folks I mentioned before. You followed the rules or suffer the consequences. As I’d mentioned this possible instability problem to the operations directors and others, they just wouldn’t pay any attention. You just couldn’t get anybody’s attention at this time during a mission because everyone was busy doing their own thing.\\n\\n So one day I was walking around the launch platform, and I said to myself, “There’s just something wrong with the stability of this control system.” So I just quickly reached up and hit that fin with my hand, with my ring, just whap! And when I hit it, that thing went unstable, and it shook so badly that we thought it was going to fall off of the pad. If they’d launched with this unstable control system in that condition, then they’d have lost the vehicle, no doubt.\\n\\n Well, we fixed it, you know, but now the QA was there and the safety was there, and everybody was there, and I was the object of a lot of ridicule, because they didn’t seem to care about the vehicle. They cared that I had broken the rules and done something that was not authorized because I knew they would not let me hit the fin with my ring. Can you imagine how these people would have reacted if I had said, “I want to hit that fin”? They’d have laughed. It just wouldn’t have happened.\\n\\n But then we went to the flight readiness review. That’s where all the big shots got up on the stage of a large conference room and peered down on all us underlings. I can still see this in my mind just as clear. And there I was, little peon me, you know. We were required to go to this flight readiness review, and all these people went through all these documents, looking all the DRs, the discrepancy records, and all the problems, and the flight readiness review board personnel were buying off or approving all the solutions to the problems, saying, “Okay. Your solution was satisfactory,” blah, blah, blah, blah, and they got to mine. When this instability thing came up, and they just stopped. This guy said, “Who is this David Pippen? Is he here?” Well, I raised up my hand, you know. They guy said, “What in the world did you do?”\\n\\n I said, “Well, sir, I just gave it the old ring test.”\\n\\n He said, “Did you have the authority to do that?”\\n\\n I said, “Absolutely not.”\\n\\n Then I just talked about the subject for a minute or so, describing the whole thing. After I was through and they asked what we did to fix it, and they didn’t really get on me any more than that, I think because they recognized how close to a launch failure it was. When we got through with it the FRR, the whole gist was to make sure that I didn’t do that again. But then we fixed the control system, and went back out, put it up on the vehicle. Everything checked out and, again, we determined we were ready for launch. And then we had the next review, which was after the first one. There were a couple of these reviews for every mission. The first question they asked, “Is Dave Pippen here?” They said, “Did you give it the ring test?”\\n\\n I said, “Well, sort of, but I did it under controlled conditions”—Everybody was willing to perform the test now, “and I used a rubber mallet,” and they all laughed, and we went on, and the control system was accepted as flight ready. But I can remember that very vividly. In fact, the “ring test” with a rubber mallet became a standard test for control system stability on all subsequent flights." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During those early days, did you travel much?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "NASA engineers traveled a lot. However, I established a philosophy then that I would let my people that were closely involved do most of the traveling. I mean, I didn’t want to be—one thing I never did like was when the boss went and would return and tell me what I should’ve learned if I had gone. So I said to myself, “I’m not going to do that. If an engineer is going to be involved and responsible for some aspect of the mission, I want him to go and perform the work, and then they can report to me what was done. .”\\n\\n So my people went all the time. I would go about a fourth of the time. We would go during those periods of time when the contractor had finished the control system or some other system, and they were doing a mating—they called them a mating, there at the plants when the contractor connected the individual systems together, and we would go and make sure that all the individual components within a system were functional and within specifications. So I would go for the final integrated checkout. But my people would go to all of them. So they traveled all the time. I would travel much less. And they would go to the plant and stay for weeks and weeks at a time, and I would kind of go at the end and make sure everything was going right, and just kind of check up on the overall progress and give them a little moral support.\\n\\n But the people I had working for me loved to travel. Oh, they thought that was the greatest thing in the world, and they traveled all the time without fussing about it. One of the fellows, I remember his name was Gilbert Goode. I’ll never know what happened to Gilbert, but he just loved to travel. [Laughs] He took great pride in the number of miles he flew and that he was a member of the air carrier’s president club. And all these engineers, they were good people. They were really good people. Very dedicated to NASA. You don’t see that dedication much anymore in most work situations. But in those days, you had a mission, and you just did was necessary to do to meet its objectives, and they gave us, generally gave us, the authority and the money to do the job, which was a very expensive approach, but it produced a pretty good product." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk for a few minutes about the relationships, one, between the Army and White Sands Test Facility, and then if you’d follow that up with the relationship that White Sands had with the Johnson Space Center [JSC, Houston, Texas], which at that time was the Manned Spacecraft Center [MSC]. So let’s start with the Army relationship." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From my perspective, we really had a good relationship with the Department of the Army. Of course, I had come from the Department of the Army, and I had come from the WSMR laboratories, where they did a whole lot of testing of guidance and control components and systems, and I had a good relationship with all the people in the Guidance and Control Laboratory there. They don’t call it by that name anymore. I had used all of the equipment that was in the lab. I was familiar, of course, with the NASA stuff too, and I was familiar with the equipment that was in these laboratories, and they trusted that I knew how to use it so they just kind of gave me a key to their lab and gave me the authority to run it myself just like I did when I was employed there.\\n\\n So we would take the items to be tested over to the lab, and I kept in contact with those responsible for the lab and told them what NASA was doing. As a result we just had an outstanding relationship with them. They’d let me do most anything that NASA wanted to do. Of course, we paid our way and we did have money. In fact, as an example, we were having trouble with— the silver zinc batteries that powered all the electronics and even fired the squibs that ignited the solid rocket motors. And when it would get cold, those batteries didn’t have enough energy to ignite the solid rocket motors. They wouldn’t fire the squibs. Being an electrical engineer, which I wasn’t by degree, but I was by assignment, you know, I figured out, what the problem was. The prime contractor wouldn’t admit that a NASA fellow knew what the problem was since they considered themselves as the real experts and NASA more of a pain they had to live with.\\n\\n So I went into the WSMR Guidance and Control lab and asked the responsible people if I could have some old parts that they’d gotten out of some of those missiles that had crashed out in the desert. I remembered that the La Crosse missile, it was a surface-to-surface missile, had a big old power relay in it, which is the thing that transferred battery power to the missile’s electronic—is having a remote controlled light switch, where an electrical signal could make the lights come on. I designed a little circuit using this relay that would remotely put these batteries under load for a certain period of time. They called it “detusking.” It would prepare or condition the batteries for cold operation. So I put that thing together, and it worked, and we just had one relay.\\n\\n Since we needed several, the contractor I said, “We want your drawings and stuff.” I said “that’s fine with me”. So they took the schematics and the box I had put together and went back to the plant and made GSE out of them; that’s ground support equipment. I put the thing together for less than $50, to be extravagant, and they charged the government $20,000 apiece for them or something like that. But that’s the way it was in those days; we had a lot of money and very few checks and balances. It was in a pretty little box. [Laughs] I learned a lesson there, you know – because I was given none of the design credit, but that’s another thing that’s vivid in my memory.\\n\\n But the relationship between the Department of the Army and NASA I remember was good. They did all the post flight recovery operations. When we’d launch the vehicle, then it would do its separation, do all of its thing, and then the command module would come down to the ground. It was on a parachute.\\n\\n The Department of the Army would furnish [and operate] all of the big heavy lift equipment and get the launch vehicle and command module back to the VAB and do all those kinds of support operations. But we, NASA, just went out and observed and analyzed the impact area and the parts we collected. We didn’t have any of that heavy equipment.\\n\\n The Army also performed range scheduling and flight safety. When NASA would launch a vehicle, the DoD’s flight safety would say when it was off course. If it was, they would destroy it in the air, that kind of stuff. That was all they did, as far as I remember, and as far as my relationship with them, it was good and they provided just really good support. We just had a great relationship." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talk to us about the relationship with the Manned Spacecraft Center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, in those days, I was just kind of a peon, and I didn’t know anything about the Manned Spacecraft Center, because I’d never been there. Didn’t know anything about it except that they called it “our organization,” as I recall, the Resident Apollo Spacecraft [Program] Office [RASPO], and it was run locally by the guy named Henry Van Goey, and he would go to Houston. We knew that. Right in this period of time, they were building the White Sands Test Facility, and Martin [L.] Raines was over there as NASA Site Manager, but we didn’t go over there much, because we were on the White Sands Missile Range and not associated with their mission. However, we did have some FRRs [Flight Readiness Reviews] at WSTF in their auditorium, and they occurred right before we’d launch —All the FRR members would all come, there’d probably about thirty or forty of them, of different people from NASA MSC, in those days, Manned Spacecraft Center. They would all come down, to put the final stamp of approval on what we had done, and they were kind of our gods. [Laughs] You know what I mean? That’s the way we operated, but I really didn’t know anybody there at MSC, and I never traveled to Houston at that time, because we always went to the West Coast to the prime contractor’s plants." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In 1966, you became the Laboratories Manager." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When the Apollo testing was finished, then what do you do with all these WSMR people that worked for NASA? And we all were to be dispersed to various NASA centers, and I didn’t want to leave the area, this part of the country So they said, “We’ll put you over to the Apollo. Site.” They called WSTF the Apollo Site in those days. And they assigned me to the laboratories, and that was my first task there. I was called a Laboratory Manager, but that didn’t mean I managed anything [of significance]. That was a title." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They assigned to me the responsibility of the calibration, of the electrical calibration, repair shop, and there was a fabrication area. That was my function. There were probably twenty-five or so contractor people there, and my job was to make sure that the site support contractor fulfilled the obligations of the contract. The laboratories at that time from the NASA organization, wasn’t even hardly a branch. It was a small group of NASA engineers un one of the NASA WSTF site organizations, and I don’t recall which one it was, but there were a lot of people there at the test facility at that time. I think there were well over a thousand people, and they were doing all the Apollo engine testing, and we [in the laboratory] were doing strictly work to support the propulsion effort. All the instruments that were used up in the test stands would come to our lab for calibration periodically, and we would repair them.\\n\\n In the fabrication area, I was kind of a design engineer, too. The contractor never had any real electronic circuit designers. They had a lot of real good workers and they worked hard, but nobody that could take a concept and come up with a design of a test system, and I did that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you share with us some of the designs that you made?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m trying to remember some of the things. I know that the test stand intercom system became nonfunctional in a lot of the stations. Everybody would sit around with their little intercom headset on their head, an all interconnected intercom kind of a thing, and then an outside contractor that had built those, it was custom-made, and the contractor that had built those was no longer in existence, and after such hard use they were kind of dysfunctional—but they had to have replacements. So I just designed it [a new one] from scratch, it was fabricated in the lab and took it to the test stands, and it worked.\\n\\n I also wrote some technical papers on some of them, like an amplitude compression device, and what that was all involved in this intercom. Of course, when somebody talks loud over an intercom system but another on the net talks softly, you want to not to have to adjust the volume control all the time. So this was a little circuit that did that automatically. Nowadays, with computers and with integrated circuits, most all of that kind of technology is now encapsulated in one little circuit, and it’s very straightforward to build them, but in those days, we had to use individual transistors, individual resistors, and it was quite a task, and these systems weren’t available commercially. So we built them in-house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also talked to us a little bit about your shutter valve circuit. Can you talk to us about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. The shutter valve is very large valve used in propulsion’s high altitude test chambers the propulsion high altitude test chambers were real large things and were located in the 400 area of WSTF. When they evacuated the test chambers to simulate high altitude, they had a big steam engine that when you fired the steam engine, it aspirated the air out of the test chambers, and that created a vacuum, which simulated higher atmospheres, as you evacuated. If they ever had a problem during evacuation if something bad happened [like the steam generator failed], then if you’re evacuated, then the air would backflow into that test chamber with such velocity that it could just destroy everything in it. So they had this large shutter valve, they called it, and if they detected a failure, that thing would close so quickly that it would keep the rapid pressure change from damaging the test article inside the chamber. Now, that’s my present understanding, here many years later. You get people who know propulsion better than I, they really may describe it differently—but that was my concept, as I recall. And the shutter valve actuation circuitry they were using was too slow [in activating]. So I designed several circuits that would speed that process up, and they worked. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-15\\n\\n )" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about your transducer instrument, the differential pressure transducer instrument?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. What that does is, you have pressure inside the cans [high altitude test chambers] or, inside this vacuum chamber, and you have a different pressure on the outside. So you want to measure the differential of these two pressure signals, and when the difference in pressure in one of them and the pressure in the other got to a certain limit, you wanted things to happen, for example, close the shutter valve. Now [presently] you could buy differential pressure measuring instruments off the shelf, but in those days, you couldn’t. So I designed and developed one that would do the job for them, just measure the differential pressure between the evacuated part of the chamber and the outside pressure and provide an output signal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then one other that I know that you had listed was your timing circuit for the test stands." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and it was all a part of this. You know, it’s really amusing now, being in electrical engineering and teaching electrical engineering [at New Mexico State University] what we thought was so hard in those days, because we had to use discrete components, individual little components, today it’s just easy, but in those days, they needed a precision timing circuit. As I recall, on some of their data acquisition systems, they needed to, after a certain period of time, extract some data off of a magnetic tape or something, and you just didn’t go buy a timer chip or microcontroller like you do today, so I designed a little timer [circuit] that at the precise time would allow them to extract that data that they needed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Pretty interesting. Would you share with us the organization of the Electrical Calibration and Standards Lab, and what your mission was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. That’s going way back, and the accuracy of my memory is kind of weak here, because we had so many reorganizations, and we called each organization doing the same things so many different names. But I can remember sort of the functions, and that’s when I first got there, like I was saying a while ago. When I first got there, I was pretty low on the totem pole —I had gone from a supervisor [at WSMR.] In fact, I’ve got a letter from Martin Raines saying, “We are now taking your supervisory stuff away, and we’re making you an engineer now.” They didn’t reduce my rank, but I went from supervising a bunch of people to just being one of the troops, which I didn’t mind at all. People are your problems anyway, right? Never the technical parts of a project.\\n\\n So I went to WSTF, and I was the NASA laboratory manager—we had a contractor that generally did all the actual physical work. They had their own management and they had their technicians, but the NASA person [lab manager] set priorities, verified that the work that they did was correct, and I had the advantage there, because there were no design engineers. I even got to design the stuff, like we were talking about previously.\\n\\n As a laboratory manager, there were several others with that title in the labs. We had like the electrical laboratories, electrical and fabrication lab, calibration lab; we had the mechanical calibration and fabrication labs. We had the chemistry lab, and we had the metallurgy lab. We had several different NASA people that managed the efforts of these laboratories, and they were all designed to support the test stand. And they, [the test stand] pulled our chains. All the requirements came from the test stand, except our own internal calibrations.\\n\\n We had people like Martin Raines as the NASA Site Manager, and then he would have his first line usually called “offices”, and under that there would be a Branch Supervisor, and then I was under a branch. I was way under there. And that’s where I started, in the labs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In [19]’67, the Apollo 204 [Apollo 1] fire occurred. How did that affect or impact the work at White Sands?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just a little bit before that, as time went on, they [NASA} had a fire problem with an oxygen system, and I can’t recall where or what it was. I can find out; I’ve got it in one of my documents. But we began to do some materials testing to support the failure analysis of this system. By that time, the lab organization, which we had—we had fifteen or so NASA people in the labs, as I recall. I mean, I was just one of those people.\\n\\n But then Apollo left—well, Apollo hadn’t left, but as Apollo was maturing and the engines required less testing at WSTF, a lot of the lab functions went away [since the lab’s prime function was to support the propulsion activities], and it had gotten down to just a very few of us in the lab, because they had reduced the staffing during this period of time, and we were just getting involved in some testing on materials as mentioned before. This was six months to a year before this 204 fire happened, and a lot of people [NASA and contractor] were concerned about this hazard of — having flammable materials in the presence of 100% oxygen in the habited portion of the Apollo command module. I don’t know, have you ever observed materials burning in oxygen? I mean, we live in about a 20 percent environment of oxygen with the balance mostly nitrogen and some things burn rapidly, but when you get into 100 percent oxygen, then these same things burn nearly explosively.\\n\\n The command module was stuffed full of all kinds of metallic and nonmetallic, and plastics, and wire harness insulations, all that kind of stuff, and there it was, exposed to a 100% oxygen environment. People at NASA were a little bit concerned about that, but they had not had any real major problems except this one thing had happened that I mentioned before\\n\\n And they got us involved to an extent, because we had a unique kind of a capability to do testing in oxygen since we were in a remote location, and I happened to be there at the right time to get involved in this new type of testing. And I was heavily involved in the setup of the initial tests and wrote the test procedures, and the NASA folks at JSC were pretty well pleased with what we in the WSTF laboratories were doing. One thing we did, my philosophy was, respond to the customer fast with good data. So it started there, and like I say, I was way down in the organization but then the fire occurred. Of course, panic ensued in the NASA hierarchy, and then everybody realized that the habited portion of the spacecraft had many flammable materials in an oxygen environment where a small electrical spark could cause a catastrophic fire —so when they looked around and asked, “well, who’s done any testing to determine which materials are flammable?” Well, we in the WSTF labs had done a little bit of testing. I’ll not forget this, because [Dr.] Leonard Schluter and I were really the only NASA people in the labs that were doing any materials testing. They had other people from NASA that would come in to use the lab facilities, but we were the only resident people in this lab building\\n\\n I can remember, just as plain as day, Martin Raines called, and he was the head of Reliability and Quality Assurance at JSC, Houston. He had left White Sands [as the NASA Site Manager] by that time. He was in Houston, and he had called Leonard Schluter, my compadre. We were the only two in the lab at the time, and said, “Okay, Leonard, I’m going to name you Mr. Materials Test,” and that made old Leonard so proud. He was tickled to death with that title.\\n\\n But in the process, JSC said, “We’ve got to gear up to test every non-metallic material that is in the inhabited portion of the spacecraft Every material had to be tested, and it had to be tested fast. So we went from just a little bitty test organization to a full-blown 3-shift operation—We had to design our own test chambers. We had to design our own test fixtures that went into the test chambers. We had to develop the test methods. We had to develop the procedures, and there was nobody there to help us who had any experience, because nobody had ever done this before.\\n\\n Leonard and I, and the Site Support Contractor developed all these processes and procedures and got the basic flash and fire test apparatus, where you’d put a material in a chamber, backfill with oxygen, apply heat, and put a flash—flash a spark over it to see if the offgassed material was flammable. See, we were running about, as I recall, 16-something psi [pounds per square inch] oxygen, 100 percent oxygen. And you’d spark that spark, and if it caught things on fire, that would be like an electrical arc in a spacecraft.\\n\\n And we asked the question, “Well, will an external ignition source ignite this material?” So Leonard and I developed little igniters that produced a constant heat output for about 20 seconds as I recall, to use to ignite the material being tested. We went through a real interesting process developing igniters that would be consistent in BTU [British Thermal Unit], from test to test. You know, repeatable heat content, to light these test materials. We would light these materials from the bottom and the top and measure the flame propagation rate. In fact, we were in such a hurry that we were always trying to improve the test methods. Once the technicians asked, “How are we going to clamp these materials so that we can rapidly test?” You’d put a material in there, and you’d test it, and you put a material in there, and test it, just over and over and over. And, we tested 3 samples of each material. The fixture at the time used several bolts and nuts that had to be operated for every sample change.\\n\\n I was carrying a clipboard when this question was asked. I said to the tech, “Let’s just take some of these clips off, and then we can just clip the materials under them, and we can change test materials real quickly.” So we took the metal clamps off, mounted them on a test fixture that was installed in the chamber, clamped the test material under there and tested. To my knowledge, this same type clamp is in use at WSTF today.\\n\\n We ended up designing a variety of test chambers and fixtures, set up all the instrumentation, and developed the test criteria, to establish the burn rate or flame propagation rate of nonmetallic materials. And NASA Houston personnel worked closely with us. Of course, they gave us the general requirements for passing or failing, but we’d put the technical inputs in to them fellows like Mike Steinthal and several other people that were at our level. Howard Kimzey, Fred Dawn, Dr. Dawn, Henry Pohl. Never forget those people because they were so dedicated to the Apollo mission—and we worked closely—never did meet them personally for years, but they just like worked with us and helped us get this thing going.\\n\\n We worked three shifts. Like I say, there were two NASA people at first, working a three-shift operation, and it was one hectic thing, but we did it. We tested over 4,000 materials over this time period, 4,000 for Apollo alone! I can’t remember whether it’s materials or tests; 4,000 just popped into my mind. But we did it. We did everything required of us. See, it was just very basic testing even in those days. It’s very basic. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-16\\n\\n .)\\n\\n And then—I don’t know whether you’re ready for this [at this point in the interview], but then that was when Leonard, Dr. Schluter, later he got his degree, his Ph.D., and I got my master’s degree. I was going to school after hours just when I could, and they [administrators at New Mexico State University] gave me an ultimatum, said, “You’ve either got to finish—.” See, I took courses even when I was in the Army, and I’d exceeded my five-year [time] limit, and I lacked two courses, and they said, “You’ve either got to finish those two courses, or we’re going to make you start over.” So there I was in the middle of all this priority testing, but I got my master’s. But Leonard took a leave of absence in this period of time to get his Ph.D., a little bit later than this hectic time. Well, when Leonard returned, the Labs had been elevated to the office level and I was appointed Chief. I don’t think he ever really accepted me as boss since he had more time than I and had reached GS 14 before I did. Ken Gilbreath was the NASA Site Manager when this reorganization took place. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-17\\n\\n .)\\n\\n But those were really interesting times. The contractor, we had some people that were really dedicated in those days, but in the labs, the NASA people were the drivers [for the projects]. We were the ones that had the—we had good contractor people, but they were more like it was a job for them. To us, it was something more. This word “world class” started coming in Leonard and I’s vocabulary, and that’s the thing [the world-class concept] that we used to motivate these people. We said, “Look, if we’re going to do any work, let’s do it the best that anybody in the free world could do.” And that’s what we were trying to do, is to instill in these people the importance of producing a product where we didn’t get into a [Apollo] 204 again, you know. And I think we did pretty well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "With the fast pace and with the lack of precedent, no one had ever done this before, how were you able to judge when you knew you had the best data, since you had to be able to provide a fast response for your customer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I guess, as engineers, you know when you’re getting good data. You know mostly, not always, but in general. And we had the authority to change things and improve things as we were going along because, see, that’s one of the big advantages of being at the White Sands Test Facility. We were little. And when you don’t have all this bureaucracy—and there’s one thing that the Manager’s office did at White Sands. They were more interested in propulsion. So what did they do with us? They just left us alone. We had no encumbrances, and we established our own paperwork system. We did all of that, you know, and nobody really knew what we were doing, and we sure didn’t tell them, because we knew what would happen. And as long as we were producing data, the people [at MSC] were really content.\\n\\n I’ll never forget that one day we were testing—and I looked at all the data, and Leonard, he was mostly involved in the chemistry part, odor testing and all of that. I was involved in all of the flash and fire and propagation rate [testing] and we kind of split those [split these from chemistry like functions] up. We were never given any official assignments to these things, but we just knew our expertise and our strengths and then we kind of overlapped to cover each other.\\n\\n But I was walking in the lab there one day, and they were running flash and fire tests on paper. They were testing paper, because you put flight documents, you have all that flight document stuff. We [NASA] were worried about the flammability of paper. And I said, “Well, how’s your data going?”\\n\\n And they said, “Fine.” They showed me paper, and it had a flashpoint of a temperature that was lower than if it was lying out in the sun, out there in the New Mexico desert.\\n\\n And I said, “There’s something wrong here.” So I watched that test and found out what was the matter. The techs were mounting the paper in such a way that they were causing this spark to go right through the material, and it was igniting it, and it had [was promoted by] the oxygen there [in the test chamber].\\n\\n So that’s when I redesigned the flash and fire apparatus. That’s when I went into my office and redesigned this whole thing, put it together, and called Houston and said, “I got a better system here.” And that’s when I got my patent on my temperature controller. That’s a little temperature thing that caused the test chamber to heat up linearly while a spark jumped across a gap every few seconds. You couldn’t buy that kind of equipment in those days. Today with the computer [technology], boy, you can just do it easy.\\n\\n With the NASA co-op, we developed that system, and I got my master’s thesis on that little temperature controller—and that’s the only way I could get my master’s degree thesis completed, because I’d work on it during duty hours—I was doing something that I had to do anyway; and New Mexico State University let me write my master’s thesis on that. But that’s why we were given freedom, and NASA Management trusted us, I guess. Most of it, I think it was because they were preoccupied.\\n\\n Now, when [Kenneth B.] Ken Gilbreath, was appointed as the NASA site Manager he was very, very interested in what we were doing [in the lab], but most of the time the manager was a propulsion or facility oriented, and naturally you’re going to favor your interest—that’s what people do. I mean, you didn’t hear of the labs. That wasn’t even a word that was spoken until Ken Gilbreath made us an office, and that was the thing that put us in gear." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you first started out, did you have a facility, or where were you housed, and then how did that evolve?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the labs [area], they had three buildings that are all attached, and on one end was the clean room, and they had big high bays on each end where they did the prep for the test articles to be tested by the propulsion office, the Apollo test articles, before they would go up into the test stand and test these engines and things. Well, in the middle was what they call the laboratory, and it housed Building 200 and 201 and 202, as I recall. It might have been 203. I can’t remember those numbers. But there was a small section in there where we had offices, and I had a cubicle and Leonard had a cubicle, and they separated the contractor, of course, from NASA. So we had nice little places to work in the lab. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-18\\n\\n .)\\n\\n We always, later on, we had a Laboratories Branch Chief, later on, and then they would be there in the 200 area in a NASA office. That was the way it started out initially, and then when the site population decreased when the Apollo engine testing ended, all those people left [WSTF] and left Leonard and I there in the lab. Then the population returned a little bit later as materials testing began and a Branch Chief was again assigned; and one of those was Ken Gilbreath, and that’s when he learned the value of the lab. And there was probably five or six of us in the lab when Ken was there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us how you came up with the design for the test chambers? How were you able to determine what you needed for that part of that facility?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was mostly a scrounging mission, if you understand my words. The propulsion had a lot of containers around, and different sizes and those kinds of things, and Leonard was good at chemistry and combustion chemistry, and he said, “Man, we have to have a certain size chamber to do this and this,” and we would go searching around for a good-looking vessel, and then take it down [to the labs] and then design it to accept the appropriate test fixture. The contractor, they have mechanical engineers, and once we would set up the requirements—I didn’t actually draw the plans –they would draw them. They would set up the things [test chambers], and then they did stress studies, because they [the test chambers] were pressurized, and you had to have observation ports [to observe the tests], and so you had to worry about all of that, and you didn’t want that glass view port to blow out on you.\\n\\n So we would come up with these concepts and make sure that we had enough gas volume in there that a burning material wouldn’t get into what they call oxygen starvation, and we’d calculate all that kind of stuff and take the chambers down to the machine shop, and they’d build it. And take it back to the lab, and we’d put all the test fixtures in. And the contractor, of course, did most of the actual putting it together, and Leonard and I, and then later our NASA people, were there to make sure that it met what we thought was right, and then we would run basic baseline tests on it, and we decided the quantity of the material based upon what the test data showed us, and we just came up with the process. And people accepted it, and it was right [proved to be correct].\\n\\n (Refer to the following photos of some of the test chambers designed by Laboratories personnel used for Apollo and Shuttle testing;\\n\\n Photo A-19\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-20\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-21\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-22\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-23\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-24\\n\\n , and\\n\\n Photo A-25\\n\\n .)\\n\\n Again, engineering intuition is a great thing. You know, you have an intuitive feel. Whatever field you’re in, if you’re interested in it, you develop an intuition, and you just kind of know when things are not right, although sometimes you’re fooled, but you learn to follow that intuition—I call it an internal flag. I’ve always taught my people, I’d say, “When the flag comes up in your mind, stop and investigate it, because if you go past—if that little red flag’s waving in there, it’s telling you something. That’s your engineering intuition. That’s telling you something is amiss. Now, investigate it. You may find there’s nothing to it, but you investigate it.”\\n\\n And we kind of developed that philosophy, and it kept us out of a lot of trouble, a lot of trouble. In fact, we didn’t have any significant accidents in the lab. All the time we were there, we were running with the most hazardous toxic fuels and oxidizers, and high pressures, and every kind of thing. Now, on the test stand they had an accident, and that’s one of the reasons we got in the materials business. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was mostly ignorance, and not stupidity. Ignorance is different. And it was a sad thing. A person nearly got killed.\\n\\n After that, that’s what started the 800 area [hazardous test area called the category J test fluids]. We [labs and local NASA Site Management] said, “Well we’re just doing things too haphazardly. We’d better centralize it, localize it, or we’re going to really kill somebody.” And they [MSC and the NASA Site Manager] gave us—built us the test cells in the 800 area. That was where we started our hypergolic testing, the kinds of testing like—really it’s the hydrazine and the N2O4, fuels and oxidizers that’s used in the Shuttle, in Apollo, really in Apollo, in the Shuttle. I have to remember that [which systems they were used on]. It’s been too long. I’m not a chemist. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-26\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-27\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-28\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-29\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-30\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-31\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-32\\n\\n , and\\n\\n Photo A-33\\n\\n .)" + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What type of precautions did you institute to make sure that safety was a major factor in your work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the thing that always my philosophy was, the safety organization wasn’t responsible for safety [in the lab area]. The Safety organization, it was an overseeing operation that would tell us if we’re going off on the wrong track, but safety [test safety] is the individual’s responsibility, and especially with NASA’s [operations], because I was NASA and responsible for the labs. Before we would ever institute a procedure, we would have a little pretest review, and I had a committee, and I was the chairman, and we would sit in there, and the responsible test people would come and present to us how they were going to assure that this thing [test operation] was going to be safe. We had some good people on there [on the committee], as contractor and NASA. We would just really beat up on the proposed procedure until we were sure it was safe.\\n\\n There was one time we came very close to hurting someone. I can remember that we had a test chamber that was mounted vertical, and it had a glass top [view port] where you could look down into it and observe as you were testing, as a flash and fire chamber, and the technician kind of didn’t follow procedure, turned the pressure up too high [when backfilling with the test gas], and he was looking into that chamber, and it blew the sight glass out. A piece of the viewport glass just nicked his nose, just nicked his nose, and it just bled—once that happened, word got to me. I was in my office just right around the corner, and the word got to me just immediately, and I went roaring down there, and he was just bleeding like a shaving cut. I said, “Oh, no. This guy is—.” But then when we looked a little closer, he’d just nicked his nose, and we said, “Man, there is the warning. There is the warning.” So we were very, very careful from then on and made sure people followed the procedures that we wrote and tested before, and had those pre-reviews.\\n\\n And then I made a practice just walking around watching test activities. I’ve considered myself a safety officer and I wanted my NASA people to do likewise—we were safety officers. We were quality; we were safety; we were everything. But we had the help from these other people [contractor and NASA safety personnel] if they happened to be around, but we didn’t wait on them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Before we move off of the Apollo era, I wanted to ask you about a Group Achievement Award that you got for developing a new technique and materials for conducting those tests to help minimize the fire hazard. Could you share with us what those procedures and those techniques were?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Really, I think it would be more enlightening to describe what it was for —the award was for [performing] the complement of tests that we did. It was for a flash and fire test. There was an upward propagation test. There was an upward and downward propagation flame test, and several other tests all in there that we developed [for the space programs]. We started out with the very basic test, and then we just developed these pneumatic impact tests, and we went into gaseous oxygen, we call it the GOX test. We ended up with over 15 standard tests for materials testing. The main document was issued by the Office of Manned Space Flight, Washington. Its title was NHB 8060.1 “Flammability, Odor, and Offgassing Requirements and Test Procedures for Materials in Environments that Support Combustion”. This document was revised twice while I was with NASA. The original was originally written by personnel at JSC. [MSC]. However, the last revision, NHB 8060.1C was completely revised and our Laboratories Office was responsible for this revision. We coordinated with all other NASA centers who performed/were interested in materials testing. This included Johnson Space Center, Marshall Spaceflight Center, Lewis Space Center, and Kennedy Space Center and perhaps others. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-34\\n\\n and\\n\\n Photo A-35\\n\\n .)\\n\\n People in different places had toyed with testing materials, but no one had really developed a process where you could do a large quantity of repetitive, rapid testing like we had to do. So we developed test processes that you could do—what would you call it? Assembly line kind of testing. And think what’s involved in that. You just don’t go out and pick up a material and stick it in there [in a test system]. You’ve got to prep it. You’ve got to make sure you don’t contaminate it. You’ve got to have real precise prep procedures. We had a little prep room, and we had technicians that we had to train, and we didn’t know how to do this at first, but we had some people that thought, were good thinkers. [For example, to test paints that were received in liquid form, they had to be painted on a Teflon sheet, and peeled off to test after they dried.]\\n\\n So we’d go in [evaluate each material]. “Here’s the way you prep this material.” And we not only tested materials like your clothes are made of. We tested paint. We tested everything that went into that inhabited portion of that spacecraft.\\n\\n And a little bit later on, we started testing materials [used] outside the spacecraft that were involved in the fuels and oxidizers, you see. Then that’s when our 800 area and all that stuff started coming into play, and the lab now was growing by leaps and bounds. Now, they [local management] didn’t let us have many more people. In about [19]’68 is when Jack Stradling came to work for us, and I mention Jack’s name because, to me, he was a genius kind of a guy, very quiet, laid back, but if you had something to do, Jack could do it. He’s a mechanical engineer, certified airplane mechanic, stunt pilot, just a quiet fellow that worked probably fifteen hours a day every day that I knew him, and got paid for eight.\\n\\n I’d stay around late just to run him home, because he’d overwork himself. A lot of times the wives would blame me for their husbands not coming home, but he was just that dedicated, and had a photographic mind and could remember data. Everything he checked, he could remember. And you’d get into a meeting, he won any arguments about testing, because he knew the data and he could interpret it. But he came to the labs from the test stand, and we just bonded real quickly. So now we had Leonard and Jack and I and a couple or three others that were doing some of the other things, and that’s when it started growing. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-36\\n\\n .)" + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The same year that Jack came, in ’68, there was a recommendation to George [M.] Low that a possible phase down needed to take at White Sands. Share with us the impact of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, here we were. The reason they were doing that [considering closing WSTF] is because we [WSTF] were a propulsion site, and propulsion activity had dropped to nothing. And they [propulsion managers] were desperate for work, to keep their many people busy, as I recall. But in the labs, it was a different thing, but we had no recognition, see. See, we didn’t become an office until about [19]’71, as I recall. So we were there, and we were doing all this stuff [materials testing], but we were not getting recognized outside of the people that needed the data.\\n\\n Then the money crunch came about then. See, there was a big money crunch. So naturally, Low was going to say, “Why have all these little peripheral things out there that have no function anymore? Let’s shut them down.”\\n\\n In fact, I spent as much time—all of my tenure, from that time on, until I left, essentially, justifying our existence because we had people wanting to shut us down. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t try. You ought to be able to verify your existence, but I tell you, we did [verify our existence]. And you get people like Leonard Schluter and Jack Stradling, and I’d like to say myself, and a guy like Frank Benz, and these people that were just technical dynamos and were really sold on their selves—not on their personal selves, but on the job that they had and the importance of that job. They’d come in from Houston by busloads with a skeptical face, and by the time it was over, they were our buddies. They’d come around and tell you, pat you on the back and say, “Man, we can’t shut you guys down.”(Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-37\\n\\n and\\n\\n Photo A-38\\n\\n .)\\n\\n Then when that happened, as we got notoriety, we grew more, and more people would give us more work, and that’s when I decided, if we’re going to survive here, after this kind of stuff [people continually wanting to shut us down], if we’re going to survive, we’ve got to get other people than JSC involved to a big way. And that’s when we got what they [local accounting people] call—when people pay their own way, they called it in those days “funny money.” I hated that. I hated that. I said, “We’re not going to call it ‘funny money.’ We’re going to call it ‘reimbursable.’” So I renamed that so it would sound more professional.\\n\\n But to get back to your main question, boy, the morale was bad. Were we afraid? Yes. I was asked to go to Houston, and everybody else—and most of these people did, and I said, “Well, no, I think I’ll stay.” And Ken Gilbreath asked me to stay. He was the WSTF NASA Manager at that time, as I recall. We were also close to being closed several times during the time Jesse Jones was NASA Site Manager\\n\\n And I got tickled at Jack Stradling. Jack told them, he said—you have to know Jack to appreciate him, but he said, “I’ll go, but there’s going to be claw marks all the way across Texas.” [Laughs] I’ll never forget that. So he said he’d stay. So our little core stayed, and we fought, and we’d go out and talk to like Paul Ordin at [NASA] Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] and say, “Paul, we need so and so.” We developed a hydrogen safety manual. We did an oxygen safety manual. We developed all of those things. Jack went off and gave presentations to all of these people\\n\\n Then these people began to say, “Hey, maybe these people are real.” They’d come down to WSTF Labs and observe our work. There’d be just a little old handful of people, and the work productivity was tremendous, and that’s why people kept saying—“How do you guys get all this done?”\\n\\n We said, “We work.”\\n\\n The government’s not known for working, to be honest with you. In fact, I never thought I’d stay with the government for my entire career. I just never thought I would. When I got out of the military at WSMR there weren’t any jobs, and they said, “Well, you just stay right here. We’ll give you a job,” and I took a temporary job, and then it just blossomed, and I told you the rest of the story.\\n\\n But I had a wonderful career. Oh, I just had more fun, more fun than you ought to have. It was fun every day I went to work, you know. Of course, you had a lot of things that bothered you, but when you’d look at it, I wouldn’t change it, except my last month of employment. But other than that, it was fun. And for the most part I was rewarded for my efforts. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-39\\n\\n and\\n\\n Photo A-40\\n\\n .)" + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What are those projects that you were working on back in the late sixties, early seventies? Did you do some work for the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Lab, the MOL?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes, we did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk to us about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Manned Orbiting Lab, it was coming into focus because the Air Force was trying to get in the outer space business, and we did all their testing. We talked them into doing all the testing on all of their material, and we were really going good, and then they cut the program.\\n\\n But it’s strange. When we did, there was all this material [materials that had been received for test] that we were just dumping, and I’m an electronics guy, and I went by the trash can—and this was a long time ago—and there was a little can, little jar of—we call it heat transfer material. It’s material that you put between transistor cases, thermal compound, we call it, that transfers the heat from the transistor into its heat sink. And I picked that up, and I was looking in my shop today, and I’ve still got it. [Laughter] And I still use it every once in a while, and that’s been years and years ago. So I put a little bit of Manned Orbiting Laboratory in anytime I hook a transistor to a heat sink. Just a little dab it takes, and I don’t did do that much in the shop, but I’ve got that—probably illegal, but I’ve got it. [Laughs] But they can have it back anytime they want." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’ll pass that on.\\n\\n The Apollo missions were up and going during that time. What type of interaction with the Apollo missions, if any, did you have, on your lab hat?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hardly any, because we did all of our work before the Apollo flights occurred, but if they got into a problem—I can remember Apollo 13. That just sticks out in my mind. That was a scary time. But, see, this was after—as we [the astronauts] were coming back—they said, “Well, you know, the fire could’ve started in one of the oxygen tanks.” So I got involved in determining the lowest voltages in the particular atmosphere that you could draw electrical arcs of sufficient intensity to ignite the material that the wire was [insulated with]—the wiring [insulation] in those tanks had is Teflon, as I recall. So I got back in the laboratory with my own little smock, and designed those tests and determined that for them [NASA JSC]. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-41\\n\\n )\\n\\n And there were others. They don’t come to mind, but in Shuttle there were several, like the oxygen-flow control valve and all of those things. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-42\\n\\n and\\n\\n Photo A-43\\n\\n .)\\n\\n But if they had a materials problem, you know—and I’m trying to remember whether all these flight documents that we had was Apollo or Shuttle, and I can’t remember, but they had a bunch of flight documents that some way or another the ink, when it offgassed—and I think it was Apollo, but I’m not sure of that—and the astronauts got blisters in their noses. So we ran a long series of tests to determine the cause for the blisters—they didn’t know what caused the blisters, and so we had WSTF Laboratory volunteers in our odor test to sniff different inks and allow their noses to get blistered so that we [NASA] could change ink if necessary—that’s the kind of people that WSTF test personnel were. I’ll not forget that. I wish I could remember what [the ink type was]—I can’t remember the details. I just remember the incident.\\n\\n But these whole [odor] panels would get together, and they’d sniff that stuff. They’d put that right up to your nose, and you’d take a deep sniff. I was on the odor panel. And we’d sniff, and the doctors or nurses would come [from the WSTF dispensary], and look in your nose. “Ah! There’s the bad one.” One nurse I remember was called “Chappie.” She was particularly dedicated. And we found out that it was a particular ink, and we found out that if you changed that ink, it would not blister your noses. Isn’t that something? (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-44\\n\\n .)" + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What other types of tests did you need volunteers for?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that was the main one. In fact, we didn’t do any other human experiments, as such. But that was the one that we—you volunteered, and so we had to develop a way to motivate folks to be testers—volunteer is fine, but is there some incentive? And what we did was, on the incentive, we would every Friday or—I think it was every Friday, if you went through so many sniffs, you’d get treated with a steak dinner. Of course, that all came through the contractor, and so we had that, and you became a “smeller feller” after a certain number of sniffs.\\n\\n I remember the guy that had the most sniffs whose name was Abe Chavez. Whatever good that is, that was his name. He had hundreds and hundreds of sniffs by the time I left. But you’d volunteer [to be on the odor panel]. It was interesting that [at first] women couldn’t be on the odor panel, because their sniffing was inconsistent, the results [were inconsistent]. We found out that it was because of the lipstick and because they put perfume on, and they had makeup on, and they were smelling that rather than the material being tested. So we said, “Okay, if you want to be on the odor panel, you have to scrub your face.” And some of them did. And we said, “That’s great.” So they became odor panel members. But they had to do that [scrub their faces]. You had to make sure they didn’t have any kind of makeup on, and that cleanser stuff you put on, that my wife uses, that I don’t know what it is. You know what I mean?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Y’all know. I don’t. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But once we did [figure out the problem], you know, that was fine [to have female odor panel members]. We had—her name was Chris. Her [last] name changed a couple of times, but her first name was Chris. She administered this test for years, and she was really, really good, a real dedicated person. In fact, the picture, the photograph you saw was her. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-45\\n\\n .)\\n\\n She was administering odor sample. But a lot of people would not serve on the odor panel. I’d say to them, “I don’t blame you.” [But a lot of people would serve.] Because you don’t know the effects of the sample on your health. Maybe that’s why I’m so lightheaded today. [Laughter]\n\nWould you share with us the lunar cleaning tools? You talked about the tools. And also while you’re talking about the cleaning of the tools, also about the Viking Project [Mars Lander] as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Lunar tool cleaning was really interesting. That program was not on the normal WSTF budget. We were always out looking for things, and we [Laboratories Office] had the clean room at that time. The laboratories, I talked Ken Gilbreath the WSTF Site Manager into letting me manage everything in that 200 area building. I said, “Look, I can manage it if you give it to me.” As a result, the laboratories had the materials testing, had the clean room, had the {mechanical and electrical] calibration, and had all this stuff. We even had our [own] little shop, fabrication shop. We had all of this stuff going on, and one of them was the cleaning [function].\\n\\n We [in the Laboratories Office] said, “If we’re going to survive, and if we want to reach our goal of being the best laboratory in the world,” and that’s all we wanted, “we’re going to have to be willing to convert normal operations to special things, to get projects in the clean room and in all areas,” and we did them [ran special projects] in all areas. “We’re going to have to do things outside the natural, the normal NASA budget.” And that puts us in a position of strength. That’s my thinking. Always operate from a position of strength, right? Never operate from a position of weakness. You’re going to get beat if you do. You know? So we always got ourselves in this position of strength before these people trying to shut us down would come. And, thinking people, you can convince them, if you’re right, that you can do a job and therefore survive.\\n\\n Well, Leonard Schluter was a dynamic person, Ph.D., new Ph.D. at the time, dynamic, very smart. And he’s an older fellow. He’s older than I am, if you can believe. But he’s an older fellow. Of course, we weren’t that old in those days. But he established an outstanding rapport in the cleaning area with customers, and he had contacts in Houston, and they said, “These tools, lunar tools, before we go to the Moon, have got to be cleaned. You cannot take your contaminant all the way to the Moon and contaminate the Moon with Earth.”\\n\\n And Leonard said, “We can do it.” And nobody had ever done that before. But we developed cleaning processes and procedures which were very meticulous, and we trained the people, mainly Leonard, trained those people, and then pretty soon JSC said, “Well, that’s the place to do it.”\\n\\n We designed special containers, and we shipped those tools back and forth, using commercial transport. We had these special pressurized, as I recall, special sealed, I should say, containers, put those tools in, all kinds of little tools that you work on the lunar tools [samples], and we met their requirements. We had faster turnaround than they could get anywhere else. Even though they had this delay due to shipping time, we had them scheduled [such that it was no problem]. We had our people trained, and we said, “You don’t want a dirty tool.” So we had all these verification processes.\\n\\n So the clean room now became notorious, not only as a test stand support [area], but as an agency resource, and that’s the goal. If you’re going to survive, you have got to be an agency resource, not just at the dictates of JSC, because they’re selfish, naturally. It’s not bad. They’re going to protect their own self before they protect you, and if they get just enough funds, to operate their own programs what are they going to do? They’re going to wean you off. But if we get [NASA] Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama]—and that was one of our great competitors, was Marshall. But Langley and [NASA] Lewis [Research Center, now Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field, Cleveland, Ohio] and all of these others, boy, they were our friends, because we responded to them, and we treated them as good customers should be treated. We gave them all they expected and more for the money they gave us. And the same way with the curator, out of his own budget, he gave us money that he would normally use for his own operations.\\n\\n Well, then Viking came. Now, Viking was the Mars thing, and if we thought we were clean with the lunar stuff, that was not even near clean. So we set up a very, very intensive, new process. We called it, as I recall, the vacuum bake [test system]. We would clean according to our normal process, then put these components in this big vacuum chamber and heat them up and pull vacuum on it [the chamber], and that would pull all the volatiles, all of that stuff off. And we would put those Viking components in there, the mass spectrometer, all that stuff in there, and they’d be in there for days. And we would watch, because when you’re offgassing material in a test chamber, you can’t pull the pressure down as low, because the offgassed material keeps raising the pressure. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-46\\n\\n and\\n\\n Photo A-47\\n\\n .)\\n\\n So we’d watch till we could get that pressure, the vacuum to a certain level, and then we’d know the components were clean. Then we’d package them with special packaging. I even designed a heat sealer. We were having trouble with the—we’d put these in special plastic bags made of Teflon and heat seal them. So Leonard, I remember he came up to me, “Dave we’ve got a problem with our heat sealer.”\\n\\n I said, “I’ll design you one.”\\n\\n So I took the old one, modified it, came up with a little circuit that would allow them to go “Zap!” and seal Teflon bags. That’s kind of my forte. You know, that was my thing. I could come up with those little things. And we never patented it. I look back; if we’d wanted to patent things, we’d probably had fifty patents. And we got discouraged at times when we did try to get a patent, and I won’t name names here. As an example, we got discouraged because we were sent a test chamber from another Center, from JSC, and the guy who designed it was so filled with pride about it! It wouldn’t work. Every time we had a reaction, the very expensive system burned to the ground. Very poor design. Very poor design.\\n\\n And the people in my lab said, “We can do better.” It was the pressurized mechanical impact system. So a WSTF Lab NASA mechanical engineer named Larry Davis designed a workable system. This guy, he came up to me and said, “Dave, here’s the way to do it.” And that’s part of management, is recognizing when somebody has got a good idea. Don’t douse their ideas. And he designed this test chamber, still in use today, where he used a little bitty test chamber, pressurized it, and you could counterbalance the force exerted on the impact pin the—we were running at 10,000 pounds [PSIA] and higher pressure. Of course, that high pressure pushed the diaphragm attached to the striker pin up so you couldn’t externally force it down, when it was impacted —we were putting a little piece of test metal in the test chamber, and we’d impact it, or other material in there and impact it [to determine the impact force]. Well, you’d get the high pressure offset and get no dent in the metal when the striker pin was struck, so he built a little chamber that counterbalanced that pressure so that the diaphragm was free to go up and down [under pressure], and then we’d impact it. And we said, “That’s patentable.”\\n\\n And the guy at Houston who had that other one said, “No, that’s my idea.” And he never would approve this totally different concept for a patent.\\n\\n You know, that kind of stuff, it’s that petty jealousy. So I just said, “To heck with it.” But I did get one patent, and I could’ve gotten a dozen, easy. We just didn’t have time to write them up. Our office staff was very, very time limited. And in those days, you didn’t have word processors. So it was a lot of work, and we just said, “Well, we’ve got to get the work done.” I thought about it [getting patents] many, many times. And I encouraged the contractor to patent their ideas and they got a lot of patents, because they had more resources [to prepare them] than we did. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-48\\n\\n .)" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While we’re talking about different types of programs, what kind of support did you offer for Skylab?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "About the same. We responded to anyone that had materials that they wanted tested, now we had sent Jack and, by this time, Frank and all these people out into the world, and so we had ASTM [American Society of Testing and Materials] standards. We’d written ASTM standards for some of our test methods. We’d written all these kinds of things. So we were well known, and so they would call us. “Are you guys interested in testing so-and-so?”\\n\\n We’d say, “We sure are.”\\n\\n One of the big problems you had was setting up the fund transfer. [Christopher C.] Chris Kraft [Jr.] didn’t like us to do reimbursable work. He didn’t like us to do materials testing for other agencies other than NASA. It just chapped him. He allowed us to do it , but he didn’t like it, and he was always kind of wanting to stop us from doing this testing , for whatever reason, I don’t know. But after budgets got tight , then we were given a little more lee way—and he finally kind of gave in when he saw the need to help others with our specialized testing, but he was always fairly critical of the reimbursable activities—I think he was opposed to it even when there was an obvious need, too, but I don’t know why. But we had a hard time with him. But when he’d come out [and visit us], he’d go away, and he’d say, “Well, we just have to stay with the reimbursable projects.” [Laughs]. I must add that our NASA Site Manager, Jesse Jones was always very supportive of these tests and went to bat for us as needed. But over the years we did a lot of important reimbursable work for DOD, other NASA centers, and industry. This work supplemented the JSC budget and allowed us to stay in business with high quality engineers and scientists. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-49\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-50\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Photo A-51\\n\\n , and\\n\\n Photo A-52\\n\\n .)\\n\\n [Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Dr. Kraft. I remember Frank Benz had convinced someone who was involved with the Alaska gas pipeline to consider the labs doing a very large, expensive and dangerous test. As I recall, an explosion and fire had occurred on the pipeline and we at WSTF were going to simulate the events that led up to it and let it explode. I think the pipeline people had come up with a pipe design to contain the explosion or something. We were going to bury a long length of this very large diameter pipe in the desert and let ‘er rip. Well, Frank and I convinced a skeptical Jesse Jones, the NASA Site Manager to sign up for this reimbursable test that would bring a lot of money to WSTF—nearly a million dollars as I remember. Someway Chris found out about our test intentions before Jesse told him about it and as I understand it, it infuriated him. I don’t know it for a fact, but I think Jesse got into a bunch of trouble for this. Like I said, we would take on anything. Well, the test never materialized fully because someone nixed the pipeline design idea so we didn’t do it. We in the lab were really disappointed though. The folks in Las Cruces would have likely heard this explosion, so maybe Dr. Kraft was correct in his attitude.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In [19]’71, you became Chief of the Laboratories Test Office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There’s Ken Gilbreath came in and gave the lab office level status —he’s my hero, even to this day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk about that time period, how your responsibilities changed. It was also the time where Shuttle was starting to impact the Center. So talk to us about those—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "See, Ken Gilbreath had been in the labs as one of the Branch Chiefs. Well, I had three or four Branch Chiefs while I was there. They would just kind of come and go. At one time I was an Operations Director for the Propulsion Office assigned to the labs, and I was reassigned to other NASA organizations but I always stayed in the lab I can’t even remember all the titles I had. We had been reduced down to very few people, but the materials testing, you know, had come in, and now we were outside of the JSC envelope, and we were doing all of this testing for other NASA Centers, DOD, and even industry. Good old Ken, he was the visionary. He would call me into his office, and he says, “Dave, this is a good thing that you’re doing up there in the lab,” and he gave me the credit for it. I gave him a lot of the credit, because he was one of those kinds of people that recognized a good thing. And he said, “We’re going to make you an office.”\\n\\n Well, now, naturally, here we were, two or three tiers down from that first line, and all of a sudden we’re up there? But that did it. I mean, when we became the office, then I had direct contact [with the Site Manager’s Office], and Ken worked with me, and I was able to expand my “empire” to four or five people. And we pulled in people from the contractor. Some of these people, who worked for the contractor wanted to come to work for us. They wanted to be NASA. And the good ones, you’d bring them in. So we were able to expand the organization. Everybody that I brought on, one of the unwritten rules I presented them with was, you do the standard stuff, but you get some reimbursables so that we can build this into an operation that’s independent of JSC financing, because they’ve got their funding problems. Let’s get all these other Centers, and let them help support our test team—and we did; and that’s what we did.\\n\\n And we were able to grow. It was a turning point, and that’s when our battle cry was—the “world class,” that was my coinage from way back, but with Leonard and I, we kind of came up with that “world class” thing as our Motto. But here’s where we first were able to create leverage to meet our motto—when we made it to the office level, see, I was a Laboratories Office Branch Chief first, but not for very long. Then Ken came in there and raised our organization up to an office level, and put me on the same level as Propulsion. Needless to say, that was not the politically popular thing to do—because, you know, it’s hard to change a culture, and we [WSTF personnel] were in a propulsion culture. But even when we were dying, people had the mindset “We started out Propulsion; we’re going to die Propulsion.” But I didn’t have that mindset, my people didn’t have that mindset, and Ken Gilbreath didn’t have that mindset.\\n\\n So that’s what did it. That made it. Then from then on, you just watch out. And we had all that support [from the Site Manager]. Of course, we were really disappointed when Ken left. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-53\\n\\n and\\n\\n Photo A-54\\n\\n .)\\n\\n But we maintained ourselves and grew even after that into a—just so close to a world class test laboratory. And “world class,” to me, was when we were going to be independent of even JSC, and we could’ve done it. I know we could’ve done it, and then we would’ve been a separate organization and in position to be the NASA agency resource for materials testing—and we had people in Washington talking about it. We would’ve been a test agency for materials testing that was being funded from NASA Headquarters, to support everybody, and recognized as such, rather than getting low-level funding, funding from two or three tiers down from individual customers. That’s different than getting funding out of the big NASA budget than from organizations within the different Centers.\\n\\n And industry. Frank Benz had come on as staff way back, and I can’t remember when he came, but he was just a college kid, but when he came on, he developed the expertise in combustion things, metals combustion and fire hazards, I guess you would call it. And he became a world resource. He went everywhere. He went to Exxon, Mobil and Exxon and Mobile and people called him all the time. “We’ve got a big, serious problem here.” And they’d pay for his trip. He’d go. And as an expert. When you get to be an expert like that, you get a lot of calls, and these people would pay their way.\\n\\n And the way we kept our site test equipment modern, we finally convinced local management to share the reimbursable “tax” money with the WSTF office that got the project —Up to then all these reimbursables were taxed by the “head-shed”[WSTF Site Manager}, and they would take that money and spend it on whatever the NASA Site Manager decided. So we finally convinced the NASA Site Manager to let us have our tax money. And boy, when that happened—there was a 10 percent surcharge on everything, which was reasonable for customers outside JSC. Then we could buy new equipment. We could keep our facility and test equipment modernized. We had the best facilities. If we needed a new instrument —new anything we could save up and get it. We had the best. And we did it with these funds. [We also funded small basic research projects associated with test development methodology and data management.] So that’s the way we kept ourselves going. We just became a little industry, is kind of what we did. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-55\\n\\n .)" + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’d like to hear more details about that, but we’re going to stop for just a minute and change out our tapes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I talked that long, didn’t I?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about your management style that you had while you were Chief of this office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Management style is an interesting thing. In all the years that I was working, very seldom did I have a supervisor or a manager that taught me anything. So I kind of learned everything on my own. But I always made this observation—in my mind, I said, you know, all the things that I didn’t like managers to do, I was going to do the opposite, and a lot of those things I didn’t like boiled down to a lack of delegation of authority. Most every manager will give responsibility, but most managers will not delegate the authority that goes with that responsibility. So that’s what I did, I gave authority to fulfill assigned responsibilities and held people accountable for their decisions. I would search for the very, very best people that I could find that I thought would be compatible with my [management] style.\\n\\n A lot of the people [that end up as employees in the lab], you didn’t have any choice but take them. Here’s a person [that needed a new work assignment], and they would be assigned to you. But if you had a choice I would choose someone whose talents I knew—in fact, over the years, most of the people that I had in my organization were co-ops that had worked there. Very, very important thing. But what I would do, I would say, “Okay, when you come to work here, here is your area,” and I would not assign [projects to their area] without their concurrence. You want to get people in the area that they’re interested in. In the early years, we had some assignments of some people that were in areas they didn’t feel comfortable or they didn’t want to perform, and they weren’t that good [operationally]. But they were capable people [professionally]. So I observed that before I got into the management role and avoided assigning people to jobs they didn’t like when I became a manager\\n\\n So that’s one of the things I did. I surrounded myself with competence. And when you surround yourself with competence, you give them responsibility, you give them the authority, you give them control over their project and funding. Now, you check them [their progress], and you make them report to you [concerning their decisions and progress] and we developed a means accomplishing this for the whole lab, which was kind of another little unique thing that Jack and I developed.\\n\\n So when you do that and you give a person the authority or the responsibility, and he has the authority without continual management interference, you’re going to find out if they’re good people, and if they are they’re going to excel. Then you reward them. And I’ll tell you, I rewarded my people in every way I could, whether it was an outstanding performance appraisal—if they earned it or a merit pay increase. Now, if they didn’t earn it, I wouldn’t give it. I got a lot of criticism. I’d tell people. I said, “I’ve got two hats. You can be my best friend, but I’m going to tell you what I think. You can disagree with it, but I’m the boss. You might convince me I’m wrong, but communicate your displeasure to me.”\\n\\n You’ve got to communicate with these people, with all your people. You’ve got to tell them the truth from your perspective. Let them fuss a little bit if they want to, and if they’ve got personal problems, you work with them on personal problems, you work with them on professional problems, and you give them technical guidance, because as the manager, you develop an overview that as a detail person you can’t. And I’ve got a knack for that. I can look at things, and I can say—whether I’m a chemist or not, I know what the result ought to be. I just don’t know how to do it chemically.\\n\\n As a result of that, I had the people that work for me [responsible for their own decisions], they weren’t robots. In my opinion, you don’t want people that just do what you say because you say it. You do [want] people that do what they do because they think it’s right. And if they’re good people, they’re going to do the right thing most of the time. Then if you go look at some of the people that are good people and make sure they are recognized for their efforts, they will continue to perform well. I got real tickled at one of my employees. It’s Frank, I’ll tell you, Frank Benz, a tremendous guy. You ought to talk with Frank at JSC. But he was a young fellow, and he came in the office one day. I said, “Frank, I’m going to put you in for this special award.”\\n\\n He says, “I don’t want it.”\\n\\n I said, “Well, why not?”\\n\\n “Because old so-and-so got one just like it, and he’s worthless.” And I agreed. He was worthless.\\n\\n Then I would go into a little lecture, telling Frank that I wasn’t basing his performance on that guy’s performance. I said, “I’m basing your performance on your performance.”\\n\\n After a while, he said, “Well, in that case, I’ll accept it.”\\n\\n But that’s the kind of trust we all had between us. We weren’t personal friends as such. We didn’t hobnob. That’s just not my style. But we trusted each other, and we developed a trust and a dependence upon our cross-technical ability. We communicated. If I had trouble in this area, and cross-linked with individual people to help out, nobody felt jealous or protective. And it worked. You ought to have seen the crew. It was just a phenomenon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have a lot of turnover in your area?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Our contractor had tremendous turnover. I had no NASA turnover, hardly ever. People would stay and stay and stay. Now, every once in a while, somebody would leave, but very, very seldom. And if they left, to be honest with you, I was glad. Because if you want someone to leave in the government, you don’t fire them, but you talk to them, and you make them so that either they produce or they’re not going to be in favor with me, you know, and get these rare government promotions—I had one fellow one time, and just clear as day said, “I’m not going to do any more than I’m doing until you give me a promotion.”\\n\\n And what did I say? “I’m not going to give you a promotion until you get that attitude out of there and you produce at the level that you want to be promoted to.”\\n\\n Well, he left. Well, that’s good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many did you have at the peak?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Fifteen. As an example, I had this young lady [Kathy Pacheco], just fantastic. She was a secretary, but she did everything non-technical in the office. She was an office manager [Manager’s Assistant - even though she held the rank of secretary. Took three years to get her promoted]. Before I left, she was promoted to an office manager [Manager’s Assistant]. And I got her promoted higher than office level secretarial staff could generally attain you know, above the 5- to [a GS] 7-level [General Schedule], but she was elevated. But I was just persistent [with my management], and she performed at a high level. Doing more than secretarial work. And if she performed, she ought to be promoted. Finally, they allowed me to promote her after a lot of persistence." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your style when you are handling and dealing with your customers? Because you had a wide variety of customers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Customer is always first, but we were always honest with the customer, and if we didn’t agree with what they wanted to do, we’d say, “Here’s the way you ought to do it, but if you insist, we’ll do it your way, but it’s not the way to do it.”\\n\\n We got our technical people in there [contractor and NASA lab people met with the customer at the beginning], and we would convince them that our way to perform a test was the best way, and I never had anybody turn us down. When we showed them after a successful test that it was the best way, then by word of mouth we would get new customers—once we got a customer, we kept a customer, and we would allow those customers direct input into their test. We would say, “Look, anytime you want to come down here [to WSTF], you come down here. You can screw on the bolts if you want to.” And some of them did. Or, “We’ll [screw on the bolts and just] give you the data. We’re going to do what you want done, and we’re going to do it within the dollars that you allocate us. If we get in trouble, we’re going to tell you. If the data is bad, we’re going to tell you. We’re going to communicate with you, and we’re going to try our best to meet your schedule,” and we did.\\n\\n And they were really proponents. They would just come down and just really be happy with what we would do, and that gets around in the scientific communities, especially if you’re specializing. One thing it took, that made a real hard management thing. Reimbursable versus funded [projects], if you’re funded, like, say, from JSC, that’s money you’ve got [that you can plan on getting in the future]. You can plan on it. Reimbursables, you can’t. It’s just like this [reimbursables were usually one-shot tests]. And so you had to manage this thing so that the up-and-down nature of the reimbursables didn’t destroy your organization—because when you’re up, you don’t have enough people [to do all the testing]; when you’re down, you’ve got too many [to support available funds], and you’ve got to pay them regardless. In the government system, that was tough, but we did it. We kind of developed a little way that we could handle these things, and we had these reimbursable funds that we could take care of the valley [when there was not enough work for all the employees], and put them into productive type of efforts. [We could never have done it without our WSTF financial guru, Leroy Luchini, who worked as hard as anyone for us and never complained; quite a guy. He made sure that everything we did was financially legal and above board.] The average was two to three years when you made a contact before the funding got to you, and it was really tough.\\n\\n Another thing that was really hard in the management world was getting a contractor that had the same motivation that you [NASA] do, because contractors don’t have that motivation, because they get the contract because they’re the cheapest that they think can do the job, and they don’t hire the best people. They hire the lowest-paid people they can hire that will meet the requirements as they see them, and that’s not a good thing. But there’s a fellow that was my counterpart, and then became this contractor’s site manager, named John Schentrup, and, boy, I gave him a hard time for that, all the time. But he tried [to always hire the best people]. Higher management [than his position] just would not concede to hire the best people.\\n\\n You would have a person that’s outstanding [in technical competence], and that person on the contractor’s side could go get a job [from another company off site] at a 30 or 40 percent increase. The contractor wouldn’t give them that raise, but that person would leave, and then they would hire a replacement inexperienced person to do the job at 20 to 30 percent higher pay than the fellow that left. That nearly drove me crazy. That was the hardest thing to accept.\\n\\n But then there’s a guy named Craig Leisure, who was a Ph.D., [chemist] and as my support contractor counterpart understood [that we needed the best qualified people], we wanted Ph.D.’s and master’s, and high-level people, because we’ve got to do a lot of deep technical thinking in these areas, that we’ve never explored before in [for example] metals combustion. We did it. He hired good people at reasonable pay and the contractor site manager, John Schentrup backed him as best he could. Nobody else ever did it. They tried. They failed. But we [NASA and the contractor] did it. That’s the kind of people you need. And it was a struggle [to get them].\\n\\n But the NASA people, see, my NASA people were good, and they could fill in the gaps [that the contractor should fill but couldn’t] but what problems that causes. You’ve got the contractor and the NASA philosophy or the government philosophy is to keep them, NASA and Contractor, separate, but we couldn’t work that way. We had to put them together [as a close working team], and when you put them together, you get in a lot of conflict with upper, upper, upper, upper stage – all the way to the top - management. They [upper management both NASA and contractor labor people] didn’t like that. Then with my real insistence that the contractor perform and get the best people, it would’ve been nearly against policy—you know, it’s a stressful situation. But I was pretty dogmatic and hardheaded." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While you’re on that subject of contractor, what were some of your responsibilities to your contractors?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, my responsibilities, I evaluated them. I graded them. See, all the awards [contracts] that we had were incentive awards kinds of things [contracts]. There were different names [for the contracts] but what you do, at the end of the [evaluation] period, whether it’s three months or two months, that changed, what you did, you wrote a detailed report card on their performance and actually gave them a grade, and that grade determined how much money they were going to get. They get a certain amount for doing the basic task, and then they get incentive on top of that. Well, that grade—and it’s a considerable amount of money on a contract and was very important to the contractor: So you can imagine that the big boys, you know the upper NASA management, and the contractors wanted to award the full incentive fee even with lower than desired performance. Like I was saying a while ago, but if they didn’t earn it, you were under pressure to give it to them anyway, because they [local managers] would go way above you, and put the pressure on you. But, again, I was kind of obstinate. Our grades [given to the contractor] were very good, but not good enough to suit management [NASA and contractor] in a lot of areas. I even heard more than one manager say that the grade we gave to the contractor was a reflection of our own NASA performance.\\n\\n So what we would do, we’d come in, we’d say, “Here’s the strengths of the contractor. Here’s your weaknesses,” and we’ll have a meeting, and then we’d get together, and, “Here your strengths, and here’s your weaknesses, and here’s why you got the grade you got.” And they had an opportunity to correct them. If they’d correct them [the next report period], then we’d raise their grade. Needless to say, you could develop an animosity there between me and my [contractor] counterpart, but this guy like John Schentrup, we never did [develop resentment toward me, he was an amazing resilient fellow who understood my motivation. And I would just run him over the edge—you know, but it wasn’t personal with me; it was about overall performance that would lead to “world class”. But he was hog-tied because he wasn’t given the latitude to hire like the quality of people that he wanted to hire because of contractor policy, that he had no control over, but I graded him like he did. So it was kind of tough, but some of the contractor managers could handle it, and some of them couldn’t. John Schentrup and Craig Leisure handled it and allowed us to advance toward world class." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about the impact of the Shuttle Program, where you were right before your area got involved, and how the new program for NASA affected your services there at White Sands." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. The Apollo Program just was progressing, and after the Apollo 204 fire, we were just testing and testing and testing, but by the last Apollo launch, we’d done most all testing, and so the materials testing effort itself had fallen off. Of course, Shuttle, here came Shuttle. Well, Shuttle was on the drawing boards, but there were no materials to be tested at this stage, and here was Apollo that used a 100 percent oxygen environment for the habited areas of the spacecraft and here was Shuttle that that was more like the air we breathe here on Earth.\\n\\n So the test systems, you know, that was a whole new area of concern. But you can see the manpower, then, from the Apollo was really falling off, and the Propulsion area was getting very low on personnel—because there was no Shuttle engines that were to be tested [in the propulsion test area]. Even though later on, the reaction control systems and things like that would require testing. So their test activities were falling off. The Apollo was falling off. So there was just an inactivity curve [versus time]. You could see it [activity] going down.\\n\\n Well, at this same time, this is when we decided, and mostly that was my orientation is, “We’ve got to subsidize our efforts if we’re going to survive this thing.” This is when these people [from JSC and NASA Headquarters] started coming in and trying to close us. So we started going out after reimbursable work. At first, we went to Lewis and Langley and a little bit in industry, but industry was tough because there was no way for them to get money to us until later. But finally we worked that out, too.\\n\\n But these other [government] people would fund us, and we were able to just hang on by the skin of our teeth, and I believe—Propulsion probably wouldn’t agree with this—they would’ve closed that site at least twice if it hadn’t been for us, because prime contractors could not find other facilities to do the specialized materials and component testing—there was no one else had the capability [comparable to WSTF’s]. The testing had to be done, and to move [to another center or organization] that [the WSTF test capability] without the expertise, and it was all our stuff, and we knew how to run it, and nobody else did; and we knew how to interpret data from it, and no one else did, you know, down into the testing.\\n\\n We had the largest database of all this [test] information in existence. We had the [test] expertise in our NASA Laboratories staff. We had all of that, even with our contractor. And if you would’ve moved it to anywhere else, you’d have lost it. It’d have taken years, if ever, to recover, and the management people saw that. Now, I don’t know that for a fact, but that’s the gist that I get from the feedback that I had.\\n\\n So we just held on. And then the reimbursable [effort] got larger and larger and larger. Pretty soon, it was just about equal to the total JSC funding, with a lot of problems, like I was telling you before, with the peaking [and valley] nature of it. But during that period of time, it was really tough. We didn’t know whether we were going to be there or close. There was no security, job security. I would tell the people, “The only job security we have is do the best job you can. What else can you do? We can sit around and fuss about it and cry about it, and worry about it, and that’s not going to change a thing. But if we do the best job we can, give the best product we can, and go out and make these customers happy, we’ve got a chance.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What type of changes did you have to make to your lab to do work for the Shuttle Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mostly, it was generally additions. See, for the standard materials test, all we did was change the test atmosphere, the gas atmosphere that we tested. But there was one test in particular that kind of hurt my heart, because I was involved in my master’s thesis with this one. We called it a flash–and-fire, but when you go to an air environment, it’s not a good test. But with 100 percent oxygen, it was a wonderful test. We ran a lot of tests, but we weren’t getting any reactions. That tells you there’s something wrong with the method. If not maybe with the method itself, but it’s telling you that that method is not good for evaluating materials in that particular test condition and that’s where our business was.\\n\\n And we were rewriting the test documents. We went from some of the old test documents, and by that time, we were just responding to JSC, but by this time, we were writing the test procedures that were accepted in the NHB-8060.1 standard test document, we were writing them. We would have people from Marshall and all these other people from JSC, Kennedy Space Center, and other Centers come in, and we were in competition with Marshall. They wanted the whole pie. Of course, we weren’t going to give it to them. But we kind of, I think, outsmarted them. If they wanted a piece of equipment, I always said, “We’ll build it for you,” knowing full well—and they gave us a lot of funding to build them the special metals testing apparatus, but we were the experts [in using the equipment]. So they’d go run it, but they’d have to come back to us to keep it going and to supply them new ones and all of that, and if they had to interpret the data they couldn’t, so we did it for them. So we would take their money, so to speak, but give them what they wanted, but we would prosper from it.\\n\\n But our quarrel with them, really, was fairly good natured. It would get pretty hot [verbally] at some of the meetings where they would want to take over—but some of the people there, you know, they were buddies to us, but we just had a different goal for our capability.\\n\\n When we got into Shuttle, NASA started having problems [hardware]. They’d have problems with [components] like the oxygen flow control valve. They were failing. Well, we developed a test method to test them. See, metal, like aluminum, metal in oxygen, some metals are just like paper in air. They burn that way. Even with oxygen K-bottles that they use to supply welder’s oxygen, a lot of people get hurt because the valves blow up because of incompatible materials [used in the valves.].\\n\\n But we became experts in the compatibility of materials in these different media, like oxidizers in oxygen. And this oxygen thing really caught on because industry was [also] vitally interested in it. But we were the experts [in compatibility testing of materials in oxygen]. So we started getting a lot of industrial work, and we even developed our own valves. We even developed our own oxygen flow control valve for the Shuttle. They never did accept it, because they changed technology some way, but we had one that would not cause them problems, and we got into component development. That’s what we did.\\n\\n Not only did we do the testing, but we developed an expertise so that we could give them information and tell them how to do it right. In fact, one of the guys, named Barry Newton, worked for me, and he’s working here in town for a forensic investigator, and what he’s doing now is, he just patented an oxygen valve for industry, not associated with NASA, but based upon what he learned when he was working for NASA, because we just tested everything. In fact, we even developed what we call an oxygen safety technical course, and my people—I didn’t do it, but my people went all over the industry, to JSC, to KSC [NASA Kennedy Space Center, Florida], Vandenberg [Air Force Base, California], ASTM, everywhere, to teach them how to use—how to be safe in an oxygen environment, how to design your facilities, what [materials] you don’t use, what you use. And it’s [the oxygen safety course] widely accepted and the course is still taught today.\\n\\n In fact, we were involved in evaluating Vandenburg as a Shuttle launch facility—do you remember, they were going to put—Vandenberg Air Force Base, they were going to have launches [Shuttle] out there? If the truth were known, and I’m just saying this off the cuff, but our capability is the thing that told them they had a tremendous hazard after they built that facility and [as a result] they never used it. They called us [the Lab’s hazard assessment team] out there, several of us. I went out there, and we looked at it, and we told them, “You’ve got a bomb,” because they were venting their excess hydrogen into a tunnel—you know when you first start to fire the engines, hydrogen fuel is dumped—they had a big tunnel [to direct the exhaust gasses from the vehicle during launch], and we said, “Boy—.” We ran tests to show them that the sparkler system, to burn the excess hydrogen, was not enough to prevent some gas from getting into the tunnel. They could blow that thing [the Shuttle] sky high. They could’ve blown that Shuttle right off the launcher. When that stuff [hydrogen] goes down there [in the tunnel], the unburned fuel, it could be ignited, and the tunnel would act just like a shotgun barrel\\n\\n And we were involved in it. See, anytime they had that kind of a problem, they called us. But the transition to Shuttle was interesting—and then we got into the metals testing, you know, work in Apollo was mostly with—with nonmetals. We got into how you evaluate metals for oxygen and oxidizer service, and that all came as Shuttle requirements. So Shuttle just broadened us up, and on the bottom end, the regular standard materials testing, it became just kind of a fixed entity [work load], so many materials to test per week using an established standard test method. As I recall, we tested about twenty materials a week or something like that. These materials just kind of came in on a regular basis like that. We called them “routine” materials.\\n\\n But all this other activity grew and allowed us to expand into technologies that in time—we were the world experts. In fact, in one case, we sent one guy to Japan—Japan wanted their materials test facilities certified. Who do you think certified them? I Sent Dr. Harry Johnson over there, and he certified this Japanese facility for their materials testing for the Shuttle. They had some relationships with NASA JSC, and so we did that [certified their test facilities]. So we were just pretty well known for our expertise, especially when the testing was generally hazardous.\\n\\n Another thing we had and developed was a hazards assessment team, and anytime—like when the T-38 that got lightning struck, all of these kind of things, they’d request that the WSTF Laboratories hazards assessment team come in, this team would assess the hazards, and that’s [the way it was] when the Shuttle 51-L,\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n , accident occurred. We were heavily involved in the aftermath of that, trying to determine whether the event was an explosion, a deflagration or detonation. Did it detonate or just burn? And we were right at the top of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How long did you spend, do you recall?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I think we spent several months. In fact, probably six months to—over six months. Heavily involved in that, trying to assess what caused the problem—we got all the tapes and stuff [films], and we were trying to determine the cause—all of that. That was Frank Benz’ expertise, and he was good. He was really, really good. In fact, that’s when we got one of the awards—like I tell you, my management style was to award. There’s this Eagle Award, and I saw a little announcement one day, and it says, “NASA Eagle Awards,” certain, certain time, and I says, “You know, if there’s anybody in NASA that deserves an award, it’s this little test team. They have done more as a group than anyone else. There’s no one has done any more.”\\n\\n So I got busy on my little thing. I’m not a bad writer, you know, in those days. I’ve kind of forgotten how to do it now. So I put this thing together and picked five people that I thought—and that’s tough, but you couldn’t go in there with twenty, and I didn’t want to go in there with one. I didn’t want to do it [with just one]. I could have, but that wasn’t right. So I said, “I’m going to pick the five best people.”\\n\\n So I talked with my NASA and Contractor insiders. I didn’t want anybody to know what I was up to, but just some insiders, and we decided who those 5 people were—I mostly picked them, and picked those five people, and they were awarded, so we all got to go to Washington, D.C., and the Hilton [Hotel], that big theater—have you ever seen that place? Oh, man, that’s where all the big things happen, and with all the big shots, astronauts, the NASA Administrator, and they came in there [to attend this award ceremony]. We had tuxes on, and Sheila got to go, my wife got to go, and all our wives got to go. So we went up there, and they [the 5 test team members] were awarded that award, and that was the highlight [of my career]. That was the first inclination that we were there, we were right at the edge—we were headed for it, our goal of being a world class test organization. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-56\\n\\n .)\\n\\n The saddest part is when I got back from the awards ceremony, after I’d done all this work, [inside effort] I found out that there was one other [contractor] fellow that was as deserving as any of the five. That like to have broken my heart, and his, too. And all I could do is just apologize [to him], because I had gotten some misinformation from some of the people that I was talking about, about his role in this thing. His name was Rollin Christianson and he was a prime mover in many of the test activities associated with this award. I don’t think he ever forgave me, and I never did forgive me either. Because I’d overlooked that [his important contribution]. And that’s sad. When you see someone that contributes and the others get that high level award, and you make a mistake, it’s kind of hurtful.\\n\\n But that banquet was a grand thing. It really was. And you know the sense of accomplishment that you have at a time like that. And you don’t take it like you did it alone but of the group that you’re associated with—because they are the ones who really do it. I always say, “Look, if [as a manager] you’ve got good people, you just ride on their shoulders. If they do good, you do good.” And that’s what this group, this whole group had done for all these years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While you were developing all these procedures and chambers, you were also developing a unique cost-tracking system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was really something. One of the things, [the problems was tracking projects]—imagine having a large number of activities going on at the same time—we had a hundred projects going. Some of them were $1,000, some of them $10,000, some of them were a million dollar projects. And every one of them had the same problem: if you overspent, there’s no way to get any more money. You can’t get more money when there’s not any, because the way the government works—and I’m not talking about just JSC, but they’ll come up, and they’ll get some funds, and then they put that in their budget and then it’s approved, and then they give it to you for testing, and then the budget process goes on. That’s all the money there is for those tasks. So you say, “Man, if you miss that budget, what do you do? You have to stop right in the middle of testing,” because you don’t have any resources to continue.\\n\\n When I first got into this problem, we were doing that [overspending], about two or three projects, and that was not only embarrassing, it’s wrong to take somebody’s money and not produce a product. So Jack Stradling and I were talking. I said, “Jack, we’ve just got to do something.”\\n\\n Now, he’s a mechanical engineer, but he has a photographic memory, just super intelligent, like I say, very quiet, but super intelligent, and he can do anything with computers. That was when computers were just—well, we didn’t even have desktops. We had big computers, and he had a little HP [Hewlett-Packard] calculator that you could program, first ones that came around, and he had one of those things. And I remember this\\n\\n VP Planner\\n\\n , which is a Lotus [Software] precursor spreadsheet. And I said, “Jack, is there any way—we’ve got a hundred of these projects going. Is there any way that we can just say we’re going to start here [a point in time on a graph], and we’re going to end here [another point in time on the same graph], and we’ve got\\n\\n x\\n\\n dollars, and we can draw a straight line from here to spending all that money, till it’s all spent, on schedule. Then can you draw that straight line with the program, and then can you update every week with the new spending data,” which was already being accumulated, “and plot in there where they are with respect to that straight line? That’s all. That’s all I want. And we’re going to have a meeting every week, and every engineer is going to come in with their project, and they’re going to show me where they are on that line. But I’m going to review them beforehand. You’re going to give them to me.”\\n\\n In fact, first, I just was looking at this data; and so what I did, we’d go to these meetings, and everybody was in there at this weekly meeting, the contractor and NASA, and I was the mean guy. I’d sit over there [in my location as chairman], and I said “Okay. On the overhead, put up your chart.” And if they were over the straight line in expenditures on the chart, I’d say, “You tell me why you’re over spent on the chart.” And a lot of times they’d have reasons. And I’d say, “Now, you’re over the line and overspent, you tell me what from this point how you’re going to project where you are in time when the money is all gone there.” I’d say, “Just project.”\\n\\n And if it looked like they were over [budget], I made a threat. I’d say, “Look, I know how to run a project myself. I’ve been doing it for years and years and years. If you can’t keep your project [within budget], I’m going to run it for you.” Boy, you think they liked that idea? No sirree. And I don’t know that I would’ve [had I been in their place]. I never had to try it. I never had to live up to that. And if it went lower, I would say, “Hey, look. Aren’t you getting the resources you want? What’s the trouble here?” And if they had a reason, I would just let it go.\\n\\n But we started coming in on budget like you wouldn’t believe, with just that simple little management technique. Nobody had to do anything [special]. Nobody had to write a report. See, that’s what kills your engineering [momentum]. When you start having your engineers do all this paperwork stuff to satisfy administrative requirements, you’re taking away from your project and spending money.\\n\\n So that’s what we did. And, boy, did it work. We had all those hundred projects under control, and those engineers knew what they were doing. They knew what they were spending on. That’s why we got good ratings from our customers, because we’d stay with it. In fact, generally, generally, on the project we’d end up with extra money. And guess what they would do, the customers? [The customers would usually say] “We don’t have any use for it [the extra money]. Use it. [Buy] anything you want.” What would we do with it? Buy a new piece of equipment. And that was just great—and if we ever needed to buy, had to buy a piece of equipment [in order to perform the testing] with that money, we’d call them [the customer beforehand] and say, “Look, we’re going to use this much money for this [piece of equipment]. Is that going to give you problems—?” And they’d always, if they bought this equipment with their funds they were entitled to keep it, would let us keep it, because we sure didn’t get the budget [for the equipment] from NASA.\\n\\n But old Jack Stradling, with his little cost tracking thing saved the day. Then we developed it into a more and more sophisticated tracking system, and then we got … later, many years later, we got a local area network for the site, and then we put it on the local area network, and then we could call it up real time. But it was always a tremendous control thing. Jack just figured it out—and that was when it was not easy. Now—I could do it [now]. But I couldn’t have done it then.\\n\\n Then we got personal computers, and they came in later, and he set it up on personal computers; used Lotus. We had another group on site responsible for developing computer programs that we wanted to develop this into a more formal system, and they spent all the money I allocated them, and never came up with anything better [than Jack’s system]. So I thought it [Jack’s system] was kind of unique, and it worked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In 1990, your role changed at White Sands Test Facility twice. Would you share with us why those changes occurred and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I’ll try to do that without being bitter. I’m not bitter. I think I was not justly—they [NASA JSC and WSTF management] didn’t treat me—I wasn’t treated right, for whatever reason. I think I know [the reason] but it’s not important. I just walked into my office one Friday, and got a call from the NASA Site Manager [to report to the 100 area – his office], and he said, “Don’t report to the lab anymore.” He said, “I’m making you my special assistant, and your office is right there [in the 100 area], and don’t you go to the lab anymore.”\\n\\n And that ended my career with NASA—I became a special assistant to nothing. That was one of the old s ways you fired the unfireable; where if you’re not satisfied with somebody’s work, you move them laterally, and when you move them laterally, you don’t give them anything to do.\\n\\n I talked to the JSC head man, the Center Director of JSC, and told him the story. He had invited me up to JSC to talk to him, and after about an hour of me explaining the circumstances, he said he always backed his local managers, and he wouldn’t do anything about the WSTF Manager’s action [even if he knew the action was wrong. What else could I do with him having this attitude?]. So I had the choice to retire [immediately] since I had about 34 years of service, but he said, “Hang on. Things might get better for you.” I could see three years added to my accumulated service would be advantageous before I retired—and I said, “I’ll try it.” It worked for two months. This happened in about June. June, July 1990. And I just can’t be inactive—I couldn’t do that.\\n\\n At first I had a temporary job that was really important [to NASA]. It was with Electrical Arcing and Kapton Insulated Wire. So I delegated myself down about three tiers, and I was given a little test area in the south highbay in the 200 area. I was assigned nothing after I finished that project … the NASA Site Manager was content to let me sit in my office all day with no assignments, and so that’s the way I finished my career [that last job], doing something I love to do. I loved testing [That wire.] So I was just replaced [as office chief with no notice or warning of poor performance]. And it was sad, because people [mostly contractor laboratory personnel with a few NASA personnel] at the site lined up for blocks [an exaggeration to emphasize a point] to come in to see me and express their disdain for what had happened—I had letters that were sent to the [Center] Director of JSC, [from off site customers and fellow workers] that they sent me copies of, all of that stuff that made you really feel like that maybe it was unjust. All of my employees, nearly every employee came up and said, “Dave, if you give us the word, we’ll all quit.”\\n\\n I said, “Well, now, why would you want to do that? You’ve got families, don’t you? And we’ve got something we’ve started [the lab attaining world-class status], and I would just rather for you to stay around and keep it going, because this thing [of being replaced] must be a personal thing aimed at me rather than a kick at you guys.”\\n\\n So the lab was completely reorganized after I left. They gutted it, and when they reorganized, if you see it today, you’ll see [for the most part] a [typical] civil servant government laboratory, and all of my little dreams collapsed on themselves. In fact, one person, I won’t give you his name in particular, even if you called him, he wouldn’t talk to you About NASA. He was so bitter over this thing and things that happened after I left. He was one of the key people in the lab. I’ve talked to him about this oral history thing, and I asked, “What about this old organization, etc.?”\\n\\n He said, “Dave, I just don’t want to talk about it.” He said, “I just don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want anything to do with them [NASA WSTF]. I don’t want to ever go out there again. I do not want to see anybody related to it.” And he is one of the top people that contributed as much to NASA as anybody in the agency, but embittered [because of these actions].\\n\\n And these people tried to hold it [the lab] together. You’ll have to talk to them to see if it happened, but it’s all dispersed now and turned into—you won’t see the labs of old. If you go, you won’t see what we had. It was tremendous. I mean, you know, fantastic. And it was all destroyed because, I believe, that our lab would not give the highest grades [even though the grades were derived from contractor performance and totally justified using written and NASA JSC approved performance criteria], and the pressure was on the NASA WSTF Site Manager [from the contractor upper management] for a raise of the contractor’s grades, and I was a little arrogant. I said, “I’m not going to raise the grades. You can raise the grades, but I’m going to write a minority report if you do because I have got a level of performance that the contractor must meet to get a higher grade—I just believed it—.” And I would’ve written a minority report if he had changed the grade. And I would do the same thing today because it is right to stand up to ones convictions. [To this day, I have never understood why a person in a high level management position, like the NASA Site Manager, would destroy his best organization for following established NASA evaluation criteria. He often told me in my evaluations that I was doing an outstanding job with the labs, he just didn’t agree with my hard-nosed approach. My response, “why change something that is producing the product you want, especially since I am hones and fair and consistent about it?” But he never, ever said or even hinted that he’d remove me if I didn’t change my management approach. So, I suppose it had to be more than that. Some people just don’t have the guts or character or whatever it is to communicate the real motivation behind their decisions. I guess.]\\n\\n When you get into that kind of situation, and you get into that kind of a bungled up mess, something’s got to give, and it was me. I didn’t have any backup [support in time of crisis], except for Ken Gilbreath, again. I talked to Ken who was at Houston and he encouraged me to hang tough. I would’ve never realized how much something could hurt as that hurt [being replaced without a reason or notice]. But in the long run, man, I’ve got it made in the shade. I have never missed a lick [professionally]. I was called by New Mexico State University to teach a special Electronics course and I have been able to influence my students in a way that I could never do with NASA, and I’m an accident reconstruction consultant—I do all these investigations, and I could’ve never—on my other career path been able to do this. My salary didn’t take a decrease at all. My retirement plus what I do exceeds what I would have made had I stayed with NASA. I’m better off financially.\\n\\n So I try not to be bitter about it, but it was a despicable thing for the Site Manager to do, especially since he did not talk to me before he did it or give me a chance to correct anything he thought I was doing wrong—from my viewpoint, probably not from his, but I think the contractor forced a conspiratorial kind of an operation [because I would not increase the grade]. What really hurt me is was one of the contractor people that I had nurtured over the years who was a technician, and the contractor upper management decided this person should be the Contractor site manager. He didn’t have the qualifications. And I just wouldn’t tolerate it. I just couldn’t do it [support him as manager]. So he and his boss became very hostile toward me. My goal for the site would be compromised if I agreed to his [this technician] being in that position —that was not consistent with what I wanted the lab and WSTF to be, so we just got into a bad relationship—so he got [retained his position even though grades were below expectations] the job as Contractor Manager and I got replaced.\\n\\n I would’ve never in a million years thought that would happen to me. And I guess that’s arrogance, isn’t it? You get yourself into a position, and you think that because of your technical competence and having set up a world-class performing organization, you have it made. And the crowning glory—the thing that just really got to me is my last performance rating by the WSTF Site Manager. After being replaced, guess what rating I got. Excellent [rating]. And I didn’t accept it. I put an\\n\\n X\\n\\n through it and said [wrote on the form], “I will not accept this rating ”. You don’t do something like what I must have done to get replaced and get an excellent performance review. I ought to be over there on the bottom block marked, ‘Does not meet requirements,’ not ‘Outstanding’ as most of the [individual] performance factors were rated. Not an overall ‘Outstanding’ as I received last year and the year before, but of course I couldn’t get ‘Outstanding,’ which was the next [higher rating] to it [excellent] because if rated ‘Outstanding’ you have to give them [the recipients] money and that would not have looked good for the NASA Site Manger. [And you know? He seemed shocked at my response, like I should have said, “why thank you for the kind evaluation.”] But it was right there, and I thought that was the most inconsistent appraisal I had ever received—just like I told him, I said, “This is the most despicable thing that I’ve ever seen happen to anyone that I’ve been associated with.” And it was despicable, to me.\\n\\n But you live with it [being replaced] and it worked out wonderfully, but I still think about it—I don’t have a warm, fuzzy feeling for NASA anymore. I just don’t. It just took it [the high regard I had for NASA] away in a way that I don’t want to contribute to them anymore. I have not been out to WSTF unofficially since it happened—I went out to the site one more time or two on official business. I’ve been invited many times, but I don’t go out there because I just don’t want to do it, and some of the people that were involved in this thing are still there, and I just can’t look them in the eye and be friendly. They’ve contacted me and tried to be friends. And I’m not bitter and I’m not vindictive, but there are some times you just can’t get something so wrong completely out of mind, and—like my buddy, I put an\\n\\n X\\n\\n through you. Just don’t bother me with that kind of operation any more." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just move on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just move on. And you have to do what you have to do. And I have no complaints about my career, though [overall]. Oh, I had more fun. Oh. Can you imagine, all that we had? While we were in there, we had stress city, but we all operated off of stress. It didn’t bother us [health wise]. It didn’t hurt our home life and that kind of stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "My next question was going to ask you, as part of us closing down today, what you consider to be the most challenging time or the most challenging aspect of your job while you were there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think the most challenging aspect of the job was trying to rescue it [WSTF when they were considering shutting us down]. When you knew—you’d have to have been blind in one eye and couldn’t see out of the other to know that we weren’t destined to stay open in many people’s eyes but if the site was closed down, we couldn’t reach our goal. So we worked where other people in other organizations would just sit around and moaned and groaned and sat on their hands, and we even tried to get projects for them, but they wouldn’t perform, and so we quit doing it, because we had contacts [for reimbursable efforts]. And that was a tremendous challenge.\\n\\n But the challenge didn’t go away, because as you got bigger and bigger, and we were operating with—we had [were using] over 40 percent of the [total site] resources [the jobs that came to WSTF]. We just didn’t have people to get the job done properly [and we were on the verge of serious safety compromises]. We just didn’t have them [because the NASA WSTF Management wouldn’t recognize what we were doing and really didn’t seem to want us to grow anymore]. But [as it was] our people worked two jobs. Everybody worked twice as hard. But we didn’t do it out of duty; we did it out of fun. So you don’t mind, right? I didn’t mind working another couple or three hours [every day]. We just didn’t mind. Isn’t that strange? It was our demeanor and our attitudes. We wanted to succeed in reaching our goal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you feel that’s the greatest accomplishment from you and your team, is that effort?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, the team that we built, and I can’t say it’s me. But, you know, I had complete confidence in the NASA lab and contractor people on the team. Now, we had a few that didn’t produce, but as an overall, we had a test team that I would put up against anyone. If somebody would say they’re going to come in [to WSTF labs] on a tour of the lab—I would just be an observer —because I didn’t do it [the tours by myself]. I would give a little introduction, and I’d say [to the team], “Okay. You do this, and you do that, and you tell them what you’re doing and why you think it’s important,” and they’d just blow the visitor’s socks off because the team members were so excited about what they were doing. [Some of the] people who came, they were [from] JSC, just kind of dull [unmotivated], you know, management type people. They’d come down here, and I had more than one of them come up and say, “You know, your team has reinvigorated me. I’m going back with a new attitude.”\\n\\n Now, that makes you feel—that’s accomplishment to me, which was not rewarding with external praise from local Management—but you don’t have to Have that You get your rewards from your little team, and that’s what we had Going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a great way to work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s great. Yes, we just did great. We had more fun. You go to them today, and they’ll reminisce. “Boy, we had it going, didn’t we?” [Laughs] Yes, we did. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-57\\n\\n .)" + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At this time I’m going to ask Jennifer if she has any questions. Do you have anything for Mr. Pippen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I just had one quick question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk about the relationship between White Sands Test Facility and New Mexico State University [Las Cruces, New Mexico]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, you can do that [ask the question]. Now, it’s limited to the relationship with NMSU and my labs [that is, not with NASA in general]. My philosophy, and I learned that well early on, is New Mexico State University was a tremendous resource, because they produced all the engineers we would ever need. They had all these engineers and all these tech [technical] writers, and all these people. So I said, “You know, what we ought to do is establish a good relationship with them.” There are these special fellowships and things that they [NASA JSC] give professors. I always went to [applied for positions] JSC and got one or two of those positions, and invite the professors out to the site a summer “fellows” and I’d teach the professors [real-world] electronics in the summer, and one of the guys [professors] still talks to me about his experiences there. Give them [professors] a good project, and help them and give them the resources [equipment, etc].\\n\\n Then I was a very, very strong proponent of co-ops. If they’d [NASA personnel office] give me ten co-ops, I’d take every one of them, and I took every one of them [that I was offered] under my personal wing. I didn’t give my people [NASA lab employees] co-ops. I had the co-ops, and the reason is because I [personally] wanted to teach them to be engineers. And I could assign them jobs and tasks, and I’d have them come in every week or periodically they’d have to tell me what they were doing, tell me the cost [incurred on the project], they’d have to give me reports and charts and all that, just what engineers do.\\n\\n As a result of that, see, I knew their capability, so about 90 percent of my people [hired staff] were co-ops [at one time]. If I could hire [regular employees]—when they [co ops] graduated, and often you couldn’t—that’s what I’d do, is get me [hire] a co-op, because I knew them and they knew me. They knew they could work for me, and so that’s what [the relationship] we built up. But you go out there and look in the labs [the NASA laboratory personnel] at that time, all but, I think, two were New Mexico State graduates, and I never found anybody any better from Rice [University, Houston, Texas], [University of] Southern Cal [California, Los Angeles, California]. It didn’t matter. The New Mexico State people were just as good [as students from these other Universities].\\n\\n So we had a good relationship. Well, obviously, we did, because they hired me as a teacher [after I retired]. I guess it paid off, didn’t it? [Laughs] And I still enjoy that [teaching]. I enjoy the relationship [with the university professors], although all the actors have changed [from the ones that originally hired me]. That’s a very important part of my retirement stuff [activities], and they [NMSU department personnel] told me the other day [that they appreciate what I do]—I got a little award the other day, and I’m part-time [employee]. So I got a stipend and an award and a plaque for excellence in teaching and what I’ve done for the university by building—I built up their little [electronics] lab. When I went into their little lab, they didn’t have test equipment [to speak of]. They didn’t have anything [that worked well]. The students didn’t have any resources [to complete their assigned lab projects]. So I fussed and moaned and groaned and [got the department head’s attention and funding] built that [lab] up, and now it’s one of the best laboratories in the whole facility, and those students just light up when they come there [to the lab], just light up. That’s a satisfaction you get. They [the students] call you—I let them [the students] call me at home and all that stuff [and work in my home electronics shop], and they feel like we have a close bond." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sandra, did you have any questions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I was just wondering if you could tell us, if at all, how were the astronauts involved with your testing procedures?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were our encouragers. Now, when we were doing things that involved direct astronaut safety, we would even have them come out, but not often. But they’d come out and give awards. (Refer to\\n\\n Photo A-58\\n\\n .)\\n\\n I’d talk to them on the phone, and when they would have something that they wanted to take on the Shuttle, or something that they were really personal about, we would talk a little bit, but generally we didn’t have much direct association with them, but they knew what we were doing, and we got feedback. They depended on us in a lot of areas.\\n\\n But the person [astronaut who came]—were but a few, [and they would come mostly when we’d get awards, the astronauts would do that sometimes, but I never met many astronauts personally except the ones that gave awards. But we always had the feeling from feedback that they were really, really pleased in White Sands, and they would ask, “Well, what did White Sands say? What did the materials people say?” on a lot of these safety issues, and that always makes you feel good, that they depended on you, and I always felt they did, although we didn’t have personal contact with them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was also wondering, you were talking about the cleaning process for the Viking, and how you did more in the vacuum chamber after your regular cleaning process. What was the regular cleaning process for the Moon?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You would go in, and of course, in the clean room it’s controlled [environment]. Your skin flakes [for example] is just totally contaminated [substance]. That’s totally dirt from a clean room perspective. We were looking at very few [contaminant] particles per million [acceptable contamination level]. So what we would do, we’d go in, and we’d have vapor degreasing, and then we would have technicians scrubbing with brushes, and they’d have on their white suits, and they would go in there with everything [covered up] and go through all of this process, and then after it was over, in order to make sure it was clean, we would put it in a solvent and rinse it, analyze the rinse, and if there was any contaminant in the rinse, you’d have to run it through again, you see. This was the normal process.\\n\\n So you could verify by testing, and we knew what solvents, we knew what materials would be on these parts, but, see, when you’re using things for oxygen and all these [contaminants], you cannot have contaminants, because they can cause fires and all kinds of problems. And we’d developed this thing [cleaning process] down to an art. Boy, we could get stuff through there in a routine [manner], and these people [clean room techs] were really good. So we just developed a pretty doggone good reputation for cleaning things. Of course, like I said, the main thing we wanted to do is to get them [the workers] recognition [for their excellent capability], is to get outside work, and that’s where the Viking came in and the lunar curator. They [laboratory personnel] even did that [got outside work] for the Cal [Electrical Calibration and Standards] lab, and I didn’t mention that.\\n\\n TDRSS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System] is just right next to them [the calibration lab], and I talked to one of the guys there [the head of TDRSS – Virgil True] out of calibrating all of their microwave equipment if he would supply us with new equipment. He did, and we did all of their [work]—big job. Every year we’d do all of his calibrations, rather than him sending it to wherever he was sending it. But that’s the way you do things [if you want to grow an organization], and that was a reimbursable for them [the cal lab]. It made them feel, “Boy, we’re important. We’re not just “plug and chuggers.” Boy, we’re doing something out-of-sight.” And that really helped in getting this mentality that you want your people to have.\\n\\n [As for Viking, we would take the above process one step farther. We would put the item in a vacuum chamber and heat it. When contaminated, a very hard vacuum could not be attained because of the outgassed products. However, when a very hard vacuum was attained on the heated item, then we could say that the item was clean. This took days of 24 hour-a-day cleaning. Analytical equipment such as mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs were also used to identify the offgassed contaminants.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think that’s our questions. Is there anything else that you would like to add that you can think of before we—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I think I’ve just been drained. [Laughs]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We certainly have learned a lot, and we thank you for all your time today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "David L. Pippen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, certainly. My pleasure. I enjoyed it." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00753", + "metadata": { + "category": "NASA JSC Space Shuttle Program Tacit Knowledge Capture Project 2008", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SSP/smelserjw.htm", + "original_file_name": "SmelserJW_5-15-08.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SSP/SmelserJW_5-15-08.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "Tacit Knowledge Capture Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "location_date": "Huntsville, Alabama – 15 May 2008" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Jerry W. Smelser" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 15, 2008. We are in Huntsville, Alabama to speak with Jerry Smelser, who served as Project Manager for the Space Shuttle Main Engine and External Tank areas at the Marshall Space Flight Center, as well as a number of other leadership positions for NASA. This interview is being conducted for the JSC Tacit Knowledge Capture Project for the Space Shuttle Program. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal. We thank you again for stopping by and visiting with us today for this project. If you would, we'd like to start with you telling us how you became involved with the Space Shuttle Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My career with NASA and the Marshall Space Flight Center [Huntsville, Alabama] began in 1960. I was a charter member of Marshall Space Flight Center. In the early days, I worked in design on the Apollo Program, and then several years in manufacturing. One of my mentors was Bob [Robert] Lindstrom, and Bob became basically the Development Manager for the Space Shuttle Program. It was through my association with Lindstrom back in the manufacturing laboratory that I became involved as a member of the External Tank Development Program in 1975." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After that time period, your positions evolved, and your duties and level of responsibilities changed and grew more and more. Tell us about some of those positions and some of the challenges that you incurred during that time period." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Michoud Assembly [Facility, New Orleans, Louisiana] is a very large building, 43 acres under one roof, and had been used for the Apollo Program. The Chrysler Company sat in one bay, and the Boeing Company sat in another bay—winding down in terms of use of the building. We went into that building as an External Tank Project and basically began to lay out the flow of the hardware, and the design of the tooling, and the conceptualization of how the tools and the flow of the plant would accommodate the external tank. I was involved, working directly for [G.] Porter Bridwell. Jim [James B.] Odom was Project Manager in the design, the layout, and the flow of hardware through the plant in the early days. Eventually, I became manager of the structural work breakdown structure, WBS, for the external tank. Worked with the contractor in the design and development and structural testing for the external tank.\\n\\n As the program moved from the early development phase and began to look toward test program and flight program, I eventually became Business Manager for the External Tank Project. After some time in that job, I moved into the Space Shuttle Main Engine Project. We were also in a plant renovation—upgrade of the plant equipment at the contractor facility in Canoga Park, California. So I spent the next few years in the Shuttle Program helping retool and re-machine the plant in Canoga Park to better accommodate the hardware requirements for the Space Shuttle Main Engine Project.\\n\\n From there, I became Deputy Project Manager for the Space Shuttle Main Engine, and worked under Bill Taylor, who was Project Manager, and we ran the flight program for the Space Shuttle Main Engine. There was a development effort that was headed by Joe [Joseph A.] Lombardo. Those were two parallel projects for a while. Subsequently, after [Space Shuttle] Challenger [STS 51-L accident], when the two projects were combined, I became deputy to Joe Lombardo, and we had both the production and the development of the Space Shuttle Main Engine.\\n\\n I was selected initially to become Project Manager to the External Tank Project, but when Joe retired, they asked me to become Project Manager on the Space Shuttle Main Engine. And I served in that role for several years in the early 90s. I left the Shuttle Program and became involved in the joint Air Force-NASA Program. Some people refer to it as NLS or ALS— Advanced Launch Systems, National Launch Systems. I was heading a group that was developing a new engine for that joint Air Force-NASA program. The program, after a few years, was under-supported and under-funded, and we never reached the point of making that hardware happen. We had contractors on board. We were doing a consortium that involved all three—Aerojet, Pratt & Whitney, and Rocketdyne—in a joint development program. Very innovative, we thought, in terms of how we were doing that. But the program never reached the point where it became a full flight development program.\\n\\n Then I was asked to come back home to the Shuttle Program. When we agreed to become a partner with the Russians and we changed the location for Space Station and we needed more lift capability, I headed a group of people who redesigned the external tank to what's referred to as a super lightweight tank. We developed some extremely innovative weld techniques that involved a material that had never been used in a cryogenic application before. We also began to develop friction stir welding as a new process. The combination of new materials and new process gave us better properties. Both were very significant in helping us in terms of achieving the weight reduction objectives for the super lightweight tank. We delivered that development effort on cost—under cost, actually—and on a schedule that supported the needs of the program and met our weight objectives, so we were very, very pleased with the ability to bring that program online and make that happen for the Agency.\\n\\n I left the Shuttle Program again, and went and did some other things for the Agency—I ran the test lab at Marshall Space Flight Center for a while and helped with looking at new launch vehicle concepts and some of that futuristic kind of planning that was going on throughout the Agency—and then came back on to the Shuttle Program as External Tank Manager again. From that position, I retired in 2004." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your positions changed, and again, your roles and responsibilities changed. Can you share with us, during all those times, some memorable ones where the challenges that you encountered gave you some lessons learned that you were able to apply to the rest of your career?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think the Shuttle Program was extremely challenging from a vehicle standpoint because it was more than one body that was trying to fly together, whereas the Saturn Program was one body—cylindrical, with a column on top, an engine in the back—and we could pretty well predict the aerodynamics and controls that were required. On the Shuttle Program, you had an airplane that was attached to a cylinder, and they have different aerodynamic characteristics and don't necessarily try to fly in the same way. So I thought the aerodynamic challenge, the guidance and control challenges of a cluster of bodies that don't necessarily want to fly the same way, was extremely challenging. I'm not a flight mechanics person, but as an engineer, that was a very, very interesting challenge that the Agency took on and was very successful at.\\n\\n One of the things that intrigued me as an individual is when Bob [Robert L.] Crippen and John [W.] Young flew the Shuttle off of the back of the [Boeing] 747 for the first time, because I was personally very concerned about the separation dynamics and the potential for recontact. From an excitement standpoint, the success of that was very exciting. I've seen some great successes. I'm old enough and go back to the Apollo Program, when I saw some of the [Dr. Wernher] von Braun team cry when the Saturn flew the first time. There's that kind of emotional attachment to programs, and I think some of us attached to the Shuttle Program, with that kind of an emotional attachment.\\n\\n From a personal standpoint—seeing a plant go from an open space to see the hardware actually flow through a plant as large as the Michoud Assembly Plant and see what I call the world's largest lathe—they're really weld fixtures, but they're performing large diameter welds, like the final circumferential wells on tanks as large as the liquid hydrogen tank and the liquid oxygen tank—to see that transformation from open space to a flow of hardware and be able to know that at least at some level, I made a contribution. I remember when I looked at it on a drawing and thought about whether it should be this way or that way, and then you see it happen. I take great pride in seeing something physically happen that I at least had some level of involvement in, in conceptualizing or designing or influencing the design. That was a great reward, investment/reward kind of a career.\\n\\n I've already mentioned the super lightweight tank. That team just was a phenomenal team, and we really had some tough challenges and unprecedented kinds of things that we made happen, so that was a very fulfilling venture for me. Space Shuttle Main Engine Program—that engine is so complex and so challenging in terms of the technology involved and the environments that are involved, and to be involved in incorporating some really significant safety features into that engine upgrade—alternate turbopump and different concepts in terms of the controls and so forth—to see them fly for the first time successfully, you just take great pride in being part of that. It's been a career that for a young engineer that comes off of a farm in north Alabama, and goes to college, and gets an opportunity to be a part of something as exciting as the Apollo Program and then the Skylab Program and then the Shuttle Program—it's just a career path that I think was unparalleled for that time frame for an engineer. I've been very fortunate in that regard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have a question for you about planning. You've worked in the areas in Apollo, and then you've worked in the areas preparing for Shuttle, and then after Shuttle was on production or in operation—tell us about some of the aspects of planning that you were able to apply across your whole career, and then if you had any aspects of planning that had to change because of how the operations changed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For complex programs—and the Space Shuttle or the Apollo are complex programs—one of the weaknesses, I believe, that often work their way into a program like this is insufficient emphasis on testing in the front end. In the Apollo Program, where we had unlimited budgetary resources and a fixed schedule, we really did emphasize testing—the testing of the engines and the cluster—and it was test, test, test. I think in the Shuttle Program—in retrospect—I think we did not do sufficient front end, in depth, aggressive testing. We had a good test program, but I just believe there were areas where we could have invested more in our test program earlier, and learned more about the hardware itself.\\n\\n So I'm a very, very strong advocate of test, test, test. When I ran the engine program, I had a motto that I shared with the people: \"Listen to the hardware, listen to the people, and listen to your gut.\" In order to listen to the hardware, you have to test it, and you have to test it in a way that demands that the hardware perform, maybe over perform, until you find out where the weak links are. So if I think the next generation should learn from us, it's don't cut corners on the test program, especially early in the program. Have an aggressive development program, have an aggressive test program, and listen to what the hardware's telling you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had so many people that you worked with, and then many that you were their manager. Talk to us about your management style and especially the aspects that you did to encourage or to instill good management performance with the people that you had trusted to get the job done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know the people that work with me and for me would tell you that I'm a hands-on manager. I've spent many, many hours walking through the Michoud plant, interacting—and I can go back to the Apollo Program when I was in the manufacturing lab. I'd go out and talk to the welders and the assemblers and machinists, and show them a drawing and say, \"Now, how would you make this come together?\" So the first thing I do is I make sure I involve people at the lower levels in the process early. Don't give them a job and say, \"They'll do the job.\" Make sure they're involved in the job early.\\n\\n By nature, I'm not a people person. By nature, I'm an engineer type, and my wife will tell you engineers are weird. She had a cadre of engineer wives that all compared notes about us, and we're a weird breed. By nature, I'm not a people person. I'm an engineer. So a part of my involvement with people—I had to work with myself. But I do delegate well, I think, and trust people once they show that they're trustworthy. I tend to ask challenging questions, and I believe one of my skills is to know whether or not people are really leveling with me when they answer my question.\\n\\n People that have worked around me and with me will tell you that one of my techniques is when people were using big words and fancy phrases, I would say, \"Would you repeat that in farm boy language?\" to get them to think in terms of a different level. Not impressive with words, but impressive with facts and information, rather than buzz phrases and shiny words. I tend to try to take complicated scenarios and simplify them in a communication setting where everybody feels comfortable with the phraseology that's being used and with the terminology that's being used.\\n\\n I can be demanding, maybe harsh. But I try not to do that very often. I believe very strongly in rewarding people that do well. And, on occasion, you have to deal with people that don't do well, and that's not the easy part. That's the hard part of managing, actually. The easy part is rewarding people, except for the fact that the government bureaucracy sometimes limits what you'd like to be able to do. But certainly, I've found ways to do that.\\n\\n I'm a great believer in setting objectives and goals and specific expectations and measuring against them. When I managed the contractor, at the beginning of the year, we always laid out in a book what our expectations were for that year. And monthly, as a minimum, we would go back with our contractor counterparts and review all of the objectives that should have been met to that point in time if we were going to meet the objectives for the year. If we started falling behind, we applied more focused attention. We do it biweekly, and if that's not working, we do it weekly. That way you have an understanding between the government management and the contractor management of what the expectation is going to be at a macro level, but then you also have it broken down so you know what you have to achieve as time progresses.\\n\\n Months aren't very long when you're working on a long-range program. Pretty soon it'll be two months instead of one month, and you won't have met your objectives unless you measure yourself. That's very significant, also—I hold myself accountable for whatever project I'm responsible for, but I also hold other people responsible for subsets of that. But I understand that the accountability moves up the pyramid, and that at some level I'm responsible, and then at some level, my boss is responsible. So I'm accountable to him.\\n\\n That's another part of managing—to make sure that not only you manage down, but you also are able to communicate up. You don't want to take so much of your boss's time that he thinks you're asking him to do your job, but on the other hand, you have to keep him informed so that he doesn't get a question from somewhere that he hasn't heard. Something that's going on, about to go wrong, or about to go right, and he hears it from someone else. There's a real thin line between communicating too much and not communicating enough, to make sure that your superiors are able to understand and support your position, and understand what progress is being made or what areas need some help from them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's true. You mentioned about learning to know who to trust, and that of course they had to trust you, too. What can you share with us, some techniques or methods that you use, to know that someone now can trust you as a manager, and that you'd be able to trust them to do the task that you wanted them to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first thing, of course, is selecting people in your organization that you have some familiarity with in terms of background. You can't always do that because when you're building an organization, you like to build at least some cadre of the people that have not only expertise in what you're going to do, but also have a personal relationship that you know is going to work. Then you augment that with people that you bring from the outside or from other organizations within the government or within the contractor workforce.\\n\\n The way that I attempted to do that is when you bring in new people—you think they have the skills, but they haven't proven it to you yet. They haven't worked in your system to make sure, and some people are very effective in one system and they just don't work in another system. You have to make sure that there's compatibility not just in ability, but personal compatibility. If you give people the feeling of responsibility and accountability, and you do that at a smaller piece level to begin with, and they produce, then it's time to expand their responsibility and accountability.\\n\\n I've found that that's very successful, and frankly, I've been very fortunate in terms of the people that have worked with me because I've had some wonderful young engineers who are now mid-level engineers that are just doing great. Matter of fact, I'm doing a little work right now with a person who a few years ago worked for me, and at this point I'm assisting him. He's in a decision-making role, and I'm a consultant that offers him some advice when he needs it, but he's the guy that makes the decision now.\\n\\n That kind of a relationship evolves over time, and I could identify probably a dozen people who have come through my organization—not just mine, of course, they were in different organizations as they moved up the line, and have advanced to levels beyond which I ever went. I could identify a Center Director that used to work for me, or a Program-level Manager that used to work for me. I consider that just absolutely tremendous, that somebody that I had some influence on years ago is now in power positions. Delegation, responsibility and accountability are the three things that I think are important in that regard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned when you were in charge of the super lightweight tank project that it came in under budget. That must indicate that you have a concern about program efficiency. How best did you ensure that your programs were efficiently being carried through with those goals and objectives that you had?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The way to make that happen—and we're not good at that within NASA—is to understand on the front end what the requirements are, have a negotiated and understood schedule and cost that both parties agree to—I'm talking about the person supplying the money and the person that's fulfilling the obligation or doing the job—don't change the cost and don't change the schedule and don't change the requirements. That's sort of in a dream world, I understand that. But that's the way to deliver a program on schedule and on cost—understand the requirements up front and don't change them.\\n\\n There has to be flexibility. The thing that happens is as a program, like a Shuttle Program, evolves, we get smarter and requirements change, and both parties then have to make fair adjustments in the schedule and the cost associated with the changes that are inherent with a big program, as we get smarter. But there must be a continual emphasis on understanding requirements, meeting requirements, and maintaining—as I indicated earlier—maintaining on a small increment of time basis—some people call them inchstones to get to footstones, and footstones to get to yardstones, and yardstones to get to milestones.\\n\\n I can't manage at the milestone level. I have to manage much lower than that, but I hopefully don't have to go down to the inchstone level, but somewhere in the middle level is where I have to understand what's going on, and I trust my sub-managers to manage at the inchstone level. All through the pyramid of organization, people must understand at all levels what the requirements are and what the expectation at each level is.\\n\\n A manager at a project management level has to really listen effectively. I indicated earlier, listen to the people. You have to listen effectively to the people who work for you, as well as the people that you work for. You'll listen to the people that you worked for because they demand that. The people that work for you can't demand it, so you have to demand of yourself that you listen to them. Because they know what's going on lower down than you know what's going on. And if they are the right people in the right jobs, they're going to give you information that's very important as you go on, and you need to react to it effectively and promptly.\\n\\n If they think they've got a problem, they have a problem. It may not be a real problem, but if they think they have a problem, it's a problem at that point in time, and you have to address it one way or the other. You have to either erase it in their mind as a problem, or you have to solve it and make it a non-problem. Or you have to go get help. If it's bigger than the two of you, you have to go get help." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think I can positively say that almost every decision you made in your career had some level of risk to it, it just being a part of the nature of the business and doing the Space Program. Tell us about some of the lessons that you've learned or some of the practices that you instilled so that when decisions were made it was a good basis for risk assessment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'd like to start my answer to that by telling you about an occasion in California when I was speaking to a high school group. One of the students said—we were talking about the engine, and I was telling them about the Shuttle Program as a whole, but specifically representing the engine projects at that time—he said, \"Isn't that a risky business?\" My answer was, \"Do you drive an automobile?\" Of course he said, “Yes.” I said, \"Well, that's a risky business, too.\" The difference is, in my opinion, we get so familiar with driving an automobile that as a group, we really forget that there's significant risk until we get in trouble with it, and then we realize that we made a mistake. But a lot of times, we'll make a mistake because we don't treat it as though it were risk management. Driving a car demands a great deal of risk management.\\n\\n The Shuttle Program—very complex. There are inherently very, very significant risks involved. Anytime you put people in a machine that complicated—be it an airplane, be it a Space Shuttle, be it an automobile—it has levels of very significant risk. Space Shuttle—more complex than an airplane, more complex than a car. People on top. It requires risk understanding, risk mitigation, continuous risk assessment, risk reduction.\\n\\n The problems we have, in my opinion, within this Agency and probably any complex piece of machinery, is not managing the risk we don't understand. We manage the risk we understand. The problem is there are risks out there that we haven't yet done enough testing or had enough exposure in terms of opportunities. They're risks that we think are managed risks or non-catastrophic risks that really show up one day as a bad day. Inherently, I know that if you manage something this complex, there are going to be failures. What we want to do is make sure that the failures are failures that are not catastrophic. That's the intent. Then learn from each one of them in terms of how we apply the new knowledge not just to that particular item, whichever one it was that didn't perform to expectations, but apply that to similar hardware across the total program.\\n\\n In order to manage risk, we have to understand what the risks are. That's the biggest challenge, in my judgment, is understanding what the risks are. We can do failure modes, and effects analysis, and critical items list assessments, and we do all the analytical things and engineering things that are practical to do, and there are still things we don't understand about the hardware. It's those things that I believe are more bothersome, and they're the ones that eventually cause us to have bad days. I mean, we've had some wonderful days, a lot of great days, and we've had some bad days. When we have a bad day, it's a really bad day. That's the thing about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you give us an example of a time that you know of that was a successful risk mitigation activity? Something that might have been going one way, and because of a process or involvement, that it became a good day?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm not sure this quite fits the category, but it's certainly on the same subject. I alluded the alternate turbopump as a change in the Space Shuttle Main Engine. We went from a turbopump that had numerous welds, and numerous opportunities for leaks—although it was a great design at the time, it could be improved on. So we went to a new contractor, developed an alternate turbopump, and incorporated that—after an aggressive test program—into the fleet, and with that, in my judgment, came a substantial reduction in the risk associated with the engines that were flying each time. There's a place where there was a substantial investment made in an ongoing flight program with a development program that was introduced appropriately to bring the risk down associated with the engines.\\n\\n This was something I was personally involved in: when we went from fusion welding to friction stir welding, we reduced the probability of having defects. We reduced the number of defects we know in the welds; we reduced the number of repairs that were in the welded hardware. In that case, what we did was reduce the probability of losing a piece of hardware in a proof-test. It should never have made its way to the flight program, but it could very well have caused the hardware to fail in the proof-test, and we'd have lost assets. Substantial loss—millions of dollars worth of assets. In that case, there's a process that we brought into the program that reduced the risk, at least from a programmatic standpoint and from a loss of hardware standpoint. Not necessarily from a loss of life standpoint.\\n\\n We did numerous things when I was a part of the Launch Management Team—a lot of things in leading up to the week before the L minus actions that went on. A lot of things we looked at and assessed. Some people were looking at weather, we were looking at the hardware, we were looking at the instrumentation, we were looking at how the hardware was performing, looking back at the test program to see if there was anything that we saw in our ground test program in the engine test that we should be aware of before we flew.\\n\\n All those things were incorporated in the thought process as we led up to, came up to, and signed off on the release of the hardware to fly. In flight, from an engine standpoint, we had certain instrumentation that told us the health of the engine in terms of temperatures and pressures and environments that were happening. There was one time where we actually shut down an engine on the way up the hill. But that was an instrumentation issue rather than a real failure—that's a case where an instrument told us that something was wrong, and we actually shut down an engine and still were able to achieve orbit.\\n\\n There are a lot of things that have been done by different managers, and there've been days when I was in the position to have to say, \"The engine's not ready to fly this week.\" Of course, the Orbiter had similar situations, where we’d get back data from an instrument that said there's something we don't understand, or the controller's not working right, and we're going to have to go in and do some double-checking—go back and check our sim model and see what's going on. There are numerous situations throughout the program where we've either called off a flight that day, or we've changed hardware over time, or changed procedures to incorporate the additional safety features into the system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Given your years of experience, are there any improvements in planning or implementing risk mitigation that you would recommend that the Agency look at?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought, as a system, our risk mitigation/risk management system was fairly effective. Not everybody agrees with me on that, by the way, I know that. I think it's the knowledge base that was the problem. I think when we applied the risk system, which I think was a good system, and when we fed into that sometimes information that wasn't precisely accurate or complete (it wasn't inaccurate from the standpoint of people not putting in their best knowledge). They put in their best knowledge, but sometimes our best knowledge just wasn't really quite good enough. I don't know how you design a system to do that.\\n\\n I do think a more aggressive test program, which I've already emphasized, would help. I'm not saying it would eliminate all the problems because you're never going to eliminate all the problems. I understand from having been in this business for forty-three years plus that there are problems that you're never going to understand. You certainly attempt to. You want to and you try to, but there are going to be some things that we just don't understand, and the next program will have issues. Hopefully they'll be non-catastrophic issues, but they'll have issues that they won't understand until they actually happen. Then they look back and say, \"Well, that was an opportunity to have advance our knowledge base.\"\\n\\n That's why I keep emphasizing, and would emphasize with any new managers who are making decisions, to just test as much as you can and learn as much as you can on the ground. Let it fail. It's okay for hardware to fail on the ground because you learn something. As long as you make application from that failure. If you test an engine and it fails, you had a weak point that you needed to know. If you test a tank and you test it to failure, you find out where its weak part is. That doesn't mean test all of them that way, that just means to test enough to find out where the weak points are and see whether or not the weak points are acceptable for a flight program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about improvements or recommendations for improving management processes that can lead to those good decisions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's an interesting question. Eventually, there has to be somebody that makes the final decision. That somebody, whomever that is, has to have a system that they're comfortable with. It must have a pyramid effect because you have to go down and get information. The great criticism—I think it was an unjust criticism—but the great criticism was that we didn't listen to people who were in the ranks. I honestly did not see that within the Agency I worked in for years. The managers I was around—I'm like the rest of them, I'm accused in a broad sense of not listening to the people. One of my theses was to listen to the people. But some way we don't convince the outside world that we're good listeners.\\n\\n I really believe that the Ron [Ronald D.] Dittemores and the Tommy [Thomas W.] Holloways and the Arnie [Arnold D.] Aldridges and the Bob Lindstroms and the Jim Odoms and those people—I really believe they were good listeners. I believe that people that worked for them were good listeners. But maybe we weren't, and maybe we don't understand. Maybe it's back to that engineer syndrome or something, I don't know. From my perspective, I did not see that communication was ignored. But I know we've been accused of doing that. Let me finish that by saying if we were guilty of that, the next generation needs to make sure that they're not guilty of that. Make sure that they do listen down as well as up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That leads into my next question. How would you train the next group of leaders for the Space Agency?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At the leadership level, there needs to be a good combination of technical skills, managerial skills, “excite the people” skills. Wernher von Braun was absolutely a master as an engineer, as a visionary, as an entrepreneur, as a motivator, as a politician. It's hard to find the skill set of Wernher von Braun. There needs to be somebody at the top, with a combination skill set that's not strictly engineer but not strictly business guy, not strictly communicator. There needs to be a skill set, a good mix of those skill sets.\\n\\n I thought people that I worked for—I thought Bob Lindstrom was very good. He wasn't deep technically in my opinion, but you couldn't snow him with a technical issue. He was deep enough to know when you weren't leveling with him. He was a good communicator, he was a good motivator, he was good representing the Center outside the Center. I thought he had a good skill set for that job. I think some people at JSC that I could name that had good skill sets for that.\\n\\n Ron Dittemore had good skill sets for that. We need people of that skill mix to manage a program and be able to understand the programmatic implications when a test program is not giving the right results. Understand the political climate, at least to some degree. Understand the technical interactions of machines and equipment and hardware. It starts with having that kind of leadership. We need that.\\n\\n I think the Agency is doing a good job with this now, but we need to get some good, young people with some experience. We really messed up as an Agency when we went through the valley in terms of between the Apollo Program and the Shuttle Program. We didn't bring people on, and we had people at the middle level, people right out of college, but we had a void in terms of middle management, lower management at the time of the early Shuttle Program—in my judgment. I think the Agency attracted some very, very good talent into the Agency now, but to make sure that we've got a good mix of skill sets across all levels is very important. To make sure that we don't have a valley in terms of mid-management or lower management. That's important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How do you teach or how do you train these young people with those aspects that you feel like they need to have to become leaders?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Excellent question. I believe there is absolutely no substitute for hands-on, get out in the shop, understand how the hardware works, run a test program for a while. I would absolutely insist—if I were at an upper, decision-maker level—I would absolutely insist that my managers have been around hardware—at least some of them—to understand how hardware works. Not just have been on the computer and looked at what the computer tells you it's going to do, but have actually been out there doing it.\\n\\n I believe we're doing a better job of that. I think we are. At least, I'm being told we are. We're doing some in-house projects, we're doing some in-house testing. I was very disappointed as a middle manager when we lost our manufacturing capability at the Marshall Space Flight Center because I thought that was an outstanding tool for developing managers and engineers. It was disappointing to me when we lost that. I'm not talking about competing with contractors. I'm talking about doing the development work, but doing it hands-on. I think hands-on experience for young engineers is absolutely mandatory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What advice do you give young people who want to have a career with the Space Agency?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm not encouraged right now. I have a son who's a medical doctor, I have a son who's an engineer, and I advise them to go into telecommunications or medical science. It's not like it was when I came. When I came out of engineering school, the place to go was the Space Program. My personal opinion is that there are more exciting futures for an engineer for the next 20 years than the Space Program. Maybe I'm wrong. Hopefully I'm wrong. But if an engineer came to me and said, \"Where's the place to work in the next 20 years?\" I'd probably direct him to medical research or telecommunications. Hopefully I'm wrong, but that's the way I see the future. That's not negative about anybody at the Agency, I'm just talking about the political climate. Maybe energy engineering if it exists in the next 20 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You worked in so many different areas. What would you consider maybe the best lesson or the hardest lesson during that career that stayed with you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There are a lot of lessons that you learn over that long a period of time. I really can't identify one right now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Before we close, I wanted you to have a chance to look at your notes. I know you brought some things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All I did was I took your questions and just put down some notes. I think we've covered most of that. Test before you fly, we talked about that. Listen to the hardware, we talked about that. Make an appropriate upfront investment, we've talked about that. Don't cut corners on design and development tests, we talked about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything else you can think of that you'd like to add about sound practices or lessons learned, or planning, management? Any other thoughts before we close out for the day?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The only thing I'd say, and it's the same thing I've said, but I'll try to summarize it—make sure you understand the program up front in terms of requirements. Make sure there's adequate schedule for doing a good job of design, development, test. It may be impractical in today's environment, but if possible, lay out a reasonable schedule and don't change it, or change it as little as possible. Those are very important parameters for a successful program, in my opinion." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Those are good ones. So thank you. I appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jerry W. Smelser", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00173", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FrankMP/frankmp.htm", + "original_file_name": "FrankMP_12-15-00.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FrankMP/FrankMP_12-15-00.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "M. P. Frank", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 15 December 2000" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "Carol Butler" + ], + "respondents": [ + "M. P. Frank" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is December 15, 2000. This interview with Pete Frank is being conducted in the offices of the Signal Corporation in Houston, Texas, for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Kevin Rusnak, assisted by Carol Butler and Tim Farrell.\\n\\n I'd like to thank you for taking the time out to do this with us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, well, I'm happy to do it. It's going to be interesting to see what comes out of this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm interested to hear what comes out of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If we can begin with how you got involved in the aerospace industry and what these kinds of experiences may have taught you before you went into the space program specifically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, just real briefly, I got my bachelor of science engineering degree in aeronautical engineering from University of Texas [Austin, Texas]. After graduation I went into the Marine Corps and flew as a pilot in the Marines for a few years; in fact, just about three years is all. From there, I went to work for an aircraft company in Dallas and spent about two or three years doing that.\\n\\n But the real thing that got me into working with NASA is when I went to work for the [Glenn L.] Martin Company in Baltimore [Maryland]. My job there was to work on reentry trajectory analysis, studies of trajectories that would be able to come back in from Earth orbit. That was just about the time that NASA was initiating some studies for lunar missions, manned lunar missions, and I got to work on those projects for the Martin Company.\\n\\n We were doing a lot of original initial investigation of what the trajectory characteristics were for vehicles coming back from as far away as the Moon, which was quite a bit more stressful on a spacecraft than just reentering from Earth orbit. Earth orbit entries were 25,000 feet per second approximately, and coming from the Moon, there was just no way to get it any less than about 36,000 feet per second, which was a major increase in heating and aerodynamic loads. I got to spend a couple [or] three years doing that, and got a lot of understanding of the problems associated with that kind of thing.\\n\\n So when the contract was awarded to North American [Aviation, Inc.] in [Downey] California and we didn't win (we were bidding on that contract but lost) I applied to come to work for NASA and was accepted. Came to Johnson—well, it was the Manned Spacecraft Center [MSC] then—in October of 1962, and was assigned as a section head for the Reentry Study Section, working under a gentleman named John [P.] Mayer, who had been with the Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] group at NASA for quite some time before that. He was the Mission Analysis Branch Chief. Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] was our Division Chief (Flight Operations Division).\\n\\n We had offices on the Gulf Freeway [Interstate 45] at a place called the Houston Petroleum Center. They had a replica of an oil derrick out in their front yard, but we were actually the only organizations in there, operations under Chris Kraft. We were there, I guess at least a year, maybe close to two years before we moved down to the Manned Spacecraft Center down in the Clear Lake area.\\n\\n That was a really interesting, exploring kind of time, because the Mercury Program was well under way. They were flying Mercury missions throughout this period. I wasn't involved in that at all. That was already in place and happening. We [my section] were concentrating on the Apollo lunar mission, with some work also for the Gemini Programs. As the Reentry Study Section, it was our responsibility for computing the guidance requirements for the reentry portion of the trajectory. I was still learning a lot from that activity.\\n\\n We had just kind of done the basic things at the Martin Company, and after I got to NASA we were really working on fine-tuning and exploring some of the things, ways we could optimize the solution to the problems about reentry. I wasn't really aware of anybody else that we could turn to, to learn some of these things. We had to use computer programs to do simulations and run analyses of the results, but a lot of the times you would try something on the computer just to see what the results were. You didn't really have a really good way of predicting these things until you'd generated a lot of empirical data.\\n\\n But that was really interesting. It was just great fun to be working on. The program was scheduled still many years in the future, several years, so it didn't feel that much pressure to get it done right away, and you could spend time really, really working on it. Although we worked a lot of late hours and long [days and nights]. I think we probably worked every weekend during those years, just because there was so much to do. That sounds contrary to think there wasn't much pressure, but it didn't seem like pressure. You got up and came to work because you were really interested in what you were doing that day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you describe the atmosphere for me at this time, with the center separated in different buildings and these kinds of things, what it was really like to be there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a bit awkward. The program offices were at a place called the Farnsworth-Chambers Building, so there was a lot of time spent traveling back and forth around different places in Houston to have meetings and go to meetings. We didn't have a lot of electronic conferencing or anything like that, so you went to these places to get together, to have your meetings.\\n\\n There was a—how do I put it—kind of a competition between a couple of the organizations. One of them was Chris' Flight Operations and the other was Dr. Faget's, Max [Maxime A.] Faget's Engineering Division. The engineering was responsible for design and building the spacecraft. Of course, Kraft's group was responsible for the operations.\\n\\n There was a lot of times in a design effort when you're building and doing the initial designs and building a spacecraft, there's a lot of compromises that have to be made between the people that want to operate it, do operate it, the astronauts and the flight controllers, and the engineers who are building the spacecraft. Things that make it easy and really efficient for the engineering sometimes makes it very difficult to operate and vice versa. Things that operators really want give the designers a really tough time. So there was a lot of having to negotiate and work out problems with these other organizations in different buildings around different locations in Houston. There was a lot of effort that went into that kind of a overhead activity, I'd guess you'd call it.\\n\\n But it was really a very exciting atmosphere. We kind of felt like we were really unique, and that coming into Houston like that… none of us really knew much about Houston before we got here. The city treated NASA, especially the astronauts, but not only the astronauts, any NASA engineer, and so we were really treated like special people and you kind of got the feeling like maybe you were, because they treated you that way so well. But it was just a really fun and interesting place to work.\\n\\n We had contractors that worked with us. TRW [Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc.] was our primary contractor at the time. They had some very capable engineers that came into the area and we would meet with them regularly. They were doing some of the supporting work for us and some things on their own that we were always getting together and going over that, comparing results.\\n\\n One of the big activities was building computer programs, designing them to do the simulations, because nobody had been doing this before. We had to get our own computer programs designed and implemented before we could do a lot of the work. That was a big part of our job during this period." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the state of computing at this time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there were always big IBM machines…. I've forgotten what the number designations were, but you laugh at them now, looking back at what the capabilities were. We used the computer at the University of Houston. They had a computing lab over there and NASA rented time from them. But NASA had their own programmers that would build the programs and then take them over to the University of Houston computer lab.\\n\\n I spent a lot of time in that lab, because the programs didn't run very fast and there's a lot of computations involved in trajectory work. It's a very iterative kind of problem where if you're going to fly from here to there, you take little bitty steps, computation steps, and the computers were ideal for doing that sort of thing. But even with the computers, it was pretty slow in those days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you maybe run us through the basics of how you developed one of these profiles? What are the physics behind it that you're looking at and how you translate that into the equations and into a computer language that can run and put this out and give you some meaningful results?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. The equations are not closed-form solutions in that you plug in some data and you get an answer. They're the kind that require this step-by-step iteration to get to the answers.\\n\\n There's two regimes: one is within the atmosphere and there's one that's outside the atmosphere. Outside the atmosphere there were closed-form solutions if you made a few simplifications, which were really primarily the ones we used for analysis, early-on analysis, to get close to a solution. Then you had to switch over and do the non-closed form solutions to get the really tight, accurate answers that you needed. So, lunar return trajectories were a combination of those two, because once you hit the atmosphere, there was nothing that approximated the trajectory in a closed-form solution. The only way to do that was the iterative solutions. That was a big part of the computation problems for this trajectory analysis, was the reentry portion.\\n\\n Apollo added another level of complexity, not only the speed of entry, but the fact that it used a lifting vehicle instead of just the ballistic Mercury-type capsule. That really complicated things, because now you had the ability to control where you were going to land once you got in the atmosphere. On Mercury you didn't have that. You control where you're going land by when you did the de-orbit and how much of a burn you put in there. Since it was just falling like a rock from there on, it was not a big footprint in which you go looking for it [the entry vehicle’s landing spot].\\n\\n But we needed lift on Apollo because of the extreme conditions of the entry. The only way you could do a successful entry on a mission like Apollo was to use lifting forces, and that was what was kind of new. It was definitely new, and what we were doing is factoring lift into this equation. It gave you maneuverability, but it also gave you real problems in controlling it. There just wasn't anybody to consult on that. You had to go work at it in the computers and see what would happen. You can make approximations with closed-form solutions, but that just wasn't accurate enough to rely on. You had to go in and do the detail work.\\n\\n Some of the people that I first met back when we were working at the Houston Petroleum Center was a fellow named Ron [Ronald L.] Berry. He started working for me in the Entry Section. Really a brilliant young kid, and he has since retired from NASA, but he was a really bright guy and we became very good friends there.\\n\\n A fellow named Hal [Harold D.] Beck, who had been with NASA all along, and he was fellow section head there when I came in. He's retired, too. Hal Beck is real character kind of person. He was a bachelor, he never got married, but he was a really fine, humorous, party-going-type guy that everybody really had a lot of fun with. I never saw him upset or angry about anything. He could go along with anything that happened.\\n\\n Ed [Edgar C.] Lineberry was another young fellow who was just getting started and was a really bright guy who really worked out solutions to the rendezvous problems. I don't know if he originated the concepts or whether he started with somebody's idea and then really embellished it and made it really workable. It was a key factor in the Apollo Program, was being able to do rendezvous in lunar orbit. He was the guy that brought all that together, really made that happen.\\n\\n Carl Huss was another guy who was there at NASA, came from Langley with NASA. He was another character, but he was totally different, very straight, rigid German guy. [Laughter] That's an ethnic bias. But he was also a very capable guy, he worked hard, did everything and really worked his people hard, but they all really liked him, really thought he was a great guy.\\n\\n He and another character who came from England by way of Canada to work for NASA, was named Morris [V.] Jenkins, he was another very capable guy, but kind of eccentric. He and Carl were quite opposites and they ended up having some personal conflicts once in a while because they would get to encroaching on each other's work area, so there was a lot of almost unfriendly rivalry, but it was never out of control. They both ended up being branch chiefs when [the organization was expanding and] things were—you know, [in a state of flux]. NASA was hiring like crazy at this point, at this time, and so the work force was increasing and the organization was getting bigger. Then Chris moved up to be a director, and then John Mayer, who was the branch chief, now became a division chief. Morris and Carl [were branch chiefs] and I became section head in [Morris’] branch….\\n\\n So the organizations under Morris and Carl tended to get kind of bumping against each other, too. There was sort of a split of responsibilities. I always felt like John Mayer did it that way deliberately so that people wouldn't get set in their ways, they'd kind of challenge the other guy to keep things moving. I think Dr. [Robert R.] Gilruth did that, too, with the Manned Spacecraft Center, because he let Chris and Max Faget loosely define their jobs to the point where there was a lot of challenging back and forth there.\\n\\n I think at the time, at first I thought it was really poor, that it was a really inefficient way to do things, but in the end, I think it helped increase the accuracy and the level of efforts on exploring things different and new. Instead of people getting set in their ways in an organization, there was always a challenge around to keep you on your toes. I have seen that work very well to improve the results of something that was being done, because the two organizations were trying to outdo each other in a particular area and you'd come up with a lot better solution as a result of it.\\n\\n The period before we moved down to where the center is now, you spent a lot more time in downtown Houston. Then eventually after we moved out here, you kind of got isolated once we came out here. I felt more like a citizen of Houston in those days, even though I was living down in LaPorte. We spent so much time in that area, that you don't feel that now. We don't live in Houston anymore.\\n\\n So there was a lot more activity involved and nightlife within the city. A lot of the socializing went on in town as opposed to out here in the suburbs. It had a different feel to it back in those days. There were an awful lot of the people, engineers that we were working with that were single, and that created a lot more social environment also as a result of that. I guess it's just the characteristics of a younger organization that's growing like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you see yourself fitting in with everyone else? Were you typical of the other people in your areas?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I actually felt, rightly or wrongly, a lot more qualified than a lot of them because of the work I'd done at Martin and had this background. I brought books with me, notebooks, of studies and results and parametric data that we had done, generated at Martin. I just felt like I was a lot better prepared for this than a lot of the people that were working for me at the time and working with me. I felt really good about the job and the fact that I came into this thing not as a longtime NASA person, but was really contributing to the work and to the results and had a significant role in what we were doing here. That was an especially good feeling about it also.\\n\\n The kids were real young. I had a six-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son, and they were freshly getting started in school. I had never done that before. I didn't travel a whole lot in my job here; it kept me in town most of the time. A lot of the people that I knew and worked with in different areas spent an awful lot of time on the road. It was mostly in California to Rockwell, North American, and later going to Boston, MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts] and Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corp.] in [Bethpage] Long Island [New York].\\n\\n I also had friends that lived close to me that were part of the recovery organization, and they spent a lot of time with Gemini and Mercury, both, actually, deploying out for recoveries that would get postponed. The launch would get postponed, and they'd be sitting on a ship for another two weeks or so. That got pretty old for those folks, but it had to be done, so they were involved. Fortunately, I didn't have that kind of a problem. All the work we were doing was right here.\\n\\n When we moved down to… the Manned Spacecraft Center… our building was one of the first ones to get built, the one [in which] the Mission Control Center was [located]. So we were down here pretty early compared to some of the other organizations. It was really, really vacant fields everywhere with this Mission Control Center stuck in the middle of it, and the main building 1, the Headquarters Building.\\n\\n Then there was a building that had a computer for the administrative work, not the Mission Control Center, it had its own separate computer facilities. That was pretty interesting to be in the offices and look outside the window and see buildings going up all around you, under construction.\\n\\n The Control Center itself was a new concept for me. I hadn't really been involved with mission control at all. It'd all been trajectory analysis and mission planning and things of that sort. So it was pretty exciting for me to get moved next to the Mission Control Center. It was right down the hall from where we were working. Also, our computer trajectory analysis programs were then going to be migrated into and become a part of the Control Center computations. So we then took on this more critical role, if you can say it, probably more critical because it's being used in real time during the mission, not just during the planning. That was a [major] uptick in the involvement with the missions itself, and I really enjoyed that.\\n\\n In fact, one of our biggest jobs after we pretty well understood how we wanted to fly the missions through the entries [was responsibility for the trajectory to and from the Moon]. My section role got expanded to do guidance work for not only the entry, but also the trajectory to and from the Moon, which was a big change, a big addition to what we were doing. We didn't have any programs that did a really quick analysis of that. It was really [necessary to] develop your own computer program now that did [this] work…. We had a subcontractor come in and work with us on that.\\n\\n We were involved developing this program that we could use not only to do the analysis of the lunar trajectories, but also migrate that into the control center to do the targeting for mid-course corrections, both going to and from the Moon. That became a big part of our effort. I spun off the reentry analysis to another section. A good friend of mine I'd worked with at Martin came to NASA and took charge of that section. Claude [A.] Graves [Jr.] is his name. Claude still works at NASA.\\n\\n So then I concentrated primarily on the lunar trajectories and the final portion of the lunar module landing on the power descent phase…. The section now is called the guidance section, not reentry. We had a lot of interface with the Marshall Space Flight Center [Huntsville, Alabama] because of the Saturn V targeting. We had a lot of work with MIT, because they had responsibility for the guidance systems, the algorithms that go into the computers, on-board computers. Then with both Grumman for the lunar module [LM] and North American—Rockwell at this time—for the Apollo command and service module [CSM].\\n\\n We spent many months developing and refining this trajectory program. The problem was, you couldn't get a closed-form solution to get to the [Moon]. We had found that there was a class of trajectory called a free return, and we had thought it just didn't make sense to use anything else but a free return in our targeting. You understand—I think you understood what a free return was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Why don't you go ahead and explain it, though, for the tape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a kind of trajectory that when you left the Earth orbit, it would rendezvous with the Moon, [circumnavigate] the Moon… (then the Moon's gravity would, of course, make that happen) and send it back toward the Earth. It would come back to the Earth and kind of enter the Earth's atmosphere at such an angle that the thing would be captured by the Earth's atmosphere without any further maneuvering. So the Saturn cutoff would send you a trajectory that did that.\\n\\n Unfortunately, it was so sensitive to [small initial velocity errors] that there was no way you could ever really guarantee you were going to achieve that, because just fractions of a second, of a foot per second of the Saturn cutoff made big differences. But still it was an appropriate way to target. You try to hit that. The reason you could live with that is because you made adjustments or mid-course corrections out on the way to the Moon.\\n\\n Of course, the purpose of all that was if the main propulsion system of the spacecraft didn't work and you were on this trajectory to the Moon and it didn't work, you had to have some way to get the crew back, and by targeting that way, you could use the small attitude control thrusters to make these fine adjustments to the trajectory, but then you brought it back to the free-return trajectory.\\n\\n Eventually you're going to use that main engine to break into lunar orbit, and that changes everything, but at least then you know [after using it that] the engine works, because up until that time you hadn't used it at all, you don't know whether [it will work].\\n\\n So targeting free-return trajectories was something that we introduced into the program and set that criteria with the Marshall Space Flight Center as how we were going to do that. We would give them the targeting conditions that we wanted to achieve, and then they built the system to get the Saturn to do that.\\n\\n Developing that program, we kind of hedged our bets, because there was two basic ways to go at it, two different approaches to doing this targeting. We spent a lot of time on both systems before we finally got down to where we could discard one and pick one to work with. It was really gratifying on the Apollo 8 mission to see that really work. That was the first time we had ever done it, and everything just clicked off the way it was supposed to. The mid-course correction techniques that were used all worked fine. Of course, you were sure it was going to before you went on the mission anyway, but it's still not done until you do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A couple of people we've talked to have mentioned some discussions of sending a Gemini capsule around the Moon in this fashion. Did you have any role on that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wasn't aware anybody was working that, actually. It never got in my area of digging around. I can imagine that we were doing that. There was such a big effort on beating the Russians to it, and, of course, that was the primary reason for the Apollo 8 mission, the way it was, is to get some guys out there and back before the Russians did.\\n\\n I have talked to some of the Russians since the program has been all over, and it turns out they didn't really have a chance. They were really far behind. But, of course, we didn't know that, and there was a lot of emphasis on it. It worked out that it was really a great concept, because George [M.] Low was a NASA manager whose idea it was to do that. He was another guy that was just an awesome person to work for. NASA had an awful lot of people at that time that were like that. You just really looked up to them as being innovative and imaginative and having enough nerve to take risks, but to also fully understand the risks and know what they were doing and proceed on and get the job done, and George Low was one of those kind of guys.\\n\\n Let's see. We built the programs, tested them on the computers as much as we could, and then worked with the other organizations to get them installed into the Mission Control Center. I guess it was 1965 or '66 when I was asked to work as a flight director. I was the head of the Mission Analysis Branch at that time and had the responsibility for the Guided Section, the Reentry Section, and the Lunar Trajectory Section. So I jumped at a chance to do that. I thought that was really great. I had applied to be an astronaut and was not selected for that, so I thought this was at least the second-best job at the center.\\n\\n That was a whole other direction from this sitting at a desk and doing the analysis and going over and standing around the computer room and watching the trajectory data roll off and trying to analyze that. Then moving into the Mission Control Center, you didn't discard everything you knew, but it didn't do you a whole lot of good in the job you're going into.\\n\\n But I think when I was selected to work as a flight director, a fellow named Milt [Milton L.] Windler and a fellow named Gerry [Gerald D.] Griffin were also selected. So the three of us started out as freshmen flight directors at the same time. I think part of the reason we were selected is we all three had been military flyers, and I think Kraft felt that had some bearing on doing that job.\\n\\n But you started out in a whole new organization. Now, I'm not a branch chief anymore, I'm just a flunky flight director over here taking directions from Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz and Glynn [S.] Lunney and Cliff [Clifford] Charlesworth, who had been flight directors on Gemini.\\n\\n It was a big learning curve, with a lot of time studying books on the spacecraft systems, understanding the details of that. It was a real eye-opener working for Kranz, his personality [was] totally different from mine. I'm really pretty casual and not exactly laid back, but don't get real excited about things and not very intense in dealing with things. Gene is a very intense person. I don't know how well you know him, but you've probably been around him, and you get that message real quick.\\n\\n I had a little bit of misgivings about coming. When Dr. [Sigurd A.] Sjoberg, he came in my office and asked me one day to ask me to be a flight director, and I told him you know, “I'd probably be really happy to do it, let me think about it, think about it overnight.” My thoughts were, can I really put up with Kranz? I had been around him quite a bit and had seen his role as a flight director over there on Gemini and had not really worked with him, but had seen him and knew his reputation, and I wasn't sure that was going to work out very well, but it was worth a try. And it did, it worked out great, actually. I [have] a lot of respect and admiration for him, and once you get beyond this outward facade that he has, it's not really a facade, he's truly what he says he is, but he's also a really kind, decent person behind all that. He's not just a martinet that he runs by, you wind him up and he does things. He's a real human being.\\n\\n So that worked really well, and I learned an awful lot from Gene. For quite a while I kind of thought it was going to be jump right in and start doing things, and unfortunately, it wasn't. I spent an awful lot of time working with the various individual flight controllers learning their job and what their problems were, and where the strengths and weaknesses were in their people, and just really had to work my way into being knowledgeable enough to get to sit on that console and make things work out.\\n\\n There are some kind of funny things that went on. Right after I got assigned there, they were flying one of the Gemini missions, they gave me a headset and told me to go sit in the room over here and plug into the com [communications] loops and listen to what was going on and how they were working back and forth. I plugged in, but I didn't know how to work the console. I pushed one of the buttons and it started flashing and I thought, god, what have I done? [Laughter] I'd punch it again and it kept flashing. I didn't know the fundamentals of how to do that. So somebody helped me out of that okay.\\n\\n After quite a few weeks and even months, probably, of watching simulations go on, see how that worked, Glynn told me one morning he says, “Look, I've got a simulation to run over here, launch abort simulations, and I've got to a meeting over in Building Two. Go take that over. Take that for me.” Uh-oh, this is not good. But I wasn't about to turn it down, you know. You just don't do that.\\n\\n I went over there and he says, “There's nothing to it. The guys know all what they're doing. You just respond to their calls. These are launch aborts. They're going to get going. They'll tell you where they are, different places.” I knew all the general stuff anyway.\\n\\n And it was a real baptism, because I really didn't know how to do it. I thought I did from watching them, but until you sit in that chair and you've got to start interacting, rather than just watching the interaction, it just really was a horrible day, but I got through it, and I told Lunney—I didn't tell him right away for a long time and we never really said anything about it, just did it—what terrible trick he played on me doing that. He says, “Yeah, you know,” he says, “I thought about it, really I shouldn't have done it.” [Laughter]\\n\\n Because I felt like an idiot and looked like an idiot. Here's these guys that someday you're suppose to be down there running this thing telling them what to do. Here they're seeing you do this and you don't know what you're doing. But by the time I sat down to the console during a mission, it was all worked out and I'd done a lot.\\n\\n I was surprised at how realistic the simulations were. NASA Flight Operations had come up with really a great way to train the people. These very realistic simulations, you run them in real time, and they were very strictly interpreted to keep it as realistic as possible. You didn't stop in the middle of something and discuss whether you should have done it that way or not; you just went ahead and did it. If you screwed it up, you screwed it up, and the whole thing showed it, and you had to all admit what you had done wrong.\\n\\n But the data that was presented to the flight controllers is a realistic simulation of what they'll see during a mission. The numbers behave the same way. You put a system failure into the spacecraft and it shows up as those kind of numbers, changed in the right way. So you really learned from the simulations. If you do enough of those simulations along with your studying and background data, you're really prepared for the flights. I think it's shown over the years how often things would happen in a spacecraft, and the flight controllers and the crew just always seem to do the right thing. I hope they keep doing it.\\n\\n They respond to the problems that come up in a way that maximizes the crew safety and also maximizes the return for the mission. You're getting the most results out of the mission that you possibly can. Once we started flying Apollo, it was like nothing I'd ever been involved in before…. That was truly, those months and few years that we were doing that, was the most dynamic, most interesting, and exciting thing I could possibly do. I don't see how you could have been any better than that, unless you had been in the crew and flying.\\n\\n But we got to work a lot of missions. The crew would fly a mission and then go away for a long time and come back and fly another mission. We were there mission after mission. Of course, it never got boring, but it never got to be a burden either. The training that you would do would get very intense before a flight and you'd spend a lot of these days and evenings training, practicing different phases of the work until you got it down where it all just seemed to come together right at the right time. It was scheduled out, worked very well with the amount of exercises you had to go through.\\n\\n There was very little individual rivalries. It was very much a cooperative period. You didn't really see anybody trying to get ahead in the organization. They were always helping each other and making sure that you were doing what was absolutely best for the program and best for the crew. There was just that feeling of the crews' lives rested in your hands and there's no way you could compromise that by trying to get yourself a little more promotion or a little more recognition out of things. People were—at least the ones that were working in mission control anyway, which is really the only ones I had a whole lot of knowledge of, were very oriented toward getting the job done safely and with as much success as you possibly could.\\n\\n There were a lot of close calls, but [we] were always able to work through them. You'd be in the middle of one of those situations and you'd just [say], “God, why am I here?” [Laughter] But after it was all over, you felt so great about having worked through it, you really wouldn't do anything else.\\n\\n I was trying to think about individuals there. Going into flight control opened up a whole new world of characters. There were a lot of people that were flight controllers that were really individualists and had some interesting ways of getting things done or not getting things done. I think some of the more interesting ones I didn't really get that close to because they were out on the remote sites.\\n\\n Kranz talks a lot about his remote-site capcoms and remote-site systems engineers. A lot of those folks were young guys who were given a small group of people and a mission to go out to a place like Canberra [Australia] and Africa and Guaymas, Mexico, and ships, and setup a little operation there that was supporting the work in the Earth orbit missions. So it fostered an awful lot of initiative and just do things the way you want to do, and it attracted some guys who were really interesting individuals, who were very successful at doing that.\\n\\n One of the most interesting ones that I did spend a lot of time with was John [S.] Llewellyn [Jr.]. Everybody knows about John because he's so visible. There's probably books that could be written about some of his antics, some good, some not so good. But he was somebody that was really part of the program, did a lot of things that people talk about. He was the subject of a lot of conversations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We've had him in that very chair." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good. Then you know all about him. Because what you see is, that's him. He has mellowed a lot, believe me. [Laughter] I don't know when you talked to him, but he's—I guess maybe “matured” is the right word, a little bit better.\\n\\n There were a lot of celebrations after the missions. There was nearly always an informal one right after a landing, whether it was morning or night. You'd meet somewhere and relax a little bit, kick back. We got a habit of having these what we called debriefing sessions usually at places down in Dickinson. The Hofbrau was one of the favorite places. The Singing Wheel was another one over here on—it was on Highway 3. Those were places where the crew and the flight controllers would get together and, well, just really a party. But there was a lot of presentations and speeches made back and forth. Those were a lot of fun and they contributed a lot to the camaraderie and the association with it.\\n\\n My impression of the Mercury Program, the crew and the flight controllers were very much separated. There was very little interaction between them. They didn't really get to know each other very well. That all started evolving, getting better, a more closer relationship, through the Gemini Program. But then Apollo, it really got very, very close there and has evolved even more. Once we got into the Shuttle, there was even more of an interaction and working than it had been before. But Apollo really started that with these debriefing sessions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Maybe you can tell us something about how things were for you once you actually got to sit on console for a mission, starting with Apollo 9, I think, was your first." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was the first flight I was actually a flight director on. It was a relatively simple mission for me, and that's the way you do it. First times on the console you're given the night shift when the crew's sleeping and things are not happening very much. But there's always things to be doing, getting prepared for the next day and reviewing and assimilating what happened the previous day. There's a lot of things going on.\\n\\n But my first shift, the first time I came on, there was a big sign on the console from somebody and it said, “Welcome to flight control.” Then, you know, it was a little bit of a small ceremony there before we got started into things.\\n\\n But after all the simulations, it was not so different. I felt reasonably comfortable with it after a little while. I mean, the first time I plugged in and got hold of the room and got things started, I was probably a little uptight about that, but before the shift was over, I was feeling pretty comfortable with what was going on. I don't recall anything particularly trying or troublesome on that mission for me.\\n\\n Now, there was problems there. Rusty [Russell L.] Schweickart got real sick and was practically useless during the mission, and that caused some difficulties, but the main activities of the mission went on pretty well as planned. So it was a pretty easy inauguration into the thing.\\n\\n The Apollo 10 thing was a lunar rendezvous mission. Did a rendezvous in lunar orbit. There I had the reentry portion of that part of the flight, so that was a big deal. We were really working. The entry trajectory had an entry corridor, we call it, that you had to be within to successfully return, so we were very careful about keeping the trajectory pointed into that corridor. Of course, that wasn't the first time we'd done that; Apollo 8 had been the very first one. That was exciting to be working on the console during that part of the flight.\\n\\n Again, I really don't remember any particularly difficulties with that. I did not work Apollo 11. Then [I worked] Apollo 12." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Apollo 10, and, I guess, Apollo 8, a little bit earlier, one of the things it's credited for is helping refine our understanding of these lunar mass concentrations and how that affects gravity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is that something you had a particular interest in, given your background in mission planning?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Most of our simulations, early on especially, assumed the [Moon’s weight was a] point mass, like it was a homogenous sphere. There had been some indications early that that wasn't the case, but nobody knew the magnitude or the exact characteristics of it. So, yes, Apollo 10 spent a quite a bit of time trying to map that just by very carefully tracking the spacecraft, because you'd track it carefully anyway, but what with especially one of seeing what kind of perturbations were happening when, and the magnitude of them and what the directions were, and gathering data that would let you back out from that data influences of what the lunar gravity distribution, mass distribution was like. So that was a big contribution to that.\\n\\n We had factored that into the way we computed orbits, computed the trajectories from that point on. Every lunar mission after that added a little bit of refinement to that sort of thing. Apollo 10 didn't get you the total story. So you're right, that was one part of that. That's one of the things that I hadn't really remembered.\\n\\n Apollo 12 with [Charles “Pete”] Conrad [Jr.] and Alan [L.] Bean on the Moon was an interesting flight. Conrad was a real character, and a very bright, very capable person, who just was as casual as you could be. I mean, he was a really fun person to be around, because he's always looking for something to keep it relaxed and keep things on a steady keel. He was really fun to work with, too. But at the same time you had the utmost respect for his ability, because he knew what he was doing and he could do it well.\\n\\n Apollo 13 was—of course, everybody knows about that, and that was a magnificent effort on that one. I was not working Apollo 13. We were rotating jobs and I [was given] the lead, the primary job for Apollo 14, so I was not working Apollo 13. Of course, once the problem developed, everybody was working Apollo 13 one way or another. We were working off-line with our crew, our team.\\n\\n Apollo 14, I was the primary flight director on that one, and had the launch phase and a good bit of the lunar surface activities. We did have some problems. Apollo 14, I guess, was the first time I really had a problem that could have been very critical occur, and that was when we were trying to dock-up with the lunar module. Like all those problems, you're never expecting those, something to happen, you've got a very routine operation going on at the dock, and it didn't capture. “Well, let's back off and do it again.” It didn't capture. “Uh-oh. This is—wait a minute now.”\\n\\n We're headed for the Moon, the lunar module is stuck in the Saturn third stage, and we've got to get that thing out of there. It was interesting how quickly the support forces came together and started working at that problem. We were trying to resolve it. Before I could even turn around, we had a model, had a version of the docking system in the control center. They brought it in and we were looking at all the things as the back-room experts were explaining and talking to us about what the various detail features of that system were and why possibly it wasn't working.\\n\\n As I recall, unless I'm mistaken about this, the final solution, we just hit it harder. There's just not much anybody can do to try to resolve any system problems with that docking latch and probe system. Although Shepard was talking about putting on pressure suits, depressurizing the command module, and then getting the probe out, and trying to work with it. Nobody on the ground wanted to do that, although we had to talk about it. But then it worked, clicked it in.\\n\\n The other thing that occurred that was worrisome was an abort light that showed up on the lunar module. That's something that I had a very different recollection of how that actually evolved, and after going over the notes and things that Kranz had, I saw that my thoughts on that way back, now current thoughts looking back, were different from the real facts.\\n\\n I had thought that we were working that problem on the way to the Moon to the extent that we got the software to work around to bypass the switch on the way to the Moon, but we hadn't. …That was done after we got into lunar orbit, at MIT, a young man [came] up with reprogramming the computer to bypass that switch.\\n\\n That was a good example of how NASA had setup this network of resources to support the mission control, and it worked really great. The thought of reprogramming that computer in-flight was just something people would never [do], you know, touch that computer [program after launch]. You check it out, you debug it and you debug it and you debug it, and once you get it to where you're sure everything in there is working right, you don't get in there again. But this was the only thing you could do, so, okay, let's do it. That saved that landing mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For 14 you said you were the lead flight director. Can you explain what additional responsibilities that is over just being the regular flight director?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Normally you have at least three flight directors on a mission, and they take responsibility for different active phases in the lunar missions; that was true. Like launch phase is one, and the guy that does launch phase is usually the lead flight director. He's there for the countdown. In fact, that was always the case. Lead flight director handled the launch phase. But you divide other phases like the lunar surface activities, the lunar rendezvous, breaking into lunar orbit, get those distributed across the three flight directors, so that nobody had responsibility for all of that work.\\n\\n The lead flight director was overall responsible for the coordination and work in that. He developed the shift schedules, …set the training plan, made the assignments on the mission, and [was] the primary interaction with the flight crew. …[He was] responsible for getting all of that coordinated and pulled together as a package for the mission. The other flight directors had their phase responsibilities, but for pulling the whole thing together that was the lead flight director. We rotated that job around.\\n\\n We started toward [the] end of that Apollo Program of bringing on some more flight directors, because we could see (we began to get a good understanding of) what the Skylab Program was going to be like. It was clear there that…[with] Skylab itself… going to fly for eight or nine months, …it just didn't make sense to have three flight directors continually on console for eight or nine months. Also, guys were moving on. Lunney and Charlesworth moved on to other jobs. Kranz, of course, didn't work the consoles anymore. He began to more interact with the higher-level management.\\n\\n So we did start working and training five new flight directors, and they came in and sat in on part of quiet shifts on the Apollo missions. So there was these other fellows working in on that. I think every one of those people—I started to say they were all ex-flight controllers. When I came in, I was not a flight controller, and neither was Milt Windler. That was the last time that happened. Phil [Philip C.] Shaffer was a mission analysis guy, he was not a flight controller, and he became one of the flight directors.\\n\\n On Skylab, by that time I was the head of the Flight Director Office. When the Skylab was getting started, then I became the division chief, Flight Control Division Chief, and also ran the Flight Director Offices as a part of that. The flight directors on Skylab were a whole new crew [except for] Milt Windler [who] stayed as a flight director for Skylab. He was the only senior guy…[serving as a flight director on Skylab].\\n\\n [Skylab] had a whole different character. The mission characteristics were so different, it became one of endurance and keeping the teams up and interested in the job. We had five teams because of that, so we could rotate them off the mission completely for periods of time, and then bring them back in after some period of rest.\\n\\n The trajectory wasn't a problem anymore; it was [simply] into orbit and circle the Earth forever [or so it seemed]. So all of the emphasis on work and activity was on what goes on in the Skylab, and it was science oriented. You had a lot of system maintenance and spacecraft maintenance to do and upkeep, system servicing and things of that sort, but the real mission accomplishments were all scientific, where Apollo, it had a certain amount of science to it, but it was mostly just to do things. Do this, get to the Moon, explore it and all that.\\n\\n It became a big change in the view in how things were done in the control center. Your characteristics of the mission, problems, were quite a bit different. You still had a fundamental concern about crew safety and this hostile environment, but now you were only a few hours away from entry to Earth instead of days, so that changed a lot of thinking about what the team focus was and how it concentrated their efforts in getting work done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How much of this had you anticipated before actually starting the program? Obviously you have to set up a rotation, that kind of thing, but in terms of really the effect on controller moral and interest, these kinds of things?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, actually we had thought quite a bit about it. There was enough thought being given during the latter phases of Apollo, people were set aside to study the Skylab Program from Flight Control Division, to look into it and get prepared for it. The concept of dividing the efforts we came up with, there was a lot of discussion about how to do that. We came up with this idea of there's a planning team, an execution team, and a “what happen[ed]” team that does this.\\n\\n We first started thinking, well, you plan, you execute, and you look at what the results were. Then you plan, execute, and look at what the results were, like that kind of a sequence. But in planning, the team could come up with something that the execute guys would have a real problem with, there was no time to work that out. They were given a plan here, and they were expected to execute it. This was long before missions started, we looked at that. Part of the people were saying, “Well, that's tough. That's what you've got to do.”\\n\\n Then we thought, “Why do we have to do that? Let's plan for a day ahead.” This team is not planning for that day's activities; they're planning it for the [one] day ahead. Now you've got this time here where people have a chance to look through it and modify it, and fine-tune it, and you got a lot better chance [for it] to work…. There was a lot of resistance to that. That doesn't make sense, you know, you plan, you execute, and you review it. But we ended up putting this time period in there, and it worked out really well.\\n\\n What we were really surprised at was how disjointed the scientific community was. There [were] four or five disciplines all competing for time on the spacecraft, and we weren't too clever about anticipating the problems that that would cause. This guy's success meant absolutely nothing to this guy over here. In fact, he resented letting this guy have [use of] the crew's time. They were very self-oriented. It was not a teamwork at all. We were not prepared for managing that kind of a thing, and yet we were supposed to. …Being the flight controllers, it was our job to manage all that. We were totally surprised and really were inadequately prepared when we first started simulating and would introduce problems so that today's work didn't get really done the way it was supposed to. [The experimenters would] only [get] half the amount of [crew] time available.\\n\\n The… arguments that would erupt back in the science planning room about how to [allocate the time when problems interrupted experiments], and we didn't feel qualified to tell these guys what was the most important. So we were really at a loss as to how to handle that. NASA management hadn't anticipated that either, I don't think, because they had us set up like that. It was taken care of by forming a science management team. You had a guru in charge of all of them, and that job was rotated, so that for a while one discipline had the overall responsibility, and they learned to cooperate. …[The science competition] came as a big surprise to [the Flight Directors].\\n\\n The earlier simulations [did not] involve the scientists—for a good while we didn't do that. We didn't simulate with the scientists, we were just so concerned with operating the spacecraft and making it work properly that we didn't bring the science people in until we had gotten our job pretty well understood. So it came kind of late in the pre-mission preparation that this problem showed up.\\n\\n So that was a lot of emphasis shifted to an off-line management interaction kind of a task. There was high-level management teams that met daily to review the results of this process. They reviewed the planning that had been done, so that it didn't come down to a bunch of flight controllers deciding what [science] needs to be done…. The mission science planning people laid out priorities and specifics of what they needed to have done, and the [Flight Control team] planners then tried to work that into a meaningful schedule, and then [the scientists] had a chance to review it and criticize it and to work it back and forth. [The Skylab mission] was a big coordination job….\\n\\n Of course, it started off with a really interesting problem when the meteorite shield came loose and the wing didn't deploy, one of the wings didn't deploy. That was a lot of effort early on to try to get that problem solved. Again, they had Conrad, Pete Conrad, was in charge of the crew of the first mission, and that was a really good deal. They took some very difficult tasks and worked them out and got things going.\\n\\n Along in there, I'm not sure exactly when, we started getting indications of this Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project, ASTP] mission showing up. Lunney [was by now the Apollo Program Manager] in charge of that…. [A joint mission was agreed to by the US and USSR]. I… got pulled off of doing much with the Skylab after that, and I took over the primary flight director responsibility for the Apollo-Soyuz mission. I still had the division chief job of Flight Control Division and [ran the] Flight Director [Office], so I still got involved to some extent, but primarily the five flight directors who were working Skylab… took… thing over. I didn't get much involved with the day-to-day operations, although Gene and I traded off times sitting in the control center to help, not as a flight director role, but as a intermediary between the flight directors and the [senior] management….\\n\\n That was very interesting. I really enjoyed that Apollo-Soyuz mission. It was a real opportunity, I thought, to learn about the Russians and how they did things, not only their space operations, but just the culture as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about working with the Russians during this time period where we're still in the Cold War, and the race to the Moon, I guess, has just been ended, even though, as you pointed out, from their end they really didn't have much of a chance there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were all really unsure about how to handle ourselves with the Russians, but we determined… we were going to be as open and congenial and friendly as we could. My first interaction with them was when they came to Houston. There had been one meeting in Moscow where NASA people went over there, but there weren't any flight controller or flight operations people involved in that. But Lunney, being an ex-flight director and in charge of the program office at the time and leading that effort, recognized right off he needed to get some flight ops people involved right away.\\n\\n So when they came to Houston, that first joint meeting here, we had a proposal for the Russians of a separate working group just for flight operations, and they were totally unprepared for it. They didn't have anybody in their operations organization here, but they assigned some guys to go meet with us, and they were at a real loss for being able to contribute anything. All they could do was take some notes. We had presentations for them, [we told] them what all we thought the ops involvement ought to be. It was pretty frustrating [since couldn’t understand operations issues]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Actually, this might be good time for us to stop out and change out our tapes and give your voice a rest for a minute. [Tape change]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Working with the Russians turned out to be really frustrating. We had prepared a lot of presentation material and we had an agenda of things that we wanted to cover and get started working on. We essentially didn't get any of that done. I'm not sure how long they were here, but several days, a week or two, and about all we got done was figure out what a big job we had ahead of us just communicating.\\n\\n But at least we got our point across to them that they had to have some operations people involved with this. It couldn't just be spacecraft designers, and that [operations planning] was going to be a big part of the work. So they were prepared when we went to… the next meeting in Moscow. That was [an] eye-opener again… how crude things were there. The place reminded me of pictures that you'd seen of downtown cities in this country back in the thirties. It just looked old-fashioned and people kind of dressed that way. The telephone system was unreliable. Their ability to do things like make copies of pages, make viewing material for presentations, they just didn't have any of that.\\n\\n We flight operations people didn't do this, but the program took all this equipment over there with them, copiers and things to do the office work, because some of them had been there before and they knew… that kind of thing was just not available. It was very slow and inefficient, getting things like that done. They relied on us to do the copying for them and to provide them support, administrative kind of support, do all that kind of thing.\\n\\n Our first impression here was, boy, these guys are really inept, you know, they're not capable of things. What you found out was they were really clever, and in spite of all these handicaps they had, they got the job done. They were very good about doing mission control. They had a grossly different approach to it, and [in] basic things like mathematics and engineering principles… they were as good as anybody in the world. It's just that the mechanics and details of doing things, they didn't have that kind of infrastructure to help them. But they knew all about these trajectory problems and obviously they'd been flying spacecraft. It wasn't luck. They knew what they were doing, they were just doing it a different way than we did.\\n\\n The primary difference in the approach was that they didn't plan their missions to very great detail. They would just kind of let things—they… had general plans [of] things that they were going to do, but if something would go wrong [or if] they couldn't complete a step, they might just quit the mission, if they couldn't come up with something in real time to work around it. They didn't spend [much] effort [in contingency analysis]. In Apollo, we probably spent ten times the amount of effort on off-nominal contingency kind of analyses that we did on nominal mission analyses, and they spent very little. So there's a tremendous difference in the amount of effort and work going into preparing for a flight that we did compared to what they did.\\n\\n We really had to drag them along to get them to do all these things. [Their approach was], “Well, why do all that? If the mission doesn't work out, we'll end it and we'll send another one up.” I had a feeling they had a factory turning out these Soyuz spacecraft just one right after another, and if one of them had to cut its mission short, well, we'll catch that next time. That kind of approach. They finally realized that we don't have that. We've got one Apollo we can send and that's it. If we don't do this mission right, then it's a failure, period. They began to feel the pressure from that. They sure as hell didn't want to fail with a joint mission with the U.S. So they began to get the picture [clearly]. [This was a public relations program and you better be successful].\\n\\n [When we got to Moscow, the Russians were ready with a general plan for the flight]. …They said, “…We want to launch first, and then you… rendezvous with us.” It turned out they didn't enough fuel to do a rendezvous to Apollo on the trajectory that we would launch from. So there was really no choice; they had to launch first. But it was also good in that if they had a problem, they quit that mission before we launched and they'd send up another one. So that contributed to helping them. They didn't have one shot at this thing… If they didn't get up there and become a good viable target, we'd just sit here and let them try to send another one.\\n\\n [The Russians did not normally] do much training jointly between the crew and the flight controllers. In fact, they did very little. They didn't have anything that let them do integrated simulations where their crew is in a simulator and the flight controllers being in the control center and work with common data. They had no capabilities to do that. A lot of [the] operational [preparation] approach [such as integrated simulations we insisted on], you know, just forced them to do these kind of things, because that was the only way that we were going to operate. I think they were pretty reluctant to go along with it, but in the end they did, and we were all a lot better off for it.\\n\\n We did joint integrated simulations…[with the Russians] in Moscow and we were here and the crew was in the simulator…. We didn't do very many of those, because it was really hard to keep that operating, but we did some of that just to make sure all of the communications were really going to work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In working on issues like this, how restrictive did you find the language barrier, working through translators and such?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was a big problem also. We worked with interpreters all the time. Some of the Russians could speak a little English and, of course, none of us could speak Russian, so we had interpreters that worked with us on any joint meetings. They became a very key part in the planning, because they could really get you messed up if they didn't understand, [if] the interpreters didn't understand, and were explaining the wrong thing to the other side. There was no way to check that until you tried to do something and it didn't come together and that was because there was some misunderstanding. I mean, we couldn't tell if they were telling the right thing, and the Russians couldn't tell if they were telling them what we told them to tell them. It was a big learning curve on how to work in that environment.\\n\\n Occasionally you'd get in some disagreement over a particular subject and find that this disagreement was really pretty basic, pretty fundamental, and you couldn't understand how in the world they could want to do what they apparently wanted to do, it just didn't make sense, but they were insisting on doing that. Finally, it came out that that wasn't what they were wanting to do at all. It was being misunderstood and they really didn't disagree on what we wanted to do, it's just that we were telling each other the wrong thing. So anytime there would seem to be something fundamentally wrong, we'd say, “Oh, wait a minute. We've got to translate, work on this translation because something is not right here.”\\n\\n But early on, you didn't know them that well to throw that out, you know. Maybe they did want to do this thing that just didn't make sense, and so you had to explore it and find out why they wanted to do it. So that was a learning thing that we went through and it got a lot better working with interpreters after a while, but it always slowed things down. Saying something in Russian seemed to always take twice as long as in English. I don't know if it's because we just have so much jargon and slang that we would substitute a word for maybe two or three sentences sometimes, and they didn't do that, apparently, very widely. So just a simple word like “de-orbit” in Russian might come out to be a phrase like saying “the maneuver that takes the spacecraft out of orbit.” So every time you came to that, instead of saying “de-orbit,” they would say “the maneuver that takes the spacecraft out of orbit.” There must have been thousands of examples like that. It'd get to be funny. Even the Russians would laugh at it, too. It'd be a couple of sentences in English, and then the interpreter would talk for five minutes in Russian. I think that's the biggest thing relative to the technical aspect of it.\\n\\n [The] flight plans that the [Russian] crew [normally] carried were very general. We had very detailed flight plans, and we ended up using very detailed flight plans on the [ASTP] mission just because we insisted on doing these things and they would end up going along with it.\\n\\n Other than the technical work, just meeting the people and getting immersed in their society, their social system over there, that was really an education also. They really, really have a different view of things, and having grown up or evolved for centuries in this non-freedom kind of environment, they're very secretive and very reluctant to talk about anything that's the least bit away from the party line in any way. Very reluctant to express personal opinions about things.\\n\\n It was kind of hard to get one of them to sign a report sometimes, because they didn't really like to get their name on something, because that goes into the files and maybe someday if there's something really bad that happened relative to that, then their name is on it and they get purged. This is speculation; nobody told me that. But it was an explanation, my explanation of why things were like that. Very much not wanting to stand out, just kind of hold back and be part of the group as opposed to being out in front of the group, leading something.\\n\\n There was one thing in particular that really exemplified the secretiveness of the place. On weekends we would have some kind of social activity, we'd go somewhere out from the city or do something [in Moscow as a group]. One weekend we went on a bus trip to a place outside of town, and going out of town, we went through parts of [Moscow] we'd never been in as part of our work there. We're driving out this big wide road and we passed a complex where they had about a twelve- or fifteen-foot brick wall with barbed wire around it, and at every entrance there were two or three guys with machine guns on their shoulder keeping guard of it. We just all looked at that and wondered what that was. Nobody said anything about it, we didn't want to call attention to it, and they didn't say a word. There were a lot of Russians on the bus, people that were working with us, the secretaries and engineers and some of the managers. We went on and spent the weekend….\\n\\n Later on in the week [back in Moscow], they were going to take us to their Mission Control Center, which was in Moscow…. We drove up to [that high-walled, heavily-guarded compound we had passed on the bus the previous Saturday morning]…. It's a big complex, maybe as big as the NASA grounds in the city of Moscow. We went to a building and there's the Mission Control Center. We had passed it three days before and nobody said a word that “That's our Mission Control Center.” I wouldn't be surprised if some of the secretaries didn't even know it was the Mission Control Center. It's just the kind of thing that nobody talked [about]. I couldn't believe it when we drove up to that place and this is the Mission Control Center. …We were just here three days [before].\\n\\n The counterpart, my working group co-chairman, a Russian named [Vladimir A.] Timchenko was, it turned out—I don't remember how [I found out]—I think one of the interpreters told me… he was a colonel in the Russian Army. He never wore his uniform; he was always in civilian clothes. But we socialized quite a bit, and he was really a nice guy, friendly, and very good, conscientious, hard-working guy. You could really count on him working to get things done and get it done right.\\n\\n We would, on several occasions, go out to dinner or go to something as a group with three or four of us at a time. After… about the second, maybe the third trip that I'd been to Moscow, …we were walking back from some social function through Moscow, and it was at night, probably ten or eleven o'clock at night and there was four or five of us. There's always interpreters with us, and [the Russian group leader] and I were walking side by side, and [the] other [members of our group] were [several steps] ahead of us…. He kind of held me back just a little bit, so I stayed with him. He says, “See, Pete, we're free. We can walk on the streets without anybody bothering us, without any guards.” And to him that was a big deal. He knew what we thought about their system, and he was trying to defend it and show me that they really did have freedom. They could walk on the streets at night without having to worry about guards and stuff. I just felt sorry for him [because] that to him was something he was proud of, that they had that much freedom." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did they take to their visits to the United States?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, a couple of different types of reactions. Some of them just thought it was wonderful, just had a ball. Others kind of resented the facilities and things that we had, the luxuries that we had. I think they felt like we were kind of showing off and trying to put them down. I know a lot of us invited them into our homes and we had dinners and parties at the house with them…. I think they just were intimidated by a lowly engineer living in a two-story home with a big yard and two cars in the garage. I think they kind of felt like we were showing off to them, and some of them did. I think [some of our] people… were doing that, kind of showing off, wanting them to see how great we had it over here, and that was misguided. But I don't think they were trying to make them feel bad, they were kind of proud of what we had, and so it came across as being pushy to some of them. Others, it didn't seem to make any difference at all.\\n\\n Before they went back, they wanted to go to a store and spend whatever money they could to take things back with them. It was interesting, the kind of things they would get. It would be the most routine things, like windshield wipers for their car. I noticed that all the cars in Moscow didn't have the blades on the windshield wipers. People would take them off and lock them in their car, because it would get stolen. Basic little hardware things they would buy and take back, as opposed to souvenirs and stuff like that. But they loved to go to the big discount stores, just to walk around and [look]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned how the Russians were secretive about the things that they did on their end. Were there security concerns from the United States in terms of what technology or information you could share with the Russians?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't really think there was. There were people who believed that, but I don't really think so. Some people thought we were giving away our operations techniques and how we did things that would help so that it would improve the way they worked. I don't really think that was the case. I think they liked the way they did it. And probably after ASTP, were right back to doing it the way they always had.\\n\\n I have not been close at all with the Space Station working with the Russians, but I do know that they have not changed their joint simulation activity as much between the crew and the flight controllers. They can do some of that now, but not nearly to the extent that we do. They just don't think it's a big deal.\\n\\n But as far as engineering and technology, I don't know that we ended up transferring anything to them in that program. It could be in some of the communications things that they got some benefits out of some of that, but I'm really not aware of any of that. I don't think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did the mission itself go in comparison to the way you had planned for it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It went pretty darn well. It was really going along right on cue, on schedule. They got their first spacecraft off on time and it did the right things. Our launch and rendezvous worked real well. [Thomas P.] Stafford was crew commander, and [Alexei A.] Leonov, the Russian commander, who's a wonderful person, he's really a nice guy and very bright, good humor. I really enjoyed being around him. He's been over here several times since the mission. I was at a couple of things where he was there and he came over and gave me a big hug. He really seemed glad to see people that he'd worked with back then.\\n\\n But the mission went well. When we opened up the docking module between the two, that module hadn't been opened since I don't know how long before actual launch, so there was a really strange odor in there, and people were wondering what that was. We spent a lot of time to try to hash that out. It just turned out it was outgassing of some of the materials that was in there and it was not harmful or anything, but we had to stop what we were doing and spend some time getting people to analyze what that might be. But that was the only kind of little glitch that I remember.\\n\\n We had several modes of where the docking system would work several different ways. The crew wanted to try them all out, and the engineers said, “Wait a minute. Let's don't screw around with this. Everything's working great. We've done our job. Let's don't push our luck.” But Slayton had practiced docking also. He was the pilot. He really insisted on doing one docking himself, because Stafford had done the one that got the two together. So when it came time to separate, we did separate and he switched to another mode and… [redocked]. Apparently, he got [the alignment] off center, and when they latched up, the Soyuz got swung around…[more than anybody liked] and the Russian crew got really excited about what was going on. [Laughter] But I think other than that, everything just went perfectly on track.\\n\\n We got live television from the Russians as their crew came down to land. It was on parachutes and we were seeing it live. Just as it got real close to the ground, they fire these rockets to slow it down, but I really wasn't thinking along those lines, and this big cloud of dust and dirt came flying up. I thought, “My God, it's blown up.” It turned out it was a normal landing.\\n\\n From then on, I was involved in Shuttle. I mean, that was what we were doing from then on, developing Shuttle. I still had the Flight Control Division [and the Flight Director Office, but]. I never worked on the console anymore [as] a flight director. But when the flight director’s teams [were very much] involved with [planning] the [operation for the] Approach and Landing Tests [ALT] out at Edwards… [and the] Shuttle orbital flights.\\n\\n Developing the flight control approach to Shuttle was a pretty big effort for a while. We were kind of fighting a trend that said “This is going to be run like an airline operation. We're going to fly sixty flights a year, and there's not going to be all this ground control support required. We're just going to launch them like airplanes, do our mission and come back and land. We don't need this big… elaborate control center operation.”\\n\\n I was really concerned, because I… felt like that wasn't practical to do. It was unrealistic to think that [operations would be so routine], but yet that was the program objective. It was the ultimate goal. So, you know, if that's the ultimate goal, we're going work toward that. But I said, “Well, look, okay, let's say we get there [that routine some day], We're not going to start off, you're not going to fly the first flight like that. So I've got to have a control center to do this, to support [the initial flight tests].”\\n\\n They didn't want to spend the money on the control center, but there was no way around it. You could not fly those development flights like an airplane. So we went through the whole big deal. It was a very elaborate, very expensive, very costly control center, and it had a lot of capabilities. We had come along way since the Apollo. What I wanted was to get a control center that had the capability to support Shuttle orbital flights.\\n\\n I said, “We've got to have it to do the development flights. If we don't need it anymore, we'll phase it out and just power down and won't have all these flight controllers, won't have all these systems going, if it turns out that that's reasonable and practical to do.” So that's the way it worked out. It was there and it came in pretty handy a lot of times, and we never really were able to power down that control center. That's too bad, really. I mean, it's unfortunate, because its cost makes it a lot more expensive to fly. It certainly would have been a lot better if we hadn't had to do that, but it was not to be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where did you see your role in the space program going as the Shuttle Program came into the operational phase as it was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there was a couple of ways it could have gone. I felt like [we] could have migrated more and more of [mission control] on board the spacecraft, because we were really getting a lot of capability in the Shuttle vehicle. It could be that the ground [could play] less and less a role, [but] how far that [would go] you couldn't really tell. You could see what possibly might be, like you turn into nothing more than an air traffic controller kind of role with the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]. I didn't… [think we] could ever get away from that.\\n\\n The other way was that the crew would have [most] of their activities involved in getting the…[on orbit tasks] done. Well, sort of like Skylab, where they [would be] focused on doing things with the Shuttle, with the systems of the Shuttle, that [we] would [do] more and more of the systems management of the Shuttle itself on the ground…. With the links that we had, the continuous tracking in Earth orbit, you could put the…[shuttle systems management] on the ground and operate it remotely. [Then] the crew…[could concentrate on] doing their thing with whatever science or payload support activity was going on. You could even go so far as to do automatic landings. I mean, that's a system that works. It could be done.\\n\\n So you got these two possibilities that are totally at odds with each other of how it could evolve. It was a matter of what worked [best], which way the system evolved. Of course, there were strong camps on both [sides] of that. I mean, the crew was not about to accept the fact that you were flying the vehicle mostly from the ground. So it seemed to me that where the flight control was going was not obvious to me, that it could have gone either way…. Something in between, which is kind of what happened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You did stay with NASA through a few years of the Space Shuttle Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why did you choose to leave when you did?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I could see the flight control role getting more routine and not as [much new] development. The budgets were getting cut back. There was very little of this exploration kind of mind-set that was getting funded. There were people working that kind of thing and trying to get support for Mars missions and things of that sort, but the budgets just weren't going to support it. It was getting routine enough that it just wasn't that challenging to me anymore.\\n\\n I saw an opportunity to get involved in developing—IBM offered me a job to work on their proposal for the Air Force. The Air Force was going to build their own Mission Control Center in Colorado Springs [Colorado], and IBM was bidding on that job, and there was a chance to go and develop that control center for the Air Force. It seemed like something still involved with the Shuttle and space operations, but a totally different kind of responsibility, and really different from what I had been doing, because it was not a flight control job so much as it was an overall control center development, prepare operations concepts, and how the Air Force would actually do their mission, which [would have been] a big challenge for the Air Force…. [After we (IBM) won the contract, the Air Force decided it was too big of a job for them]. They… backed off… [and canceled the contract. I think they made the right decision].\\n\\n …When the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n accident occurred, it was just devastating. I really had mixed emotions. One was, “Thank god I wasn't at the control center when that happened,” and the other was, “What am I doing out here? I'm not helping. NASA's really suffering and I'm sitting over here working for some Air Force program.” I really felt left out and kind of lost. But that was the way it was.\\n\\n So that was my career with NASA, in two hours." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You were right, it took two hours. I didn't think it would take that long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like I said, people are often surprised at the things they remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, you get started talking and you just keep going. There's a tremendous detail that's lost. I just don't remember. But it was just a wonderful experience for me. I'm really happy that I was involved in that, got to be a part of it. Just not many jobs like that around to work on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's certainly true. I did want to give both Tim and Carol a chance to ask some questions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there any point during your career at NASA that you consider your biggest accomplishment or something that you're most proud of being involved with?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There are several things that I thought were kind of neat that I got to do, but I think [the most satisfying was] being responsible for [dveloping] the trajectory program that was used to get the guidance [parameters] and to get the spacecraft to the Moon and back. Getting that developed, implemented, and seeing it actually [work]… was more of a personal accomplishment or achievement than any of the others. A lot of the rest of it was a team kind of [effort]—not that the trajectory development wasn't a team effort. It's just that I was in charge of that branch. It was my job to see which of those two programs, if either one of them we were going to use, because other organizations were building similar kind of programs. They weren't focused exclusively for use in Apollo though. Anyway, the fact that that worked so well, I really felt great about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wanted to make sure you had a chance for any last remarks, or other stories that may have come to mind, or any other people you want to say something about or describe for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There's a lot of people I really admire that I worked for and with. I had a great admiration for Dr. Gilruth, even though I didn't work real closely with him. One of the things that I admired about him was that people that I'd worked with that were so admirable had such a great respect for Dr. Gilruth. Chris Kraft thought he was the next thing to God, I think, and I think Kraft was just an outstanding leader at NASA.\\n\\n George Low was a great gentleman and a brilliant engineer. A lot of the guys, the contemporaries that I worked with, were really capable and worked hard, Ron Berry and Claude Graves. Al Beck, as funny and casual and loose as he was, was really an asset to NASA. I was really impressed with almost all the flight crews, the astronauts. I think if I had to pick one who I was most impressed with, it would be Conrad.\\n\\n The place was a remarkable collection of dedicated and capable people, and an unique mission and challenge to do something that doesn't come along very often. I guess that's it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's been a pleasure to hear the stories that you've had to offer and your recollections." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was pretty painless. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good. We're glad to make it that way for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "M. P. Frank", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, good." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00379", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/LunneyGS/lunneygs.htm", + "original_file_name": "LunneyGS_2-8-99.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/LunneyGS/LunneyGS_2-8-99.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 8 February 1999" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Carol Butler" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Glynn S. Lunney" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is February 8, 1999. This oral history is with Glynn Lunney at the offices of the Signal Corporation in Houston, Texas. The interview is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project by Carol Butler, assisted by Summer Chick Bergen and Kevin Rusnak.\\n\\n Thank you for joining us again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome. Glad to be here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We'll start with Apollo. In the earlier interview you talked some about the early Apollo missions, Apollo 1, Apollo 7, and Apollo 8, but you mentioned in our last interview that while Gemini was going on, you were working on some of the unmanned Apollo missions. What can you tell us about what you did?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were actually sort of two series of unmanned flights. One was called the boilerplate. \"BP\" was the designator, and it was a set of tests of the escape system, the Apollo abort escape system, the little tower that was on top of the spacecraft that would pull it over, pull it off the vehicle, if there were a problem during the launch phase. That was considered critical enough that there was a whole set of tests designed that were conducted out at White Sands. We used a solid rocket motor, and the idea was to boost the spacecraft to high dynamic pressures, high loads, and then trigger the abort system to see that it worked properly under a variety of sets of conditions.\\n\\n I can't recall how many flights there were out there, but I was sort of in charge of the flight part of it. The flight part of it had to do with tracking the vehicle and determining when it was getting into conditions that we wanted, and then hitting a button that basically destructed the launch vehicle, or stopped the launch vehicle, opened it up so that it would stop propulsion, and also triggered the abort system. We had a number of those. I can't remember the number, but over a period of probably, I don't know, a year or two, maybe less than two years. Those tests were conducted out at White Sands and basically qualified the escape system as a total system for the later flights.\\n\\n Let's see. I don't know that I can recall anything terribly significant about them except the solid rockets kicked them up awful fast. We got the conditions very quickly, the aerodynamic conditions we were trying to match, and the abort system worked, as I recall, every time, although the destruct system on the launch vehicle didn't work, I don't think, quite the first time, and I can't remember all the reasons. I think there was some problem with the cables pulling out of a box. Once that got resolved, everything out there went fine, and I can't recall any other real problems with it.\\n\\n We scrubbed one day because of high winds. The solid rockets were just sort of stabilized with a small thrust vector control system, but if the winds got to blowing too much from certain directions, then it would take the vehicle off course. We had to scrub one launch, I remember, because the winds were high, and actually the vehicle, instead of going where we wanted it to, probably would have come close to coming back over the range where the pads were. So we scrubbed that, and there was a little excitement about that within the management ranks, but that all settled down and everybody decided that was the right thing to do, and we went on a few days later and launched it, and it was fine.\\n\\n Let's see. That was the series that was conducted out at White Sands. They were rather small-scale vehicles. They went up to maybe 30,000 feet, and that went well. After that, we got into tests of the spacecraft overall, but mostly tests of the heat shield itself. There were a total of four unmanned tests of that order. Two of them were on the Saturn 1B, which was the smaller rocket that was used for the earth orbital flights. That was, for example, the rocket we used when we flew Apollo 7. Then we came back later, by the way, and used it for the Skylab missions, for launching the command service modules, and also for the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. So it continued to be used over the course of the program, but was really only used for one manned flight in Apollo.\\n\\n The first two, as I said, were on the Saturn 1B, and basically what we did was we put the vehicle in an orbit, and then we would put it up high, in a high orbit, and then drive it on down with the propulsion system that existed on the command service module. It was called the service propulsion system, SPS. It was the engine that the Apollo spacecraft itself used, a fairly big engine, and those flights were fairly uneventful, I think, in terms of what went on in them. I can't recall anything exciting or anything to tell you about, although in the launch of one of them, the launch got scrubbed for some reasons at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] that I can't recall, and then they decided that everything was okay.\\n\\n Kurt [H.] Debus was in charge of the Kennedy Space Center [Florida] at the time, he came back on the loop and asked me if we could unscrub. That was kind of a new term for us. We'd never done one of those, but everything was still up, so we got everybody settled back down and went ahead with the countdown, and it went fine. Both of those flights went pretty much by the book.\\n\\n We then flew the first Saturn V unmanned, and I was the flight director on that one, too. It was called 501, five for the Saturn V designator and 01 for the first flight on it, and it, again, was basically a test of the heat shield, and the idea there was to propel the vehicle all the way to conditions just about what they would reach when they reentered from the moon. We came close to those kind of conditions, and the flight went very normally. Everything worked just exactly as we expected, and it was fine.\\n\\n We flew a second one called 502, logically enough, 502 after that, and Cliff [Clifford C.] Charlesworth, a good friend of mine, was the flight director for that flight. That flight really misbehaved. One of the center engines on the second stage—what happened was, one of the engines on the second stage wanted to shut itself down, but the wires that did that were crossed to another engine. So we ended up with two, I think, engine shutdowns, and then we ended up with a bad vibration, a pogo kind of a vibration, on the set of beams that hold all the engines to the tank. That was of great concern to us later on when we were considering manning the next Saturn V flight.\\n\\n So we got into some funny orbital conditions, but we got into some kind of orbital conditions with the Saturn V, and again we used the service propulsion system, the engine on the Apollo spacecraft, to drive it back down in to get a high-heat entry test approximating those that we would see when we got back from the moon.\\n\\n I don't know if we got all the way to the conditions we were trying to match with that flight, but it was kind of peculiar because the flight I was on, 501, went just nominal-nominal once we got it off, and then Cliff, bless his heart, walked off and got this next one, and there were all kind of problems, especially with the launch phase of the vehicle, and he had to deal with all those. But in the end, the mission was considered successful.\\n\\n We learned quite a bit about the launch vehicle, and we made some modifications to avoid this pogo situation that we were getting into with the center engine, they think was causing it. And what we ended up doing on the later flights, the manned flight, was shutting the center engine down a little bit early, and the rest of the propellant, of course, would go into the four outer engines, and it worked fine. That was the fix that we put in for the manned Saturn Vs that first showed up, then, when we flew Apollo 8.\\n\\n Today it seems like, especially in countdowns, Shuttle countdowns run really pretty smoothly. I mean, they're pretty well thought through, the hardware works very well. But I remember when we were getting ready for the first Saturn V flight, they had what they called a \"countdown demonstration test\" [CDT] or something close to that name. Normally that should take, I don't know, three days or so to go through all the preps and fuel the vehicle and take it all the way down as if you were ready to lift it off, and then, of course, not do it in a test.\\n\\n But it took us, I think, the best part of two weeks to do that test that would normally take three days. I mean, it was just a—looking back, it wasn't at the time, but it was almost a circus of things that could go wrong, and they did. The team of people, mostly at the Cape, were responding to it, although here in the Control Center in Houston we were participating in the count. So we kind of stayed with them for that almost two weeks of getting a countdown test done, and that was probably the most anomalous part of getting ready to do the first Saturn V flight.\\n\\n We also had some probably extra bold things that were built into the spacecraft, even when you flew 201, that we never had to exercise, and I'm glad we didn't, because we actually had the ability to control the attitude of the vehicle as if you were flying it from the ground, but it gets pretty tricky because you have to have the right displays, you have to have the right controls, you have to send them the right way, and we practiced that a bit, to have this ability to control the spacecraft, but fortunately the automatic system worked fine and we didn't have to get into any of that stuff, because it would have been very hairy for somebody to be looking at an indicator on the ground and then try to, in effect, fly a vehicle that was airborne. Today you could probably do that more reasonably than the way we were going about it at the time, but we never had to use that, thank God, and everything went fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And everything did go fine. The Saturn rocket has—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "An amazing record." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "An amazing record." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Amazing record for what was asked of it. Two test flights, and then we used it throughout the Apollo series for all the moon flights, and it worked fine. It did work fine on every flight except when we launched it and got hit with lightning on Apollo 12." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And even then it got up to orbit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Even then it worked fine. Yes. A little scary, but it worked fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned the countdown and training for flying the rocket from the ground, and we had talked before about how you trained for the earlier missions like the Mercury and having to make the tapes and then changing it for Gemini. How did you change your training for the Apollo missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, by the time we got the Apollo, we were really much more adept at using digital computers to do that for us. So we had simulators that the crew used that we modified some to do these unmanned things, unmanned flights, but the simulators could then be flown, and as the simulator responded to events and the information that would be displayed in the Control Center, which is where we all were by that time, was accurate. So we didn't have to make tapes and preconceive what the courses of action might be and send them all around the world, around the network stations that we talked before, but rather we had a simulator that was flying on its own, generating the telemetry that was true to, or accurate to, whatever it was doing, and that was the telemetry that was displayed in the Control Center. We also derived from the simulator what the trajectory was and simulated the radar data coming in also so that we had an accurate simulation of the flight, and it was good training. I mean, it was very good training.\\n\\n We ran a lot of flights, simulated training flights, for the unmanned flights, and again, it was a big learning experience, because the Apollo spacecraft was new to us at the time, since most of the ops team had worked on Gemini, and then we started to mesh with the design team at North American Aviation at the time, is what was the name of the company before Rockwell bought it out, and the fellows, the men there, who built the spacecraft. So we had, in the course of those unmanned flights, a lot of chance to interact with the team of engineers, both within NASA, the program office, and the engineering team, and the engineering teams at North American Aviation, and we got where we understood the Apollo spacecraft pretty well. By the time we flew Apollo 7, the team had a very good understanding of the Apollo spacecraft and what it was capable of and what you had to do to keep it working right, etc., etc." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Certainly had a lot to learn for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many hours would you estimate that you would put in to train for a specific flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, in those days the flights themselves probably slipped a lot more than we had when the program became more mature, for mostly hardware, spacecraft or launch vehicle hardware reasons. So we would end up having, probably, extended training periods getting ready for an individual flight. If I had to guess, like for the first 201 or 202, we probably had twenty all-day training sessions in the Control Center or thereabouts. We had a lot of them. Today, for a Shuttle flight, they probably have an integrated training with the crews in the simulator and the people in the Control Center of probably, I don't know, maybe a dozen or so full days of work. Integrated sims they're called, integrated simulations. But we had probably double that number. Compared to what we're doing today, we had double that number, at least when we were doing the early flights, because it a learning experience all around. The ground systems were struggling, the simulators would struggle, the cases would go awry on the people who had planned them, and on and on and on.\\n\\n So we had plenty of opportunity to see a lot of different kind of things happening and get used to the equipment that we had, both the vehicles and especially the ground equipment, because things would break, and we'd have to figure out why did it break and can we launch under those conditions, and do we have some kind of workaround or whatever? It was quite a learning experience for all of us all around, and meshing the spacecraft and then using it as an operational vehicle—well, it wasn't quite operational, but using it in flight was also a big bridge to make because the people who had designed and built it had spent their lives doing exactly that, and it was their baby, and it was a little hard for them, I expect, to sort of turn it over to both the team at the Cape, did the countdowns and the launch, and then when it lifted off, of course, the team in Houston, the flight operations team, picked it up and took it over.\\n\\n So we had bridges to build there in terms of connecting with those folks, both in terms of planning the missions, understanding what all the mission rules were, and then having them follow the flight in real time so that in the event of a problem, if there were time, we could consult with them, as we talked about before. And that gradually got to the point where that worked pretty well, too, even with the bigger team of people that we had, engineering team that we had on Apollo, compared to what we had on the Gemini spacecraft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You grew, and you meshed, and everything happened step by step." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just kept absorbing more and more entities or organizations into it. Yes, it took a lot of exercising, but we got there and it worked pretty well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, it did, and it got to the moon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It got to the moon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During this time frame, you became chief of the flight director's office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Somewhere in there, yes. Do you have the date, by the way?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I believe starting in 1968. What were your responsibilities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, in the Flight Control Division, we had just a handful—I have to stop and count, but it would be like four or five of six people who were in the flight director's office who would be flight directors when the actual flight occurred. Their duties involved a lot more than the actual flight because it was getting ready for the flight that consumed so much of our time, and what we got in the style of appointing a lead flight director for each flight, who was then sort of the overall orchestrator with the flight crews and the training schedules and was the overall orchestrator or referee when we got to arguing about mission rules and procedures and what we were going to do under certain circumstances and so on. And that worked pretty well for us.\\n\\n We also found that individual people kind of focused, either planned or accidentally, on different parts of the mission so that we kind of did, not completely but some amount of repeating of the phases of a flight. Where somebody did this certain phase before, they might do that again either in the next flight or a couple of flights downstream.\\n\\n So we didn't go into each flight with everybody having to learn everything about each phase, all of which would be very different and very complicated. For example, the launch phase is one thing, the earth orbit is another, the going into orbit around the moon is another thing, getting ready for landing on the moon and landing on the moon is another set of things that are going on. You're introducing more of the hardware. For example, when you get to landing, you're introducing the lunar module in a much more intimate way than we had before.\\n\\n And then there was the EVAs, the walks on the moon, where we got to the point where we were beginning to mesh with the scientists, the geologists and other kind of lunar scientists who planned—made inputs to, I should say, what they wanted to accomplish on the moon, and then a team of people in the Apollo spacecraft program office let what they called traverse planning, traverse for where you were going to go on the moon and what you were going to do at each place and how long it was going to take you.\\n\\n So that was another group of people that we began to integrate with and kind of absorbed into a single set, a team of planners, and then executors for the actual flight itself, and that was all a big learning experience for us. So we didn't stick rigorously to \"You do this part, you do that part, and leave it that way forever.\" We did kind of move it around a little bit, but probably half the time we had people repeating given phases that they had done before, and we didn't have to restart and redo and reinvent all the training for any individual.\\n\\n So the flight director's office basically had people assigned to each flight, and then each one of the flight directors, each one of those assignees, lead flight directors, would kind of be the orchestrator of all the details of what was going on on a particular flight. I guess my job was to see that people were selected, trained, and then conducting those planning steps before we got to the flights the way they should. Then, of course, during the flight itself we would be on individual shifts, so there wasn't any oversight, for example, from the chief of the office, like myself, because each of the people were involved in a given eight-hour shift as I would be, and by that time we were all very confident in each other and didn't really need much in the way of oversight.\\n\\n When there got to be significant problems, people would sort of coalesce almost like telepathy somehow. The word would go out that there was a problem, and people would show up and help as best they could, but that was, you know, just for special events. Most of the time it just kind of ran along like that.\\n\\n We found that planning the training schedule with the crews and the simulations and then getting them conducted and then what kind of training might be changed as we went along. For example, if things didn't go well in one phase of the mission or not, we might repeat some simulation exercises that had to do with that phase or whatever. So it was kind of a learning, adjusting experience. I mean, it wasn't potted, it wasn't fixed, it wasn't rigid, it changed as we had to as we went along, both in terms of the people assignments and in terms of the phases.\\n\\n The other thing that was a significant part of this planning and preparation phase of getting ready for a flight had to do with getting the shift of people that you would be working with in the Control Center, getting them all working together, because, again, at the other consoles it was the same thing as the flight director's office. People would be assigned. Sometimes they would show up regularly during one phase, sometimes they wouldn't. So there was always new faces for a given phase, and it was a matter of sort of bringing a team together, getting them all thinking and working right, and then getting them interfaced with the flight crews right. You could tell. You could tell how it was going, and you could tell when it was rough, and you could tell when things weren't quite right, but then as you approached a flight, generally it all smoothed out and people knew their jobs and they did them very well. They really did them very well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned the different shifts of people and the different flight directors working with the different teams. Were the flight directors involved in selecting which [people worked on their team]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I think those assignments were usually made by the branch chief. For example, Arnie [Arnold D.] Aldrich was the branch chief of the people who looked after the systems in the spacecraft. Mel [Melvin F.] Brooks and then Jim [James E.] Hannigan was in charge of the lunar module systems people. Then we had the Flight Dynamics Branch, the trajectory guidance part of it that I had earlier run and that probably was being run by Jerry Bostick by about that time. So they would make assignments, but they would generally discuss them with us as to why they were doing something and so on and so on.\\n\\n I don't recall every having any real conflicts in that. There were certain flight controllers that each flight director always wanted to have because they were very, very good, but I don't recall any real conflicts with the assignments, and, in general, it seemed to work out pretty well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was certainly a good team." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and mixing people up and moving them around and putting them on different teams served a real good purpose, too, because each person brought sort of individual skills and talents, and then they could get mixed in with another set of players. So it was pretty homogenous, I would say, in terms of talent across the board for each one of the shifts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that for each mission there would be a lead flight director. How did you determine who that would be?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, once we got started, it kind of got a little sequential. For example, I was the flight director on Apollo 7, and I guess Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.], who was flight operations director at the time, appointed me for that. Then Cliff Charlesworth was the lead flight director for Apollo 8, although there, of course, were several of us working on all these shifts. Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz was the flight director for Apollo 9. Then I was the flight director again for Apollo 10, and Cliff was the prime flight director for Apollo 11. Then somewhere in that mix, Gerry [Gerald D.] Griffin had been operating as a flight director, and then he became the lead flight director for Apollo 12, and Milt [Milton L.] Windler was the lead flight director for Apollo 13. Now I'm starting to run out of who was what. I can't remember who was 14. I think I was the lead flight director for 15. So once we got started, it was a little bit sequential, although that wasn't entirely rigorous. It depended on what else people were doing and what other assignments they had and so on.\\n\\n The advantage of that was not only did we, maybe every third or fourth flight, get to be lead flight director, but we generally participated in all the flights, not exactly, but most of us participated in all the flights. In that respect, we were different from the flight crews, because they would fly once every couple of years, probably, and skip a whole set of flights. But we felt it was more fun to be involved in all of them, the whole sequence, and, in general, we were. Occasionally we would miss a flight for some reason or another, mostly having to do with getting ready for the next one. But that worked pretty well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It certainly seemed to. You mentioned there were different shifts. Was there four different shifts?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, generally three, although at times we had four, for reasons that I can't recall right now, except it was probably different sets of people. We had enough people, and different sets of people were very good at different phases of it.\\n\\n The first time I remember having four shifts was when we got to Apollo 13. Going into Apollo 13, we had four shifts of people. Gerry Griffin had a team. Milt Windler was the lead; he had a team. Gene had a team, Gene Kranz, and so did I. We did different phases of it, and during the Apollo 13 mission, as a matter of fact, sometime after the explosion, we took Gene Kranz's team and put them off line to work on the reentry portion, that is, firing the command module back up and getting it ready for entry. So they kind of went off line to do that while the three of us continued with the process of getting the vehicle back to that point in the flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And that fourth team was a good incidence, then, for that flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. It turned out it would turn out. It was nice to have a fourth set of players that we could turn over. Plus, by that time the command service module, of course, had been powered down. It was relatively unused, although we used some canisters and things from it, but it was powered off. So most of the people who were occupied with the command service module could pay attention to the planning that was going on for how we were going to try to do the entry when the time came, which would be—it was four or so days later from when the thing blew, maybe three and a half. So that whole bunch of people focused on what could they do to get the command service module ready, what kind of procedures they were going to use, how they were going to power it up.\\n\\n In the course of that, they also invented how we could recharge the batteries that we had used some of out of the command module. The entry batteries for the command module had been used somewhat in the crisis that we had in getting out of the command module and over into the lunar module. Normally they wouldn't be used at all because the fuel cells would have been providing the power, but in this case the tanks blew and took the fuel for the fuel cells with them, so the fuel cells went down fast.\\n\\n At any rate, on the average, it was like three shifts of people, relatively sequentially assigned, sometimes assigned because they had spent some time on a given phase of the flight. So we just would adjust those kind of assignments for that to take advantage of it depending on circumstances, and off we went." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While we're talking about the early end of Apollo, very early in the sequence there was talk about the method of getting to the moon, earth orbit versus lunar orbit versus direct descent. Were you involved in that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. There was a—I wouldn't say a controversy, because—well, it was probably controversial, but the team of people that had been planning it, especially in the person of the Wernher von Braun team, had this idea that we would launch the whole thing, one spacecraft that would do everything, that is, go out there, land on the moon, come back, and do the reentry. The problem with that was it would take an even larger launch vehicle than the one we used to really pull that kind of a mission sequence off.\\n\\n There was a fellow from Langley whose name was [John C.] Houbolt or something like that, who apparently had worked on this idea of a lunar orbit rendezvous so that the vehicle you sent—it's like the UFO things. You have a mother ship, and you send down a little thing down to the moon and back, and then you discard it. He had this concept that the lunar orbit rendezvous would significantly downscale what you had to do in terms of the initial launch vehicle and make it more affordable, make it more doable, make it, perhaps—that was the argument—make it more reliable and more likely to be accomplished successfully.\\n\\n I'm told—I don't know whether the story is true, but I'm told that this guy, bless his heart, was so convinced that he had the right answer, that he used to sit outside the office of the people in Washington [NASA Headquarters], the leaders in Washington—I don't want to say demanding, because we didn't really do that, but insisting on a hearing of his idea, and he was very persistent in it, and—again, this is second or third hand, because I wasn't really involved in it and didn't know the particulars—but he forced, by dint of his own perseverance, he forced a discussion and a debate about how best to do this and, after the debate, got seriously joined—and at first, people just tried to pooh-pooh it and put it aside, but once the debate got seriously joined, I believe the advantages became more evident to people, and then the choice was made to not only build an Apollo ship but also to build a lunar lander.\\n\\n That must have happened fairly early in the development sequence, because you had to build a command service module to do its mission and then you had to build the lunar module to do its mission. I don't ever recall working very much with the design of the command service module that was going to do everything, that is, fly out to the moon, land on the moon, and come back. I don't recall ever doing serious work on that option, so the discussion of what kind of a mission scenario to do, either direct, all up, or this lunar orbit rendezvous with two different manned vehicles, must have been joined fairly early in the sixties, the debate must have been joined that early, and the decision was made fairly early because the lunar module got started a little bit after, I don't recall how long, but in time a little bit after the command service module contract was let with North America Aviation and Grumman up in Bethpage, New York, Long Island, won the contract for the lunar module. Of course, they were rolling along and essentially ready for it by the time we started flying it in 1969." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It seems like it was a good decision." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You know, I forgot one of the unmanned flights. There was an unmanned test of the lunar module that Gene Kranz was the flight director for, and it must have used the Saturn 1B also. So that was probably another use of it, to not even fly the command service module, just fly the lunar module, not plan to recover it, but to go through a set of tests for the lunar module.\\n\\n I remember, during that flight, that the lunar module engine would not light, mostly for the kind of interlocks that were in the flight software that didn't allow it to ignite. I can't recall the details of it, but I remember being at the console with Gene while this was going on, and Chris—there was a General Vince—it'll come to me—a general who was, of course, in charge of the Eastern Test Range at the time who got kind of close with Chris Kraft, and Chris asked me to explain to the general—these guys were all talking this space jargon babble stuff, and he asked me to explain to the general—Vince Houston, General Vince Houston, who was very helpful to the program, by the way, in his job at Eastern Test Range—to explain to him what was wrong. I just remember saying something like, \"The goddamned engine won't light.\" [Laughter]\\n\\n He said, \"Oh, okay. I understand that.\" And I believe that they got the software thing straightened out and did get it to fire.\\n\\n But in our discussion of the unmanned flights I had forgotten that one, because Gene was fully occupied with getting ready. Again, you had to fly these spacecraft differently if they were unmanned because all the things that the crews normally did either weren't done or were put into some kind of automatic system that either automatically called for something to be done or, in most cases, had a command back-up from the ground. So the people on the ground were much more involved in kind of flying and configuring the spacecraft than they normally would be when crews were on board.\\n\\n I remember Gene getting ready for that flight. It was a wild time for him in terms of getting all the team ready to interface with this modified lunar module spacecraft that had different kinds of things to do with than we normally did when we had crews on board." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess that helped give you a chance to experiment and figure out how to do things in the event something did happen on the manned vehicles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it did, and it taught everybody a lot better than they might otherwise have learned what the internal workings of the spacecraft would be, although they were tougher than the manned flights in terms of the prep for them and the training for them, and in some cases the actual flights, because some things you just ask the crew to do that's not so easy to get done when you have to command it, or in some cases you couldn't command it so that you had to go without whatever it might be. So they were more complicated, more difficult to plan for, more difficult to train for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Shows a little bit, too, some of the value of putting a human aboard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They're a lot easier to fly with people on board, a lot easier to fly, because they're basically designed to have people, and then they would sort of put these boxes in the spacecraft that were supposed to take the place of what the crews did, and they did a reasonable job of doing that, but they were never complete, and they never had all the flexibility, then they had a lot of procedural things having to do with how you command them and how you talk to them and what kind of feedback you got, and so on. It was more complicated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As we're talking, going back to the unmanned missions, for Apollo, George [E.] Mueller instituted the procedures of all-up testing that hadn't necessarily been in place before. Did you have any thoughts on this at the time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I mean, that kind of a philosophy was applied to the vehicles at the vehicle level and then, of course, at the flight level when you flew them, but I wasn't involved in any discussions about arriving at that kind of an approach to things, but it did manifest itself, of course, in fairly aggressive and ambitious unmanned flights that were planned.\\n\\n I suspect that, left alone, the sequence of flights that we finally used, the sequence of manned flights we finally used to get to the moon, was initially planned to be longer than it was, and I believe one of the reasons that that was able to be contracted was the Gemini experience that we had that I have talked about before, but another was, I guess you'd say, the benefit of the maturity of the program and the experience of the people in terms of being able to make those kind of decisions.\\n\\n So all-up testing, however it got manifested in the program, probably was a help in that regard. You know, the engineers would like to take every little piece of the spacecraft and test and test and test it and, you know, by the time you get done with all that, aggregating at the higher levels of a real spacecraft system could take an enormous amount of time. So it probably helped, but I'm not the best person to have an opinion on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we've been lucky enough to talk to Dr. Mueller." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Moving on now into some of the missions, as you had worked on the unmanned missions and you were testing out the different systems in the spacecraft and coming off of the Apollo 1 tragedy, Apollo 7 came up, and the mission was—everything went right on the spacecraft, everything was great. What was that like for you, when everything did go so well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was a tremendous relief, of course, and Apollo 7 flew something like ten-plus days, ten and a fraction, in Earth orbit, and it was the first time we took a manned spacecraft and actually flew that duration of time. The early Mercury, of course, was the first Mercury. John Glenn's was three orbits. The first Gemini was three orbits, on Gemini III, and it took us a little while to build up to ten days, and we never did in the Mercury. Even in Gemini it took us a while to build up to that.\\n\\n But the spacecraft itself—and I think that was part of the learning that was going on in the country about how to build this hardware, and by the time we got to Apollo, the hardware itself, as demonstrated through the testing programs, seemed to be benefiting from the experience that the country had gained in building the earlier ships. In general, the Apollo spacecraft worked pretty well. We had, of course, some problems with it, but in general it hummed along pretty well. The fuel cells worked fine. The reaction control system, which controls the vehicle and can also translate it, make some maneuvers in space, that worked well, and both of the those systems were trouble-plagued in the Gemini flights. So we were pleased that it worked so well.\\n\\n Apollo 7, of course, was kind of the first of the series. I don't really remember when I learned that Apollo 8 was going to the moon. I can't remember whether that was right before or right after the Apollo 7 mission, but that was a big relief to us, of course, to have the performance that we did on Apollo 7, which gave us, again, good confidence that Apollo 8 had a good chance of being able to go to the moon and back the way it should. So all in all, I think we were very pleased and very satisfied with the way the spacecraft worked, and it did a great job. I mean, it really worked very well the first time out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think if it hadn't worked as well, that the sequence would have changed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It might have, yes, depending on how much it misfired, if that's the right word. That would have affected, I think, the decisions that had been made. I mean, you could imagine a very poor spacecraft with a lot of problems with it, and that probably would have affected the decision-making, because the decision-making was based on the confidence in the hardware and the confidence in the people, and had we not had the experience to establish that confidence, we would have stumbled along a little bit more, that is, more flights to get to the lunar landing than we did. We went to the lunar landing mission in very short order once we got to manning the Apollo hardware, that is, manning it with flight crews. We got there very quickly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And successfully." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And successfully." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned earlier, when we were talking about the unmanned missions, that one of the Saturn V missions, in fact, the one right before Apollo 8, had experienced a variety of difficulties." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which were solved. But when the decision was made for Apollo 8 and you were going to use the Saturn V again, did you have any concerns about it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we did, but we talked about this pogo thing that was causing one engine to shut down, and then the mis-wiring caused another engine to shut down also, and there was a good fix for the center engine just by shutting it down early. The engine testing had gone well. The other thing about it is, once we were getting to the point of saying we were going to put people on board, you know, you're going to light this thing and fire it, so we got to the point of saying, well, as long as we're going to do that, we're taking all of the risks, we might as well try to get the best gain that we possibly can out of it. You could have used the Saturn V to do an earth orbital flight, but it was oversized for that, and you wouldn't have gotten a full, complete test of it, or you would have—you know, people might have fired the engine in such a way in lower earth orbit to keep it in lower earth orbit but still fire the engine the whole duration. And we began to adopt the attitude, well, as long as we're going to fire this thing the whole way, then let's go for the mission that it was designed for and take it out to the moon, which was done on Apollo 8.\\n\\n So once we got over the initial problems that we had on 502, the unmanned flight, and saw that those things were fixed, then it became a matter of getting used to the idea that, well, we're going to light this thing, it's going to burn full duration somehow or another, in some direction or another, so instead of going sideways, why don't we go to where we want to go, go to the moon. Once you decided to take the risk of putting people on it and firing it for full duration, you might as well fire it at the mission that it was designed for, rather than some strange thing that may have kept it from less—would have been less than a lunar mission but still would have entailed all the risk of firing the engine and running it full duration, firing the stages and firing them for the full duration that they were planned for. So once we got used to that idea, we said, yes, let's get on with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And Apollo 8 was quite successful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Apollo 8 was great. Apollo 8 was great. We talked about that, and Apollo 8 was kind of like the door opener for the lunar landing mission. I think all the people, certainly in the operations team—the flight crews, I think, didn't feel quite the same way, but for us, all that had to be done to plan and execute the Apollo 8 mission says that we really knew how to do that. We kind of opened the door so that the next couple of flights were test flights. Getting to the lunar landing mission was shorter than it otherwise would have been, but we got there with confidence as a result of Apollo 8." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking at Apollo 8 and talking about the risk with the rocket, in hindsight, after having seen Apollo 13, there was some risk with the spacecraft to some degree. Do you ever look back at it and go \"Wow!\"?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. There are a lot of—I'm not sure I could recount them all, but there are a lot of times when things happened that, had they happened in other sequences or under other conditions, would have been really bad, but for the most part, the things that happened were handle-able, manageable, in the sequence we had them in.\\n\\n Apollo 13, for example, had it blown up while the lunar module was on the lunar surface, we'd have been stranded without a way to get home. So the fact that it blew up when it did didn't leave us very much margin to get home, but at least it was some margin to get home, because we still had a full-up lunar module to live off of. And had it happened thirty-six or whatever hours later, we'd have been stuck. We'd have lost the mission, we'd have lost the crew, etc. So there's a variety of things that happened where the sequence of them turned out to be forgiving, if that's the right term, and the program was able to continue without grinding to a halt.\\n\\n We were lucky. I think I talked about this before, if we hadn't gotten to the moon as quickly as we did and Apollo 13 happened somewhere in the getting ready to go to the moon, it probably would have engendered another debate about, gee, maybe this is too risky and we shouldn't be doing it at all, especially if we'd missed the goal of doing it within the decade. It just would have had a different flavor to the discussion than it did.\\n\\n Apollo 13 happening after a couple of lunar landing missions made people feel confident that, well, if we fix this problem, we can go back and repeat what we were doing before. All of that wasn't still in front of us. We already had that under our belt as two successful lunar landing missions. If we did not have that, then the terms of reference for the discussion would have been different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned or we talked around, kind of, the build-up to the lunar landing of Apollo 11. In between Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 was 9 and 10, both critical missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Both critical, and 9 was primarily—although, of course, we flew the command service module, was primarily the first manned test of the lunar module, and so people wanted to put the lunar module through all the paces that they could in lower earth orbit, and that's what the Apollo 9 mission was scheduled to do and did. I didn't work on Apollo 9. I was around the Control Center, but I didn't have a planned shift for Apollo 9 because, by that time, I was occupied with Apollo 10. Apollo 10 was another step like that, although it took the lunar module out of earth orbit and we took it all the way to the moon, and we did everything short of the actual descent phase and the lunar surface phase.\\n\\n So we had to do all the navigation things having to do with the two vehicles in orbit. We separated them. We approximated the rendezvous sequence that we would have when we lifted off from the moon. So we got through all of the phases of flight except the actual descent itself, and then, of course, the traverses that were planned for the surface work.\\n\\n So we took the lunar module to earth orbit, did everything we could with it, took it to the moon, did everything we could with it, and then, on the third flight, we were ready to commit it to the landing, did, and it worked fine. It worked fine in terms of most of its performance. There were a few problems that people had to work around in order to be sure that it got to landing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Go into a little more detail with Apollo 10, if we could." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Apollo 10 was a great flight. I was the lead flight director on it, and it was, you know, do everything except the landing phase, is basically the way the mission design came down. A number of us argued at the time that if we're going to go all that way and do all that, then we ought to go land on the moon. Probably the staunchest advocate of stopping short of the descent phase was Chris Kraft at the time. He wanted us to have the experience of navigating these two vehicles around the moon, navigating, knowing where they are and how fast they're going so that you can get them back together. Because there were unknowns associated with flying so low, close to the lunar surface, because the trajectories would be disturbed by concentrations of mass from whatever hit the moon and it would change the orbit a little bit, and that doesn't sound like much, but you can't afford to miss very much when you're doing what we were doing.\\n\\n So we debated that for a while, but after a while we all got satisfied that that was the right thing to do. So we set about to do everything. Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford, Gene [Eugene A.] Cernan, and John [W.] Young were on Apollo 10, and we had a chance to do everything short of the landing on that flight. The flight pretty much went by the book. There were a few funny anomalies where the spacecraft got out of configuration at one time and was kind of spinning up or going in a direction that the crew didn't expect, and Cernan reacted to that, I think, profanely on the air-to-ground, but that got settled down and got the configuration right, and they got that fixed, and things went smoothly from then on.\\n\\n Basically, Apollo 10 was sort of like the last clearance test for the Apollo 11 lunar landing try, and the flight went well, everything behaved well, and basically the whole system, hardware and people, passed the clearance test that we needed to pass to be sure that we could go land on the moon on the next one. Adding the descent phase and the lunar surface work was a tremendous amount of additional training, planning, getting ready for that had to occur with both the flight crews, with the people in the Control Center, and, of course, all the people that plan all these flights.\\n\\n So in retrospect, Apollo 10 probably could have landed on the moon, but it was a matter of how much do you bite off at a time, and the way it came out, Apollo 10 was absolutely the right thing to do. I enjoyed it. It was great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it was successful. And it set up Apollo 11. When you realized Apollo 10 was a good success, the astronauts were back on the ground, and here you were ready to go on the next one, did anything change in the Center?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it's hard in words to recapture kind of the mood and the feeling of things at that time, and I'm talking about it in fairly—sort of an unemotional way today, but we had been involved in this whole thing for a long time, we and everybody else, and there was a powerful sense of people wanting to pull off the Apollo landing and return within the decade. There was a powerful sense of wanting to do that, that having been the challenge and the goal. So it was a very strong motivator.\\n\\n Then all these flights had their own unique characteristics, both the unmanned ones and the manned ones. They had their own unique set of problems in getting ready for the flights, special kind of things that we had to learn and put in place, you know, kind of step by step, and then each flight had its own character when we flew it, because there were always things that happened that were a little bit out of the ordinary and had to be dealt with. So each one of them. But in the whole course of that thing, I mean, the program had this energy that was pervasive, and everybody that worked on the program for all parts of it, you know, down to the janitor and the guards who were around, and even today I still see some of the guards at the Center who were around in those days, and they still talk to me about how exciting it was. They always like to chat about it.\\n\\n But there was a sense of electricity and intensity and excitement about the whole thing, and it was like one right after another. We flew Apollo 10 in May and flew the Apollo landing in July. There wasn't hardly ever any time to sit around and savor and bask in the success of a flight, because it was always getting on with the next one that was occupying us. But that whole time, I mean, throughout the sixties, but especially in that last year, year and a half, before we landed, there was this tremendous sense of adrenaline flowing, excitement in people, common goal pulling everybody towards it, lots of technical problems all the time occurring that had to be dealt with one way or another, and it just kept everybody occupied all the time.\\n\\n So it was like busy hands are good and idle hands are not so good. We were busy the whole time, but we were busy in what we felt was a constructive way, but throughout it there was this constant feeling of excitement and energy just pulsing through the whole program. There were always issues to be decided, you know, about how to do this, how to do that, what to do about this, and so on, and people struggle with those all the time. Just issues like which astronaut is going to walk down the ladder first occupied a lot of people for a while, and which one comes up the ladder last, you know.\\n\\n So besides the—I don't want to call them unsubstantive—besides all the regular technical problems and difficulties that we had, there were other issues that had to be dealt with of that class. So there is a constant, never-ending agenda in front of us about what to do and how to do it that was being grappled with all the time. But the energy was there the whole time, just crackling, almost, and certainly, certainly crackling when the simulations—the simulations were not so crackly as they were sweat and work. I mean, sweat in the sense of you wanted to execute the simulation well, you didn't want to screw up, and they were long, and we had a lot of them, so it was a lot of work, a lot of time. But the flights themselves, it was always kind of just walking into the Control Center, day or night, was always kind of like goosebumps. You know, you just felt kind of tingly about it. I think everybody felt that way. I mean, it just infected all of us to the point that we all had the same sense of urgency and sense of intensity about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what an amazing time it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Amazing time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As you did move into Apollo 11 and the mission launched successfully and you were working the mission now—actually, we'll go forward as to when they were landing on the moon. As they were coming down, they experienced several computer alarms. At the time, where were you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was in the Control Center, plugged into the flight director console, as were all the—all the flight directors that were working the console were plugged in anyway during the descent phase. Gene, of course, was on duty for it, Gene Kranz, but all of us were there.\\n\\n This alarm thing had been experienced somewhere in the system, in the testing somewhere or in the simulator, I can't remember where, had been experienced in the last couple of weeks before the flight. So the people who had designed and built and tested the flight software, both here in Houston and up at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], spent a lot of time trying to understand these alarms and what they were indicators of. They were sort of indicators of how loaded the computer was, but it never was an all-or-nothing thing or a black or white thing where it just stopped, or it wasn't very clear how many of them you could experience over a period of time and still be okay. So there was a sense that they might occur and they had to be handled, but I don't recall the team ever having absolutely concrete, firm indicators that if this happened it was going to be okay or not okay. It was kind of a judgment call as to what the loading really was and whether it would be okay.\\n\\n So during the descent phase, lo and behold, these little old alarms that we had worried about for a couple of weeks showed up, and the team began to respond to them in no time at all, and as it progressed, you know, the judgment was made that, well, we're getting them, but we're not getting them so bad that anything seems to be not working right, and it doesn't seem like we're getting them every second or anything like that. So they were infrequent enough, although still enough to be troublesome and very bothersome, they were infrequent enough for people not to be willing to call off the landing itself, and we proceeded with the landing. But during the course of the descent, that was kind of a frightening thing, that the computer indeed might be overloading and wasn't going to get all of its functions done properly so that the landing could be achieved. It was a little scary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then on top of that, Neil [A.] Armstrong had to adjust his landing spot and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Look around, look around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—began losing fuel." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. The landing is sort of a race against the clock in terms of looking for a good place and still having enough fuel to set down, because the lunar module system was designed so that basically you were pretty close to empty by the time you got to landing phase. We didn't have a lot of margin built into it. There was some, but the crews had gotten pretty good at knowing what they were looking for on the lunar surface to set down on and pretty good about getting it down when they needed to and pretty good about keeping track of the fuel and keeping away from what was called at the time \"bingo,\" which meant, \"You're out. Get out of there.\"\\n\\n So although it was a breath-holding kind of an exercise in the last minute or so while Neil looked around, and difficult for us in the Control Center because we didn't know what he was looking at or how close he was to it or anything—well, we knew what his altitude was, but we didn't know how close he was to really picking a place and getting on with it, so it was kind of a breath-holder, and, of course, he's busy. He didn't have time to be chit-chatting about it. So it was basically an exercise in our confidence and faith that Neil knew what he was looking for, knew where he was on fuel, and knew how far he had to go against how much fuel he had left, and that he had that under control. And everybody had confidence in Neil that that was the case. Indeed, so it was, and he found a place with few enough boulders that looked okay to him and exercised it.\\n\\n Then, of course, there were a lot of concerns early in the program—not so much later on, but earlier in the program that the lunar module was going to sink into the dust, you know, all these wild scenarios about what was going to happen when you landed on the moon. But the landing itself was fine, the engine shut down, the vehicle sat there for a while, nothing was broken, the lines didn't pop, the fuels didn't leak out. Although getting it on surface was one big relief, there was still a question as to whether you got there with everything intact, and that took a little longer to ascertain, but, in time, a matter of what in those days was a long time, maybe a minute or so or less, I mean, people were pretty satisfied that the lunar module had indeed landed and nothing else had gone awry and it was going to be okay.\\n\\n As a matter of fact, we used to use terminology like \"go,\" \"no go.\" We had to revise that terminology when we got to the moon because we were dealing with, are we going to stay or not stay, because \"go\" or \"no go\" could be misinterpreted. \"Go\" could mean \"go back up\" or it could mean \"you're okay.\" It would normally mean \"you're okay, stay what you're doing,\" but \"go\" might mean—so we got in terminology of \"stay,\" \"no stay.\" All the cards and all the votes came up \"stay,\" and that reflected the condition of the vehicle, and it was accurate and it was fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When they did land and everything was fine, what was it like at that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I mean a tremendous sense of relief, a tremendous sense of having gotten there, and probably more experienced by those of us who were plugged in, sitting there, but not actively on duty, because the guys who were on duty had to worry about, \"Okay, it's the same old thing. Yeah, we got over that one. Now we've got to worry about the next one.\" They were worried about the whole next set of things that had to occur and were they ready for it and what was going on, so they were watching all the telemetry and so on.\\n\\n So the team that was plugged in on duty probably had less time to realize that we really were there, because they were occupied with the next round of questions that was on everybody's mind about what we had to do next. The rest of us probably had a chance to relax a little bit more. I don't know that I would say—I don't recall that there was like a celebration or anything in the Control Center, but there was this giant sense of relief and probably some more off-line talk and chatter than there normally is at any such event, and people just had to look at each other to communicate a sense of—you know, one look would say, \"All the things we've been through for ten years, and here we are, we got there.\" Communion amongst the people was such that it was easy to read and it was there. I mean, it was all there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What an amazing time to be able to experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A great time. Great time. I was—how old was I? I was thirty-two, I guess, at the time we landed on the moon. I'd been doing this for eight years or so before that time, but—yes, I was kind of young at the time. We were all fired up, of course, the whole time, but events like that just supercharged that sense of energy and excitement about it. It was really powerful. Great stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, definitely, and definitely a once-in-a-lifetime type of thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. It doesn't happen very often, probably more than one lifetime." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You worked the ascent phase of Apollo 11. Did you have any concerns about the computer because of the alarms?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. No. By that time we were settled down, and the ascent phase was a lot less demanding on the computer than the descent phase. So we weren't concerned about that.\\n\\n The other thing about it is, generally we always struggle with do we have to pull back from what we're doing and not go any further and find a more conservative or less risky way to deal with the situation in flight. That's generally kind of the thing that occupies you, can you commit to the next step, or can you stay in this stage, do you have to back out of it? That was generally the frame of mind we always had as to, can we stay here, or do we have to back out?\\n\\n In the case of the ascent, it was a no-brainer. There was no backing out of it. There was no backing away from it. When the time comes, we've got to light this thing and get on with it. So it isn't like we were getting ready for ascent, thinking, \"Gee, if everything isn't quite right, we're going to not go,\" or, \"We're going to stay. We're going to sit here.\" So that made it, in terms of any decisions that have to be made, mission kind of decisions, that made it kind of easy because we weren't going to back away from ascent, no matter what was going on. So that went by the book, and, of course, everything behaved well. The rendezvous went fine, the crews got back in, that went fine. That was kind of uneventful, I think, in terms of being anything other than normal, I believe, and the rendezvous back was fine, and that all worked well. So we were pleased with that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And they landed safely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Landed, and everything went well. The lunar work went well, and back we went." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And back you did go with Apollo 12." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Back we went to Apollo 12." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you mentioned earlier the lightning strike on Apollo 12." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Something else that happened, I believe it happened after Apollo 11. Chris Kraft used to involve some of us in various subjects that were a little bit outside of our normal sphere, and he did that on some basis or another out of his own head as to what he thought was good for us, but it seemed to me that it was probably between Apollo 11 and Apollo 12, he invited me to a discussion of lunar science over at the Lunar Science Institute. I don't know if I told you this on any of the previous discussions.\\n\\n Well, that was a funny thing, because all the people, the lunar science people, the principal investigators and different scientific types around the country who had invested their reputations in supporting this thing and planning for the flights and so on, they had an agenda of wanting to do an awful lot of science, and the people who were running the program kind of made the decision that, look, especially on the first flight, science is not our first priority. Landing there, being there, walking around, collecting rocks for you, etc., is fine, but that's not our first priority. It's getting there and getting back is our first priority, which is appropriate, I think, still today, was the appropriate decision.\\n\\n But I walked into this meeting with Chris and relatively few people from Johnson Space Center and this community of people from outside who were involved in planning of the lunar science, and their agenda was science is the number-one priority for all the stuff we're going to do on the lunar surface. To me, they seemed fairly hostile and kind of ugly about what we hadn't done and we hadn't paid enough attention to the science and so on and so on. It was that kind of flavor, like, \"You're not paying attention to our priorities,\" and so on.\\n\\n I remember my reaction, looking around at them all, was, \"Who the hell are these people? Where were they when the shooting was going on? They showed up afterwards to tell us that we didn't do something right.\" It was kind of a young man's reaction to this set of sage, older, supposedly wiser—I'm not sure—set of people who had a different set of priorities for the lunar landing missions. And that was fairly entertaining in a way and kind of confrontational in a way because they were pushing the agenda that we had to do good science while we were there, and they wanted to accelerate that and do it more quickly and so on and so on, and that was valid from their point of view, completely valid from their point of view, but I remember my reaction was, \"Who the hell are these people? Where were they when the shooting was happening?\"\\n\\n Past that, the ops team, in terms of the planning of the traverses and the activities that the crew was getting involved in at all the various stations became, again, more and more of a team subject as more of the people from the operations business got involved with the scientific community, and like all other new groups that were being added to the missions themselves, that gradually worked itself out as we all got to know each other and understood the priorities and so on that an individual group would represent. After a while you understand that it's valid, they have a valid set of thoughts and concerns and priorities. So you've got to find a way to work those into what you're doing and work them off.\\n\\n Now, I'm not sure where the idea of landing Apollo 12 near the old Surveyor came from. It probably had some—and maybe a lot, I don't know—support within the scientific community. There was a sense that people wanted to get back to the Surveyor and see what had happened to it in the years that it had been there since it had landed originally. On the other hand, I don't know that there was anything more scientific about that, except getting back to the Surveyor and landing at a single point on the moon would be important for the later missions when landing at a place you're really trying to land at and then going on the traverses that we really had planned required relatively accurate control of the landing point itself. So, control of the landing point was probably more important in their mind than whatever it is we might get off the Surveyor and see what happened to it over the years it was sitting on the moon.\\n\\n So after Apollo 11 and this discussion with the sciences—I don't think this came up, or maybe it did, but that wasn't my strongest impression of that meeting, but soon after it became clear that the program intention was to land by the Surveyor, which was a pinpoint landing compared to what we'd been doing. We'd not been constrained in the Apollo 11, you know. Wherever Neil put it down within several hundred yards or, for that matter, miles would have been okay, but here we were. I remember it was a little bit like my reaction to Apollo 8 when I first heard about it, which was, \"Oh, my God, we can't hardly pull that off so easily,\" but then this idea of landing next to the Surveyor, a pinpoint control landing, came along, and my reaction was, \"Holy God, we don't know how to do that. We barely got this thing down on the lunar surface the last time. What do you mean find a particular space within a hundred, two hundred, three hundred yards so that people could walk to it?\" That just seemed to me to be incredible.\\n\\n But, lo and behold, our set of planners—Bill [Howard W.] Tindall [Jr.] was the spiritual and real leader of that group of people—started to work on all the—it really was a navigation problem. How can you navigate the vehicle, know where you are, so that when you get there you are where you want to be and so on?\\n\\n So Bill had his analytical guys working on that problem, you know, examining mascons, mass concentrations, were these things that were buried beneath the lunar surface that would perturb the orbit of the vehicle as we went over. So they began to work on that and how to track it and how to put little fine adjustments into the guidance system actually during the descent phase from the tracking that we were making, and they developed a technique for how to refine the guidance system as it went down so that it knew where it was and, of course, it knew where it wanted to go, and that it would be more and more accurate.\\n\\n It wasn't like we had little beacons down there, you know, like you do at airports, or flashing lights telling you where the airport is. So we began to work on this idea of landing at a specific, pinpoint place, and the analysts, the planners, began to figure out how to do this, so we began to incorporate it into the operational things that we had to do in the Control Center and on board, that the crew had to do, and gradually figured out a scheme as to how to do that with these little corrections that we were putting into the guidance system from the ground.\\n\\n Apollo 12, you know, I think when they landed, they couldn't tell where they were relative to the Surveyor, but when Pete [Charles C.] Conrad [Jr.] and Al [Alan L.] Bean got on the surface, there it was across the crater, something just a little ways away that was within easy walking distance for them. We thought we were close, but until they got out and looked around, because the windows weren't looking at it, as I recall, until they got out and walked around we didn't know how close it was, but there it was.\\n\\n Now, for the launch of Apollo 12, I was sitting there plugged in with Gerry Griffin, who was the lead flight director for Apollo 12, so he was doing the launch phase from the Cape. The weather was such that we should not have been launching at all, but we weren't smart enough about how to measure the threats for lightning potential and so on, which, by the way, we later incorporated quite a bit of mission rules and measuring of field potentials and so on, so to know what the potential for lightning was.\\n\\n But the thing lifted off in a fairly dark, cloudy—not cloudy, but overcast, dark, and I think it was even raining, kind of a day, and that's not so evident in the Control Center as it is at the Cape, of course. I mean, you could see it on TV, but it doesn't—seeing rain on TV is not the same as being in it. So anyway, this thing starts to go up, and—ZAP!—you know, we see this kind of thing come out of the tail like a lightning bolt, and then all the systems started to go haywire, you know, and things started getting—we had main buses, which are the main electrical power stations in effect in the spacecraft, and we started to see undervolts and things kicking off line and all the stuff that happens when the electrical system is not right. I mean, it was frightening.\\n\\n Then, of course, the launch vehicle itself behaved properly. It had different design for the guidance system and the rest of the electronics than we had in the spacecraft, and it, probably fortuitously, was designed in such a way that the lightning and the discharge of all that energy didn't affect these digital machines, which could have been zapped, had they taken a direct hit from that kind of discharge, but the launch vehicle continued to fly and continued to fly right, and on board, I mean, the crew had all these lights and alarms going on, caution and warning things kicking off, undervolts, and the little eight-ball that they used to display their attitude was just rolling and twisting and flipping all over the place, but we were able to assure them, from the tracking of the launch vehicle, that the launch vehicle was flying right.\\n\\n So they were watching this eight-ball flying all over the place, as if the spacecraft were flying all over the place. After a while, I think, they got to laughing about it. Several minutes after it occurred, I think, I remember listening to the cockpit tape after the flight, and they—Pete Conrad, especially, who could find humor in anything, Pete just got to kind of chuckling, laughing about the things that this eight-ball was doing.\\n\\n But we got the spacecraft kind of settled down and reconfigured after we got in orbit, so that we're all kind of sitting there looking at each other saying, \"What the hell do we do now?\" Well, something might have been damaged, but it wasn't at all apparent. All the readings that we had once we got things reconfigured back the way they should and put the things back on the electrical bus that had been knocked off, they were all behaving right. So again we were faced with, well, we've come halfway, and the launch vehicle's okay, the spacecraft's okay, so there's not a heck of a lot of point in turning this thing off. There's nothing that we can see that's a problem, and if there's something bad happened, for example, to the parachute circuits, well, if we stop now, we've still got that problem, and if we go to the moon and back, we have that problem, so why don't we go for the mission?\\n\\n It was a little bit similar to the Saturn V, manning it, kind of logic: Let's go do it. We spent two or three revolutions in Earth orbit, which is less than four and a half hours or thereabouts, during which time we looked at all that stuff. I mean, I was not on actual duty. I was just plugged in there holding my breath and praying like everybody else, but everything seemed to be working fine, no indication of a problem, so the decision was made, well, let's go and do it. The launch vehicle did fine, did its burn, put the vehicle on a lunar trajectory, and off it went. Off it went.\\n\\n Having done everything else on Apollo 11 and Apollo 10 and other flights, the issue really was, the concentration was, \"Okay, let's get everything back in place so we can go do this pinpoint landing.\" That was the brand-new thing and the difficult thing that we were trying to pull off with Apollo 12, and it went well, did fine, and worked just great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it did work great. Of course, pinpoint landings did come in very important later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, they did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Especially if you're landing in the mountains and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. They had very good maps of the lunar surface, so they knew exactly where they wanted to land. When we were doing the walking flights, which would have been 12, 13, and 14, that was even more constrained, but we had planned by that time that on 15, 16, and whatever else was going to happen, 17, maybe more, we had this little buggy, the lunar rover, that was added to the lunar module, and it, of course, had more range than walking did, but still, in order to effectively plan the use of time and where you wanted to go and what you wanted to do, there was a high premium placed on landing where you wanted to land so that everything else would be according to the plan. That was the driver in Apollo 12. I mean, it's proof positive when you can get out and—they actually cut some pieces off the Surveyor and brought it back with them. I never did know what happened to them, but the guys cut them off and brought it back.\\n\\n I talked to Alan Bean the other day. He sent me a copy of the book that he has where he annotates a lot of the flights and ties them into the paintings that he's been making of the lunar surface stuff, and Al and I were talking about how exciting that was and how lucky we were to be part of it. It was kind of nice to walk down memory lane with Al for a little while, but he talked a little bit about the flight and the excitement of it and how great it was for him to work with Pete Conrad and Dick [Richard F.] Gordon [Jr.]. It was great. That worked out just fine, too.\\n\\n I mean, most of these flights, although there would occasionally be a problem, we were able to return to normal, sort of, in most circumstances, and things would stay under control and stay on time line. The only case where that did not happen, and, of course, it did not happen in a very real and significant way, was Apollo 13." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned Al talking about how fortunate he was to work with his crew members Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon. That did seem to be kind of a unique crew. They really bonded, it seems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think they did. I think they did. Pete and Dick had flown a couple of Gemini missions together, Gemini—no, Gemini V, [L.] Gordon Cooper [Jr.] flew on, but either Pete or Dick flew on that flight, and then they flew together on Gemini XI. They had known each other from Navy days, I believe, and were close together, and this opportunity came along for Al Bean to join that crew, and he was just thrilled and excited about it. I mean, he's written and told me that he was off working on some advanced stuff, and he was sitting around wondering if he was ever going to get an Apollo flight, and some set of circumstances caused him to be the guy that they tapped to join Pete and Dick for Apollo 12, and Alan considers it the break of his life, I guess, for that to have happened.\\n\\n They did, they seemed to get along very well together. They had a great time together, and Pete Conrad was just a hoot. I mean, he could find more fun. Again, they would go to a cocktail party or a beer party or whatever we'd have some night, people would all be standing around, and the crew would have spent the day—Al Bean with Pete would have spent the day in an altitude chamber, wearing their suits, doing a whole bunch of stuff, working very hard, physically working very hard against the suit and so on and so on, and then at night they'd go to a party of something, and Pete would start to recount all the funny stuff that happened there today and laughing about it and so on and so on.\\n\\n Alan said he was always amazed. He thought they were working like hell, and he never realized that for all the hard work he was putting in, how funny it was until Pete started to talk about it at night, and then he realized, yeah, sure, this was funny and that was funny, but at the time it was hard sweat work. That's what he was experiencing and thinking about all day long. He had no idea that Pete was seeing so much to laugh about as it occurred.\\n\\n But that was the way Pete was. He brought a lot to the crews, and he brought a lot to the program and the people in it in terms of his attitude. It was always upbeat, always good, and always a hoot to be around in terms of how he looked at things and how much kick he got out of thing, even when they didn't go well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A very good outlook. On Apollo 12, you did mention there was some concern about the parachutes and whether or not—was there an extensive concern on that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. No, it was just one of the unknowns. It wasn't extensive for us. It might be extensive for somebody. The parachute guys it was very extensive for, and when I say parachutes, I'm thinking of the little electrical devices that sequence them and operate them properly, because, you know, when you get an electrical discharge like that to the spacecraft and you don't have any telemetry on these things, people have a tendency to worry about what might have happened, and I'm sure that the people involved in that stuff worried more than we did, but our attitude was, well, you know, all that we can see working, which is most everything, looks fine, and if something like that is not working, well, it's not working. If it's not working for going to the moon and back, it won't be working for just coming down now and stopping the mission, so let's go for it and bet that it's going to be okay. We didn't have any indicator that it wasn't, and we weren't disposed to wring our hands for a long time.\\n\\n Hand-wringing was viewed as an undesirable trait. Let's put it nicely. So we didn't have an attitude about staying around wringing our hands. By wringing our hands I mean wringing our hands and worrying about things that we didn't have any knowledge of or couldn't control anyway, even if they were there laying for us. So the attitude was, okay, everything's working fine, let's go use it, and if something's not working, we'll find out when the time comes, but you can't get back from 150 miles earth orbit, you know, any easier than you get back from the moon if something is laying there and not working right. So we didn't wring our hands about it very much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Apollo 11 had been such a big event and was covered extensively by the media, and then by the time of Apollo 13, there was little coverage. Were you aware at the time that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we could see that, because, of course, it would show up in the numbers of people from the media who would come here to follow the flights. It would take the form of the coverage that would occur in the television, newspapers, or whatever. And we had a sense that the coverage was dropping off, and a number of people—people react to that in different ways. A number of people felt like they were disappointed and it should always be the same as it was, for example, for Apollo 11.\\n\\n My attitude, I think, all along was there's just something natural in this. I mean, people pay attention to things when they believe that they should pay attention to them. Certainly the first lunar landing mission was something in that category. But then when you repeat it once and you're going back to repeat it again and again—and I say repeat it. From the outside that's what it looks like. From the inside you're doing a lot of different things, but from the outside it looks like you're repeating it, then the interest and the anxiety about it probably goes down a little bit.\\n\\n So, yes, we sensed and saw the decrease, the indicators of decrease of attention to the flights, and my reaction was that's normal, that's human nature, and it wasn't anything to be terribly distressed about, although some people were more stressed, certainly, than I was about it. But I think it was unrealistic to believe that the attention that the world focused on Apollo 11 was going to continue to be focused on every subsequent flight. It just isn't like that. So, while others might have been more upset, I was sort of benign about it. I thought that was normal, and I didn't get too upset about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking at the attention of the world and the media, some people have mentioned before that they were so caught up in the Apollo Program or the other programs that they kind of lost touch with what was going on in the outside world, like with Vietnam. Did you—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let me talk about that, because the sixties were such a tremendously volatile and kind of a tearing-apart kind of environment in the United States, and speaking for myself and, I expect, really, for other people, we experienced all that, I mean, especially the Vietnam stuff, so many young men being killed and wounded and just a sense of you didn't have any idea of how long it was going to go on, how bad it was going to continue to be, and so on. It was bad. So, you know, as an American or even as a human being, I was affected by all that and all the other things that were going on in America at the time, civil rights, the assassination, marches, the hippie stuff, the drug stuff started to come on the scene.\\n\\n I remember the convention that was held in Chicago in 1968 where there was so much mayhem, really, on the streets of Chicago, tear gasses and the police hitting people to control the crowds, and the people were expressing their point of view, mostly about Vietnam, that we were on the wrong track and needed to get out of there. It was a very divisive, terribly emotional kind of issue. That and other things, all those other things were terribly emotional, and we still were in the middle of the Cold War. The threat from the Russians was real, and on and on. So there was a lot of just emotional things that were upsetting—that's a mild word. I mean, \"upsetting\" is just too mild to capture it. It was distressing the hell out of people in the country, and it had that kind of effect on me.\\n\\n The difference, though, that I felt for myself and maybe for those of us in the program was that we had a real focus on significant events in the sixties and we could do something about it. I think a lot of people were frustrated because, depending on what their interest was or what their main concern was during the sixties, most people couldn't do very much about it. I mean, people protested, and that was, by the way, an activity that eventually had its result, but it was a long time frame, and it was not clear that it was going to have a positive outcome.\\n\\n So a lot of people, I think, were frustrated because there was nothing that they could personally do to make any of these things that might have been distressing the hell out of them come out okay. I mean, there they were, and events were out of their control, and these things were happening. So there was a lot of loss-of-control frustration, I think, that people had over the things that were going on, and people felt it all to varying degrees, I suppose, but I think most people in America felt it pretty strongly at the time. All these things were occurring. It was a very difficult environment, and it all caused people to be stressed and frustrated, perhaps, at not being able to do anything about it.\\n\\n At least in our case, and certainly speaking for myself, I always had the sense that we were involved in a significant activity of our time, significant for our country and for our country's position in the world, and we were kind of—I've used this term in previous discussions—I've always felt like we were, and I was a steward. I was a small, perhaps, but one of the stewards for this program to make it come out right. So we could return to our little island or our little Camelot, or whatever you want to call it, that we had here in the space program and that we especially felt here at the Johnson Space Center, where everybody in this thing worked so closely together, and, of course, we worked with the other Centers, too, but it was keenly felt here at the Johnson Space Center in terms of the teamwork and the comradeship, and the reliance that you had to have on other people. So there was a strong sense of community and people working together and pulling in the same direction and so on.\\n\\n So the frustration that other people had, perhaps, where they couldn't do anything about this inability to control these events, we at least had a set of events that we had some active control that we could apply to, even on a personal basis. We could personally do our best to assure that our part of this national scene was going to go well. I think it gave us a sense, also, perhaps, of insulation from the emotional fallout from all these other things that were going on, the frustration, the lack of control, the stressing part of it. They were all real, but for me it was a little different, I think, than for most of the population, because we had this major sixties activity that we were involved in, and we could actually go do something about it every day. We'd go to work every day and work on it, and we could do something about it.\\n\\n So in that sense, I think, we had an outlet that most people probably didn't have to express their feelings and their sense of what they thought ought to be done about conditions in the country. We had this thing we could do, so it kept us together, and it was a little bit like, when we did our thing, we were on a little island and around us were all these terrible thunderstorms and hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes, which were the events of the time, both nationally and internationally, but they were kind of violent, and you almost had the feeling that they were cataclysmic, although it turned out that they weren't.\\n\\n You got a sense that there was an impending just blowup of all these things going on, but we were on this little island with all this going on around us, and yet we were able to focus on the stuff that we had to do, and in that sense it gave us something that we could control personally and something that we could go do and contribute to, and we could do it every day.\\n\\n So for us it was probably a rock that we could hang onto, and it did mitigate, to some extent, at least for me personally, the frustration in the sense of out-of-controlness that most other people must have been suffering from. But it was very real. It was very real and very painful. No matter what point of view anybody would represent on a given subject, it had to be painful for everybody that was in America—maybe not everybody, but everybody who wanted the country to do well and come through this stuff. It was very painful for people. It was very distressing. And they're mild words. I think what they were feeling was a lot stronger than that, and lots of points of view on almost every subject.\\n\\n But we had our island and our rock, you know, that we could go back to, that we could do something about. We felt like we were making our contribution. Yes, all the rest of this was going on. We could contribute what the program was going to contribute to the country. So it was like a solace of sorts, or a port or island in the storm that was going on all around us.\\n\\n So we were in a different condition, I think, than other people in the country, and we benefited from that, I mean, benefited from it in the sense that we had a focus and a way to express ourselves that was constructive. And it worked. I mean, it did help, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think it did make a difference. I have found in my research that after the Apollo 8 mission, a woman sent in a telegram saying, \"Thank you for saving 1968.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. 1968 was a violent, difficult year. It was the year of the Chicago thing. It was the year of the Tet Offensive that started the year off. Assassinations. I mean, it was awful stuff. The hippies and the drug thing was going on. Everybody had a reaction to that, pro or con or otherwise. Difficult. Difficult. And then Apollo 8 ended the year with, you know, Genesis being read from the moon. It was quite a change. It was a very absolutely different in-kind public event than a lot of the previous ones, most of which had been—you know, just with hurt, pain, and agony wrapped around them. This was an entirely different kind of thing, and we were part of it and felt like we were continuing to do—we had more in front of us yet to do.\\n\\n That's the other thing that happened to us. Because of the pace of things, we never really had time to stop and just enjoy it or even to reflect very much on it in a kind of a broad way or an overall way. We never had, really, time to sit around and talk about it. We were always so involved in this one and then the next one and then the next one, that we did not have time to enjoy it, perhaps, as much as we should have, although the enjoyment came from the energy and the adrenaline that was pumping the whole time. But we didn't have time to be very reflective about it, and that's really come, for me, in the last five to ten years, has been a revisiting of a lot of the events and a lot of people, one thing and another, books and movies and coverages and so on, anniversaries.\\n\\n I'm now grandfather to twelve little people, and, you know, a sense of what life's going to be for them and what, as a member of the family, what I participated in in some way, and you're helping with that, to leave something for them to have some sense of what I had a chance to be a part of. All that kind of stuff and probably age, stage of life, makes me now stop to think about it.\\n\\n We were up at an event in the White House in winter. Tom Hanks had this series, and they had a showing up there, and they invited a couple of us up From the Earth to the Moon to it, and a lot of the Apollo astronauts came back for it. So it was nice to be in the White House, it was nice to see all that and see the other people there, but it was like a reunion of old comrades, and we did think that the White House was a very nice place to have our reunion and thought it would be a nice idea to have one every year there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think it's a great idea." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It hasn't happened this year. Well, '99 is early yet. Who knows?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As we're going to close today, is there anything of what we've talked about today that you wanted to cover in more detail?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we never really have done Apollo 13 yet, have we?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not yet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, no. I think I don't have a sideline that I wanted to introduce. I wish—all of us wish, I think, that we were better able to capture the mood and the sense of things as it existed at the time, but it's one of those sort of \"you almost had to have been there.\" But you guys are very empathetic about it, but it's hard to capture, it's really hard to capture, as to what it was like every day to come in and work on the next round of things and so on, but it was really exciting. It carried us and moved us, pumped the adrenaline. It was just charge-up time all the time.\\n\\n But to answer your question, I can't think of anything else I would add about that period in the context of what we talked about here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you certainly had quite an exciting time of it, and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was. It was quite an exciting time. I mean, I can't believe, looking back, at how fortunate I was. I understand there's a new movie out, October Sky, about a fellow that apparently ended up working at Marshall [Space Flight Center, Hunstville, Alabama]. It was interesting. Somebody saw it and was telling me about it, and then I saw little clips in the paper, and it was interesting because the little town I came from was in a coal mine district in Pennsylvania where most of the men worked in the mines, and my father did for some amount of time, not his whole life, but some amount of time, enough for him to get the black-lung problem that eventually took his life.\\n\\n But, you know, the mood in our family was, \"You kids get an education and get out of this.\" Because, for generations, the mode of living had been the men went to work in the coal mines. That was all there was to do. Of course, after World War II, you know, the circumstances changed, a lot of things became possible that weren't possible before.\\n\\n As a matter of fact, I'm also reading Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation, and it's interesting. Of course, my parents' story is not in there specifically, but it's there sort of generally. They went through that same time, married right after the Depression, raising a family. My dad got drafted late in the war and went off, even though he had three kids, three boys, at home. Even at this stage, my mom tells me some stories about what they were doing and what they had to do, and what they had to do to survive, you know, a powerful sense of what those folks went through and how much it has changed, how much opportunity came to pass because of their sacrifices, really, and the circumstances that were in this country, but the opportunities that came to pass for the generation that's represented by my age and others younger than me, probably that we don't always appreciate as much as we should, either.\\n\\n But the attitude in our family was, \"You boys get an education. Don't even talk about going back into the coal mines.\" I gather this movie has the flavor of the family wanted the young man to remain and work in the coal mines. Not in our house. Nobody wanted that. I mean, it was awful. It was awful. Nobody wanted that for any of their children, certainly in our family. That was my sense of most everybody back there. Some got away and some didn't, and then the mines have kind of slowed down dramatically. There's not the activity that there used to be, and that gives people an economic problem, but in a way, thank God, because it was an awful way to make a living, just terrible, to go down in that stuff every day. So I'm fortunate in that regard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very. And it's not something that, fortunately, nowadays a lot of people don't have to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And work today is a different thing than work was fifty years ago. Work was, as my folks knew it and all the generation of that time, tough, very tough, but they were good. Tom Brokaw titled this book The Greatest Generation, and, you know, that's quite a title, but for what they did and the attitudes that they had and what they sacrificed, it's not too far off, if at all, not too far off. Great people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We wouldn't be where we are today without them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So there you are. Enough for today?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's enough for today. I want to thank you again." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00304", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HughesFE/hughesfe.htm", + "original_file_name": "HughesFE_10-8-13.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HughesFE/HughesFE_10-8-13.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Francis E. Hughes", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 8 October 2013" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright", + "Unidentified" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Francis E. Hughes" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is October the 8th, 2013, and we are visiting with Frank Hughes in Rocket Park in the Saturn V facility [Johnson Space Center]. We thank you for getting ready to walk us through and explain about this vehicle and what you did to help train people to be on it. [Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Rebecca Hackler and Sandra Johnson.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good. I think that what we’re going to do is amble down here to the back end, the engines, and start from there and come forward on the other side. We’re passing here the SLA which is the [Spacecraft] Service Module/Lunar Module Adaptor, this conical thing. It got to be a big controversy in that we had to react to that a lot in the training. We’ll talk about that, coming back. You mentioned that these vehicles are not all one unit, and as far as I know—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There seems to be a controversy over is this really all one unit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "KSC [NASA Kennedy Space Center, Florida] does not have a real one, and that would break their little heart to know that. They’ve got some real engines, but there’s a lot of engines that are not real, mocked-up. When Bob Rogers of BRC [Bob Rogers & Company] fame was working and put it all together, I think he was troubled with all that parts he had down there, that’s the deal. When we go through here, one thing that we can’t see when we come up the other side is that these are just tanks linked together, so that’s why you had these humps. These are for wires. There’s no plumbing going on; that’s for wires and pipes going up the side of the vehicle. There’s a couple of other things we’ll show that you may not have thought about it. The first stage was built by Boeing at Michoud [Assembly Facility, Louisiana], where we built the ETs, the Shuttle External Tanks, and they’re about almost the same diameter. A lot of the same machines were used to roll the steel to build it. This [second] stage was built by what was then called North American Aviation, and it’s also 33 feet in diameter, 5 engines, but it’s got oxygen and hydrogen propellants, where the first stage is oxygen and kerosene, RP-1, they called it.\\n\\n As far as the simulation goes, we didn’t have any of this to see. It’s all virtual, so all we saw as the pressures in the engines and the activity of the gimbals, they would move so the whole stack would swerve as you were moving. Since we didn’t have a motion base, what the crew didn’t know is that when this thing moved or swerved, the crew guys were not prepared for that, so we just told them about it. When you start about rotating this huge vehicle, the center mass was down in the middle of the second stage. You can imagine that if the bottom wants to go left, it’s turning the engines down here, well, the center of rotation is somewhere in the middle. Up for them, they didn’t feel that rotation—it was like they were moving sideways. It’s so big and so long that it was almost like they were doing yaw or pitch as opposed to any other roll that you’re trying to do. It was a grabber for the Apollo 8 guys—it was like, whoa!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A surprise." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was a big surprise because a small motion at the bottom made a 4 or 5 foot change where they were, up at the other end. Of course, there was a lot of vibration in this thing. It’s not like the smooth ride you got on the [Space] Shuttle. The Shuttle wasn’t very smooth either on first stage because the solid motors created a lot of vibration. We’ll pick it up the conversation down here, and what I’m going to do is talk about the training that we did, while talking in the context of a launch, just what’s going on at each step.\\n\\n I want you to look inside this engine. You see that circular device down there with all the holes? This is a real engine. That’s an injector. That was a big thing to do, to pump the oxygen and kerosene into one place and mix it and then make it burn efficiently. If you go down to KSC and try to get to the point where you look in there, it’s just a plug, it’s just a flat plate there, which means they had a nice-looking mock-up of the engine, but it’s not a real one. That’s not against anything—I loved F-1 [that huge mockup down there]. It was called F-1. We were kids, meaning 22, 23 years old, we climbed all over that damn thing because it was built to train the people how to lift it, how to stack it, put it on the crawler [transporter] and take it out to the pad, and do all those things. It was made as a mock-up. It was the real thing in everything except they didn’t put the expensive pieces on, like the engines.\\n\\n When we put it on display at KSC, they rounded up all the engines they could find, and made it as real as they could down there at KSC. The real ones, [SA-5]15 is over at Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama] and 14 is here, 514. [SA-]513 became Skylab, so the first two stages launched the third stage laboratory dry that you saw the other day.\\n\\n When you get to this point, talking about any kind of engine, an important part of it is that you have to make sure that you mix the fuel and oxygen together in an efficient way. On top of that, did you ever take a chemistry class somewhere, and you made some oxygen and then you would take a little piece of wood, a burning wood shaving and stick it in there? It would go poof and burn so fast you could not see it.\\n\\n The same thing here applies here. If you had too much oxygen in this engine, you don’t get combustion, you get an explosion. It’s the same combustion, but it’s a rapid combustion. The mantra of people as they built liquid engines, back in the ’30s and ’40s, during the war, is “fuel lead.” You always make sure you have lots of fuel before you put any oxygen in. [The fuel has to lead the oxygen into the engine.] There’s a beautiful, beautiful [video] of a Saturn V start, and you can see the clouds coming down out of the engine, you’re looking up underneath at a Saturn V.\\n\\n You’re spraying kerosene in, and so this whitish-looking stuff is falling down because it’s a little bit heavy, it actually comes down, and then, all of a sudden, it just goes bam! You know, just like explosions, the scene goes away because it’s so bright. They added the oxygen. It was already burning—there’s gas in here, and right in the middle of that thing is where there’s an igniter on each engine, so they had a thing that was like a blowtorch. It would fire into this area, but it’s so the kerosene is just burning, so if you look inside the engine, you can see there’s a glow, and there’s some smoke and everything coming out of it, but nothing until the other pump then throws the oxygen in. Then, just all hell breaks loose underneath there, you can imagine.\\n\\n The five of them, it was so big, they started it 9 seconds before launch, started lighting these things off. They lit one off every half-second, and it took about 4 seconds to get up to speed. If you add all that together, it means at about 4.5 seconds before launch, they’re all running. Then, the computers are slow in those days, so it took 2 seconds to check everything, and so, everything got checked two more times. You checked it all to make sure the whole thing is ready to go before you’d say, “Launch.”\\n\\n In the simulator, we didn’t have a motion system. They got shock coming—that was a big thing. All of this stuff is happening down there, valves clanking and things going on, you could feel them through the vehicle structure. All of a sudden, the noise of the engines, but it’s so far away. Literally, there’s a delay time even for the sound to get up to you because it’s about a third of a second, if you think on sound, to get that far. A thousand feet is about 1 second, and the old count, one, two, three, four, five, on lightning.\\n\\n Now, this thing is burning, some of those fuels, some of those areas, are oxygen and the other ones are fuel mixed in here, so it’s going. The temperature right here would be 5,600 degrees, so if you’re standing here, you would not stand long—5,600 degrees. It’s about the same as you got out of the solid rocket motors on the Shuttle, how white that is and the difference is you see the flame there because it’s got junk in it and particles and things like that, that’s why there’s so much smoke. Where here, it’s smoke-free, it’s almost a perfectly clean-burning engine. There’s a lot of stuff when you start, but when you see it climbing up, there’s nothing except this long, long, long flame, and no trail, no smoke trail.\\n\\n The temperature of 5,600 degrees is way higher than the temperature of this metal. It would melt it. All of those little tubes you see all the way down, they’re actually sending liquid oxygen through those tubes. It’s coming down the length of the engine bell and then here, those tubes end and dump into an even larger manifold, and if you look over at that one, you see that manifold tube around the middle there? All of those are throwing oxygen into that manifold, and then it’s going back up. By now, it’s been boiling, so it’s turned to gas. It’s coming back up and it’s been picked up in the top and fired into the engine. Now, you’re putting in liquid oxygen, gaseous oxygen, and the kerosene, liquid kerosene, going in.\\n\\n Each of these engines move, the four on the outside are gimbaled. The center one doesn’t do anything; it’s just pinned to one place. The vibration is extreme down here.\\n\\n I want you to look here, we would simulate down to zero and then something interesting happened down here. All of the weight [of the entire vehicle] is resting on those four corners. You’d find them if you look above. All the weight of this whole 36-story building is on there, and when we launched the first one, well, actually they decided beforehand, there’s a hold-down clamp. In other words, those engines are running for 4 seconds, so you had to hold it and make sure it wouldn’t go. Then, at zero, they’d flop that hold-down clamp back and turn it loose.\\n\\n The problem was that it’s so big, there’s so much momentum. Have you lived around a railroad or a train where the engine starts going? It starts clanking out like this, or it slows down, it compresses. This one is so big that it started compressing—in other words, the back end started moving before the front end knew that it was coming, and so it was compressing the whole vehicle. What they did to accommodate that fact is at each of those corners, they had a hole in the pad and they put a stainless steel rod, 18-inch-long stainless steel rod screwed up through the hole. The rod was about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and the hole was a half-inch. For the first 18 inches, they intentionally slowed down the first movement that it could go so that the front end got moving, all the compression happened, and then they turned it loose. Imagine the force of just taking a stainless steel rod and pull it out four times all the way through a smaller hole. It just extruded it on the fly. That was a design that worked very well.\\n\\n All of these engines had hydraulics done inside here, so there were hydraulic pumps, APUs, Auxiliary Power Units, they were all going on. It had its own hydraulics, the engines all four, so you could lose one and you could still steer it with three left. The center engine doesn’t steer; it was just static. You can imagine all these things, that they only burned 2.5 minutes, and then all the fuel was effectively gone. This is what Jeff Bezos, the Amazon guy, went back and found, two of these. I don’t know what flight they’re from." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Apollo 11, I think, is what he’s claiming." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s what they said, with the numbers, I think they tried to say that. You saw it before they cleaned it up here, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Do you see that this is S1C-14, see that? This is one from that 514 vehicle. There are four fins on it for stability. Once you got going fast they added stability. Only two of your fins mounted because once you stacked it, you’d put these other two on. They are not here now because this was a carrier. T hose fins would be down in the concrete here.\\n\\n If you come up here, I’m walking along the [right] side going upstream here, the black and white paint, this is common for any test rockets. We did that because in the photography, you could see what’s going on. Rotation, anything like that. You could see events happening.\\n\\n If you can imagine, this is two tanks, this is an inter-tank [holding the two tanks together], because this is a tank and that’s a tank up there, which one weighs more? You’ve got kerosene and liquid oxygen, that’s a quiz, but liquid oxygen weighs more, so it’s up there in front on the vehicle. You put the heaviest thing first, it’s like the tip of the arrow, that’s where the weight is. For stability, again, so in every stage, the heaviest component is always the first.\\n\\n Later, it’s hydrogen as the fuel, and hydrogen’s obviously lighter than oxygen, so it’s in the back. In the design, these gaping engines [on the first stage], each one burned 3 tons of fuel every second. Three tons a second, times five. When you see this thing taking off in the movies, it’s getting lighter by 15 tons every second, just to make it go anywhere. In fact, it was burning 15 tons a second on the pad before lift-off, so you have to think about and you have to account for all that fuel in there. When you come along here, the pipes to feed the engines from this [hydrogen] tank were easy, they were very short, they went straight to each engine. But now you’ve got to get the oxygen from up here, all the way down there. Each pipe was 17 inches in diameter. You could crawl through these pipes. In order to feed them, all 5 needed its own 17-inch line. They had five pipes going through the fuel tank, one for each engine. Literally, they went toward the place they had to terminate, which is at the engine. They would suck it down—they used to talk about that it’d take seconds to get a home swimming pool emptied out—I can’t tell you those numbers, but I used to know that, it wasn’t very long, pulling that much fuel.\\n\\n The problem was, here’s these five big pipes going down through here, so remember, these tanks are hemispheres, so there’s a hemisphere here at the bottom of this tank, and that’s the wall, and then there’s a hemisphere at the top of this one. These pipes drove right through the [hydrogen] fuel tank. It was designed that way, and it worked great. However, when we launched the first one [AS-501], the vehicle got into something called pogo. If anybody through your [interviews] talked pogo, what it amounted to is those five big pipes started acting like pipe on a pipe organ. The fuel that was going through it so fast, it was almost behaving like air does is an organ, so it starts vibrating longitudinally. It’s the long way, and that’s what happens. That starts this fuel pipe vibrating so the whole rocket is vibrating this way, along the direction of travel. If you’re on a pogo stick, it’s up and down, well, that’s what the crew would be feeling. But they never felt that here, there was no crew members on 501. That’s the kind of problem that they found and fixed early.\\n\\n That pogo was a bad deal, so what they went on 502, they went in and physically changed these pipes just a little bit. They changed the length of them, they changed the diameters of them just slightly, it’s a retrofit almost on the pad. They had to get in there and do this, Boeing made these changes and all the ones subsequent. They detuned them. At first, all the pipes were identical, they were all exactly the same length, so it was like you had a pipe organ with five pipes, then if you hit the five keys, you could get a really strong harmonic, is what it’s called, so it actually amplifies and makes a much more powerful note. That’s great on a pipe organ, but it’s not really good on something you’re trying to fly. They detuned those pipes and they put spacers in and just did lots of things to change the acoustics of the pipe. That was a big thing because that was a deal-breaker; you could not fly like that. The astronauts, they’d be eyeballs in and out going this way, at about five or six times a second. It’s not good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Maybe just the concern of how the vibrations were going to deal with the structure?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was going to tear up everything up there, yes. In fact, there was damage to that first stage during that flight. Fortunately, nothing catastrophic because we made it to the orbit as planned, but that was the worst event that happened on that flight.\\n\\n We had to simulate some of the telemetry, and then the telemetry, this is a radio antenna, there was one on each side. Remember, the Saturn is its own spacecraft, separate from the Command Module [CM] and the LM [Lunar Module] up there, so it was talking to the ground all the time. We had a Control Center here, but there was another one in Huntsville that watched over the Saturns, aside from the guys on the ground at KSC who checked it out and fired it. You come up here [at the top end of the first stage], and at this point, this is the end of the Boeing world, here. You can see, if you take the vehicle and stand it up, it’s almost as tall as Building 1. The interesting thing is this gray rig attached to the vehicle. It should be painted yellow. That was a not-for-flight; that piece didn’t fly. If nothing else, we should go in here and paint it yellow, just so it should be accurate.\\n\\n Have you ever seen them pick up the Shuttle, when they would stand it up? A crane on both ends, they’d pick it up, and then had a yoke, and they would gradually lower the back, and so you were standing vertical hanging on the crane by attachment points on the front. They had to do the same thing with this. That same yoke was used on this one, even, the same very thing. There was a pin down there where it sits on that yellow attach point on the side up there, that’s where the yoke would hook on the back end, and of course, this hook, here, they’d lift it straight up about 100 feet and then gradually lower the back end down, so it would swing vertical, and then they would put it over onto the launch tower.\\n\\n Now, there’s something missing between these two, think about it. There’s should be an inter-stage; this stage is 33 feet in diameter, it would be 10 feet between these stages, and there’s a piece in here that’s gone, and they’re all gone. What happened is that somebody scrapped them, and they’re all gone. We don’t have any of these inter-stages left. This one, on Apollo 13, is a great thing. In the video of staging, it would drop off and fall until it became the O in Apollo. Where it would happen is that after you got the separation going here, this inter-stage was just for that reason, but we kept it wrapped around it to get these engines going. There was no debris or anything. Once they were running, then you let this inter-stage slide away.\\n\\n You see that inter-stage, it becomes the “O” in Apollo 13, but physically, you can hardly see them go away because you’re accelerating away from it. Two and a half minutes, all the first stage fuel is almost gone. “Almost” is not the same as all gone because remember, you don’t want to get oxygen-rich in those engines, so when there’s a sensor that says “low level,” then it would shut down the five engines, shut them all down at the same time. You’ve been under 6 Gs [gravity]; this sucker’s hauling. Then you go to zero-G, and then there was a timer that would blow this first stage loose and start turning on these second stage engines.\\n\\n The fact is, is that when you do that, if you go to zero-G, then all the fuel that’s in this [second stage] tank now starts tumbling around in there. It wants to do that, but there are solid motors on the base of this stage that would fire automatically, that would keep gravity on this second stage so you didn’t feel the zero-G of no engines; you’d feel these solids kick on. There’s a term called, if you haven’t run into it, ullage. It’s that acceleration to make sure that the fuel stays at the bottom of the tank, so that you’d take the fuel and oxidizer into the feed lines. That’s what the idea is, that pressure is you’re priming the pump, but you keep it going. This worked fine on all the flights until we got to [Apollo] 13. This beast [first stage] is so big that on that ring, there were solid motors pointing up, when they fired, they were made to slow the S-1C down.\\n\\n It had so much inertia that the solid motors on the inter-stage was to slow it down, to make sure that they were separated. It just wanted to keep on going with you, and gravity is just not enough at that point because it had so much speed. By then, you’re about 40 miles up and going about 5,000 feet a second, or something like that. At the same time you cut this first stage loose, you fire those solids to take this second stage forward. I said it wrong. The inter-stage, it was inert, the solids were on those fins, the ones pointing forward. They would slow the S-1C down at the same time that these rockets on the outside, here, are shoving this second stage forward and providing the ullage for the fuel and oxidizer.\\n\\n These are five J-2 engines, and they’re burning hydrogen and oxygen. You remember where the higher, heavy stuff is, the oxygen is up front.\\n\\n Now, this is much easier to deal with, that is, we don’t have the problem with the size of the tanks, but they did look at them and make sure there were no harmonics as far as the fuel coming through here. It took about 4 seconds for these engines to come completely up to speed, and by then, the solids were burned out and that was it, they’re just done with their ignition process. Off we went with second stage, which is about six more minutes of burning until you got up about 23,000 feet a second.\\n\\n On Apollo 13, this is pre-computer days, so this was like an electro-mechanical timer. It’s like a very simplistic timer, and so, somebody screwed up the timer. The slow-down jets came on back in the fins before they cut the upper stages loose, 1 second early. For the crew, they were going 6 Gs, and all of a sudden, the engines were coming down and you can feel it, and all of a sudden, they’re going backwards, so they slammed forward, all three of them, and smashed into several switches on the control panel. In fact, the little wickets around, like wickets around a croquet game, they protect you from putting your foot through there, your toes flipping switches, they’re all flattened. They smashed them in, and when they got home, that’s when I realized Lexan [polycarbonate resin thermoplastic] is a really good material. There were actually marks on it where they slammed it in, then that one second went, and this posigrade rocket fired. Now they were flung back the other way. They had this 1-second slam, bam, like this, and poor old Jim [James A. Lovell] said, “That’s our glitch for this flight, we’re good now. We had our thing.” He wanted to eat those words for a long time.\\n\\n What we haven’t talked about in here, and we’ll talk about it going from this stage forward because it’s easier to see. The five engines, again, the center one is pinned, doesn’t do anything, and the other four are steerable, so they have all the hydraulics to do all that maneuvering. When you have an engine running, pulling fuel out of a tank like that, it’ll collapse the tank if you don’t design around that. These silver pipes going around here and heading up actually have gaseous oxygen. You make some gas in the engine and send it up to feed the bubble in the tank. You had to make sure you don’t collapse the tank because you have to send gas into the top, so you avoid pulling a vacuum in that tank. We’re doing the same thing internally for the hydrogen back here, but this one, you can see four of them and they’re racing up that way, going up, and if you go around on the other side, you can see where these things plug in up there. We go this way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Unidentified", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "These are J-2s [rocket engines]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "J-2s, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Unidentified", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What are the ones on the other?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "F-1, they’re called F-1. Both built by Rocketdyne, at the time.\\n\\n I wanted to talk about the inter-stage. That’s 10 feet long, 33 feet in diameter, obviously they made one for every flight. We used 13 of them, but the last two are missing, they’re gone. One is there for F-1 [at KSC] because nobody recycled it, but those are gone, and this one is gone. When you get up here, this one goes from 33 foot diameter down to 22, it’s a truncated cone, but there’s none of those either, that is, for these two vehicles—this one here and the one at Marshall. Where the hell did they go? Somebody sold them to their brother-in-law’s scrap metal place? I don’t know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It would make a good chicken coop, who knows?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, exactly. The other side of it, all the way down here, these are on the other side but these are where you have connectors into it. You put fuel in, take fuel out. Those connections, at T=zero, you see the movies, you can think about it more, but they have to unplug and close these connections because this vehicle, it’s not like the Shuttle. It is covered with ice and that ice is falling off due to the vibration. There’s no insulation on this sucker, and it’s about half-inch thick steel back there because it’s like a skyscraper building, it’s holding up the whole vehicle. Underneath it, by the engines, it actually had big I-beams welded into the structure so it supported all the weight that’s up above. It weighed 6,500,000 pounds, and the thrust was 7,500,000. You can imagine, when you got those engines going, it was going to go somewhere. All those swing arm connections had to unhitch carefully and swing out of the way to turn it loose to go. They had to move out of the way quickly.\\n\\n Come up here [by the second stage]. This one was not half-inch steel; in fact, it was very slender and it’s made with fiberglass. It was not strong enough to hold the load above it unless they fueled everything, until you put the cryogenics in it. Then you froze it, and it got stronger. They had a whole lightweight second stage, relatively, as far as strength. This connection covers the place where you could see that oxygen coming in there, but that’s okay. You can see the same thing anyway on the third stage.\\n\\n [Moving to the third stage.] This is the same J-2 engine back there on the second stage, with some modifications. This has a couple of sets of tanks, if you noticed back there. There’s a couple of helium tanks, this system is pressurizing this tank with helium. Along the way, you could relight that single J-2 engine, so this one shut down, you were about 23,000 feet per second, you’re traveling, and then you ran this one engine until you got up to about 25,500, so you’re in orbit. Then you stopped, and you just stayed in orbit a couple of times around the Earth. We could leave for the Moon in the first orbit, the second orbit, third orbit. We never tried the first—we always tried for the second. We just let everybody have a chance to look at the vehicle systems and give the flight controllers a chance to see what’s going on, and then when you are ready, you do the TLI [translunar injection].\\n\\n When we did that, there was a button inside the Command Module which, when we would push it, it told the computer to proceed, turn on this third stage engine. The Saturn did its own calculation of where the Moon was. The internal computer was figuring where the Moon was.\\n\\n [Playing planetary mechanics] You had to think if I’m the Moon and you’re the Earth, you’re going around Rebecca, here, and what you would have to do is where I’m going to be, I’m gradually moving around, I’m going to be over there, when you get there, but you would draw a line between the center of gravity of the two planets, and out the other side, that’s where you’d fire your engines. You’d accelerate and you really didn’t go to the Moon, you just went a real big ellipse up to there. If nothing happens, if the Moon didn’t come along, you’d just go back down to Earth. It just was a 150 mile by 300,000 mile orbit, and you’d just go back.\\n\\n Of course, I’m over here now, I’m the Moon, and I’m going to move over to where you placed this vehicle Now, what’s going to happen is that I’m going to, at 30,000 miles out, just fall into my gravitational sphere of influence, and it starts warping the trajectory around and go back the other side of the Moon. Back on this side, when you hit that same line [between the centers of gravity of the Earth and Moon, that’s when you burned to slow down. That’s when you burn the SPS [Service Propulsion System] engine, slow down, and stay in orbit around the Moon. Now you’re going around me. Takes every two hours to go around the Moon. It’s a smaller planet, you’re closer. The orbit is only 60 miles up but because of less gravity, it takes two hours to go around. The Moon doesn’t have as much pull.\\n\\n When we separated, though, these are solid motors. There’s two of them on either side for ullage, so they would fire automatically to make sure that the fuel stayed down in the bottom in this first one. An interesting thing, in here, there was a second one—in other words, there’s another charge in here, there are two solids, so that would fire again when it was time to restart two again. It’s been in zero-gravity, so you don’t know where the fuel is in there, and you know you got a pretty good-size bubble because you’ve used 10 percent of the fuel or something. When they started it, this thing would go for about 5 seconds as they’d start the process of getting the J-2 going.\\n\\n [Between the S-IVB and the Instrument Unit] This is the top of the oxygen tank, on this third stage. McDonnell Douglas built this vehicle at the time. What you see in here, see all these markers with the wire? Those are sensors that’s telling how much fuel is left in here. When they would go dry, it would change the resistance on the thing, so the computer knew when it got to low level. Any of these sensors, when they go dry, it just showed up in the computer. The computer, which is right behind you, up here, there’s one here and one there. It was a backup. It was funny then; this design is so old that one is a digital computer, not everybody trusted digital, so they had an analog backup. Honest to God, that’s how it worked, and they worked well.\\n\\n Remember I talked about feeding the bubble? Coming up, here’s these tanks and this is where it’d plug in, so that gaseous oxygen would get into the tank here, to make sure you didn’t crush the tank when you pumped the fuel out of it. You had to do the same for the hydrogen, all at the same time, that’s what’s going on. If you think about all the circuitry and everything, this part, there’s nothing missing—this would attach to that directly. You never separated from this stage.\\n\\n When you get to this point, and when we go through this, it’s interesting, if you look at all this hardware, wires and tanks, then you think about Fox News and all the people that say we faked all this. You think, “It was easier to do it than to fake it,” you know? It’s just crazy to think about this. It was easier than it would have been to fake it. Plus, if we had faked anything, the Russians would have been all over us. After we landed, they just sent a congratulatory telegram.\\n\\n This whole IU [Instrument Unit] goes on. The brains of this thing, it’s 22 feet in diameter but only 3 feet long. IBM built it, it’s called the Instrument Unit. In here, if you see that ring up there, that actually had an inertial platform. Remember we talked about platforms for navigation and everything, so it has one like that. It’d sit there, so it was running itself and keeping it steady no matter what the vehicle did. It talked to the digital computer and the analog, both. They’re the one that decided when to fire the engines. The crew had to say yes, or okay, it came up and says, “I’ve got a solution, it’s ready to go.” Then everybody on the ground read that one and compared that to the one they had on the ground, plus the one that the Apollo guidance computer had, and said, “Yes, go.” Then the crew pushed the button in the CSM [Command and Service Module] saying, “Yes, proceed for TLI.”\\n\\n Then, they’d light off, and it burned about another 6 or 7 minutes, almost to completion, but it burned off. Remember that it’s that big ellipse, in other words, your circular orbit, about 150 by 150, and now you’re going to burn to go from 25,000 feet a second to 36,000 feet a second. That would put that apogee way the hell out there. If you did it right, you’re leading the duck. You don’t shoot where the Moon is; you’re going to shoot where it’ll be later because it came over, three days later. The crew used to joke about that. We didn’t know much about the Moon and so you went into orbit about 200 miles up and then lowered to 60 miles, later went into 60, and we’d always think, we know nothing about the back of the Moon—if they have any 61-mile mountains back there or something. You’re flying into the dark, and you’re just crazy to actually do this.\\n\\n Now, I want to drag out my [models]. In here, what’s missing, you see this cruciform thing? I need a bigger one, I have a bigger one, I build models, but it’s not the same. I’m going to talk about this later, but the LM is stored in here. The legs are folded up, so they’re like this [demonstrates]. The knees on the LM, four places, is where this hinge is. That’s not there [referring to metal braces]. That’s to hold it together [for the display], and gravity wins all the time, so as you squish down like that.\\n\\n When you think about it, so I’m here as the LM and I’m actually this way because the legs swing out this way, so if you think about it here, it’s like this. There’s an SPS engine sticking down here that winds up only 6 inches above this thing. Everything is packaged together as good as you can. The ascent stage is way up there. That DPS [Descent Propulsion System] engine is the back end of this LM descent stage\\n\\n There’s a big-ass engine called the SPS engine, Service Propulsion System, sticks down into it. It’s just above the top of the LM, so that’s what you see on the back of the Service Module [SM]. This is folded up and everything is out of sight, so it’s like this. What happens then, the crew’s in here. When they get ready to go, they’re going to fire it now. They’re through with the Saturn V, it’s inert, kind of.\\n\\n They would hit a switch that said “CSM/LM Sep,” and so you’d move the CSM out. They would go out 100 yards out in front. You’d turn around and look back, and here’s this S-IVB and LM floating back there against the Earth below. The vehicle is not just the LM, it’s this humongous vehicle floating out there. What they do is they come back in and they dock to the top of the LM, and it’s the docking system that you saw over for Skylab. It is the same, identical thing. What they did then is they’d open up a hatch inside here, crawl in, and they didn’t undo anything but there were two wires. They would make a connection between, when they opened this hatch, they could reach through and pull a wire out of the LM, connect it in here. It was launched with that wire available because it’s all protected in here. Put it together, then close the hatch again. Now the CSM is connected to the LM.\\n\\n Then, when they were ready, they would say, “LM Sep,” “LM to Saturn Sep,” it would blow the knees loose. On top of that, when we moved forward, I forgot to say it. As they went forward, they also blew all the way around that ring, and these are panels that flopped out. They’re like flower petals. They’re huge things, and so, where the knee is, it’s a hinge, actually. When you opened it up, suddenly you looked back, and now, instead of the sleek-looking Saturn, it’s open like a flower. There was a good picture back down there, a little bit past us, should have showed it to you. This way, when they blow it, now they just thrust backward and pull the LM out. That’s it. Now, this crew is through with the Saturn. The early flights, Apollo 8 and Apollo 10, they put the Saturn into orbit around the Sun. They did it by just opening up the valves on the engine and just dump what’s left of the fuel. They just made gas push, but a little push that took it away from where these guys are going.\\n\\n Later, after Apollo 11, they crashed them onto the Moon. They redirected it intentionally; they’d orient it so that they hit the Moon, so that they would create a seismic disturbance, and they could see what’s going on in the interior of the Moon.\\n\\n When it was first designed, one of the things in the vehicle, these panels on the S-IVB, they would fly away. That is, they would open up and then they would pop loose, and so the four panels would fly away because people thought it was so difficult to fly in and touch, or there would be impingement and disturb the thing. In the simulations, we did that, and I would say, “Oh, Jesus, not a good idea.” Because now it’s not the LM and the old S-IVB but now you’ve got four other things floating around you have to make sure you know where they are because they’re tumbling off in separate directions and you hope they have enough velocity to keep going. Let’s get down in front, now.\\n\\n I had a bigger [model], but I gave it to a nine-year-old to hold while I was talking and I got it back, there’s no legs. It’s in there, but the legs were missing when I got it all back. Here you are, flying along like this, now you put together. We talked about PTC [Passive Thermal Control], where you barbecue the thing because you’re in the Sun, so this is the configuration it should have all the time [spinning the CSM/LM model]. When they got ready to land, you’d leave one person in here, two guys would transfer through, reassemble the tunnel with all the docking stuff, and then they would separate.\\n\\n When we started out, we were in 60 by 60, and that’s where we landed from that on Apollo 11 and 12. That is where this thing stands 60 up and they did a burn behind the Moon and they came down, so they were 60 by 9. Then, putting this aside, on the way down, then, so you came around the Earth back here, where if you’re the Moon now, we’re flying around, and now, you start slowing down. Let’s transfer it so that this is the Moon. I’m going around across the Moon. At 9 miles up, I start firing, and as soon as you start firing to slow down, you’re going about 2,000 feet a second in the 2 hours time to go around. About 2,000 feet, well, immediately, you start falling.\\n\\n What happens is gradually, you’ll tilt up so that the engine is pointing, not just along the direction you’re going, but down, to control how fast you fall to the Moon. You thrust along the way. This descent engine was also throttleable. It’s the first throttleable engine. Otherwise, it’s just full-tilt, but because you’re using up weight, it’s getting lighter, so you didn’t want to have too much thrust. Gradually, the thrust would come down until, if everything works right, you’re sitting about 500 feet off the Moon, hovering, and that’s why they used helicopter training and some of that other vehicle out there, LLTV [Lunar Landing Training Vehicle]. Then, you would come across, and now, in this thing, if you didn’t like where you were going, you could pitch forward and go a little bit forward, you could go left, or you could go right, standing on this thrust.\\n\\n Gradually, it came down and then touched down. As far as that, we’ve talked about how you get out and go through all this stuff. When you were going to go, then obviously, you’d pull this thing off—I’m not going to do it now, but you get the idea. I don’t want to find all the pieces. You go back up, and so, just the silver part, you dock. The two guys go in, the rock boxes go in. Whatever pieces they want to steal from the LM, if they’re going to take it home, put it on the mantle, and then that’s it. That’s why, if you’ve ever seen in Mission Control, there’s a plaque from the Apollo 13 crew? It’s a mirror, remember, mirrors are important in flight, especially if you’re going to the bathroom or something like that. Anyway, that was the deal, the Apollo 13 took that mirror and gave it to the MCC.\\n\\n We went through this time and again in the simulator. The Saturn stick software allowed them to fly this whole Saturn vehicle We had to work desperately on how to make it work right because the dynamics were awesome. Nobody was ready for the pogo, but we were already flying, the first Saturn V, [Apollo 4 was November 9, 1967]. When we came to December of 1968, we knew pretty much that we could make it. The second flew in April [Apollo 6 on April 4, 1968], so we were confident in the crew flying it in December on Apollo 8. We made it fly like those two, and then beyond that, it was a very gingerly thing. You didn’t want to do a lot of control; you would move it slowly. That was the only thing we’d say because people said you could tear it apart. Those engines back there are so strong that they’re ready to really rip you around. That’s not so good. Fortunately, the damn thing worked every time and we didn’t have to do any of that Saturn Stick flying. It’s like RTLS [Return to Launch Site] in the Shuttle, I never wanted to think about an RTLS. We were ready to do it, but I didn’t want to be there the day it happened.\\n\\n We didn’t talk about this umbilical connection between the CM and SM. The way it works is you flew, remember I showed you where the connecter was, this is where you separated the Command Module, where you plugged in. That would pop out and let the Service Module go away.\\n\\n On the way up during ascent, you had that Launch Escape Tower on the front of it, and it was useful. If you got into trouble, and the crew had to learn how to do this, they would rotate a hand controller and it would fire the tower. It would tumble, intentionally. They’re called “canards,” they were things that stick up in the side, and it would start tumbling. That was a dynamic maneuver it controlled where you were going better at the time. It’s kind of like having a Frisbee. Once you fired the escape motor, then this smaller rocket would eject the tower, it’d throw itself away. That same engine was used if you didn’t ever need to fire the tower; then you ejected the unused tower with that engine, it would just sequence it away.\\n\\n There was cork over the front of the Command Module so that the first part of the flight, you couldn’t see out. The only thing you could see is a small window looking out the hatch, and the idea there was that that one window was just to say to people, you could signal to people on the catwalk. When it flew, ejecting the Launch Tower took away the cork cover. The cork cover actually broke apart as it went, just with the force of the tower ejection going away. Then, suddenly, the sunlight poured in. It was a daytime launch, and they’d say, “Whoa, look at the view,” that kind of thing. If you had trouble, and we’d train so many times for aborts, there were aborts on the pad, then there were aborts they called 1A, 1B, 1C, for how high you were, then Abort 2 and 3 and so on, these different ones. Each one, it was a different speed, different altitude, gave you different things to do. We trained and trained in those things, and of course, the best thing that ever happened is we threw all those procedures all away and never used any of them, so that was great.\\n\\n The sad part of this is that the SLS [Space Launch System] that we’re talking about, or the Orion, we’re doing that kind of system again. I say, I have never had a good day looking up the ass end of a big rocket engine. Remember, I talked about what went bad down there at that end? Why don’t you have a big solid rocket here, underneath me, and blow me the hell out of there? That way, I’m getting something positive in a sense that I’m in control. This thing, if you look at the movies of it, it’s scary to think what’s going on. To be right in the flame part behind it. It’s like lack of imagination because all they did is say, “They did it that way in Apollo, I read the books, so I’m going to do it all the same way.” If we put crew on [SpaceX] Dragon, they’ve already got something different, you’re sitting on the launch escape rocket, it’s underneath you, they’re going to take you away. That’s nice to know.\\n\\n We talked about the 16 jets and how you could control attitude, and this is a radio antenna, so there’s one on each side." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Little jets almost just look like they don’t do much, but they do everything, don’t they?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes, exactly, and yet they did so much. You see the jets in the Command Module that you only use during entry, and some things. This is, you can do rotation or translation, but that CM system only is rotation because once you get through the Service Module, you’re on the way coming home, you just make sure that the heat shield is in front. This CM is so rusty and everything, but that’s a relic. That’s the actual one we did training offshore, getting the crew out into the rafts and into the helicopters." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Here, yes. We’d drop it in the water off a barge, and then the crews would get into it, and then they’d go pull them out with every flight and put them out with the helicopters, go through the whole recovery step. I think they did twice on every flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was the same capsule used all through that training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. That’s why it looks like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Does it have a special marking or a name?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It didn’t have a name, never did. “Command Module.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Missed your chance, didn’t you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes, yes. Sorry. It doesn’t have a real heat shield or anything like that. It was made mostly of cast iron, just like that. It’s interesting; when they shut it down, the Service Modules were built in Tulsa, the Command Modules were built in Downey, and so you could go out and see a Command Module all the time. I personally never saw a Service Module until they were at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]. I never saw one that was all disassembled. These white things over here are radiators. Remember, you had a thermal system—the thermal coolant loops would go through across that bridge thing that got the guillotine later, and that was the ethylene glycol, that was the thing that was flammable, which we shouldn’t have been using but we did, if you go back to the first flight fire [Apollo 1 accident].\\n\\n Do you know what Primacord is? It’s an explosive, but it looks like a rope. What they do, there would be Primacord on these things, all around where you separate this thing away, when you would unzip the SLA. This SLA is the Service Module/Lunar Module Adaptor, and then all around the back end of that. Way up there in the point, where that hole is, you can see the hinges. See that they would fall out this way. When they fell out this far, in the early design, it’s where they were going to then break the hinges and let them fly away, and that’s when Wally [Walter M.] Schirra took a look at that and said, “We ain’t doing that.” He was right. He was right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A profound and true statement, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, exactly. He had a lot of good statements. I was in a meeting out in San Diego [California] about four months before he died. He was already sick, but it was great to have a chance to see him one more time. I didn’t know, I don’t think he knew, at the time, that he was sick because we’d have talked about it otherwise, but that’s the deal. This is a different lecture—with the scale, they’re a little better to see, they’re this size. Since my LM has been legless and legs are a big part of this thing, so we do it that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, they were kind of needed, weren’t they?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, they were really needed. Heck of a thing. Any questions? I threw a lot of numbers about speed, do you guys understand orbital mechanics or orbital things? Maybe we should do that sometime, just briefly. Think about this. Have you ever fired a hunting rifle, pistol, anything? Let’s just take a rifle. When you fire it, the bullet comes out about 3,000 feet a second, and the range, if you set it, is a mile, which is true—unless you fire it straight up because then it’ll go further. Of course, then it comes down. If you add them together, you’re counting on there aren’t any deer up there. With the kids, I always go back to say, “Okay, take a Napoleonic cannon that fires cannon balls.”\\n\\n The thing is, if I could take this pen up 16 feet and let it go, it’d take one second to hit the floor. Starts at zero speed, gravity’s trying to accelerate it, by 32 feet a second, per second, but since it started at zero, after one second, it’s going 16 feet/sec. Let’s take that cannon and put it up on a platform, 16 feet, and just fire it. Now if they tilted down, screwed up, and the ball rolled out of the cannon, the cannonball would fall for a second. Pick it up and put it back in, get it level, fire it at 3,000 feet a second. It’s going out of the barrel, going 3,000 feet a second. How long is it going to fly? One second. As soon as the barrel’s not holding it up, gravity takes over, and so it’ll go clunk, right? How far did it go? Three thousand feet because it’s going 3,000 feet a second. We’re going to forget about the atmosphere for a minute, drag and all that stuff. Double the gunpowder, so now it’s going to come out here at 6,000 feet a second, fire. How far is it going to fly? How long is it going to fly?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A second." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One second. How far will it land?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Six thousand." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Six thousand. Double the gunpowder, 12,000 feet. Fire. One second, 12,000 feet. You can see the angle gets more shallower, but it’s still going to clunk up over there, and hopefully, if you had good aim, you did something to bad guys out there. Twenty-four-thousand feet, just double again, so it’s just gunpowder, clunk. One-second flight. There’s a magic number, though—at 25,500 feet per second, 16 feet up, you fired the gun, so the projectile’s going at 25,500 feet a second, but the arc that it’s following as gravity pulls down is the same as the curvature of the Earth, so it doesn’t hit.\\n\\n Theoretically, if you didn’t have any mountains, we lived on a billiard ball, it could fly all the way around and come back and hit you in the back of the head. That’s a satellite, that’s all it is, except we don’t live on a billiard ball, so you take up out of the atmosphere, far enough you can, you’ll notice as the rockets go up, they also are pitching over all the time, so they’re starting to get horizontal velocity. They’re striving for 25,500 feet a second, or more; 25,500 is a good number, at about between 100 and 110 miles up. If you get up there and you’re going horizontal and you shut down the engine, you are falling around the Earth. You’re falling just like the thing did, but you just don’t hit it because you’re going so fast across the ground that it’ll go around. And it will just keep going until drag—gravity always wins—slows you down and brings down a little lower, which means there is more air molecules and they get thicker and thicker until you fall in.\\n\\n If you go up 200 miles, 300 miles, like the Hubble, it takes a lot longer for drag will slow you down. Now, it’ll take 300 years before you fall down, and if you go up to geosynchronous, it’s geological times before you fall back. That’s all it’s about. The neat thing about it is once you’re there, let’s say you go up 150 miles and you’re flying along and you’ve got a buddy that’s at 200 miles up, 50 miles up, well, now, there’s a speed difference of about 2 feet per second for every mile you go up. In other words, if I’m down here at 150 and he’s at 200, then that 50 miles, I’m going to be catching up at 100 feet a second, every second I’m out there. We play with that with the rendezvous, and that’s how you set them up so the target vehicle is either ahead and above you, or they’re behind and below you and you’re going to catch up, or if he’s active up here, he would go ahead in front of you and he’d come down to get you.\\n\\n That’s what we did here, that the Command Module did a mirror-image rendezvous, the LM jumped up out of the orbit here, it was always behind and below the Command Module, and when they computed the burns, they’d fire. If anything happened and they didn’t fire, they’d say it on the radio. They did the same thing; he would have been coming down to get him. If they couldn’t fire again, the Command Module Pilot would have made the next maneuver, and there was only three maneuvers or so before they’d come together. It’s just a great way to think about it, in the sense of somebody designed that, but it’s obviously the right thing to do. It’s called a mirror-image rendezvous. [International Space] Station can’t do that because it can’t translate, not as far as going down to get—if something happened to the Shuttle, the Shuttle would just wave off and go home, you couldn’t make it anymore, or we’d find another way to get it fired so their engines would get there. Shuttle’s a different day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It is a different day. You were talking earlier, it made me try and figure out the best way to formulate this question, when you’re training in the simulators, were there times because of that training it impacted a redesign?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes. Especially redesign of the software. Sometimes, we found that it redesigned some hardware things inside the cockpit. Some silly example is that waste toilet thing, we didn’t redesign it, they just said, “Toss it.” All of those things, we went through a lot of things. I can think more on Shuttle than I can Apollo, but they’re there, I pull back up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, because obviously when you’re talking about crawling through and doing all these things and making sure that they were done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know that the probe and drogue, we had one flight where we changed something on it, that is, when we were doing physically, because they had mock-ups where you would physically get in and change that thing, and there was one lever that was just too hard, we made it longer because they had to be able to grab it and torque it, and it was too hard, with originally it was too short, relatively." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know that you mentioned that when people come back, that they had the debriefing and they could tell what worked, and by the time you got through to the flights, you had it down pretty good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That happened almost every time. When we debriefed, that the simulator guys would have a whole session, a whole 3-or 4-hour session with the crew. When, like, Apollo 11, when I remember it, we head back and it’s a funny thing because they had debriefings for about six days. Before, they just took a rest, but everybody went. It was the Mission Control guys and it was the vehicle guys and then it was the Command Module guys and the LM guys and everything, and the simulator guys. We sat down and we went through it.\\n\\n The great thing was they said, “It was almost right, it was pretty close, but here’s what we saw.” We fixed some things about the sounds, the sounds in the flight were different. That was a simulator change, not a vehicle change, but we captured that it was louder than we thought it was going to be when they’re in it. Then, they went through there, there were some shortcomings about the mock-up, and we changed a lot because of where the lockers popped open and everything.\\n\\n Like I say, I almost hesitate to talk about that because we didn’t go back and look at that LM standing up there, but you can do that just by yourself, go over and just you can think about the different things they had to do to climb down, walk around that thing. I don’t know if you heard this about all the photography that’s going on, that takes pictures? It’s so amazing because they say, “It should be dark in there.” It’s dark but it’s not dark because I’m out here, I’ve got a white shirt, I’m throwing light in there. This hill that’s right next to me is throwing reflected light is what’s in there. It was bizarre. I just love them, I just love those guys." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, they keep everybody wondering, don’t they?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They just said, “I don’t believe anybody’s smart enough to get to the Moon,” and I said, “Well, you are not.” I did, to this one guy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, well, thanks, Frank." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Francis E. Hughes", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I hoped that helped us get through it." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "nprc-oral-histories-00011", + "metadata": { + "interviewee_name": "Thelma Martin", + "description": "\"A few of us were on the telephone daily calling local, state, and county offices to find out if any of them had military records information that could be used to reconstruct records.\"", + "file_url": "https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/nprc-fire/thelma-martin-nprc-oral-history.pdf", + "collection_url": "https://www.archives.gov/about/history/nprc-oral-histories", + "original_file_name": "thelma-martin-nprc-oral-history.pdf", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04 22:30:07", + "publisher": "U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION", + "date": "June 22, 2023" + }, + "broad_source": "nara", + "collection": "nprc_oral_histories", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Caroline Shanley" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Thelma Martin" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you so much for participating in the National Archives Oral History Project, documenting the 1973 National Personnel Records Center fire and its impact on the National Archives. My name is Caroline. Today is June 22, and I’m speaking with Thelma. So let’s just get started here, and we’ll see kind of how the conversation goes. If you have questions along the way or you want to stop on a question for a while, that’s totally fine. We don’t need to get through all of these questions. We’re just going to kind of let the conversation guide us. Does that sound good?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you just provide a brief overview of your career at the National Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I started working for the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC), Military Personnel Records (MPR) on September 20, 1972, as a GS-4 archives technician. I worked for the Army Reference Branch as a GS-4 work-in-file technician." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you tell me a little more about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. A work-in-file technician responds to reference requests mainly from the Veterans Administration that are submitted on the VA 3101 form. The request is completely processed in the file area rather than in the office at a desk. I searched and withdrew the pertinent military record, completed the form, and refiled the record. Several months later I was promoted to a GS-5 management assistant position for the Military Management and Technical Staff (MMTS). I mainly wrote and made changes to the instructions that correspondence technicians used to respond to requests. About a year later I was promoted to a GS-7 management analyst position. I worked on various studies and projects. One of the most interesting projects was working with a team to develop engineered standards for the reference branches. I worked for the MMTS for about three years. After that, I spent the next five years at MPR in various supervisory positions: GS-9 Section Chief for the Air Force Reference Branch, GS-9 Section Chief for the Navy Reference Branch, GS-11 Assistant Branch Chief for the Navy Reference Branch, GS-11 Assistant Branch Chief for the Air Force Reference Branch, GS-11 Assistant Branch Chief for the Army Reference Branch, GS-11 Assistant Branch Chief for the Navy Reference Branch, and GS-12 Branch Chief for the Navy Reference Branch. So, from 1972 to 1980 I worked at NPRC [MPR] for eight years. Then from 1980 to 1991 I worked at the Civilian Personnel Records facility of the National Personnel Records Center [NPRC, CPR] for 11 years as a GS-12 Branch Chief for the Civilian Reference Branch. Then I returned to NPRC [MPR] for a brief time as Branch Chief of the Army Reference Branch and the rest of the 11 years as the Branch Chief of the Records Reconstruction Branch, then as Manager, Reference Core Two and Manager, Reference Core Five. Cores Two and Five while I was Chief provided reference on fire-related requests just like the Records Reconstruction Branch. Then in 2002 I returned to the Civilian Personnel Records facility for five years as the Assistant Director. I retired in September 2007. So, was that totally confusing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No not at all. That is a really awesome trajectory. And it sounds like you got to work in a lot of different areas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that is true. In varying degrees I learned about all the operations at MPR and CPR either through studies and projects [e.g., mailroom, accessioning and disposal of records] or working in them [e.g., management staff and reference branches]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. Just zooming out a little bit. Can you tell me a bit about what you were doing before you came onto that role or kind of what got you interested in this line of work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You mean what caused me to apply for the GS-4 archives technician position?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I graduated from the University of Missouri at St. Louis (UMSL) with a BA in English and received a lifetime certificate to teach secondary English. However, during my senior year I decided I wasn’t really interested in teaching. I met with a guidance counselor in UMSL’s placement office who told me to check out the bulletin board that had listings for job opportunities and application forms for the civil service exam. I took the Junior Federal Assistant exam that qualified me for a GS-4 position with a federal agency. Sometime after that, I got a phone call to report to the National Personnel Records Center for an interview, which at that time was at 9700 Page Avenue. The Assistant Director interviewed me for a GS-4 archives technician, work-in-file position for the Army Reference Branch. I didn’t know anything about the National Personnel Records Center, but the job sounded interesting and I needed a job, so I accepted the opportunity. Little did I know that job would be the beginning of a 35-year career with NARA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So tell me a bit about after you came in after the civil service tests and such. What kind of training did your unit provide you? Like what kind of stuff did you learn and do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "During orientation, I received a general overview of the mission of the National Personnel Records Center and its two facilities, MPR at 9700 Page Avenue and CPR at 111 Winnebago Street. The training I received for the GS-4 work-in-file position in the Army Reference Branch involved learning how to search for the military record needed to answer the request, how to respond to the request, and how to refile the record. That was the beginning of learning what it meant to provide reference service on a request that was received by the Center. But, it wasn’t until I became a management assistant and management analyst working on studies and writing standard operating procedures that I learned about the other positions in the Center that were indirectly or directly involved in providing reference service. By interviewing the best technicians, I learned how the higher level requests were processed, which helped me recommend changes to the current procedures that ultimately led to improved productivity or eliminated redundancies. The transition to supervisory positions in all of the reference branches at MPR and CPR led to more training and learning about records management, records center operations, fiscal and human resource management, and customer service operations. With each subsequent promotion, the expectations became higher for me to “get the job done” as efficiently and effectively as possible by proposing, developing, and implementing ideas with those goals in mind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So that was a great overview of sort of your day-to-day tasks. What aspects of the work did you particularly enjoy?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Although I learned a lot about the Center doing studies and writing memos, what I enjoyed most was talking to the technicians about their work, which ultimately led me to enjoy supervision." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. Just kind of on the note of working and the time that you were doing your work, I am kind of curious about working in military records specifically, and did changes in politics or the Presidential administration change the nature of your work at all? Did you feel like there was an effect with what was going on in terms of current events and political circumstances? Or did you feel like you were sort of insulated from that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I was insulated during most of my career until I became an Assistant Director at CPR." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, great. Do you want to say anything more about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were two instances where politics or current events may have played a role in the decision-making process concerning two projects at CPR, but I can’t be certain because even at the GS-14 level I wasn’t always privy to discussions between the Center Director and the Central Office leadership team. Also, keep in mind these projects pertained to civilian records, not military, so my response may not be pertinent to your question. But, here goes. The first instance involved us trying to get the necessary funding to create and deploy a digitizing operation at CPR which would have converted the paper OPF into an electronic record that could be accessed using a personal computer. The Office of Personnel Management [the legal custodian of most records of former federal employees] became our first client. OPM signed a contract with CPR and funded us $100,000 to get our “new” business started. However, based on our cost projections, we needed another $60,000 for equipment. Leadership at the time wouldn’t approve it. At a center director’s conference that the Archivist attended, all directors and assistant directors from the records centers system were given an opportunity to talk about what was going on at their centers. When it was my turn, I explained the cost savings benefits of having a digitizing operation at CPR and added that I couldn’t get $60,000 to buy the necessary equipment to get it started. I truly was in “hot water” for bringing that up at the conference, but it did result in the money being approved shortly after the conference. In the second instance, I became aware of the possibility of CPR’s records and operations being relocated to a different records center that would have shut down CPR in St. Louis and resulted in many employees losing their jobs if they couldn’t or wouldn’t relocate to a different city/state. I wasn’t told whose idea this was or the motivation behind it since CPR was, at the time, meeting or exceeding all performance goals and for the first time in several years was operating at a profit rather than a deficit. The only reason I could think of that made any sense for finding a “new” home for CPR was that the building was at 95% capacity for its records holdings. Knowing that NPRC, years before, had been checking out a cave in Valmeyer, Illinois, as a potential future site for NPRC’s records but not knowing the status or if the idea had been dropped, the Director approved my staff and certain MPR staff to evaluate the cave as a new home for CPR. When it proved doable, my staff and I prepared a position paper that included a cost analysis prepared by an MPR analyst proposing that CPR relocate to the cave in Valmeyer and keep its operations in the experienced and skilled hands of the St. Louis employees. Our proposal was approved. CPR relocated to the cave in Valmeyer, Illinois. Moving to the cave solved the building capacity problem for our records holdings but also ensured there would be enough office space to expand our “new” business of converting the paper Official Personnel Folder to electronic not only for the Office of Personnel Management but other agencies who were interested, such as the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). We were close to getting a contract with USPS when I retired. I don’t know the status of that initiative. I worked on most aspects of the move and even worked on the fun part of helping to design the office spaces, select paint colors and order furniture. But, I retired before the physical move." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well what a great way to cap your career. You’ve given me a lot of really great details so far, so we’ll just go a little bit longer. We’re kind of turning gears here, going back to the very beginning of your career. I know we spoke about this briefly on the phone, but just wanted to get it on the record as well if you could tell me a little about where you were during the fire and what you remember about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At the time, I was reporting for work as a management assistant, and I saw smoke coming from the building. And I could see that there were a lot of people and firemen on the complex. I called my supervisor, who told me to go home and call again the next day for further instructions. So I did, and I was told to report to the Civilian Personnel Records facility, CPR. I got a crash course on how to respond to GS-5 level correspondence requests. In processing those cases I learned about some of the records at CPR that would eventually become an alternate source for information necessary to reconstruct military records that were involved or destroyed in the 1973 fire. When I was finally able to return to MPR, one of my earlier assignments on staff was to find and document alternate sources for military information. A few of us were on the telephone daily, calling local, state, and county offices to find out if any of them had military records information that could be used to reconstruct records. We documented all the alternate sources we could determine to include sources at MPR [e.g., organizational type records such as morning reports, sick reports, etc.] and CPR [GAO pay vouchers, Entrance and Separation X-rays, etc.]. We compiled the information and wrote the first procedure on how to respond to requests that were involved in the 1973 fire. We also created pattern paragraphs that explained which records were involved in the fire and developed appropriate forms which facilitated responding to the fire-related requests. Since then studies have been done to find other sources of information, the procedures and various forms have been refined. Using the Case Management Reporting System, requests can be answered electronically. Archives.gov documents fully the progress that has been made regarding the fire-related records procedures. I was on that site today, and it was gratifying to see that some of the initial statements that were written in 1973/74 by the staff haven’t changed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Totally, I appreciate it. My follow-up question anyways was just going to be how did some of these procedures change and evolve in the years following the fire. But I think you answered that perfectly unless there’s anything else you wanted to add about your day to day work, what changes you saw." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The biggest change was when NPRC started the Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) in the early 2000s. We were moving away from being a paper-based operation to electronic. Technicians did their work on PCs utilizing procedures that could be accessed electronically. The procedures were modified to no longer be branch specific. In other words, a GS-5 correspondence technician who used to process just Army records requests could now use the same instruction to process Navy and Air Force records requests. The fire-related requests required specialized knowledge and training, but even those cases could be processed more timely and efficiently using the CMRS." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, that makes sense. So we will wrap it up. But I wanted to just ask kind of one final open-ended question. Would love to hear overall, how do you view your time working at the National Archives, and is there anything else you want to add in general?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a very interesting and rewarding experience starting out as a GS-4 archives technician working in the stack areas to leading CPR as the Assistant Director. I had the privilege of working with some of the best and most capable people at both MPR and CPR throughout my career. Equally important were the friends I made along the way. I met them shortly after the fire, and we are still friends today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. It’s awesome to hear that. And you know, as someone who’s working here right now, I love to hear about your experiences. I study history myself, so I’ve done quite a bit of archival research and talking with the techs who pull my materials and help me find the materials I’m looking for. I’m always very grateful for the staff who do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The National Archives impacts a lot of people throughout the world. What we do is important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Totally. So that concludes our interview. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Thelma Martin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Caroline Shanley", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, thanks. Have a good one. Bye bye." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00297", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HutchinsonNB/hutchinsonnb.htm", + "original_file_name": "HutchinsonNB_1-21-04.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HutchinsonNB/HutchinsonNB_1-21-04.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 21 January 2004" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Neil B. Hutchinson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is January 21st, 2004. This oral history with Neil Hutchinson is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is the interviewer, and she is assisted by Sandra Johnson and Rebecca Wright.\\n\\n Thank you so much for joining us this morning. I know we’ve been trying to do this for about a year, as you’ve pointed out. We’d like to start by asking you what were your roles and responsibilities with regard to the Flight Operations Integration Office?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the flight operations, I was actually the Deputy in that office and [M. P.] “Pete” Frank was running the office. The Flight Operations Integration Office was an office composed only of Flight Directors. At that time there were only about a half a dozen of us. We were coming off of getting the Shuttle going for the first time, and that office’s job, of course, was to lead the development of flight rules, which is something that the people in the control center use to manage the missions. The office also ran the flight techniques activities, which developed the ground and crew procedures and built checklists and the like for various phases of flight in the Shuttle.\\n\\n The office had been put together—, I think back in pre-launch [era of] the Shuttle the first time, I think we just called it the Flight Directors Office and, in fact, it’s really—even today, I think, there still is one and I think it’s still sort of known as the Flight Directors Office, although it has some formal name, as you just said.\\n\\n There weren’t very many of us in there. It was not really a structure in which you managed the people in there. I mean, herding Flight Directors around is kind of like herding crewmen around. You don’t really do that much. They all are kind of very senior people who are leaders in the flight operations business.\\n\\n So my role there, I was the number-two guy in that office, but the fact is that I was more a member of the team of Flight Directors, of half a dozen of them that were doing business at that time as leaders of the teams that were flying the Shuttle. It was the last thing I did in—it’s called MOD now—the Missions Operations Directorate, in which I had spent most of my career at NASA, starting way back in the beginning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Then you later went on to work as an assistant for the Center Director." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I did. In fact, I did that a couple of times in my career, once here and then once right at the end, just before I left. My job there—well, let’s see. A couple of things. Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft was the Director of the Johnson Space Center at that time and Cliff [Clifford E.] Charlesworth was his Deputy. I had come off of about five years of very intensive work having to do with launching the Shuttle for the first time,\\n\\n Columbia\\n\\n for the first time, and then launching it for the first time for the second time. It was the first time we had ever reused a vehicle.\\n\\n We started a concept called lead Flight Director concept on the third flight of the Shuttle. Again, it was\\n\\n Columbia\\n\\n , and I was the first lead Flight Director. By the time I got through that sequence, which started, really, in 1975, when we finished Skylab, and then we tried to launch the Shuttle a whole bunch of times before we finally got it in the air, but [when] we launched it finally in April of 1981, I was ready to go do something else.\\n\\n Chris, over all the years, had had a process where he had a—we called them “horse-holders.” That’s kind of an odd term. It’s not meant to be a degrading term; it’s kind of an affectionate term, in which they would take a person out of the line organization and move them up to the ninth floor of Building 1, and have him carry Chris’ briefcase. And, of course, I’m not even sure I was capable of carrying his briefcase, but the fact of the matter was, I went up to that office to be a horse-holder. I was one in a long string of people. I actually reported to Henry [E.] Clements, who was the Associate Director at the Center at that time. “Pete” Clements. Everybody called him Pete. Pete Clements, Henry Pete Clements.\\n\\n A couple of very difficult things happened. We had a structure at the Johnson Space Center where we didn’t really have a formal succession plan of who was going to be the next Deputy and who was going to be the next Center Director, but rest assured, locally it had already been decided. At that time, Glynn [S.] Lunney, who is a former Flight Director and who at that time had just, I believe, gone up to run the Shuttle Program—I might not have his title exactly right, but he had taken over from Bob [Robert F. Thompson]. The original set of guys, Bob Thompson, Aaron Cohen, and that group of guys who worked the Shuttle Program as the vehicle was being built, after the first couple of flights, there was a lot of change, and they were all tired, too. Everybody was looking to get regrouped, me included.\\n\\n I went up there to be Chris’ horse-holder and some things happened that were very difficult. Jim [James M.] Beggs was the NASA Administrator, and they were working on a process that eventually resulted in Rockwell [International Corporation], who built the Shuttle, not being the company who was operating the Shuttle out of [Kennedy Space Center] Florida. Chris and a lot of other people, me included, were very uncomfortable with turning over this very sophisticated, one-of-a-kind, hard-to-understand, complicated piece of hardware to a contractor, to turn it around between flights, who had not built it. I probably am not privy to the kinds of decision processes that went on, but Chris lost his job.\\n\\n Chris had a process in place that was—I mean, Chris was a reemployed annuitant, and he certainly was ready to go not be the Center Director anymore, and Glynn Lunney was sort of the anointed one. Everybody knew it.\\n\\n Unfortunately, my own involvement in that process was that Jim Beggs decided that he really was very determined that there would be a new structure in Florida to turn the Shuttles around and that it didn’t necessarily need to be Rockwell, and they kind of parted ways on that subject. Again, I’m not privy to the intimate details, but in the end, Chris left NASA, and I got the unenviable task of being the Center Director’s horse-holder when we changed Center Directors. And because of Glynn’s very close relationship with Chris and obvious allegiance to a lot of the things Chris believed in and, of course, came up through the system—mine, too, by the way, which is kind of interesting. I was probably too low in the pecking order for them to worry about my ability to influence things. I got the job of introducing and reacclimating the new Center Director, who was not Glynn Lunney, and that was a very overt move on the part of the leadership of the agency.\\n\\n The new Center Director was Gerry [Gerald D.] Griffin, who had been, and was and still is, a very close personal friend and a terrific guy, but Gerry was out of government. He had been the Deputy at Dryden [Flight Research Center, Edwards, California]. He had been the Deputy at the Kennedy Space Center, as the Deputy Center Director, and he’d left the government and I believe he was out of the government at the time, and he was asked to come back by Jim Beggs and take over the leadership of the Johnson Space Center.\\n\\n That was a very difficult time for all of us, because Glynn and Gerry were good friends. They grew up as Flight Directors together. There was a great deal of difficult feelings. I mean, you can imagine Glynn Lunney, who literally had been nurtured—nurtured is the wrong word, but he had grown up through the process and, there was no announcement that Glynn Lunney was going to be the Center Director or anything like that, but everybody knew that was the case. And all of a sudden, Glynn had to play second fiddle to a guy who had left the agency and who was coming back from the outside. And I was right in the middle of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us about some of the challenges that you faced with this change of guard?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "First off, Gerry was not looking for a job. Gerry had to put his stamp on—anybody that’s in that chair, I mean, “Beak” [Jefferson D.] Howell, Jeff Howell, who’s there now, is putting his stamp on it. Anybody who’s there has to be King and, you know, the King is dead; long live the King. Chris went to work for Rockwell, despite the fact that Rockwell was going to end up out of the Shuttle turnaround business, because, of course, Lockheed [Aircraft Corporation] was the successful person who ended up with that business at that time.\\n\\n Gerry came in and exercised his appropriate leadership skills that you have to do in that job, and we had a really rough six months. I guess I’d have to say that a lot of the leadership, down one level, of the directorates of JSC, resented Gerry because they kind of thought he took Glynn’s place. Glynn had to sit there in staff meetings as the head of the Shuttle Program and take directions from Gerry. I mean, Gerry isn’t ordering people around. But I can remember some very difficult meetings.\\n\\n However, to the credit of that whole crowd, including—[Eugene F.] Kranz was still there at the time, Griffin, Pete Clements was there, although he was leaving. When that happened, Cliff decided to retire, because the obvious thing that Chris Kraft had set up, he put Cliff in the Deputy job to begin with. See, Cliff and Glynn, all the way back in Mercury, had been together their entire careers at Johnson. When Glynn was running the Flight Dynamics Branch, which was my first big job in Flight Operations, I worked for him, and Cliff was the Deputy Branch Chief, and they had just gone kind of stepping stone all this way. So Chris installed Cliff as the Deputy and then, of course, Glynn was going to be the King and they would continue on their relationship.\\n\\n When Gerry came in, Cliff decided he didn’t want to be involved in that kind of a framework and he left, and they brought a guy in from the outside, by the name of Bob [Robert C.] Goetz, I believe, was brought in as the Deputy, and he was from another field center, didn’t have any human spaceflight experience and did fine, but mostly Gerry ran the show.\\n\\n Eventually, to the credit of all those people, Glynn Lunney, Chris—of course, Chris was trying to advise everybody to calm down. And people, to be quite honest, resented—I’m sure you’ve interviewed him a lot of times and whatever, but he is what I guess I would describe as an idol, almost. Most of us, particularly the group of people who grew up as Flight Directors, not so much anymore, but back then, we all figured we owed everything we had to him, and it was very, very, very hard to see him kind of summarily dismissed.\\n\\n Chris carried on. Chris never blinked an eye, to be quite honest. He went to work for George [W.] Jeffs at Rockwell and had more fun doing that than he had running the field center, and stayed at Rockwell till he decided he didn’t want to work anymore.\\n\\n So in the end it all worked out, but to the credit of the people who were still there and having to deal with it day to day, I have to say that eventually we all figured out how to get along. We all figured out how to carry on and keep the Shuttle flying. There was a lot of talk beginning about trying to get a [Space] Station started and so on and so forth. So it all worked out. I was probably better for the experience because I got to sit there and watch that whole thing unfold from the inside looking out, and I probably did a lot of fence-mending among the players over that time period that I certainly never would have had the opportunity to do if I hadn’t been in the position." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What other assignments did you work on while Griffin was Director?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I eventually ran the Space Station under Gerry Griffin." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As his assistant." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that’s another interesting story. I didn’t stay there very long. I can’t remember the exact timing, but Chris didn’t just walk out the door when I showed up. The transition between Chris and Gerry happened about halfway through my tour as a horse-holder, which those things generally lasted about a year. I did not do it for an entire year, because Griffin, in his infinite wisdom, decided that one of the things that young Neil didn’t have on his ticket was working at NASA Headquarters, [Washington, D.C.].\\n\\n I don’t remember the exact timing, but Gerry asked me to—well, there were several things going on at NASA Headquarters at the time. One is I’d gotten to know Jim Beggs in the process of this Kraft-Griffin transition. We had a guy running Code M by the name of Jim [James A.] Abrahamson, an Air Force general who used to be a MOL [Manned Orbiting Laboratory] astronaut—didn’t ever fly because that program got cancelled. Jim—“Abe,” as he is called by most people who know him well—needed help up in Code M and Gerry saw a chance for me to leave the field center for a while and go get another ticket punched, and so I did.\\n\\n Once Gerry got installed and we kind of got the system rolling down here and he got into a comfort zone in terms of his—I mean, I wasn’t necessarily responsible for his comfort zone, but we kind of got things back on an even keel. I left and went to NASA Headquarters. I packed up my family and rented out my house and I moved to McLean, Virginia, and went to work up there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were some of your main assignments as the Director of the Space Shuttle Operations Office?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You mean at NASA Headquarters?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At NASA Headquarters." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went to work for General Abe and I had all the [Shuttle] divisions, since my background, I came out of Johnson and I certainly knew the Shuttle vehicle technically inside and out, because of my Flight Director tour. I had reporting to me five divisions at NASA Headquarters that comprised all of the piece parts of the Shuttle. It was a Main Engine Division and an Orbiter Division and a Level II Division and an SRB [Solid Rocket Booster] Division. So the organization structure that Abe had that ran the Shuttle Program—and “ran” [I] put in quotes, because the program’s really run by people in the field, not by NASA Headquarters, but NASA Headquarters has a very big obligation to do budgets and so on and so forth.\\n\\n So I was kind of the number-two guy to Abe. I was not an Associate Administrator or anything. I was a—I can’t even remember—director of something. But I had all those divisions reporting to me. My big job up there basically was nontechnical, making absolutely certain that we had the budget processes sorted out. I went through two what’s called POP’s, Program Operating Plan Cycle, which is “NASAese” for the way you get the budget together for the next year.\\n\\n There were a lot of things going on in the program in terms of we were still having troubles with main engines blowing up and [turbine] blades cracking, and we still had some fairly serious tile problems on the Orbiter. So I got involved in the budgeting, not so much in the technical solution, but making sure that the right kind of money flowed and we had the right emphasis on things that could hurt us badly in the program. I spent a little over a year up there.\\n\\n I spent a lot of my personal time working on the Civil War, which was fascinating to me. If you live in Washington, D.C., and haven’t paid attention to that, I think you’re really missing something. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.\\n\\n So I drove down to NASA Headquarters every day, and a couple of things that did for me, I got a much broader appreciation of NASA Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama] and NASA Kennedy, because both of those places are absolutely integral to the health and well being of the Shuttle. I made a lot of new friends. I think at the end, Abe was pretty unhappy when I left. He really, really, really—because he stayed on for another year or so before he went off and did the Star Wars thing— [wanted me to stay]. I, later in my career, ran into Abe, after I’d left the government, where he was still in the government and I was on the other side, a kind of interesting thing; it’s not a part of NASA history.\\n\\n But I really enjoyed my time up there mostly because it was so different than working at a NASA field center. It gave me a perspective that it’s almost impossible to get unless you go do it. NASA Headquarters is a very strange place. Number one, and I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, but all the brains in NASA are in the field. The field centers have all the technical horsepower, and it’s very, very hard for people at NASA Headquarters to insulate—one of their jobs is to insulate the field centers from the Congress and from the administration. By insulate, I mean run interference for them, because when something goes wrong, the Congress raises its hand and it’s going to have an inquiry or you want to reprogram some money because you need three extra SRBs and the Congress won’t let you. And the idea of NASA Headquarters and one duty that it serves really, really well is insulating the real technical [work]—letting NASA’s field centers get their job done without constant interference from the administration and the congressional interfaces.\\n\\n One thing that that does do—I always felt like I worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week up there, and you kind of look behind you, looking for a trail of cookie crumbs and it’s really hard to find it, because it’s the problem du jour. Constant fire fights. Some congressman doesn’t like something that’s going on in Mississippi and they call the Administrator, and it’s a Code M thing because somebody asked Pratt & Whitney [Corporation] to take their engine people out of Mississippi or something. I mean, I’m making all that up, but it always seemed like everything was done not in a panic mode, but in a very reactive mode, very hard to get ahead of the power curve at NASA Headquarters. And after you were all finished, you asked yourself, “Well, now, did I accomplish anything?” And the real answer is, “Yeah, you kept the field center insulated from all that flak that comes into the agency from the outside.”\\n\\n But that answer’s kind of hard to come by when you’re there doing it and you’re used to seeing technical progress or going and flying a mission. One of the things about Flight Operations that’s very unique is that you train and train and train—and the same would go for a crewman—you train and train and train and then you go fly a mission, and if it’s successful, you get an instant feedback, instant reward. You pulled it off and it worked and whatever. The reward system at NASA Headquarters is hard to come by. I could never, in a thousand years, would not want to work there as a permanent tour, because you just work your butt off and nothing seems to happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Give us a sense of how, if at all, working at NASA Headquarters helped prepare you to manage the Space Station Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Many things. When I first went up there, I don’t think Gerry had any Space Station thing in mind or anybody else did, for that matter. But several things. One is, you are in daily contact with—at least in the position I was in—you’re in daily contact with the NASA Administrator, the AA [Associate Administrator], everybody that is in the decision-making chain in that agency. That’s one.\\n\\n Two is, you get a much better appreciation for the budget process and the priorities that have to be played between field centers. Like, Code M probably runs—I’m probably not going to get this number right, but I’m going to guess two-thirds—50 percent of NASA’s budget—five, six, seven billion dollars, is executed out of the Human Space Flight, Code M, framework up there. So, when the Kennedy guys raise their hand and say they’ve got to have a building fixed, and the Johnson guys say they need to test some RCS [Reaction Control System] more, and there’s only money to do one, you learn how to work the priorities from a programmatic standpoint between those people that put demands on the system. Learned the budget cycle really well, and probably the biggest lesson of all, learned how to use Headquarters, when you’re in the field, to keep the rest of the world off your back.\\n\\n All that was all good lessons learned. At the time, shoot, I just plowed into it. I’m saying all this in a retrospective manner. I wouldn’t have thought that when I did it, I was learning that stuff. But I did.\\n\\n Another thing that was really good was, I had a lot to do with the leadership and the programmatics of the Marshall Space Flight Center, and eventually, of course, they had a major role in Space Station, and when that role started, I knew everybody in that food chain over there—the Center Director, who was Bill [William R.] Lucas, the deputy, who was [T.] Jack Lee, the whole food chain of the leadership of another field center, who was going to be a major player. And I obviously knew the people at JSC. I’d lived my whole life there, and I’d spent a lot of time in Huntsville in Skylab. I used to go back and forth every week to Huntsville back in the seventies.\\n\\n But I got a much better appreciation. I can make the same kind of comment about Kennedy and what was going on down there in launching Shuttles and the way the OPF [Orbiter Processing Facility] worked and all those kind of things. You got a better understanding of that. So, getting a much broader, better picture of non-JSC pieces of NASA was of great value up there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you become involved with the Space Station Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was at NASA Headquarters and people were starting to sniff around about Station. I’m not quite sure of the timing, but, in essence, Gerry—and I have to attribute this to Gerry. I’m sure a lot of other people had a vote. I mean, Jim Beggs had the vote. But Gerry decided that if we were going to stand up a Station Program, I’d be a good guy to lead it. So when I went back to JSC, very shortly thereafter the program was initiated. There was a lot of political maneuvering being done by Jim at the time, with the [Ronald W.] Reagan administration trying to home in on how much it was going to cost, which is another interesting story.\\n\\n I went back to JSC and we almost immediately started to stand up the Station Program and, of course, it had some people at Headquarters, that again, people I’d gotten to know, like Phil [Philip E.] Culbertson, and they brought John [D.] Hodge back, who was an ex-Flight Director, one of the original three, by the way, who’d been gone from the agency for a long time. He worked at the Department of Transportation up in Boston [Massachusetts] for many, many years, had come back. Phil Culbertson was a major player in the Station leadership framework at NASA Headquarters.\\n\\n And, of course, the Shuttle was rolling on and I had done the flight operations part of it and then I had done the headquarters part of it. Glynn Lunney was still here, still at JSC, running the Shuttle Program, although it was very obvious to everybody that Glynn was not going to stay at NASA. He was saluting and doing his thing, and he and Gerry getting along fine, and we were flying and whatever, but most of us knew that Glynn was not going to hang around. He never really got over the not being the Center Director deal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talk to us about establishing the Space Station Program Office, those first couple of months." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was really hectic. There are a couple or three characteristics. There was a lot of activity before we really got going in the establishment, having to do with relations between the program and the field and how the program would be structured. Conceptually, Phil and John—I think mostly Phil—and he had convinced Jim Beggs that this was the right thing to do. In retrospect, it was a very, very difficult thing to do, and in my personal opinion, looking back on it, although we did get some really good help, it was very wasteful in the early stages of the program.\\n\\n In all our infinite wisdom—and I really have to admit I didn’t have much of a vote in this—I was pretty much handed a construct that said, “We are going to employ the best and brightest across all of NASA, irrespective of the field center they’re in, to try and get this Space Station going.”\\n\\n And furthermore, some of those field centers were going to have piece parts. In other words, we were not going to put it all in one place, from a leadership and a technical standpoint. There was a really serious contest that went on about the time I started to get involved in it, in which the Marshall Space Flight Center really wanted the lead in Space Station and was very chagrined that Griffin outmaneuvered them.\\n\\n And, as a matter of fact, when I got ready to leave NASA Headquarters to go back to JSC, Marshall [Jack Lee in particular] tried really, really hard to get me to go to Marshall. Mostly it was my family and the fact I had a house in Houston and I had little kids—well, they weren’t so little—yes, they were still pretty little—and I kind of wanted to go “home.” It was more of a personal decision than anything having to do with the agency.\\n\\n But they already knew, and so did I, that I was probably going to end up being the PM [Program Manager], and they were having a really, really hard time with the fact that the Level II, the leadership, the head of the program and the leadership of the program across the agency was going to be placed at JSC. And, of course, that’s the way the Shuttle was. That’s what Bob Thompson—Level II program office, the Shuttle Program Office was at the Johnson Space Center and the Orbiter was just one of several projects that reported to that office, and, of course, the [External] Tank Office and the SRB Office, and those were all Huntsville, Marshall people. And here they were again, going to be beholden—that’s really the wrong word, but going to be subjected to leadership that grew up and was anchored at the Johnson Space Center. At the time, I did not understand the gravity of that, because it later became one of the reasons I left NASA.\\n\\n So let’s go back to getting the thing started up. In our infinite wisdom—and I can’t remember exactly where I entered this, but I know that from a decision-making standpoint, the framework of this thing was kind of decided before they said, “Okay, Neil, you’ve got the stick.” It ended up, “Well, now, you go make this work,” but the framework that had been put together was four field centers. One of them was not even a field center, because it was JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California], of all people, and JPL, Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland]—well, actually, let me leave that out. Let me back up.\\n\\n JPL was a side player. It was Goddard, the Lewis Research Center, which is now Glenn [Research Center at Lewis Field, Cleveland, Ohio], Johnson, and Marshall. Those four entities were going to each have a piece of hardware that belonged to the Space Station. That piece of hardware [was] still kind of nebulous and undefined and, “Oh, by the way, Neil, you’re going to have to sort that out, sort of.” Of course, each one of those field centers had something unique about it, in terms of the skill base at the field center, and, obviously, that was meant to determine a bit about what piece of the Space Station they ended up getting.\\n\\n The problem with that construct is that two of those four field centers think they are absolute equals. They believe that they have engineering expertise and brains—and they do, by the way. I’m not fussing at either one of them, and Johnson’s no better than Marshall, and Marshall’s no better than Johnson. And again, you’ve kind of got to go back to the history books and look at what happened. When Apollo powered down, Marshall didn’t have a job and they were scared to death that the Center was going to get reverted back to the Army and that there wouldn’t be a Marshall Space Flight [Center], so they started doing all kinds of maneuvering.\\n\\n The Shuttle was kind of a gleam in people’s eyes and, of course, they get themselves integrally involved in Skylab. And when we went from the wet workshop to the dry workshop, Marshall was in charge—I’ll pick something. Nobody in history at that point had ever done an environmental control system for a spacecraft, except JSC. All the environmental-control brains in the world were at JSC until Skylab, and then Marshall did an environmental control system, and all of a sudden, here was a zero engineering set of horsepower and a maximum capability set of horsepower at Marshall and JSC, and, all of a sudden, Marshall now is up there where they’re almost equal, because Johnson was doing the command and service module, ECLSS [Environmental Control and Life Support System], and Marshall did ECLSS on the Station.\\n\\n From that point on, Marshall felt like they had as much capability to do a human spacecraft as anybody else around. Period. And, in certain ways, they did. So when they started—here’s this Station, which nobody knew what it looked like, by the way. We didn’t even understand the configuration at the time. We were going to get these things called work packages put together, where each one of these field centers had a piece of the Space Station.\\n\\n Two of the four field centers that were involved had pretty clear charters, and Glenn was the power guy; by the way, over Marshall’s objections. They absolutely—they never got over that one either. As a matter of fact, later on in the program, when, in essence, the power system reverted back to JSC, when they closed—and this is past Neil. This is long after I’d left. In the end—and I’m not sure that it [did] revert completely back to JSC, because I think the batteries and stuff were still up at Huntsville—Marshall had a problem with that.\\n\\n But Lewis had a pretty clear charter to do the electrical power generation for Space Station. Goddard—at the time, Station was envisioned to have some co-orbiting satellites flying beside it that did earth science. We called them the platforms, and the idea was to have another spacecraft, independent of the Station, flying in formation with it, and you could get on your backpack and fly over there and service it. I’m being a little crude, but in essence, the whole idea was to have a serviceable satellite that did earth science, flying in formation with the Space Station. Goddard had those platforms, or two of them.\\n\\n Those, by the way, eventually turned into Terra and Aqua, which are not flying in formation. They actually were built and flown and are up there now, but they’re at an inclination that is not commensurate with the inclination the Space Station’s in, because we want them, they’re in polar orbit, we want them flying over more of the surface of the Earth, which any idiot would have known at the time, and I don’t know why we didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about that, but we didn’t.\\n\\n So they had the platforms, and that left the main body of the Space Station and who was going to get what piece parts. And here I was, this guy with “JSC” stamped on my forehead, back at JSC, with a partner at JSC who said, well, of course, a program office at JSC below me, run by a guy named Clarke Covington, who said, “Of course you will protect us and you will give us all the good piece parts,” and a set of people up in Alabama who said, “You’d better give us the piece parts or we’ll hang you by your thumbs.”\\n\\n I’m exaggerating for effect, but that contest between those two field centers is still going on to this day, and our job was, in essence, get a program office stood up, get it staffed, and basically get a configuration defined for the Station that could be used as a starting point for the private industry to go design the thing, and that process led to a thing called the Skunkworks, where myself, as the leader, and bunch of kind of wild-eyed engineers, and I can name damn near every one of them even today, guys like Al [Allen J.] Louviere, Mark [K.] Craig. There was a guy from Marshall that was there. We pulled from all four of the field centers. Ron [Ronald L.] Thomas was a guy from Lewis. Ken [Kenneth O.] Sizemore from Goddard. Charlie—oh my goodness. His last name is escaping me. Luther [E.] Powell was one from Huntsville, just to name somebody.\\n\\n We moved off site of JSC in a building about two blocks from here, that Johnson rented, leased for a year or two. Locked the doors and went into a crash system engineering design process for the Space Station. And, of course, in that process, we also are beginning to formulate which field center has which piece part and so on and so on and so on.\\n\\n We went through several design iterations, and I can tell you that the thing that finally came out the back end of that, which was a thing called the “power tower”—that was kind of an affectionate name we had for it—looks remarkably like the Space Station we have today. I mean, except for the fact that it had solar dynamic power and there was a slightly different arrangement of the—the whole concept of having a backbone truss structure, having solar panels and heat rejection devices on it, all the basic big design parameters of a Space Station were all originated in that team of people from four field centers and some guys from JSC who later became major players in the program office that I ran here in the ensuing years, a couple years; I’ll name Al Louviere and Mark Craig, for a couple of names of absolutely brilliant people.\\n\\n So, job number one was to get a first-order configuration established. Job number two was to, in the process, construct this office where we would have the Level II office and then all the subordinate offices at all four field centers and, by the way, several of the people who were in the Skunkworks, when the Skunkworks was over and we had a configuration, went back to their field centers and became the project managers, like Luther Powell and Ken Sizemore, to name a couple, Thomas, too. Thomas went back to Lewis and became the Program Manager for the power system on Space Station at Lewis, after spending six months down here, holed up in a building, coming up with the original design concept.\\n\\n So, the first job was to get that design concept sorted out. Second job was to kind of stand up the program hierarchy around the agency, and the third job, which was just as important as the first two, was to run a competition in private industry of the folks who were going to end up building this thing. It turned out, we formed a Source Selection Board, which, by the way, had membership from all those places that I just described, including some of the people I just described. We put together an RFP [Request for Proposal], using the Skunkworks design as the baseline and asked the industry to bid. We split the vehicle up into work packages, and that process, of course, defined what Marshall’s job was and what Johnson’s job was, what each one of the field centers’ job were, and then we ran a single competition, with me being the Source Board chairman, and picked two contractors for each field center. It was the equivalent of running four major procurements, all at once in one big procurement package.\\n\\n We picked eight contractors, two for each field center, to go do the Phase B Space Station studies, which, of course, would take that baseline and flesh it out with real engineering analysis. Most of the stuff we did in the Skunkworks was pretty back-of-the-envelope, although some of it—it’s just amazing how much the real vehicle turned out to be like the one that came out of the Skunkworks.\\n\\n That whole process took about a year. It actually took more than a year. I can’t remember the exact dates, but it was a good year to year and a half by the time the competition was over. The source selection official was Jim Beggs. Work Package 1 and 2 were the most hotly contested because they had the big piece parts, like the truss structure, [crew modules], and so on and so forth.\\n\\n We picked two contractors and the guys that lost—and I’ll never forget being at NASA Headquarters in Jim Beggs’ conference room, debriefing Lockheed about why they were not selected for Work Package 2, and having the president of Lockheed, who at the time was—I’m not going to remember his name—was a very unhappy man, because it was obviously the foot in the door in Phase B. And, of course, the idea was to run the Phase B studies and then run a competition to actually build the flight hardware, which, of course, in the case of Marshall, Boeing [Airplane Company eventually] won [Phase C/D]. In the case of Johnson, McDonnell Douglas [Corporation] won.\\n\\n Of course, at the time we ran the competition, the consolidation in the aerospace industry and private industry had not taken place yet and they were all still playing as primes. You had Grumman [Aerospace Corporation]; you had Rocketdyne [Division of Rockwell International]; you had Rockwell; you had McDonnell Douglas; you had Boeing. They were all independent. General Dynamics [Corporation]. They were all independently competing for these. TRW [Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge, Inc.].\\n\\n For example, the power system awards went to Rocketdyne and TRW, were the two winners at Lewis, as an example. And Boeing and—oh, man, I’m not going to remember who the second one was, but Boeing was the big winner in Huntsville. McDonnell Douglas was the big winner here, although Rockwell—and later on in my career, I got to pleasure of leaving the agency and trying to help Rockwell win the Phase C/D and we lost. Yes, one of those things that happens in private industry. McDonnell Douglas eventually was the winner here, and of course, eventually got bought by Boeing. Boeing bought everybody out. They bought Rockwell, they bought McDonnell Douglas, whatever.\\n\\n And as you know, Boeing and Lockheed have turned out to be the big mooses on the block. They’re kind of—well, Northrup Grumman [Corporation] is still there, and they’re trying very hard to get reentered into this fray, but Boeing and Lockheed are the big guns.\\n\\n So I don’t know. There you have it. So we did the Skunkworks and we eventually moved back on site and had our program office stood up. Then we spent the next two years trying to defend Jim Beggs’ eight billion dollars to the Congress and other places, which was very tough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let me go back and ask you a couple of questions. You mentioned the relationship between Marshall and JSC. How were you able to soothe their bruised feelings at Marshall and yet keep people at JSC happy? How were you able to juggle those balls?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Never did. You just kept juggling them, and you kept trying to be a leader, and you kept trying to do the right thing for the program from a technical standpoint, and when it ran amok of the philosophical or egotistical or charter principles of the players, you tried to cram it down their throat, as the leader. It was, and is, the hardest job I ever had, from a management standpoint, in my life. It was very unpleasant. I think I count most of those guys still as my friends. It’d be interesting, you ought to ask somebody from Huntsville who was there. I know you’re doing a JSC history, but you ought to ask them what they thought of the scene. You ask a guy like Luther and he’d say, “I think Neil was fair, but, quite frankly, we felt he never got rid of his JSC bias.” You ask Covington, Covington would probably tell you, “Neil feathered Marshall’s nest too much.” I don’t think any of them were happy.\\n\\n The thing is that the people who grew up in those environments had an awesome allegiance to their field center. NASA has operated in a stovepipe arrangement, and even despite all of the cross-pollination that’s gone on today—and Sean O’Keefe’s doing a wonderful job trying to force that to happen and whatever—you get down in the bowels of the ship and most Marshall guys don’t like Johnson and most Johnson guys don’t like Marshall, and it’s because the technical horsepower exists in both places to do the kinds of jobs they do, and one would never concede that the other did it better or vice versa. Johnson’s never done big turbo machinery, like Shuttle engines, like Marshall has. In fact, nobody in the world has but them. You’d have to give them their just due there. But, quite frankly, when it comes to spacecraft and crew interfaces and that kind of thing, the two places have a lot of horsepower in both places.\\n\\n We’re coming up on a new—the big thing the President [George W. Bush] just announced, and I just spent some time with Jeff Howell yesterday discussing the contest that’s going to take place about who gets what piece of the Moon-Mars thing and, believe me, it is just starting, because it’s the very same kind of problem. You’re going to let Marshall be in charge of a manned vehicle? Human vehicle? Well, maybe. I don’t know. Thank God I don’t have that problem; it’s not my charter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Another question I had for you. How did the Skunkworks get its title? Can you tell us the story behind that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We stole it. It’s absolutely 100 percent plagiarized from Lockheed Martin [Corporation]. For many, many, many years in the classified world, the black world, Lockheed ran a facility out in California affectionately known as the Skunkworks because out of it came all kinds of incredible things, like the SR-71 spy plane, which nobody even knew existed for years after it was flying and doing real things. Conceived, designed, engineered, and—obviously not built in the Skunkworks, but it was very high [technology]. We didn’t even used to be able to say the name, but reconnaissance satellites, another thing that came out of the Skunkworks.\\n\\n The concept in the Skunkworks that Lockheed had and that we employed here was to get a really small team of really, really smart people and some absolutely arbitrary—arbitrary is probably not the right word, but forceful decision makers that would not dillydally and would arrive at a design concept for something, be it a spacecraft or an airplane or a piece of ground equipment or whatever, fairly quickly.\\n\\n So we stole the name. I don’t probably even know where it is anymore; we actually had these little lapel pins of a skunk, that everybody wore around. It was kind of cool. But there was nothing original in the name. Didn’t belong to us. Maybe that’s one reason that the Lockheed guys were so upset that they didn’t make the Phase B cut, was we stole their name." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After you came back from the Skunkworks, you mentioned that you spent the next two years trying to convince people to build the Space Station, this eight-billion-dollar Space Station. Can you talk to us about the budgetary problems that you encountered?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, the problem is probably not the way you would characterize that. I was not privy to the NASA Administrator’s interfaces with the administration, but I can tell you that in the discussions that led up to putting the program together and getting it accepted by the administration as an initiative so that NASA could then go to the Congress and get money and so on and so forth, there was a fair amount of back-of-the-envelope pricing that came up with the eight-billion-dollar number. We, of course, hadn’t run the Skunkworks or anything yet, but based on—I don’t know. Maybe it was based on Wernher von Braun’s concept of a Space Station back in the sixties, and he very definitely had one.\\n\\n But that number was not grounded in real engineering analysis, and that’s okay. I mean, that’s how it had to be, but the number got put on the floor as a number that I think Jim Beggs—my sense would be that Jim thought that if the number was much bigger than that—I kind of think there was a big psychological barrier at ten billion, and if the number was much bigger than the eight billion they settled on, he probably couldn’t have gotten the program agreed to by the administration that the agency could go forward with. Now, I don’t know that for a fact, but I’ve talked to him many times since about that number and, of course, the fact that that number was seriously flawed.\\n\\n I guess one of the other things that I had hard personal time with, I testified two different years in front of the Congress about the program and about the costs and etc., and by the time we left the Skunkworks, we knew we couldn’t even come close to this thing for eight billion, but we kept it under wraps. Now we didn’t lie, but we did things like all of the assembly and Shuttle flights and everything to put it together were all bucketed in another set of money, and all the facility modifications that we knew we had to do in Florida were all in another bucket of money. We had more peas under the pods and moved them around so nobody could have figured out what the real cost was. But by the time we’d been at it a year or a year and a half and had the Phase Bs on the street and had a lot of feedback from industry, oh, boy, we knew that there was not a cat’s chance of pulling it off for eight billion.\\n\\n Of course, myself and a lot of other people—by the way, including the industry—I personally believe the Congress knew it, too, and I think they sort of sensed the nose under the tent kind of thing that NASA was doing. I’ll never forget, there was a guy, who’s a friend, a guy by the name of Dick [Richard N.] Malow. He wasn’t really a friend then, because I was scared to death of the guy. He was the senior staffer on the House side. I can remember sitting in his office just being taken apart for not properly having all the piece parts accounted for. So I think a lot of the people on the Hill knew that NASA maybe had a bit of a shell game going, but even after I left, NASA did not ‘fess up to the fact that they couldn’t put it together for eight billion dollars.\\n\\n Frankly, I didn’t really probably appreciate the political sensitivity of the fact if the real number came out, we might lose the program. And even in the position I was in, I probably appreciate that more today, looking back on it in retrospective, than I did at the time. I had a really hard time. I was trying to get a very, very difficult technical job done. We had hundreds of contractors on board at all four field centers. We were trying to get the program baselined. We started with the Skunkworks configuration and were constantly modifying the piece parts.\\n\\n All of those modifications had monetary ramifications to them, and yet we continually operated with a kind of an out-year constraint that “You guys have got to get this thing—.” We were spending—I don’t remember my budget, but it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, trying to get this thing defined, knowing that what we were defining probably couldn’t be built inside the budget that we had, and that really grated on me. It was like, think about building a new house on the ground and you and your wife figure out how much you can afford and what you can do, and you get an architect and he lays out a plan, and you realize that the plan is way too grandiose, so you start whacking around at the edges, but you don’t ever go back to the architect and say, “You know, we really can’t afford this place, so take out the third bathroom and,” blah, blah, blah.\\n\\n And we never did that. We just plowed on, and that really started to grate on me. I probably bitched at Gerry more than anybody else, and Jim Beggs, too. Jim was just adamant, “Neil, we’ve got to hold the line here for a while until we get this thing a little better defined, and you don’t really know what it’s going to cost you because you don’t have this done and that done and this done.” It turned out we knew a lot about what it was going to cost.\\n\\n I’m not suggesting that the cost we ultimately paid today had anything—I, in my heart of hearts, believe we could have done the thing for under twenty billion, lock, stock, and barrel. But the cost that we have incurred, which is way, way, way more than that, has nothing to do with the design. It has to do with the very fouled-up management processes that the agency used after I left.\\n\\n The\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n accident fouled Station up immeasurably, believe it or not. Just tore it apart. The four years that we operated after the accident—and I was not there, but I certainly looked [at] it from afar—was an absolute disaster, and you can ask anybody that was there, because everybody inside the program will tell you it was a disaster. And it got re-baselined again in the early nineties.\\n\\n And isn’t it odd that through all of those cycles and all of that stuff and everything else, the vehicle that’s in the air is remarkably like the one that came out of the Skunkworks? If the thing had changed its complexion or it didn’t have a backbone or we’d gone from photovoltaic to solar dynamic power, or you’d changed the configuration in the modules, or any of that stuff, you’d say, “Well, okay. We probably didn’t have a pretty good handle on it back then and whatever.” But the fact is, it’s about the same." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let me ask you about your involvement with the international partners. What was your involvement with the international—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That process was just really getting started and a lot of that developed as we went on. The three big players, ESA [European Space Agency], NASDA [National Space Development Agency of Japan], and the Canadians, were very much in the mix in the structure that I was leading. We tried really hard—and they all had offices here and they came to staff meetings, all those guys, Carl Deutsch and Tak Kato, who was the Japanese representative here.\\n\\n But we tried really hard to kind of keep them out of the critical path. The Canadians were probably the closest thing to the critical path, because they had the arm and we knew, even back then, that we weren’t going to be able to get the thing assembled without the arm. We would need that eventually.\\n\\n The European and Japanese pieces were kind of like—I mean, my own thought process was, “If these guys never come through, we’re going to have a Station anyway.” And as evidenced today, neither one of them have their modules up there and we’re—I mean, we’re not doing just fine, but it’s because of the Shuttle we’re not doing just fine, not because of anything that’s going on in the air on the Station.\\n\\n They certainly were a player. They had a seat at the table. There was a pretty fair understanding on my part at the time that they were there as much for political reasons as anything else, and I don’t mean that in any way to belittle their contribution, but what we had done with that process was get the United States as a government committed to building an infrastructure that if it didn’t get finished or didn’t get done correctly, would have political implications outside the United States, and that’s a nice constituency to have, very smart move, and it’s smart for another reason. It gets all the world pulling on the same oar and, of course, we still, despite a policy, is we had our hands out, big resistance to the Russian involvement. That all came after I left, which was another good stroke, by the way. I mean, I’ll tell you what, if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have a Space Station, because since the Shuttle went down, people don’t realize how beholden we are to the Russians, keeping the thing running. I mean, we might have been able to fly it unmanned, but, god, you’d better hope we don’t have to. I sure wouldn’t want that responsibility, because every day something goes wrong that those two guys up there are fixing.\\n\\n So, bottom line on the international thing was obviously they were there; they were a big player. I got to take some really neat trips. I remember one time me and Griffin made the loop around all the players in Europe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us about those trips? What did you do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had a really good time. [Laughs] No, I shouldn’t make light of it. Gerry and I did, on a couple of occasions—we went to ESA in Paris [France]; we went up to El Spasio—I’m not going to get the name right [Agenzia Spaziale Italiana]. Anyway, the Italian equivalent of NASA. It’s up in Turin, Italy, which is above the Italian Mediterranean, which is a really cool place. If you’ve never been there, you ought to go. Went to Paris, went out to Toulouse [France], went to ESA.\\n\\n The purpose of those kind of visits was—we went to Germany and spent some time at Oberhoffenhoven, and Bremen and several other places. A lot of the leadership in those aerospace agencies, which were a little bit on the—certainly from a human spaceflight standpoint, were kind of the have-nots. They’d all put up some spacecraft and done some things like that, but none of them had ever been involved in a human adventure like this.\\n\\n At the time, we really hadn’t started flying a lot of internationals on the Shuttle, which we do all the time—or did all the time since. So we were kind of looked on—hero is not the right word, but they were really, really, really glad to see the leadership of the program and they were really excited about playing.\\n\\n We went to ESA’s place up in Noordwijk [Netherlands], for example, where they were getting ready to do some altitude-chamber testing and so on. The Germans at DFLR. Everybody was excited about maybe having an astronaut in their own country, so I think the visits served a purpose. I don’t think they served any really valid technical purpose, but they served a purpose in kind of solidifying the relationships among the partners. Of course, those relationships were really anchored in the NASA Headquarters framework, and I was merely being an executioner of the agreements that we had, because of the Level II program office framework. And the trips were a lot of fun, which I refuse to comment on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At what point did you decide that you wanted to step down as Program Manager of the Space Station?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I decided to leave the agency." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us why you came to that decision?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Several things. I guess the two drivers, two or three drivers that I saw at the time, one was certainly the budgeting situation, where I felt like we just weren’t ‘fessing up to—there was going to be a day of reckoning sooner or later, where either the Congress was coming off the eight billion or we were going to have to cut the living—we were designing something we couldn’t build. That really gnawed at me.\\n\\n I’ve said before that the relationship among the team members inside the agency was difficult. I didn’t mention the fact that I had help from two other places, from JPL and from NASA Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia]. There were people from those two field centers on the Source Board and in the Skunkworks. I also had a lot of help from Kennedy. Gosh, I’m not going to remember a name here. It’s showing my age here. Ted—I’m not going to remember his last name. But there were people from those places helping.\\n\\n Even a place like Langley or JPL, they didn’t own a piece of the Station, but they were constantly trying to get jobs. A lovely lady that I know to this day, her name was Pivorotta then, but her name is Donna Shirley now—went on to manage, by the way, the ’97 Mars landing at JPL—was the head Space Station person at JPL. And every time I saw Donna, she was spending more time talking to me about what JPL wasn’t doing for us and could do for us than what they were doing for us, continual marketing from inside the agency to get this piece of work and that piece of work. And I could say the same thing about [W.] Ray Hook at Langley. Bless their hearts, they’re all well intentioned, but they were almost as bad as contractors, in terms of pinging on you to [give them] things [to do].\\n\\n But the construct that we had put together and the management of it was very, very hard. I think we were doing a good job and, we had a very strong system engineering integration team at Level II, headed by Mark Craig. We got a configuration together; we got it out to the contractors; we started modifying it; we put it under configuration control, but every time we had a Configuration Control Board meeting, there’d be some contentious issue about Marshall wanting to do that, or Johnson wanting to do this, or why didn’t we—very hard.\\n\\n Now you know Bob Thompson had my job in Shuttle, and he maybe had a perspective on forcing the players to play together properly that was a bit more forceful, or he may have done it better than I did. I struggled with that process. I used to go home at night and worry about did Marshall say that because they got a real technical problem with what we decided, or are they playing the political card again? A constant tug-of-war in that environment.\\n\\n So, the money situation, in terms of the pricing. The very, very difficult management job. I also had some amount of—Level II, the program office here at the Johnson Space Center, was chartered from NASA Headquarters. We got our wheelbase by what they enabled. It’s very true that he who has the gold, has the stick. I felt like a lot of efficiencies could have been introduced in the program by collapsing certain roles and missions and maybe apportioning money a little different and so on, and I felt very, very constrained; I was not really in charge. I was the puppet whose strings were being pulled, who got the job of “Execute it whether you like it or not.”\\n\\n Kind of a little bit in the middle, which, by the way, is the way Level II—I’m not fussing at this. I’m not fussing at the Headquarters guys or anybody else; I’m just commenting that I used to just cringe when I got a phone call from Phil Culbertson, because I knew that Marshall had gone around me, or Lewis, and gone up to Headquarters and said, “Hutchinson did—,” or, “We want this,” or, “We want that,” and Phil’s listening to them and he’s calling up and saying, “You really ought to go back and look at that again.”\\n\\n And I’m saying, “Goddamn it, we did it. It’s over. I’ve made a decision. Now you’ve got to back me up.” So there was a lot of that going on.\\n\\n I loved Gerry Griffin and he’s one of my very best friends, but I never got over what happened to Kraft. Chris was in private industry and, believe me, I called him once a month and talked to him about the trouble I was having, the things I ought to be doing. I stayed in very, very close touch with Chris Kraft and Gerry. I didn’t go around Gerry to get advice from Chris in any way, shape, or form. Gerry [also] stayed in touch with Chris.\\n\\n Eventually I got the thought process that, “Gosh, I’ve been at this twenty-five years. I’ve about done everything but run a field center. Would I really want a field center.” I’m not saying I would have ever been a Center Director, I mean, but would I really want to do this? I kind of got a bug and started discussing it with other people and decided I would try my luck outside the agency, and I’ve never regretted that decision. The decision was made before the [Challenger] accident, and I almost reversed it. I came that close to saying, “I really need to get back here. This place needs big-time help, trying to recover from the accident.” I didn’t. I had announced the decision. I had stepped down.\\n\\n That was the second time I was up in the Center Director’s office, because Gerry left about three or four months before I did, and I was in the process—I had announced I was leaving. I remember watching [STS] 51-L from my office on the TV and we had a lot of the Station staff around watching the launch.\\n\\n But Gerry had decided to leave, and that had something to do with it, too, because it was not clear who the next Center Director was going to be. It was eventually, and, of course, it turned out to be Jess [Jesse W.] Moore, who was a guy I got to know, a wonderful man. He was working in Code S at NASA Headquarters when I was there, but in the science side, but had come over to Code M and was a really, really great guy who I’m not sure ever recovered from the Challenger accident. I mean, he did, but—so the sequence of events was—and I admit that Gerry’s leaving made me—I mean, every person in a job like that has a power base. You get it from the people above you, who, when the Marshalls and the Lewises go around you, which they do on occasion, back you up, and eventually you figure out who’s really got the stick here.\\n\\n I felt like some of my power base was leaving. Chris had gone and seemed to be having a really good time in private industry, so I decided to join Chris and Gerry. I announced and, of course, went back up to the ninth floor, and in the process of leaving, when Gerry left, a new Center Director was appointed, Jess Moore. He had just gotten here. I had gone through the Kraft-to-Griffin transition as the horse-holder, so I was horse-holding again, transitioning from Griffin to Jess Moore, when the Shuttle went down.\\n\\n I stayed on and, of course, Jess, he physically, literally, was right in the middle of—I can’t even remember the exact sequence. He had been announced and he was still on TDY [Temporary Duty] down here, going back and forth between here and Headquarters. Beggs had gotten in trouble with the federal system because of something he did at General Dynamics, which, by the way, was one of the biggest witch hunts I’ve ever seen. He did nothing wrong and ultimately was proved that he did nothing wrong, but it cost him his job as NASA Administrator, which was one of life’s—you know, nothing’s fair. And by the way, nobody stood up afterward and said, “Jim Beggs really didn’t do anything wrong,” to this day, which is one of life’s bad deals, because he is an honorable guy. But Beggs was under indictment, and a guy named [William R.] Graham was the Acting Administrator. I’m just going to leave it at that.\\n\\n So the food chain in the human spaceflight world was very confused when Challenger went down and, of course, I think some people at JSC never got—I mean, Jess Moore was at the FRR [Flight Readiness Review] that decided to go ahead and launch. I in no way believe Jess Moore could have stopped, started, or anything else that process, but a lot of people at JSC put some amount of blame on Jess Moore. They put some amount of blame on the fact there wasn’t a crisp Administrator in place who was in the middle of it. I mean, there’s a lot of noise that can be put on lots of people’s shoulders. I think most of it was just that; it was noise. But it was a very uncomfortable time.\\n\\n Jess was the Center Director, physically, when I left. He, of course, kind of got drummed out of the corps shortly thereafter. Aaron took over, I guess. Aaron Cohen took over and that was after I left. But I did sort of try and help Jesse, as best I could, get himself on board here at the Johnson Space Center, and that was the last thing I did here. And I did it with a bit of a wall in front of me, knowing I was going to unhook.\\n\\n Of course, I want to make one more comment about Space Station. As most of you know—and a couple of these guys are good friends of mine—Dale [D.] Myers for one, Sam [Samuel C.] Phillips, who’s passed away, for another, mostly Dale, who I still stay in touch with regularly, by the way, who’s alive and well and living in southern California, not far from me. Sam Phillips ran the Apollo Program from NASA Headquarters and was in that chair when Apollo was being done. Sam had a concept, and so did Dale—and Dale, of course, was a major player in Rockwell and in NASA at a couple of times in his career.\\n\\n When the Shuttle went down, you probably recall they brought Jim [James C.] Fletcher back and they brought Dale Myers back and they brought Sam Phillips back, and all three of those guys had a long history with the agency, and they’re all really, really great men, but they made a serious mistake when they decided that a similar accident could probably be propagated in the Space Station because part of the failure in the Shuttle was there was not a strong enough leadership and engineering structure in the field, i.e., at JSC, and it needed to be at NASA Headquarters.\\n\\n That started the process whereby the Level II program office that I had spent so much effort trying to build and get all the brightest people, and Griffin and Marshall, everybody had their best and brightest people in the middle of that, not only at JSC, but in the project structures at the field centers. They tried to reconstitute Level II (JSC Program Office) at NASA Headquarters. Back in the Apollo days, they hired Bellcom [Inc.] as an agent, a technical agent at NASA Headquarters, to try and provide a certain amount of technical oversight of the field centers. This is back in Apollo. This is a Sam Phillips special. He decided to institute exactly the same—and Dale was right—they were all in the middle of it—institute a similar thing. In this case, they hired Grumman. Ex-crewman, Fred [W.] Haise, Apollo 13, Fred Haise was the head of that organization. They rented a building out in Reston, Virginia, and they tried to reconstitute the Level II program office with this big [support contractor], Grumman. I think Booz Allen [Hamilton Inc.] may have been involved. I don’t know the details, because I wasn’t here.\\n\\n But it was an abject failure, and it was a failure because the field centers, who had work packages—let me back up. The only reason that Bob Thompson could force the Shuttle pieces to be integrated was because Johnson owned the Orbiter, and Bob Thompson had more influence over the configuration and the interface control documents and everything else on the Shuttle than anybody else because he had the Shuttle PM under his thumb and the Orbiter PM under his thumb. The Orbiter touched every other part of the stack. Therefore, Bob was in charge, because he could go tell Aaron, “Go do this,” and Aaron could force it on Marshall because Marshall had to fit its gear into the Shuttle.\\n\\n The exact same thing was true of Space Station. The JSC work package had the structure. Everything had to fit on the structure, and that’s one of the prime reasons the Level II program office worked so well at Johnson, because I could twist Clarke’s arm and his people’s arm by walking down the hall and doing it. And in the end, the rest of them would have sort have to fall in place. And when they pulled that Level II office out of JSC, what they did was they set up a group of people that didn’t have a piece of hardware in the fight. And you just thought there was a war between the Marshall and the Johnson Space Center. You have no idea what went on when they pulled that program office out of here and took it up there.\\n\\n So the first thing they did was they took it out of the field center that had the muscle. Anytime I got in a problem with Clarke Covington, I’d go tell Gerry, “Gerry, Clarke has to make the truss four feet longer,” and we’d beat it up right in-house, and Clarke would say, “Yes, sir,” and he’d end up going and doing it. But they lost that capability when they took that Level II program office up there.\\n\\n The second thing they lost is they couldn’t get any—and they got some really good guys, but, in essence, they couldn’t get any good people, NASA people, to go up there from any of the field centers. And, yes, John [W.] Aaron went. He was my Deputy and he was an absolute ace. They didn’t make him the PM. They started rotating the leadership of that Reston office between the work package partners. It was a Marshall guy for a while, then it was a Johnson guy, and then it was—I don’t know how many different guys held that job.\\n\\n And what resulted was four years of chaos out of which came absolutely no progress on Space Station, and they spent $5 billion or whatever. I don’t know how much they spent. And that was all a result of the Challenger accident and the fact that the people that came back to resurrect the agency, or to get the agency back on track, employed a process that worked really well twenty years ago. Lord only knows how we manage to keep this thing together enough to get it in the air, because they wasted untold hundreds of millions doing that. And I would guess if you talked to anybody at any place in that structure, they would tell you about the same story, and I wasn’t even in it, because I had gone to Rockwell. I went to work for Rockwell and tried to help them win Space Station and fouled it up.\\n\\n [Tape change.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything else you would like to add about Station?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m really proud of the fact that it’s up there. I’m not proud of the fact it took us twenty years to do it. I’m an absolute advocate of—you know, it’s interesting. The President just announced that we’re going to make another try to sort of get ourselves re-pointed at the Moon. A lot of people look at Space Station as a way to understand human physiology, which it absolutely is. It’s something that has to be done. In all my years in the human spaceflight business, I put an engineer’s viewpoint on Space Station. I think it’s important to learn how to support something that will support humans away from the surface of the Earth.\\n\\n The thing that’s neat about Space Station is, it has all the elements that will end up having to be a part of anything you do to go to the Moon or anything you do to stay on the Moon, and the logistics chain is a lot shorter. If something breaks on Station and it’s life-threatening, you can get the crew out of there and get them back on the ground in forty-five minutes. If you need a part, you can get it up on the next thing, whatever it be, a Soyuz or a Shuttle or whatever’s going up.\\n\\n We are learning an enormous amount about how to keep a human-built piece of equipment that has to sustain human life viable away from the surface of the Earth. We started that process in Skylab, and to be quite honest, as a person who’s spent a lot of his life working on Skylab, the damn thing was falling apart when we quit. I mean, if we’d have gone back one more time, we’d have spent virtually every waking crew minute keeping the thing flying. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit for effect, but the fact is, it was one small step along the process of trying to learn how to put a habitat—a place people can live and work in shirt sleeves—together and keep it running outside the surface of the Earth.\\n\\n So, from that standpoint, I think Station is just giving us lessons learned every day it’s up there, and it obviously has the added benefit of being able to work the human physiology thing. So, my concluding remark on Station would be, thank God we got it.\\n\\n I know the President said we’re going to kind of back away from it a little bit toward the end of this decade and whatever, but hopefully we will have gotten out of it what we need from both a how to maintain something away from the Earth and from the physiology standpoint, and we can get on this Moon thing, which is the next closest thing. Maybe [the Earth-Moon] L1 [Lagrange Point] is closer, but the Moon is a logistics chain that’s like a couple three days long. The farther away you get from safe haven, the harder it is and the more redundancy you’ve got to have, which means, you know, translate redundancy into dollars, because if you’re on the Moon and you have three life-support systems and one of them breaks, if you haven’t got another one ready to ship up there instantly, you’ve probably got to take the crew out of there, because you’re not going to let them sit with one point of failure away from dying. So it gets to be harder and harder the farther away you get, but we’ll eventually get there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s shift gears and let me ask you a couple of general questions before you go today. What do you think was your most challenging milestone while working for NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Launching the Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The first mission or the second?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "STS-1. Of course, the challenge was in the preparation. Obviously, the flight went really well and we didn’t really do too much in the flight in terms of saving the day or anything. I mean, it wasn’t like Apollo 13 or anything like that, which I also worked on and was certainly very satisfying.\\n\\n But in terms of my own personal involvement, we had never launched a manned vehicle—manned the first time, period. We launched lots of Redstones, lots of Atlases, lots of Titans, lots of Apollo, Saturn I-B and Saturn V. I was involved in both of the Saturn V unmanned launches, where we put a command module, with nobody in it, on top and took off. So the risk-gain ratio on the first Shuttle flight was absolutely enormous.\\n\\n The flight itself, I guess I have to say—I mean, this is in retrospect, looking back—was a little bit anticlimactic, compared to getting ready. We started training for that in 1978. By the time we got to the real launch, I’d probably run—and I used to have this number in my head—well over 500 launch abort simulations, most of which never got to orbit. So we had practiced and practiced and practiced. We were flying a vehicle that was unsymmetrical. The Shuttle goes through a flight envelope in launch. If you get it pointed in the wrong direction, you can rip the wings right off. It’s not like a pencil or a ballistic missile that’s very aerodynamically benign, mostly.\\n\\n There were just lots and lots and lots of things in the Shuttle, from an engineering standpoint, where we had not tested and had done a lot of simulations and computational fluid dynamics and you name it, using engineering models to simulate what would happen in real life and coming remarkably close to what really went on in real life.\\n\\n I don’t know. I think the risk takers—I’m not sure that we have risk takers in NASA these days that would take that kind of risk." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think was your most significant accomplishment while working for NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Getting the Shuttle going. I think if we’d had an early accident of the likes of Challenger or\\n\\n Columbia\\n\\n , I think NASA would be a very different place today, because what we did with the Shuttle was keep the human spaceflight framework alive and well.\\n\\n I worry a little bit about this end of decade backing away that the President has defined if we don’t have really a lot of progress toward the next step before we start backing off of this step. I’m probably biased. I spent my whole career in the human spaceflight thing and my career now is about one foot in each camp. I have a fair amount of activity in the unmanned side of NASA, particularly in earth sciences, and even having said that I’ve been doing that for the last fifteen years, I would sit here and tell you that without the human spaceflight business, NASA probably wouldn’t exist as an agency today, and I really believe that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As we come to a close today, is there anything else you’d like to add?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, this has been fun. I hope it helps somebody do something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We really enjoy these, and we know a lot of people use the material off of the web." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Neil B. Hutchinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that’s cool. You pay attention to who’s in there sniffing around and doing stuff and guys writing books and Kranz writing another book." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00857", + "metadata": { + "category": "NASA Headquarters History Office Oral History Projects 1999 - 2021", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/Administrators/NafzgerRL/nafzgerrl.htm", + "original_file_name": "NafzgerRL_6-12-13.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/Administrators/NafzgerRL/NafzgerRL_6-12-13.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Headquarters Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "location_date": "Greenbelt, Maryland – 12 June 2013" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Sandra Johnson", + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Richard L. Nafzger" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is June 12th, 2013. This oral history interview is being conducted with Richard Nafzger at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the NASA Headquarters Oral History project. The interviewer is Sandra Johnson, assisted by Rebecca Wright. I want to thank you again for being here today and agreeing to talk to us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’d like to start today and just talk about what led you to seek a career with NASA back in 1968?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. In 1967, I was teaching math and science in a high school in Florida, and we had gone through one county strike of teachers, so there was a short layoff, and then it looked like the entire state was going to go out on strike for the first state-wide teachers’ strike in the nation. It didn’t look promising, what was going to happen. At the same time, I had grown up working in television and radio part-time—my father was the Chief Engineer of a CBS outlet, WBNS TV and Radio, in Columbus, Ohio—so I’d done a lot of work in the engineering side of it in Ohio, in TV and radio. That, coupled with what was going on in the teaching profession, I had received a call from a friend of mine that I’d gone to school with, who had taken a job with NASA in the employment area, and he said that NASA was looking for a lot of new hires for the Apollo Project, and was I interested?\\n\\n I said, “Well, I don’t know.”\\n\\n He said, “Well, you’ll probably make double what you make now,” and so I got more interested. Of course, I was making $5,000 [per year], so they were going to pay me $9,000, if they hire me.\\n\\n He said he would have someone give me a call, and I received a call shortly thereafter from a Mr. Ray Hibbs, who worked in the Manned Flight Engineering at Goddard, which was newly-formed, and he interviewed me on the phone and said, “We’d love to have you,” and he essentially hired me on the phone. I took the job, so I was headed in to work on some sort of what I knew was manned spaceflight television. I didn’t know exactly what my job would be, so it sounded exciting to go to Washington, D.C. and work for NASA, but I can’t say that I had a career plan. I had no career plan other than to get out of Florida and make more money somewhere else.\\n\\n When I came up here and checked in and met my new boss, he then told me I would be handling what was called Apollo slow-scan television, and that was nothing like the broadcast television that I was used to. It was a totally different format, and a format on which you couldn’t watch on a regular TV—it had to be converted if you watched it.\\n\\n Quickly, I started going to the Goddard library. Goddard wasn’t all built at the time; we didn’t have a building at Goddard. We were on University Boulevard, down near Riggs Road, about probably 10 miles west of here at Goddard, where we’re at now. I would go over there—they had a library—and start learning about what it is that I was now in charge of because I had no clue. It was kind of frightening. I was about 25, 26 years old, and there were ground sites and I was going to handle television processing of some sort. We went from there, and so my career developed, from day one on, and it wasn’t a career path that I had chosen prior to coming to NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In those first days when you were here and you were reading about what you were going to do, what were your assignments at that point, or what did they tell you? Were you going to be here or were you going to the ground sites?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Initially, what they told me was—this was January, February of 1968, so we were already getting ready to launch Apollo 7. That was the first flight that would carry TV, so I quickly was indoctrinated on what we had to do to scan, convert, or convert this abnormal television downlink signal in order to view it, and then to release it to the public. At that point, I was learning how you write engineering instructions and how a tracking site works and where the tracking sites are that we would be using, such as down at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], called Merritt Island Launch Area, MILA, Corpus Christi, Texas, and then of course there was the [NASA] Johnson Space Center [Houston, Texas] that controlled everything during the mission. I would be going to the sites, and as we expanded from Apollo 7 to Apollo 8 to Apollo 9 and headed towards the Moon, there were more sites involved.\\n\\n We had what we called Earth-orbit sites, and those were sites that had 30 foot dish antennas that would track—not all of them would do television, but some would do television. And then when we went to the Moon, we had to use 85-foot and 210-foot large antennas to hopefully get a signal from the Moon. Everything was evolving: what kind of TV would be on each mission, would it even be on the mission?\\n\\n It was hotly-debated that there would be any television. In fact, Apollo 7, the first [Apollo manned] mission, we had worked awfully hard—and in those days, we didn’t have as many rules. This was a national effort and because of that, we had no restrictions on travel. If I said there was something wrong at the Madrid [Spain] site, they’d say, “Fine, get a ticket and go.” We had plenty of funding, and because it was a national project, we did what we had to do.\\n\\n To go from 1968 to Apollo 8 circling the Moon in December of that year, and going to the Moon six months later, in July of ’69, that’s a crash program. We had to learn and do things along the way. The reason I’m mentioning this is we would come in at 7:00 a.m., anytime 6:00 to 7:00 a.m., and probably leave at 8:00 or 9:00 at night, and never realize what time it was because we were having a ball. I was having a lot of fun, but probably what drove me was fright of whether I was doing it right. It was scary knowing what the final product would be.\\n\\n There was always a debate whether they’d carry television. So I guess to answer your question, your question was really what led me to this career at NASA, well, once I got here and got assigned to TV, my career was set unless I said, “I don’t want to do it.” No one else was doing it, so it was a unique career where, “We don’t have anyone to do ground television processing, you’re going to be the man, this is now your new career unless you choose to say, ‘I don’t want to do it.’” That’s how my career started. Turned out, it was a wonderful career, but not because I was wonderful, but being able to work at that program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talk about that debate on whether to have television or not on the flights." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The debate on television, which was a lot behind the scenes, we were so busy, we didn’t hear a lot of it. We would hear it maybe right before a launch that they might not turn it on or they might not carry it. It’s pretty deflating when you’re working that many hours and getting things ready to be able to try to have TV, that all of a sudden someone says you might not have it.\\n\\n I know Wally [Walter M.] Schirra on Apollo 7 was very violently, I guess you would call it, against it. In fact, one event that was passed on to me was during one of the tests on the pad where they suit up and get in the spacecraft, he actually tore his spacesuit on the TV mount. He didn’t want TV looking over his shoulder, even though it could only be turned on by the astronauts. He didn’t like the idea. In those days, every ounce was accounted for, so when we would put a pound on, if it was over the limit, a pound had to come off, and so they even had a time in the Apollo Program where they had to take off some survival rations in order to make room for the weight of the camera.\\n\\n The camera was not considered by those in the program, astronauts and others, to be a benefit or science. It was there simply for public affairs. In reality, that was true at the time, it was there for public affairs, but they didn’t see it as a necessity for the program, and it certainly wasn’t a launch-criteria project or launch-criteria element, which meant that if someone determined that the camera failed two minutes before launch, they’re not going to hold the launch. For Apollo 11, even, if that camera had failed, they weren’t going to wait another day and fix it. There would be no camera.\\n\\n What happened was we launched, we got the camera on board, but when we got in orbit, Wally Schirra refused to turn it on. He said, “I’m too busy, I’m not turning it on.” We were really upset. You know, not mad, but just deflated. We were young guys that were working to do what we had to, to get TV down through Corpus Christi and the Merritt Island tracking site, and two or three orbits later—I went to Houston on all these missions—I was told that there was a private conversation, audio, up to the spacecraft.\\n\\n These guys were all military, so they were essentially given, what I understood, the order, “You’re going to turn it on.” They turned it on, and then all of a sudden, they started seemingly enjoying it because they heard that the American public was thrilled, and they would hold up signs saying, “Keep the cards and letters coming.” It seemed like TV was now all of a sudden a big thing and it was accepted as the first TV from space. As it went on, though, there were still arguments still going on, on whether to carry the camera. That was the story of the first one.\\n\\n We still didn’t know, even through Apollo 11, whether we were going to have a camera on board. That argument went to the highest level of NASA. I think it was Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft, and I forget the other one, there was one of the heads of NASA at the time, they had a heated argument. I wasn’t a part of it, I wasn’t in those meetings, but one of the guys I worked with in a later project, Stan [Stanley] Lebar of Westinghouse, was in it. I guess Kraft and someone else said “Wait a minute,” he said, “this is a taxpayers’ mission. They’re paying for it and they have a right to see it, and we’re going to carry the camera.” That won out over, “There’s no scientific value to this.” It was, “The taxpayers have a right to see what they pay for.” Of course, history was made by doing it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk about the slow-scan, and why slow-scan was used instead of broadcast-quality television." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. When we originally started the Apollo Program, the goal is to get TV from the Moon, even though Apollo 7, 8, and 9 were Earth-orbit type missions. Apollo 10 went to the Moon and back but didn’t land. Even though the previous missions were mainly Earth-orbital, the mission and goal to get to the Moon and have TV gave rise to the problem of how much power and how much what we call bandwidth will it take to get broadcast television? We didn’t have today’s high-definition, obviously. We do on the [International] Space Station and Shuttle, now, so we’ve evolved quite a ways. At that time, broadcast was what we call 4 megahertz of bandwidth, head-scan rates, etc., that required this big bandwidth. The more bandwidth you have, the more power you need, so when a television station transmits, there’s a lot of power going out there to get it to the home sets. For getting today’s cable, or when you add an antenna on your roof, there’s a lot of power being used to transmit that to TV.\\n\\n What we looked at was, well, what kind of power can we get from the Lunar Module [LM] on the Moon, and what kind of bandwidth’s available in our downlink streams of data to put TV in it? There wasn’t any broadcast 4 megahertz available—it wasn’t built for TV. Our receivers were built for data and voice, so the widest we could come up with was 500 kilohertz, and that’s 1/8 of what a broadcast signal is. Not to get too technical, but the way to get TV that you can see when you don’t have the bandwidth is to change from what we called 60 Hz, or 60 pictures a second, down to 10. Instead of having 525 lines, which was the old broadcast, it was 320 lines. When everything lowers, the scan rate and the horizontal and vertical rates of these signals, you need less bandwidth, so we condensed it into 500 kilohertz.\\n\\n What that meant was that that signal’s not going to be the quality, but it’s going to be a signal you can see. You see it on these special monitors that are looking at 10 frames a second, flickering, etc., etc. The next question was, “We have to get this to the public, and we’re not going to take pictures off the screen—how are we going to do it?”\\n\\n I contracted with RCA in Camden [New Jersey] to build the scan converter for the ground sites. This scan converter’s job was to take that downlink signal and view it on a small, special, slow-scan monitor, and look at it with a broadcast camera through a prism, and then take that signal and repeat it five more times, so you would get 60 instead of 10, and then play it out through this equipment called processing amplifiers and stabilizers. At that point, the format becomes a broadcast signal. You’re not getting 4 megahertz of good video, but you’re getting it in a format that can play on a home TV set, and that’s why, if you look at any of the old Apollo missions—Apollo 11 is the only time we used it on the Moon—it looks blurry or ghostly because you’re repeating each image six times in a row before you go to the next image. If someone moves quick, it looks like a ghost because it’s not a picture every 1/60 of a second; it’s the same picture six times in a row. It looked very ghostly and blurry sometimes, when they’d move quick, because that conversion had to take place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The conversion was at the ground sites?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the conversion, in particular on the Apollo 7 and 8, was prototype stuff, and we built them to see how they work, and we had a Corpus Christi and the Cape Kennedy [now named Cape Canaveral] MILA sites. When we went to the actual Apollo setup, we were going to use 85-foot sites, mainly, in Madrid, Honeysuckle Creek, Australia, and Goldstone, California. Goldstone also had access to a 210-foot dish, deep space antenna. Honeysuckle and Madrid each had 85, but in Australia, I’d say about four or five months, maybe six months before launch, we contracted with Parkes Radio Astronomy to use their 210-foot dish north of Sydney [Australia]. We got scared that 85-foot dishes were still going to be noisy with this signal. This signal also, by the way, when it came from the camera, the slow-scan, it went to a 2.5-3 foot little dish built on the Lunar Module. The antenna was small, and the power’s 10 watts. Here we are on the Moon, transmitting 10 watts, trying to get a picture all the way down. The bigger the antenna, the more you can receive at low signal strength.\\n\\n We got this Parkes antenna, and we had Honeysuckle, and we had a team of guys in Sydney—that’s kind of in the middle—and the Parkes signal would come down and get microwaved. In fact, we didn’t covert at Parkes because the microwave wouldn’t handle the bandwidth of broadcast television, so we had to send the slow-scan on microwave and convert it at Sydney, Australia. Honeysuckle could convert, and they had a microwave that could handle it, so we would take the best picture at Sydney and put it out to Intelsat [communication satellites].\\n\\n Same thing at Goldstone, they just downlinked it and then fed it to what we called “Ma Bell,” or AT&T. Then, Madrid, which didn’t play a big part in it, they would relay it by microwave and go to—it was Intelsat, or I can’t remember who it was. These would all come down into either Andover, Maine, or Jamestown, California, and off of Intelsat, and then they would be relayed by ground, AT&T/Ma Bell, into Houston. Houston would then release it to the rest of the world, and it’d go back out. That was the path that could break anywhere." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, it definitely could break anywhere. The converters themselves, you said that you contracted with RCA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were they not in existence before then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, a lot of us referred to it as the Rube Goldberg device because it had so many commercial parts slammed together to make this work. There was some of what they called amateur radio that did slow-scan, a type of slow-scan TV, but no converters. This was the first converter that I know of ever built for this purpose. It was designed and built in conjunction with RCA, and there just weren’t any converters out there for any purpose to do this before because the broadcast signal didn’t need conversion. The world on broadcast TV was built so that whatever we used was visible to homes, and we sold TV sets based on that format. When we take a slow-scan, it meant that it’d be special if you wanted to show it on a regular TV set." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned there were a lot of opportunities for problems. Did you ever have any problems with those converters or any of those signals?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we had some big problems. The converter design was fine. I remember specifically when I was in Sydney, and prior to mission, probably three months, maybe—I can’t remember the exact dates—probably three months before the July ’69 mission, that’s how close we were when we were actually setting up to operate for a mission that was going to launch. Many missions, you’d be ready a year ahead and be testing all the time. We were on the fly. We had this converter, and we were operating out of downtown Sydney, in Australia, called the Overseas Telecommunication Commission.\\n\\n Australia was a unique place; they loved Americans, which was nice, but they were also a different societal-type operation than us, so you had to be very careful that you didn’t offend anyone by doing something before the right people met you. We were very strictly controlled on what we could do when, and who we had to see before we could go to the next step, even to get in that building. Once we got set up, we installed a converter and the Navy brought in a power converter. The Australians use different power than we do. They use 50 hertz cycle—at that time, called cycle—we use 60. Their wiring—not, again, to get too technical—what a red wire and a black wire means in the U.S. to an electrician is the opposite in Australia.\\n\\n This big converter, to take this Australian power of 50 hertz and make it 60 so we could run our converter that takes slow-scan and makes it broadcast, we’re converting everywhere, that converter—which was called Big Bertha; it was tons of equipment that came into the basement of this building—was hooked up to our converter, and everything was powered up. We were running successful tests.\\n\\n I remember it was a weekend, and for some reason, we weren’t allowed to work there. I don’t know if it was because it was Sunday or a Saturday, or we had a day off. Whatever it was, we were off and came in the next Monday morning. We came in, and I was in charge, and they said, “Dick, turn on the converter.” I turned it on and that smoke came flying out of it. Relays were flapping all over the place. I turned it off, but it was too late. It blew up about $100,000 worth of equipment. We’re three months before launch and we’re trying to figure out what happened.\\n\\n Eventually, what we found was a technician came in on the weekend. He was down in the basement, looking at this big converter, and he said, “Oh, these Americans have wired this backwards—their red wires.” Instead of giving us 110 volts, he gave us 240 by changing the wires. We never took action against him—they did—it was a shame, it was an honest mistake, but he didn’t ask questions and he switched the wires without telling anyone. That’s what blew up our converter.\\n\\n We had emergency shipments from Camden, New Jersey, from RCA. They had technicians flown over at the last minute. It was a crash program to get the converter back up. As you know, we got it all back up, working. The only other thing that happened—along the way, you always have tests that have a problem or you have interference or whatever, and you’re always working to clean it up—that was the only major problem.\\n\\n Right before launch, when they buttoned up the Cape, buttoned up the total launch vehicle, I got a call. There’s two reasons why the camera, being small, didn’t have a bigger antenna. Later in the missions, we had an antenna they would take out of the LM and put it on the ground and deploy it, and it’d be a five- or six-foot dish. We wanted to see Neil [A.] Armstrong’s first step on the Moon, so you can’t go down and put up an antenna and go back up, and take the first step on the Moon! That’s why the little antenna on the LM was going to be used.\\n\\n The camera had to see him, so how are you going to see him? They had what they called the MESA [Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly] Palette on the side, and when they landed, they’d pull a rope and it flops out. It flops out, and inside, there’s some stuff, but also it’s a camera mounted on the door, essentially, pointed at the stairs for Neil Armstrong. This camera, later, is to be taken off of the MESA Palette and put on a tripod. That’s where you saw all the EVA [extravehicular activity] and the lunar activity because they took it off there and mounted it—which meant it had a handle.\\n\\n To put this in the MESA to watch Neil Armstrong, you couldn’t mount it with the handle up. You mounted it upside down, so the top of it was on the shelf, and therefore, you would be able to mount it there, and then you took it up, you turned it over, and put it on the staff that it was mounted on the surface. They didn’t realize, or didn’t think about it, until the last minute, that, “Wait a minute—when this thing opens up, the camera’s upside down, it’s going to look like he’s walking off the Moon—it’s upside down. We can’t get into the spacecraft. You’ve got to change all your scan and conversion at the ground sites so that left is right, right is left, up is down, down is up.” This isn’t technically a very difficult thing to do. You’d have to have a switch so that when he comes down, it’s one way, and when you take the camera and mount it, you flip it back the other way. You also have to have it all perfectly aligned, so that each way you flip it, it doesn’t throw this thing off or half the picture’s missing.\\n\\n It was a last-minute emergency switch, and lo and behold, when we started Apollo 11, they decided to come out early. This was to take place mainly over Australia. In fact, even the first step was on Australia, but the whole thing was coming to Australia. The astronauts got antsy and wanted to get out of the spacecraft early, so now Goldstone was the first site. They wanted the first step at their first site for TV downlink, and I remember, I was sitting at Houston [Mission] Control Center, and they said, “Turn on the camera,” and, “Well, we don’t have anything yet,” and we’re all holding our breath, you know?\\n\\n What happened was because it wasn’t supposed to be at Goldstone, operating television was kind of an art, this converter. You had to know how to set up things on the fly to make the picture look right. Because it wasn’t a well-established program like telemetry or voice or tracking, these people trained for years to do their job, we had to train people and pick them and find out which guys might work out better. They didn’t have TV backgrounds, so you were picking guys so the best guy would be on during the support—well, they went out early, and the best guy wasn’t there. He had the switch in the wrong place, so when it first came on, it was upside-down.\\n\\n They corrected it, and within six minutes, it transferred, because of the Earth’s rotation, to Australia, who had their best guys on. That’s where the first step occurred, but that switch was in play and obviously showed it to be in play because it was in the wrong position at Goldstone when they first came out of the spacecraft. When Neil started his descent, he was upside-down. It all worked out eventually, but it was kind of hairy. I remember sitting in the Control Center, and of course, the goal of Apollo was to go to the Moon and safely return—that was it—and when they landed safely and everybody was celebrating, that was the goal and we were all caught up in that. I wasn’t thinking a whole lot about the TV yet.\\n\\n One of the managers walked in and said, “Well, we landed. Now there’s 600 million people wanting to see TV and it better work.” That’s when it dawned on me, a 26 year old sitting there, saying, “I’m the guy, now they’re going to blame if it doesn’t work.” You’re 250,000 miles to the ground, you’re back to Intelsat, you’re down, you’re through all the equipment at the site, you’re through AT&T, you’re through people you don’t even know, and this has got to be live. This isn’t like a commercial that you can play over—it’s got to be live. It was kind of scary when we first started, what we were going to get. It worked out as good as we could have hoped for, I guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The quality of the picture, from what I’ve read, what you saw in Mission Control was different than what we saw at home on our televisions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let me explain, that probably not so much what we saw in Mission Control; what we saw at the tracking sites was the raw downlink slow-scan, which would be much higher-quality than the converted signal. What we saw at Houston would probably be what you would call the best converted picture because once we sent it out to Intelsat again or to the commercial carrier, depending on how he’s doing, he may preserve it as well or not.\\n\\n What we saw at Houston was pretty similar to what the world saw. It wasn’t edited; it was passed through. The only reason it went through Houston was if there was a problem, someone had to cut it. If there was a fire on board or something blew up, you always have to be able to turn it off to the public if there’s an emergency, just as we do with Shuttle or any other project. But nothing was edited. When they talk about the quality of it, people are generally referring to the fact that the slow-scan, if you could have seen it, was probably, I’d say, three to five times higher quality than what you could get when you converted it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you always in Houston during those Apollo flights?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were always at Mission Control?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would be at tracking sites and Goddard throughout between missions, and I would go to Houston every month. Even without the mission, I would be there a couple of weeks every month, getting ready. Then, every mission, I would go to Houston so that I would be in contact with all the tracking sites at the same time and be at this, I guess, the center of operations, so that if there was a problem, I would be there to talk to the people at Houston." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also did testing at the Electronics Systems Test Laboratory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The ESTL, yes. The ESTL at Houston was just a tremendous place for me because they had all the spacecraft equipment. Again, when they decided to go to the Moon, we didn’t have all the equipment we needed and we couldn’t run test signals from the Moon to us to see how strong they would be. We had to simulate everything, and ESTL was the only place we could actually simulate the lunar signals with actual spacecraft equipment. I spent tons of time at ESTL, working with Jack [W.] Seyl and others that ran that facility, not only looking at the downlink signal, but what we had to do was a lot of our ground site equipment other than the converter—even in later missions, when it wasn’t slow-scan—was to process that downlink. It was commercial equipment that we would either modify or we would buy commercial equipment. This was after slow-scan. Prior to and during Apollo 11 was the only time slow-scan was used. Then, it went to color-sequential, and then eventually, when it got to Shuttle and in Space Station, it’s high-definition.\\n\\n What we did was we took commercial equipment, sequential-color TV came into play in Apollo 12. It was on the Command Module in Apollo 11. This is instead of, I mentioned before, a 500 kilohertz signal, this was 3 megahertz. Still wasn’t 4, but it was 6 times what we had before—which was somewhat interesting because now we had a signal that was 3 megahertz wide, 6 times what we were able to do before, but in the middle of it were two telemetry signals, voice and data. Right in the middle of our picture. It’s like saying you just stuck two sticks up in the middle of the picture and blocked part of the picture. We had to get rid of it, so they built what they called cancellation devices that would actually take the signal and reverse it on itself and just canceled each other out in the middle of the picture. It worked very successfully. All that testing went on at the ESTL lab, and we would bring commercial equipment down there.\\n\\n We would go to RCA or we would go to what was called Grass Valley [Group], or JVC or IVC and buy what we called processing amplifiers. Actually, it was like the battle of champions. We’d bring five companies in with their equipment and we would take a signal from the spacecraft equipment, simulate it, bring it down weaker and weaker and weaker, until we called it a loss of signal [LOS], and see how these pieces of equipment would process it because they were built for broadcast. The best signal we ever got from space would never meet the standards of a broadcast signal, so none of these devices are designed to handle—what we considered our best TV was terrible for them.\\n\\n What we’re talking about is an engineering noise content, where you start seeing noise in the picture. We couldn’t get near this cleanliness that you can when you have a big transmitter and do all these things, so we had to look at what equipment would still handle things for us and how we could modify it to still lock on to a signal. It wasn’t just lunar that we were worried about; it was even Earth-orbit. When we do Earth-orbit, you come over a site—say it’s White Sands, New Mexico—when it’s Earth-orbit, you have what you call AOS, acquisition of signal. You go 8 or 10 minutes, and then you have LOS. The better the equipment, the longer you can hold on to this thing before the next site picks it up.\\n\\n That’s where we did all the testing, all the simulation, and learned what we needed to learn as they had tremendous support at ESTL at Houston. I couldn’t have done it without them, they were terrific, just terrific guys to work with, too. I was kind of the guy in charge and learning, and they accepted me for that. It wasn’t us against them. There was a lot of competition between JSC and Goddard—always has been—on, “We don’t need you,” and, “We can do it all from here.” It was kind of like, “Do we need a separate tracking network run by Goddard versus let Houston run it all? We do the spacecraft, we can do this.” And yes, it was true, they could do it if they were given the job to do it, but that wasn’t it. We had the tracking network. We had to work together, but there was always this competition.\\n\\n I remember going to Houston for meetings and reviews, and they were challenges. At my age, most of the guys were in their 40s—I’d say anywhere from 35 to 50 years old—and I was 25, and you come in there and you are going to go through a beating in these meetings. They were going to question you up and down. I went to law school later and got a law degree, but it was probably my first training to be a lawyer, was to have to be cross-examined by Ed [Edward I.] Fendell and some of the people at Houston." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Apollo 8 was the first time the people on Earth actually got a good view of what the Earth looked like from space, and also those close-up views of the Moon. Of course, it was still the black and white, the slow-scan. Can you talk about those first images and when they came through, and your relief?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I remember the night because it was Christmas Eve. I remember the astronaut started—I guess there were some stories I heard recently about who was going to read what from the Bible—we didn’t have any controversy going on about should they read from the Bible or not, but we didn’t really know what they were going to do. As it turns out, I don’t think they did for sure, either. It just kind of came together: I remember before we saw the Earth, they were trying to point that camera and get a view of the Moon and the Earth together, and so it took some manipulation because they don’t have a good viewfinder on a camera. They’re holding the camera up and the Earth’s telling them what they’re seeing. They have a monitor, but it’s pretty hard to do. Once they got the view and started reading, and it was Christmas Eve, it was pretty impressive, and I think most of the television audience was quite impressed with that. Later on, you see color photos that were taken out the window of that view, coming around the Moon. That’s what I remember. It wasn’t anything special or difficult to do for the TV part of it, but it was spectacular as to the effect of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just further away, to get that signal back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, again, we were having to work with signals at a lunar distance. This was from the Command Module. I think we had a little more power there than we did—same camera, but it wasn’t from the Lunar Module—I think we used 85-foot dishes, as I recall, on that, so it worked out all right, but it wasn’t going to be the same on the Moon from the LM, from the Lunar Module." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were mentioning the color—Apollo 10 was the first time that color cameras were used?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, sequential-color." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sequential-color, so then on Apollo 11, they had the color in the Command Module, but they didn’t use that on the surface of the Moon. Was that a power issue, or was it the weight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Both. Weight and power. The development of the sequential-color wasn’t ready for the timeline of Apollo 11 regardless. Probably if it had been delayed six months, it probably would have gone with color; they might have gone with it and tried it. You have to remember, once we used color, like I earlier said when I was talking about sequential-color, it was six times the bandwidth. Once you do that, you use that same little transmitter, you’re going to have a weaker and weaker signal.\\n\\n The other problem was, the link from the Moon would not pass 3 megahertz. It was a link and a receiver meant for data, and so we didn’t have it available. The whole career in television at NASA, television wasn’t part of the program. It was almost like an afterthought, “We ought to have television, let’s try television, let’s do this, let’s do that.” It was pretty piecemeal throughout, even when we went to Space Station and the Shuttle, it took them a long time to start accepting that television wasn’t just for the public anymore. You can use this to look at science, you can use this to work on EVAs, and all of a sudden, television became a tool and a science item. It took them years before NASA would start saying, “Television’s not just public affairs.” That’s what made it more of a program item is because it was now being used as part of the mission-required tools." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Apollo 12, of course, they had a problem with the camera on the surface. Can you talk about that just for a second?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have friends who know Alan [L.] Bean, and he’s still apologizing. From what I hear, he’s a real nice guy and he feels terrible about it. That was simply a case of a camera that—these cameras are not to be pointed at the Sun. When he was moving the tripod or whatever, the camera got pointed at the Sun. We had really good video going on, and all of a sudden, we see this bright glare, and then we see part of the picture in the top, but not in the bottom, and we knew right away—this was called a Vidicon [camera]—and it’s burning up particles on this Vidicon. The blind leading the blind, we have people—it wasn’t my job; I don’t do the spacecraft camera, I only take the signal when it comes down—they’re on the ground and saying, “Move this and do this,” and he said, “Wait a minute, maybe if I hit this on the side,” and as he hit it on the side, thinking something’s loose or something, I don’t know what he was thinking, you could see actually pieces of the Vidicon falling.\\n\\n The image was probably not those pieces, but you could see it was crumbling in front of your eyes. It was pretty wiped out when he first pointed it at the Sun, but that’s how sensitive it was. This thing had to go from pitch-black to bright and adjust, and if you just went whack in the Sun, it was going to do—I didn’t know it would do that. It was surprising that they didn’t have automatic aim controls to the point that it would just shut it down and tell you to get it out of the Sun, but these cameras were designed for lunar surfaces.\\n\\n The camera itself, it was kind of interesting. These cameras, when you saw a picture of the Lunar Module and say you see a shadow from the Lunar Module, and here’s a camera on the tripod, Apollo 11, or any Apollo mission on the Moon, when that camera sits in the Sun, it’s 250 degrees Fahrenheit. If you move it in the shade, just move it over in the shade, it’s minus 200-250 degrees. These Vidicons, these tubes and these internal electronics of these cameras had to be able to cycle through those huge temperatures in a short time.\\n\\n They had gold padding on them. I remember getting some test gold leaf—I still have it at home, it might be worth money now—these are wrapped in Sun reflectant and insulated, but it had to go through tremendous temperature and light changes as it is. As time evolved, they protected the camera from sunlight bursts and fatalities such as this camera. I think they blame Alan Bean for hitting the camera, but the real problem was it was pointed at the Sun and the camera didn’t have the protection against a quick look at such a bright object." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know that like with the still photography, the astronauts went through training on how to take photos. As the missions went on, they learned more and more. The same thing for the television cameras?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I wasn’t involved in that but I worked with, again, Westinghouse, who built the camera on the Moon and built a lot of the cameras, Stan Lebar. They went through complete training sessions on how to hold the camera, how to point it. That wasn’t an unknown, that you don’t point at the Sun. I can’t blame a guy that’s walking on the Moon in a spacesuit making a mistake." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, he’s a little excited." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’ve got a lot of things to think about besides is the camera pointing up at the Sun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know that the technology was evolving in the cameras because they did find these problems, that the cameras evolved as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. We stayed sequential-color for quite a while. It was working. That required a conversion also, but it was no longer called a scan converter. This was really extracting what you call red, blue, and green signals and putting them back together in a composite that gave you essentially 3 megahertz of broadcast color. It was a conversion done at Houston. This was all done at Houston. We would feed the sequential color signal—and by sequential, what I mean is these cameras had a spinning disk in front of the tube, and it had a red, green, and blue filter. Every 60th of a cycle, it would be all blue or all red or all green. Those are the basic colors that make up color TV.\\n\\n When the signal came down electronically you would just see what we call 3 megahertz broadcast signal. If you broke it down every 60th of a second, it would be all red, blue, or green. When I got to Houston, they extracted what was the red, what was the blue, what was the green, added what they call a color burst, which was what controlled color and put it back together and sent it out live. That was now broadcast television. It was 3 megahertz, which was what we call good quality for what we had when we had slow-scan, but it still wasn’t broadcast. It was still two-thirds of the way towards having a full broadcast camera. It wasn’t until we got—and I may be wrong—but it wasn’t till we got to Shuttle, I think, that we really had broadcast-rate downlinks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course, Apollo 13, the accident happened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, Apollo 13 was, I don’t know—it’s funny, people ask me about that and I don’t recall much except worrying about whether they were going to get home. I can’t remember a thing about TV support, other than I remember them putting the camera out, looking at the damage, and seeing where the explosion occurred. I could kind of tell—I couldn’t tell what they were talking about to the extent they could see it, but that’s the only video." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They used the TV video to view the damage?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, but I think at an angle. What they saw is, I think, they took a spacewalk eventually or something, once they got into the rescue mode. Maybe not, but they were able to see the damage and determine it was an oxygen spare tank. We were in the dark during all that. We were there, but it was like, “Everyone stay in place and we’ll work on it.” In fact, I think I came back to Goddard while they were still in the rescue mode then because TV was not being used, power was being conserved." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the end of the Apollo missions, Apollo 15 and 16, there were ground-controlled cameras?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was probably a breakthrough also. We had what we called a “ground-controlled television assembly,” GCTA, which we humorously named “the Gotcha.” This was the housing that would go, the camera would mount in it. In fact, Apollo 15 did two things: it had a ground-controlled television assembly, which meant you could remotely move the camera up, down, left, and right, zoom in and out, and they also put a rover. It was the first rover on the Moon, and this camera, when it wasn’t on a tripod, mounted on the front of the rover like a headlight. They could stop the rover, and then the ground would control where it would look. I remember two things—one is that that’s what enabled us to then watch a launch from the Moon, that was put on a tripod at that point. Ed Fendell was famous for all this because he was the controller that would send the signal, and if there was a countdown to launch, he had to send the tilt up. You’re going to launch, so you’re going to tilt the camera up and you’re going to pan it.\\n\\n You got a predetermined path that you think the LM is taking so that you can follow it, but you have to start your signals 2.5 seconds before they do the actual launch on the Moon because the signal won’t get there. If you were in a studio and you told the operator, “Move the camera up,” it’s instant. We’ve got 2.5 seconds before that thing is told to move up, and he’s launching. You have to make sure the signal gets there when he hits or mixes the fuel on the LM. That was the trick, to do everything 2.5 seconds before it was needed. That’s what enabled him.\\n\\n The other thing was when we were on the Moon on Apollo 15 and we had this ground-controlled assembly, I remember, we were talking—I don’t know if it was in the Control Room or where it was—what happened is there was a dish on the rover, and they would stop and then re-point the dish to the Earth to lock up and then turn on the camera. What we said was, “Well, even though we’re not going to air this to the public, let’s keep the camera on while you’re moving and see if we can keep locked up on the signal for a while”.\\n\\n We did it for, as I recall, and I wish I had the tape, it was, I think, about 30 seconds before the antenna was no longer pointed right because they were moving—because it wasn’t automatically going to point at the Earth, you had to manually do it. During that 30 seconds, they’re moving along, I would guess, five miles an hour? Maybe slower. With the camera mounted right down, probably two feet off the ground, looking at the lunar surface and horizon, it looked like they were going 100 miles an hour. It was amazing. It looked like a racecar headed across the lunar surface. It was really slow, but it didn’t look slow. I thought that was really neat, but it was not something we could do for the public because we couldn’t guarantee it was going to stay locked at all. The ground-controlled assembly enabled them now to see the astronauts doing things that before, when you put the camera up there, unless they’re in the field of view or go remove the camera and then go back and do something.\\n\\n The other thing that happened during the ground-controlled systems is the astronauts knew, of course, that they didn’t have to go move the camera. If they were going to go over to their right, they would say, “We’re going to move over to the rock about 30 meters to our right.” Of course, then the ground would send a signal to start the camera moving before they did. The astronauts, some of them—I can’t remember which ones—they had a sense of humor and they’re on the Moon. They said, “We’re going to go over to the rock on the right,” and the minute they said that, they’d run to the left. All of a sudden, the camera goes the wrong way, and they can’t find them, and they don’t know where they’re at. They would have to search and find them, and it was half funny and half not so funny because we don’t know if something happened. They were hiding behind rocks because, “You couldn’t find us—there was no cameraman to find us!” You had to know which way to point. I guess that was part of their fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess you have to find your fun where you can." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Knowing you may never come back, you might as well have fun while you’re there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, and there are some of those iconic images—of course, Pete [Charles] Conrad singing, and all those different things that we all remember. I think they did have a lot of fun while they were there. While we’re on Apollo, let’s talk about the recovery of the Apollo video that you’ve been involved in here in the recent years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You mean the search for the missing tapes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The search for the missing tapes, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I also was involved a little bit in some tapes that were actual recovery tapes of the Apollo 11 capsule, the U.S.S. Hornet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That would be great, we’d love to hear about that, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There’s not a whole lot of story, but during the search, what happened was that long story short, it came up that someone had looked, in Australia, at some of the slow-scan pictures of the TV set with the slow-scan and said, “Oh, my gosh, that’s so good compared to what we’ve ever seen—where are those tapes that had the slow-scan,” because lo and behold, this was 1969 and it’s now 2006, and it’s almost 40 years later, and the world is digital. We can take tapes and digitize them. We can convert them.\\n\\n In ’69, that wasn’t even a thought, so when we recorded the downlinked TV, what people don’t remember when I went through all these press conferences about where are the tapes, digitize the tapes, the goal of the mission was to transmit live TV from the Moon, and that was done. That was the only goal: get it down, convert it, send it to Houston, send it to the world, you’re done. It’s an historic moment, and it was accomplished.\\n\\n The video itself, slow-scan, was converted, but let’s say the converter broke during the downlink. It was taped so that we could play it back through the converter if we had to. It wouldn’t be live anymore, but it would be still video from the Moon. That’s why we recorded it, and it was recorded on a big reel that was used for telemetry and data. In order to get—I mentioned that little 500 kilohertz of video, that’s much wider than the data they ever had—so to get that on one of these 14 tracks on this tape, that tape had to spin at 120 inches a second, which meant it only took about 10 minutes to fill up a tape 15 inches wide. For every 15 minutes of video on the Moon—we did a 3-hour EVA—you had tons of tapes being made at every site, prime and backup recorders, and on and on. It was one track out of 14 other tracks that had telemetry data, voice data, biomedical data, tracking data, so mainly, those recorders weren’t for TV, but we found a track we could use, and that’s where we put it. When they saw the pictures, they said, “Well, where are those tapes?”\\n\\n These tapes were all shipped in, and they were shipped in to Goddard, and then they were transferred, eventually, to the national archives storage facility in Suitland, Maryland, [Washington] National Records Center. We said, “Well, if we could find those, we can now digitize them and come up with four or five times better quality TV than anyone’s ever seen.” We started looking for the tapes. I was authorized by Headquarters to go ahead, they’d contacted Headquarters and then they called me. We went to the National Records Center and started looking.\\n\\n What happened was we found some Apollo 9 tapes in the National Records, and National Records Center in Suitland is part of the National Archives [and Records Administration], but it’s not the National Archives. What that means is we had hundreds of thousands of articles. I found JSC stuff in there, all kinds of stuff that nobody knows is there, even though it’s categorized and labeled and there’s a record of it. Unless someone is actively looking for or reviewing it, it’s mission tapes, all kinds of audio and video—but we found some Apollo 9. These tapes that came in from the sites, all around the world, our tracking sites, there were probably 400,000 of these things. We found Apollo 9—no video, but tapes—we said, “We’ve got the right place.” And we couldn’t find Apollo 11, and that’s what we wanted, the slow-scan. That’s the only time it was recorded.\\n\\n What happens is these tapes come in and sit in the National Records Center, and they might sit there for 20 years, and they get reviewed maybe every 10 years, and then what they do is they go back to the people who had the data on there—scientists, mission experts—and say, “Look, we’ve got these tapes, we’ve got 500 of these tapes with the so-and-so data on there, do you still need this data?” Most of them didn’t need it because they already got it live. This was a backup tape. Or they used the tape, extracted it, and sent the tape back.\\n\\n Once they say, “We no longer need it,” the tapes can be either destroyed or they can be what they call degaussed, recycled, and sent back out for further use if they’re in good shape. They had a whole recycling center, that basically Goddard would take tapes, erase them, then run test signals on them and measure what we call bit-air rates to make sure they had the quality to do mission. We were looking, at the time, in late ’70s, early ’80s, Landsat [Program] needed tapes and the Shuttle Program needed tapes.\\n\\n As I tracked this down, I found that what happened was we were buying millions of dollars’ worth of new tapes and they didn’t meet spec [specification], they came in and got rejected. Now, we had the Landsat and we had Shuttle about to launch, and we were short in the network to be able to record data, which was a crisis. They started hauling tapes out of the National Records Center and reusing them. Nobody at the time was saying, “Wait a minute, there might be some tapes,” they didn’t come to me and say, “Are there any tapes with TV on them?”\\n\\n I wish they had, but nobody was tracking this slow-scan TV because it was thought of as just another piece of data on a data tape. Again, as I said, the mission objective was to get live TV to the world, and they did. No one had the foresight to say, “But we could do something with this.” Long story short, we were able to pretty well definitize what happened, which was these tapes were degaussed, recertified, sent in the network, and that data was lost. That’s what happened. If someone had said in ’69, “We’re going to record this as a backup, and if we don’t need the backup, we’re going to keep the tapes anyways because we think 40 years later, we’ll be able to use them,” then we’d have done it.\\n\\n In retrospect, the other side of it would be, “You know, there’s something called TV, even if it’s not broadcast, on one of these tracks.” If they’d said that to me, I’d have said, “Don’t destroy that.” I’d want it even if I couldn’t use it on broadcast—I would want it because it’s TV. It just wasn’t like that, that way.\\n\\n It was unfortunate, but the tapes weren’t lost, they were intentionally reused. If someone had said, “Track 14 is slow-scan TV,” the people recycling it would have probably said, “So what?” They wouldn’t know that that’s something they should question. It was simply, “Is there any reason that we need this anymore?” Again, the mission didn’t have TV as a prime objective, and secondly, when we did put TV on, we met the objective of live TV to the world. It’s unfortunate, but that’s what happened.\\n\\n What we did as the second level was we went out and searched all the broadcast tapes from CBS New York, ABC New York, went to all the positions that had the first feeds and got what we thought was the best broadcast quality. Then, we worked with a company in Hollywood [California] and we removed noise and removed smearing, we removed all kinds of artifacts in the tapes and came up with what was called the re-done Apollo 11 video. That’s what we have now. It’s probably twice as good in many areas than it ever was, but it’ll never be as good as the slow-scan could have been." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How long a process was that, once you started looking?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It took me about three years, from 2006, I believe, to 2009, when we finished the project and had the reconverted or enhanced tapes done. Then, they had the Emmy Awards and decided they ought to—I think what happened was that when we did all that tape stuff, searching the tapes and then upgrading the quality and playing it, and got a lot press, and then they had some press conferences, you know, to question me, “Did we go to the Moon?” We had a lot of those nuts out there. All that publicity, I think, triggered the Academy saying, “You know, the radio and television arts and sciences part of the Academy has never awarded an Emmy to NASA for historic TV.”\\n\\n All of a sudden, the 40th anniversary came around, all this stuff was being publicized, and all of a sudden, it’s announced that NASA’s getting an Emmy. Then, Headquarters calls me and says, “We want you and Buzz Aldrin to accept on behalf of us.” I felt almost ashamed to do it. At first, I thought, “Okay, whatever,” then I realized it was a big deal. My wife went to Hollywood with me and walked on the red carpet and all that, so it was pretty exciting stuff for her more than me because I had to make a speech. That’s the last thing I wanted to do, but it all worked out really great, yes. I’ve got a big Emmy sitting in my dining room." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really? That’s exciting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and there’s one at Headquarters in the lobby—you could have seen it there. You’d see my picture with Buzz Aldrin, and June Lockhart was the Master of Ceremonies at this part of the Emmy Awards." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "From Lost in Space [television show]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, they use her all the time. A wonderful woman, just so friendly. Really great. Went drinking with her afterwards. It was terrific." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that you were involved in some of the recovery on the Hornet? The video?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wasn’t involved in the recovery, but during the search. When I was looking for the tapes, we would get calls from people saying, “I think I have your tape,” you know, “my dad worked for NASA and I found this thing in the basement.” We got calls left and right, and other people saying, “Well, we have a tape, but you can’t have it unless you give us a lot of money.” None of them had what we wanted, so we humored them a while, and then said, “Sorry.”\\n\\n I got a call, this was a fellow that was the Second in Command on the U.S.S. Hornet, which was the recovery ship for the Apollo 11 capsule for the return to Earth. He was over in Chesapeake Beach, on Chesapeake Bay, he lived over there. He had tapes from on-board, and that’s when the Apollo 11 capsule was picked up, was brought to the U.S.S. Hornet, they were put in, what do you call those? I’m trying to remember the name of it, the little vans you pull that you live in when you go on vacation [Airstream travel trailers], the famous ones?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, for when they were in isolation [Mobile Quarantine Facility]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, so they put them in this isolation, and that’s when [President Richard M.] Nixon came on board to visit them and say hi, and all this. All this was recorded for ABC. ABC was the news coverage, and they recorded it on board. He was explaining, he wanted to give these to NASA, donate them before he died. He was an older guy. He says, “I want NASA to have these.”\\n\\n I said, “Even after reading about what they call our lost tapes, you want us to have your tapes?”\\n\\n He says, “Oh, yes.” He wanted to give them to us and what happened on board was when all that took place, some of it was live, but a lot of it wasn’t. They had two tapes they made, two recorders recording all this stuff. One tape was given to the guy and they put it on a helicopter from the U.S.S. Hornet and flew it to Hawaii, to bring it back to the U.S. to play to the public. The other tapes stayed on the U.S.S. Hornet in case the helicopter crashed. That was the reason, “The helicopter might crash, we need a second.”\\n\\n It didn’t crash, and these tapes were given to him, and he’s had them for years. It shows a lot of footage of the actual recovery and the Hornet streaming to the capsule. Pretty exciting stuff, actually. He was telling us about some of the stories and some of the things that occurred, that when they first started the recovery process, when they landed, they didn’t know what germs could be brought back. That’s why they were in isolation, right? When the frog-men or recovery men would come in, the first thing you did was there was a tube that came around the capsule to keep it floating. They completely sprayed it all with Betadine—I don’t know if you recall Betadine, it was like Merthiolate, it was a disinfectant—and they spray everything with that.\\n\\n It turned out this stuff was slippery as hell, and they couldn’t get up on the Command Module ring because they keep slipping off, so they had to come up with some other disinfectant or they couldn’t recover the astronauts. That was one thing you learn, and you can see the red around the capsule. That was one of the problems they had. It was just interesting footage, and some of it’s probably never been seen. NASA Headquarters, you might want to check into it, has this. I don’t know where they put it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Has it been digitized, do you know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t believe it has. Some of the historians down there should be aware of where this is. This is something someone ought to take a look at and utilize because it shows a lot of recovery stuff that I doubt if most people ever saw. It’s fascinating stuff, even Nixon and everything Nixon did wasn’t on TV, so it shows all the Nixon going around the ship and acting important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s the raw footage." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m sure the Hornet people would like to have a copy, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They might, now. He had it digitized on the DVD, this guy that gave it to me. He had DVDs of it, but NASA didn’t, unless he included that. I can’t recall, now. Maybe I have one—I’ll have to look before I die, and see what I have at home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During this search, in finding different tapes—like you said, you found Apollo 9 and some different things—what about playback for these things? Did you still have the equipment to look at what you were finding?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One of the big pluses at the time was the fact that one of my technicians had been there as long as I had. He came maybe a little after me, but the recorders in his lab that were used from Apollo, he had preserved those for 40-some years, and they were in total operating condition. They’ll still play tapes that we used in the network for data and stuff, so we had actual Apollo 11-type recorders that had been preserved and in-use, ready to go, if we got the tape. We had everything we needed to convert." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk about some of the other programs. Skylab?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Skylab was, of course, the first lab we had, and we did a lot of support of Skylab out of Rosman, North Carolina. We had a Rosman tracking site down there, an 85-foot dish up in the mountains of North Carolina, near Asheville. There wasn’t anything I can really recall special, other than we did our normal support, and it was kind of like, Space Station or Shuttle after it’s been up a while, it was just ongoing support. I can’t recall, unless someone reminds me of something that happened, anything specific in that project, other than support from Rosman was a new area of support." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like you said, they were there 24 hours a day for extended periods." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, right, absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you stay in Houston the whole time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. On those missions, on Skylab, I was mainly at Goddard, and we would directly go to Rosman or one of the tracking sites for work, ongoing work, but mainly at Goddard once it was ongoing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project] was the first time Americans saw a Russian launch, and did you coordinate with the Russians in the television coverage? How did that work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn’t handle launch TV. That was handled out of Houston. However, they coordinated showing the launch of the Russians at the time. I handled the television from Apollo-Soyuz, and that was unique. Our coverage used ATS [Applications Technology] Satellite, at the time, and our tracking sites weren’t able to cover that. What happened was we set up to use a tracking site north of Madrid—we have a tracking site out of Madrid, northeast or due west of Madrid, but we couldn’t use it.\\n\\n They gave us a location called Buitrago, Spain. It’s a Spanish tracking site mainly for submarine support, worldwide submarine support, but it could handle the ATS feed and the Apollo-Soyuz downlinks. What we did was we had me and one other fellow, each with about 10 people, two shifts, 12 on, 12 off, fly over to Spain, and go up to this Buitrago. That’s where we’d do Apollo-Soyuz TV support. When we flew in there to Madrid, they called us to the American embassy, and the first thing we were told was that the Basques in the North—[Francisco] Franco was in power, and they had regular police that directed traffic, and they had what they called the la Guardia Civil. These were two military policemen all over the place. One had a long-range rifle and one had a submachine gun, and they would have motorcycles or horses, and they would commandeer cars or do whatever they wanted; it was military rule.\\n\\n We were called to the embassy and told that there had been a threat on our lives, and that they were going to kill an American this weekend, and so they were warning us to take stickers off of anything that said NASA, and to stay out of town, and don’t be overly visible. They assigned la Guardia Civil to guard us. That was our introduction to Apollo-Soyuz support. We were young enough that we thought, “This is neat!” I know that the NASA rep [representative] tore all the stickers off his car and got out of town. What we did was we had rented a villa—and it was roughly called a villa because where we were, it’s brick and mud—but it was a place that would house 10, 12 people. I had an apartment in Madrid because my wife was with me. First thing we did was throw a big party at the villa.\\n\\n Before I get to the Apollo-Soyuz support, this was the human part of it, was that when we went out to the tracking site, la Guardia Civil were behind trees, in the bushes, in the building. They knew where we were all the time, they followed us. We didn’t know they were following us, but they knew everywhere we went, whether it was downtown Madrid, didn’t matter. These guys with long-range rifles, submachine guns.\\n\\n I remember one time we were in Spain, what happened was noon was the big meal, so we took over part of the building in Buitrago that they let us have, and then every day at noon, they would bring us this six-course dinner with wine. Then, one of the higher-ups at NASA found out we were having wine and said, “No more, no more, you can’t have that,” so they cut out the wine. When we would have a successful completion of something, we would have bubbly wine. I remember we had our little engineering room they gave us, and someone said, “Hey, you know, that downlink went great, let’s celebrate,” and they popped the cork. When that cork popped, next thing I heard was click-click, and two guys with guns at the door. I mean, they were everywhere and we didn’t think about that at the time.\\n\\n We later did what was called an AIDSAT mission out of Spain that went around to Pakistan and Libya, and they wouldn’t let us fly over Libya, and Pakistan. [Benazir] Bhutto got assassinated two months after we left, and we didn’t even know half the dangers over there when we went because we were just over there doing things.\\n\\n Long story short, Apollo-Soyuz, we supported 12 on, 12 off, out of this Buitrago site. The downlinks would come and we would record them, and then immediately at a given time, would uplink them back through ATS-6 to Houston, who would then either use them or play them to the world. There’s a story, I can’t tell all of it right now because they’re debating what we’re going to do with it, but it was Apollo-Soyuz and I got a call about midnight one time, about, “You got to get out here, what happened on the downlink?” I didn’t know what they meant, and they said, “Well, just come out here.” It was about a 50-mile drive in the Burgos Highway, and it was just a danger in itself. We had times where we went between two semis to avoid a wreck.\\n\\n This is just a world of crazies over there. Fifty-mile backups on the weekend were common, people all leaving Madrid, for the weekend, to the hills. Fifty miles of backups! I mean, it’s crazy, and you see these little metal cars with loaves of bread sticking out all the windows, and families of 8 or 10, and it was like a movie.\\n\\n I go out there and I said, “Well, we got a downlink,” and they were docking with the Russians at night, practicing. They were practicing, and most of the video is flashing strobe lights—you can’t see, it’s dark, except the light’s flashing, and then you hear the commander and others start to say things. What they said was not fit for transmit back to Houston, and what they said had to do with the Russians.\\n\\n If you can imagine this, what was on the tape that they asked us to play back was audio that would be heard by the press. It was an open link. The next day, the Russians are docking, coming in and shaking hands, our good buddies. If they’d have heard what we heard, it would have been all over the newspapers. We didn’t send it, and they said, “No, you’ve got to transmit.”\\n\\n “Well, we can’t do that.”\\n\\n “Well, what’s on it?”\\n\\n “We can’t tell you.”\\n\\n We couldn’t say anything on the loops and they said, “Okay, erase it.”\\n\\n I said, “Okay,” so before they erased it, we made our own copies.\\n\\n But then they called back and said, “Don’t erase it, we’re sending a courier.” A courier came to take the tapes and fly them back to Houston. We never heard another word. They said they never got them—I don’t know what happened to them. There were copies, and I thought I had the copy at Goddard for a long time, couldn’t find it.\\n\\n I said, “Oh, somebody cleaned out the penthouse storage area and threw these old tapes out,” or whatever, and lo and behold I’ve come across a guy who had the tape. It wasn’t me, a guy that worked for me.\\n\\n I now know where the tape is, I’m debating with Mark Hess on what we do with converting this tape on an old machine back so we all know what was said and what happened during that docking session. That was interesting, the la Guardia Civil were interesting, and the Apollo-Soyuz. I know one thing we found with the Russians, be it Apollo-Soyuz or the [Shuttle] MIR [Russian space station] project, whenever we had a problem and needed to get information on the MIR or the Soyuz, it became a military issue. It was worse than pulling teeth. They wouldn’t tell us a lot about what they had on those spacecraft that we needed to know to better be able to receive it because what happened was I became in charge, other than video, of what’s called VHF Emergency Voice. This is tracking sites at White Sands and Wallops Island [Virginia] and the Cape that are there specifically for emergency transmissions to and from the Soyuz spacecraft, and at the time, the MIR. That’s because we have U.S. astronauts involved.\\n\\n If the Space Station has a problem today and they have to get out of there, even before the Shuttle stopped, the Soyuz is the escape of choice. Once they get out of there, if they’re over the U.S., who are they going to communicate with? It’s a Soyuz spacecraft, so we have VHF, special emergency. I remember, when we set that up, the MIR had a fire. Wallops Island was the first place they called, saying, “We’ve got a fire on board.” It was pretty interesting to have all this Apollo-Soyuz and MIR-type Russian support, but it was very difficult, if you had a problem, saying, “Well, how are you configured? Are your antennas on the fore or aft side because we’re having trouble locking on?”\\n\\n It was like, “Well, we’ll discuss it with the military and we’ll let you know,” and then it was, “Well, we’re flying over Russia, we can’t tell you anymore.” We’re trying to support not only the Russians but the U.S. astronauts, and it was difficult. JSC was one that had to try to get the information out of them to show the configurations, and they were very reluctant to tell us much about what they did because it was run by the military and still is, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s interesting. That also reminds me of, like you said, you visited—especially early on—these other sites in Australia. Then, of course, you’re talking about Spain. Were there any other cultural differences that you noticed that you’d like to talk about? Maybe some of the other sites?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Again, the Australians had a very inflexible hierarchy in society. If you were from NASA, you were almost like an astronaut to them. “I want you to come out to my country club.” “This is my friend from NASA.” It was very particular who would invite you out or who was allowed to invite you out, or who you had to talk to. Spain wasn’t that way at all. The Spanish, it was mainly just a language barrier for those of us who spoke broken Spanish and picked it up, didn’t take Spanish, so it was a little more difficult to communicate. The Spanish people were simpler, much simpler. Maybe we were a little hyper because we had timelines and we were trying to do things on the run that had to be done quick. Spanish seemed to be almost, on occasion, overly laid-back, not understanding the importance, that this has to be done by tomorrow, not next month, but their support was terrific. There was no complaint there.\\n\\n Other than that, I would say that we enjoyed being in Spain. Their culture was interesting, but they have a lot of upper and lower class. They had hardly any middle class at the time, so you were either well-to-do or you were using the center water tap for your water. It was fascinating, being in the atmosphere we were, living in Madrid in a nice hotel, but five miles away, seeing people that had to share one pump of water.\\n\\n The only other thing I remember that stuck with me is I kept telling my wife when she was there one time with me, “When you’re walking down the sidewalk, the people will walk into you—they’ll never move.” I found that Spain, for some odd reason, that if you’re walking down the right side of the sidewalk and someone’s coming the other way, they’ll come the same side you are. It was kind of like, “I don’t understand this culture—maybe it’s like driving on the left, I’m on the wrong side of the sidewalk?” I guess to make it a fair statement of the Spanish, they did everything we asked them, and they worked hard. The people at the tracking site, there were some guys that they would have key guys that were the experts, and they kept everything going for us over there. With Franco there, it was a highly politically-charged area, so it was quite different than our Australian visits." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You sent us a list of different programs you’ve worked on—Landsat?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Landsat, I just simply supported it. I threw that in there because it was just something I supported. Landsat imagery was Earth-orbit and had television-type images and recordings, and so, there wasn’t anything unique. It was unique to the scientists, but not to me, so it was just ongoing support of a project that had video-type signals." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As these programs—and of course with Shuttle and then when the TDRSS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System] was launched, and then the coverage became easier. It wasn’t, like you had mentioned before, you’d have that few minutes between AOS and LOS." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s a good point, that when we launched the TDRSS satellite, now what happened was we were able to relay from the spacecraft to TDRSS, and TDRSS down to White Sands, New Mexico, as a central hub, and we were able to have about 80 percent of an orbit continuously covered, even though it was Earth orbit, where before it was 8 to 10 minutes for each site. You would pass a site and lose it and then be two, or three, or four, or even five minutes before the next site picked it up; now you had 80 percent, or an hour and a half, of continuous coverage every pass, until you went to the back side. TDRSS allowed us now to have continuous support of Shuttle, which was really important, and Space Station, where you only have small drops, and when you’re able to have live data, and that data’s recorded and dumped when they come out of the blocked area. They can downlink some of that stuff in places like Russia, if the support calls for it, but for U.S. coverage, yeah, the TDRSS made a big change in how we did Earth-orbit coverage." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you stay in Goddard for most of those coverages of the Shuttle flights?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We support most of the TDRSS service out of White Sands, New Mexico. Actually, there’s two sites there at the same location, so I spent a lot of time out there. The mission, like I said, when you get to Skylab or a mission that’s just there all the time, then it seems that yes, there’s a Control Center at Houston, but it’s not a singularly short-term event, so unless someone calls for you to go to Houston for some reason, we support from our location. That’s the way it worked from then on. When it got through the Apollo Program, Apollo-Soyuz, when it got to Skylab and Shuttle and Station, you didn’t need to go to Houston to support it, other than to run tests and get ready." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As you mentioned before, as far as the acceptance of TV, once you got to Shuttle and ISS, or Shuttle-MIR, NASA started accepting the fact that it could be used for scientific purposes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It became more and more a tool for engineering and science than it did public affairs, unless there was a specific event they wanted to be public affairs. Before, the only time you saw TV was if there was something for the public. We have television coming down right now, as we speak, and most people never see the stuff from Space Station unless it’s a spinning spoon or something. Politically, I would say they could do better to get the American people involved. The bottom line is that they’re using TV all the time for science experiments, you name it, and it’s now just a tool up there. EVAs are a tool, but that’s probably more of the time they use it also for public affairs because everyone’s interested in EVA because it’s different. That’s what we found over the years—at least, I found—if you don’t do something different and exciting, you’re not going to have the public caring what you’re doing. You went to the Moon in Apollo 11 and 12, and 13 didn’t make it? Well, 14, 15, 16, and 17, the interest went way down. It was mainly, “How many rocks are you going to bring back?”\\n\\n It’s the nature of the program. You didn’t go up there to entertain people, but on the other hand, NASA’s highly dependent on public support and getting Congress to support what the public says they want them to support, and it takes going to Mars, exploring, excitement. I was lucky enough to be around in 1967-68, and fell into something that was an historic event, through no deed of my own. I was in the right place at the right time, and everybody wanted this thing to work. I would have to say that in going back to talking about what we did in the Apollo days, this was world-wide. It was not just NASA and the United States. When I went to Spain, when I went to Australia and Hawaii, or Mexico, or Germany, these people were all wanting—it was like a big team, in the true sense of the word. It wasn’t the U.S. and NASA showing how powerful they are; it was, “We need everybody in that whole link, and everybody to work together.”\\n\\n It was one of those unique times where it didn’t take a whole lot of encouragement or inducement for people to want to participate and make this work, and it didn’t take a whole lot for people to want to watch it—the public like you and me—although I didn’t realize that until many years after Apollo 11. When they told me there was a lot of people-watching, it didn’t mean a thing to me. In fact, when Apollo 11 landed and that mission was over, we were already working on 12 and 13, and we just went, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.\\n\\n I’ve told many people, it probably wasn’t until the 25th and even 40th anniversary, it became more and more apparent to me how historical this event really was. I knew it was historical, but how many people watched it and what it meant, since we never went back again, became more and more important in the eyes of many. Probably even the Emmy awards are based on, “Hey, look at what we did and we’ve never done it again,” and that was the story.\\n\\n You get a different perspective, as you get old and look back at what you did. At the time, it wasn’t like, “Oh, look what we did.” We were happy we were successful, but it was no more than you being successful with your interviews. You did your interviews and someone said you did a great job, and now you’re off to your next interview. That’s how we treated Apollo at the time. We didn’t have a historic perspective, and that’s probably one of the reasons that we don’t have those tapes! No one had a historic perspective. They had a perspective of, “What’s the next mission? Let’s get going.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, and we’ve heard that from other guys in Mission Control, that when it was happening they were doing their job, they were paying attention to what they were doing, they had no idea the world was celebrating." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. If I had to say I want to blame someone, I would say there should have been a total public affairs involvement to the point of saying, “Anything that has any video associated with this Apollo, we want set aside.” That’s all it would have taken. Didn’t happen. We have a lot of pictures and stuff. They—years later, even—cleaned out storage areas to make space without any perspective on what you’re throwing away. Part of our Apollo 11 tape search I spent months looking for documents that were sitting in a room down the hall from me until they threw them all out. “We don’t need those anymore.” It gave me an interesting perspective.\\n\\n I was asked to speak at one of these archiving conventions, and I never went because it seemed too complicated to me because I’d done all this searching and it didn’t work out time-wise, either. But I had a whole different perspective of what it means to be an archivist and what it means to preserve things that may be historically significant, but at the time you don’t know it. You have to take a look at what needs to be stored for periods of time and then evaluated as to its significance. Just as you’re recording people like me—I called it the “Project to Get it on Tape Before They Die Project.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s harder afterwards." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, it is harder afterwards!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Interview these guys before they die because you won’t hear it again. It’s the same as that, that if you don’t put it down or you don’t hear some of these stories, you don’t hear the information. Whether anyone listens to it again, you don’t know, but it’s there. You preserved it, and that was the key, preserving something that people can either listen to or read later that they would have never known if they hadn’t. In my mind, the tape search—as an engineer, I didn’t get involved in that stuff—but as a tape-searcher, I became involved with the National Archives and the National Records Center, and what they do and how they store things. It’s pretty fascinating. Pretty difficult, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It is fascinating. With the volume." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The volume, and Apollo, as you know, ’68, ’69 was Apollo 11, the records then were three-by-five cards. I went through thousands of three-by-five cards because they’re trying to computerize it all, but it’s manually transferring data from three-by-five cards onto computers, and so it’s not there. It’s almost impossible—you get clues and then search areas. It’s amazing. Just the little bit I did was just mind-boggling, trying to put it together and search it, and I had people helping me. It was very, very difficult to track down leads and what meant what, even on the documents we stored, it’s very cryptic what was stored. There’s no detailed description, that “This is a recording of Astronaut Deke Slayton speaking to,” you know, it’s “Apollo 12 Audio,” and maybe a code number and what date it went in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Kind of gives you an appreciation for an archivist’s job, trying to figure out where everything is. Was there anything about your career through Shuttle that you’d like to talk about, or is there any significant events?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would just say that Shuttle brought a lot more advanced television. It brought a lot of efforts at Goddard that we hadn’t done before, where we now became a key remote site for NASA TV, and a lot of Shuttle support. I was able to get Goddard TV to be the main hub to support White Sands and other sites for television support—engineering—if there were problems with launch. Shuttle also gave rise to a new area of support, which was called “external tank television,” at the Cape. After they had the [Space Shuttle] Challenger [STS-51L] explosion, they put a camera on the main tank, looking towards the wings, to look at ice or things or ice particles falling off or tiles falling off.\\n\\n We put sites in at the Cape and at Wallops Island on the East Coast, so that we could transmit during launch. It was battery-operated, and once they turn it on, if they delay launch too long, the battery can go down and you don’t get it, but it always had enough life that we were able to get the downlink from the small camera that was downlinking TV to our sites during the first three and a half to four minutes.\\n\\n Well, I take it back—I think we could go through Wallops and we went up the coast, maybe up to 10 minutes or so before we lost it, because the tank would fall off. Interestingly enough, what happens during launch is we would then have a visibility—there are other cameras they put on that aren’t downlinked live; they’re cameras that record and dumped later—I’m trying to put this together, so I’m kind of freewheeling, but you have two solid rocket boosters on the side of the main tank. These solid rocket boosters are jettisoned and come down and get recovered. They had cameras and recorders in them, so there’s video on each one of those that comes back, looking at different parts of the Shuttle during launch for damage.\\n\\n The main tank burns up, so when that video’s done, it drops off and burns up in the atmosphere, and you don’t see it again. We were able to put in the systems to take live TV for this period of time, and when it would get to, say, Wallops, where Wallops would take over the track on a launch out to the Atlantic Ocean, when that solid rocket booster would fall off, the duty of Wallops was to track the Shuttle.\\n\\n What happened was we were still seeing TV as the booster’s falling away. It’s interesting TV, but the antenna’s still looking at Shuttle, so as they get further and further apart, if we tracked the booster, we could track it for minutes and watch it fall and burn up, but we had to track the Shuttle, so we lose lock, we lose the signal because they’re splitting apart from each other.\\n\\n That was an interesting project. I remember working with some [NASA] Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama] folks, and they kept saying, “You don’t need to,” they were buying some of the hardware for this. I’m not sure how that all came to be, but Marshall was involved in hardware and they were asking me, “Why do you need two recorders and two of this and two of that?” Another site was called Ponce de León, that’s a little portable site north of the Cape, where MILA is, that would do some of our launch during a thruster where it would block MILA from seeing it because the burn of the spacecraft, we had another angle from a small Navy site.\\n\\n What was interesting to me was how TV gets developed. They were asking me why I wanted to spend all this money to buy two of everything, and I said, “Look at it this way: when we launch, when you do a TV show,” for these folks that worked in broadcast TV, “they tape things and if it doesn’t go right, they’ll tape it over and they’ll get it right. If it’s a live show, then it’s live, but they tape it for historical reasons and in case there’s an outage or something.” I said, “If there’s a real outage, they can redo the show on tape. Whatever they want to do. But when you do a launch of Shuttle, it’s one time. When it goes, it goes, and if that piece of equipment that you told me to buy, ‘don’t buy two of them,’ had a problem, then we didn’t see the tiles fall off. We didn’t see the TV. You don’t say, ‘Let’s do it over again.’ It’s gone!”\\n\\n A lot of people had trouble, that came into the program later, understanding the differences on what you have to do cost-wise, to buy all this equipment for backup, because you only get one shot at all this stuff. It’s a one-shot deal. It’s not, “Let’s redo it, it didn’t go well.” You can take this tape we’re doing and say, “Let’s go over this section again, it didn’t sound right.” But once that rocket’s gone, it’s gone, so we were living by, “It has to work when it goes up, otherwise it’s a failure and you can’t redo it—forget it.” We wanted to see anything we could see on those tapes or live." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There was a lot of the video coverage of the Shuttle, especially after [Space Shuttle] Columbia [STS-107], with the cameras so that they can inspect it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, yes, that was one thing that probably stuck out with Shuttle, was the tragedies we had were probably as meaningful as the successes we had. Especially the Challenger. Not to get in the politics of it, but we were all really upset about why we felt Challenger happened, and what was known and launched regardless of all the risks. That was a terrible thing. The Columbia, I think, just took everyone by surprise. That was a terrible thing—they both were terrible, when you find out the facts of what happened after the explosions—being spread out over land like that. I know a lot of you Houston folks had to go out there, part of teams that searched for parts. Those things stand out a lot, I think, in the minds of everyone that supports the network because it’s like our network is trying to support this vehicle with all these people in it, and bang, it’s gone. That one caught us, I think, more by surprise than the Challenger." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I would think that because you were dealing with video footage from the beginning and it had to be determined whether you could put it out there for the rest of the world to see, your office worked closely with public affairs all the way through?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What happens on Shuttle and that is anything that untowardly happens is just they lock down everything. Just lock down the room, nothing can be moved, and everything is gone over with a fine-tooth comb that might be relevant to finding out what happened. That’s pretty much a common procedure, that if there’s a shutdown due to a problem with the spacecraft, every control room is locked down to determine where the information is that we need to determine either what we need to do to fix something or what caused the tragedy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also mentioned that you worked with the closed-circuit television [CCTV] at Goddard?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, Goddard has a pretty extensive closed-circuit system. So does JSC and Marshall. I’d been working with them on the side, before I retired, kind of overseeing—not running it—what they did in closed-circuit. They have several hundred channels of video. That function of the closed-circuit TV folks here at Goddard also accomplished being the primary site for all NASA TV uplinks, and to support the tracking sites once we went to TDRSS. It was a combination of manned-flight support, onsite Goddard TV, interface to networks that we have specials, and it was interesting thing that was more like broadcast TV work than my manned-spaceflight strictly downlinked stuff was.\\n\\n I got my hand in there and it developed into quite an outfit here that if I was around and you had time, I’d take you around and show it to you. It’s an impressive outfit, and Houston has a similar one. We probably do more different things because we’re a NASA TV primary uplink with Headquarters. Closed-circuit TV, they probably do more than we do onsite, but overall, with all these things together being mission support, uplink for NASA TV, and on Center CCTV, there’s a group of 10 or 12 people that keep very busy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned you got your law degree—were you still working at NASA when you decided to do that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I don’t know—do you want to hear about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I was working on the Apollo Program, for some reason, I thought—I had a brother-in-law who’s a lawyer at the time. He still is, but he’s retiring. We used to drink beer and argue a lot, and then he would always say, “Well, I’m a lawyer, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” We’d be at some law argument. I never knew for sure why, but one day I said, “I think I’ll take the bar exam [Law School Admission Test, LSAT?] up in Baltimore [Maryland], just to see.” I took it—I don’t know why I took it—that’s the only reason I could figure, maybe it’s because I wanted to argue with him on the same grounds. I took the bar exam, and then I was able to get in to either [University of] Maryland or University of Baltimore, night school. Maryland, I had to wait a year to get in, but Baltimore had an opening right away, and it was cheaper. It was night school.\\n\\n I was working full-time at NASA, so I took a couple of courses, and I guess I liked them, so I took a couple more, and I just started taking courses. I didn’t even go there with the idea of getting a law degree; I just went there to see what it was like. Once I started, I remember I was carrying law books on airplanes to Houston. I would be there on an Apollo meeting and also studying law. People would always laugh at me because I was doing all this law work.\\n\\n I’ll never forget it because I had a kid during that time. I remember one time, I had my first law exam when my wife was due to give birth, and she insisted that I go to the law exam because she said, “I’ll be in labor eight hours down in Prince George’s [Hospital] here at Baltimore, you’ll be down here.”\\n\\n I took the law exam, I got out, had a splitting headache, I think, because I was so concerned, and I called the hospital. I wanted to know if she was still in labor, or what. I’ll never forget it because whoever answers, probably some protocol they have, they said, “Well, yes, Mrs. Nafzger gave birth.”\\n\\n I said, “How’s the baby?”\\n\\n “We can’t discuss that; you’ll have to come down here.” She just meant that “We’re not allowed to discuss it.” I took as, “What the hell happened,” and so I’m racing down there to the hospital. I remember going in the hospital and going up to the maternity ward, and walking in when some woman was breastfeeding and she’s screaming and they’re telling me to get out of there, and I said, “I want to know about my baby!” Everybody was fine, but so, I went to law school. She always told me to go, and it’s true.\\n\\n She passed away by cancer in 1984, but during that time, she had all of the work of these two kids and I’m traveling around the world and studying for law and doing all this stuff, so I thought she had the hardest job. I mean, there’s no question in my mind. She had to do more to let me do this than I was doing because I could just focus on what I was doing. Even though it was law, education, and NASA, having kids, you probably all know, it’s 24/7. She did more than her fair share.\\n\\n I kept going and I finished law school one summer and said, “Okay, I guess I’ll take a bar exam.”\\n\\n They said, “Well, you can’t, you finished too early.” They had a rule from the Court of Appeals that if you go to night school, you have to go longer because the whole idea was that, “We know you’re working so we don’t want you taking too many courses,” and they didn’t have summer school at the time, but I took summer school. They said, “You can take the bar exam now if you first petition the Court of Appeals of Maryland and have them specially allow you to take it.”\\n\\n I said, “No, I’ll just audit a course.” I took the bar exam, and of course, they only pass, like, 51 percent of the people in Maryland on the first try. I always remember that because there was a guy at Goddard that everyone thought was a raving idiot, but he passed the bar exam! When I go to take the bar exam, all the other guys say, “He passed it! You’ve got to be able to pass it or you’re an idiot!” You know? I knew Maryland only passed 51 percent. It was one of the lowest pass rates in the nation, and it’s done politically. “How many lawyers are we going to let in?” You could go up to Pennsylvania and it was 98 percent. The idea was, you just graduated an accredited law school. Why shouldn’t you be passing the bar exam?\\n\\n I took the exam, then I was in Spain supporting what was called an AIDSAT mission. This was another mission out of Spain, and it was coming due weeks and weeks after when I should hear from the bar examiners. They send you a note, it says you pass/fail, you don’t know until you hear. I told my wife, “If you hear, call my boss and he’ll call me in Spain.”\\n\\n I get a call over there one night, and I get the call at the tracking site, and he says, “Dick, this is Ray, your boss. Your wife called me and you got a letter from the bar examiners. I don’t know what to tell you, I don’t know how to tell you this.”\\n\\n I said, “I passed it, didn’t I? You would never do that to me!”\\n\\n I had passed it, and whether I passed by the skin of my teeth or not, I don’t know. I get out of law school now and I’m working at NASA full-time, I got two kids, I got a little house, I got a mortgage. I look around, just for the interest of interviewing with people—in fact, one’s a well-known Congressman now; at the time, he was just a lawyer—but I couldn’t get a starting job that would pay enough to pay the mortgage and take care of my family, so I just started doing law on my own. Divorces and stuff like that, and I did it 36 years on the side. Represented a lot of people and a lot of buildings at Goddard Space Center. I could tell you stories about people at Goddard!\\n\\n Anywhere from criminal cases to divorce and you name it. I always threatened, I said, “You know, when I die, you got to be there for the will reading, because they can’t disbar me after I reveal all this.” I did a lot of representation here at Goddard, and I took a lot of vacation time to be in court. I remarried, and every wife I’ve had has had to put up with—“We’re going on vacation?” “No, I’ve got a court case.” “Vacation?” “No, we’ve got a mission.” Yes, I guess I enjoyed working, so after 36 years of law and 43 years of NASA engineering, I said, “You know, somewhere, you got to retire because I really don’t want to be found in a chair somewhere,” you know, “He’s not moving!” I just said when Shuttle came to an end, manned-flight was going to be Russians on it, I said, “This seems like an appropriate time because I’ve done manned-flight my whole life.”\\n\\n In 2010, I said, “I’m out of here.” NASA’s a great place to work and you could work until you die. I can’t speak for everybody, but if you look at the polls of how many people like where they work, NASA’s always one of the tops, if not the top. I don’t know how it is for your job as contractors, but if you do your job and you’re responsible and don’t have a crummy boss, NASA’s pretty lenient and treats you as a professional. You do your job, and we’re happy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Exactly right. Is there anything you wanted to ask, Rebecca?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I just wanted to ask one question, and it’s about technology. All the years that you’ve worked, is there a tipping point in the technology that your field really changed, that you felt like really made a difference?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think going to digital TV was a big, significant difference. Seeing how that changed ability to handle—all the parameters of how we had to handle what was called analog data and TV changed with digital. There was a mental chasm of how you handled—when it went digital, all of a sudden, we had a lot of people that knew only digital data handling television and other things because your home TV is digital now. The final picture TV is still TV that has color and brightness and contrast and settings that are important, so it got very difficult for people to relate to television as being anything different from just getting data on the Internet.\\n\\n That was a struggle, getting them to realize we still have to do certain processing and certain things to it after it’s removed from its digital stream. It also made it easier to do things because you can use different bit rates and data rates, to use multiple cameras and multiple streams of data. Going digital was one big thing. Of course, when we went from slow-scan to sequential to broadcast. As far as technology, I think it’s mainly the transition to digital that was the biggest thing over the years, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There’s so much more now. I know with still photography, going from film to digital, the number of photos taken just grew by thousands and thousands, and so I’m assuming the TV too because it’s easier to store and everything else." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s easier to store, but to tell you the truth, that’s even an issue. When I was out at the Emmys, the Radio and Television Society asked me to be on a panel to talk about storage digital because digital formats change. It’s like saying I had an old video recorder that I can’t play back tapes—it’s the same in the digital world. If you’re going to keep something 20 or 30 years, that format that went on that disk is no longer used. They’re looking at how do we best preserve digital data, given that there’s more information? How do we preserve it where we still are capable of extracting it whenever we want to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a constant upgrade." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s a constant, yes. Every time someone comes out with a new device or a new format, that means trouble for the old formats because now you have old devices that have to be preserved. I don’t know any way around it, and there’s never going to be a universal standard for everyone in the world to use at all times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, because technology keeps going forward, no matter what." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’ve pretty well milked me for what I can [remember]. Hey, you get old, you don’t remember anything. It’s harder." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, it was good. I think we got a lot of good information, and we certainly appreciate you coming and talking to us, sharing with us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can’t say that I was excited to do it, other than I think that when people ask me—not that I was so important; I’m a little niche in a lot of things that happened. I’m sure you’ve talked to a lot of important people higher up, but when people ask you, “We want to interview you,” they’re asking because they want information that I have, and it’s almost like a duty to do it. This was pleasant, this was fine. Television interviews can be really tedious. Like that Japanese interview went five hours, and it was just difficult. I remember saying, even doing photo pictures of the Moon and stuff, the Washington Post one time took, I think, three hours to get one picture to put in the newspaper. I was standing in front of an image of the Moon, and I said, “This is tiring! I’d rather be playing golf.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’ll let you pursue that now! Thank you again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome.\\n\\n [pause]\\n\\n Are you on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, we’re on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You asked me about The Dish movie, and I remember I got a call one time and said, “Hey, have you heard about The Dish movie?”\\n\\n I said, “No.”\\n\\n They said, “Well, you got to see it—it’s a movie about Americans over in Australia for Apollo 11.”\\n\\n I said, “Well, I was over there for Apollo 11 getting prepared.” There was another fellow, Bob [Robert] Taylor, who handled antennas that went to Parkes a lot. I went and watched the movie and said, “This is what we did!” It was really about the American presence in Australia during Apollo 11 and prior to it, setting up for this antenna. A lot had to do with the Parkes site, this big, 210-foot antenna that we spoke over earlier that we had essentially rented out for the mission. The more I saw it, the more I said, “That’s exactly what we did.” They talked about the processing of the TV and all this.\\n\\n I had somehow got in contact with the producers who said, “Well, here, we’re going to send you tickets to this.” They had a big celebration for The Dish with NASA, but they didn’t bother to call me. Headquarters, they just grabbed whatever they could. They had a downtown Washington party about The Dish, and yet they didn’t contact any of us who were the subject of the movie! I thought that was kind of rotten, but not surprising.\\n\\n A lot of them don’t even know it—they wouldn’t know who was there unless someone said, “Do you know who those people were?” Or they could have asked. It was a cute movie, and there are always technical things that are manipulated to make the movie interesting, but no, nothing in that movie was irrelevant to what happened. It was a good movie, and it’s a family movie, of all things!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was, it was, it was a good feeling." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But if you were there with us after-hours, it would not be a family movie! That’s all I can tell you about Australia. It’s a fun place when we had free time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I thought it was interesting because it did explain how the Australians felt about how proud they were, that they were bringing that video through." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were so proud. One other thing about the Australians is it was like from the motherland, even though they’re Australian, they have this English Queen backing, and what we would do when we went over there, we would take Playboy magazines. In those days, Playboy was the ultimate—we didn’t call it a porn magazine, but it was an adult magazine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Gentleman’s magazine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, but what happened was you weren’t allowed to bring Playboy. When you would go into airport customs, you would clearly display this Playboy magazine innocently, like you don’t know what you’re doing. They would confiscate it and give you a big certificate that said, “By order of the Queen,” and it would go on to say, “We’ve confiscated your Playboy magazine.” They didn’t allow those in Australia. No one could sell them or buy them, so we would bring them over to get the certificate that we had the Playboy confiscated. That was a big thing to us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were proud of those certificates?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes, “By order of the Queen, I’m hereby confiscating goods that are not allowed within the country, i.e. namely one Playboy issue 14.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A badge of honor." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard L. Nafzger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, yes. The Dish was a good movie, and it was in all respects valid, as far as I’m concerned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I appreciate you adding that, thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00069", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/BoldenCF/boldencf.htm", + "original_file_name": "BoldenCF_1-6-04.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/BoldenCF/BoldenCF_1-6-04.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Charles F. Bolden", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 6 January 2004" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Sandra Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Charles F. Bolden" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is January 6th, 2004. This oral history interview is being conducted with Charles Bolden in Houston, Texas, for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. Interviewer is Sandra Johnson, assisted by Rebecca Wright and Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.\\n\\n I want to thank you again for joining us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I want to begin today by asking you, what made you decide to pursue a career in the military and in aviation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The military first, because I never wanted to be an aviator. I saw a program on television called Men Of Annapolis when I was in seventh, eighth grade; fell in love with the uniform; fell in love with the fact that they seemed to get all the good-looking girls. And then at the same time, there were other programs on television, West Point Story, which was okay. There was a program about the submarine service called Silent Service, and then one other one. But they were all Navy or naval oriented.\\n\\n So I just became infatuated with the Navy, and decided that’s what I wanted to do when I went to college. And I wanted to go to the United States Naval Academy [Annapolis, Maryland]. So, over the whole process of my junior high and high school years, everything I did was focused toward getting a congressional appointment to the Naval Academy; actually getting a Vice Presidential appointment to the Naval Academy. I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, and at the time, a congressional appointment was out of the question.\\n\\n So, I wrote my congressman, my senators; yes, my two state senators, my congressman, and the Vice President of the United States, who at the time was Lyndon B. Johnson, every year from ninth grade, saying that I wanted to go to the Naval Academy. I would get letters back, very kindly, from each of them each year, saying, “Well, it’s not until your senior year that you’re eligible, so just kind of relax and enjoy life.” I would write them back and say I just wanted them to know who I was, because I was serious about it.\\n\\n Finally, in my senior year, President [John F.] Kennedy was assassinated, in the fall of my senior year, which, the impact for me was that this relationship I had been nourishing with the Vice President over four years was out the window, because now I would have to deal with a new Vice President. My father, although he had served in World War II, his service was not such that I was eligible for a Presidential appointment. So my only hope was the Vice President, I thought.\\n\\n Nonetheless, I applied through the normal procedures. I went to my congressional representative, Albert [William] Watson back then, and my two state senators, [J.] Strom Thurmond and Olin D. Johnston, and wrote a letter to the President and said, “I know I’m not eligible for an appointment from you, but I’ve been writing for the past three years, and you told me you would help when I became a senior. And I need help, because I can’t get an appointment from my state. Is there anything you can do?”\\n\\n Never heard from him, but about a week or two later, got a knock on the door from a Navy recruiter who said that he had learned that I was interested in going to the United States Naval Academy.\\n\\n Almost simultaneously, a former federal judge by the name of Judge Bennett came to my school, and he was sent there by President Johnson, sent throughout the South, looking for minority students who were interested in going to the service academies, because they were trying to—this was 1963, actually. They were trying to find young men—no women at the time—but young men of color who were interested in going to the service academies, since there were very few, if any.\\n\\n I told him that I was very interested in going to the Naval Academy. There was another classmate of mine named Wilson Rorie, his father was a career Army officer, so he was eligible for a Presidential appointment. But he also was interested; he wanted to go to [United States Military Academy at] West Point [West Point, New York]. Then we had a third guy by the name of Corroy Ferguson, who we tried to interest in going to the [United States] Air Force [Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado], because we thought it would be great to have somebody from one class be at all three service academies. We could never convince him, so he ended up at Bowdoin [College] in [Brunswick] Maine, and Wilson and I both got appointments.\\n\\n Mine came from Congressman William [Levi] Dawson in Chicago, Illinois, and Wilson’s actually came from the President. So we went to West Point and Annapolis, respectively. The only things I knew at the time that I went to Annapolis was, I was not going to be a Marine, because I thought they were a little different, and I was not going to fly airplanes, because that was inherently dangerous. And my mom had always—I tell people, “My mother did not raise a fool.”\\n\\n So I went to the Naval Academy. My intent at the time was to become a [Navy] Frogman, what is now a SEAL [Sea-Air-Land]. When I got there, my first year was typical—bad, horrible. Plebe year is just rough. I cried all the time. I wanted to go home, and my father kept me there. Every time I’d call on the weekends, he’d say, “Stay one more week and then we’ll talk about it.” And so that’s the way I went through plebe year.\\n\\n My second year, the new superintendent became Admiral Draper [L.] Kaufman, who was the father of UDT [Underwater Demolitions Teams]. He was actually the person who had established the Underwater Demolitions Teams in the United States Navy, and Admiral Kaufman and I became at least communicative. I was on the chapel choir and some other stuff, and I was the president of my class, so I had an opportunity to meet with the Superintendent periodically.\\n\\n When he found out I was interested in UDT, he broke the news to me that I couldn’t do that out of the Naval Academy, because at the time UDT was what they call a restricted line billet, so you had to be in it as an enlisted person, and then be promoted into the officer ranks to become an officer in UDT. So, that kind of broke my heart. I had no idea what I was going to do.\\n\\n Sort of a difficult time, but I thought then about nuclear power. That kind of turned me on and off. I’d never met anybody at the Naval Academy who was a nuclear power officer that impressed me positively, so that went no way. I thought about aviation, but I really didn’t want to do that, because I hadn’t changed my mind about aviation.\\n\\n Over the course of the four years, the one person that kept coming back to me was my first company officer at the Naval Academy, who was a Marine Corps major, an infantry officer, infantry “grunt” by the name of Major John Riley Love. When it was time for me to decide where I was going my senior year at the Naval Academy, I said, “I want to be an infantry officer. I want to be like him.”\\n\\n I had no idea what that would mean. I just knew that infantry officers died real quick when they went to Vietnam. This was the height of Vietnam [War]. The Tet Offensive had occurred during my senior year, the end of my junior year, actually, and then into my senior year. And although the life expectancy of a second lieutenant at the time was expressed in months, I’ve always believed that, you know, it won’t happen to me. So I decided I wanted to be an infantry officer.\\n\\n I got into the Marine Corps and went to Quantico, Virginia, for a six-month course of study that every Marine officer undergoes, called The Basic School. Its intent is to prepare you to be a rifle platoon commander, to be an infantry officer. And then from there, everybody gets sent out to other occupational fields, but the intent is that, as you’ve heard about the Marine Corps, every Marine’s a rifleman, and so every Marine officer has to be a rifle platoon commander, or at least qualify to be one.\\n\\n So, as I was going through the basic school from July through November, December of 1968, the weather turned brutal in Quantico. It was much worse than today in Houston. It was snowy and frigid, and we had our three-day war toward the end of my time there. We were in the field. And I never have liked the cold. Although I had done very well at the basic school, I really enjoyed infantry and all that, I decided there’s no way in the world I could live like this. And so I looked for something else to do, right at the last minute.\\n\\n I had done well enough at the Naval Academy to get an aviation guarantee, or an aviation option. I was married. I had married right out of the Naval Academy, and my wife was never enamored with me going to Vietnam as an infantry officer. So she kept trying to talk me out of it. I went in to tell my company officer at the time, that I was going to give up my aviation option. He was an infantry officer and he told me I was crazy. He said, “You’re out of your mind. Most people would kill to get an aviation option and be able to go to [Naval Air Station (NAS)] Pensacola [Florida] and fly airplanes, because not very many people get an opportunity to do that. And you want to give it up.”\\n\\n I said, “That’s what I really want to do.” That was pre our three-day war. I came back in after three-day war and I said, “Colonel McElroy, I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ll take my aviation option and I’ll go to Pensacola.”\\n\\n So I went to Pensacola, against my better wishes, my better thoughts, anyway. Went through ground school; did very well. Went to [NAS] Saufley Field [Pensacola, Florida] for my very first flight, and first time I got in an airplane, a [Beechcraft] T-34 [Mentor], and went up with an instructor, it was unbelievable. It was like magic, and I knew that I wanted to fly. So I stumbled into it, to be quite honest.\\n\\n I did very well in the initial phases of flight training; did well enough to go jets. Went through [NAS] Meridian, Mississippi, back to Pensacola for carrier qualifications in gunnery, and then to [NAS] Kingsville, Texas, where I got my wings in the spring of 1970.\\n\\n Again, Marines kept having an influence on me, even through flight school, and one of my primary flight instructors in Kingsville was a test pilot, and we talked about it all the time; guy by the name of Pete Field, by the way. He eventually became the Commander of the Marine [Boeing] F-18 [Hornet] Test Detachment at [NAS] Patuxent River, Maryland, when we decided that we were going to purchase the F-18 and go through its development. Ironically, one of my other instructors was a guy who ended up being a general officer in the Marine Corps, and whose son I happened to have in my last command. So it’s funny how things happen to you in life.\\n\\n But anyway, I decided I wanted to fly A-6s, the A-6 Intruder. At that time you went to [NAS] Cherry Point, North Carolina, for training. So I was dispatched from Kingsville, Texas, after I got my wings, to Cherry Point, went through the initial training in the A-6, and then to my first squadron, which was an A-6 squadron stationed at Cherry Point. Stayed there for a couple of years, and then finally got sent to Vietnam.\\n\\n During those days, everybody went on individual orders. You didn’t go as a unit, the way we do today. So I reported to my squadron that at the time had come out of Vietnam. President [Richard M.] Nixon was in office. With everything going the way it was going in Vietnam, he had elected to remove all ground forces, all U.S. ground forces, from Vietnam, and consequently, took the aviation forces that were there and brought them back to different places. But then my squadron was sent right back into Thailand, to continue support for the South Vietnamese, but from outside of Vietnam, so it would look like we weren’t there.\\n\\n So, I got orders to Iwakuni, Japan. I was on my way, and when I got there I called my wife to let her know I was there. She said, “Oh, are you going to have to go to Thailand?”\\n\\n And I said, “Why would I be going to Thailand?”\\n\\n She said, “Well, Time,” or Newsweek, “just had an article about this secret Marine Corps base in the middle of Thailand, that President Nixon has really put aviation units back in there.”\\n\\n And sure enough, I checked in and they said, “Don’t unpack. You’re going to Thailand.” So I went to a place called Nam Phong, Thailand, in the north central portion of the country, about sixty kilometers south of Vientiane, Laos, the capital of Laos. I spent a year there in an\\n\\n A-6 squadron, flying what turned out to be mostly night single-plane missions into North and South Vietnam, and Laos and Cambodia, and then came back from there.\\n\\n Went back to the West Coast to recruit for two years. Still flew, sort of, in what was called the Flight Proficiency Program, so flew a [North American] T-28 [Trojan], a single-engine prop, big single-engine prop, and then finally got assigned down to El Toro, to the Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, and went back into the A-6 community, and stayed there for another three years.\\n\\n I never got out of my mind the fact that I wanted to be a test pilot. And all along, I had been applying to [U.S. Naval] Test Pilot School, and every year the Marine Corps would come back and say, “Forget it. No.” And I started applying long before I even had the requisite flight time. I just wanted to go. It was sort of like my desire to go to the Naval Academy. I wanted people to know who I was, so that when I became eligible, people would be acquainted.\\n\\n About the sixth or seventh year of applying to Test Pilot School, I decided that I’d try it one more time. A couple of things had happened in my life that turned out to be fortuitous. When I got to recruiting duty in Los Angeles [California], I had learned about a master’s degree program that the University of Southern California [USC, Los Angeles, California] had, called a master’s in systems management. It was sort of a hybrid MBA. [Master of Business Administration] and engineering master’s degree. I enrolled in that and I got my degree in 1977 from USC in systems management.\\n\\n That was also the year that I decided I was going to make my last pitch for Test Pilot School. When my application went in this time, I had a master’s degree. And lo and behold, the Marine Corps came back and said, “Okay, we give. You got it. You can go.” And they gave me orders to Patuxent River, Maryland. So I packed up with my wife and two babies at the time—well, one small child and a baby—and we moved to Patuxent River, Maryland, and I went through the Navy’s Test Pilot School there.\\n\\n Just before I left I’d learned that NASA was accepting applications for the astronaut program, something I never had any interest in. I knew what astronauts were, but again, because I had grown up in South Carolina and I had seen the things that I had seen, I knew who astronauts were, I knew what they did, but not in my wildest imagination could somebody like me become an astronaut, because they were all white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, all test pilots, all about five-feet-ten. They all looked alike. And I was none of those.\\n\\n So I picked up an application, but I didn’t fill it out. I didn’t send it in. I said, you know, why waste my time and the Marine Corps’ time? So I went to Pax River, did my test pilot training, became a test pilot, and I was assigned there when NASA selected the first group of Space Shuttle astronauts in 1978. That was a very diverse group of thirty-five people. It included [Ronald E.] Ron McNair, Sally [K.] Ride, [Guion S.]Guy Bluford, [Jr.], [Frederick D.] Fred Gregory.\\n\\n And in the spring of my first year as a test pilot, many of them came back to Pax River, since most of the Navy guys were Patuxent River graduates, and they came back for the Test Pilot School reunion. I met a lot of them. I met [Robert L.] Hoot Gibson, Ron McNair, Guy Bluford, Fred Gregory, and we talked a little bit about their experiences their first year down here. And I got interested and said, you know, “Probably won’t be selected, but I’ll never know if I don’t apply.”\\n\\n So I put an application in through the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps nominated me to NASA for the space program, and then I was fortunate enough to be invited to come to Houston in the winter of 1980. I came down and went through the interview process, went back home and told my wife it was awesome, that no way, it’s just not going to happen.\\n\\n And months passed. I think I interviewed in February, and on the 31st of May, my wife’s birthday in 1980, I was on my way out to fly a test-op and got a phone call from Mr. [George W. S.] Abbey, asking me if I was still interested in being an astronaut.\\n\\n I said, “Sure.” I thought it was a joke, really.\\n\\n And he said, “No, you’ve been selected to be in this group of astronauts.” There were nineteen of us, and two Europeans, Claude Nicollier and Ulf Merbold from Holland. So he said, “If you can be here the first of July, we’d like for you to join this class and start training.”\\n\\n So, packed up my family and we moved to Houston, and that was the beginning of my fourteen years in the Astronaut Office. Initially, I did the same thing as everybody else. You go through the astronaut candidacy for—first six months is all classroom work, and then you get assigned to a senior astronaut, somebody who’s got some experience, and they kind of take you under their wing and show you around.\\n\\n My first officemates, as a matter of fact, were [Joseph P.] Joe Allen and [William E.] Bill Thornton. The two of them, I could not have asked for better officemates, because they were two guys who had really been through the wringer here. They had come down in the Apollo era, had survived without flying, had been through Skylab. Bill Thornton had at least had an opportunity to participate as a surrogate for the Skylab astronauts in—they had a ground test program [Skylab Medical Experiments Altitude Test (SMEAT)], long-duration program that went on, and Bill at least was in that, so he could tell me about that. Joe Allen told me about the things that he had done.\\n\\n And the good thing was, neither of them were military. Joe was a physicist and Bill Thornton was a doctor. So I got an opportunity to live with two non-military guys and get their perspective on life as an astronaut. They helped me kind of keep myself balanced, and also as it turned out over the years, helped me keep from being discouraged, because nobody was being assigned to fly. We had not flown yet. We had not flown Shuttle yet.\\n\\n And so the only people going to the simulator were John [W.] Young and [Robert L.] Bob Crippen. Now, every once in a while, [Thomas Kenneth] T.K. Mattingly [II] and [Henry W.] Hank Hartsfield [Jr.] would go, or Joe [Henry] Engle and [Richard H.] Dick Truly, because they were the first three crews that had been named, and then, eventually, [Robert F.] Bob Overmyer and Jack [R.] Lousma. So, other than those eight guys, nobody went close to the Shuttle Mission Simulator, the SMS. The rest of us just kind of drooled and, you walked by the building; you didn’t even go in.\\n\\n Some guys were—guys and girls—were assigned to support them. I was fortunate in that my very first assignment became tile repair, because at the time, we had flown Columbia from its production facility in Palmdale [California] to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], and on the way over it just shed tile. Stuff just dropped off in flight. So we became very, very concerned about tile damage and tile loss and everything. So we put together a tiger team, tile repair tiger team, which is, in hindsight, considering what happened to Columbia, you go, “Okay. What didn’t we do right?” Or, “What didn’t we learn?” And there are very important lessons we didn’t learn.\\n\\n But that was my first job. I worked for a fellow named [William B.] Bill Lenoir, Dr. Bill Lenoir, another physicist. And Sally Ride, Anna [L.] Fisher, John [M.] Fabian, [William F.] Bill Fisher, a number of us were in the tile repair tiger team. We traveled all over the country. We went to Denver, Colorado. The Air Force and Martin Marietta [Corporation] had a simulator there called the Space Operation Simulator, that you could actually get dressed in the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, EMU, the spacesuit, and you could get on this arm, and it simulated your doing a spacewalk.\\n\\n So we went through all the scenarios we could imagine for having to repair tiles on the Shuttle. While we were doing that, developing the tactics, techniques and procedures, if you will, there was another part of the team, the materials sciences guys, who were trying to develop the material that we would use to actually repair the tile. Ideally, what we wanted was something that would be like a spray gun or a—shucks, what do you call it—something that you could just squirt and it would go into place, and then you could use a trowel and smooth it out, and you could fly home.\\n\\n Everything seemed to be going very well initially, but every time we took whatever material was developed into vacuum, it just didn’t work. It would do something called outgassing. The gases in the material would just start to bubble out and cause it to crack and pop. And we became seriously concerned that the repair material would probably do as much damage or more, than we had by a missing tile.\\n\\n We had pretty much determined, or convinced ourselves, that the zipper effect that everybody was afraid of, was not going to happen. The initial problems with the tile were determined to be just inadequate adhesive, so they went back to the drawing board and developed an adhesive that would work very well, and we became satisfied that that would not be a significant problem. But there was still always the remote possibility that you would damage or lose a tile.\\n\\n We worked on this for almost right up until the first flight of Columbia, to no avail. We became discouraged with the procedures, because, again, our most likely prospect was that we’d have damage to the underside of the vehicle. You’d have to put a spacewalk crewman outside, under the vehicle where you could not see them. At the time, NASA was not at all enamored by that. In fact, they would not accept that risk.\\n\\n We didn’t have, at the time, again, the Remote Manipulator System. While we could reach around under the nose of the vehicle, we couldn’t get up under the wing to see anything. So it kind of went out the window. Eventually, we walked in to management and under the recommendation from the Astronaut Office, we said, “We’re throwing away good money after bad. There are too many reasons not to do this. And also, we have faith that the tile will work,” which turned out to be good. It turned out to be a good decision at the time.\\n\\n Interestingly, never in my memory—and I’ve been through my notebooks and everything—never did we talk about the reusable carbon-carbon, the RCC, the leading edge of the wing, leading edge of the tail, and the nose cap itself. Nobody ever considered any damage to that because we all thought that it was impenetrable. In fact, it was not until the loss of Columbia that I learned how thin it was. I grew up in the space program. I spent fourteen years in the space program flying, thinking that I had this huge mass that was about five or six inches thick on the leading edge of the wing. And, to find after Columbia that it was fractions of an inch thick, and that it wasn’t as strong as the Fiberglas on your [Chevrolets] Corvette, that was an eye-opener, and I think for all of us.\\n\\n So, I always say, for all the Monday morning quarterbacks, and for everybody who wants to beat us about the head and shoulders for what we didn’t do, the best minds that I know of, in and outside of NASA, never envisioned that as a failure mode. And if they did, they sure didn’t say anything about it, because we never looked at that. But that’s neither here nor there.\\n\\n So that was my first job. After we gave up on that, my second job was, I was assigned to T.K. Mattingly of Apollo 13 fame, because he didn’t fly. But T.K. had the systems group in the Astronaut Office, and my assignment became Auxiliary Power Units [APU]. So I was to go off and become the duty expert for APUs. Everybody in the office had some field or some area that was their field of expertise. Hoot was a main engine guy. I was an APU guy. Somebody else had something.\\n\\n So I was sent off to learn everything you could possibly learn about Auxiliary Power Units, and I tried. It seemed like every time I came back with an answer for T.K., then I got three more questions. And I learned after a couple of years of working for him that, just slow down your answer, and that would slow down the questions. But if you went back in and answered it right away, wanting to impress him, then you were in trouble, because he kept a computer printout long before people used computers for data filing and all that kind of stuff. But he was way ahead of his time, and he would pull out this long computer sheet with all the questions that you had been asked to find out for him.\\n\\n So I worked APUs for a long time, and then in conjunction with that, started working autoland [automatic landing system] in time for STS-3. The engineering community was really trying to force us to demonstrate an automatic landing of the Shuttle, something that those of us in the office did not want to do, especially the pilots, because we recognized the fact that although many of us had flown automatic-landing aircraft before; some of them had even—I had not, but some people had even flown on autoland to a carrier, to an aircraft carrier, and made an arrested landing.\\n\\n So, the fact that it could be done was not a question. The question was, did we want to do that on a powerless flying machine. The Shuttle is not an airplane. We had to keep trying to remind the engineers that it was a glider, and we knew of no gliders that utilized an automatic-landing capability. So that became my next project.\\n\\n I worked with aircraft manufacturers, airlines from all around the world, trying to determine how they went about decisions to implement autoland; how they went about training; how they went about the decision in the cockpit whether or not to use autoland when the weather got bad. And in every case, it turned out they had multiply redundant systems. They had not only multiple engines on the airplane, but they had air speed indicators, multiple air speed indicators. In the Shuttle, we don’t even use air speed. We use energy and energy management.\\n\\n So the things that commercial airplanes and the Navy use for autoland just didn’t exist in the Shuttle Program. And so we tried to talk everybody out of it, but for STS-3 it was determined that, “Okay, we hear you, but we’re going to demonstrate it. And we won’t go to touchdown, but we’re going to go to 500 feet.”\\n\\n So John [E.] Blaha and I—John was working on the Heads-Up Display, HUD, under the leadership of [S. David] Dave Griggs at the time. John Blaha and I would go out to [NASA Ames Research Center] Moffett Field [California] and fly the simulator out there, he primarily looking at the HUD, and I primarily looking at autoland with the engineering community. So we developed the procedures that we would use for autoland for STS-3, how they would manually take over at the very last second, to go ahead and land the vehicle.\\n\\n And through everything that we did, we came back in and we recommended, “This is not a good thing to do. We should not do this. And if we’re going to do it, we should really only take it down to just under—.” And I know I’m getting way into the weeds here, but, “We should not allow autoland to fly the vehicle through the final flare,” because now you’re asking a person who’s been in space, their physical gains, their mental gains, their balance, everything’s not there, and you want them to take over in this dynamic mode of flight and land the vehicle safely. Not a smart thing to do.\\n\\n And everything that we had seen at Ames in the simulator, when we were in complete control of our faculties, told us you didn’t want to do that. But the decision was made that, “We really need to demonstrate this, so we’re going to do it, and we’re only going to go to 500 feet anyway.”\\n\\n And we said, “That’s the point. You’re going to go to 500 feet.” So anyway, we did it. At the time I was actually, for the flight I was working with ABC Radio [Networks]. Back then, the Astronaut Office put astronauts with all of the major networks, both television and radio, so that they would have somebody who’d be able to kind of walk them through from beginning to end, the pre-launch preparations, the launch, the orbit stuff, and then the reentry. So you were teamed with somebody. I was teamed with ABC Radio. So, kind of travel around the country with them from launch to landing and recovery.\\n\\n My team went to the Cape for STS-3. We got through the launch and everything, and then it came time for them to land. We were at the Cape, and the weather turned bad. They were actually supposed to come into the Kennedy Space Center [Florida] the first time. Weather was bad at Kennedy, so it was decided that they were going to land at Edwards [Air Force Base, Edwards, California], especially since they were going to do autoland.\\n\\n So we got in an airplane, headed out west, and somewhere between Orlando, Florida, and Houston, they determined that the weather at Edwards was not going to be good for a couple of days, and they were going to land at White Sands [Northrup Strip, White Sands Missile Range, later renamed White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico]. So we landed at Houston. We were supposed to just land in Houston, change flights, and keep going. So they took us off the airplane and put us on a flight to El Paso [Texas], and then subsequently out to White Sands.\\n\\n We got up there and it was a horrible dust storm. I don’t know if you’ve ever been out there, but it’s gypsum, and it’s very fine, like talcum powder. And this dust storm was unlike anything I’d ever seen. So they waved off the first day at White Sands; didn’t land. Everything inside was covered with plastic. The windows were sealed with plastic; didn’t make any difference. When we got inside the ABC trailer, everything was covered with gypsum. So that was a hint that this was not a good place to land the Shuttle.\\n\\n But anyway, second attempt, second day we managed to bring them in, and we brought them into White Sands. Everything seemed to be going well until just seconds before touchdown, when all of a sudden we saw the vehicle kind of pitch up like this [gestures] and then [vocalizes sound] kind of hard nose touchdown and everything. We found out that just as we had thought, just as we had feared, Jack Lousma had trained to do—just move the stick in both the vertical and the side axis, so, pitch and roll, to disengage the autopilot.\\n\\n Well, you need to move it an appreciable amount. We didn’t realize that. Or you could just punch two buttons on the glare shield. The way that he had trained was just to do a manual download with a stick. When he did that, he disengaged the roll axis on the Shuttle, but he didn’t disengage the pitch axis. So the computer was still flying the pitch, although he was flying the roll.\\n\\n And when he realized what—in fact, I think, as the debrief showed—[C.] Gordon Fullerton just happened to look at the eyebrow lights, and he noticed that he was still in auto and pitch. He told Jack, and so Jack just kind of really pulled back on the stick, and it caused the vehicle to pitch up. Then he kind of caught it and put it back down, and we saved the vehicle; he saved the vehicle. But that was my experience with autoland.\\n\\n We ended up with the vehicle out there for several days. That was Columbia. I flew it several flights later, on my first flight, and when we got on orbit there was still gypsum coming out of everything. You know, they thought they had cleaned it, but I think probably some of the debris from Columbia that we gathered probably had gypsum in it. It was just unreal what it had done. But, so that was my very, very, very, very, very early time in the Space Shuttle Program.\\n\\n It was 1984 that I was finally assigned to a crew. I was assigned to STS-51L, which turned out to be the teacher-in-space flight. My commander was going to be Hoot Gibson. I was the pilot. [Steven A.] Steve Hawley, Franklin [R.] Chang-Diaz, and [George D.] Pinky Nelson were the mission specialists. And as we started training, then we picked up [S.] Christa McAuliffe and [Gregory B.] Greg Jarvis as our payload specialists.\\n\\n We trained with them for a little while, and then the decision was made—we had flown Jake Garn, Senator Jake Garn, as the first member of Congress to fly in space. And so [C. W.] Bill Nelson, who was the Chairman of the Space Science and Technology Subcommittee in the [U. S.] House [of Representatives], had accepted the invitation from the NASA Administrator to fly, and so they decided he was going to fly. Mr. Abbey, in his infinite wisdom, decided that Hoot Gibson and his crew of merry men could better handle the congressman than most other people out there, so he switched us, and we became STS-61C, with Congressman Nelson. And [Francis R.] Dick Scobee and his crew picked up Christa and Greg Jarvis about six months prior to flight.\\n\\n So we brought Bill Nelson down from D.C. and he trained with us. We picked up a fellow by the name of [Robert J.] Bob Cenker, who was an engineer with RCA. We actually flew the prototype for a—at the time it was highly classified. It turned out it—I was operating it and I didn’t even know what it was, other than the fact that it was an infrared imaging camera. They would let me know that. But Bob Cenker, who was the RCA engineer, knew everything, and he was working this thing with the Air Force. But it was classified enough that I couldn’t know about it, so I just operated it.\\n\\n So we flew Bob to be our technical advisor on the camera, and we flew Bill to be our congressional representative. And contrary to what people will tell you, who don’t know about the flight, and don’t know about the crew, and don’t know Bill Nelson, I thought he did very well. He actually left his congressional position to live here, for the most part. He did not miss a vote, to my knowledge, because he would get on an airplane and fly back to [Washington] D.C. for critical votes. And while he did not have the technical background to fly, he worked really, really hard to understand what was going on. And he became the brunt of a lot of jokes because he was a lawyer who was designated to fly on the Shuttle.\\n\\n Jake Garn was great. Jake Garn was the ideal candidate to do it, because he was a veteran Navy combat pilot who had more flight time than anybody in the Astronaut Office. Jake had 17,000 hours of flight time flying transports, when he flew in space. So we all grew to accept him being there. I don’t think most people in the Astronaut Office ever grew to accept Bill Nelson, but I did. I thought he was great. I really liked his family, and I liked him as an individual, and still do. And I consider him a friend.\\n\\n But anyway, we trained for the last six months of the flight. Originally, we were scheduled to fly—when we were [STS] 51L, we were scheduled to fly in early 1985. When we got switched to [STS] 61C, we were scheduled to fly in June of ’85. That kind of went by the wayside because flights started getting delayed for a variety of reasons.\\n\\n We ended up slipping to December of ’85, and there was even talk, because there was really a lot of pressure to get the teacher-in-space flown—there was even talk that if we didn’t get off in December, that we would switch positions; that they would go ahead and fly 51L so that we could get that mission accomplished.\\n\\n And there were rumors, you know, because the State of the Union address was coming up and all this kind of stuff, and you still hear that. But anyway, we went down to the Cape in December. Our first attempt to launch, I think, was the 8th of December or something like that. I can’t remember.\\n\\n We got down to fourteen seconds, and we were happy as clams, thinking, “We’re going to go now.” And all of a sudden everything just stopped, and the countdown clock went back to—I guess it goes back to T-minus nine or something, and just kind of ticked there.\\n\\n We had no idea what had happened, and the ground had no idea what had happened, to be quite honest. As they started looking at the data, they had an indication that we had a problem with the right-hand solid rocket booster, with the hydraulic power unit, which is really an APU. So here I was. I mean, you know, I’m back to, “Gee, my goodness. My APU has bitten me.” And as it turned out, when we finally got out of the vehicle and they de-tanked and went in, they determined that there wasn’t really a problem, but it took them several days to find that it was a card. It was a computer problem, not a physical problem with the hydraulic power unit at all, and it probably would have functioned perfectly normally, and we’d have had a great flight.\\n\\n But anyway, we got so close to the Christmas holidays that it was decided that we would wait, and we’d come back after the holidays and try it again. So we went back down to the Cape for a January 3rd launch attempt. That day we got down to thirty-one seconds and the clock stopped. They could not get a valve in the engine, in the propulsion system, the main engine system, to work. I can’t remember whether it was an oxidizer valve or a fuel valve. It doesn’t make any difference. It was a valve. The ground thought they could make it work right, but they decided, “No, we’d better not do that. We’d better go ahead and check it out and see what’s going on.”\\n\\n So that time they went in and found out that—good decision, because they probably could have gotten it to work right, but it just wouldn’t have worked the rest of the way up, or something like that. So they fixed whatever the problem was.\\n\\n We came back; don’t remember the date. But came back out, got in, and that time we got down to thirty-one seconds, and one more time things weren’t right. So we got out, and it was another main engine valve. This time they found it. There had actually been a probe, a temperature probe that in the de-fueling, they had broken the temperature probe off, and it had lodged inside the valve, keeping the valve from closing fully. So that would have been a bad day. That would have been a catastrophic day, because the engine would have exploded had we launched.\\n\\n They got the valve changed out, got the probe out, a new probe put in. We went back, got in the vehicle, and this day we stayed out there for hours. We went down to thirty-one seconds and they went into a hold for weather, and it was the worst thunderstorm I’d ever been in. We were really not happy about being there, because you could hear the lightning. You could hear stuff crackling in the headset. You know, you’re sitting out there on the top of two million pounds of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and two solid rocket boosters, and they told you about this umbrella that’s over the pad, that keeps lightning from getting down there, but we had seen lightning actually hit the lightning-arrester system on STS-8, which was right there on the launch pad. So none of us were enamored with being out there, and we started talking about the fact that we really ought not be out here.\\n\\n And after several hours, they decided to scrub, and we got out and came back. We were getting loose. We were starting to—I mean, as a crew, we were really starting to relax, though, believe it or not.\\n\\n And so we went out for our fifth attempt. Steve Hawley had a mask on and some other stuff. I forgot what we did, but we did all kinds of crazy stuff, fully expecting that we wouldn’t launch, because I think the weatherman had given us a less than 50 percent chance that the winds were going to be good or something. So we went out and we were about as loose as you could be that morning. And they went through the countdown, came out of the holds and nothing happened. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six.”\\n\\n And we looked at each other and went, “Holy—we’re really going to go. We’d better get ready.” And [makes sounds indicating takeoff] the vehicle started shaking and stuff, and we were gone. Had an alarm go off within seconds after lifting off. I looked down at what I could see, with everything shaking and vibrating, and we had an indication that we had a helium leak in the—I think it was the right-hand main engine. That was a bad day, because had it been true, it was going to be a bad day.\\n\\n Bill Nelson writes about this in his book, Mission, which is about his space flight. And contrary to his belief, I didn’t save his life. To this day he thinks that Charlie Bolden saved the crew and Columbia, and I didn’t. We didn’t have a problem. We didn’t have a real problem. We had a problem, but it was an instrumentation problem. So we got an indication that we had a helium leak, and I told Hoot. Hoot looked. We called the ground and said, “Hey, we think we’ve got a helium leak. We’re going to work the procedure.”\\n\\n The ground didn’t see anything. It had happened; it was one of these, again, a card in one of the many computers on the Shuttle, in what’s called a multiplexer/demultiplexer, an MDM. The card had glitched and had caused it to look like a helium leak, so we started working the procedure. Tried to isolate the first system, with no luck. Still looked like it had a leak. Tried to isolate the second system; no luck. And then all of a sudden I looked back down and it looked like we were making helium, so I knew that couldn’t be true, because you don’t do that. So I told Hoot. I said, “Hey, I think we’ve got a false indication here. I think we’ve got a sensor problem.”\\n\\n And Hoot took a look. He said, “I think you’re right.”\\n\\n So once again, we called the ground. We said, “Hey, guys.” And this is all in the first few seconds. It’s inside a minute after we lifted off, and we worked this procedure and talked and all this stuff. So we called the ground. We said, “Hey, we don’t think we have a problem. We think it’s instrumentation. We’re now seeing the engine make helium. We know that can’t be true.”\\n\\n The ground called back and said, “Hey, we don’t see anything. Press. Go ahead and reconfigure everything back to normal.” So I reconfigured the system back to its normal condition, and we went on uphill. And, you know, eight and a half minutes you’re in space, so it went by really fast, that one did.\\n\\n And we got on orbit and it was awesome. It was unlike anything I’d expected. Technically, we were fully qualified, fully ready, and everything. Emotionally, I wasn’t even close. I started crying. Not bawling or anything, but just kind of tears rolling down my cheek when I looked out the window and saw the continent of Africa coming up. It looked like a big island. Just awesome, unlike anything I’d ever imagined.\\n\\n We had a great flight. Some of the stuff—we used to call ourselves, we were the end-of-year-clearance flight, because we had picked up just tons of payload, science payloads that [NASA] Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama] had been trying to fly for years, and some of the Spacelab experiments and stuff that they couldn’t get flown. So we had Congressman Nelson and every experiment known to man that they couldn’t get in. There was nothing spectacular about our mission. It was almost like a year-end-clearance sale.\\n\\n So we finally launched on the 12th of January, flew for a grand and glorious seven days. Because they were trying to get Challenger off with a teacher in space, then they decided they would cut our flight short. So instead of going the scheduled seven days, they decided that we would be a four-day flight. They’d bring us back early so that they could go right into the flow for Challenger.\\n\\n Everything worked except God. God didn’t cooperate. We were scheduled to land at the Kennedy Space Center. I think we were going to be the first landing there, but that may not be true. But our flight was scheduled to land at Kennedy. We tried the first couple of days with no luck. Kennedy had bad weather for two days going, so the program decided, “Okay. Let’s go to Edwards.”\\n\\n The first attempt at Edwards was waved off because the weather there was bad. And finally, on our fifth attempted landing—so it was five attempts to launch, and then five attempts to land—in the middle of the night on January 18th, we landed at Edwards Air Force Base, which was interesting because with a daytime scheduled landing, you would have thought that we wouldn’t have been ready for that. And Hoot, in his infinite wisdom, had decided that half of our landing training was going to be nighttime, because you needed to be prepared for anything. And so we were as ready for a night landing as we could have been for anything.\\n\\n It was uneventful, other than the fact that it really upset Congressman Nelson, because he really had these visions of landing in Florida and taking a Florida orange or something. And boy, the crew that picked us up was unmerciful, because they came out with a big—it wasn’t a bushel basket. It was a peck basket of California oranges and grapefruits. And even having come from space, he was just not in a good mood. So that was a joke that he really did not appreciate.\\n\\n But that was the end of my first flight, and we were in heaven. We were celebrating as much as anybody could celebrate. Next to the last day of our debriefs, we took a break to go watch Challenger launch, and the weather was really bad at the Cape, so they didn’t launch that day. So we went back in and finished our debrief.\\n\\n And then the next day we kind of finished up real quick, because we were done, for all intents and purposes. We sat in the Astronaut Office, in the conference room with everybody else, to watch Challenger. Liftoff seemed—nobody was comfortable because of all the ice on the launch pad and everything. I don’t think there were many of us who felt we should be flying that day, but what the heck. Everybody said, “Let’s go fly.” And so we went and flew.\\n\\n The launch went without a hiccup, and then about 73 seconds into the flight—just this awful explosion, at least that’s what it looked like. And most of us, at least in my case, I really thought it was a premature separation of the solid rocket boosters or something. So, in my case, I just kept thinking we’d see the vehicle fly out of this mist, and they’d do a return to launch site abort, which everybody knew you do not want to do, because we don’t even know if that’s going to work. But we were looking for something good to come out of this. And nothing came out except these two solid rocket boosters going their own way.\\n\\n So it took a while, but it finally sunk in that we had really lost the vehicle and crew. We were just all stunned, just didn’t know what to do. The good thing was that by the end of the day we knew what had happened. We knew what had caused the accident. We didn’t know the details, but the launch photography showed us the puff of smoke coming out of the joint on the right-hand solid rocket booster. And the fact that they had argued about this the night before meant that there were people from [Morton] Thiokol [Inc.] who could say, “Let me tell you what happened. This is what we predicted would happen.”\\n\\n So, because we knew what had happened, we were able to come back in the next day and really get started in earnest, in getting back flying. I don’t think there were many of us who didn’t want to just turn around and start flying again. I know there were some who were diametrically opposed to the way I felt, but at the time I felt we should go ahead, knowing what we knew, find a way to repair the problem that we had, but keep flying. Pick and choose the time you fly. Don’t fly when the weather’s cold like that, since we knew that it was an O-ring that had caused the problem, and we knew that it was temperature-related. So I felt we should go ahead and fly as quickly as we could. Turned out quickly was not quick at all; it was two and a half years.\\n\\n But anyway, we went through that period of time, post-Challenger. I was moved over to the Safety Office to become the Chief of the Safety Office at the Johnson Space Center, because just as after Columbia, the safety community just was beat on unmercifully. They were blamed for the accident and blamed for not speaking up, and blamed for this and blamed for that. So it was felt that—I’m not sure what it was felt I could do in the Safety Office, but I went over and took over there.\\n\\n We did some reorganization and brought some operational people in to go along with the safety professionals who were there. [Charles S.] Charlie Harlan was the Director of SR & QA [Safety, Reliability, and Quality Assurance Office] here at the time, and he did a tremendous job of just trying to get that organization regrouped and everything. So I worked there for a year during the recovery.\\n\\n And then we were relatively on track to go fly, and then you had to go through the political part of return to flight. And that proved to be forever, which is a good lesson for people who watch what’s going on today. I tell people, “Anybody who thinks we’re going to fly next fall is crazy.” I don’t think there’s any—not a snowball’s chance in hell that we’re going to fly prior to the elections, which is going to put us into the winter. And we’re not going to do that because of our fears, and because we’ve got to go to station, and because it’s got to be daytime, then the number of launch opportunities you have are just so small. So it’ll probably be the spring of 2005 before we fly again, is my prediction.\\n\\n Anyway, we worked really, really hard to get back. Just prior to my flying my first flight, I had been assigned—I mean, it was awesome, because I had been notified that I was going to fly the Hubble Space Telescope deploy mission. Didn’t cause any—I was elated. It was unbelievable, not for the reason you would think. I was elated because I was going to fly Hubble, but the big reason I was elated was because I was going to be John Young’s pilot, so I was going to get an opportunity to fly with the legendary John Young. And that was just mind-boggling. So I got really excited.\\n\\n After the accident, while we continued to train, the decision was made that we were just going to put everything on hold. We broke up most of the crews. For the most part, the nucleus of the Hubble mission stayed together, but the decision was made that John was not going to fly. He was replaced with Loren [J.] Shriver, who ended up being the commander for the mission.\\n\\n So, long story short, I ended up coming back again in 1990, after we started flying again, and flew the Hubble Space Telescope deploy mission aboard Discovery, with Loren Shriver, Steve Hawley, [Kathryn D.] Kathy Sullivan, and Bruce McCandless [II]. And that in itself was another very interesting story, and preparation and expecting the unexpected, and having the unexpected happen, because could not have had two people—I think the three people at JSC [Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas], anyway, who had the most extensive knowledge of Hubble, everything, its inner workings, everything about it, were Bruce McCandless, Kathy Sullivan, and Story Musgrave, because they had been with that program, that project, from its very inception, so they knew everything to be known.\\n\\n I was privileged to have an opportunity to fly with Bruce and Kathy, so I felt very good, because I had the two Hubble experts on my crew, and they were our spacewalk crewmembers. They were our EVA [extravehicular activity] crewmembers. Bruce had flown the first flight with a man-maneuvering unit. Kathy had become America’s first woman to do a space walk. Very competent and capable people, very knowledgeable on the Telescope. And so it was fun to get ready to go fly with them.\\n\\n We finally did fly in 1990, and it was ironic because our very last integrated simulation—and the way we do things here is that the crew trains for about six months, generic training, and that’s intended for your benefit. You go into the simulator and you just do stuff by yourself with your training team. It’s meant to bring up your knowledge, or refresh your knowledge in some cases, of the Orbiter and its systems, and just to get you working together as a crew. And then the final six months of that last year, you start doing what’s called integrated training. That’s where you bring in the Mission Control Center and the flight controllers.\\n\\n And then the crew becomes secondary. They could really care less about the crew. You’re just there. You’re the training tools. You’re the—whatever they call it—training aid for the Flight Control Center, because everybody recognizes that in Shuttle, if the Flight Control Team is doing their job, if they are on top of things, nothing goes wrong, for the most part. That’s where they see things days ahead, usually, and they need to be sharp. So the last six months, you really focus on the Flight Control Team, and you have a team of people who do nothing but dream up diabolical things.\\n\\n I always tell people, it’s catastrophic training, getting ready to go fly in space. You would love to get in the simulator and have everything go right. Never happens. The training team’s life is designed to make you miserable all through training, but prepare you for everything that can go wrong. And they generally do. They do a superb job of imagining every conceivable thing that can go wrong, and exposing it to you at least once.\\n\\n Ironically, our very last integrated simulation session, the failure mode was a failure of a solar array to deploy on Hubble, and it was a failure that went to the point that we could not solve it from the ground, and we had to send Bruce and Kathy out to do a spacewalk and manually wind the solar array out. While it would work and we knew we were very confident it would work, it would spell disaster for the Telescope, because once you did that, it took it out of its automatic mode and it would no longer be able to take care of itself. It was sort of like taking a baby from the womb, putting it on a respirator, and putting it in a position where the rest of its life it would need something. And that was what that would have meant for Hubble, had we had to unwind it, you know, until you send another crew up and put on another set of solar arrays and reset the clock.\\n\\n But we had been to Bristol, England. The crew had gone over, where British Aerospace designed and built the solar array. So we went over there and we actually—they had this water table. I mean, it was a huge long thing that was filled with water, and the solar array, the actual flight unit, they could let wind out and back in, and we were actually trained to go out and manually wind this thing out. All of us got a chance to do it, so we would know what it was like. Bruce and Kathy became extremely competent on it.\\n\\n So we launched. Everything went superbly. Got into space on deploy day. Everything started out bad. We were trying to lift the Telescope out of the payload bay, and the remote manipulator system, which in the simulator, it compensates for things rotating, and differences in mass and all that. Steve Hawley was our primary arm operator and I was the backup, and from the moment we started lifting it out, I mean, it started moving and doing things that we didn’t expect.\\n\\n It turned out that there were characteristics of the arm that we didn’t know at the time, and so we were making it up as we went along. Finally, what was supposed to take a few minutes took several hours, and we finally got the Space Telescope out of the payload bay, and then up over the vehicle. So now we’re well into the time that we’re supposed to be deploying the solar arrays and high-gain antenna and all this, and approaching the time we’re supposed to let it go.\\n\\n So we start sending commands, or the ground starts sending commands, and the high-gain antenna start out. One of them has a problem and it kind of burps, but they take a few hours and they figure out what’s the problem with it, and they finally get it down. Then the solar array, one of them goes out, no problem. The second one starts out and just stops. And we go, “This is not really happening.” So they reeled it back in and they started out, and it stopped. We went, “You’ve got to be kidding.”\\n\\n Bruce says, “It’s a tension monitoring module, I’ll bet.” He says, “We put the software module into the system so that if it sensed that there was unusual strain on the solar array, that to keep from destroying it, to keep from ripping it, tearing it, since it was fabric with all these solar cells on it, the tension monitoring module would just stop the deployment, and we’d be able to go out and fix it and manually put it out. So that’s what we ought to do.” Bruce said that at the beginning of the day.\\n\\n Many hours later, I mean after we’ve tried everything and the vehicle’s going all over the place, a young engineer—as we were told—a young engineer at the [NASA] Goddard Space Flight Center [Greenbelt, Maryland] said, “Only thing I can figure—.” In the meantime we had been told to put Bruce and Kathy in the airlock and we’re going to send them out and do a spacewalk, and we’re going to manually deploy this thing.\\n\\n They were happy; I was terrified. Because I was what was called the intervehicular [IV] crew member. And it didn’t occur to me until that time what the significance of that really was. You’re the person that’s going to go down here and put these people in a spacesuit and send them out into space, and that’s pretty significant. Other people had done it and didn’t have any problem with it, and I don’t know why it affected me. But I just—I’m going down here, “Boy, whatever you do, don’t do anything wrong, because if you screw up, these guys are going to die.” And so that really just bothered me.\\n\\n But we went through the hours of pre-deployment preparation and everything, finally got them in the suits, started depressurizing the airlock, and we were about five minutes away. We finally got the airlock depressurized, got a “Go” to send them out, and we were about five minutes away from having them open the hatch, when the ground called and said, “Hey, time out. Hold on just a minute. Don’t open the hatch yet. We’ve got an idea.”\\n\\n And we found out post-flight that a young engineer at Goddard had decided, “This can’t be real. It’s got to be software, and I think it’s the tension monitoring module. And if you all will give me permission to send a signal up and noop [no operation] that module, just take it out of the loop, I think the solar array will start to open.”\\n\\n [William D.] Bill Reeves was the lead flight director, and he and I talk about this all the time, even to this day, because it was a superb Flight Control Team, both in Goddard and here. They talked about it long and hard, and they decided, “Okay. We’re going to do it. If we’re wrong, all we do is destroy the Space Telescope. If we’re right, everything will work right.” I mean, these are the kinds of things that they had to deal with down on the ground. We’re fat, dumb, and happy up there. We’re having a good time. Bruce and Kathy are happy as pigs in slop, because they’re going to go get to do a second spacewalk each, and they’re going to go down in the history books because they saved the Hubble Space Telescope. And I’m scared to death because these guys are getting ready to go outside. I don’t know what Loren and Steve are thinking about up on the flight deck, but we’re all tired because it’s been a whole day.\\n\\n And finally they decide, “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. We want you to put the vehicle in position for a deploy, because we’re going to noop the tension-monitoring module, and if it works, the solar array is probably going to start moving right away, and we want to be able to release it as quickly as we can.”\\n\\n So we said, “All right.” We got the vehicle in position and we said, “Okay. We’ve done all we can do.”\\n\\n And they said, “Okay. Stand by.” And we looked, and all of a sudden we saw the solar array start to go out.\\n\\n And we went, “Holy jeez.”\\n\\n I said, “Bruce, how did you know that?”\\n\\n He said, “That’s what we put it in that for.” He said, “We knew it all along.” He was now upset because he and Kathy both knew that we’re going to have to repressurize the airlock, and they weren’t going anywhere. But they did get some EVA time, because when you depressurize the airlock, when it gets down to zero, then that starts counting as EVA time.\\n\\n But anyway, so we repressurized the—well, we left them in the airlock. We deployed the Telescope. So they’re down there in the airlock by themselves, wondering, and they can’t even see it. So now you’ve got the two people onboard who had devoted all of their adult life to this thing, and they don’t get to see the deployment.\\n\\n So we deploy Hubble coming off the Pacific Ocean, across the west coast of South America, and it’s just the most beautiful thing you can imagine. It comes off the end of the arm and down. We’re looking at the Andes Mountains, and it goes right across the coast between Bolivia and—somebody will tell me I’m wrong, because my geography is not all that great, but I think it was Venezuela. But anyway, whatever. So it goes zipping by and we watch it for a while. And then what we did was we took the Shuttle up to a higher orbit, which caused it to fall behind Hubble, so that’s the way we let the Space Telescope get out in front of us.\\n\\n While we’re doing all this, we’re just oohing and aahing, and Bruce and Kathy are going crazy, because now they’ve lost their EVA, they don’t get to see their telescope. And finally, when everything’s okay and the ground is satisfied that we can go back to normal, then they repressurize the airlock and we bring Bruce and Kathy out, and we go to sleep; that’s the end of that day.\\n\\n And then the rest of the time on orbit, we’re doing experiments inside, student experiments. We had something that was a fire experiment. A young man, as a high school student, had designed this experiment, and to show you how long it took to fly student experiments in those days, he was graduating from medical school on the day that we activated his experiment. That’s how long it had taken to get this student experiment onboard. The kid had gone all the way through college and medical school, eight years, in the time that we got around to flying his experiment. Can’t remember his name, but we celebrated his birthday onboard and wished him the best, and all that kind of stuff. So we did those kinds of things.\\n\\n And finally the folk at the Space Telescope Science Institute [Baltimore, Maryland] said, “Okay. We’ve done all we can do. Everything seems to be working properly.” We didn’t have any images from Hubble yet, but we knew that physically the solar arrays could be controlled, the door could be opened and closed and all that, and it was okay for us to come home. So we deorbited and came back home.\\n\\n A couple of weeks later, a week or so later, we learned that Hubble had a problem, that it had this thing called a spherical aberration. The mirror was perfectly ground, but the dimensions on the outside were a little bit off from what they should be. So, like you or I with a problem in our vision, the Hubble had a problem with vision. It still gave spectacular images, but to the trained eye, they weren’t what they were supposed to be.\\n\\n And so some of the experiments for which it would be needed in the early phase, they were put on hold. They brought a lot of optical telescope stuff up into the forward end of the timeline, so they could do that, because the telescope was good enough to do that, stuff like photographing Mars and Saturn and some of the early stuff you saw from Hubble. But even as bad as it was, the first Hubble image was one that showed us what turned out to be a binary star, two stars that are very close together; so close together that they appear to be one star. You find them every once in a while, but not very often, because we just don’t have the instruments that are capable of doing that, I understand. I’m out of my league here.\\n\\n But it was ironic that Hubble’s first image was a binary star, one that astronomers had been studying for probably hundreds of years without knowing it. That was the very first image that came to Earth from Hubble, and it foretold of what Hubble would do the rest of its life, and continues to do today. The rest of the story is that we went up and put some optical instruments on Hubble that made it even better than it was ever designed to be, and now we have upgraded a lot of the scientific instruments on it and everything. It does phenomenal stuff.\\n\\n But that was the end of my second flight. After that, I got tasked to go off and do a variety of things. Worked for Mr. Abbey as his technical assistant. I worked for [Jesse W. Moore, who] didn’t stay very long [as Center Director]. Worked as the [Technical Assistant] to the Center Director [Gerald D. Griffin], and did all kinds of stuff. And then I was assigned to command my first mission.\\n\\n And I’ve been talking. You had another question. I’ve been talking for an hour and a half here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, that’s fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was just in answer to your first question. Want to go to question two?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[Laughs] No, that’s fine. I’ve been making notes as you’ve been going on, and we’ll go back and talk about them. You’re on a roll, if you want to just continue on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, we can go back to question two if you want, since that’s a good break point there, at the end of the first, because now I start talking about being a commander, which is different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. It is different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Jeez. Question two, an hour and a half into this session." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s okay. What we’ll do is we’ll kind of start talking about the 31 mission and work backwards." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things that Steve Hawley told us was while Bruce and Kathy were in the airlock and he was up there, they were the ones that were actually supposed to take the photographs also." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely right. I forgot about that. That was a nightmare." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But he said that you turned on the IMAX camera. Do you have any other memories about that incident?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I do. As a matter of fact, that was my one moment of fame. We had all trained for IMAX, and we had an in-cabin camera as well as an IMAX payload-bay camera. So we were ambidextrous; we could all do what needed to be done. As it turned out, it was fortuitous, because the two primary camera operators were locked in the airlock.\\n\\n Steve, he’s flying the arm. Loren’s flying the vehicle. I’m down trying to watch them. So the three of us were playing musical chairs, trying to get the cameras set up and document everything we did. And among the three of us, we managed to capture everything that there was to catch, I think, on the deploy, to include getting the payload bay camera turned on, which got some absolutely spectacular footage of Hubble that you see on Blue Planet [1990] and there’s another IMAX movie that featured stuff about Hubble [Destiny in Space (1994)].\\n\\n But my crowning moment was post that. It was when we did have Bruce and Kathy out of the airlock and back in. But I did a shot of interior with IMAX. They had trained us to do this thing that was—I forget what the technical name for it is, but it’s a transition from interior to exterior, where you have to—because IMAX is all manual. It doesn’t have an automatic bone in its body, the one that we flew. So when you change the F-stop and the lens setting and the focus and everything, it’s got to be all manual. You have nothing to gauge whether you’ve done the right thing, because it’s also not like a normal camera, that you’re looking through and you can see what’s going through the lens.\\n\\n So I did this shot coming up from the mid-deck. I floated up from the mid-deck with a camera, took Loren at the controls, flying the vehicle, and then transitioned to the outside, where you could see Hubble. And it stayed in focus the whole time, and everybody said that was absolutely phenomenal. And I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. It was just luck. But that was my one moment of fleeting fame. But it was tricky getting everything coordinated and done real-time; not at all what we had trained to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Quite an amazing mission, from all sides. We can continue to go backwards if we want to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In between your first and second flight, you mentioned some of the duties that you had, and, of course, one of them was the Chief of the Safety Division. What exactly did that entail on a day-to-day basis?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The way that Safety, Reliability, Quality Assurance was made up back then—it’s now Safety and Mission Assurance, I think is the way they’ve changed the name. But we had three divisions in the SR & QA Department. We had the Safety Division; I had that. The Quality Division, I think was a guy named—forget his first name, but it was [Duane L.] Duston. We used to call him Dusty. And then the Reliability Division was headed up by another guy.\\n\\n Safety was responsible for the boards that were held, meetings to determine what issues potentially had safety impacts on the crew, the vehicle, anything that had to do with anything involving human space flight. We didn’t do unmanned stuff, but we did everything that had to do with human space flight. So that meant we essentially controlled, or had oversight over every safety issue dealing with Shuttle, solid rocket boosters, external tank, crew training, you name it. And it was all headed up out of JSC.\\n\\n Now, we had other safety offices around NASA, but they all came and reported, essentially, to the [NASA Systems Safety Review Panel (SSRP)]. And as the Chief of the Safety Department at JSC, I chaired that panel. So, my responsibility was twofold. It was to Charlie Harlan as the head of SR & QA. It was to the Center Director, who had overall oversight of everything that was going on, and then it was to the Shuttle Program Manager, to make sure that we did everything that they needed done to ensure that flights were going to proceed safely and all that.\\n\\n I also coordinated with the SR & QA folk up at Marshall, and down at [NASA] Stennis Space Center, Mississippi] and Kennedy. All the contractor safety folk reported in to us. Boeing [Company] was my prime contractor at the time, so they really had the corporate knowledge, and they did all the legwork for safety analyses. All the analysis that had to be performed, we did; hazard analysis. Back then we learned about something called FMEACIL, Failure Modes Effects Analysis and Critical Items List, building the Critical Items List.\\n\\n If I remember correctly, the Quality Division actually performed the FMEACILs, or the FMEA, the Failure Modes Effects Analysis. And then it all came together where we and the Safety Department kind of helped the Program Office put together the Critical Items List. These were the thousands of things, pieces, parts, on the Orbiter, the ET [External Tank] and the SRBs [Solid Rocket Boosters], that we could not fly without having them work properly. For something to get on the Critical Items List, it meant that if it failed, you lost the vehicle and/or crew, and there were thousands of them.\\n\\n So my principal job was oversight of the safety effort, not just for the Johnson Space Center. That was industrial safety and hygiene, as well as operational safety for the Shuttle Program. And then gradually we started taking on Space Station, as Station took on a life of its own. I also had the coordinating responsibility for overseeing the other safety organizations within NASA. So that’s what I did.\\n\\n I forget how many contractors, but there were almost 200 or so JSC NASA safety employees who were housed in Building 45. That’s where our offices were. And as I said, again, I worked directly for Charlie Harlan in the SR & QA Department. And if there was something we didn’t think was right, we said it. The good thing that we did, the thing that I remember the most, was again we took—the Safety Division at the time had very competent and capable people, but they were mostly industrial safety and hygiene people. They were safety professionals.\\n\\n They knew their job, but some of them wouldn’t know the front end of the Orbiter from the back end. So we were asking them to be responsible for critical decisions or critical advice on operational issues concerning Shuttle and Station. The one thing that I was able to do was go out and recruit people from within NASA and the contractor community, and some from academia, who came in with the requisite operational background and technical expertise to fill out the Safety Division.\\n\\n So instead of being all safety professionals, there were some operators that we taught safety, because we figured that we didn’t have enough time to teach the safety professionals operational things. And it worked pretty well, I thought." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also were the lead astronaut for the vehicle test and checkout at Kennedy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I did that. In fact, I think I went to VIT [Vehicle Integration Test]—I want to say I became a Cape Crusader after—I became the lead, I think, after my second flight; actually after Hubble, if I remember it correctly, because that’s what I was doing when I was named to be the commander for STS-45, because I spent a couple of years down at KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida], and that was great.\\n\\n Two jobs, two outstanding jobs in the Astronaut Office, in my opinion—everybody has an opinion—the two outstanding jobs were being a Cape Crusader, flying to the Cape on Mondays and coming home on Friday night, but being around the vehicle all day long, every day, working hand in hand with the engineers and the logisticians and everybody that physically put the vehicles together, physically integrated the payloads. Just a totally different life from being here. It was real.\\n\\n Here is, it’s okay. Being at JSC is good; nothing at all like being at the Cape, where the hardware is. And so I did that for two years. And as the lead Cape Crusader, your job was to be the person responsible for tying KSC and the operational world together with the rest of the world, with people at JSC and Marshall, primarily, and also at Stennis.\\n\\n During that time I also worked part-time as Alex—Alex [A.] McCool [Jr.] had Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance at Marshall, and so I became his Astronaut Office liaison. So I would fly up to Marshall for a couple of days sometimes, and spend time with them to try to make sure that the integration was working right, that they felt comfortable that they were getting word from the Astronaut Office of concerns, and that the Astronaut Office was getting word back from Marshall. So those were two jobs that I really enjoyed.\\n\\n The other job is being a CapCom, Capsule Communicator. That’s the way it used to be. I’m not sure whether it is now or not, but that was the other thing that everybody wanted to be. The third job that I thought was outstanding, and I did for most of the time I was here, off and on, that nobody wanted to do, but two of us loved—three of us, Story Musgrave, Claude Nicollier, and I, we fell in love with it—that was being in SAIL, in the Shuttle Avionics Integrations Laboratory. And there you essentially just flew the test rig.\\n\\n That’s where, in Building 16, every piece of software that ever goes on the Orbiter goes through stress testing at SAIL. They run it through all kinds of scenarios. When I say stress it, they make the vehicle have to do things; make the software have to perform in stressful environments. They’ll fail an engine on liftoff, or fail something else to see if the software then says—tells everything the right thing to do.\\n\\n I talked about RTLS [Return to Launch Site]. While a lot of us flew a lot of them in SAIL, I’m not sure any of us ever believed that that’s something you really wanted to, because this was a maneuver in which something goes wrong shortly after liftoff, and you decide you’re going to turn the vehicle around and fly it back to the Kennedy Space Center. And the computer’s got to do that, so the software really has to work.\\n\\n It’s crazy, because you’re going upside-down outbound, and all of a sudden you decide you’re going to go back to Kennedy. And while you’re still flying downrange, you take this vehicle and you pitch it back over so that it’s flying backwards through its own fire for several minutes. What has to happen is the computer has to calculate everything precisely, because it’s got to flip it over, have it pointing back to the Cape while it’s flying backwards, so that just before the solid rocket boosters burn out, it stops the backwards downrange travel and starts it flying back to the Cape.\\n\\n And then once that happens, then the solids cut off. They separate; they go their way, and then you fly back for a few minutes, for another six minutes, and the main engines cut off and you separate from the external tank. And that became a very tricky maneuver, because what you’re worried about was re-impacting with the tank, and if you did that, you were dead. So it’s a maneuver that we still have and we still train for, and nobody ever wants to fly it, because just, it’s like, boy, this is really bad if you have to do this.\\n\\n Anyway, so I spent many of my fourteen years over in Building 16 in the SAIL. Made a lot of friends over there, because the good thing about it was you got to fly. You didn’t fly physically all the time, but you sat through the ascents and the entries and the on-orbit stuff, and everything that was going to be done on any flight was done in SAIL. So that was the third really good job, and I did everything except CapCom." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are there any other positions during that time that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That I liked? No. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Those were the ones, huh?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Those were the two choice ones. And the Cape one, for the reasons I gave, and also for the fact that you—boy, you flew a lot. It was not unusual to go to the Monday morning meeting, go out to Ellington [Field], get in your airplane and go to the Cape. And you might take a couple of just training flights while you were down there. If the STA came down, the Shuttle Training Aircraft, because you were already there, then you generally were always available to fill in if somebody who was scheduled to come down couldn’t get there because of the weather or something. So you got to fly the Shuttle Training Aircraft a lot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why don’t you go ahead and talk about the STA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, the STA, it��s awesome. The Shuttle Training Aircraft is actually an old airplane. It’s a Grumman Gulfstream G II. It’s a twin-engine business jet that I have no idea how NASA happened to pick it, but they chose this to be the airborne Shuttle simulator. And although we used the Shuttle Mission Simulator, the SMS, which is a regular simulator inside a building, it too is awesome because it visually and a lot of other ways, it perfectly prepares you to go into space. The visuals are awesome, very realistic and everything, and you can do everything in it.\\n\\n There is nothing like being in a real airplane, hurling your body at the ground at 300 knots, and pulling up and seeing yourself go to this elevated touchdown on a real runway, and that’s what we used the Shuttle Training Aircraft for. It’s a highly modified Grumman Gulfstream II. Although it looks like a normal one from the outside, the wing is different than a normal G II. We send it to Gulfstream in Savannah, Georgia.\\n\\n Grumman built a special wing for the airplane. It’s a beefier wing. It’s capable of taking a lot different forces than a normal airplane would have to take. The flaps on it not only go down to create lift, but in flight, in simulation, they come up and act as spoilers, to spoil lift so that it flies like a brick. That’s what you want it to do. It has an in-flight computer that sits in the back. It’s separate and distinct from the airplane’s computer, and this is the Shuttle simulator computer, and it causes all this stuff to happen, and causes it to fly like the Shuttle.\\n\\n When you get into simulation, the instructor pilot’s sitting in the right-hand seat. The person under instruction, the astronaut-pilot, is sitting in the left-hand seat. You have what we call masking. There are pieces of thick cardboard material that go into the windows to block the view, such that it’s a small restricted view like you have in the Shuttle. The whole part of the left-hand side of the cockpit has instrumentation and displays that look just like the Shuttle. It has a heads-up display just like the Shuttle. It has, actually, an Apollo hand controller, which is what we use in Shuttle. It’s the same hand controller they used in the Apollo era, and that’s still what we use in Shuttle.\\n\\n It has a speed-brake throttle controller on the side, so when the command or the instructor pilot puts it into simulation, you’re flying it like you would the Shuttle. The visual image is the same. The sensation is the same. You know, you’re kind of hanging in your seat, coming down at anywhere from an 18- to 21-degree glide slope, a little bit more than 300 miles an hour, hurtling your body at the ground.\\n\\n They put the main landing gear down, the engines in reverse thrust, and the spoilers up, and that just causes it to go [demonstrates] like a brick. It goes from having a normal glide ratio of a normal Gulfstream that’s, jeez, I don’t know, probably twenty-to-one, which means that for every mile you’re in the air, the airplane can glide twenty miles. When we put it into the Shuttle-simulator mode, the glide ratio is three-to-one, which means that if you’re a mile up in the air, you’re going to glide about three miles and crash. So it’s not very good flying. It’s not a very good glider.\\n\\n But the pilot puts you into simulation. You start flying and you get to 2,000 feet above the ground, and you initiate a very gradual what we call a pre-flare. You just start to pull the nose up gradually enough, and the primary purpose for this is just to start bleeding the air speed off, to lose the energy that you have, because you’ve got too much to land and stop on the runway. And you lose a knot per second, one nautical mile per hour per second. It’s just [demonstrates] clicking off.\\n\\n Going through about 400 feet, you put the gear down, the landing gear, in the real Orbiter. So in the STA, the Shuttle Training Aircraft, either you can do it or you can have the instructor pilot simulate being your pilot and do it. You put the gear down and what that does is it takes the nose gear and it now puts it down, along with the main landing gear that were down all the time. So now you’ve got three down and locked, and you go to about a twenty-foot elevated touchdown over the runway.\\n\\n That gives you the same what they call seated-eye position to the runway that you are going to have when you land the Shuttle. Shuttle’s a big vehicle, so when you’re sitting on the runway in the Shuttle after landing, you’re at the same height above the runway as you are at a twenty-foot elevated touchdown in the Shuttle Training Aircraft. You go through thousands of simulated landings in the Shuttle Training Aircraft before you fly your first flight.\\n\\n I think the rule is you have to have 750 simulated landings in the Shuttle Training Aircraft, plus the thousands of simulated landings you’ve had in the SMS, before you’re qualified to fly as the pilot, the co-pilot, really. Before I flew as a mission commander, I think I had 2,500, 3,000 simulated landings in the STA, prior to the first time I flew the Shuttle. But the thing is, first time you fly the Shuttle is the first time you fly the Shuttle, you know. Contrary to what people think, you don’t go out and get in the Shuttle on top of the 747 and they let you go and let you go land it. You don’t do that.\\n\\n We do essentially the same way that commercial airliners do nowadays. Commercial airline pilots go in the simulator. A guy flying for Continental [Airlines] goes up here on [John F.] Kennedy Boulevard [In-Flight Training Center, Houston, Texas] and spends months in the simulator and accumulates hundreds of hours of simulated flight time, and then they send him out to a real airplane and he’s got passengers in the back. He flies as a co-pilot; doesn’t do the first landing, you know, but that’s the first time he flies a [Boeing] 747 or whatever it is, is the first time he flies it. But it’s because of the sophistication of simulators today. They are just that good.\\n\\n So that’s what we use the Shuttle Training Aircraft for. Every flight, it’s very much like the SMS, because the instructor pilot is a diabolical person, and on every approach they put in some off-nominal situation. Either they start you out too high, so that you have too much energy, or they start you out too low, so that you have too little energy, or they start you off way to the right or left of the runway, so that you’ve got to figure out how to get there.\\n\\n And because it’s a glider, then the only thing you can do to change energy is either pull the nose up, push the nose down. You can’t push it down too far, because in the Orbiter you start shedding stuff. So it’s superb training. It just teaches you how to think real-time, recognize, first of all, that you’re in an off-nominal situation. You depend a lot on your eyes, but you also depend on the instruments. Where are you altitude-wise versus air speed, versus proximity to the center line of the runway? You have to integrate all that stuff and tell yourself like this, “Okay. I’m not where I need to be. How do I get there quickly, safely?” So that’s what you do in the Shuttle Training Aircraft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So how did it compare, the first time you flew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "First time I flew the Shuttle, it was like I’d been there before, from both sides. When I was Hoot’s pilot, sitting in the right-hand side, calling off air speeds backwards, air speed and altitude, putting the landing gear down, it was just like being in the STA, flying it. And that’s a bad way to say it, because being in the STA, in hindsight, was exactly like it was in the Shuttle. Combine that with the SMS. It was just as if I had been there before. So, the world of simulation, even back then when it wasn’t as good as it is today, was awesome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think we’re going to take a break and let Rebecca change out the tape.\\n\\n [Tape change]\n\nWhen we stopped, we were kind of working backwards through there. I think what I’d like to talk about just for a moment is to go back to the Challenger accident. Did you have any specific duties immediately following? You said that you immediately started getting ready to go, but as far as the memorial service or any of the tributes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was a family escort for the [Ronald E.] McNairs, and so I spent the next, well, lifetime, actually, because I don’t think you ever finish being a family escort. We’re still very good friends and, you know, still try to stay in touch with Cheryl [McNair] and the kids. But I was their family escort for the post-flight, post-disaster stuff.\\n\\n So I sort of became a surrogate, if you will, for Joy and Reggie, and just trying to make sure that Cheryl had whatever she needed, and got places when she was supposed to be there, because for them it was an interminable amount of time, I mean years, that they went through the post-flight grieving process and memorial services and that kind of stuff. So I spent the bulk of the year after the accident doing that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s go back to your first flight on [STS] 61-C. Since this was your first flight, when you said you learned about it in [19]’84, you knew you were going—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that’s when we were assigned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. What was it like when you got that phone call, if you can describe—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it wasn’t a phone call. You got—I’m trying to remember exactly how it happened. I think, again, I was told to report to Mr. Abbey’s office at two o’clock or something like that. And we were all there, the whole crew. He brought the whole crew in. I think Hoot, as the commander, had been notified ahead that they wanted him to—that’s generally the way they did it, I think. Since I’ve never had any part in picking crews, I don’t know how they did it.\\n\\n But I think the commander was notified that, “Okay, our intent is to give you this—.” That’s what they did for me, anyway, for my two flights. “Our intent is to make you the commander of this flight. Here is the crew that we’ve put together for you. Have you got any objections?” or anything like this.\\n\\n So we all met in Mr. Abbey’s office and he told us we were going to be the crew of STS-51L, and we went off, happy, excited, ecstatic, and all that kind of stuff. And started getting crew assignments in terms of who was going to do what with the flight, who was going to do which experiments and what your responsibilities were going to be; who the EVA crewmen were going to be; who was going to be responsible for earth obs [observations]; who was going to be responsible for this and that and everything else. So that’s kind of the way I remember it happening.\\n\\n Franklin and I were the rookies on the crew. Steve, Pinky, and Hoot had flown prior to that, had had their first flights. So Franklin Chang-Diaz and I were classmates, and so we were beside ourselves. We were like two little kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the other crewmembers that had flown before take you under their wing, as far as making you aware of what was going to happen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Hoot was unbelievable, especially as a pilot. He and John Young were two guys that to this day continue to boggle my imagination in terms of their piloting ability. I’ve met a lot of people in my life in aviation, over thirty-five years; never met two people like them. Everybody else gets in an airplane; John and Hoot wear their airplane. They’re just awesome.\\n\\n You know, you get with them in the simulator and things start happening. Their mind just takes over, and they instinctively know the right thing to do. It’s like that in a normal airplane. It’s like that in a simulator. With Hoot, it was like that in the Orbiter. You’re sitting there thinking about something, trying to figure out, “Okay. What the heck’s going on?” And he’s got it.\\n\\n And the two of them, really, they’re two phenomenal aerodynamicists. These guys are engineers at heart, to be quite honest. They’re both aeronautical engineers, real aeronautical engineers. I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination. My major at the Naval Academy was electrical science. I didn’t even get a major in electrical engineering. I just did get out of the Naval Academy.\\n\\n But these guys are not only smart, but they can really apply their smarts. So Hoot took me under his wing. As a matter of fact, I had a very difficult time getting ready for my first flight. There is so much stuff to learn. There’s an overwhelming amount of knowledge that one has to grasp if you really want to understand the Orbiter and fly it well, or execute the mission well; not fly it, because you don’t do a lot of flying, physical. But there’s so much stuff to commit to memory, so much stuff to know when to apply.\\n\\n And because the way that I was trained with Hoot was you don’t ever wing anything. I credit him with my technique as a commander. He preached from day one, “We don’t ever do anything from memory. We don’t ever wing it. If something’s going to happen, there is a procedure for it. And if there’s not a procedure for it, then we’re going to ask somebody, because somebody should have thought about it.”\\n\\n And so what we did was we trained ourselves just to know where to go in the book. And hopefully, crews still train like that, although I always flew with people who would invariably want to wing it, because they prided themselves in having photographic memories or stuff like that. The Orbiter and just space flight is too critical to rely on memory, when you’ve got all of these procedures that you can use, and the ground to talk to.\\n\\n Hoot taught me a bunch of things. He taught me Hoot’s law. Hoot’s law says—in fact, let me tell you how he taught me Hoot’s law. We were in the simulator one day, in the SMS, and I was still struggling. It was in my struggling phase. And I really wanted to impress everybody on the crew and the training team. We had an engine go out, boom, like that, right on liftoff. So we worked through the procedure and everything, and as the training team is wont to do, they just start piling things on top. And really what they’re trying to do is just get you distracted.\\n\\n There is probably one critical thing that you really need to focus on, and the rest of it doesn’t make any difference. If you don’t work on it, you get to orbit and you don’t even know it was there. But if you notice it and start thinking about it or start working on it, you can get yourself in all kinds of trouble. They love doing that with electrical systems, so they would give you an electrical failure of some type.\\n\\n And that’s what happened that day. We lost an engine, worked the safeing procedure, because you had to safe an engine when you got it down. And in the middle of doing this procedure, I got a minor electrical problem, just really one of these super, super sub-buses, something that I should have ignored. I started working the procedure for this minor bus. Wrong bus, in the first place. And this was my nemesis throughout my training.\\n\\n There are three of everything in the Orbiter; sometimes there are four. I picked the wrong sub-bus to start working the procedure for. And it just so happened—everybody knew this was going to happen, because it’s happened to everybody else. The training team intended it this way. You learn a lesson from it. So I started working this procedure and what I did in safeing the bus was I shut down the bus for an operating engine. When I did that, the engine lost power and [demonstrates] it got real quiet.\\n\\n So we went from having one engine down in the Orbiter, which we could have gotten out of, to having two engines down, and we were in the water, dead. I just—here I went from I was going to feel real good about myself because I’d impress my crew, to feeling just horrible because I had killed us all. And Hoot kind of reached over and patted me on the shoulder. He said [imitating Gibson’s voice], “Charles, let me tell you about Hoot’s law.” That’s the way he used to do stuff sometimes.\\n\\n And I said, “What’s Hoot’s law?”\\n\\n And he said, “No matter how bad things get, you can always make them worse.” And I remembered Hoot’s law from that day. That was probably 1984, or 1985 at the latest, early in my training. But I remembered Hoot’s law every day. I have remembered Hoot’s law every day of my life since then. And I’ve had some bad things go wrong with me in airplanes and other places, but Hoot’s law has always caused me to take a deep breath and wait and think about it, and then make sure that somebody else sees the same thing I did. And that’s the way I trained my crews, but that was because of that experience I had with Hoot. And he did that throughout.\\n\\n I can remember going to him—boy. We had already gotten Bill Nelson onboard, so we were inside six months of our flight, and electrical stuff was just killing me, which was ironic because that’s what I really liked. That was going to be my major in college until I flunked a course, which is another story we can tell. But I just had a difficult time grasping all this stuff. Finally, one day I said, “You know, I don’t know that I’m going to get all this stuff.”\\n\\n And he said, “Hey, relax. Forget about it. We all get there. Some learn quicker than others, and it’ll come to you.”\\n\\n And a couple of days after that it was like—bing!—like a light bulb went off, because all of a sudden things really did start to gel. I have no idea what it was, but I really started to understand and comprehend what was going on. After that, the training became really enjoyable. It didn’t become a piece of cake, by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t think it ever does. But from that point on, things seemed to go well, seemed to go right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you felt prepared when you finally—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I felt fully prepared when we launched. However, as fully prepared as I felt—kids ask you, “Were you afraid?” I can’t ever remember being afraid, ever. When we had the alarm go off on my first flight, it was just that’s what you train for. You do it. We had some other things happen on other flights. I just don’t remember being afraid.\\n\\n Apprehensive is something different. Before every single flight—and I flew four times—before every single flight I would lay there in my seat, just with stuff in your stomach, because there was so much to do that you just didn’t want to do something wrong and put the crew in jeopardy. So, that bothered me. You work your way through it, but to say that it was a piece of cake—for some people it was, or for some people it may have been, but never for me. I worked really hard every flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And with the delays on that one, I imagine the apprehension grew." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It actually turned out to be good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was because you were more relaxed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was probably a blessing, because I was really uptight the first time we went to the pad. First time you—I went over every procedure in there. I mean there’s stuff taped all over the—stuck all over the cabin—procedures. And what worried me, because you’d had it happen to you in training, what worried me was that in the excitement of the moment, with stuff vibrating all over the place, which I had no idea it was going to vibrate the way it vibrates, by the way. That was the only thing that was a surprise to me. In the simulator, stuff shakes around and all that. Nothing shakes like the vehicle when you lift off. When the solids ignite it just goes [demonstrates], and here everything starts to shake and vibrate, and you go, “I don’t remember this. This wasn’t in there.” And that’s the one thing that was a surprise to me, was just the volume, the extent of the vibration on the vehicle. Everything’s shaking and vibrating, and you can’t read anything. And so you’ve been training for years to read these procedures. You’ve got to reach out and grab stuff.\\n\\n Like when the alarm went off for the helium leak, I literally had to reach out and grab the procedure, take it off its Velcro and hold it in front of me so that it wouldn’t be doing like this [demonstrates], because the vehicle’s just going like this and you couldn’t read anything. So I was very, very apprehensive about picking the wrong procedure. I’d had it happen to me before and put everybody in the water, and I just did not want to have that happen in flight.\\n\\n So, that was something that I had to deal with. That was just me. I imagine most other people never had that. But, boy, I’ll tell you, like I said, every single flight of my four, you lay there beforehand saying, “Okay. If something goes wrong, make sure you get the right procedure.” And there I go back to Hoot’s law. What I did was every single crew I commanded, there was a rule that said, “Okay. Nobody does anything. Don’t you touch a switch until at least one other person has verified that what you think is wrong, is really wrong. There is nothing we can do right away, no matter how bad you think it is. Let’s at least make sure there are two of us that agree on the procedure, and then we’re going to start working it. And we’re going to work it as a team.”\\n\\n And the training crew, they’d always try to divide and conquer. What they really liked to do, and it worked a lot of times with people who were typical pilots, arrogant, cocky, very confident, it was real easy to get us to split up. You know, “I got this one. You get that one.” And before you knew it, all hell broke loose, because you guys weren’t communicating and you’re working something over here that was in opposition to what was being worked over there.\\n\\n So eventually you learn that, okay, this is a team effort. This time to star, to be an all-star, is over. But that was one of the things that the training team tried to do. They tried to give you something that would split the crew. So what I did was, we always worked in pairs. Usually, MS 2 [Mission Specialist 2], who sat in the center seat—Steve Hawley and me, for example, would work certain systems together. Steve and Hoot would work certain systems together. And if it was anything that was on Hoot’s side of the cockpit—DPS, the Data Processing System, the computers, the environmental control system—Hoot could see it. I couldn’t, so he and Steve worked that. Anything that had to do with electrical, hydraulics, APUs, Pinky, who sat behind me but could peek around, and he could see the console pretty well, so he and I worked those procedures together.\\n\\n And then periodically we would go back and forth and say, “Okay. Here’s where we are in this procedure.” If you were on orbit, where you were in a book and you’re working a page, you say, “Okay, I’m on page so-and-so.” And you would call the ground and say, “Okay. We’re working step three on page 2.5 of the on-orbit checklist in this procedure.” And it worked very well for me, so that was just the way I got used to working with Hoot, and that was the way I trained everybody I flew with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Part of your training, also, was in the KC-135. How did training in that vehicle compare with your first experience with weightlessness?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The training in the 135, for a pilot the primary focus was landing. It was actually rollout. So while we went on, when our mission specialists went to do their EVA training, for us it was just fun, because you had about twenty to thirty seconds of weightlessness at a time. It usually made people sick, more than anything else. It was just because you went from weightlessness for about twenty or thirty seconds, to 2 Gs while they would pull the airplane back up to get it where they could go weightless again. And that constant zero-G, 2 Gs, zero-G, 2 Gs, for most people just after a while—you did 200 parabolas over a course of two hours, and for most people, sooner or later your stomach just said, okay, I’ve had it. I don’t ever remember getting sick, but I can remember not feeling comfortable sometimes, just depending on whether you had something to eat or that kind of stuff.\\n\\n But for the pilots, you flew two of what we call heavy aircraft training flights prior, within—once you got within about six months of flying, then you would go out, the commander and the pilot, and you would fly two heavy aircraft training missions. What they did was you’d go out and fly touch-and-go’s; a couple of practice approaches and some real touch-and-go’s, and what they call stop-and-go, where you would land, roll the vehicle out and stop it on the runway, and then turn around and go back and take off and do it again, in the KC-135.\\n\\n The reason we did that was because it was the simulator for the Shuttle on the runway. Shuttle’s a huge vehicle. It’s the size of a [Boeing] 727. And most of us came from tactical jet communities. Like I was used to the A-6, which was a pretty big airplane, but nothing like a 727, or nothing like a Shuttle. So, just the fact that you’re sitting thirty feet above the runway means your view is different, your sensation of speed is different, the way you handle the vehicle in coming to a halt is different. And it just kind of lumbers down the runway. It’s a big vehicle.\\n\\n So we used the KC-135 to get you on the runway, learn how to apply the brakes, how to get this vehicle smoothly stopped without going off the side of the runway or something, which you could do if you panicked, or if you didn’t do it right. The good thing about the KC-135 was it was generally nominal. Unlike everything else in training, they didn’t try to put in any failure. It was hard enough to fly. It was just a hard airplane to fly, for me, anyway. You end up flying it with your right hand sometimes, but then when you want to do power, you had to fly it with your left. It has a yoke. Almost all jet pilots are right-handed, flying. The airplane configuration is such that the power level for the engines is on the left side, so you’re flying the stick in your center. And that’s the way you grew up.\\n\\n All of a sudden you get in this airplane and the power levers are in the middle, so you’re moving that with your right hand, and you’re trying to fly this thing with your left. And it’s big, and it wants to do this [gestures with tight circular hand motion] all the time. It has something called a Dutch roll that makes the nose just wander like this. People who fly them for a living, piece of cake. They don’t even notice it, because they know you’ve got to do this, then it won’t do that.\\n\\n Flying the KC-135 for somebody like me, the nose starts doing this [gestures with tight circular hand motion] and you’re going, “Oh, man, what am I going to do?” And you’re like this with the stick [rapid up and down motion with left hand] and like this with the power [motion of pulling back on power level with right hand]. So it was always fun. The crew chief would laugh and the instructor pilot would laugh, and then finally you’d get it down. And you got pretty good after a while. But, whew. But they were fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what was the first experience, when you first felt weightlessness for the first time and you got to look out the window?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The very first long-term weightlessness was on orbit, because as I said, in the zero-G, in the [KC] 135 it was just twenty or thirty seconds at a time. One of the things that had done a superb job of preparing me, however, was the water tank, the Weightless Environment Training Facility, the WETF. Now I forget what we call it, now that it’s out in the Sonny Carter [Training] Center [Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, JSC, Houston, Texas].\\n\\n But I found that when I went to the tank with my EV crewmembers—I never got in a suit; I was always in scuba. But I would spend most of my time upside down, in odd positions, so that things didn’t look the way they looked down here. I think that benefited me better than anything. It’s not the feeling of weightlessness, in my case. It wasn’t the feeling of weightlessness that bothered me at all. That was good and I got used to it instantly.\\n\\n It was just the disorientation of being—you thought you were upright, but the writing wasn’t. Because you were literally upside down in the cabin, then the writing didn’t look right. And so by being in the water tank a lot, I got accustomed to the feeling of—because when you got upside down in the water tank, gravity pulled blood into your head. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was good, because weightlessness is exactly like being upside down in the water tank. It’s not this euphoric feeling, or stuff. I don’t know how people describe it to you, but it hurts, initially. Weightlessness initially is somewhat painful in your head, because your fluids in your body seek equilibrium. They want to fill every void the same way. So the fluid inside your body—your blood, your body fluids, everything—wants to have the same relative amount in your big toe that it has in the top of your head, and it goes [demonstrates], and you end up with this pressure in your head that, unless you’ve been in the water tank upside down, you’ve not had before. And it’s just uncomfortable.\\n\\n You’ve got this feeling of fullness, like a really bad head cold. You take care of it by going to the bathroom, and over the first couple of days you just pee to beat the band. You’re trying to get rid of the fluid you don’t need, and you end up eliminating about two liters of fluid from your body that way. And then you’re perfectly comfortable, because the balance of fluid is just where it ought to be.\\n\\n You really want to stay hydrated, and it’s really easy to know when you’re properly hydrated because you drink until you get this feeling that, “Okay, I’m getting ready to have too much fluid in my head.” It just triggers something down in here, barrel receptors in your neck. When the barrel receptors say, “Okay, I’ve had enough,” then you quit drinking, and you’ve got enough fluid in your body. You can do that in space. You can’t do it here, because you’d have to drink a lot of fluid. You’d probably pop before you got the barrel receptors down here on Earth to say, “I’ve had enough.”\\n\\n So the feeling of weightlessness initially is pain. That, however, does not detract from the sensation of weightlessness, which is awesome. Just seeing the world from that vantage point, recognizing the fact that it doesn’t make any difference what position you’re in; it’s all relative, and it doesn’t make any difference, depending on who it is. In my case, Hoot again had told me, he said, “Hey, just go easy. The first few minutes, first few hours, I’d recommend, don’t move your head without moving your body. If you want to look left or look right, move your body and keep your head locked straight ahead in relation to your chest.” Worked great. Didn’t need it, but it worked great.\\n\\n I never sensed any sensation of stomach awareness, or never felt I was going to be sick or anything. I was doing somersaults and stuff within a couple of hours after being on orbit. But again, Hoot prepared me that way, and said, “If you get sick, no big deal. Happens to a lot of people. Just don’t do anything to hurt yourself.” And so that was basically what I did. And you learn, again from being in the water tank, how to reevaluate where you are and how to get yourself oriented pretty quickly when you’re not in a normal attitude. So that part I was ready for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As you said earlier, there were several delays on the landing, so you actually had more time up there than you were expecting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we actually got back to the original time. We were supposed to be a seven-day mission. I think we were supposed to be a six-day mission, and we ended up being a seven-day mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there time you had to fill?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. We went back and we filled the time with the experiments that were originally scheduled to be done. They were really trying to figure out how to chop stuff out of our schedule to get us back in four days. So it didn’t affect us in terms of activity onboard, other than the fact—well, I take that back—other than the fact that we had to pack up and unpack every day, from Day Four, which we not ordinarily have done. That took a huge chunk of time out of the on-orbit availability of experiment time.\\n\\n So, some of the experiments that we would have ordinarily done, we didn’t get to do, or we didn’t get to do them for the length of time that the ground would have liked for us to have done them, because when you started buttoning up the vehicle for landing, then you stopped doing experiments. Everything went into their drawers or into their lockers, and that was it.\\n\\n Even after we waved off and it was decided we were going to stay on orbit for another day, you didn’t go back in and pull everything out wholesale, because some experiments you’d already fixed, if you will. If you had something live, you’d already put the death fluid in there, and so it wasn’t going to come back. It was dead, and it was fixed in perpetuity, or whatever it is. So, some things you just couldn’t reactivate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things that you were supposed to do on that flight was observing spiral eddies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. How do you know that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[Laughs] We’ve talked to other people. Actually, I’ve read a couple of different things. I think Steve Hawley’s interview, and also [Robert E.] Stevenson—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Bob Stevenson taught us about spiral eddies, bless his soul. I was okay at it. I wasn’t the world’s best. But, it’s amazing, again, what you can see from the vantage point of space when you have—there’s a feature called sun glint, and probably they’ve talked to you about it. But it’s taking advantage of the relative angle of the sun to the ocean, and when it’s low on the horizon, you can see tremendous features in the ocean, on the ocean surface and sometimes many tens of feet below the surface of the ocean, that you couldn’t see ordinarily.\\n\\n Spiral eddies become very visible in sun glint. In fact, that’s the only time you can see them. The other thing is, they’re called internal waves. The ocean is full of underwater turbulence and waves. Everybody knows what waves are like on the surface of the ocean. That same activity goes on under the surface of the ocean. What we found out—we didn’t do it, but the early space flyers found that, after they came back and looked at some of the images they had taken, “What is that?” Didn’t make any sense, because they didn’t remember seeing anything. They didn’t remember seeing any waves or anything. What they were doing is they were looking at as much as thirty, forty, fifty feet beneath the surface of the ocean, and they were seeing this phenomena of internal waves. Internal waves can be very violent, because sometimes they’re seismically caused, maybe a mild earthquake under the ocean, and you get these waves going. They’re destructive. They can damage ships; they can do all kinds of stuff.\\n\\n And it was our first clue to damage that had occurred to underwater facilities or underwater things that we just didn’t know about. That was something that was discovered just from the vantage point of space, by happenstance. But I don’t know anything else about spiral eddies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think you ran out of film on that flight. You ended up drawing pictures of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, no. Taking spiral—yes. You all did get that. In fact, Bob Stevenson—I just drew what it looked like. As a matter of fact, the one that Bob was talking about—now I remember. The picture we drew, “It could not have been,” was the claim, because it was a wrong-handed eddy. Just like in the northern hemisphere—I’ve got to get this right—I think eddies go counterclockwise. He’d kill me, you know, if—and in the southern hemisphere, because of Coriolus Effect, things go clockwise. If you want to see it, you just look at your toilet. When you flush the toilet up here, the water goes out of the toilet counterclockwise because of the Coriolus Effect. In the southern hemisphere, because it’s just the opposite, the water goes out spinning to the right, or spinning clockwise. And the eddy we saw and drew for them, it didn’t faze us because we knew that you’d see them going both ways. But the Shuttle’s theoretical position, or the position we thought we were in when we drew this eddy, you shouldn’t be able to see one that was going clockwise.\\n\\n What they determined, I think what Bob Stevenson and the experts determined, I think, was that there’s a transition zone around the equator, and although you shouldn’t see it, then in this transition zone you might see southern hemispheric-acting eddies in the northern hemisphere. I don’t know whether that’s what he told you or not. But I had drawn it, and so I had my proof." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn’t have a picture to show for it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned earlier that this was sort of the end-of-the-year-clearance flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any specific challenges that you remember on that flight that you’d like to share with us?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. The big challenge was arguing with the ground about how we should do some of the experiments. There were some that we could see were not going exactly right. I didn’t have the problem as much as Pinky. Pinky was the big person working a lot of the material sciences experiments. And while we had very little insight into what was going on inside the box, we could tell that because of the data that we were seeing onboard, we could tell that if we were just given an opportunity to reenergize an experiment, or to turn the Orbiter a different way, or do something, we might be able to get some more data for the principal investigators.\\n\\n The principal investigators agreed, but the flight control crew on the ground, that wasn’t in the plan. They weren’t interested in ad libbing. They had a flight to fly and a plan to fly, and so forget about these doggone experiments. And that generally represents the pull and tug that you see all the time.\\n\\n You have the Flight Control Team that’s responsible for the conduct of the mission and the safety of the vehicle. You have the crew onboard—and I can talk about this a little bit now or later. But there’s always a pull and tug between the Flight Director, who is in charge—nobody argues that point—and the Crew Commander, who, by the General Prudential Rule of Seamanship, of navigation at sea, has ultimate responsibility for the safety of the crew and vessel. And so if there’s a disagreement between the Commander and the Flight Director—and that’s happened on very, very few occasions, but every once in a while it happens. If there’s a disagreement, the Commander can do what he or she thinks is the right thing to do, and is justified in doing that by the General Prudential Rule. And even NASA recognizes that.\\n\\n Now, you could be in deep yogurt when you come back, if something goes wrong. But you have the right to countermand the direction of the Flight Director. Almost never happens. For my two flights, I had two superb—I had a bunch of awesome Flight Directors. But I can remember the guy that I had this discussion with probably more than anybody was [Charles W.] Chuck Shaw. Chuck was an Air Force colonel at the time. He’s now retired from the Air Force, but still working in the space program. I think Chuck is still here, working with NASA as a contractor.\\n\\n But my discussion with him came up in terms of landing. I had watched over time the ground use computers to determine whether you should use the close or the nominal aim point. The way we land the Orbiter, because it’s a glider, is you’ve got two points on the ground, two schemes of lights on the ground. One’s called the nominal aim point, that’s 7,500 feet off the end of the runway. The other, the close aim point for high wind conditions, is at 6,500 feet off the end of the runway. You know, you say, well, what difference does a thousand feet make? It makes making the runway or not. That’s the difference it can make.\\n\\n We had seen a couple of flights where, due only to the superb airmanship of the Commander onboard at the time, that we were able to get the vehicle to the runway. I remember that happening twice, but where the computers on the ground took the winds and everything else and said, “Okay. We know what they think, but you ought to go to the nominal aim point, because if you don’t—.”\\n\\n The engineers on the ground were always worried about running off the other end of the runway. With a 15,000-foot runway, there’s no pilot in his right mind who ever had any concerns about running off the other end of the runway. But it was a bad day if you didn’t make it to the runway. So, just to begin with, we were in opposition in terms of what our goal was. Granted, they wanted to get you on the runway, and 2,500 feet down the runway, which was your target landing position, but they always had in the back of their minds, early in the game, that, “Boy, if we do this wrong, we’re going to run the vehicle off the other end, and we can’t survive that.”\\n\\n We just wanted to get to the runway. We could stop it. We had confidence that the brakes were good, from the first time John Young said, “Boy, we’ve got some good brakes.” And so we believed it. And so we never worried about running off the other end of the runway.\\n\\n So Chuck Shaw and I sat down a couple of times before my first flight, and I said, “Chuck, a couple of things we need to talk about. One is, aim-point selection on landing. If there’s 5 knots of wind reported or greater, I’m going to the close-aim point. I don’t care what you guys say.”\\n\\n He said, “But that’s not the rule.”\\n\\n I said, “Well, the rule’s screwed up, or it’s screwed up for me, because I know how I’ve trained. I know what I can handle, and I’m not worried about running off the other end of the runway. I do know what 5 knots of wind will do if it’s a bad day, and so you may as well recognize the fact now. Don’t put me in a situation where you and I are going to argue about it, or your Entry Flight Director and I are going to argue about it over the net, because the media’s going to pick up on it and it’s going to be real ugly. So, let’s figure out a code or something. I can tell you what’s going to happen. No matter what you tell me to do, I’m going to put the close-aim point in if the wind is 5 knots or more.” And we had that agreement, and nothing happened.\\n\\n But if a Commander and a Flight Director kind of have at least an idea that you’re going to have egos involved, and that should not impact anything, then I think you can work anything out, and that’s what we generally did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things I read about you is that you were the first one to get in the basket on the escape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk about that for a moment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. At the Cape, on the pad, as I mentioned, for everything, we go through hundreds of hours of simulation of everything that can go wrong. One of the many things that can go wrong on the launch pad before you launch is a fire, a leak, or something else that necessitates an emergency evacuation of the crew from the vehicle. And the very last thing that you do when you go down for your—we go down about two weeks prior to your scheduled launch, and we go through a dry run of the launch, from waking up that morning all the way to an emergency egress and going down into the bunker, and then driving the tank and all that kind of stuff.\\n\\n But for years we had always said, “We always come to the basket, jump in it, hit the little paddle here and the basket goes two feet, but you don’t go down the wire. How do we know that things are going to work when you get down at the bottom? How do we know we’re going to do the right things? How do we know the wire’s going to work?”\\n\\n “Well, we put sandbags in.”\\n\\n I said, “Yeah, but that’s sandbags. That’s not people.” But nobody wanted to put a person at risk, especially an astronaut. They figured, “Holy G, if we do that.”\\n\\n Ironically, after Challenger, we went back to the very beginning of the space program. The good thing about being here after Challenger, as horrible as that experience was, the good thing about being here was, we went back to the very beginning of the Shuttle Program. We redesigned the vehicle. We went back over the design of the vehicle. We completely reviewed every decision that had been made. Why are there no air-breathing engines? Why do we not have a crew escape pod? Why did we choose individual tiles instead of something else? Why did we do this? Why don’t we do this?\\n\\n And the question that kept coming up out of the Astronaut Office, and me as one of the prime questioners, since I was a Cape Crusader, was why have we never tested the basket? Why have we never trained a crew by letting them get in the basket? “No, we don’t want to do that.”\\n\\n And so we said, “Well, then we can’t say it’s certified, if you’ve never done it.” Putting a sandbag in there is one thing, but having a human being go down there and say, “Yeah, it’s okay. I didn’t break my neck when I struck the bottom and came to this rapid stop, and I still had my faculties and could jump over the side or let the thing down and get into the bunker.” Until you’ve actually done that, you can’t guarantee that that’s going to happen. We’re just counting on getting a crew safely out of the vehicle, and then we lose them at the bottom because they’re disoriented due to impact or something else, and the thing blows up and they’re lost.\\n\\n And so I finally convinced them that we ought to do that. So, the scheme we came up with was that eventually there would be three of us who would ride the basket—an astronaut, a fire rescue guy, and a closeout crew member, one of the Kennedy personnel who actually is in the vehicle when the crew gets in there, because if you have to use the slide wire, it’s going to be in the pre-launch phase, and the only people around are going to be the fire and rescue guys and the closeout crew.\\n\\n Because I didn’t want to put anybody else at risk before I knew everything was okay, then I said I wanted to go first. If I didn’t get hurt, then we could put other people in there. And so we came out and it was very choreographed and everything. Everybody held their breath, and I hit the paddle [demonstrates] and the thing went down and stopped. I jumped out and kind of fell in the sand, and then ran to the bunker and said, “Okay, it’s okay.”\\n\\n And we talked about some of the things, just—the reason I was able to do it first was because of my background. As a test pilot I had been trained to be observant, and I tried to look at everything. I tried to look at the attitude you needed to be in in the basket, what it sounded like, what it looked like, what it felt like when you came to a screeching halt, because it was an abrupt stop. You went into this net, and although it looked like it played out pretty smoothly, you hit the net and you just [demonstrates] stopped.\\n\\n So, determining whether or not you could get your faculties real quick, because you had to pull these pins and let the side of it drop down, and then you had to swing yourself out. And as people started getting out, one of the things we didn’t anticipate, as you start getting weight out of the basket, this wire coming from the top of the launch pad is a couple of thousand feet long, a big old guide wire like this. And if it’s got five hundred pounds down here at the bottom pulling it down, every time you take a hundred pounds out, the wire’s going to want to straighten out more and more.\\n\\n What we found was when the third guy came out, I mean the basket was way back up in the air. And so that person, you couldn’t just jump out, because you’re going to break your leg. And that we discovered by virtue of the fact that we put human beings in it and had it go. The first one to go out just kind of rolled off the side and the basket was almost sitting in the dirt, because you’ve got a fireman in all the silvers; you’ve got an astronaut in eighty-five pounds worth of flight gear, which was what we had after Challenger; and then you’ve got the closeout crew guy who’s got an oxygen bottle and all this stuff.\\n\\n So you’ve got a lot of weight in that basket, and every time you throw somebody over the side, the basket gets lighter and lighter and goes higher and higher. So I did that. That was my claim to fame. And it was awesome; it really was. It’s one of those things that you—and it was never done again, for some reason. We did it; we got away with it, and everybody said, “Okay. We hope you’re satisfied. We’re never going to do it again.”\\n\\n So, what I wanted to do was get people confident that it worked, so that we could then begin to train the crews. But to my knowledge, we still don’t do it. And they’re asking the same question now. “Why don’t we do it?”\\n\\n “We don’t want to put anybody at risk.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m going to go back to the beginning again. When you said that you first heard that you had been chosen, and it was on your wife’s birthday, how did you—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "May 31st, 1980." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did your family react to the news?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hard to say. I can only tell you—well, my wife was the only one that knew at first, because Mr. Abbey said, “Do not tell anybody until—.” He said, “You’ll know you can tell people because it’ll be on the news.” And the leak happened [snaps fingers] instantly, because I didn’t—I went out and flew. And it was an unbelievable flight. It was what we call an accelerated—I remember it very well, because it was an accelerated service test on an A-7, single-engine jet, and my job was to go out [demonstrates] and try to get the engine to quit. We did those all the time. And so I went out and flew my flight, and I was all over the place. I was as giddy as you could be. And everybody kept asking, “Okay, what was that phone call? Anything wrong?”\\n\\n I said, “No, no, no. Nothing wrong.” Went out and flew my flight; came back went home. Told Jackie [Bolden]. She was sworn to secrecy, couldn’t tell anybody. And the phone started ringing off the hook that night—NBC from Washington, and other people had heard. And I said, “You’ve got me. It’s the first I’ve heard about it. You need to call Johnson Space Center.”\\n\\n “Yes, we’re waiting for word.”\\n\\n “Shucks, I interviewed in February, and I haven’t heard anything.” That was my story and I was sticking to it.\\n\\n And the next morning, NASA came out with the press release. And so they did give me an opportunity to call my mom and dad; no, my mom. My dad had died. My father never got an opportunity to see me do this, because he died in October of [19]’79, the year prior to my—in fact, I was in the process of putting my application in when he died. So he never got a chance to see it physically.\\n\\n But I didn’t want my mom to get the word on the news, so I called her and she was, as she always is; she was just beside herself. Here I was going off and doing another crazy thing. She did not like the fact that I was a test pilot. She did not like the fact that I was flying airplanes. Every day of her life until she died two years ago, last year, she asked, “When are you going to quit? When are you going to retire and get a real job?”\\n\\n But she was very proud, unbelievably proud, but just afraid, and wanted me out of everything I did. She was a very highly educated woman. She had a master’s in library science. I grew up as a son of—one of two kids, but our parents—mine and my wife’s—parents were educated. My mother was a career librarian from the elementary, middle school, high school level until she retired, and then died a number of years later. My father was a career teacher, and he was my high school football coach." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s interesting. Well, of course, you said your wife, you got to tell her, and then, of course, then you had to move to Houston." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that ever an issue—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—or was that something you’ve enjoyed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We loved it. We had no qualms whatsoever about—although it was funny, my wife cried going into Patuxent River. When I told her I’d been selected for Test Pilot School, she was excited. She had never heard of Patuxent River, Maryland. She had no idea where we were going. I knew, because I had been back there, and I knew it was the sticks. It’s South St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Nowadays it’s a big place, because the Naval Air Systems Command migrated from Crystal City, Virginia, to Patuxent River, and it is built up now, unbelievably.\\n\\n When we moved to Patuxent River, it was tobacco country. When you crossed the county line, all you saw for miles around were fields of tobacco; families that were inbred. You name it about the country. It was like—and people will kill me for saying this, but it was like going to the Beverly Hillbillies or something like that. These were country people, and they were happy. But a number of my engineers and people had grown up down there, so they bore the brunt of all the jokes about where they lived and everything. When you went to Pax River, you were going to Pax River. There was nothing.\\n\\n There was one thing south of Pax River. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the State of Maryland and how it’s shaped, but it’s got the bulk over here, western Maryland and all that, and then it has this little appendage that goes down. That’s South St. Mary’s County, and the very tip end of it is Point Lookout, I think. Fishermen go down there. Nobody else goes there. Nobody comes into the finger of the State of Maryland unless you’re going to Pax River or unless you’re going to fish. So you don’t pass through Patuxent River.\\n\\n And when I took Jackie there, we just kept seeing trees and tobacco fields, and she cried, wanted to know where I was taking her and her kids. Our son, I think—that was 1978, so he was seven years old, and our daughter was two. And Jackie cried for days. The two years we were there, she fell in love with the place and the people. She crabbed every day, so, when she wanted crab, she went out and caught it. It was just phenomenal living there. We got to know the watermen and all that, the people that do oystering and crabbing and everything.\\n\\n And when we left to come to Houston, she cried on the way out of town, not because she was sad to go to Houston, but because of the friends she was leaving. So, she cried on both ends. We drove through South Carolina, stopped and spent some time with my mom, and then drove on into Houston.\\n\\n We got down here Fourth of July weekend, as a matter of fact, and that was our introduction to the Astronaut Office, because they had one of these outings planned. They were all going up to Canyon Lake [Texas], up around north of San Antonio [Texas], and were going to go tubing for the Fourth of July. So that was our introduction to tubing. It was miserable for Jackie, because we got in late, so all the cabins were gone. We borrowed a tent from somebody. Jackie hates—there is nothing that she hates worse than the great outdoors.\\n\\n So I took them up there the Fourth of July. It was 120 [degrees]. I don’t know, it was hot and humid, and as we were setting up our tent, she noticed that—it was [David C.] Dave Leestma, who is over in Engineering now, but Dave and Patty, his wife, were out, and they were putting this chalky-looking stuff around their tent. They were in a nice big tent that had all kinds of stuff. They had planned. But it was stuff to keep the scorpions out. I told Jackie that and then she was—she was fit to be tied then, for sure. “What are we doing?”\\n\\n And we were in this little dome tent that we had borrowed from somebody, so we’ve got my wife and two kids in a dome tent with the scorpions outside, and snakes, and it’s a hundred-and-who-knows-what. So, I had a great time. We went out, tubed and everything. She was miserable.\\n\\n She let me do that to her one more time. We drove to the Cape for STS-1, for the launch, and we carpooled with the O’Connors, Bryan [D.] O’Connor and his wife, Susie, and their two kids. The O’Connors had a camper. They had a Volkswagen with one of these convertible tops and everything, so they slept in their camper.\\n\\n Again, the Boldens had nothing, so we went—I can’t remember which car we drove, but it was old, and we had a dome tent. We stopped in Pensacola [Florida], out on the beach at—it’s one of these old Confederate forts. So we pitched our tent on the sand. The kids and I loved it, and Jackie was miserable. It was hot and sweaty. It was in July. We were out there on the sand, and you could go shower at the little—because this place was a campground. But by the time you got back to the tent, your feet were full of dirt and stuff. That was it.\\n\\n So after that, never again was she going to go camping anywhere. Her idea of camping would be a black-and-white TV in a hotel room. And that’s exactly what we looked for on the way back. She said, “I’m not stopping to camp. We’re going to find a hotel, motel.” And so that was the end of our camping experiences, early in our marriage. But that’s what we did when I came down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking at everything we’ve talked about today and your first two flights, is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you’d like to add for today?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "People, but we can talk about people anytime you want to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If there’s anybody you want to talk about right now—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was saying earlier, of all my experiences in the space program—people always ask, “What was your best flight? What was your most exciting flight? What is your most vivid memory?” implying that it’s something about some flight. I had four awesome flights. All of them were distinctly different, I mean in every respect. They all had a totally different mission; none connected whatsoever.\\n\\n Three of them involved international partners, because I went from Hubble to ATLAS 1 [Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science], which was a truly international flight; had a Belgian payload specialist. Ten of our thirteen experiments were non-U.S. And my last flight was the first joint Russian-American mission. We flew STS-60 with—I had Sergei [Konstantinovich] Krikalev and Vladimir [Georgievich] Titov, who came over from Moscow [Russia]; experienced cosmonauts and their families.\\n\\n So it was the people that really made our fourteen years here memorable. I always cry when I talk about Franklin, because Franklin is just an awesome individual. [Cries] He is an inspiration to anybody. I interviewed with Franklin Chang-Diaz. We got to Clear Lake Airport. None of you are old enough to even know anything about Clear Lake Airport. But there used to be a little airstrip right there on Highway 3, and they’d fly commuters in and out of there, back up to Ellington [Field] or Hobby [Airport], you could even go.\\n\\n I must have been one of about five test pilots and flight test engineers, test pilots and test NFO, Naval Flight Officers, backseat guys, who came from Pax River, and a handful of people came from Edwards [Air Force Base], all military. They always brought us down in groups of twenty. My interview groups had—shoot, I don’t even remember how many, but it probably was three or four non-test pilots or military people. Franklin was one of them, very quiet and reserved.\\n\\n I think [Richard N.] Dick Richards—I can’t remember who it was, but one of the guys in my interview group, a fighter pilot, decided that since we were all going to be in this group for the week, we needed to get to know each other. So, as a fighter pilot would do, stepped up and said, “Hey, why don’t we get to know each other. My name’s so-and-so, and I’m a fighter pilot.”\\n\\n We went around the waiting room there while we were waiting on the van, and we all went through, “I’m an attack pilot.”\\n\\n “I’m a this.”\\n\\n “I’m a that.”\\n\\n And it came to Franklin, and Franklin kind of looked up sheepishly. He had come in from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts], and he said [imitating Chang-Diaz’s voice], “My name is Franklin Chang-Diaz. I’m a plasma physicist.”\\n\\n And I kind of—I looked, and I didn’t intend for it to be a joke. I wasn’t exactly sure what a plasma physicist did, but I knew it didn’t have anything to do with blood. But I couldn’t resist, and I said, “You work with blood?” And you could see this look on Franklin’s face. He’s never seen me before in his life. He’s here with all these people that he thinks are like him. He thinks they’re all really smart, and the first thing he gets is all these assholes who are fighter pilots and that was all they want to talk about, flexing their muscle, and then this other idiot comes up and asks him if plasma physics has anything to do with blood. And he turned pale. And he says, “No, it’s not about blood.”\\n\\n And so I said, “Okay. I’m just making a joke.” But we got to know each other that week, and it turned out to be a tremendous week.\\n\\n I gained a tremendous amount of respect for him because I got to know his story. He had grown up in San Jose, Costa Rica, and at the age of seven, after having dreamed of being an astronaut for the first seven years of his life, at the age of seven he went to his father and he said, “I’ve got to go to the United States.” Spoke no English, so this is all in Spanish, by the way.\\n\\n His father said, “For what?” His dad was actually an American citizen, I think, by birth, but had traveled all over the world as an engineer and had married Franklin’s mom, who was a Diaz from Costa Rica. Franklin’s father was Chang. And the way it happens—and you all probably know this better than I do—to preserve the mother’s name, then her name gets appended, hyphenated on the end of the child’s name. So Franklin was Franklin Chang, and he was Franklin Chang when he first came to the space program. But then he legally took his whole name, and that’s what he’s used ever since. So he took the Costa Rican name of Franklin Chang-Diaz.\\n\\n But when Franklin went to his dad, he said, “I’ve got to go to the United States because I am going to be an astronaut. I am going to be an astronaut, and I have to live in the United States to do that.”\\n\\n And his father said, you know, “Franklin, get real. You haven’t even gotten out of elementary school. Go back to school and talk to me when you graduate from high school.” And so Franklin said he went back and studied, and he worked real hard and he did real well. And he said the day he graduated from high school he told his dad, “Okay. It’s time to go.”\\n\\n His father said, “Time to go where?”\\n\\n He said, “Well, when we talked ten years ago, you told me to graduate from high school and I could go to the United States.”\\n\\n He says, “Yeah, but I was kidding.” He said, “You’ve got to be out of your mind for me to let you go to the United States because you’re going to be an astronaut.”\\n\\n And Franklin, he wouldn’t give up. He insisted. And he said his father finally gave in. He gave him $50 in cash and a one-way ticket to Hartford, Connecticut, and a note to some friends that said, “This is my son Franklin. He thinks he wants to be an astronaut. Humor him. And when you’re finished, send him home.”\\n\\n And Franklin got on the airplane, came to Hartford, enrolled in the University of Connecticut, almost flunked out because he couldn’t speak English; would not let them put him in a remedial program; taught himself English; went on to graduate with honors from the University of Connecticut. Got a graduate scholarship to MIT., got a Ph.D. in plasma physics, and today is one of the world’s foremost plasma physicists.\\n\\n You know, you go, “What am I doing with people like this? What did I do to be here?” And he still goes back to Costa Rica routinely. When we finished my last flight, he took us down to Costa Rica for the inauguration of President [José María] Figueres, who was a childhood friend of his who was elected, one of their early democratically elected Presidents of Costa Rica. And because Franklin knew him, Franklin asked if he could bring his crew down for the inauguration, which he did.\\n\\n During the two weeks that we were down there, he took us into the jungle, into the Amazon rainforest, to little communities of kids that had no electricity. All of the books and stuff that they—they knew more about the space program than I did, and it was because of all that Franklin had done to get material to them, to go in and talk to them, and just teach them about space and dreaming. And these kids, when we went to the school, they were wearing—because everybody wears uniforms in Costa Rica—this school wore blue bottoms and white tops, and the tops were pressed. And we all asked Franklin, “How can that be? There is no electricity here.”\\n\\n He said, “The moms put an iron on a fire and they iron them. They will not send them out to school unkempt.”\\n\\n We stayed there for a whole day, answering questions from these kids in this little elementary school. And we went to the presidential inauguration. Franklin was in the U.S. delegation. The Costa Ricans had wanted Franklin to head the U.S. delegation. I forget, I can’t remember which—1980; must have been [George H.W.] Bush, [Richard M.] Nixon? No, Nixon was gone. It’s not important.\\n\\n But they decided that the Secretary of Commerce was going to head the U.S. delegation, but Franklin would be marching up front with him. And it was unbelievable. It was an outdoor inauguration in the soccer arena, which is huge. When the U.S. delegation came in and was announced, and they announced, “Franklin Chang-Diaz,” the place erupted. It was everybody in Costa Rica knows him, and he is a national hero. The place went wild.\\n\\n And that night we were driving around. He was driving the car and had us all loaded in there, and we were going to one of the many inaugural balls. We weren’t dressed like very much, so we’re driving around. Every time we came to a barricade, the policeman would stick his arm out, and then he’d look, and he’d come over to the window and he’d say, “Señor Chang-Diaz! Oh, come through. Come through.” And they’d wave Franklin through.\\n\\n And the next thing we knew, we were at the ball, the principal inaugural ball where President Figueres was entertaining his guests. And we parked right at the front door. The next thing we knew, we’re all standing around, and Franklin was just going to see if he could get us in, and just let us look, and all that stuff. The next thing we knew, here comes the President of Costa Rica out the door, President Figueres. “Oh, Franklin! Franklin, I’m so sorry. If I had known you were going to be here, we would have had you at—give me a moment.”\\n\\n He goes back in and he empties a table, clears a table and brings Franklin and his motley crew in. And so there we are, sitting in the inaugural ball for the President of Costa Rica, with this national hero. It was unbelievable. But Franklin is one of the many national heroes that I had an opportunity to meet and associate with here.\\n\\n When we went to Russia after my last flight, we were there as guests of the Russian government. We had had the first cosmonaut to ever fly on the Shuttle. That was Sergei Krikalev. Sergei was a veteran Russian cosmonaut. He had been in space longer than any of us combined, at the time. His first flight has lasted, I think, five months on Mir [Space Station], and then his second flight on Mir took place when I was flying my first flight as a commander.\\n\\n When I was flying STS-45 in [19]’92, Sergei was still stranded onboard Mir, because the wall had come down [collapse of the Soviet Union], and the Soviets—now the Russians—just didn’t have the wherewithal to get him back yet. He had actually—he ended up up there for ten months because at the four-month point when he was supposed to come back, they were going to end up with a totally inexperienced crew. So they asked if one of the two onboard would mind staying, so they would have somebody experienced and somebody new, and Sergei volunteered.\\n\\n So he stayed for what was to be an eight-month mission. The eight-month mission turned into ten months, because the Russians couldn’t get him back. And then finally he came back. I met him via ham radio while I was on orbit and we did the first communication between Mir and a Shuttle.\\n\\n And then I was at NASA Headquarters [Washington, D.C.] as the Assistant Deputy Administrator. When [Daniel S.] Dan Goldin had become the NASA Administrator, I’d met him on my back when I landed after STS-45. I looked up because I had agreed that our crew would stay supine and all that for the medical guys, which was heresy. You know, no good crew doesn’t walk off and inspect their Orbiter. And I said, “This is stupid. There’s nothing we can do. But if they need for us to do it, we’ll do it.” So we came out on gurneys.\\n\\n But I was laying there and looked up, and here’s this guy I’ve never seen before. He introduces himself, “My name’s Dan Goldin. I’m the new NASA Administrator, and I want you to come work for me.”\\n\\n And I said, “Yeah. I have no desire to go to Washington.”\\n\\n So he said, “Well, when you get finished with your debriefs, come and talk.” And I ended up going up, and, like many people, I was unbelievably impressed with him first time you meet him. The guy was a visionary, really was. So he kind of wooed me into agreeing that I would come to Washington and be the Assistant Deputy Administrator for a while, anyway. So that’s what I did.\\n\\n While I was there, then it was decided that they were going to let me command STS-60. I was really hoping that I would have an opportunity to command the Hubble revisit, because that crew hadn’t been assigned yet. So, deep down inside I was kind of keeping my fingers crossed that that would be my next mission. [Richard O.] Dick Covey ended up commanding that. He was STS-61, and I ended up being assigned as the Commander of STS-60.\\n\\n When they told me what it was going to be, that it was going to be the first joint Russian-American mission, I said, “Forget it. I mean, no way. I have spent my entire life hating these guys. I could give a crap, the significance of this. I don’t want to do it.” I said, “Pick somebody else.”\\n\\n And they said, “Come on. Just lighten up.” They said, “Wait. At least meet them, and then you can say no.”\\n\\n So they brought Sergei and Vladimir through Washington to come down here for some briefs and stuff like that, and I had an opportunity to meet them and have dinner with them and stuff, and immediately, was very impressed.\\n\\n Sergei, at the time, was a very young engineer, I mean unbelievably sharp guy; had been a Soviet aerobatic champion and now was a Russian aerobatic champion; flew aerobatic airplanes. There wasn’t anything he didn’t know. Spoke fluent English.\\n\\n Vladimir spoke none, I mean zero, nada. He couldn’t even ask for water if he wanted to. And you grew to really empathize with him. I wouldn’t say you felt sorry for him, because you didn’t feel sorry for him at all. You just were impressed with his resilience, how he, in spite of the fact that he didn’t understand a word, went through the training, struggled for the whole year we were training and everything, and eventually learned English and became very good. But the decision was made by the Russians that Sergei—the right decision, by the way, was that Sergei would fly with us. But they didn’t know until the very last minute, or the last few months, or something like that.\\n\\n But again, we brought their families over here, moved them into plain old homes. Sergei and his family lived over in what is now—back then it was a newer part of Clear Lake [Texas], around Meadowbrook [Subdivision] or something like that. We moved Vladimir and his family out to Friendswood [Texas]. His son was eight; spoke no English. His daughter, eighteen, Marina, spoke fluent English. His wife, who was gorgeous, a very cosmopolitan woman. Sergei’s wife was very Russian—quote, unquote—“Russian,” you know, the stereotypical no makeup, quiet, spoke no English. She was an engineer, by the way, in the Mission Control Center.\\n\\n Volodya [Vladimir Titov] was a colonel in the Russian Air Force, MiG-21 pilot; had been an air attaché in Paris, so Sasha [Aleksandra Titov] spoke fluent French; had been exposed a lot to life outside of Russia; really sharp in every respect. Anyway, within six months their son was speaking cowboy, Texan; wearing his cowboy hat, boots and everything, and speaking fluent English.\\n\\n Sergei only had one child, Olga. She was two years old when he came over here, and although they were here for almost two years, she learned some English words, but she was just learning to talk. So she never got a chance to learn English for real. Now they’re both grown. All three of them are now grown. Marina still works here, and Vladimir is now the Vice President of Boeing-Moscow. Sergei still flies, still with the space program, and his wife is still in the Mission Control Center in Moscow.\\n\\n But that was a fitting end to my time with NASA. So, when people ask me what is my most memorable occasion or event or whatever it is, it was preparation for my last flight. It was the people I had an opportunity to meet and make friends. And that was my last flight with Franklin. I flew my first flight with him and my last flight with him. So it was a fitting way to leave NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think we’ll stop for today. We’ll come back when we get together again, and talk about those last flights and your time at NASA Headquarters." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles F. Bolden", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. We can do that." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00290", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/JohnsonGW/johnsongw.htm", + "original_file_name": "JohnsonGW_5-3-10.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/JohnsonGW/JohnsonGW_5-3-10.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Gary W. Johnson", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 3 May 2010" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Gary W. Johnson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 3rd, 2010. This oral history with Gary Johnson is being conducted for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Sandra Johnson. We want to thank you so much for coming in this afternoon to talk with us. We know you began working with the Manned Spacecraft Center in 1964." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary W. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s correct. It was June 1964. I had just graduated from Oklahoma State University with a BS [Bachelor of Science] degree in electrical engineering. Started work on June 15th. Everything my wife and I owned was packed in a VW Bug [Volkswagen Beetle] and we came directly down here. Initially stayed in apartments in Dickinson, Texas—Tall Timbers Apartments.\\n\\n My first assignment was in the power distribution and sequencing section of the Instrumentation and Electronic Systems Division. Ralph [S.] Sawyer was the division chief at that time. My section head in that section was Bob [Robert E.] Munford. Those divisions were in the Engineering Directorate. The director at that time was Max [Maxime A.] Faget. I was young and labeled as a project engineer, and I was put on following the Command/Service Module [CSM] development for the power distribution system and sequencing system.\\n\\n Early first involvement was with the [Ascent] Abort testing we were doing out at the [US Army] White Sands Missile Range [New Mexico]. The Little Joe II launch vehicle you see there at Rocket Park at JSC was one of the vehicles used to boost the spacecraft to particular altitudes, and then you’d initiate an abort signal. The objectives for all the tests out there was to test out the abort system as well as the Earth landing parachute system.\\n\\n That was a very good program. We got to work on some of the hardware actually here at the Johnson Space Center. The work we mainly did was on what you call the development flight instrumentation, DFI it’s referred to. North American Aviation [Inc.], of course, was the one that had the contract for building the Apollo Command/Service Module. They built the basic boilerplates that were used and responsible for the integration and the overall testing of the program, but we supported with the DFI that was installed. I was fortunate, I got to go out to White Sands and be there for all the launches we did.\\n\\n One of them turned out to be a lessons learned for us. It’s Boilerplate 22 [Mission A-003]. That launch was one where the big fin on the Little Joe II rocket failed in a hard over position, so the faster the rocket went up—and it was propelled by solid rocket motors—the faster it spun around. It spun around so fast that the launch vehicle literally came apart. It had six solid rocket motors in it called Algols, and those six motors all just came apart.\\n\\n I was sitting there in the stands at the time. We were only a half mile away from the launch pad, and all of a sudden these rockets were coming flying in every direction almost like they were coming back at us, but they weren’t of course. Well, they were coming back at us, but they were far enough away that that was okay. To show you a little difference in the safety requirements, we were only a half mile away there. They’re getting ready for the Constellation Program Orion [Crew Exploration Vehicle] project Pad Abort 1 test out in White Sands. I’ve been involved in some of the readiness reviews, and the launch site is four miles away from the actual launch of the pad abort. There’s a big difference in what was perceived as being the safety distance in the Apollo days versus now.\\n\\n Anyway, the lesson out of that was the abort system to initiate the abort for the spacecraft and the launch vehicle consisted of the opening up of the circuit between the spacecraft and the launch vehicle to initiate the abort. Well, when the launch vehicle came apart, that in itself opened up that wiring and automatically initiated the launch escape system. The pyros [pyrotechnics] fired to separate the Command Module from the launch vehicle, the launch escape motor went off, the pitch control motor went off, and it went through the entire sequence, which consisted of tower jettison, deploying the apex cover [forward heat shield covering the parachute], putting out the drogue parachutes, putting out the main parachutes, and then safely recovering the vehicle. The lesson there was on any future vehicles—and we did this later on the Saturn I and Saturn V [rocket] vehicles—one of the abort sensors should be this wiring that goes down to the launch vehicle such that if it ever opens up due to a launch vehicle blowup or structural breakup, that it would automatically, without any other indication, initiate the abort.\\n\\n In that particular case, it also was a great test on the Earth Landing System [ELS], because the vehicle was going at an extremely high rate of speed when we aborted, and when the drogue parachutes got ready to come out, they came out and were whipping around on the upper deck. It’s a good thing we decided to use steel risers rather than the nylon that previously had been thought about, because those steel risers were beating up against the upper deck and the sharp edges—if we’d had the standard nylon risers they would have gotten cut loose. The way it was the drogues helped stabilize it, and then later the main [parachutes] came out and everything worked fine.\\n\\n That was a couple of lessons I passed on to the Constellation folks since we just now designed the somewhat similar [Orion Command Module]. One [lesson] is consider the use of the cables—which they made a change. Originally the program had the nylon risers in there, and now they’ve gone to the steel cables like we had back for Apollo. I don’t know if they’ve implemented it yet, but I pointed out that we needed the abort signals that come from the launch vehicle, the spacecraft, need to be on that same concept—that if you lose the signal all of a sudden to the spacecraft that it’ll automatically initiate abort. Hopefully that’ll be followed through.\\n\\n We then later had some other abort tests out at White Sands, and they all turned out to be perfectly okay. Also, I was following the unmanned testing that we did from the [NASA] Kennedy Space Center [KSC, Florida], and I’d like to point out that one of the main responsibilities both at White Sands and later was the sequencing system. That’s the very system that initiates the aborts. So I was very pleased after the Boilerplate 22, because my system worked real well and helped save the spacecraft.\\n\\n We launched one of the first full-up, what we call Block I, Apollo spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center off of a Saturn IB [rocket]. The launch was referred to as AS-201. AS stands for Apollo-Saturn. It was 201, and the spacecraft was [CSM-]009. It was going to be the first launch so it wasn’t an orbital flight, it was the ballistic launch. The lesson that came out of that—we didn’t know it exactly in real time at the time, but during the beginnings of the entry phase for the Command Module, we lost all Command Module RCS [Reaction Control System] control. The buses got shorted out, so we had a lot of problems.\\n\\n It turned out the vehicle went into a stable roll position, and it did what you call a ballistic entry, which brought the vehicle down safely and the Earth Landing System worked fine, but it was like 200 miles up range. So it took a while because recovery forces were down in the nominal range. Instead of doing a normal lifting entry it did a ballistic entry and landed upstream, but they recovered the spacecraft.\\n\\n I supported these missions since I was in engineering. We actually followed the testing alongside of our flight control counterparts in the Staff Support Rooms in the Mission Control Center. In reviewing the data though for that flight, we found out there was a wire that went out through the Command/Service Module umbilical which is guillotined in flight and was no longer being used. It was wiring that was being normally routed out to the KSC people on the ground. Instead of removing the wire from the vehicle, the wiring was left in the vehicle. The other problem was this wire was still attached to one of the circuit breakers on the panel. Matter of fact, the circuit breaker it was being used for was System B on my Earth Landing System. When the wires were guillotined during the entry, that interface heated up and since this one wire, because it at that time was unused, had not been looked at as to whether it needed to be deadfaced, opened up, so it wouldn’t short out when you did the guillotine.\\n\\n Since this wire had been unused, it had been dropped out of the drawings. They had dropped it out even though it was still in the spacecraft. So when the people were doing the review for how to deadface wires as being hot with power on them, this got missed. That power on that ended up sending power to the motor switches that control the position of whether—if they’re in the Service Module they fire the RCS jets for the Service Module, and then when you do the separation, the motor switches transfer over to the Command Module so you have RCS control in the Command Module.\\n\\n Well, this wiring shorted down at the umbilical and the power that was in there from this other circuit caused those motor switches to transfer back to the Service Module. And of course the Service Module was no longer there. So that’s the reason we lost all Command Module RCS and the reason we had the shorts on the buses, because this wiring had shorted at that umbilical. That one wire wouldn’t have shorted that much as far as the buses, but when that motor switch transferred all of those control wires to the Service Module, those wires then caused a big short on the main buses and lost the power. The circuit breaker that was feeding that, Circuit Breaker B, popped, which disabled one half of the Earth Landing System, which was my responsibility. But the System A worked fine, and we recovered the vehicle.\\n\\n Several lessons of course came out of that. One is any time you have circuitry in the vehicle and the function is no longer being used, if you can’t remove the wire, you’ve got to make sure that it’s removed from any power source, and that the drawings still show that as an unused wire in the vehicle so it could be understood and identified later on. Fortunately that’s pretty much the cause of all the other problems that occurred. So in a sense that was an easy fix to make for the later vehicles.\\n\\n We then later had a flight on the Saturn V. It was the AS-501 [Apollo 4], which was spacecraft 011 [CSM-017], which was fairly uneventful. The next, 50[2] of the Saturn V [Apollo 6], however, had spacecraft 017 [CM-020] on it. Before we launched, people at KSC were having problems with a lot of noise on their instrumentation system. They had worked and worked and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. So they actually got ahold of JSC, our mission evaluation team—Don [Donald D.] Arabian in those days was heading up that activity—and asked Don if he could get some folks together to go down to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] to help the KSC people figure out what the noise problem was on the Saturn.\\n\\n So we went down there, and Don asked me to go since I always followed the electrical system. We got down there and started looking at the drawings, and understood that it was well designed in the sense that we had what we called an I ground for the grounding that all your low-level instrumentation would be on. Then we had an E ground that was the power for all power; it was separated. According to the drawings, this system would be isolated all the way down to the base of the Saturn V, the mobile launcher. Matter of fact, that’s the launcher that goes out with the [Space] Shuttle nowadays.\\n\\n Down below in that launcher the two grounds were tied together to go to the main ground to make sure everything was grounded. I went over the drawings and I got with the KSC engineer, and we started up at the top and we started walking down the grounds, opening up the various junction boxes. Got all the way down to the base, which was in a closed compartment underneath that launcher mobile crawler, and opened up the one box. A link was missing between the E and I ground. The E ground, the power ground, turned out to be really grounded. The I ground was basically floating. It wasn’t tied, that link was just missing. So that real quickly explained why they were having noise on the instrumentation system.\\n\\n Once again that was an easy fix. The lesson learned there of course was any time you have any noise on the system be sure and look at the grounding system. And when you look at the grounding system make sure you don’t just look at drawings and think everything’s all right; you actually physically go out there and go through everything to make sure everything is in place. That came up as a big help later on when we got asked to do the Viking program. They had a problem I might mention at this time before I forget.\\n\\n The Viking was the first Mars landers we had, Viking 1, Viking 2. They were built up at Denver [Colorado] at that time at Martin Marietta [Corporation]. Its location’s up on the sides of the hill, it’s fairly dry there. Don Arabian got a call saying, “We’ve been trying to check out these Vikings in our thermal vacuum chambers, and we’re getting all kinds of noise on the instrumentation system. We’ve had our people up here looking, going through everything, and we just flat can’t find what’s wrong with what’s causing the noise problem.”\\n\\n So we went up there. Once again I sat down the same way and figured well I’ve got to look at the grounding system, because that’s where problems are. Once again looked at the drawings. They had a similar concept—they had what they called an I ground and an E ground, two grounds that would be carried all the way, and then get tied together at the very base, and then go on outside. Once again I started at the top going all the way down with one of the Martin Marietta electrical engineers.\\n\\n Everything was checking fine through the test stand. It turns out there were two big, almost like welding cables, and the E ground and I ground went outside the building. Because it’s dry there on the side of the mountain, to get a good ground they actually had a water well outside the building. So we walked all the way out to the well and I had the guy pull the cover off the well. The two cables went down inside, and I could see at the bottom of the well that there was water in the well. I said, “Let’s wiggle one of the cables.” The water didn’t move. So the water had dropped below where the cables were, and both the E and the I ground were floating. They weren’t grounded at all.\\n\\n Once again it was an easy fix for them. They felt extremely embarrassed, needless to say, and that was something they said in the future they’re always going to have on their checklist, check the water in the grounding well. Once again there was a lesson there. That needs to be mentioned to people quite often because as you can see, it’s repeated. So any time in the future I hear about any noise, programs and launch vehicles or test setups or what have you, I’ll have a suspicion it might be somewhat related to the same thing.\\n\\n [Spacecraft-020, Apollo 6]. We had a launch. On that [second] Saturn V launch there was problems later with the launch vehicle itself. They had a POGO [longitudinal oscillation of launch vehicle] problem, having engine shutdown. We also had some structural problems. Fortunately these wires that sense the abort signal were located around the vehicle 120 degrees apart, and we only had a problem with one of the signals. The abort system required two of the three wires to be open or signals to issue an abort.\\n\\n I might be a little bit out of sequence on the time here, but the next big thing that I was involved in—like I mentioned before, we were monitoring the testing that occurred at the Cape in the Control Center. When the Apollo 1 crew—and that was referred to as Apollo-Saturn 204, and it was Spacecraft-012, Block 1 spacecraft at the Cape—they were at the pad, Pad 34. It was pressurized to 16 psi [pounds per square inch] pure oxygen. They were going through a full-up test just like they would be ready for launch. They were in their spacesuits in the spacecraft. I was monitoring in the [Mission] Control Center here at Houston. I was in the backup Staff Support Room sitting on the EPS [electrical power system] console. Turns out the test was having problems. It ran way late. It was on a Friday about 6:00 p.m. The majority of the flight control team, including Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz and the majority of his team, had left the Control Center, so there were just a few of us. Dr. Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft was in the front room on the flight director’s console. Then back in the Staff Support Room it was only myself on the EPS console and Mort [Morton] Silver, who was a North American flight control engineer, was on the ECS [environmental control system] console. About that time is when we had the fire in the spacecraft.\\n\\n The other thing that was bad about that is listening to the ground crew trying to go up and get the guys out—there’s lessons here. Turns out the gas masks that were available at Launch Complex 34 were not the standard ones you’d have for firemen. They had a cartridge in them just designed to screen out toxic propellant. They were there strictly if you had an N2O4 [nitrogen tetroxide] or MMH [monomethylhydrazine] propellant leak. The recovery people were grabbing those gas masks and going up, and the White Room [pre-entry chamber] of course was filled up with smoke, and as they went in there this would not filter out. So they were breathing in the smoke and they were actually passing out. It was bad hearing about the guys going up trying to do something and passing out, and turns out they didn’t have even the gas masks for a ground crew.\\n\\n Dr. Kraft came running back and told us. When I heard him announce that they were locking up the building and for us to be looking over our data—actually at the instant it occurred, I heard the crew talking about fire in the cabin, I was thinking just for an instant, well, the crew is in their space suits, they’ll probably be okay. But then the test director at the Cape, I heard him on the loop tell Dr. Kraft you need to go over to the private phone. I knew then. Of course what happened was Gus [Virgil I.] Grissom, he had turned to change his com [communications] cable, and to do that you step off with one foot off your couch and one down—best we could tell. That fire had burned through that part of the suit so you had the toxic gases inside the suit as well. Fortunately for them, they expired fairly quickly because of the toxic gases.\\n\\n In going through the data, I noticed right away that the short that occurred at that time was on Main Bus A and B. It shorted both Main Bus A and B. That meant I’d be needing to go through all the drawings and find out where in the spacecraft all the dioded Main Bus A and B loads were located. Also, by the way, Kraft had told us when they’d locked up all the doors that we could tell our wives that we’d be late, but not say why. So I called to tell her, but she had already been hearing on the TV and the radio. I didn’t get out of the building until the next day, as we were getting our data together.\\n\\n About a week later I got sent to the Cape to go through the vehicle, and prior to that I’d been already mapping out everyplace we could go look to see where the dioded loads were. I was the only engineer that was assigned to go in and look through all the wiring. That area over on the left-hand side was pretty much totally destroyed. That’s where the oxygen was and aluminum and metal that burned over there, so the wiring that was over there you couldn’t see. The rest of the vehicle you could take a damp cloth and wipe off the smoke and it looked brand-new. Things happened so quick, and the pressure on the Command Module broke and it snuffed everything out at that time.\\n\\n We looked at closeout photographs of the wiring in that area. It turns out that there’s one dioded load that went in to power the environmental control system instrumentation, and that wire was routed over the stainless tubing and went underneath the door that’s opened up for lithium hydroxide to get access. Earlier photos showed that they had a Teflon wrap over that to protect that wire. However, the last photograph we had of that area showed that Teflon protective wrap had slipped down, so you just had the wire there. We weren’t able to prove that’s the location, but we also know that it started somewhere in that area. So we surmised that when Gus Grissom stepped off and stepped down with his foot to turn and do that he probably stepped on that wire. Teflon is not a very tough insulation, it actually has cold flow properties, so pressure on it can extrude through. It could have been a case where he mashed that wire and it caused a short, or it could be a case he stepped on it and that wire had been abraded by the door that was opened and closed. The photos showed it was probably against that door, then maybe him stepping on it flexed the wire up—but we had an [electric] arc that initiated the fire.\\n\\n That led to later improving a lot of our quality assurance procedures and a lot of putting in extra protection on wiring. The big factor was making sure that our materials would all be compatible with 100 percent oxygen. We were going to operate at 5 psi pure oxygen and not ever operate on the ground at 16 psi pure oxygen, because there was almost no way to make things compatible with 16 psi pure oxygen. Even metal burns. All that was put in place, in addition to the fact that we redesigned the hatch.\\n\\n The hatch on the Apollo 1 spacecraft was in three segments. The inner segment you had to unlatch it and pull it inward, it was pressure-sealing. Then you had the heat shield one and then the boost protective cover one on the outside. That pressure buildup from the fire prevented the crew from being able to open that inner hatch. So the hatch was redesigned on Apollo later to be a single rapid-opening hatch that would be outward so you wouldn’t have this problem of higher pressure inside sealing it. It also would allow the crew to quickly exit the spacecraft, as well as the ground crew operating the hatch from the outside could quickly enter the spacecraft. Some of those design features were carried forward in today’s spacecraft. In the case of the Orion capsule, they’ve got an integrated single hatch a lot similar to the design that was done for Apollo.\\n\\n Then after we put all of those procedures in place we had the Apollo 7 mission, which was the very first manned mission for the Apollo spacecraft after the fire. There was a lesson on that mission in the area that I work in, which was the electrical system. It was an Earth orbit mission strictly for about 14 days. But when they were on the back side, out of radio contact, all of a sudden lights went off in the spacecraft and alarms go off on the AC [alternating current] system. Then we were able to recover that, but what we found out—and at this time we were operating in the Building 45 MER [Mission Evaluation Room]. Shortly after the Apollo fire it changed where all the flight control people—matter of fact, on those early unmanned flights with the Saturn V, Chris Kraft came back there one time and said this room is too crowded with all these engineering people in addition to his flight control people. He demanded that the engineering people come up with their own facility, and that’s what led to the Building 45 third floor arrangement.\\n\\n [Regarding Apollo 7] we determined there it was the AC short. Actually we determined this while the mission was still going on. We had motor switches located in the Service Module that when you had them on automatic they would automatically, depending on the pressure in the cryo [cryogenic] tanks, cycle the heaters and the fans on and off. It turns out that on one of those cycles is when the AC shorts occurred.\\n\\n So we just told the crew for the rest of the time after we reset things to only manually operate the cryo tank heaters. Don’t have them on auto, and don’t operate the AC part of it, just do the DC power for the heaters. The postflight analysis that we did, we were able to determine that the short was in the motor switches. What we determined was the motor switches have what we call an environmental seal, which was a potted type seal rather than a welded hermetic seal. The nitrogen pressure that’s inside there for sealing the compartments was leaking out while we were on orbit, and it got down to what you consider the critical atmosphere, where the voltage is such that you can have corona arcing, as they call it.\\n\\n That’s what happened here. With the AC system, since you’re talking 120 volts—and then you’d be talking 240 on the phase-to-phase, which is being switched—it turns out we were able to determine we got down to pressure and the voltage sufficient that would cause corona occurring and cause a short. So that was changed to make sure that things we had in the Service Module would be hermetically sealed, not environmentally sealed, especially if you’re talking high voltage like the AC system was.\\n\\n I followed all the Apollo missions. The next one which had a problem related to the electrical system was Apollo 10. Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford was the commander and John [W.] Young was the Command Module pilot on that one. That was in lunar orbit. They had just gone on the back side of the Moon, and all of a sudden they had had one of the fuel cells fail, hard fail. Then they went on another—still out of contact. Later they ended up having an alarm on their second fuel cell, which caused concern.\\n\\n It turns out on the one fuel cell the glycol pump shorted out, so it was lost for the entire mission. But the other problem we just had to watch, to reduce the loads a little bit. That brings up a point that’s been a lot of discussion with our new design spacecraft, is what level of redundancy and what was the philosophy. The part I’ve been able to pass on is that the redundancy follow-up policy we had early in Apollo was based on three factors: the criticality, flight experience, and the technology level of the hardware.\\n\\n I’ll give you an example. The fuel cells are a very good example. Back in those days the fuel cells were the new technology. We’d used them on Gemini, a different type of fuel cell we didn’t have problems with. And the fuel cells were what we call Criticality 1. Flight experience on those fuel cells except for the unmanned flights would have been very little. Then you had the experience with the different type of fuel cell on Gemini.\\n\\n We wanted to make sure we had three fuel cells such that if one failed we could actually continue to operate, which is what we did on Apollo 10. We continued the rest of the mission with one fuel cell totally failed. Even if we had a second fuel cell fail, we could power down the spacecraft and safely return. So we had what you call fail op/fail safe, or triple redundancy.\\n\\n But if you go to something like the main buses, which are bus bars in boxes, and the main switching components were like big hard contractors—those were devices that had proven flight experience, didn’t have any problems. Even though they were Criticality 1 it wasn’t new technology. If anything it was old technology, well utilized in aircraft as well as other aerospace and spacecraft applications, so for the main buses we only had two. For the area that was the low technology concerns, you had three. In other words the redundancy level varied.\\n\\n The same thing occurred on the AC system. The bus structure for AC and the switching components for AC was dual redundant, but for Apollo for weight savings we’d gone for the first time to what you call a three-phase solid state inverter, which was brand-new to the aerospace world. Once again because this was new technology and we didn’t have the flight experience on it, we had three AC inverters. However, we only ran one AC inverter per each one of our AC buses, so the third one was always on standby or off. It turns out the inverter system was very reliable, and we never really had to rely on the third inverter. The only time we used the third inverter is when we had to do powerdowns for other reasons to keep this vehicle from getting too cold. We turned that inverter on to just put heat into the cold plates. It was used like a heater almost for the cold plates. And that was about the only use we used for the [spare] solid state inverter. They worked very well.\\n\\n I passed over Apollo 8—I was involved in that. If you remember, I had talked about how on Apollo 7 we had the shorts with the AC system. Like I said, we had pretty much determined what that was and felt like we’d fixed it. But George [M.] Low was the program manager at the time, and there was a lot of concern because Apollo 8 was going to be the first launch to go to the Moon. There was a big concern at that time because we thought the Russians were going to go with a circumlunar flight before we were. We felt that some apparent data indicated they were getting ready for that so there was a real concern about making this launch and flight.\\n\\n George Low directed that we run a test on the Apollo 8 spacecraft to carefully check out and test every AC load and component on the spacecraft, because he didn’t want to have anything with the AC system. So I worked for a week or so here at Houston working up what needed to be done.\\n\\n Then I went to the Cape and Apollo 8 was on the pad. I spent a week at the Cape writing what we call TPS [Test Preparation Sheet] test procedure, for the Cape to run the test on the spacecraft. I was, to be honest, very nervous at that time because I’d run tests on spacecraft here in Houston. We’d had the 2TV-1 vehicle and Spacecraft-008 vehicle that actually were full-up vehicles that were tested in the big large vacuum chamber here at JSC. One of [the tests], 2TV-1, was actually a full-up manned test for 14 days. So I’d been involved in doing tests on the actual vehicle, but this was the first time I’d ever been responsible for something being tested at the pad on a mission getting ready to be launched to the Moon for the first time, and having to make sure it worked with all the ground support and connections we do for JSC for checkout. I spent time going through, and it turned out to be a pretty thick procedure and very carefully checking things.\\n\\n I got to thinking, a JSC engineer running the test here at KSC, I’m sure these KSC guys are going to really check me over and make sure I got everything right, so they’ll really look at things well. Well, when I started taking this big procedure through the signature chain, guys would thumb through it and look through it and say we know you feel like you’ve checked with the right people and done the right thing, and they just signed off. I went through all the required signature chains, and nobody had really gone through and carefully checked everything. That even made me more nervous.\\n\\n The test was scheduled to be run on what you call third shift, which would be in the evening. I was out at the Saturn V launch pad actually sitting just inside the White Room with my procedure there and my headset on to monitor the test, and the ground crew was in the spacecraft—I could see in the spacecraft, the hatch was open and they were going through the test.\\n\\n About halfway through the test all of a sudden everything went black. The lights in the White Room went off, all that. Almost had a heart attack. I thought my goodness what have I done. Then there was comments in the Control Center about we’ve lost power. But I looked inside the hatch and all the lights were on, everything was fine. Well, turned out Florida light and flicker as we called it in those days [Florida Power and Light Company] had gone off, and it was just the ground facility power had gone off. So the lights in the White Room had gone off, which caused everything to go dark and led to the talk in the Control Center, but the spacecraft itself was on backup emergency battery power and all so it was fine. It turned out there was nothing wrong with my test and everything went fine, but I almost had a heart attack. Oh boy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Easy fix. Flip the switch, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary W. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All I could think was, you’re responsible for scrubbing the Apollo 8 mission. That was really something that stuck with me a long time. Then Apollo 9 was an Earth orbit mission testing out the Lunar Module [LM]; didn’t really have any major areas that came up in my area. However, once again I was always in there responsible for the sequencing and the power distribution system, monitoring those systems.\\n\\n The sequencing besides the aborts was critical because it fired all the pyros. It did the Command/Service Module separation, it did the docking probe retract. It separated when you docked with the Lunar Module—to pull it out of the launch vehicle, it fired the pyros to separate the LM from the launch vehicle. It was used to deploy the apex cover and put out all the parachutes and stuff for landing. It was a real critical system, so needless to say I was usually on edge following the missions.\\n\\n Apollo 11, I was in the control room. People of course ask you a lot about Apollo 11 [first moon landing]. Whether you talk to Chris Kraft or almost anybody that was involved in those days, the mission that kept everybody on the edge of our seats and glued to the data was Apollo 8, because that was the very first time we’d launched and gone out of Earth orbit and gone to escape velocity with a crew, and it was the first time we’d flown the Saturn V manned. And that occurred just after that flight that we’d had problems with the Saturn V.\\n\\n Also it was the first mission we knew that the crew were on their way. It was going to take three days or so to get there and be in orbit, three days to get back—what if something goes wrong? So everybody was really on edge watching the data the entire flight, because everything we did was done for the first time. It turned out for that mission it’s a good thing. That was probably one of the most problem-free flights we had, because everybody was so on edge, that if the least little major thing had gone wrong we’d have probably come home early or something else. But it turned out that everything just went extremely well for that mission.\\n\\n Then we had Apollo 10. The new thing then was the activities in lunar orbit and the activities with the Lunar Module going down and coming back up. So when you got to Apollo 11 the part that really had you on the edge of your seat of course was that final last bit of doing the actual landing itself, as well as the period for being on the surface and the launch of the LM to go back and re-dock. The previous missions, Apollo 8 and Apollo 10, and then of course we had Apollo 9 to check out the Lunar Module; had checked out everything so the only thing really new about that was the actual landing activities. In terms of the time duration that kept us on the edge of our seats, Apollo 8 was the longer time period at the time.\\n\\n Then we had Apollo 12. This was something that I was involved in because that’s the one, Apollo 12, where we had the two lightning strikes right after launch. The fuel cells got disconnected from the buses, the AC inverters all got disconnected from the AC buses, and those two events there just lit up all the lights in the spacecraft of things going wrong. Of course we had battery backup that came on, but still caused everything, loss of data. John [W.] Young made the right call to go to the backup switch for the instrumentation. We regained our data and was able to see the status, and we were able to reset the motor switches back to the main buses, the AC buses we were able to reset.\\n\\n It turns out the reason all those things tripped—we had what we called a circuit overload on those motor switches, and it’s a solid state SCR, silicon-controlled rectifiers, was on there. If you tripped it, which would normally be tripped if you had an overload or short circuit or something, you would switch those elements offline. Well, this lightning strike caused a very large negative voltage to occur in the spacecraft. A negative voltage spike on an SCR will cause it to inadvertently trip. So all of those overload sensors accidentally tripped, and that’s what caused all the disconnects. Fortunately that’s something we were able to always reset. So everything got reset, reenabled the guidance system, and as everybody knows, we were able to pull off the Apollo 12 mission the rest of the way just fine. Everything went fine.\\n\\n Apollo 13. I was in the Control Center when we had the short in the tank on Apollo 13. We were very concerned. Matter of fact, some of the men in the MER there were very visibly upset, and everybody was upset, but some of them were very upset thinking we surely lost the crew. That turned out to be another time that we didn’t get out of the building till the next day, sitting there looking at our data.\\n\\n Being responsible for the power system like I was, we were very closely helping look at the loads and what needed to be done. We were mainly over in the Lunar Module, and one thing that I had developed with my Lunar Module subsystem manager before Apollo 13—turns out the Command/Service Module had a battery charger, because we operated off fuel cells and we also had the batteries for reentry when we separate the fuel cells. We had the capability to recharge the batteries on the Command/Service Module before we’d get ready to reenter. We did have some connections that went over—so myself and my Lunar Module power distribution manager were concerned about it’d sure be nice if we had a way to charge the batteries in the Lunar Module using the Command/Service Module. So we’d actually developed a procedure on how to connect up wiring between the Command Module to go over to the Lunar Module that would allow us to maybe put the charger on and charge the Lunar Module, if for some reason we’d do that.\\n\\n All of a sudden here’s a case where we didn’t have power in the Command/Service Module, and the Lunar Module had power. So I went over right quick to get that old procedure out of the file cabinet. In those days, we just wrote things up in memos. Later when we were bringing the crew back, we were faced with a case of having to power the Command/Service Module up, and you wanted to conserve the entry batteries in the Command Module to do that.\\n\\n One of the things we did was we used that procedure basically, except we did it in reverse. We used these wires that were connected from the Lunar Module back to the Command/Service Module to use some of the Lunar Module power to power up the Command Module and then eventually put the entry batteries on. The other thing I was doing though—and very busy doing—was what should be the switch configuration for the spacecraft, because now we’re going to be separating from the Service Module first, getting rid of it, and then hanging on to the Lunar Module as long as we could, and then separate from the Lunar Module. That in turn would change our switch positions and the things we should have in place for the normal Command Module entry. So I was busy with the drawing of the control and display panel, and I’d mark and go around and talk to the various systems people and say on their system whether the circuit breakers had to be open or closed and what the position of the switches was. I marked in red the ones that had to be open and the ones I marked in blue was the circuit breakers that had to be closed for that configuration.\\n\\n Then we sent that procedure over to the flight control team, which was just this drawing with the markup on it, and the flight control team then converted that into a checklist format, and then Ken [Thomas K.] Mattingly checked it out in the simulator. That of course was checked out all right, was used by the crew. That was used by the actual crew. I’ve still got that original control and display drawing that’s got the blue and red markings on it that I kept. It’s one of the things I still have from that mission. And of course as we knew we got the crew back.\\n\\n One thing I’ve done both for Apollo 1, since I was heavily involved in that, and Apollo 13, there’s presently available on the Knowledge Site at JSC a case study for Apollo 1, that I do the presentation on, that’s a video and charts, and then there’s one on Apollo 13 that I do the study on.\\n\\n Apollo 13, on the other hand, is not about what we did during the mission. Apollo 13 is all the things that happened to cause the problem in the tank. There’s a whole series of things, and that’s where the real lessons for Apollo 13 came about—what caused the problem. Early on out at Downey, California, North American, which was later Rockwell [North American Rockwell Corporation]—they were using a type of a forklift procedure to put in the shelf that had the cryo tanks on it in the Service Module out there for assembly. They had a hang-up of a bolt and it caused the thing to drop, so the shelf dropped, and you had a shock on the cryogenic tanks. They took the oxygen tanks out of that Service Module and ran them through a lot of tests to see whether they felt the tanks were still okay. It had a lot of complex circuitry down inside the tank for the heaters and the wiring for the fans that was down inside. Then you had a vent structure, for not only the heaters, but you had to have a path for venting of the tank as well as emptying.\\n\\n It turns out you can’t see inside the tank, even though they X-rayed the tank. Even though they checked all the tank out, that oxygen tank is the one that got put in Apollo 13, even though they thought everything was all right. In retrospect we feel like that caused this tubing to slip down, because when they filled up the cryogenic tanks in the countdown test for Apollo 13—when they finished the test, they weren’t able to get the oxygen out of the tank. It wouldn’t drain properly. We feel like there was a problem caused way back when that drop was made that caused that to occur.\\n\\n One way to get the oxygen out of a tank is turn on the heaters and heat it up, and so-called boil it off. So the KSC people went that way and turned the heaters on. It turns out though there’d been change in what they were doing. In the past, in order to speed up using that mechanism to get the oxygen out of the tanks, they had changed the voltage that the switches used for the heaters. They had changed the voltage from 28 volts—which is your normal voltage for the heaters and the thermostat switches that operate—to 65 volts, which increased the heater power in the tank and would cut down the time. The problem was, and there’s your lesson here, nobody had gone back to see if that thermostatic switch was certified to operate at switching 65 volts instead of the 28 volts. They didn’t bother to go back to the vendor or anything else. Well, the switch was not rated for that.\\n\\n The other thing that happened is the tank—the display on the temperature inside the Control Room was at a temperature level that was on the upper end of the heater, but didn’t display [above that] heating range. What happened is that the heater was turned on, the temperature went up to the upper limit, the temperature limit pegged out, but the people in the Control Room didn’t notice, thinking the thing was normal. Meanwhile the thermostatic switch that’s supposed to open when you get to the high temperature did attempt to open, but because of the high voltage the contacts welded closed, so the heater stayed on. The temperatures are estimated to maybe have gotten up to 1,000 degrees or very high before they got turned. Of course it did boil off the oxygen.\\n\\n It turns out that extremely high temperature had damaged the Teflon wiring insulation on those wires in the tank. So when Apollo 13 was launched you were sitting there waiting for almost like a bomb to go off, because you had high voltage AC wiring, as well as the heater wiring that was damaged, and of course we know when Apollo 13, the explosion happens is when the crew were told to stir up the cryo in the tanks. Well, that’s turning on those AC fans in the tanks, which is that higher 120-volt AC, and that’s what set that off. So lessons had to do with the fact that operating something outside of its design limits like that electrical switch, and the displays in the Control Center should have covered temperature ranges above where that was at, and there should have been some sort of alarm system in the Control Center that says if you got excessive temperature.\\n\\n Other factors had to do with the design of that tank itself, with its blind assembly and difficult to install components, that needed to be improved. Later there was changes made to a lot of that. The wiring in the tank was changed to metallic, something to take the high temperatures to make sure. Of course we never had any more problems with that.\\n\\n Apollo 14 was the next flight. It went fairly well except when it got into Earth orbit and you separate the Command Module from the Service Module and the Command/Service Module turn around and they come back, you have to dock with the Lunar Module in order to operate the pyros to separate it from the Spacecraft/LM Adapter and be able to pull it out and dock. Well, Apollo 14 they went in to try to dock and on the docking probe itself there’s three capture latches, and you’ve got to close two of the three latches in order to enable the pyro firing circuit to fire and retract the probe.\\n\\n Once you retract the probe, you had a bunch of latches around the rim that were spring-loaded such that when it was pulled back, you would trip those latches and they’d all latch up. But you had to retract that probe to get back at that. The Apollo 14 crew kept trying to bang into the Lunar Module, and they couldn’t get two out of the three indications to come on to retract the probe. Due to concerns that we might one day have some relays fail in the sequencing system or something, I had written out a procedure—we had a test connector on the sequencing boxes that you had to use at the Cape for going in and checking out the pyros after they installed before you closed everything out. On this test connector you had wiring that would go directly into the pyros if you applied power to it.\\n\\n I had developed a procedure that if it ever got down to it that we couldn’t fire a pyro the nominal way and something we needed, we could take a utility cable or something and cut off one connector and make wires and be able to go over and insert them in the proper pins and then hook it up to a utility power outlet and use that switch to operate it. I’d already written this procedure out that said how you got to the connector and the box and what pins need to be used. So all of a sudden I thought gosh, I may have to use that thing. Because there’s a chance if you retracted the probe and carefully went in you could maybe make contact and trip those other latches and latch up without the probe capture latches working, but until you retracted that probe you wouldn’t be able to do that.\\n\\n Don Arabian said yes. In those days we always had a Command Module in the Teague Auditorium. It used to be on display there all the time, it was usually a spacecraft of one of the previous flights. So I got one of the other astronauts and we got his toolkit that he has on board, and we went over to the [Teague Auditorium] and the astronaut got in there with his tools and basically went through this procedure I’d outlined to see if we could really do it. We confirmed you could probably do that, but it was difficult having to make the cable, and you had to be sure you got it in the connector.\\n\\n Apollo 14, they finally after many repeated attempts were able to bang it in there and got the latches, and it worked. They were good, so we didn’t have to do that after all. But that made me think it’s occurred on Apollo 14, it may happen again. I finally got through a change board to have on board what we call a contingency docking cable that one end would connect up to the utility power outlet and the other end you just connect right to the Lunar Docking Events Controller test connector. You didn’t have to worry about getting all their own pins or anything else, and you’d be able to retract the probe. On the other Apollo missions, fortunately, we didn’t have to use that. I’ll mention later on, when we get into Skylab, there was a case that occurred. The rest of Apollo 14 went fine.\\n\\n Apollo 15. Everything was fine there except [when] they got into Earth orbit. As soon as we got into zero g [gravity] we got an indication on the entry monitor system that their light came on indicating they might have had an SPS [Service Propulsion Subsystem] engine enabled. Then shortly it went away and didn’t show up again. Meanwhile, when we finally did our TLI [Translunar Injection] burn and was on our way to the Moon, this came up again and stayed there. That’s a no-go condition to be able to continue the mission, because you’re maybe one failure away from [inadvertently] firing the SPS engine, which would be catastrophic. So with that indication on, we were no-go till we figured out what’s wrong. Even though the service propulsion system engine wasn’t my system, I still got out the drawings. I was really looking at that, and I got to thinking this thing has only shown up when we’re in zero g—it’s almost like it’s got to be something floating around.\\n\\n Our section was also responsible for the controls and displays on the spacecraft. We were responsible for circuit breakers, the panel switches, and the design of them so we knew what they looked like. I remembered that in the toggle switches we had on board, even though there was an insulator around the case, there was a braided type wire that went from the toggle handle to the contacts. It had fine strands of wire along to make the bigger wire, to make it flexible so you could operate. I got to thinking, “Well, what if one of those small strands broke off and floated and got down in close to the contacts.” Because this circuit was switching ground, a short to ground would look like it turned on the switch. The circuits to fire the engine was the same thing, you switched the ground return to do that. When I was looking at this, this switch had to do with the entry monitoring system, and looking at the circuitry that if the short occurred there it would be in the indication circuit. It’s not in the actual circuit that’s closing the valve to the engine; that’d be instrumentation.\\n\\n I went over that with Don Arabian, and Don said, “Well, your theory sounds pretty valid. We’ll give you an access badge, and you need to go over to the Control Center and talk to the flight control group.” So I went over there. Chris Kraft was in the back, so I actually sat with Chris Kraft and went through the logic, because you didn’t want to bother the flight directors and the flight controllers on console. I went through my logic and the drawing, went over that with Chris Kraft, and Chris Kraft said, “That sounds logical, but this is such a critical thing, you guys have got to get together and perform a test to prove absolutely that that’s the case, otherwise we can’t take a chance.”\\n\\n We were going to be doing the SPS midcourse correction, an SPS engine burn on the way to the Moon. I got with the flight control people and the SPS engine people, and if everything went according to our procedure, when we made that burn with the SPS engine it would prove that it’s not engine circuitry and prove that it’s just the instrumentation part of it. And sure enough, that happened, so the Apollo 15 mission continued on.\\n\\n When we got the hardware back and pulled that switch out, one of those broken strands had gotten down in the switch. The data of actually taking the switch apart proved that that was really the case. Because I basically did save that mission, I ended up receiving a Manned Spacecraft Center special certificate of recognition for coming up with that. I kept thinking that evening, later when the mission was still going on, I thought well I’ll get interviewed on TV. But as everybody knows the guys that got the TV coverage were the flight controllers. The guys in that Building 45 MER, the engineering guys, we didn’t get any of that. But that’s all right, even though we provided the flight control people a lot of the engineering data they used.\\n\\n I supported all the other missions, but there wasn’t anything that came out in terms of problems or lessons that I was involved in. On the other hand, I did get involved in one of the later missions. On Apollo 15, 16 and 17, we flew the lunar rover that was deployed from the Lunar Module on the lunar surface. The lunar rover was the responsibility of the [NASA] Marshall Space Flight Center [Huntsville, Alabama] so we really weren’t following it per se, but it turns out that even on Apollo 15 and 16 when they experienced real cold temperatures on the Moon, they were getting funny readings on the voltmeter and the amp-hour meter and some of the other meters. They were still able to operate the rover, but they were having a lot of what appeared to be unrelated indications on the rover. The Marshall people had formed a blue-ribbon team or panel to go investigate and try to understand exactly what it was, and apparently they’d even formed this after Apollo 15, and been working and hadn’t been able to solve it.\\n\\n Rocco [A.] Petrone was the Marshall [Center] Director at that time. He called up Don Arabian and said, “Don, we’ve been working on this a long time, we haven’t figured out what it is, can your MER team”—we had a history of being able to solve flight problems—“come look at this and maybe figure out what’s wrong for us before we make this last Apollo 17 flight?” Don said, “Sure”. Initially Don said, “Well let’s hurry up.” I said, “Don, wait a minute, let’s get all the drawings in here and look over everything ahead of time.”\\n\\n Going back to my previous example, since they had all these unrelated instrumentation funnies I was already thinking something with the grounding system. I got the Marshall drawings. They didn’t have what we call integrated system schematics where everything gets tied together like we use on spacecraft, but we did get the so-called wire list. I made a great big schematic on the wall over in Building 45 there in the MER room and tied all the grounding system together. Then we had all the data that indicated which problems they’ve had. When I was drawing the grounding system, all the grounds associated with the problems were going to one spot. So we checked into that and it was a splice. The battery, which was the main power source, had a real heavy-gauge wire on it, and these other indicators, like the voltmeter and the thing that read the amp-hours and some other meters, were all low instrumentation, very small wires, but they were all coming into this single splice.\\n\\n When you have a large barrel-type crimp splice—on the spacecraft side there was rules that you shouldn’t use any major difference in the wire gauge and you shouldn’t put any more than like three wires and splice a crimp splice and the wire gauge couldn’t vary by so much. Well, turns out there was four or five wires in this one crimp splice, and it had this very large battery return wire in it and it had all these small wires. When you take a crimp and try to crimp down on it, those small wires were probably not properly crimped like they should be, and so when you got into the real cold temperatures and things tend to shrink or contract, apparently that’s when these wires loosened up in that crimp splice.\\n\\n The hooker on that in terms of the data was the amp-hour meter they had, the electronics box for that—the crew would be reading a real steady increase in amp-hours instead of a decrease in the battery as they were running the rover. It was a steady rate, just like some fixed rate. Well, lo and behold, when you disconnect the ground wire for that electronics box on that amp-hour integrator, the circuitry in there is looking for a ground. There was like a ten-milliamp draw on the circuitry. The way they did the amp-hour meter is they had a column of mercury in there and you transfer mercury from one end to the other depending on how the current flowed through it. It just so happened that when you removed the ground from the circuitry, for it to find another ground through the chassis of the box, this current through that mercury column would go in a reverse direction, and that ten milliamps exactly corresponded to the rate of increase on the battery charger. So that data in itself has pretty much proven that you had ten milliamps of current flowing through that in the wrong direction.\\n\\n The other thing we looked at—because the lunar rover had been checked in a thermal vacuum, the full-up flight had been checked in the thermal vacuum chamber down at the real cold temperatures and the hot temperatures—that’s what had gotten the Marshall people buffaloed on the problem was hey, we fully checked out the design. Well, when we investigated the qual rover [Qualification Test Rover], they had solder connections. They didn’t use the crimp connections. So the lesson here was number one, follow the proper procedures about not putting the large wires with the small wires in the crimp, but it also is an indication of a very minor configuration difference between the test vehicle and flight difference, that using solder connections instead of the crimp was another factor in them not being able to uncover the problem.\\n\\n The other thing that we found out when we first went to Marshall—we did listen to their team give us a discussion of everything they’d done before we even said anything. When we went to Marshall we knew what the problem was, but anyway we listened to them. What their approach was, they had each one of the—like the man in the company that was responsible for the electronic box on the charger, they had that guy do a failure analysis on his box to determine is there any failure in his box that would cause that thing to do that. But the individuals, and each one in these various areas was told to do that, obviously assumed that external to their box everything was connected up right, because their action was to see if anything in the design of their box could cause the problem. They all came back and said, “No, we couldn’t come up with anything that caused a failure like that.” Of course they were right because the problem was the grounding outside the box.\\n\\n If you’re a review panel or something else investigating something, the point is to go back like we did. Go back to the actual wire list, go back to the actual drawings, go back to the flight data, make sure everything fits, review the testing and all details. Needless to say that committee was pretty embarrassed. Before we made the announcement and went through our presentation to that team of Marshall folks, Don [Arabian] called Rocco Petrone up and said, “Rocco, come down here and we’ll tell you what’s wrong.” Rocco walks into the room, and I was surprised because they were apparently a lot more regimented. Everybody at the table except us stood to attention when Rocco walked in the room, it was almost like a military thing. Then Don laid out what was really wrong. They were all pretty embarrassed about the deal. Here it was such a simple thing and they had spent all this time and effort, and couldn’t solve it. We went away once again pleased that the JSC mission evaluation team had been able to solve a problem, and also we were able to get some important lessons for everybody.\\n\\n Now we finished Apollo, we went into Skylab [space station]. The first Skylab crew mission [Skylab 2], as a lot of people know, we had this thermal problem with the Skylab. It was overheating because it had been damaged on ascent going up [Skylab 1], had problems in the venting. I won’t go into that because it’s Marshall-administered, but apparently the design hadn’t gone through the proper analysis for venting as you go up quickly. And when that trapped air and atmosphere in there tried to get out it actually caused structural damage and damaged the workshop such that they weren’t able to deploy the thermal shield to protect the vehicle.\\n\\n Of course the MER was heavily involved in developing some technique the [Skylab 2] crew could take up to maybe deploy and protect that area. I wasn’t involved in that, but then when they went up there and got ready to dock with the workshop they ran into the same problem as Apollo 14. They couldn’t get the capture latches to engage and they kept [trying] numerous times, and it still didn’t—in this case fortunately they had the contingency cable on board. So the crew was able to connect up the contingency cable and retract the probe and they carefully went in and latched up those outer latches. And it worked just like we had hoped it would, and they were able to do the docking.\\n\\n So in a sense that little special cable ended up getting built, and putting it on board, did save that mission, and saved all of Skylab because they could have never docked, and of course they would have never been able to put up the thermal shield that worked and saved the space station." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How large was this cable that you’re talking about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary W. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The cable was probably only about six feet or so. Initially the thinking was it was like a standard utility cable they use for powering their cameras and other stuff, but we made sure that the length was such that it would definitely go from [the panel] over the right-hand side where the Lunar Docking Events Controllers were located.\\n\\n I did talk to PJ [Paul J.] Weitz, he was on that mission, out of curiosity because I never had heard. I asked PJ, “Did you guys ever get any training on that contingency docking cable?” He said, “No, all we did is they gave us a briefing one time. They said, ‘Oh by the way there’s this contingency docking cable on board if you ever need it.’” So he said they never got to use it till they got on orbit, but at least they’d been told it was there. Of course we on the ground, the flight control team, told them.\\n\\n The other thing is that on the last crewed mission to Skylab, which was considered Skylab 4—Skylab 1 was the one that launched the workshop and 2 was the crew mission, and the third [crewed mission] was called Skylab 4. Ed [Edward G.] Gibson was on that mission. Ed, it turns out, was the chairman of our Orion standing review board I just recently was a member of.\\n\\n On the Skylab 4 mission we did have a problem with one of the circuit breakers not closing to get ready for reentry early on when they were checking out. I developed a procedure in case that breaker didn’t ever close that we could still connect up that battery using the connections that normally would power the inverters. Turns out we didn’t have to use that procedure. But something that did occur on that mission that could have been catastrophic that Ed Gibson reminded me about is that on the deadfacing of circuits—remember going back to that one problem—it turns out there’s circuitry going to the Service Module for the SPS, service propulsion system, gimbal motors. You’ve got three circuit breakers, pitch, yaw and roll, for the SPS engines. There’s also three breakers called SCS, stabilization and control system. That’s your automatic control system, pitch, roll and yaw.\\n\\n Those three breakers for the SPS and the three breakers for the SCS were located on the same left-hand panel that the commander would operate, and the breakers were located close to one another. When they were getting ready for doing the Command/Service Module separation, they go through the checklist to make sure they deadface, which some of that is opening breakers. The checklist called out to open up SPS pitch, yaw and roll—SPS. Well, here you got SCS pitch, yaw and roll. For whatever reason, he pulled the SCS breakers. He didn’t know it. He pulled the three SCS breakers. When you jettison the Service Module you’re in an orientation such that the Command Module is in what we call apex forward position. That’s the pointed end forward rather than the heat shield.\\n\\n When they separated from the Service Module—and of course they lose the Service Module control—he went to his hand controller to orient the spacecraft around to the proper orientation for the heat shield, and guess what? Nothing worked because those SCS breakers were open, he had no power to his hand controller from the automatic system side of it. They were beginning to get worried because if they were to come in forward like that, you’d cause the loss of the vehicle because you’d be coming in without the heat shield, and you’d burn off the end that’s got the parachutes and everything else. So they would have lost that crew. Well, as a backup we had what we called manual RCS control. There was a switch that allowed power to go from the hand controller—instead of going to the automatic system, the power would go directly to the RCS jets in other words. They remembered they had this manual RCS control switch, so they flipped it, and sure enough they oriented around to the proper direction and came in and everything was okay.\\n\\n The crew themselves didn’t realize it till they got on the ground that the whole problem was caused by the mistake they made, but the lesson out of that has to do with the design and the layout of switches. You can see if they’re putting three functions that had to be open and three functions that had to be closed labeled almost identical in the same location is just setting yourself up for a chance of crew error. That was the real lesson that came out of that, and fortunately we had the manual capability otherwise they might have never figured it out.\\n\\n That was the last Skylab mission, Skylab 4. The next for Command/Service Module effort to follow was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project [ASTP]. I was assigned to Working Group 4 on that. It was my first experience working with the Russians, and I got to make my first trip over to the Soviet Union shortly before the launch back in May of 1975." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Gary, can you tell us when you learned that you were going to begin working with the Russians and your thoughts of this partnership?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary W. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Back in 1973, maybe even beginning a little bit in ’72, NASA had already as an agency decided to jointly work with the Russians. The NASA Administrator that really came up with it is [Thomas O.] Paine, and it goes all the way back to when [Richard M.] Nixon was president. Paine had been thinking at that time, even though we were in this competition with the Russians, that we ought to try to work together. He was especially concerned about there ought to be a common way of rescuing one another if need be during orbit.\\n\\n So Paine was on the same Air Force One [presidential airplane] with Richard Nixon. They were actually flying out to the Pacific to greet the lunar Apollo 11 team, so that goes that far back to 1969. Paine at the time asked President Nixon about his idea that we ought to work together and try to develop something, and Nixon gave Paine the go-ahead.\\n\\n It took quite a bit of time and several summit meetings, but then they finally reached agreement between the US and also between NASA and the Russians to come up with this joint mission. That became the basis of it. It was very exciting to me, because we did always have an admiration for the Russians because they were first in so much stuff and done so much. It was one of these things that we [were] just really interested in knowing more about them. They knew a lot about us, more so than we even thought they did, but we knew very little about them. You’re always interested in what they were doing. So it was very interesting to me to work with the Russians when they came over, and I became impressed with some of the things they did and the way they did things. I was lucky to be with Working Group 4, which turned out to be the only working group that got to go to Baikonur [Kazakhstan], their launch site, which was really off limits back in those days. The reason for that is NASA had provided the Russians a Lunar Module transponder—that’s the thing that you use for the signal to dock with the Lunar Module, or in this case we were going to be docking with Soyuz [spacecraft]. It gave the Russians a Lunar Module transponder that was going to be mounted in the Soyuz. Once we docked with the Russians we were going to have to have a way to connect up cables between the two spacecraft for both TV and audio.\\n\\n We went over to be at Baikonur to be there involved in the actual checkout of the Lunar Module transponder, to check that out in the Soyuz spacecraft. That’s the reason we were there, and we actually spent ten days at Baikonur going out there to do the checkout. I was responsible for the cabling that we do, so I actually got to go inside the Soyuz spacecraft to check to see where best to put the so-called speaker box that the crew would use when they were over there, and it would be hardwired back to the Command Module. The Russians used what we would call Velcro also, so went in there to see what it was like.\\n\\n The Russians were concerned. They wanted to make sure that their part of the mission came off right. They actually had two spacecraft all ready to go for the ASTP missions, two launch pads, two launch vehicles. While I was there I got to go in the two spacecraft. They’d told us that both of these spacecraft were identical. I went in the one spacecraft and saw a good location, a shelf and had some Velcro. I went in the next spacecraft and the Velcro wasn’t in that same spot. So when I came out—we always met in the evenings with them to tell them what all happened, we’d jointly get together—I started off by asking, “Are you sure that both these things are identical?” “Of course yes, oh yes, they’re identical.” Then I pointed out that there was this difference, and you could see they were visibly upset. They insisted that that couldn’t be right. “They’re identical, you must have been wrong.” I didn’t argue. The next day, first thing in the morning, I was told I was to go in and look at the other spacecraft. So I went in there and you could still smell the glue—they had glued the Velcro in that spot. I came back out and said, “Yes, everything’s fine, we can mount it in the same place.” But it was an indication of how they did not want to be embarrassed.\\n\\n At the same time we knew we were monitored. We also checked out the TV equipment while we were there, the signal. We were in one of the rooms upstairs, and there were windows there and we weren’t allowed while we were there to take any photographs or anything, very well restricted to an area all the time, and we knew we were being monitored. An engineer from Westinghouse [Electric Corporation]—Westinghouse was responsible for the TV—he was kind of a cutup all the time. One day we were going to run the TV test. The Russians had stepped out or something, so we were by ourselves. He says, “Hey,” in kind of a quiet way, “Why don’t we pan the TV out the window since we can’t take pictures?” In those days we didn’t record anything so there was no recording in the TV, it was just TV. Well, next day when we got ready to run the tests, the blinds were all pulled, and of course what we were doing was just doing that to see if we proved we were being monitored." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You weren’t alone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary W. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We weren’t alone. We all got a big kick out of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What an interesting time period for you to be there and be able to work in that environment where no one had actually gone before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary W. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, right. It turns out just briefly before us that Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford and Vance [D.] Brand and Deke [Donald K.] Slayton had made arguments insisting that they wouldn’t do the mission unless they got to go there. So they briefly got to go there on just a real quick thing, but we were the only ones to be there actually for that extended period of time working. We actually stayed at what they called the Cosmonaut Hotel. At the time the town was called Leninsk, named after [Vladimir Ilyich] Lenin. It’s the place the cosmonauts stay at now, the same place. We went back there every night, and there was always an empty bus behind our bus that transported us, the idea being if one bus had a problem we’d go to that one. Even around the Cosmonaut Hotel you had a barbed wire fence all the way around, and it was always being guarded so we were always being watched all the time. We left our cameras in the rooms and we’re pretty sure they checked to make sure the frame count on the cameras was what it should be.\\n\\n Otherwise they really tried to be very nice and accommodating. You could tell in the building we were in that the floors were polished, everything had just been painted, just spiffed up just right. In the little breakout room we had—this is in a desert type area, so it gets pretty warm during the day—there was a room air conditioner. We look, and it’s Whirlpool [Corporation]. They had bought it probably just for our visit, because that’s the only place there was a room with an air conditioner. They knew that things were air-conditioned over here, so they’d gone out of their way to make sure everything was just as good. And they wore these white coats and dressed a lot like we did.\\n\\n The other thing that we found out which was strange is they kept insisting that when we were doing our testing it had to be in 30-minute blocks. We’d have to stop. Well, come to find out, because their spacecraft didn’t have active cooling, there was a timer in the Control Center independent of the flight control team that at 30 minutes it turned off all power to the spacecraft automatically. For a long time we couldn’t figure out why they kept insisting we could only do the test for 30 minutes. I guess they were embarrassed about it. Then they finally indicated to us that there’s this timer that turns the power off. We understand that, cooling. But it’s funny how they didn’t want to explain initially what that was about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you feel in your findings that the spacecraft was a good spacecraft?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary W. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes, yes. The other thing that we did getting ready for that mission—and a lot of people didn’t realize—we worked on joint safety assessment documents. We worked on a large number of detailed joint engineering documents. Those documents detailed the Soyuz systems, the safety of them, what they’d done. Likewise we shared with the Russians the design and the operation and the safety of the Apollo spacecraft. Matter of fact, here recently I ended up having to write a paper for Bryan [D.] O’Connor on the safety of the Soyuz, and a lot of that report I did was about what all we did way back in Apollo-Soyuz to make sure it was safe for our crew to go over to the Soyuz spacecraft. Even though it was on orbit, we didn’t launch on it. Likewise the Russians came across.\\n\\n [NASA/SP-2010-578 - NASA Astronauts on Soyuz: Experience and Lessons for the Future, August 2010]\\n\\n To do all that we had what we called a Docking Module because the Command Module operated at 5 psi pure oxygen, and the Soyuz spacecraft worked at nominal 14.7 mixed gas atmosphere so to transfer crews you had to go through an air lock. Our crewmen would have to pressurize the Docking Module to 5 psi pure oxygen, and then go in there and shut the hatch behind them, and then you add the nitrogen and other oxygen to it to build it up to 14.7 mixed gas, and then you’d open up the hatch to the Russian vehicle. Of course you did the reverse to bring the Russians over to the Apollo spacecraft.\\n\\n Now we come to the mission itself. This is where I’ll have a couple lessons that I mention, because we had some problems. First, Tom Stafford was the commander for ASTP, and Tom Stafford was also the commander back on Apollo 10. The early Apollo crews were always concerned about making sure the parachutes didn’t come out early. We had a panel switch that said ELS auto, and if you had that switch in the automatic position when you got ready to return, then the parachutes would deploy automatically at the correct altitudes based on the barometric switches we had inside the sequencers. That’s something we usually wanted to have the crew do because before Command/Service Module separation, later you get blackout during entry, you don’t get any data. So we were always arguing, and the spacecraft was designed to put the switch in auto, such that after we’ve lost contact with them, even if they did nothing else, we’d know we’d get the capsule back.\\n\\n But at least early on [the crews] were worried about that’s a single switch, what if it were to short and inadvertently enable the system. Even though the baro-switches would be open, they were still concerned about enabling that system and applying power to it early. So they always insisted on not turning that switch to auto until they got down to like 40,000 or 50,000 feet during entry, and then arm it up and let the [para]chutes come out in the proper sequence.\\n\\n Because of that concern, and because I always myself worried since I was responsible for the sequencing system, I always wanted them to arm it up and make sure things were right. I argued through the program—and at the time Aaron Cohen was the Apollo program manager—I argued very long and over many trips to the control board that we needed to add a redundant switch in there so they had two switches, and the switch contacts would be put in series so a single switch contact would not enable the system. Turns out in ground testing one time we did have one contact fail so that’s when the program said okay, we’ll do that. So they added the redundant switches with the redundant contacts.\\n\\n Then the Apollo crews did agree to go ahead and go to auto, and we’d been doing that on the later Apollos—14, 15, 16, 17. Came up to getting ready, going through reviews over the procedures with the ASTP crew. Tom Stafford kept insisting that he was going to not put the switches in auto before separation. I personally argued with him that we purposely made this design change to allow that to happen and we wanted to make sure that that would take place, and the previous Apollo flights the crews had been doing that and things had been fine. Tom insisted, “No, I’m not going to do that till the normal time like I did on Apollo 10.” He said, “We’re never going to forget to put out the parachutes, we’re never going to forget to put out the parachutes.” Famous last words.\\n\\n They were coming in for entry on ASTP and they were getting lower and lower and lower, and nothing was happening. We did have the capability to manually—we had push buttons that you could flip the switch open, and it was guarded, and you could arm the system up and go ahead and individually jettison [deploy parachutes]. Without messing with that auto switch you could automatically punch out the apex cover and punch out the drogues and punch out the mains and do all those steps individually. All of a sudden the crew recognizes hey, we’re way low. So they went through their manual steps for doing that, not recognizing that they failed to put the switch in auto. Of course we didn’t know any of this was going on because this was all during the blackout period.\\n\\n It turns out that when they were doing this at low altitude, part of that sequence is to dump propellant. You didn’t want to land with the RCS propellant in the tanks in case they broke or whatever. So when you say dump, you’re firing all the jets to get rid of the propellant, but you always do the loading such that one propellant runs without the other. N2O4 is actually more toxic than the MMH, which brings me back to mention something about Apollo 15.\\n\\n Apollo 15 was the one and only mission where we lost one of the main parachutes when we landed. We only landed with two chutes actually deployed. At that time, because the N2O4 was considered more toxic, the MMH was loaded more than the N2O4, such that when you were in this dump sequence you were dumping MMH, you were not dumping N2O4. After this when we were trying to understand why the Apollo 15 chute was lost, the testing showed the MMH coming out of the hot engines was actually burning above the spacecraft in the atmosphere high. We were lucky that it only burned one of the parachute risers. Because we found out this MMH would be burning, it was decided let’s make the N2O4 because it didn’t have the burning problem, it’s already the oxidizer rather than propellant—load it so that when you get to the dump sequence you’re dumping N2O4, not MMH.\\n\\n Now going back to ASTP, the crew were down at a low altitude when they were going through this dump sequence. When they were dumping N2O4 overboard, they were low enough altitude the cabin relief valve was venting from the outside in. Now very toxic N2O4 fumes were being sucked inside the Command Module. The ASTP crew got exposed to higher levels than most people have ever seen before. They spent a couple weeks after that mission, people didn’t realize, in the hospital under observation getting cleaned and X-rays.\\n\\n It turns out it was a blessing for Deke Slayton because in the very careful X-rays and analysis they were doing of his lungs they found a small spot, turned out to be cancer. They took that out. Deke had been a real heavy smoker. Deke lived a lot of years after that, but later as we know, Deke eventually did die of lung cancer, but he lived a lot longer because they found this at a stage it’s almost hard to detect. The only reason they found it is they were doing all these special procedures because they’d been exposed to the N2O4.\\n\\n I talked to Susan [N.] Brand. Susan Brand works for NASA now, and she was Vance Brand’s daughter. Unfortunately Tom Stafford always let Vance Brand, since he was the command module pilot, take the blame for not throwing the switch. Susan told me that really bothered Vance. The command module pilot’s job was to throw the switches, the commander’s job was read the checklist. Tom skipped over and forgot to call out the ELS to auto [command], so Vance didn’t throw the switch because it wasn’t called out. Though Tom does say in his book that he came out with later [We Have Capture, 2002] that there was that mistake.\\n\\n Going back to the ASTP mission, [Thomas P. Stafford] did the initial docking with the Russians, and it went super smooth. Tom was an outstanding spacecraft pilot. He did outstanding dockings in Gemini and his dockings on Apollo 10, and the docking here was super smooth, right on. There was also going to be a second docking attempt and a flyaround, and this was Deke’s first space mission. Initially, which was probably an indication of concern, the Russians even commented that the Command Module was doing the flyaround the opposite direction of what the checklist and all the planning had done beforehand. Then, when he got in position to try to get ready to do the docking, the lighting conditions weren’t what they had been planned pre-mission. When Deke was coming in, the lighting was such it tended to block out the docking target. Meanwhile, Deke thought he was in close enough anyway. Even though he couldn’t see the target, he pressed on. He slammed into the Russians so hard they thought they had been done in. Then the vehicle swung around, it stroked the docking system to the max limits. If you’ve ever seen a view of ASTP, the Command/Service Module is a much larger vehicle than the Soyuz. So you had this very large vehicle coming in and slamming and hitting at a little bit of an off angle and a much harder force than ever planned on, so the Russians were scared to death, them and the ground controllers. They thought they had really been severely damaged. Nothing, of course. Per our usual rules in writing up our flights we never mention crew procedure problems.\\n\\n There’s some lessons that came out of that, particularly the thing about the switch not armed, circuitry. Then also there’s lessons there about how one thing led to another. This change in the propellant—because we had a problem we went to the N2O4, which was more hazardous. I believe that’s all the lessons out of ASTP, then we can go into the Space Shuttle and the orbiter design.\\n\\n After the Apollo 1 fire, one thing that was done is what we call management walk-through inspections where myself, being responsible for power distribution, was responsible for wiring. Just before the Command/Service Modules were shipped to the Kennedy Space Center, the NASA subsystem managers and their North American or Rockwell counterpart as engineers actually got to go and actually crawl in. They’d open up the panels and you got to inspect, so I got to inspect all the wiring. That was a part of after the Apollo 1 fire, make sure everything was all right. We had not only me looking at the wiring, but you had materials experts making sure the materials were right in the right quantities they had to be, had people responsible for plumbing. Did that on every vehicle.\\n\\n This goes back to the ASTP vehicle. We had what we call a SIM bay, Scientific Instrument Mission bay, in the Service Module to have experiments on when you were in lunar orbit. We had booms that went out on some of these, and you had limit switches to indicate whether the boom had been retracted far enough away that you could fire the SPS engine without that boom coming back and banging into you. We even had a pyro system if need be to sever that. On one or two of those missions we’d had a problem with the limit switches not sensing like they should, and a problem with the booms. When I was doing the wiring inspection on the Service Module for the Apollo-Soyuz missions at Downey [North American Aviation, Inc. plant at Downey, California], I was looking carefully at those same limit switches because we’d had that previous problem. I noticed that the little lever arm that’s supposed to trip the switch was not making very good contact with the boom piece itself so I flagged that as part of this walk-around inspection.\\n\\n Then we were checking how’d that get missed. The quality people always inspect [the vehicle] to make sure it’s per the installation drawing. Turns out this was per the installation drawing. The problem was there’d been a long time lag since the last Apollo flight. When they’d had this same problem back earlier they’d made an EO, engineering order. Instead of changing the actual drawing, which is more expensive, they had an EO which would have an attached small drawing that shows the change that was made, that modified the limit switch and moved it such that it would make better contact with the boom. That was on the EO. When they came to the drawings for the ASTP mission, it was going to have a SIM bay in it also. They pulled those drawings out to do that, but they failed to pick up that EO. When the quality people inspected, it was per the drawing, but it wasn’t per the design change that was in the system. The designer can look at something and say that wasn’t designed the way it ought to be. That was the beauty of this wiring inspection. Of course there’s a lot of other little things we often picked up, but that was one of the major ones. We did carry that process over to the Shuttle as well.\\n\\n Other Centers don’t do that, but JSC always stated on any of the manned spacecraft that we were responsible, we’ll do these final inspections that way. That was carried over to the Space Shuttle orbiter, and on one of those walk-through inspections on the first orbiter, Columbia, one of the Rockwell design engineers picked up on this. They were out there looking at the plumbing. The Freon [coolant] on those lines that went out going through the payload bay—according to the design they were supposed to be mounted on isolation standoffs from the actual structure, because you had a metal line and you wanted to make sure it was thermally isolated. Actually there were heaters on that line to make sure it stayed warm.\\n\\n Well, when he was out there inspecting those lines, they were actually mounted to the aluminum structure. The thermal insulators weren’t on the lines. So he caught that, and it’s a good thing that he caught that because if we’d ever gone into flight, which may have been the only time we’d pick it up, those lines would have probably frozen, because the heaters wouldn’t have been capable of keeping up with them, would tax the structure that way. That was the lesson there. That was another thing about how these walk-through inspections by the designers were able to pick up something, because it turns out that was a mistake in the installation drawings. The quality people are inspecting per the hardware drawings, but they don’t look at the design criteria that went in before then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s interesting. Were there others or is that the main one you can think of?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary W. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Those are the two biggies that stand out. The one I was involved in, and then this one was a major item. There were other things found, but these were the two major, the reason I remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When did you start getting involved in the Shuttle operations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary W. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was still in engineering. At that time I was a section head, and we were still responsible for designing the power distribution system. We developed a power distribution lab that’s JSC that included all the contactors [electrical power switches]. One of the design changes we made was changing the wire insulation from the Teflon, which had all the problems we had in Apollo, to Kapton, which is a tougher, harder wire insulation. We made sure there was a lot more wire trays and covers to protect the wiring. That’s the reason I was always involved still in doing the wiring inspections on the orbiters. We also helped develop the SAIL [Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory] that was located here.\\n\\n While I was in engineering I got asked to go over to be on Dr. Kraft’s staff. Dr. Kraft had a management training where they would invite engineers to come over and work for three months on the ninth floor and we were staff. I didn’t know anything about the program at the time, but I got identified—they’d requested I be one of the people to go up and work there, and I did. Previous to that I’d always had an interest in maybe going to work for flight operations, but it turns out early on in Apollo Engineering Directorate had disapproved my request. At the time flight control had some positions opening and wanted to hire me, but because I was subsystem manager engineering they refused to let me transfer, so I stayed in engineering with them.\\n\\n While I was up there on that training program with Dr. Kraft, the idea was when you finished the program you would go back to the organization you came from. It turns out that prior to me doing that, my former branch chief that was real knowledgeable about power distribution, had retired. Instead of having a chance to compete for the branch chief job, me and the other section head were still section heads, and a GS-15 manager that was basically on staff with the division was directed to come down and be the power distribution and sequencing branch chief. He really didn’t have a background or real interest in power distribution so I wasn’t all that enthused about going back to working in that branch. In the meantime George [W.S.] Abbey, who was in charge of flight operations at the time, gave me an offer to come over and be the deputy branch chief to Rod [Thomas Rodney] Loe in what was called Flight Control Division at that time. [M.P.] Pete Frank [III] was the division chief. So I accepted that job and went over to be in flight operations.\\n\\n That branch had the INCO [Instrumentation & Communications Officer] section, which Ed [Edward I.] Fendell was the section head on, and Bill [William L.] Peters headed up the electrical section, which would be the EGILs [Electrical Generation and Integrated Lighting Systems engineers], and then Charlie [Charles L.] Dumis was the section head for the environmental control or EECOMs [Electrical, Environmental & Communications Controllers] in the training. When I went over, I was able to be in training as a flight room flight controller at the EGIL position, given all my electrical background. At that time when we were getting ready for the STS-1, a lot of branch chiefs were the actual flight controller people who picked out the most experienced people to be on the flight control team for that first Shuttle flight, because we were launching it without a manned flight that preceded. I was the orbit EGIL for that mission.\\n\\n Right after that STS-1, which flight went well, Gene Kranz put out an order that branch chiefs would no longer be allowed the fun, if you want to call it that, of operating a flight control position. You had to focus on being branch chief, and you’d work what we called SPAN [Spacecraft Planning and Analysis]. SPAN is where the managers worked. That was an interface between the flight control team and the MER, so I was banned to SPAN as they say.\\n\\n About that same time Gene had a reorganization. They were going to organize a separate Flight Director Office, and Pete Frank was going to head it up. Pete Frank wanted me to go over and be a flight director, which at one time was one thing I really wanted to do. At the same time Gene Kranz was reorganizing the Systems Division and organizations. He wanted to create a new branch in the Systems Division that had upper stages and RMS [Remote Manipulator System] and mechanical systems. He came to me and wanted me to be the branch chief for that new branch. I decided—well, it’s tough to tell Gene no. I figured when it came to competition for a GS [government service level]-15, I’d have a better chance at getting it as a branch chief than I would being the rookie flight director. Because everybody in the Flight Director Office—their whole life had been flight control, so I knew I’d be the low man on the totem pole to ever make flight director over there. So that’s what I opted for.\\n\\n It was an interesting branch, it had all these new elements to it. One of the areas was the upper stages. We had one case that comes lessons learned. It had to do with the Space Shuttle STS-5 mission. That was going to be the first mission that we launched satellites from the Shuttle. They were called PAMs, payload assist modules, built by McDonnell Douglas [Corporation]. We were going to have two of them in the payload bay. When we were at Kennedy Space Center getting ready for going through some of the ground checkouts of the system, all of a sudden instead of going through the test sequence for launching the satellites, it started going through the flight sequence and undoing latches.\\n\\n It turns out at the pad the lines were not hooked up to the pyros or ordnance system, so there was no way you could fire the motor, which would have been catastrophic, but it did operate other functions. If they’d been connected up, it would have caused a problem because all of a sudden this thing was going through the flight sequence. Here it was pretty late, close to launch so I got asked to go out to investigate with McDonnell Douglas people what could have caused that with their sequence controller. They had two controllers.\\n\\n We were able to finally pin it down to one of the memory locations. It had solid state memory in the computers, and on the solid state memory you had a voltage on it to be one and then it switched to ground for zero. Well, one of those little transistors in the solid state memory had shorted to ground so it always read zero. When the software was loaded, and there’s lessons here, there was only a one-bit difference between the test sequence command and the flight sequence command. The flight sequence was a zero and the test command was a one in that particular slot location. When the test program was loaded it just so happened that particular memory location that’s always going to be reading zero was the one that was looking at that time. It read a zero when it should have been reading a one, and that’s the reason it went into the flight sequence.\\n\\n We quickly corrected that in the computers, and then because we knew that could go into an inadvertent sequence like that, we put in some inhibit switches such that you would only enable that system—and the heater system would be enabled on a different arrangement—if you got on orbit such that you were ready, the payload bay doors were opened and ready to deploy. That way if the computer inadvertently went into that, you’d still be okay. That worked. There was a lesson there in terms of the way you build your software.\\n\\n So in the Space Shuttle and a lot of other things you have to have what they call a two-bit change. You have to have two memory slots be failed. The other thing that’s changed also is you had two computers but they were always in parallel; they weren’t series to one another. That always brings up another concern about making sure you don’t put inadvertent commands out from one computer or the other.\\n\\n Dale [E.] Moore was my RMS section head. Skip [Axel M.] Larsen, who later became the Space Shuttle payload safety chairman, was my upper stage section head. Larry [Arthur L.] Schmitt was my mechanical systems section head. This is one thing that’s different about mission operations versus engineering. I’ll admit I was a poor manager in a sense when I was a section head in engineering. What I mean by that is I didn’t really rely on my people and let my people do the work. Engineering unfortunately has got a bad structure that even though you became the section head, you were still being held responsible for all the technical detail and often being called up to meetings. Because you felt like you were obligated to do that and know that, you were involved in a lot of stuff where you should have been focusing more on administrative matters. It demotivates your young engineers if they see the manager is doing it.\\n\\n Well, over in mission operations, Gene really graded you heavily and ensured that the managers did management jobs and didn’t get involved. One of the good things when I went to MOD [Mission Operations Directorate]—when you’re in engineering you’re always pretty much confined to the discipline you have your degree in, and it was always going to be in that electrical area. Operations, they shift you around, where you learn. I was put in charge of a branch that had mechanical systems, upper stage and the RMS, totally different than the electrical distribution that I’d been used to. That, in a sense, forces you to stay out of that. So you relied on your section heads and flight controllers and you concentrated on making sure the administrative functions of the branch were being done. At the same time staying technically on top, because the other thing you did, during simulations you’d been in the SPAN. You were involved in certifying your own flight controllers. You’d listen on the loops to score them, see how they did and so forth. Part of your responsibility is the training and certification of all the people that you have under you. The branch chief is at the time the one that did that.\\n\\n The other thing Gene did is every two years he shifted you around. About the time you get comfortable in running this one branch, Gene would shift, did the branch chief rotation. I got rotated over to the DF6 [Systems Division, Guidance and Propulsion Systems] branch, which had RMS, [RCS (Reaction Control System)], booster systems and GNC [Guidance Navigation & Control], once again totally out of that area, but I had to work on that. To show you how long ago that was, I picked Ron [Ronald D.] Dittemore to be my section head for the RCS system [Propulsion Systems Section], and [N.] Wayne Hale and [William H.] Gerstenmaier and all of them were in that same section. So tells you how long ago that was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Quite a crew." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary W. Johnson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I had a really sharp group of people in that group. There was a lot of flight directors that came out of that particular branch, particularly that RCS Propulsion Systems section." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Gary, you want to take a break for today, and we can pick up tomorrow? Then we can finish with Shuttle." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00993", + "metadata": { + "category": "Herstory", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/Herstory/RomanNG/romanng.htm", + "original_file_name": "RomanNG_9-15-00.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/Herstory/RomanNG/RomanNG_9-15-00.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Headquarters Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "location_date": "Chevy Chase, Maryland – 15 September 2000" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Nancy Grace Roman" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This oral history is being conducted with Dr. Nancy Roman in her home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Today is September 15, the year 2000. The interview is being conducted for the NASA Headquarters History Office. The interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Sandra Johnson.\\n\\n We thank you again for visiting with us today. You’ve had such a distinguished career with NASA. We want to hear about all those times and experiences that you’ve had, but we’d like to start today by you providing us some of your background and how you got started." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. To start with, I’m trying to use my double name again, Nancy Grace. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, so I was a Southern baby, and in the South they used double names. I always used it in my family and I used it throughout college, but I went to graduate school in Wisconsin, and I found Northerners just could not cope with it, so I dropped it. Then, oh, maybe six years or eight years ago now—time flies—we had a summer student working with us at the Astronomical Data Center at Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland], and she used her double name. I decided, well, if she used it, why can’t I? So I’m trying to use it again. I will answer either way, and I have to admit, most people don’t use it, but I’m trying. Okay.\\n\\n Well, as I said, I was born in Nashville. I lived there all of three months. One of the interesting things is, as you probably know from your research, after I joined NASA, NASA was very new, and so it was getting a lot of publicity, and the women’s pages were desperate for some female outlooks. So I got lots and lots of press coverage. One of the articles which was syndicated, actually, coast to coast, discussed my Southern accent, and all of the people in Washington were just very amused by the whole thing because I’d lived away from the South so long that I didn’t really have much of a trace of a Southern accent. It was pretty clear that the columnist had not actually talked to me.\\n\\n But, okay. I did live in the South for, oh, I guess, three years, not only in Nashville, but also Oklahoma City, Houston, then back to Oklahoma City. No, sorry, not Oklahoma City—Tulsa. I have to admit, though, that I was too young to really remember any of that part of the world.\\n\\n We then moved to West Orange, New Jersey, just outside of New York, and I lived there until I was six, started kindergarten there. I did go to kindergarten there. Then we moved to Houghton, Michigan, which is on the tip, not the tip, but about half way up the finger on the northern peninsula of Michigan. Yes, quite a contrast from Houston. We were there four years, then went out to Reno [Nevada].\\n\\n I’m not sure when or how I got interested in astronomy. I blamed my mother, which she was a little taken aback at, because her field was music. In fact, that was her piano [Roman gestures]. She really had no particular interest in science. Well, she was interested in just about everything, but she didn’t have any background in science at all. She let me know, although she later denied feeling that way, but she let me know fairly subtly but definitely that she didn’t think science was quite the field for a woman. As I say, I told her this when she was living with me and she said, no, that she certainly never tried to discourage me, and, as I say, I suspect she didn’t realize that she was discouraging me.\\n\\n But, anyway, we did live in Reno, and the reason I went into this, is, oh, yes, I started out by saying that my first experience was that Mother used to take me out and teach me the constellations. Of course, living in Northern Michigan, we had the Northern Lights, and she’d take me out and show me those. So she really got me interested in looking at the sky.\\n\\n Then we lived in Reno for two years, and the second year we lived on the very edge of the town. We were the last house on the street. There were no houses across from us, an empty lot behind us, a ranch on the other side of us, an empty lot on all three sides of us, I guess, plus the ranch. So we had a really clear dark sky. I wouldn’t be surprised if that had a major influence on my being interested in astronomy. I don’t know. As I said, I don’t really know when I started.\\n\\n My usual answer is that most kids, or at least many kids, are interested in astronomy at the age of, oh, eleven or twelve, ten to twelve, and I just never outgrew it. It was as simple as that. And interestingly enough, a fair number of people who go on to major in astronomy have decided on it certainly by the time they leave junior high, if not during junior high. I think it’s somewhat unusual that way. I think most children pick their field quite a bit later, but astronomy seems to catch early, and if it does, it sticks. Okay.\\n\\n Then we moved to Baltimore [Maryland] and I went to high school there, and, as you know, I went to Swarthmore College [Pennsylvania]. I picked Swarthmore for various reasons. I had gone to a girls' high school. The better public high schools in Baltimore were, and still are, sexually segregated, which I think is rather interesting in this day and age. So I went to a girls' high school, and I’m an only child, so I didn’t have any brothers. I was relatively new in Baltimore, as you can tell, and so I didn’t have a lot of male friends. In fact, I had almost none. So I very much wanted to go to a coed college. So that was my first consideration.\\n\\n My second consideration was that I wanted one that wasn’t too far from home. This was, well, it was 1942 when I went to college. So it was the middle of the war, and transportation wasn’t trivial.\\n\\n The third and perhaps the deciding feature was that I wanted a good astronomy department, and I knew that Swarthmore had a good astronomy department. And unlike today when kids apply to a dozen colleges, I didn’t apply anywhere but Swarthmore. It never occurred to me that I might not get in, even though I happened to be late in applying.\\n\\n As I say, the war had come along. I was scheduled to graduate from high school in 1943, but I was in a course that was supposed to give us four years of high school plus a year of college in our four years. So by the end of my junior year, I would have had enough credits to graduate from high school. Well, our class was fairly small. I think there were only twelve of us in it by that time, our home room class. Obviously, the whole graduating class was a lot larger. Some of the girls had asked the administration if we could graduate a year early. You know, with the war they wanted to get into nursing or teaching or get to college and get out faster. They felt that that extra year in college didn’t mean that much to them.\\n\\n So the administration said yes, we could do it under two conditions, that everybody in the class had to do it, they wouldn’t split us, which was understandable; and we had to go to summer school and take chemistry. So we went to summer school and took a year of chemistry in ten weeks, which was sort of fun, because we started the second semester at the same time we started first semester, which meant that we had to cope with second-semester chemistry without any background. But we managed. We all got through it.\\n\\n Oh, excuse me, I’d better get the phone. [Tape recorder turned off.]\\n\\n Now, let’s see where I was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Never too much detail." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. So, I, anyway, we had chemistry four periods a day, two periods of lectures and two periods of lab. I don’t know. There were times when I dreamed test tubes that summer. [Laughter] But I got through chemistry. As it say, we all did, and, in fact, I passed my freshman college, first-semester freshman college chemistry on the basis of it several years later.\\n\\n So then I went up and went to Swarthmore. At Swarthmore, the Dean of Women was very opposed to women going into science or engineering, so opposed that if she couldn’t talk a girl out of it, she just never had anything more to do with her for the four years she was there.\\n\\n So she sent me over to the Astronomy Department and I met with [Peter] van de Kamp, who was the primary, the head of the department and the primary Astronomy Department professor. I talked to him and told him I wanted major in astronomy. Well, he didn’t overtly talk me out of it, but what he said was, he said, “You know, I’m using material that was collected by my predecessors fifty years ago, and I’m collecting material which will be used by my successors fifty years in the future.” I realized many years later that he was trying to discourage me. But, anyway, I stayed with it.\\n\\n Mother’s reaction was that—well, both of my parents were supportive. I mean, they felt I should make my own decision. I’ll come back a bit to high school again. But Mother said, “You know, you don’t really know much about other subjects. You should take other subjects, too, before you commit yourself.” There was no reason to commit myself as a freshman. So I took history. I had to take German because of scientific German, and astronomy and math. Well, I felt that the only way I got through my freshman-year history and German was that I was taking math and astronomy, and I never had to study the math and astronomy. So that pretty well convinced me that I was in the right field.\\n\\n Well, I talked about the discouragement at college. High school was much more blatant. When I thought I was going to have a senior year in high school, I asked to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. I’d had Latin from the middle of seventh grade on, and I felt that I wasn’t that interested in specializing in Latin. The guidance counselor looked at me. My memory of, visions of her, I’m sure is exaggerated, but she seemed about ten feet tall, looked down her nose at me. “What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?” which was about as obvious as you could get. [Laughter] I said I wanted to, but, as I say, it became a moot question when I didn’t stay for my senior year.\\n\\n Well, at the end of college, it was just at the end of the war. I graduated in February in 1946, and the question was, what graduate school was staffed again? Most of the professors had been off in war work, and so there was a question of where I might go. Well, van de Kamp had suggested I go to Columbia [University, New York City] because it had a fairly full staff by then, and he had talked to [Jen] Schilt, who was the chairman of the department there, and I think Schilt was counting on me coming.\\n\\n Well, in the meantime, Yerkes [Observatory, University of Chicago, Williams Bay, Wisconsin] had gotten back to a reasonable status, and I felt, and van de Kamp didn’t disagree, that it was a better department than Colombia. So that’s how I happened to pick Chicago. Well, it had its consequences, however, because Swarthmore has a scheme of outside examiners, and Schilt was my astronomer examiner. I did not get high honors, and I’m pretty sure, from what I was told, that I should have. I talked later to, I guess it was Elizabeth Urey, [Harold] Urey’s daughter—I happened to meet her on an Alumni Day or something, something that I was campus for. She was several years younger than I was, but she had known the Schilts because they’d lived near them, and she said, “Schilt is that way. He has that reputation.” Well, it didn’t really hurt me that much, except it was a little discouraging, especially when others, van de Kamp and others, implied to me that they thought I should have.\\n\\n Well, anyway, I went to Yerkes, and that was certainly an excellent choice. Yerkes was really the hub of the astronomical world at that time. There were people from all the world who’d come. They might come for a few days. They might stay several months. A couple stayed six or eight months or longer, maybe as long as a year. As you said in your e-mail, the GIs were beginning to come back, so it was a lively place from that standpoint.\\n\\n There were always at least two women. I think it was when I started, there were ten students, of whom two were women. There was a Canadian woman who actually arrived either the day before or the day after I did. We shared an office for quite a while. Well, she was only there for two years because she came with a master’s degree. We shared an office. She was at Goddard for fifteen years, much, much later. I had kept up with her over the years, as a matter of fact, and we’ll still very good friends.\\n\\n Then after she left, there was another woman who came, who did not stay. In fact, there were a couple of others that came from time to time that did not stay. But I didn’t really have any problems as long as I was a student. I felt that I was treated pretty much the same way as all the other students. Well, I guess that’s all I can say. I was treated quite normally and I didn’t feel any problems with discrimination.\\n\\n After I graduated, I stayed on there. Astronomy at that time probably, to some extent still, but certainly very strongly at that time, depended on your thesis advisor to get a job. My thesis advisor did not want me to leave, so the only jobs he told me of were jobs that he was fairly sure I wouldn’t want. That had a number of problems, but that’s neither here nor there. They’re in the distant past. I also was paid about two-thirds what the men at the comparable level were paid. At one point I commented that I was getting less as a Ph.D. than what they now call data clerks, that they then called computers, who had a high school education and nothing beyond were getting, and I was told, “Don’t look around.”\\n\\n At another time the chairman of the department, who was [Subrahmanyan] Chandrasekhar, who obviously had faced discrimination himself as a dark-skinned person, told me, “We don’t discriminate against women. We can just get them for less.” I think he honestly didn’t recognize that that was discrimination. Well, there was an obvious problem. I was quite sure that I had no chance of tenure as a woman at that time. There were no—well, I’m not sure. There was a woman at Michigan who may have gotten tenure just about that time, but she and I were the first women on the faculties, even, of a research, major research astronomy institution. So it was not exactly trivial.\\n\\n Cecilia [Payne-]Gaposchkin, who probably was the leading astronomer of her era and certainly an outstanding one, was on the Radcliffe [College, Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts] faculty for many years, but she did not get a Harvard appointment until 1957. So, as I say, the chance of getting tenure was pretty slim.\\n\\n Well, fortunately, one of the other professors at Yerkes obviously recognized the problem, and he told me of a job at the Naval Research Laboratory [NRL] here in Washington [D.C.], in radio astronomy. Radio astronomy was new at that time. It was quite new in this country. I decided that it would have a lot of potential for the field of galactic structure, which was what I was interested in. It did, and I enjoyed my stay there, but at that time you were expected to build your own equipment, and I didn’t want to start over as a electronic engineer, because it really would have meant essentially starting over. So I won’t say I was actively looking for another job, but I was keeping my eyes open.\\n\\n But in the meantime, I enjoyed working there. I did a number of interesting things. I made a map of the galaxy at sixty-seven centimeters, and as a result of comparing my results with those of another person who was working there at the time, working in much shorter wavelengths, I was able to show that the center of the galaxy was not a single source, but was a mixture of both thermal and nonthermal sources. Unfortunately, though I did publish that briefly, I was not able to do much toward substantiating it because the other person would not let me publish his data.\\n\\n So in 1958, when they set the center of the new galactic coordinate system, I said we should wait three years—the International Astronomical Union meets every three years—that we should wait three years, and I explained why, and they asked me to prove it, and I couldn’t. So it was set on the basis that the galactic center was a single source. Since then—in fact, it was a couple of years later one of the astronomers from what by that time was the National Radio Astronomy Observatory came to me and he said, “You know, you were right.” I said, “Yes, I know.” [Laughter]\\n\\n Another interesting thing that I did is I participated in the first radar measurements of the distance to the Moon, and with that we were able to improve the lunar distance quite substantially, not nearly as well as it’s known now, thanks to Apollo and the lunar lasers and so forth, but a lot better than it was known then. So I enjoyed it.\\n\\n I went there in 1955. In 1956, I received an invitation to a dedication of an observatory in the Soviet Union, in Soviet Armenia, as a guest of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Well, I had only four weeks, between the time I got the invitation and the time I had to leave. I found out later that the reason for the short notice was that they had invited a much more senior astronomer who had been born in Russia, and he had been with the White Russians and had escaped, and he was afraid if he went back to the Soviet Union, that they’d never let him out. So he declined.\\n\\n I guess I’d better back up. So I got this invitation, and I was sort of curious as to why. It turns out that while I was still at Yerkes, I was studying what are called high-velocity stars. All of the stars rotate, have orbits around the center of the galaxy, and most of them go around the center of the galaxy in nearly circular orbits. They vary a little bit from circular, but they’re predominantly circular. The sun has a nearly circular orbit, so that of the stars near the sun, almost all of them are moving pretty much in the same way as the sun. So the relative speed of the sun and all these other stars is fairly low.\\n\\n But there are a few stars that have more elliptical orbits, and even a few stars that move in the opposite direction from the way most of the stars near the sun move. These, of course, because their orbits are so different, have very different speeds with respect to the sun. So we call them high-velocity stars, although in fact their velocities are actually slower. Anyway, I was studying these high-velocity stars partly as an extension of some other work I had done before.\\n\\n One of the primary ways that astronomers study stars is to spread their light out into a rainbow, which we call a spectrum, and from that rainbow we can learn something about what the stars are composed of and how hot they are, how bright they are, and how they’re moving, at least how they’re moving toward or away from us. We can’t find any transverse motion from that.\\n\\n So I was taking spectra, a lot of these high-velocity stars, all the ones that I could reach. One of the stars I observed, according to the catalog, should look like the sun. Well, when I developed the plate, it didn’t look at all like the sun. It was completely different. So I just assumed at first that I had gotten the wrong star. Well, then I took some other plates and, sure enough, it looked the same. I definitely had the right star. So I took various spectra, different resolutions; that is, the light was spread out somewhat more than the ones I took at the beginning.\\n\\n Afterwards, when I got back to Yerkes—this was done in West Texas at McDonald Observatory [Fort Davis, Texas]—when I got back to Yerkes, I measured these plates and looked at what, described, what I saw, and wrote a little two-page note, which I didn’t pay a lot of attention to. It was not the primary thing I was working on. I just thought it was interesting enough to publish. Well, the director of this new observatory in Armenia had seen this note and was interested in it, and that’s how I happened to get invited.\\n\\n Well, as I say, I had four weeks between the time that I got the invitation and the time that I had to leave. Well, I was working for the Navy, still in the middle of the cold war. I had secret clearance, and I wanted to go to the Soviet Union. It turns out I was the first civilian to go to the Soviet Union after the beginning of the cold war. So, as you can imagine, if you’ve had experience in government and red tape, this was a bit of a hurdle, and it turned out that the only way I could possibly get the paperwork through was to essentially walk it through myself. I could not rely on channels to get things through in time.\\n\\n As an extreme example, when I had everything else—well, I might add that the paperwork had to go all the way to the Secretary of the Navy to get approval for my going, so it was a major undertaking, and needless to say, by the time I was finished, people knew me at the Naval Research Lab.\\n\\n Well, anyway, I was going to tell you a story about how I had to do my own walking, because I think it’s an interesting story in itself. I had sent all my papers over and my passport over to the Navy Travel Office to get a visa, and they were supposed to get a visa for me. Well, a week passed and no visa. A few days more passed, no visa. So, finally, I said, “Can I come over and get my passport and get my visa myself?” Because I just didn’t have time to wait. Well, yes.\\n\\n So I came over. She gave me the passport. She said, “You won’t get it.”\\n\\n So I said, “Okay, well, at least I’m going to try.”\\n\\n So I went down to the Soviet Embassy, and the first day they had me come in. I explained what I wanted and sit in the hall. I guess I was there about forty-five minutes. Then they took my passport, and they said, “We’ll call you when it’s ready.” Well, that was all right. I expected that.\\n\\n Well, the next morning or maybe even late that afternoon, I had a call. It was ready. So I went down to get it, and this time it was quite a different reception. I was ushered into the office of the scientific attaché, given tea, a cup of tea, and just generally greeted like a, almost a great VIP. You know, I was what, all of thirty-one? It turned out, among other things, that the science attaché had been a translator for the man who was going to be the director of this observatory, not that the man needed a translator. His English was excellent, but, anyway, he knew him and had a lot of respect for him, and the fact that he had invited me to this dedication really put me on a high peg with him. So I had a very interesting session and a very interesting general discussion with him.\\n\\n Then I took my passport back to the Navy Travel Office, and the woman just about dropped through the floor, as you can imagine. She had been absolutely certain I couldn’t get a visa and didn’t even try. So, anyway, that was just one example of the sort of problems that I ran into in trying to get things through.\\n\\n Well, after I got back from Russia, I was asked to give a colloquium on my experiences, which I did. Then probably as a result of that colloquium, I was asked to give a course in astronomy, so I gave a series of ten lectures in astronomy. That was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done, because the audience were engineers and scientists, so I could assume a complete background in science, in physics and math. I didn’t have to into the fundamental problems, like Newton’s laws and so forth or algebra. I could assume that they’d understand basic physics concepts and so I could emphasize the astronomy, and I very much enjoyed that series, and apparently other people did, too, because the attendance was pretty high and pretty steady. I say “pretty high,” my memory is that it was two or three hundred. It wasn’t trivial. Well, that was 1956.\\n\\n Well, in 1958 when NASA was formed, a good bit of the science part of NASA was transferred from the Naval Research Laboratory. All of Project Vanguard went to NASA and a good bit, although by no means all, of the rocket program. Now, I had not had a lot of involvement with either of those of programs. Oh, occasionally somebody in the rocket branch would call me up and ask me an astronomical question or ask me for advice on astronomy, but no more than lots of other people in the lab asked me for advice on all kinds of things. So that I was not automatically transferred with the group.\\n\\n If I’m not taking too long to back up about asking advice, after I’d been there a little while—well, there’s another story I’ll tell you being a woman, but I’ll come to this one first. After being there a while, people began to decide that astronomers really had a rather interesting background in terms of, well, I guess the primary thing is that they had a fairly decent background in radiative transfer and optics, so they’d ask me questions on optics, although NRL had a pretty good optics branch. But radiative transfer turned out to be of interest to them because they weren’t interested in radiative transfer, but they were interested in sound transfer, underwater sound, and problems were sufficiently similar that I’d get asked questions on that.\\n\\n After I’d been at NASA, oh, several months, maybe longer, an industry rep came in and met with me, and he said, “How long have you been in astronomy?”\\n\\n I said, “All my life.”\\n\\n He said, “Well, the last time I met you, it was in a conference on underwater sound.” [Laughter] So, anyway, as I say, people at NASA knew me.\\n\\n Well, I guess it was early 1959, I went to NASA Headquarters to hear Urey. They had a lecture from Urey, and I thought that would be interesting, a lecture on the origin of the Moon. While I was there, one of the men who had been transferred from NRL, who didn’t know me well from NRL but knew me, asked me if I knew anyone who would like to come to NASA and set up a program in space astronomy.\\n\\n Well, I debated about it because I knew it would mean leaving research, and I had enjoyed research. I also had had only one bit of experience in management, and that was not terribly successful. But I finally decided that the challenge of starting with a completely clean slate and mapping out a program that would influence astronomy for fifty years was just more than I could turn down, and I don’t think I underestimated it, looking at the Hubble [Space Telescope, HST], which is one of the things that I was involved with. So I took it and in February ’58 I joined NASA.\\n\\n I was going to tell you about the problems of being a woman when I joined NRL. The person who hired me at NRL was John Hagen, and Hagen had moved over to become the director for Vanguard by the time I arrived. It was a four- to six-month period between the times. When I arrived, I thought, well, they’re hiring me. It’s a government. They will have a job that they want me to do. So I sort of expected them to tell me what they’d like me to do. Nobody said anything. Well, I’d brought some work with me and I also wanted to do some reading to learn more about what was, to me, a new field. So I succeeded in keeping myself occupied.\\n\\n Of course, at lunch and coffee times and so forth, we’d talk, and gradually they began to decide that maybe I would be useful and they began talking to me about their problems and I sort of worked into the group. Well, many years later one of the men in the group told me, he said, “You know, the problem was, when you arrived, we’d had another woman (who happened also to be named Nancy), and she was absolutely useless, and the last thing we wanted was another woman astronomer.” [Laughter] And that’s why when I got there, they didn’t have any use for me, which is, I think, an interesting indication of stereotyping that would not have happened to a male in the same position.\\n\\n Well, when I joined NASA, as I said, because the women’s pages were so very anxious to get material, I got a great deal of publicity, much more, I think, than I deserved, but in a way, it was fun. As a result, of course, I had a lot of opportunities that I probably would not have had as a man in the same job.\\n\\n Well, that sort of finishes that part of the story, and I think maybe it’s up to you to ask some questions at this point." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were asked to head up this new program, did you have the opportunity to set your own agenda, or were there expectations of what the government wanted you to do with this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was pretty much a blank check. Now, during the IGY [International Geophysical Year], the National Academy of Sciences had asked scientists, asked all scientists, not just astronomers, to propose satellite experiments. There had been four proposed for astronomy, only one of which could possibly have been carried by Vanguard, and probably not even that. So when NASA was formed, they decided to use these as the basis for the astronomy program, at least in the beginning.\\n\\n By the time I arrived, which was six months after the organization had been formed, they had gotten these people together at least once, I think. I think only once. They got them together very shortly after I arrived, and they pretty well decided that, as I say, that these four experiments would be used as the starting nucleus of the program, and not only that, but that they would build a common spacecraft, which became the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, for these experiments.\\n\\n They were quite different from one another in many ways, but they all required accurate pointing, or at least by standards of those days, accurate pointing, and the ability to point to any place in the sky.\\n\\n The first year I was at NASA, as you can tell by my résumé, I was only responsible for optical and ultraviolet astronomy. Frankly, there wasn’t much else. But the person who was supposedly head of the astronomy program was Gerhardt Schilling [phonetic]. Well, Schilling was a pretty good manager, and I learned a lot about management from him. I don’t think he was a particularly good astronomer, so I think from the standpoint of doing much with the program, he really hadn’t done much.\\n\\n So there were two things that had been started. I think the second one had been started. One was the OAO, as I told you. The other was the Orbiting Solar Observatory, which was the brain child of John [C.] Lindsay at Goddard. He had proposed a satellite in which most of the weight would be in a wheel that would rotate relatively rapidly and form a gyroscope. Rotating against that wheel were two boxes that could remain pointed at the sun, to a reasonable degree of accuracy. Now, these boxes couldn’t look anywhere else in the sky. Well, let’s put it this way. They presumably could have looked anywhere in the plane of the wheel, but they couldn’t look away from the plane of the wheel. So they were restricted to solar observations. But they came along, as it happened, appreciably earlier than the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, primarily because the pointing was a so much easier problem. All they had to do was to find the brightest source in the sky and lock on it and then have the wheels start spinning, and, well, the wheel probably was spinning because of the spin of the rocket launcher. So that was reasonably under way by the time I started, but that was all. There was nothing in any region of the spectrum other than the ultraviolet.\\n\\n So my job in the early days was to get things started in primarily high energy. I also started the radio astronomy program. Infrared I didn’t do much with at that time—I did later—because the detectors just were not available. Clearly, we knew the infrared would be interesting, but the only thing we had in the way of detectors were bolometers and they just were not sensitive enough to do much science. So it was the other wavelengths that we paid attention to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about staff and budget?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The way NASA Headquarters was set up and still is, actually, as you may know, is a dichotomy between engineers and scientists. For example, in a particular division, like the Astronomy and Astrophysics Division, there would be either a scientist and an engineer as the head and the other as the deputy. Below him—it was always a \"him\" in my case—there were two groups. There were the scientists and there were the engineers. Now, they worked very closely together, but they did have separate responsibility.\\n\\n In general, it was the engineers who worried about the project budgets, and I worried about what we called SRT. I worried about the support of the university participants—well, not only universities, but any of the scientific participants. I had full responsibility within the normal limits for their budgets and deciding which of them to fund for what, that type of thing.\\n\\n As I say, I didn’t have responsibility for the detailed planning of the project budgets. Actually, the detailed planning of the project budgets was done by the NASA centers, the center that had the responsibility for the mission. But the engineers at NASA Headquarters oversaw what the engineers at the centers were doing. I pretty well oversaw what the scientists were doing, whether they were at the centers or outside of the NASA community." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At what time in your role were you able to bring ideas for new projects and help see those projects become reality?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I don’t know if I can think of a particular time. I’d had a lot of discussions with members of the astronomical community about what they might want to do. I did an awful lot of traveling in my early years, trying to visit all of the major astronomy departments in the country. I also visited industry but that was in a different role primarily. And talking, trying to get them interested in doing astronomy from space, whether from rockets or balloons or satellites, telling them what the possibilities and constraints were, finding out what they thought would be important. Then on the basis of that, I tried to formulate the science program that would make sense and what sorts of facilities we needed to carry out that program.\\n\\n I can’t say that I can give you an exact time when I would say, “Okay, now’s the time to build such-and-such a satellite, and this is why we want to build it, and this is how we want to build it,” but it all sort of developed along gradually, I guess is the way I should put it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess it’s a process of evolution. It just keeps moving from one to the other." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, of course, which is the way science works, in general." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you give us some ideas of how that happened? As you mentioned when you first started. Maybe take an example of one of the projects and show us that phase, that evolutionary phase of how it moved from gathering information from your travels and then moved into projects that became—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I can tell you about a fairly minor one, because, as you probably know, I’m writing a history on space astronomy, and one of the people I contacted was a person who had done the red shift, the rocket red shift experiment. He sent back some fairly extensive comments which were sufficient to refresh my memory on what had happened, which I would not have remembered otherwise.\\n\\n But early in the space program, yes, I guess really quite early, [Howard P.] Robertson, who I think was then at Stanford [University, Palo Alto, California]—unfortunately he died fairly soon and quite young—had held a conference on relativity and tests of relativity, with the primary emphasis on space tests of relativity. I had gone to that conference, so I had some idea of what sorts of things looked interesting.\\n\\n Another person who had gone to that conference was Bob Vessot at Harvard, was Harvard and not MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts]—I think it’s Harvard, I’m pretty sure. He was working on clocks. He was not an astronomer. He was a physicist, and his field was atomic clocks. Because of the fact that clocks obviously have a major role to play in relativity, he had gone to this conference, and I talked to him about the red shift experiment. Actually, I talked to him about the possibility of flying a clock in a satellite to get into a lower gravity field to compare the timekeeping in the satellite to the timekeeping on the ground.\\n\\n Well, nothing came of that very soon. It was an expensive proposition, and even in those days, when money was relatively flush, there were limits. We went to another meeting, which we both went to, and he said, “At that meeting you asked me to think about what I might be able to do with a high-altitude sounding rocket. You told me about the capabilities of the four-stage Scout rocket. After that, I went home and began to think about it and realized that we could do an interesting job with the sounding rocket.” I can even show you. I have his e-mail if you’re interested.\\n\\n So I went to my supervisor and told him that I’d like to make a proposal, and he encouraged me. So I proposed to NASA to do this experiment in a Scout. Of course, it did go on. So, I don’t know, does that answer your question as to how things happen? It’s sort of a mixture of propositions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, sometimes, and many times, people will read, or I will read, the end of a result, but the progression of how it got there is somewhat of a mystery to all of us. It always helps to—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I told you about the OAOs, that they grew out of the IGY. The major decision was to create a standard spacecraft. Well, there were four experiments in the IGY, proposed for the IGY: an ultraviolet photometer; a relatively low-resolution ultraviolet spectrometer; and a high-resolution ultraviolet spectrometer, all for stars or celestial sources, which were assumed to be stars at that time; and one for the sun.\\n\\n Well, as we began to look in more detail at the planning, it was pretty obvious that the solar experiment was not going to be sufficiently compatible with the others, to use the same spacecraft. The thermal problems were too different. For that matter, the pointing requirements I mentioned earlier for the sun were less than they were for the stellar experiments, so it would have been overkill.\\n\\n So it was decided to save that experiment for a new series of solar satellites called AOSO [Advanced Orbiting Solar Observatory]. Well, AOSO never came to fruition. Probably the follow-on to AOSO, or the first follow-on, was the ATM [Apollo Telescope Mount] mission using the [empty] Saturn as the laboratory, and that, of course, did a magnificent job. So that particular solar experiment never got flown, but the three stellar experiments remained in the program. There was a fourth one, and that was one to do a TV survey of the sky and the ultraviolet.\\n\\n Well, the TV survey and the photometer were both small compared to the others. They weren’t exactly small, but they were a lot smaller than the others. So we decided that we could put one on one end and the other in the other end of the OAO. The OAO was basically a tube surrounded by a structure which contained all of the satellite equipment, all the telemetry, the power supply, the electronics generally, and so forth. So you had an open tube surrounded by all of this other stuff and you could obviously have one experiment pointing out one end of the tube and one out the other end of the tube, and that worked actually quite well.\\n\\n Well, there was more to that and, again, I don’t know how much detail you want to go into. Unfortunately, the TV experiment turned out to be a lot more difficult than was anticipated. TV tubes were clearly available. Cathodes were available, but melding them turned out to be very difficult. So by the time we were ready to fly the first OAO in 1965, the TV experiment was not ready to fly.\\n\\n So the question was, what do we put in the other end of the tube? Well, we had been supporting some rocket work at Lockheed [Aircraft Corporation]—it wasn’t Lockheed Martin then—and so Phil Fisher [phonetic] said, yes, he could adapt his rocket payload to go into the telescope. Explorer 11 had been a gamma ray satellite. [William L.] Kraushaar said, yes, he could adapt that instrument. There was a prototype. He could use that to fly.\\n\\n The prototype had been on exhibit at the World’s Fair in New York outside. I had seen it the preceding summer, and I was shocked at its condition, but it turned out that the damage was only superficial, and it took very little work to get the experiment back in working order. So we flew that experiment in the first OAO. Well, the first OAO didn’t last long enough to get any scientific results, unfortunately. If it had, we might have discovered gamma ray sources a little, well, not earlier, because OAO did not fly till the rocket experiment discovered Scorpio X-1. But that’s another indication of program planning, of how you react to an emergency.\\n\\n Okay, your turn." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Funding. Has that ever been an issue to continue while you were in position?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, very definitely. Yes, the early days, funding was pretty flush. Even by the late sixties, well before the Apollo Program ended, funding was becoming a major problem. Most of the missions—well, maybe not most—most of the big missions had to be de-scoped to save funds. I say, \"save funds.\" Save funds temporarily because the HST is either a horrific or an excellent example, depending on which way you want to look at the thing. We had to cut the costs.\\n\\n Well, we did various things to cut the cost. We started with a three-meter telescope, which is what the astronomers wanted. In order to cut the costs, we cut down to 2.4 meters, and that had a couple of advantages. It saved building new test chambers. It meant that the spacecraft could be redesigned into a system that would make pointing easier and maneuvering easier, and it meant various other savings.\\n\\n But even after that was done, the budget was still higher than NASA felt they could ask for, that they didn’t think Congress would approve. Well, then the question was, what do we do? Well, the only thing we could do—well, I guess we sent it to Congress that way. I don’t think we did any other de-scoping, because we did look at the question as to whether we could go to a smaller mirror.\\n\\n One of the main things that the astronomers wanted to do was to determine to so-called Hubble constant, the ratio between the velocity of recession of a galaxy and its distance. Unfortunately, we can’t do that from nearby galaxies because all of the galaxies relatively near the sun are in what is called a local group and they all interact gravitationally, so their velocities are like the velocities in the solar system where they’re all dependent on one another. They weren’t separate, so there was no way we could use the nearby galaxies to determine the Hubble constant.\\n\\n So the first real group, the closest group, that we felt we could use to determine the Hubble constant was the Virgo cluster. The way we get the distance to a galaxy, or at least the nearer galaxies, is to look for a type of variable stars called Cepheids, which vary in intensity in a period which is directly related to their absolute brightness. So once you can find a Cepheid, can measure its variation with time and long enough to get its period, you know exactly how far away it is, or at least pretty well how far, how exactly in terms of distances to galaxies, not exactly in terms of the nearest stars.\\n\\n So the feeling was that unless the Hubble could get light curves, could find Cepheids and get their light curves in galaxies in the Virgo cluster, that it was not worth doing, and that put a limit on how small we could make the mirror. We decided that 2.4 meters was usable, but anything smaller would not be. So we stuck with that and we pretty well stuck with the program as it was. But what happened was, it was too expensive for Congress, so they stretched it out to the next year, and it went a couple of years that way.\\n\\n Well, this whole time we had a marching army being paid, so we didn’t keep down the total cost of the program, but we kept down the annual cost. Well, then Challenger came along and, of course, that killed everything that used the shuttle for several years. By that time we were ready to go. So we essentially had this beast in storage for three years while we maintained all the engineers that were working on it. So a lot has been quoted about the price of the HST having grown so much and, of course, it did.\\n\\n There was also a major inflation in that period, which added to the cost a great deal, that we had no control over. So the cost actually tripled over our original estimate. But of that tripling, almost all of it, or at least a very major fraction of it, was the result of, (a), stretching out the program to keep the costs down, (b), the Challenger disaster, and, (3), very definitely the inflation. So I don’t really feel that the project should take the blame for any of those things. I won’t say there were no cost overruns, but they weren’t major compared to the other problems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Has that project resulted or lived up the expectation that you wanted—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You haven’t heard about the Hubble? [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not from you. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think it has more than lived up to the expectations. I think we have done everything that we said we were going to do, and more." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It must be very exciting to see that for you and all of your colleagues to watch that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One thing I ought to tell you. I think I’ve mentioned this in other interviews, but I still find it interesting. In the early days when we were still trying to get approval through Congress, [William] Proxmire—you might probably remember him—asked why the average American taxpayer should want to pay for the Hubble. It was then the ST, Space Telescope. My answer was—and this was all by mail; I didn’t ever testify in Congress, fortunately, I think—my answer was that for the price of a night at the movies every taxpayer would receive fifteen years of exciting scientific results.\\n\\n In the first place, I don’t think my prediction was wrong. In the second place, I recently figured whether that statement was still true, and it is. In spite of the increase in cost of the Hubble—other things have also gone up—it’s still true that the average American taxpayer is getting fifteen years of exciting science for the price of a single night at the movies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And hopefully they will continue to learn more and more about those results as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, I think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were discussing earlier the first days and then, of course, the days that led up to the Hubble, it made me think about the different type of spacecraft or vehicles that your telescopes have used to get where they need to go. How did that change, just that piece of technology, affect how you planned?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, of course, in the seventies when all the NASA effort was being put on the space shuttle, it was decreed that all missions would be launched on the shuttle. So all of our spacecraft were designed to use the shuttle. Now, the Space Telescope actually had been planned to use a manned launch and manned maintenance in orbit from its very beginning.\\n\\n I guess the first suggestion of space telescopes goes back much further, but the first serious planning after the beginning of NASA, if you can call it serious planning, was in 1962 at a National Academy of Science Summer Science workshop. At that time there was serious discussion of a three-meter telescope which would be man-maintained in orbit or on the Moon. There were discussions of low Earth orbit, low Earth orbit with the telescope attached to a space station, high Earth orbit, and the Moon. At that point there was no particular thinking about one or the other.\\n\\n I felt that before we’d launched OAO that we were a little bit too premature to go into a three-meter telescope, and I’m afraid I didn’t do anything about it. But in the 1965 National Academy summer study, the push for such an instrument was so strong that in spite of the fact that I thought it was a little early, we still hadn’t launched OAO, and I don’t think they’d launched even the unsuccessful one. I know we hadn’t launched a successful one. I felt it was still pretty early, but, okay, it was clear that it was going to happen.\\n\\n So I started the planning, and, as I say, that from the beginning was planned as a mission that would be man-maintained and man-serviced in orbit and, of course, with the shuttle. When the shuttle planning came along, it was an obvious payload. However, everything was to go on the shuttle, even relatively small missions. So when Challenger came along, most of those were taken off. Those that could be launched by expendable launch vehicles were taken off the shuttle and, as a result, many of the missions had to be redesigned. The IRAS [Infrared Astronomy Satellite], for example, and COBE [Cosmic Background Explorer] both, particularly COBE, had major redesign problems as a result of being taken off the shuttle. I think IRAS had originally been on the shuttle. I’m not sure about that. I know COBE was. So from that standpoint, the change in launch vehicles was a pretty major effect.\\n\\n Other than that, I think the main growth in the capability of expendable launch vehicles was the fact that we could go to larger spacecraft. Now, that didn’t mean that all of the spacecraft had to be larger. We’re now launching relatively small ones. But certainly the HEAO, the High-Energy Astrophysical Observatories, would not have been possible without the more major capabilities that had grown up in the ten or fifteen years before it was launched." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Prior to the shuttle, of course, you had different spacecraft that were going. I know that you mentioned the ATM earlier. Could you tell us about those early days of working with that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, ATM wasn’t exactly early. At the end of the Apollo Program, there were Saturns that had been left. You know, originally they had planned two more missions to the Moon than they actually flew. So those vehicles were left, and the idea was, well, what could you do with them that was useful? There were suggestions of filling the Saturn, the last stage, with sand for technological tests. Well, some of us, some people didn’t think that made a whole lot of sense when you could use them to get things into orbit, in which you’d learn more than you’d learn from a tank of sand, and at the same time would get some engineering experience as to how you launched things. So that is the origin of ATM.\\n\\n By that time, I was not handling the solar program, so I can’t give you a lot of details as to what happened. But basically we looked at the things that the solar physicist or solar astronomers, whatever you want to call them, wanted to do, and clearly they wanted high-resolution spectroscopy. They wanted a coronograph, which blocks out the main light of the sun and lets you see the outer atmosphere of the sun without waiting for an eclipse. A coronograph is basically an artificial total eclipse. They wanted an X-ray telescope that would let them see where the X-ray radiation from the sun originated. What else did they want? Those were the main things they wanted, a white-light coronograph, a high-resolution ultraviolet spectrograph, an X-ray imaging telescope, and an X-ray spectrograph. With the capability of being carried on the Saturn, they could build fairly large instruments, get high resolution in the spectra and reasonable resolution in the imaging. So they put those together into the ATM payload.\\n\\n Now, it was really an early space station, because the Saturn can was made into a residence for the astronauts, and I think it was a six-month mission. It was quite a long mission, much longer than any others that we’ve had. So it was very productive scientifically. It was maybe more expensive than sand, but we thought the return was worth it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think so, and maybe those taxpayers would have something more than sand, you know, speaking of return, and Senator Proxmire as well.\\n\\n The evolution from the idea to the reality for the project is one thing that we certainly have talked about, but the evolution of your job, was that also happening, what you started doing when you first joined NASA compared to what you were for those years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes, I mentioned that in the beginning I was only responsible for the stars and I was only responsible for the ultraviolet optical. Then after the first year, I took over the sun as well and the whole electromagnetic spectrum. It’s always amused me, [Homer E.] Newell defined astronomy as the study of where you aren’t and then proceeded to add geodesy to it, which is, of course, the science of the Earth. [Laughter] So I was given the responsibility for the geodetic program, probably because the techniques of geodesy are much closer to those of traditional astronomy than they are to the space physics types of activities. Of course, relativity just sort of naturally fell in, primarily because nobody else wanted it. So I had really everything outside—well, I was going to say everything outside the solar system plus geodesy, and I guess relativity really is within the solar system, too.\\n\\n But then as the program got larger, pieces of it were split off. First, the solar program was split off into a separate program. Then the high-energy was split off into a separate program. EUVE, the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer, was just beginning when I left NASA, and I don’t really remember if that was part of my program or not. I certainly was involved with it, but I don’t remember whether I had responsibility for it. But everywhere from that through longwave radio remained my responsibility, if it was outside the solar system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Goodness, you had quite a galaxy of your own to take care of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I did, and, as far as staff, I had a secretary the whole time, or least the branch did. The first year, as I said, I worked for Schilling. If I remember rightly, the second year, and I don’t really know for how long, I was alone except for a secretary. Then I had an assistant. Then after three or four years I had a full-time assistant, first an astronomer and then an engineer, actually, because I couldn’t find an astronomer, and I hired Nancy [W.] Boggess, who had a Ph.D. in astronomy, but was a mother and didn’t want to work full-time. So she worked, I think, half-time, but her hours were such that she could stay home till the children left in the morning and be home by the time they came home in the afternoon. So it worked out well for her and it worked out well for me. As her children got older, she began working more, first three-quarter time and then full-time, so that by that time I had two full-time technical people working with me, by the time I retired. Nancy actually handled most of the [infrared] astronomy program.\\n\\n I think it was the engineer first and then the astronomer, because it was Ernie [Ernest] Ott who was an engineer and then Jeff [Jeffrey D.] Rosendhal who was an astronomer, who later left and went into—I don’t know whether he went to the Education Office directly or not. I think so. I hired Ed Weiler then to replace Jeff. Then when I retired, Ed had been there a year and I felt quite comfortable leaving things in his hands." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’d like for you to elaborate for us and explain for us a comment that you’ve made often or part of your conversation that you’ve made while we were sitting here, and it goes back to what the astronomers wanted. I find that very interesting and would like for you to talk to us about that, on how you determine or take what the astronomers wanted and where this group of astronomers came from that basically shared with you what they wanted. And if you don’t mind, while you think about that, I think we’re going to change the tape out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay, fine. I wondered if you wouldn’t have to some time along the road." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’re going to change that out and let you think about that question for a second. [Tape change]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, there were various ways that I found out what astronomers wanted. As I mentioned, I did in the early days make an effort to visit all the major astronomy departments in the country, talked to them about the possibilities of doing things in space, and tried to interest them in participating. The ones that showed an interest in participating, I simply tried to find out what they thought made sense and what sorts of things they’d need to do what they want to do. Now, obviously some of the things were impossible. Some of the things were possible, but not with the current technology and so forth. Many people were just not interested at all.\\n\\n There was a major split, I’m tempted to call it the East Coast-West Coast split, although it’s not strictly that. But the West Coast astronomers had their major ground-based telescopes, and they weren’t really terribly interested in going into space. Now, they’ve changed. They’re taking an active role in the Space Telescope, but at that time they were rather opposed to NASA’s astronomy program. They felt it was likely to take money away from them, and they were a little afraid of that.\\n\\n Actually, that brings up something which is probably worth mentioning, although it’s also in the literature, and that is that [Alan T.] Waterman, who was the Director of the National Science Foundation [NSF] when NASA was formed, was worried about the NASA astronomy program because the NSF had been the prime funder of ground-based—of astronomy, period, because there wasn’t anything but ground-based except for a few rocket programs at NRL, well, in DOD [Department of Defense] generally. So outside, for civilians, NSF was the fund source for astronomy and he didn’t want to lose the program.\\n\\n So he and [T. Keith] Glennan signed a memorandum of understanding that NASA would not support ground-based astronomy, that that would be an NSF responsibility. And that actually proved to be a problem at times because it was clear that there were areas of ground-based astronomy, particularly theory and laboratory work, that were needed to interpret the space observations or even to plan the space observations. Yet there was a difficulty. NSF wasn’t interested in funding them because they weren’t necessarily the types of things that would attract the highest enthusiasm from others in the field, and they had to be funded.\\n\\n It was only a problem relatively early, but we had to argue that we had to be able to fund these areas in spite of the memorandum of understanding. I guess the primary way we got around it as a problem was that I had very close relations with the astronomy people at NSF. We’d call each other up on the telephone and say, “Look, this is something we would like to have,” or, “Should we go ahead and fund it or do you want to?” and they’d call me up and say, “Well, we have this proposal that really looks like you should be funding it,” that sort of thing. So there was a sufficiently close coordination and cooperation at the working level that we could get by. But it did, at first, cause a problem, as you can guess.\\n\\n Well, anyway, let’s come back to how I determined what was wanted. A second source of information was the Space Science Board. The Space Science Board had panels on astronomy, I guess eventually different aspects of astronomy. I don’t remember for sure when they were subdivided. They’d meet and do long-range planning particularly. You may or may not be familiar with the fact that in astronomy, every decade, starting with 1960, the National Academy of Sciences has produced what they call a decade survey in which they discuss and list the projects in astronomy that they think should be done in the next ten years.\\n\\n The first one, the 1960 one only, only concerned ground-based astronomy. But after that, they included space astronomy together with the ground-based astronomy in their decadal reports. Then, as I say, there was a Space Science Board that studied only space.\\n\\n Probably the single most important source of interaction with the astronomical community was something that, I don’t think originally, but fairly soon was called the Management Operations Working Group for Space Astronomy, or the Management Operations Working Group for Astronomy. NASA had something they called the Space Science Steering Committee, which was an in-house NASA committee. Under that, they had various of these management and operations working groups. They were basically subcommittees, but if you called them a committee, they had to be open to the public, and so the name was changed, even though the function wasn’t.\\n\\n So I had one which I chaired. Now at the present time they have something similar, but it’s chaired normally by a non-NASA person. But I chaired this committee. We’d meet every few months and discuss the program. We’d look at what was going on. We’d look at the development of projects. We’d look at what areas of observations or experiments would be likely to be the most productive with various projects. And we’d look at what we needed to think about for the future.\\n\\n At first that committee actually selected proposals for flight. Later, we went to a system where we selected for flight by ad hoc committees, or ad hoc groups. But the system was set up fairly early to use peer reviewers to select experiments for flight. Now, for what we called the Supporting Research and Technology Program, the SRT program, in the early days there was relatively little peer review. I say “relatively little.” Some proposals I would fund or reject by myself, if I felt that I understood them well enough and had enough background to make a good judgment, and there wasn’t a whole lot of competition in the field that I thought needed development. But relatively soon I would send them out to two or three people for reviews, and then make a selection on the basis of what I heard, learned, plus what I felt by myself.\\n\\n Now I think the system, as I understand it, is that they have an assembled review of SRT proposals, just as we used to have for flight proposals, and the selection is pretty well made by that group, rather than by the program chief." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you able to submit some of your ideas or your—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I never submitted any. Well, in the first place, I think it would have been a severe conflict of interest for me to submit any, an actual proposal. But even beyond that, the job at Headquarters was sufficiently demanding that it was just about impossible to do research. When I took the job, I was told that we would have one day a week for research and every seven years we could have a sabbatical. But to get the one day a week for research, you had to work two other days, and to get the sabbatical, you had to find somebody who really wanted to come for a year, which at that time was pretty difficult. Now it doesn’t seem to be so difficult, but at that time it was. So I never got either one of those.\\n\\n I did a few rather routine types of work while I was at NASA. The first thing I did, I wrote a chapter on high-velocity stars for a compendium. I had promised to write that before I went to NASA, and it had gotten delayed many times. That’s one of the hardest things I ever did, because settling down to really concentrate on a field, review the literature, and so forth took a different kind of concentration from the Headquarters activities in which you very rarely had time to just to concentrate for more than five or ten minutes on a particular subject.\\n\\n But I did go to McDonald [Observatory] and observe for a week and took spectra of stars that [Karl] Henize had gotten from Gemini. So I had ground-based classification for his, the stars he’d observed in the ultraviolet spectra. For a while I spent some time at Goddard occasionally, classifying plates that I had taken before I went to NASA, and finished that job. So I did a little bit of research, but it was pretty routine. You know, it was fairly mundane. It wasn’t state of the art by any stretch of the imagination." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The astronomers that you have referred to, were there many and did that number change as the years moved on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it changed in two major ways. In the beginning, there weren’t many. As I mentioned, there were only four proposals in the IGY. Beyond that, when you went into the X-ray and gamma ray fields, you were not dealing with traditional astronomers; you were dealing with physicists. So a fair number of physicists came into the program, for two reasons. One, because they had the techniques. They knew the techniques to work in those regions, which traditionally trained astronomers did not. But the second reason is that nuclear physics was ramping down, and they were looking for new things to do.\\n\\n So there was a very large influx of high-energy physicists into the astronomy program. The major influx was probably in the late sixties or somewhere in earlier. [William L.] Kraushaar at the University of Wisconsin, for example, was responsible for the first gamma ray satellite, Explorer 11. I don’t remember the date. I have it. It was obviously, as you can tell from its number, pretty early. It was not a terribly successful satellite, but that was simply because of the problems with gamma rays, not with his instrumentation. In fact, he later flew a gamma ray experiment on OSO, on the OSO wheel, which contains experiments as well as spacecraft implements, and got some very interesting results.\\n\\n In the meantime, well, of course, [Ricardo] Giacconi and the X-ray group had come in from physics, very definitely. I mentioned that [Robert] Vessot was a physicist, although he’d come in a very different part of physics.\\n\\n So, yes, there was major expansion, and certainly the astronomical interest in the program grew. On the instrumentation side, the growth was primarily from the physicists. Now, where the astronomical participation in the program grew was with the International Ultraviolet Explorer [IUE], because that could be operated pretty much the way you operated a ground-based telescope. You applied for time in the same way as you applied for time on the ground. It was open to everybody. Good proposals were approved as long as there was time available, let’s put it that way. I wouldn’t say that all good proposals were approved.\\n\\n So the astronomical community became very comfortable with space, working with space, as the result of the IUE. Of course, Hubble is benefiting from that experience very definitely, even though it’s not nearly as simple to operate as the IUE was.\\n\\n The IUE, according to one report that I’ve read, was used by more than half the astronomers in the world, which is an incredible thing. There are well over, I think it’s 3,600 papers, refereed papers that have been published on the basis of IUE data. IUE is a satellite which, I guess, of all the spacecraft I’ve been involved with, I feel the proudest of. I think, although I’ve had people contradict me, that Hubble probably would have come along eventually, even without me, because there was enough enthusiasm for it in the astronomical, in at least parts of the astronomical community and parts that were fairly influential, that it would have come. It may not have come as soon. It would have had different problems, but I think it would have come eventually. IUE, I don’t think would have. IUE was probably the last program that I could get approved in spite of opposition, and there was a lot of opposition for a couple of reasons.\\n\\n The primary opposition came from the high-energy people who fell that it was competition for funds. But the other problem came from the fact that the U.S. participation was from Goddard. The astronomical community, the university community, has never really accepted the scientists in NASA centers. So putting those two things together, it was a real struggle to get that into the system. So, as I say, and particularly in view of the results, that’s the program I feel most proud of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I sort of worry that the present system, which puts so much responsibility into people who really do have a conflict of interest. Even though it may not—you know, they may not be proposing a competing experiment for a particular mission, they do have a conflict of interest, and I guess I feel that that’s dangerous." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let me take the other side of that. What was probably the most challenging part of your job? You mentioned that IUE was probably one of the proudest things that you were able to accomplish." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I guess it was also the most challenging in many ways because I had so very little support." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, the difficulty of that. Did the continual change of technology, just how different that we do things in the seventies compared to doing things in the fifties, and how technology progressed, did it affect your decisions or did that have a—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it certainly affected what we were able to do in a major way. One of the things I did because of this history project is, I re-read Smith’s book, and I was interested to read something that I had forgotten. Apparently I was almost entirely responsible for the fact that we’re using CCDs [charge coupled devices] for the wide-angle camera, the wide-field planetary camera on the Hubble. That was, in fact, the first use of CCDs in astronomy. Now CCDs have just completely taken over astronomy since then. But I just did not feel that the intensified Vidicon, which is what most people assumed we’d use, was going to do the job. It looked to me like the CCDs should, and they have, obviously." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So much that changed, I know people have a hard time trying to decide what day they’re going to buy their computer because they know the next day it’s going to be better and cheaper. I was just thinking about that when you were talking about how so much change, you know, of course, you have so much, and, of course, the Challenger stopping things, and you had technology still progressing, how much did you have to go back and redo before you could do what you wanted to do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t remember too much of that happening, actually, in spite of the Challenger redesign. As I say, the Space Telescope was pretty well set by the time, oh, it was pretty, reasonably well designed by Challenger, and it certainly, yes, it was, yes, I said, I guess I said it was almost finished at the time of Challenger, so you couldn’t do much about that.\\n\\n In the case of COBE, it was primarily simply a matter of a different spacecraft. I don’t remember that technology had a major role in the changes there. In the case of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory [CGRO], it was launched by the shuttle, but it was originally designed both to have some maintenance in orbit, although because of budget, a lot of the maintenance was dropped before launch, I mean, before it was built. It was just decided that it was too expensive to put in that many maintainable components. I’m told that they felt that maintaining it in orbit might have been rather dangerous, although there were things they could do. I don’t know whether they could take care of the gyro or not. Probably not. But the thing that is striking is that it was designed to be recaptured by the shuttle and taken back to Earth, and that was some budgetary decision." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and sad." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because it was working well and was certainly a good satellite, good set of instruments getting good data." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You retired, I believe in 1979. When you retired, did you feel like the goals that you had set for yourself and for your program had been accomplished?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think so. I had my mother with me by that time, and she was getting older, and it was obvious—well, there were a number of reasons for retiring, but it was obvious that it was getting pretty difficult to take care of the apartment and her and a very demanding job with a lot of travel. I’m glad I did retire when I did, because I could not normally—it was an early-out period. I normally could not have retired for another six years, and by that time I could not have handled things at all. I also felt that I was tired of the job, and I had looked for other jobs, but there are not that many jobs in the government at my field and level.\\n\\n I did look at Goddard, but because I would not support having the [Space Telescope Science] Institute at Goddard, the Goddard Science Group was against me, and there was no way that I could get a job at Goddard. Now that changed, but that’s a different matter. I guess those were the two main reasons why I should have retired, but I’m glad I did.\\n\\n But it was rather interesting, I went in to [Frank] Martin, who was the division chief, on Thursday. The early-out period ended that Friday. I went in to see him on Thursday, and I said, “I’ve got to leave Headquarters. I either have to go to Goddard or I have to retire.” At that point I wasn’t sure which I wanted to do.\\n\\n He said, “Well, I’m going to California this afternoon, but here is my number. Call me in the morning with your decision.” This was, I don’t know. Well, it was on Thursday. I don’t remember what time of the day. So I called him on Friday and told him that I had decided to retire. He, in the meantime, had arranged for a job at Goddard for me, which I thought was rather interesting in the time. But I decided that retiring was probably the thing to do, and, as I say, I’ve never regretted it.\\n\\n As you know, I continued to work half-time up until a little less than three years ago. I have been connected, well, I guess I worked with more, no, I guess I hadn’t, didn’t work more than half-time. I’ve been connected with Goddard that whole time. I worked first, well, actually, the first thing I did was to consult for one of the “beltway bandits” and primarily on the Space Telescope, so it was not a complete break. I stayed with them—I did various things for them. I did a little bit on what is now the Chandra. It was then AXAF [Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility]. I did a—well, basically managed a study on the—also, Space Telescope—the cost of supporting the observers for the Space Telescope, not just the institute but, not the institute—that was separate—but the people who were going in to use the telescope, what sort of support they would need, how many we can expect, what the astronomical community was likely to be by the time the Space Telescope was launched, that type of problem.\\n\\n I did two studies of the use of geodesy, use of space techniques for geodesy, primarily to compare the relative cost-effectiveness of different techniques. I did miscellaneous other things for them. Then they dropped the Goddard contract and I went over to McDonnell-Douglas [Corporation], which had picked it up. Did a little bit on Space Telescope, but primarily there I worked on the Earth observation system. I found that the instruments for looking down are not all that different from the instruments for looking up. So I worked there on a part-time basis.\\n\\n But in the meantime I hadn’t gotten enough work with ORI, the beltway bandit, to satisfy me, and I was aware of the Astronomical Data Center at Goddard. So I thought, well, I’ll see if I can get a job there. So I went out there and I said, “Look, I know astronomical catalogs. If you’ll teach me computers, I’d like to work for you,” and I got the job. So I started working one day a week and then gradually worked more as I was getting less, really getting less at McDonnell-Douglas. Up until then I probably was working pretty well for ORI. Finally after the McDonnell-Douglas ended, I started working half-time entirely for the Data Center. So that’s it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you explain a little bit more about your role there at the Data Center, what you did?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the Data Center archives computer-readable versions of astronomical catalogs. Actually the first years I simply would review the catalogs, check that they were consistent, reformat them if I thought that would make them more usable, and then prepare documentation which would provide enough information to let somebody else use them. But after, I don’t remember how long, five or six years, I guess, the person who was in charge of the Data Center was asked to leave, and for all practical purposes I took over managing it. Now, I wasn’t always the manager in title, although I was for a while, but for the most part, I effectively ran the science side of the program.\\n\\n Now, there were other people who were much more skilled at the computer side than I was, who played a major role, but basically I had the primary responsibility for the center. That involved not only the Astronomical Data Center at Goddard, but it involved major interaction with the Astronomical Data Center in Strasburg, France, and to a lesser extent with others around the world.\\n\\n But that involved not only reviewing catalogs once they came in, but also keeping my eyes open at meetings and any of astronomical literature for catalogs, which I think, thought would be appropriate to be archived, and things of that sort, and asking for them and talking to people about how to—I’m often answering questions about they should prepare their data to submit it to the center, that sort of thing. This, I should emphasize, did not include satellite data. The center is only ground-based observations and laboratory work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you got to use quite a bit of your talents all in one spot, and possibly not have so many long hours—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s true, yes, and it was even better because I could do a lot of the work from home, telecommuting. By that time, Mother couldn’t be left alone for a day, and I did have help so that I could do other things, and I could get to Goddard when I needed to. I went at least one day a week because I felt that I had to interact with the other people in person, not just by e-mail, at least that often. But it helped. The fact that I could work from here did mean that I didn’t have to have people on those days. She didn’t need the kind of attention that would keep me away from work for a long period of time, but I had to be here. I had to prepare the meals. I had to help her out of a chair, that sort of thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What a great combination. You could feel very relaxed doing your work in, take care of your personal—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it worked very nicely, and I continued after she died. I continued to telecommute quite a bit of the time, and now the administrative assistant in the group telecommutes three days a week, and the primary computer person, although they do have some others working, helping the group now, but the one was primarily working with me, has moved out to Arizona and is telecommuting. So I started something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your trend continues. What a legacy. I’m sure they all appreciate that, too. It’s nice to be able to have great people working for you, and everybody’s happy in that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, well, I think the group was happy, although the reason I left—as it happened, I think it was probably the best thing in a lot of ways. But the civil service person, this was a contractor, of course, the civil service person, who had taken over our part of the contract, and I did not get along. I was asked to leave. I think, to some extent, she was jealous of me, but there were other—I mean, we also disagreed in many areas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. When we were preparing for this time with you, I read that someone had quoted you as saying that you had categorized your career into three phases: research and teaching and management and support. Do you still feel that way?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes, very definitely. In my period at Yerkes, I stayed Yerkes for six years after I got my degree, did graduate-level teaching and spent most of my time on research. Of course, NRL, the three and a half years at NRL were research entirely except for this informal course I gave. Then I had the management period, which was very definitely management. Then the support services contractor. Now I guess I might say I have a fourth area that I’m keeping pretty busy on a whole variety of volunteer activities." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And enjoying those as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And enjoying those, too, and also doing other things, but, well, I’m the secretary of the National Capital Astronomers, which is primarily an amateur organization, although it does contain a number of professional. I’m now, as of a few weeks ago, assistant treasurer of our local AAUW branch, but I also manage their web pages. I read for the blind and dyslexic because they were anxious to get technical readers and they particularly wanted somebody who could read astronomy—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, how neat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—and I do various other things. Give lectures. So maybe my fourth portion of my career is as a volunteer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But all those great credentials, all the previous roles have, certainly will make you a supreme volunteer. You’ll have so many different opportunities to go for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and I have done a little teaching since I—well, I actually did a tiny bit before I retired, but I’ve done a little at the local community college in the summer, teaching, well, I’ve done one course for advanced high school students and several courses for high school science teachers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, what a value for them. That’s terrific." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’ve been co-teaching those and it’s been fun. As I think I’ve indicated, I’ve always liked teaching, and most people seem to think I’m a good teacher. So it works out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you certainly have shared so many of your ideas, which is, of course, the foundation of teaching, is that sharing of information. I was thinking back when you were talking earlier about not quite sure when your interest began to be an astronomer, but certainly it was at a time when there weren’t very many astronomers. What was the perception then of astronomers compared to what maybe the perception of astronomy is now?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it certainly was a lot less known, and I guess maybe today people get astronomy and astrology confused a little less. I’m not sure. But, yes, when I joined the International, the International Astronomical Union [IAU] supposedly contains essentially all professional astronomers in the world, when I joined it, that was the first year the membership got over 1,000. Now it’s pretty close to 10,000. So that’s been quite a change. But the fact that the field is small has made it interesting because the fact that the field was small means that astronomers knew each other all over the world. This has made it very pleasant, and it’s also helped in my job at NASA because, of course, in our international programs we dealt with astronomers in other countries. The fact that they knew me and I knew them in many cases made things a lot easier. Of course, the other thing is pretty obvious. As a woman, I was better known than someone else probably, than a man would have been with the same career. So people remember me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Out of that thousand, I’m sure there weren’t too many women. Is that—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not too many. There have always a lot of women in astronomy, but in general they’ve had more menial jobs, or they’ve taught in women’s colleges. Women astronomers go back a long way. I guess the first one is generally acknowledged to be—I can’t even think of her name. She was an Egyptian, about 300 B.C. I guess that was Hypatia. Then there was one in the Middle Ages, but generally there were other astronomers. For example, Herschel’s sister, did a lot of observing with him, but [Caroline Herschel] also did a lot of observing on her own. Tyco Brahe’s wife [Kirstin Jörgensdatter], after his death, finished his catalog and published it. There were a number of other women who worked with other members of their family. The man got the credit but the woman did her share of the work, to put it mildly.\\n\\n Then there were a lot of women at Harvard around the turn of the century. They were known as \"Pickering’s harem.\" [Edward C.] Pickering was the chairman of the department and he hired women, and he hired them to do very menial work, but they did excellent things.\\n\\n For example, the Henry Draper catalog, which is a catalog of the spectral types of all stars brighter than about ninth magnitude, which is something, oh, I don’t know, close to 300,000 stars, was done by a woman. It was a woman who found the relation between Cepheid brightness and period. These were women at Harvard. The women did a lot of work in variable stars. A lot of progress in that field is due to the work of these women in Pickering’s harem, but they just didn’t get much credit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, maybe in the years ahead—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it’s much, much better now. It’s much better than it waswhen I started, in spite of the fact that today’s women think they’re terribly put upon. Well, maybe they are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find a lot in the years that you were at NASA, see more and more women come into this field?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, very definitely. You know, they’re both in NASA and in the universities." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As part of your career, you mentioned you traveled quite a bit. Did you have a chance to stop your reasons for being there and have a chance to gaze up and look up at the stars from all over the world?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, unfortunately, a good num—well, it depended on where I was. A lot of places don’t have very good skies, like Washington, and I guess I always—I do look at the stars. Even here I go out every night and look at the sky, and it’s pretty discouraging. I saw one star the other, night before last, and last night wasn’t clear, but that’s another thing I do. I support a program where the amateurs bring telescopes to a national park near here so that the general public can look at the sky. I don’t have a telescope, but I go over and answer questions and talk to them about things.\\n\\n But, anyway, coming back to looking at the sky, I can tell you a story about that. Once upon at time at Yerkes, I used to do a reasonable amount of babysitting, and I babysat for a family that had gone to the movies, and the Chandras had gone with him, the Chandrasekhars, and after they came home, we sat a while and probably had some coffee and ice cream or something. I don’t remember that anymore, but, anyway, Chandra and I left together, and the person that we’d babysit for, who was an observational astronomer said, “You could always tell an observer from a theorist. The theorist looks down. The observer looks up,” and I never noticed that but I realized at the time, yes, I always look up when I go out at night." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, well, there’s so much to see, isn’t there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You spent so many years day in and day out and then something other people literally reached the stars from one way or the other. Was there a time that you thought maybe you should have take a different road, or were you always glad to be in the path that you were in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I was glad to be in the path. As I said, the period at NRL, I did feel that it was not a field I stay in indefinitely because of the fact that I didn’t have the electronic background, but I enjoyed it. I found it very helpful when I went to NASA because, of course, there I was, in NRL, I was in an engineering organization, so I was dealing with engineers full-time.\\n\\n One of the problems when I started with NASA was that the astronomers knew what they wanted to do and the engineers were perfectly willing to help them do it, but they couldn’t communicate with each other. So I felt that much of my time in, or at least an important part of my time in the early period, was acting as an interpreter between the astronomers and the engineers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, finding a common language, I guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Finding a com—well, yes. It really did need somebody who had some feeling for both sides. So my period at NRL, it was a happy period. I’m not unhappy about it and particularly in view of the fact that I didn’t see, I thought it was a much better opportunity than I saw anywhere else in the university area. So I don’t feel unhappy about any part of my career." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any time at all that you come on something that was possible maybe unexplainable as you were starting to put things together in your research or having maybe the proposal people wanted you to do something that would push the envelope, would maybe answer some questions that people have asked for decades and no one wanted to reach to find those answers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, well, sure. Certainly some of the proposals were— in fact, particularly in the early days when we were doing surveys, it was a matter of simply trying to find the answers to the unknown. As far as my research, I made some interesting discoveries, but I guess I wouldn’t say that they were unknowable because I found them out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, they were unknown at one time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were unknown at one time, definitely yes. I think the most—I mentioned that I worked on high-velocity stars. The way I got into that was that I was studying stars, bright stars not all that different from the sun. The group at Yerkes who had been working with [William W.] Morgan, who was my thesis advisor and whom I continued to work with after my degree, had pretty well divided the types of stars by temperature. Different people worked on different temperature groups. Well, the last group that anybody worked on was the sort of “average” star, let’s put it that way. So I took over that. Nobody else wanted it, and so this was a supposedly very uninteresting group of stars.\\n\\n Well, when I took the spectra and looked at them carefully, I discovered that some of the stars had somewhat weaker lines of what astronomers called metals. Now astronomers have a very strange definition of a metal. A metal is anything heavier than helium. So to an astronomer, neon is a metal and oxygen is a metal and carbon is a metal, etc. But I found that in these stars the lines other than hydrogen and helium were a little weaker, just a little weaker than they were in other stars. I divided the stars into two groups according to whether the lines were stronger or weaker. I found two things. I found, and this was the primary thing I found, was that when you looked at the space velocities and the space distribution of the stars, the stars with stronger metals had lower velocities relative to the sun and were more concentrated to the plane of the Milky Way. Of course, the others had higher velocities and were farther from the plane of the Milky Way. Then I also found that you could measure this difference in metalicity by looking at the colors, and if you compared the color—you assumed the colors were in the blue and the yellow were the same and then looked at the ultraviolet, the ultraviolet was stronger in the stars with the weaker metals so that you could tell them apart a lot more easily than you could by the spectra. That we knew, had known for a long time, that very high-velocity stars tended to have the weak lines, but nobody had ever thought that the stars near the sun would. It was not an easy thing to find. I could see it on the photographs. I had never been able to see—I made tracings of plates. I made tracings at all kinds of resolutions. I never could see it. I have since tried looking at it with tracings from CCDs. I cannot see it. I could see it photographically. I still can, but I cannot see it on tracings. But anyway, it was clearly an important observation from the standpoint of understanding the structure of the galaxy. So here were these uninteresting stars turning out to be very interesting indeed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess that’s the—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s the fun of science." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was saying that’s fun of astronomy because it’s a endless quest—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I think any science field is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, when we look up at the stars, I guess that the one quick place that we know that you’re looking only a small part and there’s just so much more to see. You were the first astronomer for NASA, the first female senior executive, and your list of firsts go on and on, but looking back, did you at the time realize the ground that you were breaking for so many others? Not just for women but for other astronomers and for people who wanted to move into a field that they loved?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know. I think I did but not something that I payed all that much attention to. I guess that’s the best way to put it. As far as other astronomers, I don’t know to what extent I broke the ice for them. I think the women’s movement generally broke the ice a lot more for them than the few of us who did things early." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you feel your field of astronomy is certainly one that’s of value today for people to move into?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, although fresh Ph.D.s will tell you that jobs are very hard to get. They are if the job you want is a research position in a university. But very, very few astronomers are unemployed. So I would say yes. What I tell people about astronomy as a career is go in with your eyes open but if you really want to do it and you recognize the problems, do it. I mean, after all, when I graduated there were extremely few jobs in astronomy, to put it mildly, but then, of course, there were a lot fewer astronomers. This was right after the war when we had the influx of GIs coming in and getting degrees. Even at that time the average number of astron—Ph.D.s in the country was about—per year was about twenty-five, male and female. Today, well, it’s probably closer to 1,000. Maybe not that high, but it’s certainly several hundred. There just weren’t that many jobs either, as you can imagine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And do you feel like the taxpayers are still getting their money’s worth on—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I guess the question is, what do you feel is worth it to the taxpayer? The taxpayer is still learning about the universe. Also, depending on what field the astronomer’s in, he’s learning about things that affect the Earth and affect the climate of the Earth and the problem of solar flares, solar activity and its effect on electromagnetic systems and communications satellites and things like that. So my own feeling is, yes, but I don’t think you can put a price or a value price on basic science. I think basic science is like poetry, or like, was it—who, Edison who said, “What value is a newborn baby?” So to say, “Is the taxpayer getting his money’s worth?” it’s a question of what he feels his money should be used for and what various things mean to him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So much of it’s an investment to learn more and more, and it’s certainly pays for itself, doesn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, when you look at the amount of money that’s going into astronomy, including both the space and ground-based program, which is very large by historical standards, and you compare that with the amount of money that’s going into, say, football or baseball or cigarettes or alcohol, it’s trivial. The question is which do you get more from, and I don’t know. It depends on who you are and what you want." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What your value is, that’s exactly right. When we were talking about, I was thinking about satellites, and even that word has changed, I guess, in its meaning for lots of people. I was going to ask you and I forgot earlier about your reaction or what your thoughts were when you first heard about Sputnik and, of course, and how that affected so much more. When you look up at the sky now, there’s more than just stars. You have artificial or man-made objects as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I guess mainly I was excited, and I was in NRL at that time and we immediately went over to the lab and started listening to it, but I don’t remember much beyond that, except for the excitement." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And, of course, there’s been so many more other objects that are up there now, and then, of course—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Now they’re sort of routine. You don’t even pay attention to launches of anything except manned launches." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is it like what a traveler riding down the street and they have this wonderful landscape they look, but they don’t look at the billboards? Is that how you do when you see this other space debris, or is that come to block your vision at all when you’re starting to—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, space debris doesn’t block vision, but it’s a problem in satellite safety, and it will be a problem in other ways eventually. But right now it’s primarily a matter of damage." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess the other area that we were just curious about your involvement was the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Did that cross your realm of possibility?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It did, but not in a very major way. When NASA first became involved with it, I was handling that part of the program, but I never got very deeply involved in it, and it gradually went over to the planetary program. I have to admit that I had and still have mixed feelings about that. I think that the SETI Program is highly unlikely to succeed. I think there is life elsewhere in the universe. I can’t prove it, but I’d be very surprised if there isn’t, but that there would be life sufficiently like us in both capability and evolutionary status to communicate with us and yet still be near enough to communicate, I think personally is highly unlikely. On the other hand, there are people whom I respect very highly, scientists I respect very highly, who do think it’s worthwhile. So, as I say, I have mixed feelings." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, but you’ve had such a very full career and still haven’t finished. You have so many more things that you’re doing now and sharing information. Are there other things that you can think of that you would like to add or maybe something that we didn’t cover or maybe something we just talked about briefly that you would like to add some other details on? I’m just kind of going through my notes and trying to make sure that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I cant’ think of anything at the moment, but—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have one thing that—when you were talking about your trip in 1956 to Russia, we talked about it, but you—some of the details. If you could share with us what it was like going to—was that your first trip also outside the country or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it wasn’t my first trip outside the country. My first trip outside the country was in 1955, when I went to the International Astronomical Union meeting in Dublin and before the meeting I visited, well, I spent a few, I visited observatories in and near Paris and southern France and in Germany and also visited a friend in Germany and a friend in London before I went to Dublin. I guess I, you know, the interesting thing about that trip was that I just sort of assumed it might be my only trip to Europe, because in those days people didn’t travel as much as they do now. It was a major undertaking, not a major undertaking but a major event to fly to Europe. Of course, I don’t how many trips to Europe I’ve had since, quite a few. Anyway, but, so it wasn’t my first trip. It was my second.\\n\\n The trip itself was fine. I was met—as I say, I was a guest of the Academy of Science, so that I was definitely a VIP. In the Soviet Union at that time scientists had a pretty high status. So I was met at the airport and taken to a good hotel. But I had a number of interesting experiences. In Moscow, at that time we weren’t allowed to wander on our own. They said we’d get lost. Now two years later I was there for the IAU meeting, and I guess there were just too many Americans, and they gave us on us and we wandered all over the city by ourselves. But in ’56 we didn’t.\\n\\n I disliked Moscow. I’ve been there the two times. I haven’t been there since, and I have thoroughly disliked it both times. I was glad to get away from it the first trip to go down to Armenia and also to come back. I’ve enjoyed the rest of the Soviet Union, but not Moscow.\\n\\n But, anyway, so then I went down to Armenia, and I guess I have a number of interesting bits of memory of that, let’s put it that way. One of the things that I remember—well, one of the things from Russia generally, but particularly Armenia at that time was that so many obviously mangled soldiers, people with one leg or an arm missing. The war damage was apparent elsewhere in Europe, even by that time. But in the Soviet Union, it was a matter of seeing the people, the men that were damaged.\\n\\n The observatory was new, obviously, and yet—and I stayed in the dormitory there, which was a new building, and the top step was slanted at about a fifteen-degree angle from the horizontal. Then later I went, the director of the observatory had a house on the observatory grounds, but he also had an apartment in Yerevan.\\n\\n The observatory was outside in a town called Bjurakan [Armenia], and I visited his apartment, which was three years old. You walk up the stairs and the plaster was coming off the walls. I mean, it just, incredible. It was fast building. You could see that. You could see buildings going up. Well, a huge building that covered most of a block could go up a floor a day in Moscow, but the quality was terrible. Another thing that I remember is that they talked about equality of men and women. They were doing the building. The men were standing around watching. The women were carrying the cement. You saw the same thing on the roads. The men would be watching. The women would be doing the work, the road work. We had supper, really a dinner, on the collective farm nearby, and—very nice dinner, local food.\\n\\n Two interesting things about it, there weren’t enough forks to go around, and, more striking, they, the local, the people, the farmers were, had been doing the barbecuing or grilling. They had a pit. I guess—what do you call that? I can’t even think of the name. It’s a perfectly standard name, standard way of cooking with a fire and you hang meat over it. Anyway, they had been doing that, and they were all standing behind the area where the fire was, watching us. But when we finished and left the table, they all came and sat down and ate what we had left. I found that very striking. There were also interesting things.\\n\\n One of the more interesting experiences, I was so glad to get out of Moscow that the first morning, quite early, I went for a walk, just a, you know, just went out in the country, and met some farmers. It was fall, and they were picking grapes. So they had to give me some of their grapes. Well, I was beginning to get so many grapes, I didn’t know whether it was more polite to accept them, which they obviously wanted to give to me because they were proud of them or to turn them down because it was obviously more than I could possibly eat, but it was an interesting experience just the same. Then there were sort of things that I noticed, like, for example, they bake their bread, by putting—they have flat dough that they hang over the fence posts, fence rails, and let the sun bake it, which I thought was rather interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Be a different recipe, isn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and another experience I found interesting was one of the young women there asked me about—I was not at Yerkes anymore, but she asked me about, you know, where I lived when I was at Yerkes and so forth and what did I do about getting home after observing. I said, well, I walked. And she said, “Aren’t you afraid of the wolves.” I said, “No, we don’t have wolves in that area. We have them farther north, but not in that area.” Well, while I was at the observatory, one of the dogs was killed by a wolf. So they really were worried about wolves there. Well, those are some of the experiences.\\n\\n Then, another experience, after the conference we drove up through Azerbijan to Georgia and went out to western Georgia to an observatory at Abastumani, which was normally off the area where the foreigners could go, but they had special permission to take us. Well, it snowed while we were there, and so they decided, this being in a mountain, as observatories often are, that we probably shouldn't go down, we were supposed just to spend the afternoon and then come back that evening. So they decided it really wasn’t safe to drive down in the snow. Then there were a couple interesting things about that. I don’t remember where they put various people, but they didn’t really have accommodations for us because they weren’t expecting us.\\n\\n Well, I stayed with the librarian and there were two things that I found interesting about that. One, it was fairly cool. It was snowing, after all, and but the end of the room, the sort of a very tiny apartment had French doors, and they didn’t close. So it was cold, really cold. The other thing about the apartment is there was no seat on the toilet, which was a bit of a problem, but I guess not for them because they tend to use the Asian-type of toilets where you stand over them.\\n\\n The other thing was, it was some of the younger people, including there was a Russian woman whom I ran into many times during my career, who, I guess, not at that time, because the space program hadn’t started, but had a major position in the Academy of Science and later essentially was my counterpart in the astronomy part of the program. She was a lot more politically inclined than I am, but other than that, she was more or less my counterpart. She was several years older than I am, but not much. She and some of the students were playing ping pong. Well, I went out to watch and they invited me to play. She challenged me, I guess, that was it. She had challenged me to play. Well, I accepted. I figured it was a way to get warm, if nothing else. Much to the amazement of everybody, I beat her soundly. It was such fun to sort of watch these students standing around counting, keeping score and getting more and more amazed. So I felt that I’d upheld the pride of the U.S. Clearly, they didn’t think any American could beat her. She was very highly respected by them because both her age and her position, and they thought she could do everything, and here was this foreigner coming in.\\n\\n The other thing, and this may be more than you wanted to hear about this experience. The other thing was, the next day, we drove down to Tbilisi, and this woman who was sort of our, as I say, she really was our hostess, insisted that we each drive. There were in the group, at this symposium there were four of us from outside, well, five of us from outside the Iron Curtain, two who were clearly communists, a Mexican and a Frenchman, or at least communist leanings. I don’t know if they were party members, but they certainly had communist leanings, and three Americans who, as far as I know, had no communist leanings. So she insisted, she had obviously heard that all Americans could drive and didn’t believe it. So she insisted that we each drive.\\n\\n Well, the two men drove first, and then she insisted that I drive, and I said, “Well, I don’t have an international driver’s license.” “Well, that’s all right.” Well, she insisted. So I took the wheel, and it turns out that at that time, women did not drive in the Soviet Union. A few of them were beginning to drive in Moscow, but that was all. Well, the chauffeur who was, of course responsible for the car was obviously very worried, but he couldn’t say anything against this woman. So as I started, I could just seem him visibly relax and feeling much more comfortable. He realized that I could drive, and it felt so good to drive after sitting for so long that I just kept the wheel. I drove into the—no, let’s see, no. The observatory where the dedication was was at Bjurakan. I drove into the town of Bjurakan, which is a resort town. I just drove right into town and eventually parked for lunch, but the interesting thing of that was that they were un-used to seeing a woman driver that I got cat calls and whistles, which I have never gotten, at no other time gotten for my driving." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What an impression you left." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I surely did. So those are my impressions of my first trip to Russia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of the observatories that you had the opportunity to visit, is there one that seems to stand out in your memory as, well, in fact, well, more than one of the others? And that might even have been influenced by the time that you’ve seen them. You’ve seen them so many times now that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, as I said, I was—I don’t know. I don’t think of any that I feel—I have to admit the 200-inch telescope is pretty impressive, its dome, and the other things. Well, you know, the prime focus cage and so forth. I guess that I would say that was the most impressive that I’ve seen, although, well, I have not seen the really large telescopes in Hawaii, or even the one in Texas, which is a—well, yes, I have seen the one in Texas. No, no, I haven’t. I saw the 107-inch, but I haven’t seen the new one that they have which is a different type of telescope but very large. So I haven’t seen the really large telescopes that are coming up today. So I guess I would say that in my—things I’ve seen that I would count the 200-inch as the most impressive, although I have to admit that it’s sort of hard to pick one as standing out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At least it’s nice that they’re changing so you have places to go now and more things to see and more adventures to have and things to learn." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, oh, yes. Yes. I’ve been to Mauna Kea [Hawaii] a couple of times but not since the really large [Keck] telescopes are up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we’ll be looking forward to hearing about your latest adventures as they become quickly history. You’ll be able to plan more and to do more things. We certainly have learned so much, and we certainly enjoyed speaking with you today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m glad you have. I sort of felt that I was rambling, but I’ve been interviewed so many times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not at all. No, it’s been wonderful with the details and we certainly hope again as we send this to you for your review that if you find more things that you would like include, please do and just thanks again for saving the day for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Nancy Grace Roman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00727", + "metadata": { + "category": "Shuttle Carrier Aircraft", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/STS-R/StilsonSS/stilsonss.htm", + "original_file_name": "StilsonSS_7-14-11.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/STS-R/StilsonSS/StilsonSS_7-14-11.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA STS Recordation Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "location_date": "Kennedy Space Center, Florida – 14 July 2011" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Stephanie S. Stilson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is July 14th, 2011. This interview is being conducted with Stephanie Stilson at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, as part of the NASA STS Recordation Oral History Project. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal. Thanks again for making time to meet with me today. I certainly appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely. It’s a pleasure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I want to start by asking if you could give me an overview of your career out here at Kennedy Space Center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. I actually started here at Kennedy as a cooperative education student when I was in college at North Carolina State [University, Raleigh, North Carolina] back in ’89. I had been to the visitor center as a child, in the third grade, with my father, and said “Oh, when I grow up I want to work for NASA.” So I went into science and into engineering and eventually went to NC State. They were big on the co-op program with their engineering program there. So lo and behold, I’m looking through the opportunities, and there’s NASA Kennedy Space Center. I immediately applied, and initially they were not accepting. They didn’t have any openings. So I was like well okay. I just moved on. Let me apply to some other companies. Eventually I got a call out of the blue that they had an opening, and would I like to come down to Kennedy. Of course I said yes.\\n\\n So I started. The ironic thing is the first office I worked in as a co-op was called Mission Planning. It’s actually the office that I ended up in as a flow director for Discovery. So I went full circle and came back. In the course of that I started off working mission planning, building manifests for the Shuttle to show it flying out to the year 2020. Here I was this young kid building these schedules to show us flying to what, at the time, we thought was the end of the program. That was 2020.\\n\\n From there I spent three semesters—on and off back at school—working in Mission Planning, doing that same kind of thing, but I wanted to get more into hardware. The job I was currently in was all programming. I really didn’t want to be a programmer. I was a computer engineering major. Lot of folks see “computer” in the degree title and think computer science, programming. I wanted to do hardware.\\n\\n Based on some recommendations from some folks here, including Russell [R.] Romanella, I went over to the Spacelab organization and started working over there in payloads and spent some time there. Then eventually once I graduated I started full-time with the Spacelab Program as an electrical engineer. I double-majored in electrical and computer engineering. I was doing testing of experiments that were going to fly in Spacelab. That was really neat work, a lot of fun, but Spacelab was coming to an end.\\n\\n So I hung in there, I wanted to be there until we were completely done with Spacelab. Then I just transitioned right over to Space Station and was working power systems for Space Station. Eventually I got to the point where I was what they call a test director for the multi-element integration test team, which is basically the team at Kennedy that processed all the different components of Space Station and tested them on the ground to ensure that when we put them together on orbit they were going to work properly.\\n\\n I got to lead that team, and that was real fun and exciting work. In the course of doing that I was actually spending some time in Huntsville [Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama] testing out the US Lab component for the Space Station and met this gentleman named Mike [Michael D.] Leinbach, who I found out later had grown up in the Shuttle Program and was doing somewhat of a detail type of assignment with the Station Program.\\n\\n I got along very well with him. Obviously he saw something in me that he liked because he started having some conversations with me, “Hey you might want to come over to Shuttle. We’re doing great things over there, and you might really like that.” So I saw that as a great opportunity. It was going to be a big change but a good opportunity. That’s how I joined Discovery’s team. I went through the interview process for an opening that they happened to have. At the time it was a vehicle manager position, because we did not have flow directors at that point in time.\\n\\n Kennedy had gone through a reorg [reorganization] where the position of flow directors, which we had in the past, was downgraded to a vehicle manager role. Eventually the flow director role was reinstated. So I started out as vehicle manager but was still the team lead from the NASA perspective of Discovery’s team." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you come up to speed so quickly on such a complicated vehicle?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was just talking about this yesterday with someone. There’s no one person out here that knows everything about any of these Orbiters. That’s what makes it such a team environment, you really have to rely on everybody to know their little piece of it. There are over 30 systems on the vehicle itself. I don’t have to know everything about the Orbiter itself, because I have such a strong team and they do know everything about their little pieces.\\n\\n That’s how we operate. So really I can’t tell you the inner workings of every system at all. I can tell you on a high level what they do, but when we get into a technical issue or something that needs real down and in-depth discussion I turn to the technical experts to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any sort of on-the-job training? Were you shadowing the person who was the previous vehicle manager?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I somewhat got thrown right into it. It was really more like drinking from a fire hose kind of approach at the time. When I came into the first processing flow they were midway through the OPF [Orbiter Processing Facility] flow when I joined the team. The Orbiter Processing Facility flow is really the most complicated of the entire Shuttle processing flow that we have here at Kennedy. You’ve got the processing of the Orbiter, the boosters and the tank, which I’m involved with all of that, but the most complex is the Orbiter obviously because it’s the most complex part of the STS. So the team was right in the middle of that.\\n\\n I didn’t know the people. I didn’t know the acronyms. I didn’t know the process. I went from an environment in payloads where I basically grew up over there—and if I didn’t know the answer I knew exactly who to go to to get the answer—to being over here and really knowing no one. That was difficult. It was a very challenging time. I spent a lot of time just talking to people and asking questions. I knew that I was asking dumb questions, I’m sure to them. A lot of the people I worked with had been working Shuttle since STS-1.\\n\\n My contractor counterpart at the time was Gene Nurnberg, who had been here since Apollo days. He is a wealth of knowledge, but because he was an old-timer, he wasn’t real anxious to spend a lot of time training not just a newbie to the Shuttle Program but a young person and a female. He came from the old school. It was, I think, a shock for him to all of a sudden have a counterpart like me. I was very much inferior to him when it came to knowing what was going on.\\n\\n So really it was just over time, just absorbing, talking to people. The other difference that was very challenging is in Station we had a different setup in regards to how the contractor operated. We didn’t have a prime contractor. NASA pretty much ran everything. We had contractor support, but when I was a test director over there I ran all the meetings. I was the main person doing that part of the task. Where over here we let our contractor counterpart do that. So I’m a part of those meetings but I’m not necessarily the one running them or building the schedule or anything of that nature. I’m doing more oversight in Shuttle than I did in Station. So that was a big change for me, especially a type A personality like me that feels like I need to have full control. It was a big change for me to really feel comfortable with having someone else basically running things and me being able to stay engaged enough to really be part owner of that schedule, but that is what I had to do. We worked together so I had to sign up to that schedule, but I didn’t know the down and in details to it like the contractor did. So that was a challenge.\\n\\n Besides just spending time with the team, and absorbing what I could from them, it was really the basic OJT [On the Job Training]. There weren’t really training classes that I took to say here’s how you become a vehicle manager or a flow director or anything like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned something that I thought was interesting, and I did want to ask you at some point. Since you brought it up, you mentioned you were a woman, and you were working with these guys. It seems like this is very much a male environment with all the technicians here and the engineers. Are there many women who work in the OPF?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It has changed a lot even since I’ve been here. I’ve been with Discovery for 11 years now, so I have seen quite a bit of change. In fact even now we have three female flow directors. That has never happened in the past. There was one point in time where all of our NASA vehicle managers, which is the next step down from flow director, were all females. In the past that had never happened.\\n\\n Definitely at that time there were not a lot of females in the workforce, but there were more I think than maybe in some private industry companies because there were quite a few. Even technicians, we’ve got some great female technicians as well. But the males did outnumber females overall on the team for sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us a little bit about Discovery itself. What makes it unique from all of the rest of the fleet?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I get asked that question. I do a lot of media type events and so forth and interviews. I get that question a lot. From a vehicle capability perspective and how it looks, there’s really not much difference. There are a couple things. From a technical perspective, Discovery has the Station-to-Shuttle Power Transfer System, which allows us to stay on orbit longer. When we’re docked to Station we can feed off their power as opposed to using our internal power sources. We have that and Endeavour has that. Atlantis does not. So that’s one of the differences.\\n\\n There’s something called three-string GPS [Global Positioning System], which is a communications system, that Discovery and Atlantis do not have but Endeavour does. So there’s some differences between the Orbiters like that. Really when I think about the difference in the vehicles, it’s more about the team in the sense that I feel like Discovery basically lives through the team. That’s what makes Discovery a living being. A lot of people think of it like that, think of Discovery as our child, and we’ve been taking care of it all this time. We nurture it and look after it. Soon we’re going to be sending it off to college is how I’ve been looking at the fact that we’re transferring it over to the Smithsonian [Air and Space Museum, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Virginia]. It’s time to let it leave the nest.\\n\\n So the team for Discovery and each vehicle, their team has a persona that’s a little bit different. Discovery has been known as the workhorse of the fleet. There are several reasons for that. We’ve done both return to flight missions. We’ve delivered the Hubble Space Telescope. We’re the oldest. We’re the heaviest because of being the oldest. Some people call it the hog. I’ve heard that term as well.\\n\\n In regards to the team I see us as a really get the job done, we’re not here to mess around, let’s get going, we’ve got a job to do, we’ve got to move on, let’s get this flight under our belt and move on to the next one. That’s been the impression I get from our team, and I like that. That’s somewhat my attitude as well. So I think that’s really how, when I think of Discovery, I think more about the team and all the work they’ve done and how they’ve approached the challenges that we’ve had over the years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Walk me through if you can how you process the vehicle. It’s a complicated machine. It takes much longer than they originally anticipated. They thought the OPF was going to be like maybe a day place for Shuttle then it was going to move on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Yes. We use 125 days is what I’ll call our baseline for the amount of time that the Orbiter spends in the Orbiter Processing Facility. I like to compare an OPF to a garage for a car, because that’s really what it is. It’s the best place, if you’re going to do any type of work on an Orbiter, you want to do it in the OPF. That’s its home. That’s the best place to do it.\\n\\n During the process of a normal flow through the OPF, the main thing we’re doing is system testing and checkout to ensure that those systems are still functioning properly for the next mission. We spend a lot of time working towards requirements. We have set requirements, about 4,000 requirements for every flow that we have to go in and meet. We do that using written procedures.\\n\\n Everything we do here at Kennedy, we’re very much into documentation and records and being able to prove that here’s what we were supposed to do and here’s what we did. There are a lot of reasons for that. An obvious reason would be we want to make sure we do it right. Then heaven forbid if something were to happen and we had something go wrong, we want to be able to go back and see. Okay. What did we do? Did we do what we were supposed to do? Was that not the right thing to do? So we want that traceability as well. We’re very in tune to documenting everything we do.\\n\\n The first step once we tow from the runway into the OPF is to get that vehicle into a safe configuration so that the masses can come work on it, because initially there are hazards that are still active on the vehicle. So we go through that process. Getting all the platforms in place. Getting access so the technicians can get into the ship.\\n\\n Then a couple different things happen in parallel. We start the download of the payload from the previous mission, whatever payload flew before. If we have to remove a module, or change out panels, remove longerons, those kinds of things, that all happens right away. Then we start the process of uploading for the next payload. Preparing the payload bay for that next payload that normally doesn’t get installed until we get out to the launch pad, but there’s a lot of work that happens in the midbody as well as the crew module to get ready for the next payload that’s going in.\\n\\n In parallel with that is all that system checkout and testing for all the systems. We don’t go in and test every aspect of every system. That’s why we have requirements based on what those system experts feel are at a high risk of potentially not working properly or if it’s a Crit [Criticality] 1, something that’s very important that it works the first time. Those are things that we’re going in and checking along the way.\\n\\n We’re also doing problem resolution. So if on orbit we had an issue, something didn’t work right, obviously we’re going in and fixing that or troubleshooting that to determine what we have to do to fix it. Then also along the way, as we’re doing testing, we are finding problems. That’s why we’re doing the testing, to find and then repairing those problems.\\n\\n Another aspect of the processing flow that takes a lot of time is inspections. We do a full inspection of the outer surface of the vehicle. That’s blankets and tiles, reinforced carbon-carbon [RCC] panels and so forth. When I say inspections, technicians and quality inspectors are going in with a magnifying glass and looking at every thread point on those blankets. So every little knot of thread they’re looking to see is there any fraying going on. The black tile, they’re very easy to break. So they’re going in and looking for any damage that might have occurred. They’re having to measure that damage and determine from the size of it, “Can we go in and just repair it, or do we have to replace that entire tile?” There’s certain criteria that has to be evaluated before we can make that decision.\\n\\n The critical path for us while in the OPF is usually through the aft. Engines are one of the first things that we do. Pull the main engines out. Send them over to the engine shop, and they recycle them over there. Then also the TPS [Thermal Protection System] work, the tile work, is usually worked throughout the entire Orbiter processing flow, and then sometimes even into the VAB [Vehicle Assembly Building], depending on how much we have to do.\\n\\n We end up usually pulling—it’s ironic. The number of tile that we usually remove from the vehicle correlates to the number of days we’re in the Orbiter Processing Facility. I’m not really sure why that is. When we try to predict how much tile work we’re going to have, that’s the generic baseline that we use. So we spend a lot of time working tile throughout the entire processing flow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned Crit 1 criticalities. What would be a Crit 1 criticality that you would have to investigate?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Main one that jumps out would be landing gear. You’re not going to be able to land if your gear doesn’t deploy. We have a landing gear functional that we go through that ensures that that system is going to work properly. We have redundancy for I would say almost every system in the vehicle, whether it’s double redundancy or triple. So in most cases your Crit 1 systems have triple redundancy.\\n\\n Another thing would be when we jettison the tank from the Orbiter. Obviously if you’re going up during liftoff and you can’t release that tank, that’s a bad day. So systems like that have critical functions. Opening and closing payload bay doors is another example, because once we get those doors open on orbit, if we can’t close them, we can’t return until we close those doors." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about that first mission where you were vehicle manager, and you were officially in charge, you started from the moment of landing until launch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first one I actually came in in the middle of the OPF flow. Good or bad, I don’t know. It was very overwhelming for me at that point in time. I really was more just in receiving mode as opposed to contributing to the team, because I really wasn’t prepared to do that. Now obviously there were other people looking out for me. Kelvin [M.] Manning was my lead flow director, lead vehicle manager at the time. I wasn’t completely thrown out to the wolves. There were many people that were keeping an eye on things. Not just for my benefit but ensuring that things were being done correctly.\\n\\n That timeframe is all a blur to me. The main thing I remember is meeting the team, not sitting in the right chair during one of the first meetings. They had assigned seats, where I was supposed to be, and I didn’t know that, and I was quickly told that was not my seat and I needed to move over here. I think it was difficult for the team also, because once again most of the people that I worked with had been working Shuttle their whole career. Not many people had transitioned from payloads to Shuttle.\\n\\n We had plenty of people come from Shuttle to payloads. A lot of that happened when the Shuttle Program changed the contract and went to the prime contractor concept. At that point, Shuttle had a lot of NASA personnel but didn’t have as much work for them as they had previously, so a lot of those folks influxed over to Station. But not many people transferred the other way.\\n\\n Shuttle teams here take a lot of pride in the fact that they’ve been doing this work for a very long time. This is their life. So when newcomers come in it’s not a real easy change for them either. But once again I had a lot of folks that were willing to help me and guide me and really create an environment that I could learn and understand things better.\\n\\n We didn’t have the best relationship with our contractor at that point in time, looking back on it now. Of course at the time I didn’t know that that wasn’t normal. There wasn’t a lot of trust then between NASA and the contractor." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s Boeing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was USA (United Space Alliance). I don’t know really why that was, because I came into that new. It was very obvious that it wasn’t a comfortable situation, like we have now. So that’s one of the things—we have really grown in that respect in the sense that it was, I want to say an us against them environment back then. The contractor wasn’t real anxious to share with NASA. It was more of I’d have to really insert myself to gain knowledge.\\n\\n Now I have a great relationship with my counterpart, and we share everything. We have that trust. If it’s something that he doesn’t want me to elevate right away, we work together to determine the right time to do that. It’s a much more enjoyable environment. That’s something that has progressed. Some of that could be personality-driven. It could be environment-driven. Whatever it is, I’m just glad that we’ve gotten to where we are. Even though I’m speaking for the Discovery team, I know that’s the same with the other vehicle teams as well. We all get along very well and work very well together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about the lessons that you learned from that first flight that you applied then to the flight that you managed the entire flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The main thing I learned from the first one was to really listen and be in receive mode. In my previous role before Shuttle I was very much in a transmit mode because of the function I had and because of the knowledge I had. That was a little bit of an adjustment for me, to really need to just sit back and listen, and not necessarily be the person in charge of the meeting, and be the person to point which way we were going to go. Sit back and let that happen. Insert myself when needed, but realizing that that need wasn’t there as much as it had been with some of my previous roles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How do you keep apprised of all the technical and engineering challenges that are occurring on the floor? As you pointed out there are plenty. There are major systems down there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely. The main thing that happens is we have a good communication structure that when something happens, if we find a problem, something’s not working right, we immediately get that feedback from those folks. First of all the ones on the floor report it. The technicians report it to the engineers. The system engineers then report it to our integration engineers, who then pass that along to me. I have an Orbiter Project engineer. Basically the way we’re set up is your flow director is your primary lead for the team—I’m talking only the NASA structure—from the NASA side. Then I’ll call my left- and my right-hand people: a NASA vehicle manager who covers the ops [operations] side of things, looking at schedule, looking at when tasks are supposed to happen, did they happen on time, why didn’t they happen on time kind of thing, and then I’ve got the Orbiter Project engineer, who integrates all the technical work. He or she speaks for all those system engineers. So that’s my conduit. The system engineers bubble that up to him, who then can really translate that to me. I don’t need to know all those low level details. I need to understand what’s the problem, and what do we need to do to go fix it, and how long is that going to take. The NASA vehicle manager and the Orbiter Project engineer work together to come to that answer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about what impact budgets and schedules have on your position." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really have never had to deal with the budget side of things before now. That’s something that’s new now that I’m doing transition and retirement of the Orbiters. As Discovery’s flow director I was fortunate to really be sheltered from that. Pretty much what we needed we got. The only time we really dealt with what I’ll call budget-related concerns would be from a resource allocation perspective.\\n\\n When you have three vehicles flying, you have a top priority vehicle, second, and what we call third in flow. If you’re the first vehicle, the top priority vehicle, you’re pretty much going to get whatever you need, because it’s our overall goal to ensure you make your manifest target before the next one can fly. Being second and third, then you’re taking what you can get in some cases depending on what resources are available.\\n\\n Once again, I didn’t really deal so much with budget. But as we’re seeing now, as our workforce goes down because we’re transitioning out of a program, and closing down a program, I’m having to deal with less resources, and that’s always a challenge for someone in a job like mine. Resources are one of the critical tools that I use. So if you take those resources away from me then that obviously makes my job more complicated, because now I’m having to balance even more than usual. If we don’t have the people to do it today, when will we have those people? What does that mean to our overall schedule?\\n\\n As a flow director, that’s really the primary function as I see it. We’ve been given an end goal to launch on a certain day. We’re going to do everything we can to do that safely and with a sound vehicle. So that’s the balance. We’ve got a certain amount of time that we anticipate needing to do the work. Does that fit with what the goal of the agency is as to when they would like us to launch? Then how do we manage that or maybe feed back to them, “Hey you didn’t give us enough time and here’s why? We hit this technical problem, it’s going to take three weeks to fix, and my overall end date is going to move out. Therefore I have no contingency.” As a flow director that’s really to me the important thing that we manage and communicate. If I can do what you’re asking me to do, great, that’s easy. If I can’t, how do I go explain that? What do I do to hopefully mitigate the impacts on the end?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How closely are you working with some of the other element managers? What impact might a delay with the SRBs [Solid Rocket Boosters] or the ET [External Tank] have on your processing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Flow director role starts from the minute the Orbiter lands, Discovery in my case, until Discovery launches again. Although my primary focus is on the Orbiter, I still have management responsibility for the boosters and the tank as well.\\n\\n Now fortunately I have very capable people, a NASA vehicle manager for the ET and SRB that handles that for most of the time. When the Orbiter is in the Orbiter Processing Facility most of my focus is on the Orbiter unless there’s a technical issue or something that arises that needs my attention on the boosters and tank. Until then, they pretty much operate stand-alone without much impact to me or from me.\\n\\n Once we go integrated then I have more involvement with booster and tank. Just the nature of now you’re coming down to the last month of the flow. We’re putting all those elements together. They’re all talking. There’s more likelihood that now you’re going to see a problem that can possibly impact your launch date.\\n\\n If things are going well for the booster and the tank, I don’t have a lot of involvement with those particular project leads or project managers. The vehicle manager assigned to that task does. But say for instance STS-133, where we had all the issues with the tank, I did have a lot of interaction at that point in time because of the high level impact of what that problem meant and what we were going to do to go fix that problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk some more about that flight and the external tank issues?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s definitely going to be one of my most memorable missions, not just because it was my last one, but because so much happened. Really I don’t know if we jinxed ourselves or what, but the OPF flow was very generic. It makes sense. It’s our last one. You’re not doing a bunch of modifications. Over the course of time a lot of the challenges for an OPF flow would be new modifications, late requirements, and things coming at the last minute. “Hey we’ve got to go do this, can you still make your rollout date?” Those were the challenges that we faced.\\n\\n Obviously for Discovery’s last flow, we didn’t have that. It was a pretty, what I call, vanilla flow. It went very well. We didn’t have any real major challenges along the way. Then of course we go integrated. We find the issues with the tank, which surprised everybody, nobody was expecting to see that.\\n\\n That was the first real big effort with the tank that I had been involved with of that magnitude. Once again, different people, people I wasn’t necessarily used to interacting with. Different contractor in the sense of Lockheed Martin was now coming here and doing work. That didn’t normally happen. So now we’re not only just integrating with our USA and Boeing counterparts, we’re now also integrating with Lockheed Martin as well.\\n\\n It went really well. For the amount of work that had to happen and the challenges that were put in front of the team, I was just constantly amazed at how well everybody handled it. It was a very stressful situation. The work we do here is stressful. There is pressure. A lot of people don’t like to use that “pressure” word. It’s become—schedule pressure—a negative word with a lot of folks. I think I heard Mike Leinbach, the first person to say it, “It’s not schedule pressure, it’s schedule awareness.” We have to be aware of the schedule. There are reasons we have a schedule. That’s an important part of what we do here at Kennedy, is process to schedules. We shouldn’t be afraid of them, and we shouldn’t see schedules as a negative thing.\\n\\n Now can a schedule become negative if you let it? Absolutely. If you put schedule above safety, above the technical aspects of the vehicle being your top priority, then of course. It’s that three-legged stool. You have to balance all of it together, but schedule is a very big part of that. We can’t forget about the schedule. After the accident of course we had a lot of talk about schedule pressure.\\n\\n One of the examples I used to give, talking to my team was—say you have kids. They have to be to school in the morning, so they have to meet the school bus. You have a schedule then, right? You have to get up at a certain time. You’ve got to eat breakfast a certain time; you’ve got to get out to the bus. If you don’t have that schedule, you’re not going to make the bus. You’re not going to get to school. That’s a bad thing. Schedule pressure is always there. It doesn’t have to be bad. It really should be good, because that allows us a target to work to.\\n\\n If we at Kennedy didn’t work towards schedules, we’d never launch. You’d never get there. So I’m very passionate about schedules obviously. I want people to see them as the good that they are. But once again I will reinforce that schedules should never cause us to sacrifice safety or get in the way of the technical needs for operating the vehicle and mission success. We look at safety for the crew first, and then mission success after that. Then the ground processing would be third." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you ever feel any pressure from JSC [Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas] or [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, DC] to get that vehicle off the pad? Or were they insistent that we have to fly safely, whatever resolution comes? If it comes six months later, then so be it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was both. Definitely felt both, because I knew that they were expecting me to be ready by a certain date. If I couldn’t, they were going to listen and understand why, but they were also going to challenge. It wasn’t going to be an easy task. If I were going to come in and say, “Oh guess what, guys, we need to slip launch a month,” it wasn’t going to be, “Okay Steph, that’s fine. Let’s just go slip launch.” I was going to have to justify why that was and explain to them what options I had looked at and why there was no other option but to slip.\\n\\n Now, it usually wasn’t a month timeframe, maybe it’d be a couple days or whatnot. But they would also want to make sure that technically we were doing the right thing. The way we’re set up is the folks in the Orbiter Project Office [OPO] at JSC are the requirements owners. To me it’s a healthy balance because OPO is pushing that hey, we need to do this mod [modification], or we need to do whatever it is, this special test. That’s their goal. That’s their job, to make sure we’re doing what we need to do from a requirements perspective.\\n\\n It’s my job to then push back and say, “Okay, if you want to do that this is going to be the result. Program, you need to weigh that risk and decide. Is it that important to do this modification, knowing that it’s going to then impact this milestone? If it is, great, we’ll go change the schedule, and we’ll move it. But program, you need to understand my job is to tell you the impacts of doing this work.”\\n\\n We got into a mode after return to flight that I call the polishing the apple scenario where it was a real struggle, because we had become ultraconservative, obviously for a good reason. We had had an accident. We needed to be ultraconservative to make sure that did not happen again. As we continued to move forward and come up with new modifications and so forth, I saw where there was work that you really had to ask yourself, “Is this really necessary for safety of flight or for mission success?”\\n\\n If it’s not, do we really want to take the time and money to do this now? Or is it something maybe we can do on the next flight or a future flight? Of course, that point in time, we weren’t thinking about the end of the program. We were thinking we need to get back to flying again, and we’ll continue to get better. Our goal was always to make that next flight better than the previous, always moving forward.\\n\\n So to me we got, as an agency and as a program, in a little bit of a paralysis of feeling like oh my gosh if we don’t do everything that people put in front of us then we’re not doing the right thing. Well, if you take on everything, you’re never going to fly again. I could sit here on the ground and continue to modify this vehicle forever. You’ve got to pick a point that says okay we’ve done what we need to do to lower that risk to an acceptable level. Now we need to fly.\\n\\n That was a challenging time, especially for someone like me. It’s my job to get the work done, tell me what I have to do, but at some point you got to quit giving me work if you want me to finish. That was difficult because before then we had not operated where we were getting so many real-time changes so quickly. Normally when we have modifications, there have been years and years of discussion as to what we’re going to do, when we’re going to do it, how we’re going to implement it. We’d have that plan in place before we started that flow.\\n\\n After return to flight, we were getting those modifications real-time because obviously we had a lot of big changes we wanted to make. So implementing those real-time was very different for us and quite a challenge." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk about [the Space Shuttle] Columbia [accident, STS-107]. What impact did it have on you? What involvement did you have in the investigation and recovery?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The day the accident happened, I was actually doing some OJT, some training in the firing room for landing. I was sitting with the test directors learning what they do, what their role is for landing.\\n\\n I really wasn’t familiar with that aspect of it. I had not sat on console for landing previously. We were hearing, of course, the voice loop about the indicators that they were seeing. Nobody initially thought much of it. They thought “Ah, it’s instrumentation.” There’s a lot of vibration going on when you’re coming in. It’s not surprising to have some data dropouts and so forth. I had no clue at all. Then as they kept discussing it, I was noticing that the people around me were looking more and more tense.\\n\\n I could tell. “Okay, something’s odd. Something’s not quite the way it’s supposed to be.” The fact of having a catastrophe like that was nowhere in my mind at all. When we realized we weren’t having any communication with the vehicle my first thought was. “Okay. They’ve landed out west in the desert somewhere. We’re just not able to talk to them. We’re going to have to go recover the vehicle and get out there, and get the crew out.” Once again not thinking we would ever lose a vehicle or a crew or anything.\\n\\n Then we got the call saying that folks were visually seeing the breakup of the vehicle and that it was on TV. Normally in the firing rooms we have access to all the channels, but during critical operations they block out the non-work related channels. So we just have mostly our video cameras, Weather Channel, things like that.\\n\\n The test directors immediately said, “Hey we need to get this patched in” but it took some time. The people in the firing room were still not seeing the video. We still weren’t quite understanding what was happening.\\n\\n The launch director, the Administrator at the time [Sean O’Keefe], and the flow director at the time were already out at the landing strip. That’s where they are at touchdown. So of course when we realize we’re not landing, they send word that they’re coming back. Well, because I’m the only person there that doesn’t have a function, I’m just there to observe, they said, “Hey, Steph. They’re all coming back here. They’re going to need headsets. Run down to the comm [communication] room and get some extra headsets so we can have them tied in.”\\n\\n I go down to the comm room, and sure enough they’ve got CNN [Cable News Network] up. There they show the breakup across the sky. I immediately come back and say, “Guys, I just saw it on TV; it was a complete breakup.” I was the one to tell them what was being shown out on the airwaves. We went into lockdown mode just like they did at JSC and reacted from there.\\n\\n In regards to the recovery effort, I did spend some time out at Nacogdoches [Texas] as the, we called it the hangar lead for the recovery efforts. My role with that was to coordinate the team that was taking in debris as we received it, trying to classify it, if we could identify what it was. Get it packaged up to ship it to Barksdale [Air Force Base, Louisiana] where it then was shipped back to KSC. We had an assembly line process to do that.\\n\\n Another big part of my job was to talk to the field walkers—and this was the part that I really enjoyed the most. Every morning I got to go speak to all the people that were walking the fields. Remember, it was cold and rainy and miserable. It was terrible. Even in the hangar we didn’t have any climate control. We were bringing in big gas heaters to try and make it more comfortable for the team.\\n\\n Everybody had parkas on. We’re on a concrete floor. No chairs. No tables. We had all this stuff that we were trying to pull together just on the fly. So in the mornings I’d go to a stadium where I believe they held rodeos and bull riding. It was a big outdoor arena with dirt.\\n\\n It had bleacher seats filled with all these people from the National Park Service and the fire walkers, and anybody who was a part of the process. Every government agency represented out there: FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] and so forth.\\n\\n I’d get to talk to them about basically what was the latest status. What had we found? Did it mean anything? Where are we concentrating our efforts? Those kinds of things. These people were sleeping in tents. By the time I got there they had been doing it for weeks on end.\\n\\n You could tell a lot of them were just worn-down. It was my responsibility to try to motivate them, to tell them how important what they were doing was to NASA. They’re walking through briars up to their armpits every day and looking for little tiny pieces of whatever they could pick up.\\n\\n It was my job to motivate them and get them pumped up. “Hey, Nacogdoches is going to be the site that finds the key to all this. We’re going to be the ones to figure this out so that we can find the problem, fix the problem, and start flying again.” Meeting all those people, and seeing how there was such an outpour from every person involved at every level to want to help. Something as simple as bringing in ice cream for the team so they’d have a treat—the local vendors did things like that. It was a really good feeling.\\n\\n It’ll always be a fond memory. Even though it was a very tragic thing that happened I have a lot of good memories of that because of the way people pulled together. I think that really is a tribute to the crew and to what the crew meant to not just NASA, but to our whole country. Everybody was willing to stop everything they were doing and say how can we help get through this? It was a very emotional time, but also a very rewarding time, to be a part of that process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you do when you came back to KSC?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ironically enough, Discovery was in its Orbiter Maintenance Down Period [OMDP], which is a scheduled maintenance period that we do. I believe it’s every seven flights, eight years, something along those lines, I can’t remember exactly when. We have a set period of time that we do it.\\n\\n So we were already in the process of taking the vehicle apart to do in-depth inspections: wiring inspections, structural inspections to do major modifications. We were doing the MEDS, the Multifunction Electronic Display System, glass cockpit, and the other big one that was already scheduled. I don’t remember; I’ll have to come back to it.\\n\\n We were doing modifications of all levels. Inspections and looking for corrosion, which was part of the structural inspections. We were already planning to be basically grounded for about a year, when the accident happened.\\n\\n Initially all work stopped; we all stopped. Then we as the Discovery team quickly got back to work, because we were really the only vehicle team that could work. We had to complete the maintenance period no matter what. We had a huge amount of work to get as opposed to Endeavour or Atlantis, who didn’t know when they were going to fly or what their mission was going to be. I think that was very fortunate for our team, because it gave us something to focus on. It wasn’t just a matter of us sitting back waiting to hear what was going to come out of the CAIB [Columbia Accident Investigation Board], what was going to come out of the restoration effort here. “Hey guys we can focus on this. We have real good work to do here.” I think that was very helpful to the team. That’s what we did.\\n\\n Once the CAIB report came out and we figured out what the problem was, that then drove a bunch of additional modifications that we did on the vehicle. The main one being installation of the Orbiter Boom Sensor System so that we could do the inspections on orbit that we had not been able to do in the past.\\n\\n Also the Wing Leading Edge Sensor System. We went in and put sensors on the spar of the leading edges of the wings, underneath the reinforced carbon-carbon panels, that would allow us to detect if we had any type of impact. At least we would know that right after liftoff or on orbit if something happened to hit on orbit, and know where to go look in case there was a breach.\\n\\n Reinforced carbon-carbon had a lot of scrutiny as to are we doing enough to test it and screen it to make sure there are no flaws that could cause a break in the carbon-carbon panels. So we came up with a thermography technique that basically scans and looks for any minute flaws. Then of course anything we found had to be addressed as to is this acceptable or not acceptable? That’s all handled by the engineering team in Houston, but we did the work of doing the scans and gathering that data.\\n\\n Last one I’d mention would be the Boeing Rigid Insulation tile, a new tile was created. It was a much stronger tile. Right now you can take a black tile off the belly of the Orbiter and tap it with your fingernail and that’ll chip the outer surface of the tile. It’s very breakable, very fragile, which is why we spend a lot of time processing and repairing tile after every flight.\\n\\n They came up with this harder tile that we could put around the edges of the openings, the ET door openings, the landing gear door openings. Anywhere where there was a higher potential for a breach we were installing these stronger tile. Of course the first question is well why wouldn’t you just put the stronger tile over the whole vehicle? They weigh more. So you increase the weight of the vehicle. You decrease the weight of your payload. You increase the amount of fuel required to get you on orbit. Everything is a trade.\\n\\n Also because obviously going in and changing out, there’s 24,000 tiles on a vehicle, that would take a lot of time to go and change them all out. So it made sense to do it in the areas of highest concern. That wasn’t something that happened in completeness during the return to flight flow. We did a majority of it then but then we continued to upgrade and replace tiles in those areas over multiple flows. That was a modification that continued for quite a while.\\n\\n The other significant modification we were doing that wasn’t return-to-flight-related was that Station-to-Shuttle Power Transfer System or SSPTS which allows us to stay on orbit longer. That’s a wiring modification basically wiring from the tip to the tail. So it took a lot of time to do that, which was one of the reasons why our period of time for doing this maintenance was about a year, even before we had the return to flight modifications." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about getting that phone call. Atlantis was actually supposed to fly the return to flight, but it turns out that Discovery was able to do it. Tell me about getting that phone call." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Scott Thurston had been the flow director; actually we were still vehicle managers back then for Columbia. After the accident he eventually became the flow director for Atlantis.\\n\\n We all expected Atlantis to be the return to flight vehicle based on the fact that normally we somewhat try to plan the Orbiters’ flights in a row. If [OV, Orbiter Vehicle]-102 [Columbia] flew then [OV]-105 [Endeavour], [OV]-103 [Discovery], [OV]-104 [Atlantis], then back to [OV]-102. That changes very often, but that’s how we lay it out to begin with. Based on the fact that Atlantis was the next vehicle that had been scheduled to fly, we all assumed that the order would not change and therefore Atlantis would be the next one to fly. They quickly, from a program perspective, realized that with Discovery already being in a maintenance period and then all these additional mods that needed to be implemented, it made sense to do those mods on Discovery first. Then obviously that would be the first vehicle that would be ready.\\n\\n Scott was actually the one to give me the news. He was in the meeting or on the telecon [teleconference] where they made that decision. It was a late afternoon, and so I was already at home. He called me, and he was the one to tell me that. Scott is a great guy. I’m sure he was very disappointed. I’m sure he wanted it to be Atlantis, as I would have if I was in his place. He said, “Hey looks like you guys are up. We’re looking for you guys to pull it through and take us back to flight.” I was very excited about that. I was shocked, because I wasn’t expecting it, but very excited because I knew it would be something really good for my team.\\n\\n The KSC team as a whole, the NASA team as a whole—I want to look out for all of them, but my primary function is to look out for my Discovery team, that’s part of my job. So I was very happy that they were going to get that, because once again it gave them that focus of, “Okay guys, we will never forget about this accident. But we need to focus on getting back to flying, that’s what we do here, that’s what we need to process for.” I think that was helpful to the team." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you ever talk with the previous flow director for the return to flight following [the Space Shuttle] Challenger [accident, STS 51-L] to get a sense of what he or she might have gone through?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No I did not. That would have been a really good idea. To be honest with you—I hate to admit it—I’m not even sure at the time who that flow director was. I am guessing it was “Tip” [John J.] Talone [Jr.]. I actually worked for Tip Talone when I worked for the Station Program. I did not know him when he was a flow director\\n\\n Unfortunately I haven’t had a lot of interaction with previous flow directors besides the ones that were still working Shuttle when I joined the team, like Kelvin Manning. I haven’t had much interaction with those flow directors from the far past. We were trying to put together a history to show all the flow directors along the way. I hope that we’re able to pull that together, because I love the job that I do, and I’m sure they felt the same way when they did it. “Pepper” [Philip E.] Phillips is another one. He was a flow director. He’s still around and was the Deputy Director of Shuttle Processing when I was a flow director. So I’ve worked with and for him. Grant Cates was in my office. He wasn’t acting as a flow director then, but he had been the flow director for 102. I had some interaction with the ones that were flow directors just before I came on, but not many of the ones from farther back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about the media interest and really the scrutiny about what you were doing with Discovery and making sure that every I was dotted and T was crossed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was a lot of media attention during the return to flight timeframe, I never thought about the media aspect of my job, but it quickly became a big aspect of being the flow director. Fortunately I had an awesome public affairs representative, Jessica Rye, at the time. She just got me through it and helped me prepare and feel comfortable. Without that I think it would have been a very unpleasurable experience just because it was my first exposure to the media and it happened very quickly. Jessica really helped me feel comfortable and confident.\\n\\n Actually I really enjoy that aspect of my job now. I did a lot public affairs events then and then it dwindled off. Now that I’m working transition and retirement, it has ramped up again so it is a large part of my job again.\\n\\n In regards to the impacts of having all eyes on us, once again I pride the team for not letting that affect them too much. I think we put enough pressure on ourselves that any pressure from the outside was not going to even measure up. We all were so anxious to make sure that we were doing the right thing and doing a good job, and ensuring that Discovery had a great mission, when we had the return to flight.\\n\\n Based on the CAIB report we had —I’ll call it a “mods on the fly” kind of scenario. Based on the CAIB’s findings the program was developing mods. We were implementing them almost immediately after they were developed. That was challenging. But other than that I didn’t see any real—I’ll call it a negative effect from the CAIB. Of course once again heightened focus on safety on making sure that we were doing everything we could to be as safe as possible, a huge responsibility on the team to get us back to flying. But I, once again, didn’t feel pressure coming so much from the outside. It was more internal to ourselves and who we are and what we do.\\n\\n I think the program did a good job of protecting us from a lot of external pressure as well because everything that we do here at Kennedy obviously has been approved by the program. We’re really just the implementers. At the program level they were the ones having to go under the scrutiny of being asked have you done enough? Have you done the right thing? Is this all that needs to happen? The program helped keep those questions away from us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Earlier you were talking about some of the challenges working with JSC, where they might want to implement something but it’s going to drastically impact schedule. Was that something that you were dealing with with return to flight? Were there other changes that they wanted to make to the Orbiter to ensure that the crew would be safe? And you thought maybe this is too much or it’s too much time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think eventually we implemented everything that they felt we needed to. I saw more of what I thought was doing too much after we got back to flying, because we continued to obviously want to improve and do things better. At that point is where I think we were in an overkill mode, polishing the apple per se, as opposed to really balancing the risk of what we were doing. Yes, there were times where I felt like certain modifications and special tests were approved without a true necessity for doing the work. I can’t, right off the top of my head give an example, but I felt that there were things that we did to the vehicle that we really didn’t need to do. It wasn’t necessarily improving the safety. Nor was it improving the success of the mission. Now, that’s my opinion. The people that came up with those modifications and special tests I’m sure would argue vehemently that I am wrong. But, that was my perspective on things. I was anxious for the program to scrutinize some of those new requirements more than they did.\\n\\n But I also understood where the program was coming from as well, and the pressures they were getting from the outside for ensuring that we were doing everything that we possibly could. Like I said, it’s a balance. [N.] Wayne Hale was in that position [Shuttle Program Manager] because he could handle that. He’s a pay grade much higher than mine and those decisions come with that territory.\\n\\n Overall I was very impressed with the way things were handled, especially with Wayne Hale. I got to spend six months working with him in Houston on a rotational assignment. One of the biggest things that I learned from Wayne, or that I respected even more once I spent more time with him, was first of all his ability to make everyone feel important and to feel needed and necessary. He deals with thousands of people on a regular basis. I would walk around with him and see him take the time to stop and talk to the person from the janitorial staff. “Hey, how’s your day going? How are things for you? Thank you for what you do.” Really just constantly with all these pressures he had on his mind that he must have been dealing with to still take the time to make sure that everybody on his team felt that he personally needed them. I tried to learn a lot from him. I think he did a great job.\\n\\n We also saw Wayne bring out the dissenting opinion. Everybody always knew yes, we have dissenting opinions. Wayne was very adamant about saying “I need to hear a dissenting opinion. We’re not going to leave this meeting until somebody gives me a dissenting opinion, because I know there’s one out there. We need to not be afraid to voice our dissenting opinions. We need to hear them.” I think we needed that at the time. We were almost forced into that dissenting opinion so that now it’s not taboo. Prior to the accident I think there was some feeling you were going to be shunned if you brought a dissenting opinion up in a public forum. Now it’s very commonplace for anyone at any level to bring something up.\\n\\n Now should you follow your chain of command and follow a process? Absolutely. We’re not looking to change that. If you follow that process and still feel uncomfortable there’s plenty of open forums where you can stand up and talk. I think that’s been a real positive for NASA and something that I don’t think that we’ll get away from. I think that’s been ingrained in us now. That has become part of our culture." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What other changes were brought about by the accident? Obviously there were new systems on the Orbiter. Were there changes in inspections in terms of what you were doing here in the OPF?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. The main thing that changed was the inspection process; I mentioned the reinforced carbon-carbon panels for one. Also in the past on the tile—I talked about the fact that you don’t always have to change out a tile, if there’s damage. You can repair it. One of those repairs is called a putty repair, and it’s called that because you’re basically putting a type of putty into the hole, smoothing it out, baking it, and then it’s usable again.\\n\\n Well, we went through a process of basically getting rid of any large putty repairs, because there was concern that they were going to come loose and could become debris that could damage another part of the vehicle. So that was a different mindset, because now you’re changing the inspection criteria and then going in and removing what in the past had been considered a perfectly good repair technique. It still is but only for certain sizes. That was a big change not only in the fact that from now on with new damage you may not be able to use that putty repair anymore, but also going in and digging all those repairs out. Or removing and replacing the tile based on the fact that the putty repair area has become too large.\\n\\n Another big change was the addition of the on-orbit inspections. That was a huge thing for the crew and Mission Control, but from a ground processing perspective the additional thermography and minute inspections were the biggest impact to us. Earlier I mentioned the blankets and the fact that, prior to the accident, we were not scrutinizing the blankets or the whole thermal protection system as much as we are now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any major challenges that you faced on this flight? I think it was your third flight. Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes it was. I thought back about that. It was over three plus years before we actually flew again. We spent just under 1,000 days in the Orbiter Processing Facility. I had to go look that up because I was wondering myself. Just under three years in the OPF. That’s an enormous amount of time.\\n\\n That OMDP was actually the first one that was being done at Kennedy, a full OMDP. We had done partials in the past, but previously full OMDPs were done at Palmdale [California]. So even going in, before we even got to the Columbia accident, we were under a lot of scrutiny because there was still a pocket of individuals that felt like that work should stay at Palmdale, that it shouldn’t be done at Kennedy. Even before the process began there were a lot of discussions and us having to prove that yes we were capable of doing this work, and that it should be done here. We discussed the costs of ferrying back and forth to California, and how staying at KSC would avoid that cost. We’ve got the workforce here. We’ve got everything we need.\\n\\n Once again I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves because we wanted to, of course, make sure we did this right, because now we’re going to be judged on, “Ah, well, if we’d done this at Palmdale, maybe it would have been done quicker,” or something like that.\\n\\n So that was already the challenge and then once you lay on top of that the return to flight modifications, and not being able to operate in as much of a controlled fashion as we were used to. The way we had operated in the past the program would have said, “Here are the mods, you’ve got six months to go write the procedures for them and get the requirements defined.” All of a sudden it was, “Okay when can you have the procedures written and get them executed and what is that going to mean to the schedule?”\\n\\n Not the best way to plan a processing flow. Nominally an OPF flow—believe it or not—is about 40% unplanned work. That surprises a lot of people. It really surprised me when I heard the statistic. I think that goes to show how much the vehicle is still a developmental vehicle. Everybody wanted to think a long time ago that this was going to be a very routine thing like flying an airplane, and it’s really not. That’s because every time we process a vehicle we find something new, or the engineers come up with something, “Hey, maybe we can improve this system, maybe we should do this differently.”\\n\\n As a flow director, we go into a processing flow with a baseline schedule. “Here’s what we have got to do.” We have built in contingency, knowing that we’re going to have some of that unplanned work. But you never know what it’s going to be and what that overall impact is going to be.\\n\\n If it’s something small, okay, no problem, you can absorb that. We have built in contingency to allow that to be absorbed. If it’s something major that drives you to go pull off an OMS [Orbital Maneuvering System] pod then that’s a completely different activity. Then you get into the process of, “Can we do that work in parallel with everything else and still maintain our schedule?”\\n\\n By saying that, if I go back to the return to flight flow, it was almost as if all of those things were happening at once at a very large scale. So opposed to having just a few little problems or modifications to add, all of a sudden we had these huge modifications to add, where we were waiting on hardware, because it was being developed real-time. Then sometimes maybe that hardware didn’t look exactly how it was supposed to. Once we got it here and tried to connect it into the ship it didn’t fit right. Now do we send it back to modify it or do we modify it here, because we have some skills here that can do that.\\n\\n It obviously took a lot more communication and work between Centers than we nominally would have to do, a lot more back-and-forth. The way we normally do it is we receive the requirements, and we implement them. Sometimes there are issues that require us to coordinate back and forth with the designers. During return to flight this was a constant day-to-day, hour-by-hour back-and-forth with the requirements developers that we didn’t normally have to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about that communication. You’re in charge of this vehicle but you’ve got responsibility to talk to people in Houston, the Orbiter Project Manager, the Space Shuttle Program, the ET Project Manager here. I’m sure there are plenty of people I can’t even list. Talk about communication. Has that evolved over the years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It has. We got to a point where we developed what I call the core team for Discovery, and each vehicle has done that. It’s comprised of your leadership folks from both an operational and technical side here at Kennedy on the NASA side, then also on the USA side, as well as Boeing. We have a Boeing vehicle manager and a USA vehicle manager. My main counterpart is a USA flow manager and then we have integration folks as well. There’s also a representative from the Orbiter Project Office who is the JSC vehicle manager who is basically my counterpart with the Orbiter Project Office. We got to a point where we had a daily tag-up in the morning to talk high level issues, concerns, anything of importance. That allows us first of all to sync up and make sure everybody understands where we are with processing, what’s going on. Then communicate especially to Houston, “Hey, we need this from you guys. This isn’t working the way we expected. We need you to go help us with getting the new requirement,” or whatever it is.\\n\\n So that’s really helped. Then from a higher level, I obviously have management here that I report to. Then I also have the program that I report to, Mike [Michael P.] Moses being our program rep [representative] here at Kennedy is the person I have the most interaction with. For example if there’s a new requirement that comes through, say a special test; a chit is what we call that. It’s my responsibility to tell Mike what the impact of that chit will be. So JSC says, “We want you to go do this.” Then I go back to Mike and say, “Okay, Mike, this is what it’s going to take to do it. Do you want to approve it outside of board? Do you want to have them present you with the details of their request and have me present the schedule side of it?\\n\\n We had a lot of that type of interaction with Mike. His involvement gets even greater once we go integrated, because at that point in time he’s very interested about any additional work. The later you get in the flow, the less you want additional work that could drive something unexpected, because any time we make a change to the vehicle there can be negative fallout if it doesn’t go as expected. That’s why we at Kennedy somewhat have the reputation, especially to the folks at JSC, of not wanting to do work. We are often accused of “saying no to everything.”\\n\\n I understand why they say that, because we do. I also understand that we have that obligation to once again push back a little bit, because although a task may sound very simple, I go in to do it, and heaven forbid the technician drops a wrench on top of an RCC panel. That’s over $1 million to replace and it takes a year. Things happen. As careful as we try to be, those are the things that we have to think about. So I feel like we’re almost like that conscience, “Let me remind you that although this sounds like a really good idea, we have to remember that unless we really need to do work on the vehicle it might be taking a risk that we as a program don’t want to take.”\\n\\n So once you’re integrated, of course, that risk goes up by three now, because when you do something on the Orbiter you could impact the boosters or the tank, or vice versa. You increase that risk. So Mike at that point becomes very interested and is not willing to take as much risk. In the OPF I can approve special tests on my own. If it’s not a big impact to the schedule I can say, “No we’re good to do this; we’ll just take it on.” I won’t have to bother Mike with it. Once we go integrated, he wants to be bothered, even if it’s something that I think is going to be a simple task and not take much of our resources or our time to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How closely was the RTF [Return to Flight] crew following what you were doing here at Kennedy?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were here I believe as much as they could be. Their training schedules I know are horrendous. They paid several visits to the workforce. I think for a couple reasons. I know they’re interested in seeing what we’re doing. Obviously they have a very big interest in that. So they were here in that respect. Even more importantly they were here to encourage the team and show they appreciated what we were doing, because that was a very hard time for us. It was a lot of work. We were working around the clock because everybody was so anxious to get done. We weren’t overworking people. We have workforce rules that we abide by to ensure that we’re not overextending anyone. Still being an environment that’s used to launching Space Shuttles and going that long without a launch, it weighs on folks here more than anywhere else.\\n\\n Plus there was that unknown of will we ever really fly again. That even crossed my mind in some of those cases. A lot of the reason why it crossed my mind was going back to that “polish the apple” scenario. “If we don’t draw the line somewhere we’re never going to launch again, guys. We have to get moving.” Although nobody talked about it much there was still in the back of everybody’s mind, “Are we done; is the Space Shuttle Program done because of this accident?”\\n\\n That’s what made the actual liftoff of that mission so critical, well maybe not the liftoff as much as the landing. I think that was even bigger. The liftoff was great. Launch is always a great day, and we were excited because it was the culmination of our work. But to really prove that we had found the problem, fixed it and could fly again safely, we needed to land. So landing day was really more of a relief, I think, for the Kennedy team. “Whew, we did it. It really happened. We really got through this. We’re back to where we should be.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you the person who signed off that said, “Discovery is ready to go when she leaves the OPF?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The process that we take, there’s reviews all along the way. So the first review of that kind for me is the Orbiter mate review. Actually let me step back.\\n\\n We have an ET mate review. So before we mate the tank to the boosters we have a mate review to ensure that we’re okay there. If there were any technical issues along the way we talk about what they were and how we fixed them. Or if there’s still open work, we discuss when we’re going to do that work and how we’re still going to be able to mate on time. Or we need to move the mate date. That’s the first one. That one is usually pretty benign. There are usually not a lot of issues with mating the tank.\\n\\n The next one being what we call the Orbiter mate review. That’s where we talk about what’s been done on the Orbiter and that we’re ready to roll from the OPF over to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Once again high level we talk about the work that was completed, any technical issues along the way. I don’t sign-off for that review. I’m presenting data so that others feel comfortable to sign.\\n\\n So now we’ve had these two mate reviews and we continue processing. The next big review that I’m involved with would be the launch readiness review. That is where I stand up and give a highlight of the flow for the Orbiter, boosters, and tank. I describe the challenges we’ve had and detail the remaining work in front of us. I discuss the contingency remaining and give my position on the likelihood of meeting the target launch date. When my part is complete the Orbiter Project engineer talks through any technical issues of interest.\\n\\n After the launch readiness review then we get into the flight readiness review, which bumps up above me. Although I prepare the charts that the launch director uses, it’s the launch director speaking for us at that point in time to say yes we are ready. So if I think about it, the only review that I actually sign off on myself is our internal launch readiness review. The external one to the program, my director for launch vehicle processing, she signs that based on what I’ve given her as information about where we are and how things are going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are you in Launch Control the days before mission and for liftoff?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Actually we have the Shuttle test directors that run countdown. They basically lead the launch team. Although there are members of my ground processing team that are also members of the launch team, it’s somewhat as if I’m handing control over to the Shuttle test director. I’ve done my part. I’ve got the vehicle ready to go into countdown. Now the Shuttle test director has to finish the job, get us through countdown and liftoff.\\n\\n During the four days of countdown, I’m not in the firing room until launch day. There’s really not a function for me during a nominal countdown. If something goes wrong, then I am back in the mix of things and depending on the problem I can potentially step back into the leadership role. It’s a real close coordination between the Shuttle test director and myself, because if we have a vehicle problem then that immediately goes back to my responsibility of fixing it so we work very closely together through that process.\\n\\n Then on launch day I’m in the firing room. The flow director doesn’t have an active role with the launch team, which means we don’t have a call on the net where we say we’re good to go or anything like that. We do sit on console with the launch director and the assistant launch director and help them with anything we can help them with. One of the most helpful things we can do is assist with monitoring voice loops. In addition if there are targets of engagement, aircraft in the controlled area, the flow director will help plot their location. Basically if the assistant launch director is the launch director’s right-hand man; the flow director is the left-hand man to pick up anything else that has to be done.\\n\\n We are there more in the sense that we’re the only person that has followed the processing flow the whole way through. We are the consistent factor for that vehicle. So the launch director, assistant launch director, they do all the launches, but they’re not part of all the ground processing to get us there. If there is an issue that comes up, they’re going to look to me to say, “Is this something we saw in the OPF? Is it something you’re familiar with, or is it something brand-new?” So it’s a consistency role and a reward for being the leader of the team that has gotten us this far along." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about the landing. You said that that was probably the most memorable moment. You were out in the Shuttle Landing Facility [SLF]. Tell me about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was great. I’ve gotten to be at the SLF for every Discovery landing that I’ve been a part of. It’s so quick. It’s like you’re waiting, you’re waiting, you’re waiting. All of a sudden it’s there and then it’s landing. It’s hard for me to describe if someone’s not seen one. You’re looking; you’re looking. Sometimes you can see it way overhead. When it’s coming down it just seems to almost fall out of the sky and then it’s on the ground. Obviously for return to flight, a lot of us were just very anxious to land. Prior to the deorbit burn we are in the firing room awaiting the “Go for landing.”\\n\\n We’re listening to the voice loops and watching Mission Control on the television monitor. On STS-114’s landing day it was decided that we were going to land out west so we weren’t real happy about that because we were anxious for it to land at Kennedy. But that decision is made from Mission Control so we don’t have any say in the matter. The reaction for the return to flight landing probably wasn’t as impactful because it didn’t happen here as it would have been. Still hearing they had touchdown, that was all great. Then we immediately head out to California and start processing for the next mission.\\n\\n We leave for California the day after landing. Watch touchdown on TV from the firing room and then go home, pack, and get ready to leave. We usually plan to be out there two weeks just in case, but it usually only takes about a week to get the Orbiter ready to ferry back. Flow directors are part of the ferry flight back as well. We lead the team that’s out there processing, getting it ready to ferry back, and then we’re on the Pathfinder on the way back. Based on weather the ferry flight could end up taking a week to get back so you’re never really sure when you will get home.\\n\\n That’s the downside of being out there, from a personal life perspective. You can’t say how long you’re going to be there. It’s like, “Well our schedule says we’re going to be ready on this day but then we’ve got the ferry so maybe in a week we’ll be home.” We never want to land out west because of the risk of ferrying the vehicle cross-country. There’s a lot of risk involved with that. Plus the additional time that it takes out of our processing schedule because we know there’s always a chance to land out west, so we build in some contingency based on that. But we’d always like to have those days. If we can have those extra days for processing at KSC that would be great.\\n\\n It’s very costly, I should say that too. It’s obviously costly to ferry the vehicle so we don’t want to spend money that we don’t have to spend. The fun part of being out there is it is even more focused than we are here in the sense of we’re all out there to get this job done and get home. It’s nice to have a little more close relationship with that smaller team while you’re out there than we have here, because here you still have your distractions of your home life and things like that, where out there it’s like night and day this is what we’re doing until we’re ready to go.\\n\\n It’s enjoyable being out there. The folks that work out there full-time of course love it. It’s nice for them to get a chance to process the vehicle, because they’re out there prepared and ready to go every time. We send people out as well. We actually have folks that go out there a couple days before launch, and they stay out there until landing because they’re required to be there in case we have an emergency landing. So they’re already out there, waiting. I can imagine how they feel, because they go out every time, and they have to get everything ready to go, and then it doesn’t land there. That’s probably a little bit frustrating for them as well. I’ve only had two opportunities with Discovery landing out west. They’ve been good experiences though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many people end up going out there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There is a small group that goes out prior to launch. Then a couple of days before landing we send the first wave which I believe is approximately 45 people. Then we send about 60 more the day after landing. So over 100 folks are required since we’re operating around the clock. We have to cover three shifts a day when we’re out there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you have to do to get the vehicle ready for ferry?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There’s some initial safing that we do, cryogenics and so forth. There are some things, mostly payload items that have to be removed from the forward—the middeck area, just like we would do here. The main thing is getting it to a position where we can lift it up and get the 747 underneath and mated so we can ferry home. There are some SCAPE [Self-Contained Atmosphere Protective Ensemble] operations which are hazardous. Initial draining and safing of the systems that contain hazardous commodities such as cryogenics, hypergols and ammonia. We’re also looking for any type of leaks. If we have anything like that we have to take care of it before we can ferry.\\n\\n We have to put plugs into the water spray boiler and auxiliary power systems. Also we have to do inspections for the thermal protection system. Not only do we have thermal protection system requirements for launch and for the mission, but for ferry we have requirements to ensure we don’t have any billowing blankets or things that as we’re flying cross-country would rip those blankets off or do damage. It’s a smaller team, but there are quite a few systems that are involved. For example, hydraulics engineers are required because we have to retract the landing gear once we lift up the Orbiter to mate it on the 747. They have to retract the gear and make sure the landing gear are properly closed out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did Discovery look when you got out to see her?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That one, I don’t remember there being anything that wasn’t typical in regards to the tile damage. I expect I looked at it and said, “Wow this looks great. Obviously all these mods to the tanks and things have done well,” but then when we got back to the OPF and they did the minute inspections, we had many repairs to do. I thought, “Wait a minute, it looked so clean.” So that’s been a running joke, because every time we have looked at Discovery on the runway since then we’ve always thought, “Gosh this looks really good, I don’t think we’re going to have much tile work.” Then we end up with just as much if not more, because our eyes are not trained to look for what the experts are looking for.\\n\\n The same thing happened after STS-133. That was a unique situation, because normally when I’m looking at Discovery after a mission I’m automatically thinking, “What is this going to mean for processing? What additional work are we going to have to do? What is this going to mean to the schedule? What’s the impact of what I’m seeing?”\\n\\n Several times I had to shake my head and say, “Oh you don’t have to worry about that this time,” because we’re not doing a lot of tile repair before we ferry it to the Smithsonian. I had to keep reminding myself to just enjoy what you’re looking at. Once again it looked beautiful. I was very impressed. I said I thought it was the cleanest I had ever seen it.\\n\\n We were really struggling to find any kind of tile damage. There just really wasn’t any. Normally there are a couple somewhat significant gouges that are obviously from ice off the tank or some foam, but never anything that I was ever worried about. These were just turnaround issues we had to fix before the next flight. But after STS-133 the damage was very minimal.\\n\\n It made me a little bit angry because it was so clean, not because I wanted to see damage but because it made me think, “Why are we not continuing to fly these vehicles?” We feel like we’ve really gotten a handle on the things that we needed to improve, and as soon as we do it’s the end of the program. So a little bit of negative feeling there, but overall I’ve stayed very positive in that regard. I think I deal very well with change. It’s not a decision I could affect. The decision was made. Therefore we’ve got to act on that decision.\\n\\n It also helps that I’m getting to work transition and retirement. So I’m going to be able to work on all three of the vehicles right up until we deliver them. My team will be the team that actually delivers those vehicles to the display site. I’m very fortunate to have that opportunity, and it’s been very exciting work so far. So I’m very fortunate for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any other memorable missions besides 133 and return to flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Return to flight actually, that stands out the most obviously because of everything involved with that—the amount of work that it required and the attention, and the media side of it. As I thought back over some flights, STS-116 was actually the shortest OPF flow since return to flight. It is still the shortest flow. It was a very intense time getting through that flow but also it was very rewarding. We’re like anybody else that works in a team environment; we have some competitiveness amongst the different teams. To be able to say, “Hey we processed Discovery in the shortest time since return to flight,” that was a big deal for the team.\\n\\n When we roll out of the OPF—there’s always celebration involved with meeting a major milestone. That’s the first major milestone once you start a processing flow. Major milestones being: rolling out of the OPF, then rolling out to the launch pad, and then launch. So with that being the first major milestone, everybody was really excited about it. That was memorable.\\n\\n Then STS-128 was a relatively quick OPF flow, not the shortest, of course, but quick. The real challenges for that flow happened after we went integrated. It ended up being a zero contingency flow. We normally go into an integrated flow with at least five days’ contingency, at an absolute minimum three, but there have been some that we’ve had zero contingency based on trying to get to a launch date and other factors that are affecting that launch date. In the case of STS-128 there was a window of time right after our target launch date where the range was not going to be available to us and then there were other constraints such as beta angle cutouts. It was a situation where if we didn’t make the targeted launch date the next attempt wasn’t going to happen right away. A delay of that magnitude was going to have a ripple effect through the rest of the flows.\\n\\n We did not, as the people responsible for preparing these vehicles, want to be the reason that we missed the target date. That’s our job, to be prepared and be on time. Not to say that if something happens that makes us feel like we can’t get there that we wouldn’t speak up. If it comes to that then I’m going to be the first one to say, “John [P. Shannon, Space Shuttle Program Manager], we can’t do it; we can’t get there.”\\n\\n We had some technical issues during that integrated flow that were very challenging, things that we had not had to deal with previously. Each time a problem arises I work with my USA counterpart for the integrated flow, which is James [G.] Taylor to resolve it. We determine the impact, and then what that impact means to everything else in the flow. So we basically build schedules to show what would change. In each case that we had an issue come up, we were able to lay a schedule out that showed, at least on paper, that we could still maintain our launch date.\\n\\n Understanding that the schedule is only as good as your guess on how long it takes to do the work. For the guys executing, we talk to them. “Hey, how long do you think it’s going to take to do this?” That’s what we’ll use. We’ll go from there. Now granted, engineers versus operations people don’t always agree on times so we had some good discussions along the way. But the questions JT and I have to answer are, “Do we really think that we need to come off the launch date now? It sounds like we still have a chance to make it. If we do, why wouldn’t we try? Why wouldn’t we try to get there?” JT is a little more conservative than I am in regards to that. Granted, he’s the contractor so he probably feels that he’s going to be assessed more with that answer than I will be.\\n\\n For STS-128 we discussed it and said “No, we can’t in good faith say we really have to come off the launch date yet.” Now can something happen tomorrow that drives us off of it? Sure. So the way that we looked at it was if it’s important for us to get to this launch date, and we still feel like we have a chance, then we should try. No guarantees, but we should try.\\n\\n So that’s what we did. Lo and behold, we got through some challenges, and we were able to make the launch date, which was a great thing. Afterwards there was some fallout in the sense that some folks felt that we pushed too hard to get there and that’s where you get back into that schedule pressure discussion. We had a lot of lessons learned on how we communicate, and what the team’s perceptions are, whether their perception is really what’s happening or not. If that’s their perception, that’s real to them so we need to make sure that their perception is accurate. If it is not accurate then we need to clarify and discuss with them. So I’ll say I took some heat for that. I did some self-assessment in regards to the way I communicated with the team and what I could have done differently. I would not have changed my recommendation to continue working towards the target launch date but I would have looked and listened harder for those perceptions. I think that we did the right thing, but you can always learn from any experience. Some people felt a bit uncomfortable with the level that we were operating at, and we did make some changes after that. We decided, “From now on we’re not going to go into a flow with zero contingency.” That’s really not a smart thing to do. You really shouldn’t because it does create pressure. The contingency days are there for a purpose, and that is to allow that if you have some stumbling along the way you’re not immediately impacting a major milestone.\\n\\n Nobody on the Space Center ever wants to have to impact the launch date. They’re all as anxious to launch as anybody in the program is. So when you have those contingency days it definitely gives a little bit of relief to the team. We strategically put those contingency days after major operations, where we have a higher likelihood of encountering problems. We’ve gotten very good at where we stage those contingency days. I definitely took a lot of lessons out of STS-128, but overall I was very happy with the results and proud of the way the team executed.\\n\\n The only other flow I’d mention would be STS-133, which we talked about already. Not just because it was the last one, but because of everything it took for us to get there. On launch day, we had the issue with the range. I don’t know how much you heard about that or followed that. We thought we were going to have to scrub for a range issue. For an issue that we were hearing was fixed, but we couldn’t get them to say on the loop that it was fixed. I’ve had people say they saw me on TV while that was happening, and they could tell how frustrated I was.\\n\\n I’m not very emotional. I am a very emotional person but I don’t usually show that. Unless you know me very well you don’t know that I’m an emotional person. I have somewhat of a rough exterior. So everybody kept saying, “Are you going to cry on launch day? It’s the last one, you’re going to cry.” I really didn’t feel like I would, because I knew I was working transition and retirement. So really my job with Discovery wasn’t done. I felt I’d be more emotional when I take Discovery to the Smithsonian and then I leave her there. I think that’s when it’ll be an emotional hit for me.\\n\\n On launch day of course I was thinking, “Am I going to feel emotional?” I wasn’t sure how I’d feel. When we had five minutes left in the count, I was starting to feel a little emotional and then when we had the snag, and I thought we were not going to launch. Prior to that point, the launch director kept saying, “Nah, we’re going to go today. They’re going to get this resolved; we’re going to go.” Mike’s words assured me it was going to be alright.\\n\\n Well then it got to a point where Mike said, “I don’t know, Steph. I’m getting worried now,” because he didn’t think they were going to get the issue resolved. I literally at that point started to tear up, because I thought to myself, “Don’t put this team through this. They have worked so hard to get to this launch. Weather is perfect. The vehicle is perfect. This is something completely out of their control. Don’t do this to them.” I could feel it in the firing room, everybody was thinking, “Oh my gosh, please don’t tell me we’re going to scrub a launch for something like this.”\\n\\n I had to get control of myself. Then once we got the go, oh, I was so relieved! Obviously my emotions showed through to people that were watching on TV, because I was getting very aggravated. I was literally thinking about everything that the team had overcome to get us to that point and then to have it taken out of our hands like that was going to be awful.\\n\\n To have to start again that’s such a letdown. Any time you have a scrub, no matter what the cause, it’s a huge letdown, especially if now you’ve got to go do a bunch of work, like we did with the tank on the first scrub. My initial thought was, “Oh my gosh, now what do we do and how long is it going to take?” So thank goodness we got STS-133 off on the second try. The range came through for us in the end." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about how processing has changed over the past ten years. Are there significant changes or just minor differences?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think the main change that I’ve seen –we touched on it a little bit at the beginning— was that we’ve become more of a unified team, NASA-contractor team. That’s so important. It can be hard, because obviously as NASA it’s our responsibility to critique what the contractor does and to ensure that they’re doing the right thing.\\n\\n Of course we have to think about cost and schedule as well. If they don’t do something correctly, we have to write them up and that goes into their award fee. That can potentially affect their salaries. So we work so closely together. We’re very much a family. Then to have to also score them that makes it difficult. I’ve really seen over the past 11 years us come to a point where there’s better understanding of that aspect of our role and how we’re not going to use that to beat them up. Award fee is a necessary thing we have to do. We all know it’s there. We’re going to do our best to make sure the contractor is successful, because if we’re going to be successful they have to be successful too. So we want to help them be successful. Then they do stumble, depending on what it is, we’re going to be right there with them. If the contractor makes a mistake, misses a step in a procedure, we’re going to have to take that forward. Then we’re going to work with them to figure out how to keep that from happening again.\\n\\n I’ve seen the communication open up to where—in the past it would be very hard to ever get USA to share any information, much less share something that didn’t go the way they expected it to. Now if something happens, I know I’ll get a call immediately. “Hey, Steph, here’s what happened. Here’s what we’re doing.” They will also already be in the process of investigating and doing those things they know I’m going to ask them to do.\\n\\n So it’s like there’s been an acceptance of this is the way we operate. They know what I’m going to ask. They know I expect a lot. They know that I’m going to be looking for answers if something doesn’t go right, but they also know that I respect what they do. If they explain to me and just give me the information I’m looking for, it’s going to be okay, and we’re going to work through it together. I’m going to stand up and take an arrow if I have to, because I’m a part of the team. It’s not us against them. So that’s been probably the biggest thing that I’ve seen that’s changed.\\n\\n From a process perspective, we are constantly making changes to improve our processes. So I don’t think there is any one thing I can point out. That improvement has stayed consistent. We are constantly asking, “How can we do this better?” Lessons learned are critical. We have lessons learned discussions after every major task. If something does go wrong we have a process to evaluate the situation. We determine how to fix it and how to ensure it doesn’t happen again. I’ve seen us continue to improve that process. Another process improvement is the increased focus on dissenting opinions which we already talked about.\\n\\n Then lastly, John Shannon always says “Stay hungry.” Mostly he’s talking to the engineering community in the sense of asking are there things that we need to do to make the vehicle safer. We at Kennedy—we’re a part of that process, because we have expert engineers that are very knowledgeable about their systems. And then from an operational side I see us constantly looking for ways we can do things better. Be more efficient. Be safer with what we do. Be more proactive about things. That’s something that I hope that we continue to do. I’ve felt that it has progressed over time, at least the time that I’ve been here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had previously mentioned there was some competition between the teams. Can you talk about your relationship and your work with the other Orbiter flow directors and other teams?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. The flow directors, we of course have interaction. The main thing that we want to ensure that we do is if there’s something that happens on Discovery that could potentially affect the other two vehicles, it’s my responsibility to make sure they know about it right away. So that’s something that we do. If one of the other flow directors is in a meeting and a topic related to Discovery comes up, they’ll make sure I know about it and vice versa. There’s good close-knit communication in that regard.\\n\\n We have to be tied together closely because of sharing resources, and the fact that when we’re processing three vehicles, anything one person does on one vehicle can ultimately affect the other two vehicles. So there has to be coordination. Now do we always agree? No. Especially with Dana [M. Hutcherson, flow manager for Endeavour] and Angie [Angela J. Brewer, flow manager for Atlantis], I almost feel like we’re like siblings in the sense that you don’t always get along with your sibling. You can be completely different. We are, all three of us are completely different in our styles and in the way that we manage our teams.\\n\\n But in the end you’re always going to look out for your sibling. You’re always going to be there for them when they need you and get their back. So to me that’s the way our relationship is. Like I said very different styles, not that one style is better than the other. I could never use the style that Angie uses, because we’re very different in how we approach leadership and what we do, and what our talents are.\\n\\n So she leverages what her strong points are to function the way she does, and I leverage my strong points. Dana, I think, is in the middle. I’m more off-scale high in the sense of I’m a type A, very much get the job done. We’re here to do a job. I think Angie is more on the emotional side of, “This is the team, and we need to take care of our team.” I don’t remember what letter that is, but she’s that type more of the emotional side of things.\\n\\n Then Dana is in the middle. She can tip the scale my way or she can go more towards the emotional side. So she’s probably the most balanced, in my opinion, in how she operates with her team. I like that we are all so different, because it allows me to learn from them. I’ll never operate exactly like either of them do, but there are certain things I can take and say, “Ah, I can use that, I can put that in my toolbox and really learn from that.”\\n\\n I think the style of the flow director really permeates through the team and influences the way the teams operate. We all do the same function, but how we get there is different depending on the team. From a workforce perspective we even interchange team members. You have your core team which pretty much stays with a vehicle. But the technicians, safety representatives, and quality inspectors, they move between vehicles. So you have that continuity to keep us from being very separate teams.\\n\\n The way we’re set up is the engineers and operations folks are tied to a tail number, tied to OV-103 Discovery or OV-105 Endeavour or OV-104 Atlantis. The technician workforce and the quality and safety personnel are tied to a bay. Once again they can move, but there are technicians that are assigned to OPF-2, OPF-1, OPF-3. When we had four vehicles and three Orbiter Processing Facilities, the vehicles were constantly rotating between those Orbiter Processing Facilities, so the technicians didn’t become as attached to a vehicle, as much as the engineering and operations teams.\\n\\n After we lost Columbia we had three OPFs and three vehicles. Discovery was already in OPF-3 and pretty much stayed there for the remainder of the program. And then Atlantis and Endeavour stayed in OPF-1 and 2. At that point we had more of a dedicated full team to an Orbiter. That environment built up a little more of that, “Hey this is my Orbiter,” as opposed to, “This is my bay.”\\n\\n They still worked multiple vehicles but I think anybody you talk to will claim one Orbiter as theirs based on which one they worked on the most. It became a little more of individual teams as opposed to crossing amongst them. For instance, having the shortest Orbiter Processing Facility flow was something that the team really wanted to do. They wanted to say, “Hey our team did this over in OPF-3.” If something doesn’t go well, like for instance—and I hate to say it because it was Discovery—we had an instance where we were towing Discovery back into OPF-3. Because we had changed a process—we thought we had enhanced a process for the towing operations and the spotting operations. We ended up not being able to get spotted. We had to back up and try again, back up, try again. We ended up doing it 11 times before we got correctly spotted.\\n\\n So of course we got teased a great deal by the other teams. “Oh can’t you guys get spotted? What’s going on? Don’t you want to start your flow?” Once again nothing’s ever mean-spirited, but there is that competition of wanting your team to be the best and be seen as the best." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s turn to the transition efforts. We’ve got a few minutes here. You’re currently preparing OV-103. I did see her yesterday go over to the VAB. Tell me what’s been happening with the Orbiter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As the transition and retirement flow director for the Orbiters, I will oversee all the safing activities and the preparations for getting those vehicles ready to ferry or to tow over to their display site. I will also be leading the team that does the offload from the 747 at the display sites. We turn over responsibility and ownership of the vehicles after we offload from the 747 and place the Orbiter on the ground. At that point, the display sites are responsible. We won’t have much involvement after that. However, we are working with the display sites to help them, to give them our knowledge of the best way for them to handle the vehicles once they have ownership. But our true responsibilities will end once we demate the Orbiters.\\n\\n Discovery right after landing rolled into OPF-2, and started what we call down mission processing. Down Mission Processing is the same no matter whether you’re going to fly again or not. We always go through down mission processing. Basically it’s the initial safing, gaining access to the vehicle, starting the processing flow. That has happened on Discovery. The difference is we also pulled some of the safing activities into the Down Mission Processing timeframe. The portions that we pulled in were removal of the forward reaction control system [FRCS] and the OMS pods. We performed these tasks as soon as we could because processing of the FRCS and OMS pods is the critical path for getting all three of the vehicles ready to go to the display sites.\\n\\n The reason for that is those are the most hazardous systems on the vehicle. So here’s our new goal. We’ve been processing these Orbiters to fly in space. Now we’re processing them to be safe to the general public. There are hypergols, cryogenics, ammonia, Freon, pyrotechnics, all of which are systems that we have to get into a configuration so that they no longer have any of that hazardous commodity. Other commodities, like hydraulic fluid, are not truly hazardous, but we’ll drain down to the lowest possible level to decrease the likelihood of having any leaks while on display.\\n\\n For processing of the OMS pods and the forward reaction control system, we have a separate Hypergolic Maintenance Facility [HMF] here at KSC. So we removed those modules from the Orbiter and took them to the HMF. One reason for this is that a lot of the work just can’t be done in the OPF. The facility is just not set up to do it. Also, the safing of the pods and FRCS is a hazardous operation requiring technicians to wear a full body breathing suit. Only those specially trained personnel involved with that task can be in the bay during the operation. All other work is put on hold.\\n\\n Once at the HMF we did the initial draining and deservicing and then shipped those modules off to the White Sands Test Facility [WSTF, New Mexico]. White Sands is where Discovery’s modules are right now. WSTF personnel are doing the full decommissioning, which means they’re completely draining the systems, cutting out lines, cutting out tanks, removing or cleaning anything that has any hypergol residue on it. Once complete the decontaminated modules will be sent back to us to be reinstalled on Discovery. From the outside it’ll look exactly as if it was on the runway after its last launch, but inside it’ll be pretty much gutted. That will allow it to be safe to be displayed in public.\\n\\n In the meantime we’ll continue to safe the rest of the vehicle and then also do the display preparations. Meaning, for instance, we pull out the potty and the galley every time we start a new processing flow. They reservice them in Houston and then send them back to us and we reinstall. Well, the display sites will have the choice of having us put those reserviced systems back in or leave them stand-alone so they can be shown to the public. The public will not have access to the inside of the Orbiters once they are on display. So there will be some things that the display sites choose to keep out of the vehicle.\\n\\n The Smithsonian wants to keep Discovery as flightlike as possible because it is the vehicle of record. So they want most everything reinstalled when possible. They can’t have everything because there are some things that as an engineering community NASA wants to keep. There are a couple reasons for this. One is potential reuse of the hardware. A good example of this is the main engines. We think that we’ll have use for those main engines in the future. So instead of reinstalling flight engines on the vehicles we’re going to go with what we call a replica Shuttle main engine. It’s a real nozzle, a nozzle that has flown before or was used in testing. But it is what we call on a nozzle on a stick. It doesn’t have the turbopump and all those things that makes the SSMEs so special. The powerhead is not there.\\n\\n From the outside you will see the nozzles. It will look like a real SSME. But if you were to look into the aft of the vehicle, it’s going to look very different because of the powerhead being replaced by an adapter. So even though Smithsonian would love to have the flight engines installed, they’re not going to be able to because we’re going to reuse them.\\n\\n The other rationale for keeping some things is for testing. This is hardware that has flown in space. In Discovery’s case 39 flights for some components that have never been changed out. So we want to do some research—I call it science projects—with avionics boxes, valves, wiring, and so forth. So basically engineering came up with this wish list of, “Here’s all these things we’d really like to have,” and then the program reviewed it. Based on cost and schedule the program agreed to keep some components.\\n\\n So we still have that type of work to do with Discovery. In the meantime Endeavour has landed. It’s in an OPF, and it’s still in its down mission processing phase. We have removed the forward reaction control system and it is down at the HMF being processed. We’re getting close to being ready to pull the OMS pods. That’ll happen at the end of the month. We actually have a hazardous operation which we call a SCAPE job this weekend to do cross-feed drains, which allows us to be in a configuration to remove the pods. That’s not something we would do in a nominal processing flow unless we discovered a problem with one of the OMS pods.\\n\\n So we have been processing Endeavour and Discovery at the same time. Well, you saw us roll Discovery out of the OPF. The reason for that is when Atlantis lands we’ve got to get it into an OPF right away, because it’s got to immediately go into its down mission processing. There are certain aspects of down mission processing that have to happen right away, so we had to make room for Atlantis. We’re no longer using OPF-3. We turned that over to the Center to be used for a future customer and we’re in the process of decommissioning it. We’ll be done with that work at the end of this month, and then a new customer will take it over. I don’t have details as to who that new customer is, but we evaluated releasing OPF-3 and got approval from the Space Shuttle Program to process the decommissioning of the Orbiters through two OPF bays. We’re just going to have to have one sitting in the Vehicle Assembly Building until Discovery leaves for Washington DC.\\n\\n As soon as we can finish the upfront work on Endeavour, being the pods and the FRCS, since that’s critical path, we’ll back out Endeavour, bring Discovery into Bay 1, and then let Endeavour sit in the VAB for a while. Discovery will be the first one to ferry out of here, because Smithsonian is basically ready to get it as soon as we can get it to them.\\n\\n It’ll be somewhat of a shell game moving vehicles around based on priorities. I also have the new challenge of dealing with contracts, which I mentioned in the beginning. I’ve never had to worry about contracts or budget. We’re still in negotiations with United Space Alliance on what it’s going to take to do this work. So that’s the other half of my job, evaluating contracts and the proposals from USA. We give our government estimate, and then procurement takes it from there. USA proposed more than we as the government think they need to complete the job, so the negotiation phase is in progress now to get us to a point where we both agree on the amount of money required.\\n\\n The other hard thing about the current situation is we just don’t have a lot of money. This isn’t a situation where we can say, “Okay however much it costs we’ll have the money.” No. Here’s this bucket of money that we have, so we have got to figure out a way to make it work. The size of the workforce will go down. It’ll take about just under ten months to get Discovery ready.\\n\\n That’s a good baseline for the other vehicles. So unless I have additional requirements, or unless we can’t resolve the contract issue and we get delayed, it’ll take each one about ten months of work to be ready to leave KSC.\\n\\n Although we are processing three vehicles, I only have one team. It’s going to be one very small team to cover all three Orbiters. So the challenge for me then as the flow director is basically moving that team from vehicle to vehicle depending on what the priority is. Right now the priority is Endeavour so that’s where the team is focusing. As soon as Atlantis lands, Atlantis is the priority. Will I still have some work I can do on Endeavour? Yes, but the majority of the people will be on Atlantis. Then we bring Discovery back. Once we get through down mission processing on Atlantis then I can focus everybody back on Discovery. It’ll be a constant moving of resources. Besides just the vehicles, that same workforce is going to be responsible for decommissioning facilities as well.\\n\\n For example, I will also have to share resources to decommission Pad A. We’re done using Pad A so it’s important that we get it off our books as soon as we can. It’s going to be a new situation for those of us that have been working the Shuttle Program and only had to worry about processing vehicles.\\n\\n To be clear, my primary focus is the vehicles. There are other people looking at facilities, but now I’m going to have to go lobby in some cases to make sure I’m getting the resources I need for the vehicles. Because it could turn out that based on cost it makes more sense to shut down Pad A as soon as possible so then you might want to move everybody over there. Well, what does that then do to the vehicle schedule? Does that hurt me or is that okay based on when the display sites are ready to take the vehicles? A lot of coordination will be required. It’s been great. I’ve really enjoyed it already. Dealing with the display sites, we’ve had some site visits, talking with them.\\n\\n They’re so excited to get the vehicles. Granted there are a lot of people that were very disappointed that they didn’t get a vehicle. I can completely understand that. Once again, this is something beyond our control, so we’ll just deal with it and go do the best job that we can. It’s a complicated operation, the offload of the vehicles once we get them to the display sites. It’s about 30 days of work with probably about 45 people. We’re still negotiating how the work is going to lay out. Thirty days to get everything there and set up. We have this big wind restraint system that connects to the Orbiter. We will have two heavy-lift cranes holding on to a sling lifting up the Orbiter. If there are strong winds it’s like a sail. It can catch the wind, and prevent us from being able perform the off-load.\\n\\n To mitigate this we have the wind restraint system that is made up of four masts with taglines that connect to the sling. The system controls the lateral movement while we’re lifting the Orbiter up, moving the 747 out, and then setting the Orbiter down on the ground." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you’re not going to be using the mate/demate device." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We will use it here to onload, but we won’t have one at the display site. So you’re exactly right. The wind restraint system takes the place of the mate/demate device. It’s actually a system that was designed to be used at TAL [Transatlantic Landing] sites. If we ever landed somewhere where we didn’t have a mate/demate device, that’s how we would have offloaded. Fortunately we’ve never had that happen. So we actually just did a dry run recently to make sure we knew how to properly operate the equipment. This stuff hadn’t been out of boxes since we used it in ’85 when we took Enterprise to Smithsonian. That was the last time we used it. Before that it was used when they were offloading Enterprise in Mobile, Alabama, for the World’s Fair. That was ’84 I think.\\n\\n Yes, all this equipment has been in a box. Procedures have been on the shelf. We’ve been going through the process of dusting them off. We set it all up out at the SLF and made sure we understood how it works. We are still updating procedures and improving hardware. Neat work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Cool job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I’m very fortunate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We have just a few minutes. Anything else that you want to add? As we talked we really hit on most of the questions that I had thought about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think the only other thing—you had asked me about being in the Launch Control Center and then maybe Mission Control during the missions. I wanted to tell you a little bit about that. For a flow director, on-orbit time is really our only down time when you think about it, because at that point we’ve handed control over to Houston. At that point all we are doing is preparing for the vehicle to come back and start over again. So that approximately two-week timeframe for me is usually when I take some time off.\\n\\n We do have the opportunity—I know Angie Brewer who’s the Atlantis flow director is there now—to go and be in Mission Control and support the mission. There’s no requirement to do that. It’s more of a perk, “Hey you’ve got us this far, would you like to come see how things work here.” Because I spent six months in Houston I’ve never gone like Angie has done this time, because I was fortunate enough to spend time in Mission Control when I was there.\\n\\n For me like I said, that’s usually when I try to catch up on some stuff at home before the mad pace starts again. We’re of course paying attention to what’s happening on orbit. The main thing is—if we weren’t at the end of the program—the main thing I would be concerned about is if there is anything that’s not working. Hopefully that’s not going to impact their mission. Hopefully they can still accomplish their mission goals. If it’s not working what are we going to have to do here to get it working again? So we’re already thinking about that if they have an issue.\\n\\n Like recently I think it was [STS]-131 we had the Ku-band failure. We were saying to ourselves, “What? It worked fine here; what’s going on?” When something like that happens we start thinking what kind of retest are we going to have to do. Are we going to have to change out an avionics box or the whole Ku-band antenna? Do we have a spare? So we’ve already started that work prior to landing. We’re interested in hearing how things are going so we can determine what it is going to mean for turnaround for the next launch. Luckily 133 was a phenomenal mission.\\n\\n I was so happy that the crew had no issues to work in regards to the Orbiter. Being on the runway after landing, that’s one of the perks of being a flow director. We get to greet the crew when they get off the vehicle. For 133, each one of them, when they got off, said Discovery worked phenomenally. They had no concerns, no issues. Of course I’m lucky enough to hear it directly from them, and I get to go back to my team and pass the message along.\\n\\n That’s what we were hoping for. Of any of the missions, we wanted the last one to be where the crew didn’t have to worry about Discovery at all. They’ve got work to do. Plus it’s their last one with Discovery. It’s their last one as an astronaut on an Orbiter. They get some free time up there. We wanted their free time to be free time, not, “Oh we have to go work on a Ku-band antenna” or something like that.\\n\\n So I was just so happy that every single one of them made a point of saying gosh it was just perfect. What a way to go out, that’s exactly what we wanted, was to end on such a positive note. We’re not done yet because we’ve got to get to Smithsonian. That’s a big job, but I’m confident that we will stay focused and do just as good of a job on that as we have in processing Discovery over all these years. I’m really impressed with the team, especially because it’s a hard time for the contractors. We’ve got a lot of people that are leaving that don’t want to leave, and they don’t have a choice. That’s tough. A lot of my very good friends have already left or are leaving next week.\\n\\n So to remain focused through that, the folks that are still here. Even the ones that are staying don’t feel real good about it. If their buddy is leaving and they’re getting to stay, they don’t feel great about that. I’ve never been through a mass layoff like this before. It has definitely been a hard time. But I think that United Space Alliance has done a great job of trying to help the workforce find new jobs and not be left out in the cold.\\n\\n USA didn’t have to do a lot of the things they did, but they did those things because that’s how much they care about the workforce. Even talking to USA employees that are leaving, they’ll say the same thing. “Gosh, we’ve been given every opportunity to find new jobs. All the assistance we could even ask for. Do we want to leave? No. But if we have to at least they’ve made it as painless as they could.” I think that says a lot, not just about USA, but also about NASA because I’m sure we have influenced that as well. This wasn’t USA’s decision for the program to end. I think that we as an entire agency team have handled it very well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’re going from a team of how many down to how many?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Normally our full processing team is about 1,000 people at Kennedy for a whole processing flow. I don’t yet know how many people I’m going to have on my transition and retirement team, because of the contract negotiations, but it will be much less. I’m guessing probably 60 or so. So it’s going to be a real small team. There’s good and bad about that. It’ll make us closer. When you have a smaller team it’s easier to be closer, but that means a lot of work for people that normally we would have spread out over multiple people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tough time, but I’m glad to hear you’re positive about it. Exciting though too to have the Orbiters in different parts of the country where people can see them up close." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. That’s going to be great. It’s going to be neat to go back after it’s all done and they’re in their final display configuration and see them there, because that’s going to be several years down the road before they have them displayed how they want them in their permanent facilities. I think everybody will enjoy doing that. From what I can tell, all the display sites, all four of them, are really conscientious of representing the team. Not just, “Here’s this incredible vehicle here that flew in space. But here’s the team behind it, and what they did to make all this happen.”\\n\\n So I’ve been very happy to hear them already talking about that. Asking for ideas of how they better convey that to the public. It’s not just about the hardware, there’s a heart and soul behind it. That’s the workforce that has cared for these vehicles for all these years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are you working moving Enterprise up to New York?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. When we drop off Discovery we will pick up Enterprise and immediately go up to JFK [John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, New York]. Actually it’ll take us about a month before we can get all the equipment and people there to offload. So the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum [New York, New York] will have to keep Enterprise in a hangar on top of the 747 for about a month. We’re refining schedules right now, but it will be about a month before we can actually offload. Then once we offload they’re going to store Enterprise at JFK until they have their permanent facility ready. So they’ll have it at JFK for a couple years, but they’re setting it up so that they can bring the public in to view it there.\\n\\n That was a stipulation that NASA gave them. You need to, within a year, be able to display these vehicles. You can’t take three years before the public can see them. All of the display sites are having to abide by that. California is the same way. They’re going to have a temporary display site. As well as the Visitors Complex here at Kennedy. So all of the sites except for the Smithsonian are going through the process of having a temporary site while they’re working on their main site." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I look forward to seeing them. Thanks very much for your time today. Appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie S. Stilson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00771", + "metadata": { + "category": "Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project 1998 - 1999", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Shuttle-Mir/KitmacherGH/kitmachergh.htm", + "original_file_name": "KitmacherGH_6-29-98.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Shuttle-Mir/KitmacherGH/KitmacherGH_6-29-98.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "location_date": "Cape Canaveral, Florida – 29 June 1998" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright", + "Paul Rollins" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Gary H. Kitmacher" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's June 29, 1998, and we're speaking with Gary Kitmacher as part of the Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project. I'm Rebecca Wright, with Paul Rollins and Carol Butler.\\n\\n Good morning, and thank you for making time to visit with us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you for picking me to participate in this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We have learned that you have a long history with this project, and we'd like to begin that this morning by your telling us what are your roles and responsibilities with the Phase One Project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I've been involved in it for quite a while, and went through a kind of evolution of roles. Probably my most notable role was as the project manager for the Priroda. The Priroda was the last big module of the Mir Space Station that was launched to the Mir and carried a good deal of the U.S. science and systems hardware that supported our activities on the Mir.\\n\\n But actually, before that I had some other roles. I was involved, even before the NASA-Mir Program got started, with the Spacehab Project. In fact, I was one of the advocates and one of the people urging Spacehab on to develop the larger double-module configuration and urged them to make a play to get involved in the Mir Project as that was getting started. So I had some involvement there.\\n\\n After my role in the Priroda activity, once the Priroda was launched, I became sort of a project management specialist or support person for the Mir Operations and Integration Working Group, which was one of the working groups, the joint working groups, set up in the program office, in this particular case to put hardware on board the Mir and to make sure that we knew how to operate it, the crew was trained to properly operate it. I set up much of the configuration management and program management associated with that, so I've gone through several periods.\\n\\n My involvement, I guess, in the Mir Project started back in about 1991-92 with Spacehab. I was one of three NASA participants in the Spacehab Project. We had a very small office. The Spacehab was a commercial module that was developed to support U.S. science on board the Space Shuttle. My particular role initially was as the utilization planning manager, and, as such, I was looking for different kinds of missions and activities for the Spacehab to support, [such as] science experiments and other kinds of activities.\\n\\n I had previously been involved with the Space Station Program, was involved in some of the design of the Space Station, the International Space Station, at that time Space Station Freedom. One of the things that I was urging the Spacehab people to do was to develop a larger cargo-carrying configuration of their module and to support the Space Station as a logistics transport carrier.\\n\\n When the NASA-Mir Program came along and we needed to look for a way to support the Mir activities, it was sort of a natural fit, except that at that time the Spacehab double module did not yet exist. I worked with the Spacehab people in terms of identifying what it would take to create a larger module. I advocated the development of that module with NASA Headquarters and with the Space Station Program, which became eventually the NASA-Mir Program, and so we developed that module into a larger cargo carrier and ultimately was involved in the selection of the Spacehab over some other competing systems like the Space Lab because of cost and because of the logistics of being able to support a very quick turnaround.\\n\\n As my activities with the Spacehab people were winding down, I was actually the mission manager on STS-60 for NASA, and STS-60 was the first of the NASA-Mir flights, although that was not a docking mission; it was just a rendezvous and a fly-around.\\n\\n [Correction by Kitmacher: STS-60 was the first US/Russian flight with Sergei Krikalev as a crewmember; STS-63, which I also had some involvement with, was the first Mir rendezvous mission].\\n\\n But as that activity was winding down, in my office, which was the science payloads management office, the opportunity came up to lead the Priroda effort. There was already an ongoing effort to put science hardware on board the Spektr module. The Spektr, which was one of the modules of the Mir station, carried much of the life sciences hardware. The Priroda was a little bit different, in that the Priroda module was going to support a great deal of Earth observation activity and, from the science aspect, from the NASA science aspect, was going to support microgravity experiments, which is really more of my forte than the life sciences. I had not had too much to do previously with the life sciences activity.\\n\\n I was actually not the first person that they had gone after to do that. There was someone else in the office, but she had a family and obligations and felt that lots of trips to Russia was probably not going to be something she was going to be able to support. So I jumped at the opportunity to go after the Priroda. I'm one of these space nuts who sort of grew up with the program and had been following very actively the Russian program as well as the U.S. program for much of my life, I guess. So I thought it was a great opportunity to see how the other program worked and how it had evolved. And it was not as though they had a lot of people available to do it.\\n\\n So when I jumped at the opportunity, they gladly said, \"Sure. Go ahead and take it on.\" That was in, I think, March of '94. As I say, I'd been peripherally involved earlier in 1993 with some of the other kinds of activities, and I was involved through my Spacehab experience with flying many of the payloads that we ultimately were going to put on Mir in terms of developing the integration plans, integration documentation.\\n\\n When we actually went ahead and started about early '94, the first goal was what was it we were going to fly. We had a group of people called the Tactical Planning Group, and they were busy looking at what kinds of payloads, what kinds of science could you do on Mir and could actually be supported and that we could also support by having the hardware ready in time. So they had put together some lists of payloads, but there really was nothing finite as far as exactly what it was that we would fly.\\n\\n I went out and I negotiated with many different centers. Priroda was a little bit different from the Spektr experience, in that the payloads that we were flying were coming from all over. We had Canadian payloads. We had U.S. microgravity payloads that were really being built by the European Space Agency or their contractors. We had payloads coming from many of the different NASA centers, from Lewis Research Center, Ames Research Center, [also Jet Propulsion laboratory] as well as some from here at JSC [Johnson Space Center]. So I was involved in going out and identifying what were the payloads that could be readied in time, that were far enough along already, and that would provide a viable program. So I sort of picked up where the tactical planning group had left off.\\n\\n We identified a candidate list of payloads. Most of them ultimately made it on to the mission, although there were a couple that fell off because they either did not have the contractual support available or they could not make the kinds of schedules that we were outlining. And so most of the payloads were there and were ready to be integrated. So that was the first identification of what it was that we were going to fly.\\n\\n Then we came back to work with the Russians and identify what was it that was required in order to support these payloads. This led me to get to work on some of the systems that we were going to need on board the Mir. Most of the payloads that we were flying were offshoots of things that had been flown previously on the Space Shuttle or on the Spacehab, and, as such, they were designed to fit into a standard locker, a mid-deck, Shuttle mid-deck locker. We had to design in the interfaces inside the Russian module to support these, the mechanical interfaces, the electrical interfaces, the data interfaces.\\n\\n I had a very small group of people within the Lockheed-Martin Company, and some of them were just about fresh out of school, very talented, though, and we decided that because of the nature of the payloads we were going to fly, we needed to get these mid-deck types of lockers. We went out to the people who had built lockers previously, the Space Shuttle people or the Spacehab people, and we said, \"We need a bunch of lockers, probably on the order of fifty or seventy-five lockers,\" and we needed them within six to nine months. They came back and they said, well, they'd only built enough lockers to support the Space Shuttle or to support the Spacehab. If they were going to go out and design and build or even just build the same things as what they already had, it would take two to three years to arrange the contracts and subcontracts and put in place the mechanisms necessary to build these things and supply them to us, and it was going to cost big bundles of dollars.\\n\\n So I took some of these young folks from Lockheed-Martin, and they were trained engineers and designers, and they got the right kinds of machines, and they went to work physically designing the hardware. The lockers were designed to be common interface with the Space Shuttle lockers and with the Spacehab lockers, but they were unique because, since we knew we were supporting active payloads, they had to have some unique features, such as removable panels, removable fronts, so that you could provide different kinds of feed-throughs, you could provide air flow to them. And they went to work physically designing that.\\n\\n The electrical system, there was a standard utility outlet capability in the Space Shuttle. We knew most of our payloads were coming either on a Space Shuttle or on a Spacehab which had similar kinds of interfaces. So we took the Shuttle designs, we modified them to a configuration somewhat unique to the Mir, we worked out the interface details with the Russians so that we knew how to integrate our system, but our system became the interface between the U.S. experiment hardware and systems hardware to the Russian hardware. Again we went out, we designed the systems, and we set to work building them.\\n\\n We were on a very rapid template. We had to turn around so quickly that physically constructing the hardware was a major problem. We just could not turn them out quickly enough. The Spektr folks had gone into some trouble because the Russians were looking to launch Spektr, and when the hardware could not be turned around quickly enough, they came back to NASA and said, \"You're delaying the program.\" I was under strict orders from my management at the time, both within the space and life sciences directorate and also the NASA-Mir Program, that no matter what I did, I could not delay the launch of the Priroda. So we had to go out and figure out ways to design and build, test the hardware quickly enough so that we were not going to serve any kind of delay on the Russians.\\n\\n For instance, in the case of the lockers, we negotiated both locally here at the JSC, here at Johnson Space Center, to have some of the lockers built here, but they could not physically turn them out quickly enough, so we went to an outside contractor, and they were contracted to turn out some also. So my design people turned out the [CAD/CAM] tapes and for our design. We fed them to both of these groups. The hardware was coming off the assembly line, and I was physically examining this stuff. Within a matter of just about two or three months we were actually getting these things turned around and ready for testing and ultimately for shipment to Russia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It must have been an exciting time for these new people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. Some of them had never really worked on a real space effort before and especially to see them go themselves from the design; first we'd defined what the requirements were, but then the design and the manufacture and construction and then figure out the logistics in shipping to physically get them to Russia and then go over there and actually integrate the hardware into the Russian module. Keep in mind, most of the projects at NASA, you never see that kind of end-to-end activity, and usually it's over a much longer time period. Here we were going within about a year, year and a half, from just beginning to understand what it was we were going to fly through the design, development, construction, actual fabrication, tests, and then do the actual integration for flight. So it was very exciting, and we made use of capabilities here at the Johnson Space Center that probably had not been made use of for decades, but it was here, and when we needed it, it really came about.\\n\\n And a lot of the talent, not only of the young designers but also of folks here to be able to turn around flight crew equipment that quickly was really amazing in terms of how it could be turned on so rapidly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How much did you know about Priroda, or how did you find out more about Priroda so that you knew when you were building this it was going to work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Within the first couple of months of actually getting involved in the program, I went off on my first trip to Russia. I worked partly through the science organization, but probably more so through the actual vehicle design and development organization.\\n\\n The Priroda module is one of four of modules on the Mir that are somewhat similar in the basic shape and form and systems. The other module, which is the base block or the core module, is somewhat different, in that it has much of the more integral environmental control and power distribution systems. But these other modules are primarily utilization modules. They're built to support experiments and other kinds of activities.\\n\\n We worked with the designers and developers for the mechanical systems, for the electrical, for the data, for the thermal control, for the environmental control in terms of identifying what it was we could fly. Now, early on in the program, we were under severe constraints, primarily from a standpoint of mass. That was set up through the contract that we had with the Russians. Actually we were limited by the amount of mass we could carry on both the Spektr and the Priroda modules, and the Spektr folks had been indicating that they were going to fly a lot more hardware than actually they had ultimately flown. So we were reduced down in terms of how much we could actually put on board. If we had it to do over again, we probably would have flown more capability and carried more things up.\\n\\n But we outlined the plans to carry roughly about thirty lockers' worth of equipment. We figured out where the best place was to situate the different kinds of hardware. We had about three major facilities, a Microgravity Glovebox, a Microgravity Isolation Mount, and the Biotechnology System. None of these systems was quite developed at the time we started on the effort. We did identify what the requirements were for physical placement for astronaut use, and many of the systems that we developed were actually defined around what those pieces of equipment were. In addition, we had a number of other experiments, on the order of about a dozen additional experiments that were going to make use of different systems, at least at the time of the launch of the Priroda, and then later on those systems would be changed out for other kinds of payloads.\\n\\n So that's how we got involved. We started working with the Russians designers in terms of identifying how to tap into the power supply, what were the appropriate places to put the different kinds of structural attachments, where was the best place physically to set the equipment up so that the astronauts could make use of them. The Russian modules are pretty confining in interior volume, and on top of that, as we found out, as more equipment is brought in, it becomes even more confining. So it was somewhat strategically located in order to be able to have the astronauts support the activities. So we worked out those kinds of details.\\n\\n The young engineers that I had working for me, and when I say young, most of them were in maybe their late twenties, on average-but they were working hand in hand with the Russians in terms of identifying what were those kinds of interfaces that needed to be defined, how best to build the equipment. It was somewhat interesting to watch this activity going on, this sort of group dynamics, because while most of our folks were in their late twenties, most of the Russians had been around since the beginning of the program. So the people they were dealing with truly were experts on the various systems they dealt in and had been doing this kind of work for thirty years or more, some of them since the early Vostoks and Voskhods, and so they were, on average, in their early to late fifties and some of them even into their seventies. Some of the individuals that were introduced and their roles in past programs was pretty amazing to me, that these folks were still around and still playing an active role and, at the same time, that in many cases the Russians did not have the young people that we had been developing. So it was a little bit of a cultural shock to get these two different groups together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did it work out well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. There was no - very little problem, very little issue. Interestingly, one of the things that we decided early on that was required were a set of standards and specifications and working processes for how to do this work. The Spektr folks were under such time pressure that they were not able to get a lot of that in place. So while part of the work that we were doing was physically designing and developing, testing and integrating the hardware, another major thrust of my activity was in terms of defining what are the working processes; what kind of documentation was required; what kind of safety inspection was required; what kind of interface testing; how do we actually document what we were flying; how do you build a manifest and provide the right kinds of details so that the people on the other side, whether they be in the engineering or in the operations arenas, would know what kind of hardware they're dealing with.\\n\\n We worked out a system of documents, the USR-001 that actually defined the working process and the kinds of documentation that would be required; the USR-002 that defined the technical details to be supplied for every piece of hardware; the USR-004, which was the manifesting detail of what kind of hardware to be flown. So in many cases we were defining the process and the information required at the same time we were defining the hardware. Eventually, later on, it got caught up so that we provided, I think, a useful guide for the people who were coming later, for the hardware that was coming up on the later Shuttle missions, but early on, a lot of that was undefined and we were just trying to establish what the working processes were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You didn't rewrite the book; you just ended up writing the book." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Pretty much we wrote the book. The Russians actually had drafted some pieces. Based on the Spektr experience, we had some knowledge of what kinds of information they were looking for, but the problems early in the program was that you had several dozen different Russians looking at a couple dozen different U.S. experiments, and every time you got a group of these people together, exactly what the information content and documents were, were a little bit different. So we sort of systematized and standardized the approach so that we didn't do a lot of duplication of the documentation and of the information exchange, so that we provided the kind of information that was required, either for hardware integration and operation, for training of the crew members, for ground support. So it was a systemized approach, I guess.\\n\\n Eventually we got that turned into a system of databases and a management control system so that we knew what to ask of the people who wanted to fly hardware, so that we could actually develop those tools up front and know whether, in fact, it was a good move to put certain kinds of hardware on board. But early on, we were kind of searching. We weren't sure actually what it was we needed to know before we even got the program started." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's curious. On the candidate list of what becomes a criteria, how do you start sorting when it's the first time you've ever done this and it's the first time you've ever put these things together? What were you looking for to make those decisions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we were looking for, number one, did the hardware even exist. Now, in many cases, what we ultimately flew were offshoots of things that had been flown previously on the Shuttle, on the Space Lab, on the Spacehab. Some of them had had serious developmental problems, so we needed to have some comfort that when we got to the point of being able to integrate and verify this hardware on board the vehicle, that it was going to be ready to be integrated and verified.\\n\\n Some of the problems had to do with physical size. For instance, we looked at putting exercise equipment, ergometers and rotating chairs and things like that, and in some cases we physically could not manage that because of the constrained environment inside the vehicle. Some of it had to do with funding; was the funding and the contracts in place to support the development and the flight of this equipment? In some cases it rules out experiments. They were good experiments, they had a flight history, but we could not get the contracts in place quickly enough. Ultimately, it became something of a choice, because since we were limited in terms of the resources on board the Russian vehicle, we had to cut out some things. It turned out that there was nothing cut out early on that probably would have made it anyway, so it all worked out in the end. But the dozen or so payloads that we picked up front were able to be fit and could be developed in the time that it took and the organizations were able to support that activity on the schedule that we needed the activity to be supported." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Will you give us some examples of some of the ones that made it that seem to be significant to the project?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably the most interesting experience was a biotechnology system, BTS, as it was called. It had flown a couple of different Shuttle flights in various forms, prototype forms, and it had had some serious developmental problems: contamination of the working fluids; the hardware not functioning properly. But it was a very high-priority payload. It was something that had been briefed to Congress several times.\\n\\n It was well known within the program as being on the cutting edge of technology development, in this case to support the growth of different kinds of organisms, and it was tied to a lot of research, cancer research, how different kinds of organisms could grow and could develop in microgravity. In fact, even though there had been some developmental problems, there was also some major successes with it, in that they could show that certain kinds of organisms would grow to much larger sizes and the organism's structure, the molecular structure, for instance, was far better defined when it grew in microgravity than when you try to do the same kind of activity here on the ground. So it was a very high-priority payload.\\n\\n We determined that the system that was in development for the Space Station could be adapted to put inside of the Mir vehicle. It would take about a half dozen lockers' worth of volume, but that could all be done. Some repackaging was necessary because we would have to fit it into the Space Shuttle for launch and return and then transfer it over to the Mir. There were some constraints because the people who were working on the development of the system did not really understand, in many cases, what it was going to take to provide the information and develop the operations and training information necessary to get it integrated onto the Mir. So along with the development of a lot of the supporting hardware, my group was sent in to help them out in terms of identifying how to document and define exactly what it was they were going to do. So we spent several weeks with the biotechnology system people identifying their configuration, their interfaces, the kinds of documentation they would have to develop in order to support flying on board the Mir. Ultimately it was successful.\\n\\n I even had a chance to personally load some of the experiment. It flew in the forward end of the module, four lockers' worth of equipment all adjacent to one another, a couple of additional lockers of stored equipment, and provided a lot of activity on board the Mir. Sometimes we had developmental problems and problems with the fluids going through the system, and the astronauts involved had to do a lot of hands-on work in order to make it all function properly, but I think in the end it was a very beneficial activity. It not only showed us some new things scientifically, but it also proved out a lot of the systems ultimately to be flown on the Space Station.\\n\\n That was the biggest effort here at JSC, the biggest single development activity as far as a payload goes. We had a payload called the Microgravity Glovebox. It was an offshoot of glove boxes that we had flown on the Spacehab and the SpaceLab in the mid-deck, either previously or subsequently, but it was a little bit unique in terms of its design for the Mir. It was more of a facility. It wasn't a payload in and of itself, but we could use it for supporting a whole variety of experiments. We had experiments in how fluids would shift and move in microgravity, experiments in how flames would burn and propagate in microgravity. We also used it as a system for supporting other kinds of activities, loading of different kinds of cells and vials and whatnot.\\n\\n It was probably the largest and single most complex piece of equipment that we had to get ready, and its development schedule was pacing the schedule for the program, so we were working hand in hand with the people, in this case from Marshall Space Flight Center, so that as they were developing the system we were getting the information necessary in order to provide back to the Russians and also look at it ourselves from a safety standpoint and from an integration standpoint. And again, it was a system that was developed specifically so that we could prove out that system's development and configuration for systems to be flown now on the International Space Station.\\n\\n The microgravity isolation mount, or MIM, was another one of these major systems. It was developed by the Canadian Space Agency, and it served as a platform to isolate experiments from the vibrations of the spacecraft, which are a regular occurrence. It provided sort of a floating platform that was magnetically isolated from the rest of the vehicle, and it was also a system that the development of it was pacing the development of our own integration efforts on Mir. So we were working hand in hand with the Canadians to make certain that we understood the interfaces to our systems, data management system, and we were also developing several of the payloads that ultimately flew and used this platform. So it was another interesting experience, because now we had a three-way Canadian-U.S.-Russian set of interfaces that we were working between.\\n\\n From an engineering standpoint, it wasn't a real problem. I mean, the engineering was relatively straightforward, but we had to communicate between not only those three parties, but Lewis Research Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, all had payloads that were flying on this. We needed to verify that the software all worked together, that everyone understood how the other uses were going to be affected. On top of that, we had a system that could not be simulated here on the Earth, so we were developing something that, we hoped, once we got it into orbit, could actually be modified in terms of its operational factors and parameters so that it could, in fact, provide the kind of microgravity isolation that it was meant to. And in the end, it worked out, I think, quite well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us where were you when it went up into orbit and then about watching it become part of Mir?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Over the course of my involvement in the activity, I made, I think, about fifteen or sixteen trips to Russia. Three of those trips I went from Moscow or the vicinity of Moscow also over to Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. My activity also involved lots of trips to the various other NASA centers and also to Canada on developing all of the payload hardware.\\n\\n It went through in different phases. The early part of the program, the first several trips, were involved in just defining how was it that we were going to set up this program. We had different payloads on different development schedules, different systems on different development schedules, and we needed to work out a manageable plan for how all this was going to come together. We couldn't be dealing with a dozen different payloads and a half dozen different systems all on their own individual schedules. So we worked out with the Russians almost a series of relays of, \"Okay. You come here. We're going to do this set of hardware in terms of reviewing it, developing the documentation, doing the inspections of the hardware, doing certain kinds of interface verification. Once we've finished with that group of hardware, we're going to take that hardware; we're going to go over to Russia; we're going to mount it into either the Priroda module, which was still on the ground, or in some of their simulators. We're going to verify how it all operates together. When we're done with that, we're all going to go back to the U.S., we're going to do the next set of hardware.\"\\n\\n There was a set of relays, probably about five or six of those. Generally, the earlier systems, things like the lockers were first. The little bit more complex systems came along later, and the last of the complex systems, which included the BTS and the microgravity isolation mount and the glove box, those were the last things. In fact, some of the final integration and verification work was going on as we were loading it into the module at Baikonur Cosmodrome. So it was back and forth. Sometimes it was very interesting, we would ride with our Russian colleagues on the same airplanes going back and forth to the same set of activities.\\n\\n Sometimes we were hindered in what we were doing, mainly by the logistics and shipping and customs processes. Here in the U.S., although we had a small shipping department and physically they'd prepare some of the hardware for moving back and forth, generally they went through a big NASA shipping organization that we had very little insight into initially, and we assumed that they'd take these various packages, locker-sized packages, wrap them up, ship them over, we'd go over to Russia, and someone would deliver these to us. It turned out, for instance, that our shipping group was taking ten or twenty of these lockers and putting them in a crate maybe ten feet long and six or eight feet high, and weighing probably several hundred, if not thousands of pounds.\\n\\n We would go over to Russia, and I know I made the rounds to the various custom houses several times, and this stuff was stuck in Customs, partly because we hadn't filed the appropriate paperwork, partly because there was no equipment in Russia to physically be able to load these things. The Russians had to go out and lease buses-they were actually hearses that they used over there, and they would have to get a half dozen or ten people together in order to be able to lift these crates, load them in there. They'd deliver them over to a facility that we were using for a lot of our early testing, a facility called the NITS, which was actually a schoolhouse that was offsite from the main Energia facilities.\\n\\n Then I had to bring my Americans along, and we all had to work together with the Russians in order to get this stuff off the hearse, drag it down the halls. I mean, there was nothing in the way of big power equipment or anything. We were all manually handling that. I had to go back to the shipping people and say, \"You can't ship it that way. It needs to be in much smaller pieces.\"\\n\\n We learned what was the appropriate documentation that needed to be filed, what was the appropriate process, when was it best to ship big things over separately, when was it best to carry it as hand luggage and take it through the airport Customs. I made many trips going into the Customs with my Russian counterparts in order to recover hardware. I learned what were the regulations and laws on tariffs and taxes and what it was that we had to pay. In some cases we had to get involvement even by people as high up as the Vice President to say, \"Certain kinds of hardware are excluded so you don't have to pay any kinds of taxes,\" and we'd have to bring those letters along and show the Russian Customs officials.\\n\\n It was a long involved affair, and it was interesting because we were working overtime in building the hardware and then in many cases the hardware was stuck in Customs for weeks or even months at a time before we could get it out and bring it over to do the work we needed to do with it. But it was interesting, because I got to see a lot of things that the typical American tourist, I'm sure, never envisioned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You saw it from the inside out, or literally had hands on every part of it, didn't you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. And then when we actually went to Baikonur-,I made three trips there. I was there leading a group. The initial trip to Baikonur, we had about a dozen Americans [and 1 Canadian] altogether, most of them representing a given payload or a given set of payloads. My job was pretty much to choreograph the whole activity, together with my Russian counterparts, make sure we knew what we were doing, that we had a test plan in place, and that once we got there we actually were following that plan and that we were actually verifying everything that we needed to verify in terms of the physical interfaces, the functional interfaces.\\n\\n The last big integration trip, I just brought a couple of people with me, and we did the final physical loading of the hardware, the final physical stowage for flight, some of the larger systems that we had previously been verified but which we did not want to leave in the module because they were still working on other things inside the module. Then the last trip, I physically got to go over and see the launch of the Proton booster and see the vehicle take off into orbit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it like sending your child away to college?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. The Proton is a [totally] liquid-fueled vehicle, unlike the shuttle, and because of that it takes off very, very slowly, much more slowly than I had anticipated. I'd seen some other purely liquid fuel vehicles, like Saturns, take off, but it had been many years. So first thing when you see the launch take place, they really don't give you a countdown, and here you are, you've been on the road, in this case for days, traveling from the U.S. to Moscow, Moscow to Baikonur. You're not even sure exactly what time it really is. You're standing around with a bunch of people, high-ranking Russians, other Europeans, and other internationals who also have hardware on board, and everyone's standing around saying, \"Well, it's about time,\" and all of a sudden they say, \"And it's launching.\" So you're looking at it.\\n\\n The particular day of the Priroda launch was a very, very windy day, low overcast clouds, and we were commenting to ourselves, \"Boy, we would never launch a Shuttle in this kind of weather.\" You're quite a ways away from the vehicle, probably on the order of a few miles, because it's using propellants that are fairly dangerous so that if anything were to happen, they don't want you too close. The vehicle takes off, and there's antenna posts in the ground not too far from you, so you have something to judge the vertical rise of the vehicle. Well, first what you see is ignition and flame and then a tremendous amount of smoke, and we saw nothing happen. I thought, \"Oh, my God, that's the end, and we've spent all this time and effort and money and it probably blew up on the ground.\"\\n\\n Then all of a sudden you see something rising very slowly out of this huge cloud, this rocket. Now, there's a little low overcast cloud layer, as I mentioned, probably about a mile up or so, and it took a full minute for that vehicle to get from the launch pad up to the clouds where it disappeared, so it was averaging sixty miles an hour, not very fast. And because of the wind, and you could see it shifting between these antenna rods and you could literally see the vehicle moving off to the side as it was rising vertically. So it was quite a dramatic launch. So I was there for that.\\n\\n Subsequent to the launch, I went back to the control center and participated in some of the activities associated with the docking and the crew first opening up the hatch. I had previously been involved with the crew, both Shannon Lucid, who was the first U.S. astronaut to get to work in the Priroda, and then later with Norm [Norman] Thagard [Kitmacher’s correction: Thagard was on Mir prior to Priroda’s launch.] [John Blaha] and I spent more time training and [he’s] who really spent much more time making use of the Priroda and its systems. I was involved with some of their training. I got them into the module and reviewed some of the locations of equipment.\\n\\n In fact, on that same trip as the launch and working in the control center, spent some time with [John] Blaha, making sure that he knew exactly how everything was laid out, where cables were routed, where we had specifically put holes to route different kinds of utility lines, what kinds of things were located in each individual locker. So he was fully aware of exactly what was on board.\\n\\n Shannon, who had to go in first, was not really meant to use a lot of the equipment inside there, but still had to be somewhat familiar. There were some problems with the launch that Shannon had to face, which I was delivering information back home. For instance, the Priroda, as it was launched and as it's operating even today, carries none of its own power solar cells for power. So in order to power this from the time that it was launched for the few days until it got to the Mir and docked to the Mir, the Russians used batteries, and it turned out they were batteries that were developed for use on their nuclear submarines but had never been used in space before. And so there was a lot of concern back here about what were these things, what kind of development and test program, and there was especially a lot of concern because one or more of the batteries exploded and burned up after the time of launch and before it got there. So, for instance, when they opened up the hatch on board, the crew was very concerned that they smelled this acidic and toxic material and they smelled the fire. So I was providing some of that information.\\n\\n One of the things that I had gotten, either on my own or from the Russians, was the photographs of the vehicle as it was closed out and prepared for flight, and that was something that was being widely used and evaluated both here and in Russia, as it turns out. So I was involved pretty much with all aspects and was right there on top of the hardware throughout its preparation phase, and until it got into orbit probably was the American with the most time in the spaceship. It was interesting from that standpoint also.\\n\\n It was interesting to see how the Russians actually developed and built the spacecraft. Priroda had actually been built probably a decade earlier, had not been launched, either for financial or other kinds of technical reasons, and so when it was being prepared for the NASA-Mir program, they were doing some major retrofits. So we got to see a lot of that activity going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you compared it to something on Earth, how big is it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's probably the size of a bus. That's probably the closest thing that we would be familiar with. But it's very, very loaded with equipment. There's interior walls versus the exterior. There's things behind these interior walls. Part of what we were learning was exactly how the Russians loaded it all up with different kinds of equipment and tested all that equipment out.\\n\\n It turned out, as we ultimately flew the different Mir missions, that we were running out of the inside space. We initially had this agreement with the Russians based on a contract that we had with them, that we were limited in terms of how much mass could be placed in the vehicle. But, really, the mass limit was not something that was a big concern, because once you get it into orbit, the mass is really of very little consequence.\\n\\n I negotiated with the Russians as part of the Phase One-C extension contract that we could put a lot more equipment on board the Mir and that we were not limited by mass, but that we were going to be limited in terms of volume, and therefore we had had to develop a joint team to take a look at the overall vehicle and what kinds of equipment we were trying to put on board and make certain it was all going to fit.\\n\\n Priroda went up very clean early on, but as we kept bringing up more and more stuff on board our Shuttles, which, by the way, provided a logistics capability that the Russians had never really had previously, the Priroda, as well as the other modules, were really filling up with things, because it turned out they could not get rid of-and also were not of a mind to get rid of things as quickly as we were bringing things up. So the space, the volume inside, was becoming very constraining. If we had to do it over again, we would have provided more lockers, more housing for payloads, much more electrical capability.\\n\\n The way we designed it, it was very good in terms of it provided a good, direct interface. You could slide something out of the Shuttle or out of the Spacehab, bring it over, plug it right in. The astronauts thought that was great. It was how a spaceship needed to be designed. But we just didn't have enough. We were just trying to do an awful lot, make use of the crew's time, bring up a lot more payloads, and we just needed more storage space, more electrical power. We kept building more extension cables and Ys in the extension cables so that you could power additional hardware off the same outlets that we had limited inside the vehicle. So we just needed more." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On an average day, how much time does an astronaut or cosmonaut spend in Priroda?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it varied some. Early on, for the first year of so of activity, of course, we had two main modules, the Spektr and the Priroda, that were being used for U.S. science. The Spektr was primarily the life sciences module. The Priroda was primarily the microgravity module. And in addition to that, the Spektr, for Shannon Lucid and for John Blaha, was really their living quarters, so they were sleeping and doing other kinds of things in there also. The base block module was being used for food and exercise and so on, and then the Krystall and the Kvant and Kvant-2 modules were being used in a limited extent for other kinds of science.\\n\\n But by and large, the predominant activity was going on in Spektr and Priroda. That was especially true as we were getting from Blaha into Mike Foale and the later missions. They were doing a lot more of the microgravity, so they were probably spending a good portion of their working day inside the Priroda, probably four to six hours a day.\\n\\n When the Spektr collision occurred early in 1997, June of 1997, that eliminated one whole main U.S. module. We had to launch on some of the subsequent Shuttle missions equipment to replace some of the equipment that had been lost in Spektr, mainly to support the life sciences research, and so now we were really spending a lot of our time inside the Priroda versus the other locations because most of our equipment was now inside the Priroda. So probably on the order of eight to ten hours, maybe more, or their working time was being spent in the one module. So it was quite a bit of time that they were using it, and a lot of valuable research going on with the different facilities and other kinds of experiments that we had put in there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There was quite a number of accomplishments you've mentioned, I mean, getting something off the ground that had never been off the ground and designing it all. So personally you must have seen a lot of growth for what you have been able to do just in these last few years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I was able, as I say, to work with the Spacehab folks, which was a new system, and develop that into a greater capability for logistics and cargo support going back and forth to a Space Station. We worked out new methods with the Shuttle for how to operate. Previously, of course, the Shuttle was the system, so everything was tied together in terms of, you know, you launch, and minute by minute you plan out what the astronauts are going to do, how the equipment is going to operate.\\n\\n Here we were going somewhere and so we had to interface with a whole different set of people, different set of activities, different vehicle. So that was another major portion, was working out how to interface across cultures and across different kinds of systems, the module activity itself, in terms of the design and the development, making certain that everyone was in agreement of the kinds of technical engineering information that needed to be exchanged, what kinds of hardware inspections needed to be conducted before you felt that the hardware not only was safe to fly, but all the interfaces had been verified, working out what those processes were and documenting those.\\n\\n Then, ultimately, I came back to the U.S. after the Priroda activity, and we needed to be a little bit more specific in terms of working out the organizational details between the people who were doing the hardware integration on Spacehab and Shuttle, the people who were responsible for integrating the hardware on board the Mir, the people who were responsible for training the astronauts, the people who were responsible for supporting and managing the on-orbit operations. So my later role came back to be a project management role in terms of working out those interfaces, working out what the databases were to support documenting the information, not only on the hardware, on the physical parameters and the interfaces, but on crew time and procedures and how to operate that equipment and also how to transmit the equipment, both to the NASA-Mir Program office and to the Shuttle Program. So that was how I was involved later on. So I saw a lot of development and personal growth all through that, and we developed a lot of the processes that I'm hoping will be made use of as we get into the next stage of activity, which is the International Space Station.\\n\\n Initially we saw a great deal of reluctance on the part of the Phase Two Space Station people to make use of our ideas and our hardware, but as time has gone on and we've gotten closer to flight, they have adopted a lot of what we developed. We developed a logistics system, the actual system of bags and stowage and so on that was used throughout NASA-Mir. The Phase Two Program is now going and developing those bags a little bit further for their own uses. The actual hardware lockers, power utilities, a lot of that is now being adapted for use on board the Space Station. The actual payloads that we developed and used in Phase One are, in many cases, going to be flown now on board the International Space Station. And a lot of the working processes, I think, are being used as a guide for how to set it up for the Space Station, also." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You told us about watching the launch. Are there other times that are very significant to you as good memories of this program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as I mentioned at the outset, I had been watching the Russian program since I was about seven or eight years old, so I'd spent the better part of three decades trying to learn the history. One of the things that I really enjoyed and made sure that my people had the opportunity to see was the Russian program. We didn't have a lot of time for tours and things like that, but what time we did have we made sure that we visited a lot of the Russian facilities and installations. We met many of the cosmonauts and designers, and we saw a lot of the actual hardware, hardware from their successful programs like the Vostok and the Voskhod, Soyuz, Mir, hardware and how they developed some of the unsuccessful things also, their moon-landing effort that was never successful. The Buran Space Shuttle was something that, especially when we went to Baikonur, we had lots of time to examine close up. The Energia rocket. So that was one of the most enjoyable parts, actually working with the people who had been party to and developed a lot of this, and learning a lot more about how they operated was really a great experience.\\n\\n Also, having the opportunity to work with, on the U.S. side, people from a lot of the different areas. Previously I had been primarily involved in payload integration, and here I was getting involved much more in systems development, safety verification, operations of the hardware on orbit, training of the astronauts. So those were things that I'd never previously had an opportunity to do and had a lot more opportunity on this program.\\n\\n As I mentioned also earlier, on other programs you usually see a small segment over a lengthy period of time, and so you become specialized in that one area. On this program we got to see almost the end-to-end development, from picking or designing the hardware that we needed to fly in the first place all the way to operating it on orbit and in some cases returning it back to the Earth and seeing what the results were. So we got to see the end to end and over a very short period of time. The time pressure in doing these things, especially early in the program, was tremendous, but it was very positive because you could see the results of your work very quickly, something which in some other programs you never have the opportunity to see and do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did the language difference affect your business?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In my case it didn't really have too much of a hindrance. Generally we always had interpreters and translators. The biggest problem was physically to take all these documents that we were working out the outlines and processes and physically turning them around into the Russian language. But generally speaking, it wasn't a real problem to deal with the Russians at a personal level. Partly because I had had a couple of years of Russian language training, albeit a long time ago in college and in high school, so I knew a little bit of the Russian. I could understand much more than I could speak, and a fair number of the Russians could speak English fairly well. Between that and having the interpreters and translators, it generally did not pose too much of a problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess a common language was the success of the Priroda." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right. I mean, much of the work that we were doing was either scientific or technical in nature, and once you understood what the goals of the activity were, it was very easy to communicate. Once you understood and outlined the details that needed to be provided, it was very easy because people were driving towards the same set of information to be exchanged." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Several years ago you jumped at the chance to do this. Now that you've been through it, would you be jumping at the chance again?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I really thoroughly enjoyed all of the activity, and given the opportunity, I'd certainly do it over again. I'd kind of like to get more involved in some of what we're developing now for the International Space Station, especially with the Russians or some of the international partners. My biggest concern is that so many of the people, not only myself, but so many of us who went through this, some of them are going on to work on the station, but in many cases they are not, and that's probably my biggest concern, is that we make sure that we take what we have learned through this program and transmit it to the International Station Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was a real-time lesson in real-time activity. Everything was moving at the same time and everybody was learning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were a lot of things that we learned that are very different, from a standpoint of operating on a long-duration mission something like a Space Station versus operating on a Shuttle. For instance, on the Shuttle, you know, you plan things out to the minute. On the station it's much more important that the crew, for instance, have a sort of generic knowledge of the facilities, the operation, and that you provide some guidance, that you not try to dictate down to the minute all of their activity.\\n\\n It's very different in terms of the power system. On the Shuttle you have a finite amount of power that can be used over the duration of a one- to two-week mission. On the Mir Space Station, with the solar cells, the total amount of energy that you have to use is not too significant. It's much more important how much power you're using at any given point in time, but the power is a renewable energy source, so you can do the experiments over much longer periods of time and use a much larger amount of energy.\\n\\n In terms of the internal volume, you know, managing the volume and the physical configuration of the Shuttle is relatively simple because you have to launch within a certain amount of volume. You're not adding a lot of hardware to it, so you package it for launch, you use it on orbit, you put it back pretty much in its place for the return. Trying to keep track of the hardware, whether it be the inventory management or the management of the stowage volumes, is very different on board the Space Station, because what goes up in one configuration doesn't need to stay there. Some of the things, like stowage cushions that you use for packing, is just wasted volume once you get up there, so you need to get rid of it. You need to keep close track so that either during normal operations the astronauts know where to go looking for things, because there are constantly changes of crew and handovers. Or, in the case of something off nominal like the Spektr collision, you need to know very quickly what kind of equipment you lost and how you're going to use other kinds of systems to fill in those kinds of gaps. So those were some of the things we learned that, quite honestly, at the outset we had never even thought about. So it was as much a cultural shock as it was a technical shock to learn some of those things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While we've been visiting, we've had two models sitting here that, I understand, you put together. Is this a hobby, or is this something you did for the program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This is a hobby.\n\nThis is one of the ways in which I got involved in the space program back when I was seven or eight years old, and I've continued that, although I don't build them too frequently anymore. But the Mir and the Shuttle were something that a lot of people in the program wanted these, and they were not generally accessible. So I went out and took bids on them and built a whole bunch for folks. So they're now disseminated all across the working force of the program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did you design it, or was there a package out there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There's a couple of different packages, but I had to get it all together, and a lot of it did not have the kinds of detail to show the real equipment. So I had to do a lot of detail work and adding things, and also for different kinds of open houses and visitations, people really didn't have much of an idea of what the insides of the modules looked like. We had technical drawings and so on, so the cutaway of the module really shows a little bit better what the inside of the vehicle is like and what kinds of things we were working with. But that was also something that was generally not available and was very useful as an educational tool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It helps. And how many of the Shuttle-Mirs are -" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I built about a dozen and a half of the Shuttles with the Mirs, and everybody from the program manager on down to different folks in the operations and the astronauts, those are pretty widely distributed right now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Speaking of the astronauts, I notice you have an astronaut pin, not the pin but the pin that the astronauts give, a Snoopy. Tell us how you got that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Shannon Lucid gave me the silver Snoopy pin. That's probably the most significant recognition that I received from the program. That's something that you hear about, and especially on the NASA side not too many people received them, but I thought that was pretty nice, and I guess that was for my work with the Priroda. As I say, the experience of actually doing the job was really the best thing to come out of it, but the recognition on the side, like the silver Snoopy and some of the awards, were also nice. I didn't turn anything down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you. I was going to ask Paul and Carol if they have any questions for you. Do you have anything you'd like to ask?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul Rollins", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I want to move the camera so I have a better backdrop and have you explain from one end of the module to the other." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. All right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul Rollins", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There's twelve Shuttle-Mirs, but only one of the -" + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This one here? Yes, just one of those. At one time I was going to do Spektr also, but I never quite got to finish that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You must have had other things to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I have a wife and four kids that, when I'm not enjoying myself in the space program.\\n\\n These are a couple of models, I guess, that represent some of the work that I had involvement in the program. This is the Mir and the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle has a double hab module that was flown on, I think, about five of the missions, and then a single hab was flown on a couple of other missions.\\n\\n The Priroda module, which was where I had my most involvement, is the module that's towards the upper end here. One of the most notable features is this large radar antenna, and it was used for some of the observations of the Earth. \"Priroda\" means \"nature,\" and it was primarily an Earth-observation module, although as we used it, it was principally for microgravity experiments.\\n\\n Some of the other modules here include the Spektr, which was the module used primarily for the U.S. life sciences research prior to being hit about a year ago by one of the Progress spacecraft, and that put it out of commission from the standpoint of internal use, although the solar cells are still being used to supply power.\\n\\n The Soyuz and the Progress spaceships are used to carry crew and cargo back and forth. The base block, which is the long module down the centerline of this station, is where the astronauts' and cosmonauts' primary living and exercise quarters are, I guess, versus the science modules that are arranged in this cruciform arrangement.\\n\\n This is the Priroda module. I had spent some time in the Spektr module prior to its launch, mainly taking a look at what my colleagues were doing in terms of integration and development, but most of my time was spent in the Priroda. Of course, I'd never been in any of the other modules of the Mir because they were all in orbit by the time I got involved in the program.\\n\\n The blue represents everything that we launched inside of the Priroda or, in some cases, things that went up subsequently. The module has what we call the front end or the nose end. This was actually the part that was at the top of the rocket at launch, and then the hatch end, which was actually down at the bottom of the rocket at launch. As you go in through the hatch, you have a large open area. This is mainly to accommodate the hatch and some of the systems that are arranged inside of there, the power and the systems for blowing air through the module, for distributing air.\\n\\n Then you have an area at the bottom, on the floor of the spacecraft, which is a large stowage compartment that we have actually designed in. They're the same size and shape as lockers, but we didn't provide lockers. The Russians built a storage cabinet, and that's what is here and back here.\\n\\n Overhead we launched something called the \"enhanced dynamic load system,\" EDLS. It was a system that made use of different kinds of handholds and footholds and touchpads so that you could see how much force was actually being applied and distributed through different parts of the structure. It was in the overhead. Although initially during the launch the Russians had put a different system up in this vicinity called the Toru, and it was the actual steering system. Since Priroda was launched up without any people on board, they had an automated guidance and control system, and it was the steering system that drove the Priroda to the rest of the Mir station and ultimately docked it there.\\n\\n Beyond that is a series of standard interface racks, SIA racks. These are very similar to the racks that are used predominantly in the Space Station. On Priroda we launched an experiment called the \"GASMAP,\" which was a metabolic analyzer that was used in conjunction with some of the exercise equipment. The astronaut would breathe into it, and this system could detect what kinds of gases he was exhaling and what kinds of things were being dissolved in his system. That GASMAP experiment was moved from the Priroda into the Spektr after Priroda was launched, and ultimately the GASMAP was lost in the Spektr module.\\n\\n Then the next area is the Microgravity Glovebox. This is a facility used for viewing contained experiments where you have to be protected from things going on, whether it be dangerous fluids or flames, that we were burning things to see how flames propagated. It had interfaces to the data system, and it had its own data system for recording photography and different kinds of information. It was a prototype for things flown on Shuttle and also to be flown on the Space Station.\\n\\n The MIM is in this vicinity, opposite of where the gas map was. This is a Microgravity Isolation Mount. We had to build a special compartment that would totally house and surround the MIM, but which would allow the astronauts to do different kinds of work and also allow different kinds of experiments to be placed on this floating surface. This is an electromagnetically floating surface.\\n\\n We had power panels in the front end of the module, and that allowed us to bring in equipment from the Shuttle and very quickly power it up. We had a lot of stowage that ultimately got arranged along the floor and the sides of the module, and that's what is in the center section.\\n\\n The other big section that we had for the integration of experiments was the nose end, opposite from the hatch. We had an arrangement on the floor of a series of four lockers, and this is where the biotechnology system was placed. It had an integral set of gas supply modules, electronics control modules, and experiment modules. The experiment modules were changed out several times over the course of the NASA-Mir Program so that we flew different kinds of experiments and used this one facility. On the ceiling we had a series of about nine different lockers, and it was used for stowing a lot of the equipment that was being used for all these different facilities. On the aft wall, we had a mounting location. Originally it was designed to mount some refrigerator devices, although ultimately we wound up using it to mount different kinds of glove boxes and facilities for other kinds of biological and plant-growth experiments.\\n\\n So that's mostly what was inside the Priroda, either at launch, and as time went on, as I mentioned, we were launching up lots more hardware inside the Shuttle, and it was becoming very full, especially after the collision with the Spektr, when one of the Progress vehicles went off and hit several places here, including on the Spektr module. The Priroda became the main U.S. working space on board the Mir. So that's where the astronauts were spending a lot of their time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul Rollins", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's a relatively new piece of gear. I guess it's not feasible to use that on the station?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it's interesting that you bring that up. The Priroda, of course, has only been up there for a couple of years now. A lot of us thought that, you know, because it was so new, it would probably be really useful to put it on board the station as a Russian science module and yet have a lot of U.S. territory inside, because it's our systems, and the systems are directly interchangeable and common with the Shuttle and with the logistics carriers for the Shuttle. So that's one of the bigger disappointments, is that Priroda had a relatively short life before they're going to dispose of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul Rollins", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because I'd heard that there were discussions of trying to use some of the stuff from the Mir on the station, but -" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As a matter of fact, we brought back a lot of the equipment that had been on board the Mir back on the Shuttle, and now we're talking about putting some of that equipment on the Russian modules or other modules of the International Space Station. The microgravity glove box, for instance, was something we brought down on STS-89. It's perfectly suitable to fly again and a lot of capability for doing different kinds of experiments and a lot of research work. So we're talking about putting it on either the FGB or the service module or maybe one of the later modules. BTS, and GASMAP are going to required in order to do some of the life science, exercise and medical experiments on board.\\n\\n So there's a lot of the equipment that we physically did carry. Some of it's available. Some of it we'd have to go to back-up equipment. The MIM, for instance, we decided to leave on board the Mir because the Russians are continuing to use it, and there's no longer any capability to return it to the Earth. But there's a back-up MIM, so we'd be able to put it on board the Russian vehicle.\\n\\n A lot of the actual systems that we developed for use on the Priroda, the lockers, the SIA racks, the power supplies, those things are all things that are potentially useful. In fact, we have a study going on right now to put some of those even on the first launches of either the FGB or the service module, try to put an early science capability on the International Space Station. This came up a few weeks ago, and some agreements that were reached between the highest levels of the government agencies, they said, \"We'd like to provide some useful work for our astronauts and cosmonauts to do early on.\" They said, \"What kinds of equipment do we have available to put on board early, and it has to be available now?\"\\n\\n We built not only a full set of flight hardware, but we built a full set of training hardware. Most of the training hardware was pretty much flight-like or flight standard. And we had a fair amount of back-up hardware. So it's all available and just waiting for someone to make use of it. And then some of the equipment the Space Station people are now taking, modifying it a little bit - lockers and the stowage bags, the logistics system -- and are intending to use offshoots of it. So we did a fairly good job, and now they're developing it for their own purposes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Paul Rollins", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you very much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gary H. Kitmacher", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "assembly-oral-histories-00007", + "metadata": { + "interviewee_name": "Lee Gladwin", + "description": "Lee Gladwin worked at the National Archives from 1990–2009. He spent his entire NARA career working in the Center for Electronic Records, later renamed the Electronic and Special Media Records Services Division (NWME). In his oral history, Gladwin talks about his career at the National Archives working with electronic records. Gladwin passed away on November 27, 2022.", + "file_url": "https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/gladwin-lee-transcript.docx.pdf", + "collection_url": "https://www.archives.gov/about/history/assembly-oral-histories", + "original_file_name": "gladwin-lee-transcript.docx.pdf", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04 22:29:46", + "date": "November 16, 2009" + }, + "broad_source": "nara", + "collection": "assembly_oral_histories", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "John LeGloahec" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Lee Gladwin" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why don’t you state your name and your dates of service to the National Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Lee A. Gladwin, and began work on March 12, 1990, downtown branch [the National Archives Building in Washington, DC]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you retired in January?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "January 31, 2009" + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me a little bit about your educational background and how the degree(s) that you pursued prepared you for a job at the National Archives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was a history major primarily, I thought I was going to go into teaching but then changed my mind. One of the things I always thought would be nice would be to work at the National Archives and possibly the Library of Congress. That goes back to my junior high school days when I was doing research on various topics. I was overwhelmed by the amount of things I could find either here or there. Anyway my major would be history with a minor in English for example. My major period’s concentrations were Colonial American period up through the reconstruction. The topical area was social, cultural, and election history, and I have done virtually nothing with any of them but one article in the Journal of Social History on tobacco and sex, which you’re not old enough to read yet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You actually started as a professor; you started out teaching before you came to the National Archives right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I started out as an assistant professor of history at what is now Shenandoah University in Winchester." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did that prepare you for your career at the National Archives, or did it not prepare you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, none of the things I did actually prepared me for work as an archivist specifically. What my association was always doing research and I did a great deal here beginning early-to-mid 1950’s and continuing up all the way to graduate school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After leaving Shenandoah University, you went to work for University Research Corporation, SAIC, and On-Line Computers. What was that work like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was one of my career changes. After finishing up with what was then Shenandoah College, I needed something else. I applied at every place I could think of to get a job and I was at that time working on my doctorate. I noticed that the nature of the letters coming back to me after I put in an application there was a change of tone. When I first applied right after getting my masters they would simply say, “We don’t have anything, sorry buddy.” After I’ve gotten my doctorate and I started getting all these refusals coming back, they were sounding much more sympathetic. At that time there were a million of us all wanting work and no one with a chance of getting anything so I kind of switched majors to curriculum design and instruction with a minor in history. I went to Carnegie Mellon and pursued a Doctorate of Arts degree and that let to quite a change in direction. There was a wizard upstairs I was told I should get to know because I was interested at that time, on how historians solve problems. I went upstairs and met the wizard, who turned out to be Herbert A. Simon. He was a genius in a number of fields and revolutionized the field of economics and was one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. That got me involved in studying the mind, its operations and the possibility of applying what I learned to design courses of instruction with what I was doing at SAIC, University Research Corporation, Oakland Research and some others. The only piece of that that actually translated here was something I eventually called Impex (Imports & Exports). We have a number of files, probably a lot more now than when I first made their acquaintance. They were the import and export files and they covered I guess 20 years or so. When I first came here in 1990 we used to get regular calls for these files and I dreaded them, I just dreaded them. Diane Palmer was the archivist who worked with them and she very kindly made sort of a grid [a chart] that made it a little easier to look at each one of the files in the series and in sequence. There would be sometimes duplicate pages, say 1991 duplicated from pages 1990 and later on that might not occur but you leave some other instructions. So what I did was I wrote a program in George Washington basic, which took her charts, changed them to rules and added a front end to it. It took the information from the archivist or whoever was preparing a price quotation you could type that in and would use the rules against information that I digitized from Diane’s charts. Within maybe less than a minute you had a printout of a quotation that would ordinarily have taken hours and I don’t think the program survived. I think it was one of the things that got thrown out when I left. They changed Imports and Exports several years ago so what I designed, while good for the earlier 20 years or so…" + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They found a different way of doing it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it wouldn’t work now. You would have to do a massive job of revising all the lines of basic code. I doubt that anybody is going to take the time to do it. I went and worked over a year and a half on it. When we had people coming in from the sense classes I’d hand them the Palmer method and they would do it, I’d just go through and print it and run the program and they would just [makes gesture] chins would hit the floor." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You spent your entire career at the National Archives working with electronic records—was there a reason for that? Did you not think about changing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I was definitely thinking about it. I tried at least twice before once after graduating from college but there was nothing. There was a job freeze in the federal government you couldn’t get in anywhere. Then I tried after the masters degree to get in, couldn’t get in at all, another job freeze. So after the doctorate, while I was still working as a beltway bandit and at one point I wound up temping. Some of the temp jobs where good working as an office assistant and very careful when I filled out my applications for these jobs. I never mentioned the masters or the doctorate otherwise they wouldn’t believe you. The first time I tried it I went to Woolden Shoe store in Winchester, Virginia and I made the mistake of saying I have the masters, I have the doctorate. You know I meant the doctorate very proud of it and the owner of the store said, “Well these cash registers are offly complicated I just don’t think you can handle them.” I said, “I can handle an IBM tops A” but I didn’t get the job. So later on, I was working as a temp at the place I was working at before I came here was some sort of an insurance clearing house where people would send in their claims and you took the written claim and you entered it into a database that was basically the job. What they didn’t tell me when the temp agency assigned me to it, was that it was a sweatshop. You came in, you reported exactly on the dot whenever you were supposed to. They had the desks and the chairs evenly spaced all of them exactly six feet apart so you wouldn’t talk to anybody else. The only thing you could see was straight ahead other than your screen and the wall and the clock, a very prominent clock, [points]. At ten o’clock, a fifteen minute break we all got up and we tramped over to the machines and got a drink or some crackers, “oops, your 5 minutes are up back to your desks” and so we did. They monitored out keystrokes and then they let you know, you’re going too slow, or if you speed it up of course you’re going faster but you’re making more mistakes. Lunch hour was the same thing, “everybody up, you have half an hour for lunch” and they’d walk you over to this place where you could eat and they would walk you back. I couldn’t take it. Somehow I happened to come across an ad that there was a job here. It could have been anything if it would have been a janitorial job I would have jumped at it, it wasn’t that bad it was just archivist. So I applied and Tom Brown told me later, because I couldn’t believe he wanted me for it, that he looked for someone with a historical background and a background in computers and I had both." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The rest is history.\n\nWhat was your impression of the National Archives when you first joined the staff?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was actually quite different from coming to do research. I know that when I came here anything had to be better than what I had been doing. I was kind of looking forward to being able to on my lunch hours time off going down to the reading room and doing research, I never gave that up. When I came here…I think the only thing that struck me was a little bit of awe, the sense of history. We were on floor twenty which you could look up and there were these old sliding windows that didn’t slide anymore and they were still carved with tarps. They were blacked out, the original blacked out windows dating from WWII so I felt safe from German bombers. Other than Tom, the first person I met was Peggy Adams and about that time she was made head of reference and she got her GS-13 about the same time. We were in this huge room, well to me it was this huge room, with a very high ceiling and she had one desk to my right side and I was to her left. She was trying to make…with a compact computer an old yellow looking thing. Then she said when she first came there she didn’t even have that. They gave her a typewriter. The first thing she typed on it was her request for a computer. So she had that and occasionally on occasions I got to use that, later they brought in some leading edge and they scattered those around. There was something else they used, I can’t think of the name of it, a special hardware system for doing things like SOS…but I can’t remember now what they called it. I was her first employee coming in March and did it all. I wrote the letters, answered a lot of phone calls, I remember one of the first phone calls I received was from a girl. Usually phone calls wouldn’t come in until about 8 o’clock or so. They gave you a chance to get some coffee and wake up before you got this call. It must have been 7 am, I just had gotten in and at that point I was barely finding my way up the elevator and to the office. This woman said “I’m (whatever her name was and she was military in the Navy), and we got all these punch cards and we were just wondering if you would like to have them.” I said boy did you get the wrong person but I listened to her and I took down lots of notes and I said “Well I can’t do anything with this but I’ll give them to someone who can.” I gave the information over to Tom and it turned out that was the naval group China punch cards that were worth a great deal later on. I had no idea in the world what they were then I figured, I better tell somebody." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were really instrumental in developing many of the pieces that facilitated the work for the center for electronic archives. If you can talk about sort of those pieces and how they worked, how they functioned and how it improved the work of the archives staff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We have to look back at how we were doing things in 1990. We did not have computers so if you did something you used the typewriter. We were creating price quotations as I remember then we used a typewriter. Letters of course had to be done like that and we did get lots and lots of letters to be done. Eventually of course we got the computer and that speeded that up considerably. We did have I can’t remember what we called our first system for tracking, what we call NOIS now. I think originally it might have been called XRA; Peggy can probably give that one to you right away. We had a system that worked of a main frame out of John Hopkins University. It was written in, I can’t think of the language, B2, I think, but anyway it needed to be expanded quite a bit. We started it off with just a few fields like the person’s name; we tracked that for somebody who was ordering something. We’d get their name and what they ordered, maybe something else, but there weren’t that many items. As the program became better and I started taking courses out there, Peggy would say “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do this to it, could we have this broken down by months, by physical year.” Well that always meant that you added a couple more fields and then she would get another idea further, “let’s track something more.” Eventually the order form NOIS just, well you’ve seen it now I don’t know how many fields there are but my gosh, there are far more than we ever contemplated and that made life somewhat easier for us but the other thing that we did not have but that we were tracking all the time were the interactions with the public whether they were telephone calls. We got a lot of phone calls in those days there was no email, later on of course email. We had a lot of people that wrote to us, actually sent letters with stamps. We would take these cover sheets that we still use, they are lined but it’s an actual sheet itself. You pulled it and that was the cover and then you put down the date and whatever information and then you stapled it together with anything else a copy of the letter you just sent. They were off lee hard to find afterward. We usually kept three stacks all shuffled in the wall. You kept your present month, and then the two months before that and when you were done, we sorted then by record group. They would be bundled with these huge rubber bands. Peggy would go through them and find things that needed correction and she’d flag them and they’d come back. You had to redo them all over again. Once she was done with it, they went to Tom and within a few days he’d come walking downstairs with this huge mass with little post-its all over it. Then they’d get together and they would talk about it and maybe you’d had to do something over again. A lot of time went into that, but sometimes the hardest part for us other than having to rewrite a lot of stuff was finding something. Somebody would call right and say “I talked to you a month ago about…” whatever it was. So you went back and started digging through, and sometimes they really were right maybe it was the previous week, or a few weeks before but sometimes they were way wrong. You would go back to the current month, and to previous months then you took a walk up a couple of flights to the vault which was nothing as big as the vaults you have here. If you hung a rubber duck in there it would be appropriate, like something of a butcher shop. It was cold, it was uncomfortable. We had cardboard boxes that were loaded with these stacks of notes. On the outside of the box would be written June through October say and then you would go there and pick out the months just before the ones downstairs. You would go through, go through one by one by one. I can remember spending like two days going through, looking and it turned out the one case I really remember well, the guy was off by a year. So I kept pleading with Peggy, can we put together a program like NOIS to track these things and finally just about the time we came out here [College Park] something possessed her to agree that we needed a tracking system. So to NOIS we then created NALDS that was the other main program we had just before we came out here or very soon afterwards. NOIS we sort of inherited and then augmented greatly but NALDS was starting to run right around 1994 about the time we came here. Now the next thing, and one of the kinds of requests we had was always for casualty records. At that time we didn’t have AAD, we didn’t have any of the systems I later developed. What we had were the printouts. So what you did was you took these huge printouts that were very cumbersome to deal with and you went to the Xerox machine and you xeroxed the record that you wanted of course you got some others with it as well but you wanted to have the whole record. Then you sat down with the code book on one side and a sheet of paper on the other, and you went through and you knew how long each field was and you’d count off and you’d separate the fields. Then you would look at whatever was in that field and you went back to the documentation and you wrote it out, and eventually you’d type up something. You capture the information in each field and type it out with a typewriter, or later on with a computer. What I did, after I got out of here, was create a system that preceded AAD. We loaded all those casualty databases, POW databases into AAD. Well first we put it into excel because that is the easiest way that I know to edit them, then I would import it into AAD and from there we could search them, sort them, and print them out right away. The forms looked very much like the forms we were filling out by hand or manual methods and that really speeded things up for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned obviously Tom and Peggy, who else was working in the records staff with you? I mean how many people were undertaking this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The next person to arrive was Ted Hull. He came in I think it was December of 1990 and that was to save us. Trying to remember, Dawn, I can’t think of Dawn’s last name. He found virtually his own replacement, somebody he knew Gary Stern. I’m trying to remember, her last name was Lau but I can’t think of her first name. But there was pretty much a regular turnover from downtown until we came up here. Gene Kidde is another one who came downtown and then moved out here. Anita Pintado came out here with us, I think they were the only ones that came out and followed us out here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Switching gears for a minute, you’ve already mentioned your love for research and things like that. One of the things I think you’re known for is your extensive work and your published articles on World War II code breaking. Let’s take some time and talk about that and how that came to be with you and how you pursued that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hmmm... I think I always had an interest in World War II records probably beginning with the naval group China things and working to develop these database systems for them. I was interested in code breaking, there were so many codes involved with some of these records we didn’t really know or understand a lot of them we just didn’t know. I would wind up going down to modern military records for a lot of the paper documentation that wasn’t transferred with the records. Some of what we had was just flat wrong for tags and we had been given the documentation for 1947 which was well after the war, what we needed was what was actually printed during the war. I was able to find that with the help of the people in modern military and finding a lot of things that no one else had. Part of it was working with at least in the WWII POW files; it was much more difficult to figure out. They had these codes but there weren’t code books for all of them, so that meant a whole lot of additional work. Such as going on various websites finding people for whom you had a code and you would read something about them “oh, a T-2 it was some sort of transport a glider. That meant that you had to go through the WWII POW database and just update all the T-3’s you could find. So I visited a lot of WWII POW websites and wherever they had that information then I would go back and update our records. That’s were an awful lot of the codes came from in the cases where we didn’t already have something here. That was a whale of a lot of fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s comment about the efforts that were required to bring the Center for Electronic Records from downtown out here (College Park) and what was your role in getting everything out here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn’t get everything out here. No, we were all just responsible for packing up pretty much our own things. We might have been asked to get some other things ready. I know everybody was living with boxes and packing them up and writing on the boxes their name and where they wanted these things to go when they got here. That was pretty exciting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The Center was one of the first divisions to come out here, is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we came in February now there were a few that come the previous fall. They were maybe administrative offices but we were one of the first of the divisions. I went back a few weeks or possibly a few months after we moved here I went back and visited old number 20 and just gagged. The dust was so thick. I always wondered why I was coughing and sneezing and I realized when I got back there we had all that 75 years of accumulated dust everywhere." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Crazy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You people do not know how much you have here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s a great building." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes, and you have space and it’s clean. What I did here prepared me for what I do now, which is now I’m actually being an archivist not just reference. The Leesburg United Methodist Church decided that they wanted a historian and it turned out that most of what I do is the work of an archivist; organizing all their materials and preparing accessioning lists and then…marking the location of things. In some cases things are underneath display cases, some of them are still in the church office, some of them are in people’s homes. They were told they needed to get things out of there during the war, and then when we started meeting again afterwards everyone was supposed to bring it back. Well, they didn't. That was the War Between the States and we’re still waiting for some of these people to bring them back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You sort of have been touching on various pieces of it, but let’s sort of take it from beginning to end, the reference function in the center for electronic records. From when something comes in, in whatever format it comes in what happens to it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Now it’s very systematic but when I started the letters or whatever would come in I think Peggy simply would dole them out. Of course when I was here it was simple, she would look at it, open the envelope and hand it to me. We got quite a bit of mail; occasionally we got telephone calls but not quite so many. Of course there were no emails at all. We would get the request; a lot of them would be for casualty records and especially around Memorial Day. We’d get people who were putting up memorials to Vietnamese, the casualties of the Vietnam War. We had these state lists and we would take one or two of those, or whatever they requested, put it in an envelope and mail it out. It would be similar if they were calling and you would take down the information and say “ok we would get back to you, as soon as we can find an answer for you.” The basic nature of reference has not changed its how it’s done. They now meet, well when I was here they were meeting every afternoon at 2:30 and divvying up whatever came in whether it was phone calls, letter. Which is a better way, you weren’t just having all that stuff dumped on you whether you really wanted to handle it or not, you just had to. Of course the other part of it is that everything is so mechanized. We didn’t have AAD but once that came along it changed everything. For me having NALDS and NOIS as systems to work with make everything so much easier to track and to produce statistics sometimes even for things that were requested by the trust fund. We were the only place in the building where they could go and say, “We have our records showing what was ordered, the amounts, the costs, can you match these up with your system?” Well we could. Nobody else could do that because nobody else was tracking things the way we were or maybe still do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Before we move on, we’ve been using a couple of acronyms and for the benefit of the transcriptionist lets them straight. NALDS does that stand for anything?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "“N” always stood for whatever we were at the time (…) the National Archives would be “N.” I’m forgetting what the rest of it stood for. It was the acronym of the department." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The other one is NOIS?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "NOIS that would be the National Archives or NWME Order Information System; NALDS would be the NWME Automatic Log Data Sheet but “N” stood for all kinds of things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let's talk about your professional involvement and as this is an interview for the National Archives Assembly, did you have any roles in the Assembly? Any impact?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you a member of the Assembly?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I was a member but I was never an officer or anything like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about any other professional organizations? Did you get out and spread the word?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The one organization that I belonged to was one for cryptic analysts, cryptographers I’m trying to remember, I can’t remember now. Their main publication was crypto logia and I wrote quite a few articles for them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had several articles in there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I got kind of pushed into it by John Taylor who kept telling me, “oh, you got to look at some of this stuff over here.” It had just come in and was being processed, and usually an archivist is just processing something, no one looks at it. John kept saying, “go over there, and take a look at this stuff.” So I did, and it just turned my life around for like 10, 15 years working on code breaking in both theaters: the European and the Pacific theater." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If John Taylor told you to do something you did it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And now I’m finding I’m having trouble doing the research when I should be working as an archivist. Boy, but for a while there, I was having a ball. I’d go down there, eat at my desk, and then gallop downstairs to the second floor and just read whatever I put in a slip for that morning. So I’d get 20 minutes or so in each day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the National Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That, I really don’t know. I’m so busy thinking about the challenges of what I’m going to do as the archivist of this little church archives and also as of last week, I am also archivist of the Old Stone Church Foundation Archives. We are the oldest Methodist society in Virginia, founded in 1766. They got all these old records going way back. They need to be organized, they need to be preserved, all essentially the same things you’re doing here. It might not differ quite so much except, you got space!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have any impressions, thoughts, or comments on any of the challenges that came up during your tenure here? How you think? I think the PROFS case would be one of the first things to come to mind, but I think that was prior to your arrival right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was here for that but it didn’t really affect my work, unless it involved getting some statistics right away. For example double checking figures given to us by the trust fund. I really didn’t have much to do with any of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Keeping under the radar.\n\nWhat would you say would be the significant turning points in your career?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were probably several. I think first just coming here as a junior high school kid and doing research and going to the Library of Congress too and just seeing all that information. The thought that was so much out there you could learn and know about some really interesting events or people. That was probably the first influence. And then much later meeting Herb Simon at Carnegie Melon, that was a total revolution in my head to start thinking about just “how do historians solve problems.” If you looked inside their mind, how would you find historical information organized, how would they retrieve it so quickly and easily? Could you do this for a student? That was sort of what I was doing when I came here. It also lent itself naturally to code breaking which was of interest to people in artificial intelligence and it certainly kept me occupied for a good many years. Though not much at this point, you’re just too far away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How do you view your time here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the past 45 minutes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Somebody asked you to summarize your career here at the National Archives, however long you want to take to do it. What would you tell them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I would think of those things that I created that made our lives a whole lot easier. Including INPHYX and NALDS and NOIS and all the systems I’ve put together to help us print out requests for casualty lists, POW lists. I think about that a lot but I also think more and more about the people because it was really like a family. You do miss that when you go on and you miss the structure. What I’m trying to do now is sort of recapture that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I miss your coffee personally." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, thank you. I do appreciate that. Yeah I used to think, if I can get the coffee made, make it properly. At least I’ve done one thing right today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There were several mornings, cause I’m making the coffee now, there are certain mornings that it doesn’t get made." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you heard the story about Peggy, didn’t you? This was one that Greg Lamotta told me. You may have heard it. Greg and I used to switch on and off making the coffee. Well anyway, one day Peggy came by and thanked him for the coffee and said that it was pretty good. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he hadn’t made any coffee that day. She had gotten yesterday’s. Usually she gets in around 10, that time the coffee pot is off and it might be luke warm if she’s lucky, but she’ll drink it anyway. If you give her crankese oil, she’ll drink it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "She’s been off coffee for a little while. I’m wondering if the world is beginning to spin off its axis because she hasn’t been drinking as much coffee anymore." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hmm, I’ll have to talk to her about that. Well I’ve been off it too for medical reasons. When the church secretary makes coffee I go over, I don’t drink it, I smell it; just the aroma of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For the last question, I sort of had it on a list of questions that I had players choice. If there’s something you want to address, this is the question that has been rolling around in my head, that I think would sort of be a good summary and conclusion. Somebody from 10, 15 years down the road, they come across this interview, and they are just starting out their career at the National Archives. They pop this in, and they are watching it. What does Lee Gladwin want to tell the new NARA person who’s just starting here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Lee Gladwin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Enjoy it, cause it’s a wonderful, wonderful place, and wonderful people. It’s an exciting place to hold a document. To me it was always like being there, if I could touch the document. When I was there, I could see somebody else who wrote that paper and sort of imagine them writing it. I was recently at the church going through some things cataloging them and found a receipt for something that was dated 1 September 1939. Immediately I could hear the German tanks rolling into Poland. Wherever you are, you’re going to have a wonderful time here, it’s a time machine. Much more than that, it’s family!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John LeGloahec", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s a great answer! You have anything else? Thank you very much, Lee." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00175", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-MR-2002-001-008.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Van Hala, Ruth Ann (Stanonik) (1965-1968): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-MR-2002-001-008", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-MR-2002-001-008", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Ruth Ann Van Hala (then Stanonik) served as a Peace Corps volunteer in India from 1965 to 1968 on a poultry project. She trained at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, with the India 16 group, and learned Hindi and how to care for chickens. Due to political instability in India at the time the group was due to depart, they were temporarily sent to a kibbutz in Israel instead. Van Hala was then stationed in Satara in Maharashtra state in central India, where she worked with a poultry project sponsored by the Indian government with funding from USAID. The project was intended to encourage people to raise chickens and to introduce eggs into their diets, which was challenging due to cultural norms. At the end of her first year, Ruth married fellow volunteer Marcus Van Hala and moved to Udaipur. Note: Interview ends abruptly. Interviewed and recorded by Robert Klein, November 17, 2001. 1 tape (web streaming files combined into 1 file).", + "dates_of_materials": "17 November 2001", + "extent": "1 audio cassette (mono; 58 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "041. India.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. India. Van Hala, Ruth Ann (Stanonik) (1965-1968): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "India", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "MR-2002-001", + "transcript": "RPCV-MR-2002-001-008-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/f2vjplsjk34om47gkmh6734lc3gt76o2.pdf?odc=20231115174350-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/84700c4e-f337-4782-99af-da23b4a74058/5eb88a39-3210-4eba-85c5-24e8627a8d42/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzI3ZThfN2YyNWRiYjdhMmM2ZGRhZjE4YjlmMzRmYTVlZGNlMmRkZTE4NzVjNDU4OWZiYTkzMzY0M2I3MDg5MzA5YzYxNl8vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS84NDcwMGM0ZS1mMzM3LTQ3ODItOTlhZi1kYTIzYjRhNzQwNTgvNWViODhhMzktMzIxMC00ZWJhLTg1YzUtMjRlODYyN2E4ZDQyL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Moreno Valley, California", + "length": "45 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed December 27, 2001, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Ruth Ann Van Hala Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Robert Klein" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Ruth Ann Van Hala" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is Bob Klein. Today is November 17th, 2001. I am speaking, interviewing Ruth Ann Stanonik." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:15", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Stanonik." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Stanonik Van Hala, who lives in Moreno Valley, California. She was a volunteer in India, 1965 to '68. The way we usually start is I ask people to go back to the time, oh, six months or a year before you joined the Peace Corps and give us some idea of what you were doing. You can go back into your own background at that point and then we'll come up toward your deciding to join." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:47", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. I was attending college the years before I joined the Peace Corps and I, I had met President Kennedy when I was touring with my senior high school group in the White House so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:01:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where did you go to high school?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:01:04", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went to high school at, in Ohio, and Mantua Corners was where we lived. But the school was called Crestwood High School. It was a conglomeration of several of the cities around. I had been raised in Hiram, Ohio, and I just moved over to this area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:01:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what kind of area was it, farming or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:01:24", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, Hiram, where I spent most of my years was a small college town, but Mantua Corners more or less was an agricultural cum bedroom city becoming bedroom city for the outlying cities of Streetsboro, Akron, Cleveland. We were in a triangle between Cleveland, Akron, and Youngstown." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:01:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the occasion for your meeting President Kennedy?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:01:48", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was on our senior trip. We had raised money for our trip to Washington, and we were touring the White House and we were just at the end of the tour, a friend of mine, a girlfriend and I. And she turned around and I turned around. And President Kennedy had come down from the elevator from up above. And all of a sudden several of the other tourists were turning around and running after him. We came over more slowly, and of course, we were very much in awe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:02:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:02:18", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I managed to get a little thumb shake in there. So it was very, it was a very important occasion. And since when I went to college, I decided I would major in social studies and history and look for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:02:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What year was it, the senior?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:02:37", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This occurred in 1961. I graduated in '61. So it was the spring of that year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:02:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:02:44", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And, um." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:02:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Had you studied the Peace Corps? At that point, had you heard of it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:02:48", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was just, I don't think I had, I don't remember at that point whether I had heard about it, but I think I heard about it a few years after that. And I had been thinking about joining." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:03:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:03:01", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course, I was still in college. And so I did take a, I was able to get a, it's not a scholarship, but an award to go to do a three month study in Washington, or no, a six month study in Washington called Washington Semester Program when I was a junior in college. And I went to Hiram College." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:03:22", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:03:23", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And in that program, we were sent all over Washington, and that would have been in 1960. Actually, it was right after President Kennedy was killed. I had asked to be in that program hoping, you know, we'd get back in there and get some government work done and so forth. But then he was killed and it was in the, uh, from January till June of '64 that I attended that program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:03:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:03:48", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I became very interested in that type of work. And because we had had seminars with a lot of government officials and we were sent around to many, many different departments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:03:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what were you majoring in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:04:00", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Political science and history." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:04:03", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any long-term goal at that point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:04:05", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, at that point, I had hoped to go into government work of some type. I didn't know what kind. But, um, then I heard about the Peace Corps and I thought, well, after I graduated, this would be a good thing to go into before I make up my mind about going to graduate school or whatever I was going to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:04:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you particularly remember how you, how you heard about it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:04:29", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can't remember. I think it was just advertisements, probably." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:04:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Anyone would come on campus and talk?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:04:36", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. No, I didn't hear anything like that. Hiram was pretty conservative. At any rate, I was very interested in traveling, so I thought this would be good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:04:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were coming close then to your finishing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:04:54", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And I didn't ask for any particular area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:04:57", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall the application process?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:05:00", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, pages and pages and pages and pages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:05:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:05:04", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then we took a very long test." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:05:07", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:05:07", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I still remember part of that test today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:05:10", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, which part?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:05:11", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I remember the part where they had words on paper that were only partially seen. Well, this was easy because, of course, in school we had been reading dittos, which we can never read. And when I was, you know, since I've been teaching, we still used dittos for years later. And the kids would always say, we can't read this. Pft, you can read it. Just look at it a little more carefully. What do you think those letters might be?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:05:36", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did you study any foreign language?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:05:39", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In college, well, in high school, I studied Latin two years, and then I also studied French in college, two years of French and one year of Russian. And when we, when we went to India with the Peace Corps training, we had training in learning Hindi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:05:56", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, well we'll get to that. So as of completing college, you had your bachelor's degree." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:06:02", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:06:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And had you applied at that point before graduation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:06:07", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think I started the application process in January of my last year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:06:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any fallback? In other words, if I don't get in the Peace Corps then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:06:17", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. I had gotten, despite not wanting to, my high school certification for teaching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:06:23", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:06:24", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As a fall back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:06:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, since you mentioned, you characterized, you said that Hiram was somewhat conservative." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:06:31", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:06:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did people, friends, family, colleagues react to your wanting to join the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:06:38", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was very surprised that I had been selected to go to India because I didn't even know India was part of their program. And when I found out I was going to be working with a poultry project, I told people, oh, I'm, I'm going to India to work with a poultry project. And they thought I said poetry project, because coming from a liberal arts college, they hadn't expected anybody to go into that type of thing. And I really hadn't had any experience with poultry raising other than the fact that when I lived in Mantua there was a chicken farm near us and I did wash eggs. That's as close as I got to them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:07:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember whether you had put that down on your application?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:07:17", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I did. I did. That must have got them. So I had washed eggs for several years, earning pennies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:07:27", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Yeah. But did people think you were absolutely crazy or did they think that, you know, what in the world are they doing, sending you to India?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:07:37", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They, once I explained it, I think they thought I was a little crazy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:07:40", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:07:41", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And what are you doing that for? But I've always been a person that likes to do different things so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:07:48", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about your family?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:07:49", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My family. I have three brothers and two sisters and my mom's a nurse. And my dad was at that time, he was working for the Ravenna Arsenal as he's a steamer. He was a steam fitter, pipe fitter. He was in charge of his group there. And they always let me do what I wanted to do as long as I was really definite about it. I mean, they didn't put clamps on me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:08:14", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:08:15", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, I was not a person that was going to go do some weird thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:08:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:08:22", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They, um, they had had a little experience in that because of what, when I was a freshman in college, I, I applied for this job that said Maids for New York. And they had thought this was arranged through the college and it wasn't. It was some fly by night operation that was going to lock us in a room. We got there, we took out a bus ticket to New York, and they were going to, if we didn't get a job, they were going to lock us up because they had paid for our tickets. And so I was the only white person in the whole group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:08:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:08:55", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was a little scary there. But I did get hired and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:09:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As a maid?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:09:00", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, as a maid. I worked as a maid one whole summer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:09:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the city or out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:09:05", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was in the New Jersey side of New York City." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:09:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Was it someone's summer home or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:09:12", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was a kind of a fanatic family. They, they were extremely concerned about everything being nit-picky clean." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:09:22", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, my goodness." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:09:23", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the husband and wife didn't really get along, but they were quote unquote friends. So, at any rate, I just. She would come around with a white glove and everything. I mean, she was. I was on my hands and knees for hours scrubbing out waxed floors that had been waxed for years and never cleaned off." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:09:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how long do you last at that job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:09:46", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Three months. When she found out I was going back to college, she had a fit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:09:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. She didn't know that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:09:51", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, she didn't ask me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:09:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:09:53", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were so glad to find a white person." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:09:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:09:56", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, they were very bigoted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:09:57", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:09:58", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Prejudiced. So they didn't ask me that and I didn't tell them. At any rate, I told them after a couple of weeks being there that I would be leaving to go back to school and they had a fit, so they just stomped and raged and then they reduced my, my fee and kept me locked up more. I mean, my payment, my salary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:10:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you survived?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:10:25", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I survived that. I mean, they rationed the food and everything. I only got a little teeny bit of food every day and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:10:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, funny." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:10:32", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "These rich people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:10:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And this was when, when in your college career?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:10:39", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was at the end of my freshman year going into sophomore summer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:10:45", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And by the time you graduated college, had you done any travel outside the United States?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:10:52", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think when we were, I was very young, we went to Canada, but mostly my parents didn't go anywhere." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:10:57", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Right. And then during college, you didn't, you went places but within the United States?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:11:03", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, okay, let's see. Yeah, I know I'd been in Washington and, of course, lived in Cleveland for a while. I worked in Cleveland during my junior year in an internship program there. But I had not traveled anywhere, I don't think, outside the United States." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:11:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall getting the notification that you were being invited to India?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:11:21", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:11:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "With the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:11:22", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very excited about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:11:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you did you have any idea where India was or what?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:11:27", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. I had studied Indian religions, just that, not knowing I was going there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:11:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:11:34", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I had already studied that and I was very interested in the country already and it had quite a history. So, and since being a history major, I, I don't know if I took a history of India, but I was reading up on it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:11:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you had no hesitation about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:11:47", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, no. I know people told me that it was going to be terrible in terms of the poverty and all of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:11:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. People back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:11:57", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that we were, we were very well. During the training, we were very well prepared for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:12:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So then you're accepted, you finish your degree." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:12:06", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:12:07", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how soon after did you report?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:12:09", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Immediately. I think within a week or two of the end of my school, graduating, we went right to training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:12:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you go into training with the expectation that you would go from training directly to India or that you would have a chance to come back home for a leave? Do you recall that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:12:30", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It didn't really matter to me because I really had lived away from home when I was in college. But, um, I think they told us we were going to have a short leave before we went." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:12:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mean, you have to pack up and stuff like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:12:45", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I also remember I was trying to get my driver's license." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:12:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:12:51", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I had tried several times, but I, at that, when I was young, I was so nervous that every time I went in there to take that test, I couldn't do it. I was so cautious. And finally, this last time, I ended up driving a car that was not even mine, and I wasn't familiar with it even. And I was just determined I was going to get it. And I think the guy finally got tired of seeing me there and he said, well, you can learn how to drive in India. And I told him I was going to India. That's probably how I got my license. I didn't realize I wasn't going to be driving a car in India." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:13:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the local paper make note of the fact that you had joined and it was Peace Corps in India?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:13:30", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, probably did, but I, I don't know if. My parents cleaned out most of my stuff and threw it out, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:13:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. It's interesting, you're of the early generation of people who joined the Peace Corps after Kennedy had died. And, of course, in the early days, joining was always somehow related to President Kennedy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:13:54", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. I saw him as quite a role model at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:13:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:13:58", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He and his brother, having worked so hard with the civil rights and everything. Of course, that really came after we were over in India but." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:14:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:14:07", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just his ideas were so different from what, and of course, my parents were Democrats. They were solid Democrats so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:14:14", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:14:15", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This was, uh. And to have such a young president." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:14:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So, I mean, go in '65 when you went in, there was there was still some association." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:14:26", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. I mean, just the idea of the Peace Corps, I thought was such a great idea. And I knew he had started and Sargent Shriver was carrying it out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:14:36", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You reported for training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:14:39", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:14:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:14:40", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:14:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me where." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:14:42", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We went to Annapolis, Maryland. St. John's College." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:14:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:14:46", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I was assigned, of course, the women's dorm. And our training consisted of getting up early in the morning for exercise program. We did a Royal Canadian Air Force exercise program and then we did running." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:15:03", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:15:04", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were running the mile by the end, which to me was a lot. Nowadays it's nothing. But those days nobody jogged." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:15:11", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:15:12", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So at any rate, we went to classes all day long, had a little break for dinner, of course, lunch and dinner. And then we went on in the evening till like 10:30, 11:00. So it was very intensive training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "00:15:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How long was it scheduled for, the?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "00:15:32", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was, I believe, about 12 weeks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "00:15:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. And do you remember the number of approximate number of trainees?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "00:15:40", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were about 103 or so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "00:15:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall the male female break on that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "00:15:47", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was half and half, but I'm not really sure. I don't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "00:15:50", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And at that point, did you know that you were about to become India 16? It was there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "00:15:58", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so. We were, I think we were called India 16 from the beginning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "00:16:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "00:16:03", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I really can't remember how many women there were compared to men." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "00:16:07", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, that's, that's okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "00:16:10", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't pay attention to that, I guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "00:16:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you on a seven day a week schedule with the training or did you get?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "00:16:15", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, it seems to me we were, because we always had to take care of the chickens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "00:16:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that from day one?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "00:16:22", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "00:16:23", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And tell me about taking care of the chickens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "00:16:25", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, our classes consisted of learning Hindi, of course, which was usually in set conversations to memorize, for learning how to take care of chickens. And also we had to do cultural classes. And of course, the physical training part, just getting ourselves in shape. And, um, let's see. And then just, I think some history classes about India just to give us information." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "00:16:56", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there anything in the name of American studies, learning about U.S.? You mentioned Great Books." + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "00:17:03", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. We, um, we used the Great Books to, as a guideline to. We did a lot of reading in those areas and then discussed them in relation to some of the things we might meet as we got to India." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "00:17:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "00:17:19", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Now you had asked about whether we have seven day a week training. I know we must have had some let-up on Saturdays and Sundays, but I don't can't recall exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "00:17:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember when you're first checking in or during the first week or two, how you measured yourself up against the others who, you know, who were trainees? Here are a bunch of people who had joined." + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "00:17:42", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would have, I was. At that age, I was very, very quiet. I never said anything. And I think this was a drawback. They were concerned about me because I didn't speak up much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "00:17:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "00:17:57", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's just that I was very shy and I had been raised to be seen, not heard. Six kids in a house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "00:18:06", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "00:18:07", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I was in the middle. So at any rate, I was not accustomed to speaking my mind about things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "00:18:14", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "00:18:16", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't learn how to do that till the end. I was almost 38." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "00:18:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But then that must have related to the selection process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "00:18:24", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were a little concerned at the end whether I might make it or not, because." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "00:18:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall what the selection process was? I mean, how? Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "00:18:34", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, part of it was, of course, we had to learn how to take care of the chickens. That was easy for me and running and all the physical part, that was easy. And I had no problems with anything, um, grading and writing. I've always been very good at writing and anything that was required for grade wise, that kind of thing. But speaking was not something I did. I would speak up once in a while, but I was very shy about that.\n\nBut during the final process I remember we had to completely clean out the chicken houses and take care of all of that. And then these returned Peace Corps volunteers told us we had to break the neck of a chicken in order to pass. Now, I think that was, they were just pulling our legs, but that was pretty gross. And some of the girls wouldn't do it, but I did it. And then another part of it was I remember there were a group of professors that were questioning me about being in India and they were going on and on about different things. And would I be worried about not seeing my family and not dating and all of this type of thing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "00:19:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it a group interviewing you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "00:19:46", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "00:19:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, it was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "00:19:48", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "About three. I think a couple of the returned volunteers and about two or three other people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "00:19:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "00:19:56", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It might have been the project coordinator and somebody else." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "00:19:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were the returned volunteers built into the training from the very beginning" + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "00:20:04", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. They did a lot of comical things to show us some of the situations in India, skits and things. And we had a, we did some talent show type things too, as we went along." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "00:20:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any Indians involved in the training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "00:20:19", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I believe there was one man at least who was working with us on the Hindi and some of the cultural aspects." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "00:20:25", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "00:20:25", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I'm sure when you interview my husband, you'll get more along those details." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "00:20:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "00:20:32", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was a very naive person at that stage of the game." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "00:20:37", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Uh. Did you have any training? So you. Was there a level of Hindi fluency you were expected to reach?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "00:20:49", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had our final testing in that and I think I got an S plus or something like that, whatever, on the." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "00:20:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you know of any in the group who were who flunked out because of the Hindi?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "00:21:01", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, I don't, I don't recall anybody who flunked out because of the, the Hindi problem. There were some that either had family problems or something like that. We didn't lose too many." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "00:21:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "00:21:19", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were. There was one other thing I remember they did with us as part of our final training, our selection. They took us to, let's see, I guess it was somewhere around Annapolis. They took us out in the boondocks. There was a couple of different things. They took us out in the boondocks and dropped us off and wanted us to make our way for a day or two. Out in these country roads, dirt roads somewhere. And it seems like we ended up just going to some churches or something and getting some help from them. And somehow, it's kind of foggy. I can't remember everything, but I know there was another instance where they dropped us off in downtown, some slum area. I don't know if it was Annapolis or some city right near there. And they wanted us to make our way at night in that area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "00:22:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "00:22:16", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And those didn't bother me any because our group worked together in small groups and we took care of whatever it was we had to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "00:22:25", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's very, I guess it's variations on the Outward Bound concept of, you know, there are points where you're challenged to face the problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "00:22:32", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "00:22:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall if there were African Americans in the training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "00:22:40", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think there were. I mean, I should get out my old Peace Corps book and look through. We, we used to keep tabs with it up until about '82 when we moved out here to California. After that, we kind of lost track." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "00:22:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So training went on. Was it, did it last 12 weeks?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "00:22:59", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. As I recall, we were finished sometime near the end of August or early September, and then we went home for a week or so. That's when I got my driver's license. And then then we were told to report to New York City." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "00:23:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Now let's go back to the language training. Was it your understanding that you would be working in Hindi or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "00:23:22", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were told that it would be to our benefit to know Hindi. Most of our people were going to areas where English was well spoken, though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "00:23:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "00:23:32", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it's a good thing we did get the Hindi training because we were dealing with a lot of very poor people out in the rural areas and they didn't speak English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "00:23:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, is Hindi the common language throughout India?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "00:23:46", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. India has at least 16 major languages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "00:23:50", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, that's what I thought." + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "00:23:51", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And thousands of, hundreds of dialects. So Hindi was, and English are the universal languages in that country." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "00:24:01", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did anyone, did you have any sessions talking about, you studied the culture, in which you were prepared to deal with Indian English, which is not quite the same as American?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "00:24:17", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. I believe that sometimes in the skits they used the Indian English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "00:24:22", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "00:24:25", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I can't recall it after that. It took me a while to pick it up and to talk like they are talking." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "00:24:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "00:24:31", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I will listen to you. You are coming now and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "00:24:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And tuning in to the pattern, I mean. So overall, what was the role of the returned volunteers? Was it helpful? Did they overdo it? Were they like veterans trying to scare?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "00:24:47", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think they were blazing a trail and I don't think anybody had given them much guidance." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "00:24:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "00:24:53", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They weren't, you know, people who had been trained on how to teach other people or anything, but they did, it did help us. And it was encouraging to see they were still alive after the whole thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "00:25:03", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Had they been in a chicken project or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "00:25:07", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can't remember what their projects were. One of them might have been, because they knew how to do the chickens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "00:25:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "00:25:15", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So maybe somebody must have been in one, in the chicken project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "00:25:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At the time you were going, do you have any idea what the total number of volunteers in India was, say, as about '65?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "00:25:28", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "00:25:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you, did you have any sense of the project?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "00:25:31", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm sure we did at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "00:25:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You knew." + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "00:25:34", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were several groups in India at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "00:25:36", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So you had a sense it was a big project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "00:25:38", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And there were different. There were several people in the poultry project, several different groups in that and several. Of course, we're India 16, so there were only that many totally. Um." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "00:25:50", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 237, + "timestamp": "00:25:51", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That had been in the country in the history anyway. But I know there were some projects that were in health areas too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 238, + "timestamp": "00:25:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 239, + "timestamp": "00:25:59", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were fortunate with the poultry project because that was one the state or the country of India really supported. They didn't always support the other projects." + }, + { + "turn_id": 240, + "timestamp": "00:26:11", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall final selection that, did they announce you're going and you're not or anything?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 241, + "timestamp": "00:26:20", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't recall that it was anything mysterious." + }, + { + "turn_id": 242, + "timestamp": "00:26:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 243, + "timestamp": "00:26:26", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, I was so naive. I just figured, why wouldn't they let me go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 244, + "timestamp": "00:26:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 245, + "timestamp": "00:26:31", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, it didn't bother me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 246, + "timestamp": "00:26:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any sense of who might be going with you? In other words, were you clustered?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 247, + "timestamp": "00:26:36", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I know that when they finally, when we finally got to India and they told us who my partner was going to be, I was disappointed. It was not one of the, they put me with a very strong- willed other girl." + }, + { + "turn_id": 248, + "timestamp": "00:26:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it may have been because she was so strong." + }, + { + "turn_id": 249, + "timestamp": "00:26:50", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because they thought I was too meek and mild. They just didn't know me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 250, + "timestamp": "00:26:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. So was there a graduation exercise?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 251, + "timestamp": "00:26:59", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We probably did have one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 252, + "timestamp": "00:27:01", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did anyone come, do you remember anyone coming out from Washington during your training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 253, + "timestamp": "00:27:06", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were probably some bigwigs there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 254, + "timestamp": "00:27:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You didn't meet Shriver." + }, + { + "turn_id": 255, + "timestamp": "00:27:11", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 256, + "timestamp": "00:27:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. You went home for a couple of days. Did you come home as a hero? Did people?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 257, + "timestamp": "00:27:20", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, my. I just came home. Nobody." + }, + { + "turn_id": 258, + "timestamp": "00:27:25", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your folks try to discourage you at that point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 259, + "timestamp": "00:27:28", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 260, + "timestamp": "00:27:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Or they knew you were for it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 261, + "timestamp": "00:27:30", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My parents, my mom was a nurse. She's just always accepts what's there. Six kids. You get used to it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 262, + "timestamp": "00:27:38", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And your siblings? They must have kidded you some." + }, + { + "turn_id": 263, + "timestamp": "00:27:42", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Meh, probably. I don't remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 264, + "timestamp": "00:27:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 265, + "timestamp": "00:27:45", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Most of them were gone, were not home. I think only my younger, well, even my younger sister and brother were probably gone by then so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 266, + "timestamp": "00:27:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You reported to New York then. Do you remember approximately when this was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 267, + "timestamp": "00:27:59", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We reported about, I think it was either the second or third week of September of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 268, + "timestamp": "00:28:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "1965." + }, + { + "turn_id": 269, + "timestamp": "00:28:06", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "'65." + }, + { + "turn_id": 270, + "timestamp": "00:28:06", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. And at that point, your expectation was you were on your way to India?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 271, + "timestamp": "00:28:10", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 272, + "timestamp": "00:28:11", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember where you staged in New York? Was it at a hotel?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 273, + "timestamp": "00:28:15", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We stayed at one of the hotels in New York. I don't know which one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 274, + "timestamp": "00:28:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That, that, yeah. So it was a hotel." + }, + { + "turn_id": 275, + "timestamp": "00:28:20", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And we were right downtown somewhere." + }, + { + "turn_id": 276, + "timestamp": "00:28:25", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And you had a few days to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 277, + "timestamp": "00:28:27", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we, um, when we got there, we found out. Actually we went first to the airport." + }, + { + "turn_id": 278, + "timestamp": "00:28:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 279, + "timestamp": "00:28:35", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I had flown from Cleveland to the New York airport, and we were supposed to be taking off from there directly to India. But then we got the news that China was threatening to invade India in the northern areas where our Peace Corps volunteers were going to be sent. So they decided that that would be too unsafe to send, I think there were 300 of us at that time, three different groups going in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 280, + "timestamp": "00:29:01", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, so you all had gathered at the airport?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 281, + "timestamp": "00:29:03", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 282, + "timestamp": "00:29:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it going to be a charter flight then? Several charter flights?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 283, + "timestamp": "00:29:07", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Two or three flights. And so they were all canceled. And they put us up for a week in New York until they decided where to send the groups." + }, + { + "turn_id": 284, + "timestamp": "00:29:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All 300?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 285, + "timestamp": "00:29:18", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Oh, big bill." + }, + { + "turn_id": 286, + "timestamp": "00:29:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And so there were people who had trained at other places?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 287, + "timestamp": "00:29:24", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 288, + "timestamp": "00:29:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For other projects?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 289, + "timestamp": "00:29:28", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm not certain now what their numbers of their group was. They were not, um, they were not located near our training area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 290, + "timestamp": "00:29:37", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Were they all chicken people?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 291, + "timestamp": "00:29:42", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm not sure. My memory fails in that respect because I didn't pay much attention to those groups. I do know that we were sent, after a week in New York, they finally decided to send our India 16 to Israel." + }, + { + "turn_id": 292, + "timestamp": "00:29:57", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 293, + "timestamp": "00:29:58", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the other groups, one was sent to Guam and I'm not sure where the other one was sent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 294, + "timestamp": "00:30:03", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Guam?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 295, + "timestamp": "00:30:04", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And at any rate, we went to Israel and we were given a tour of the country for a week by bus, which was really nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 296, + "timestamp": "00:30:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that just a gesture on the part of the Israeli government?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 297, + "timestamp": "00:30:20", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't think they knew where to send us. They were probably working out the details with the." + }, + { + "turn_id": 298, + "timestamp": "00:30:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 299, + "timestamp": "00:30:27", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And finally after that they sent us to the kibbutz to work, the different. We were split up on three different kibbutzim and then we just filled in their summer labor group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 300, + "timestamp": "00:30:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you went, when you were assigned out to a kibbutz, was it, well, you'll be here for six weeks, eight weeks?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 301, + "timestamp": "00:30:48", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They had no idea how long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 302, + "timestamp": "00:30:50", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was open ended?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 303, + "timestamp": "00:30:50", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was open ended. We ended up being in Israel 40 days and 40 nights. So that was a very unique experience. And actually that's where I first suffered food shock." + }, + { + "turn_id": 304, + "timestamp": "00:31:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 305, + "timestamp": "00:31:07", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because they only served us certain things to eat. And we were working really hard in the fields, picking, weeding, all very physical labor. So we were up at 5:30 or 5:00 in the morning and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 306, + "timestamp": "00:31:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. Where was the kibbutz that you were?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 307, + "timestamp": "00:31:21", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, we were near the northern part of Israel." + }, + { + "turn_id": 308, + "timestamp": "00:31:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 309, + "timestamp": "00:31:25", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ramat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 310, + "timestamp": "00:31:27", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. You weren't down in the Negev?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 311, + "timestamp": "00:31:30", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, we were near, um, Haifa, I think it is. [tape break] Well, anyway, our food. I was talking about that. I had been used to drinking milk. I always drink milk with every meal and no milk to be had anywhere. In fact, no water either. The only water they served was seltzer water, which I couldn't stand. And so liquid was a big problem because we were working so hard and I guess their water wasn't pure enough or something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 312, + "timestamp": "00:32:10", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 313, + "timestamp": "00:32:11", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At any rate, or maybe it had too much salt in it, I don't know. So we ended up drinking a lot of tea, and that's the first time I ever had tea. And there was some kind of cream, I think, to put in a tea. So I did get a little milk that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 314, + "timestamp": "00:32:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 315, + "timestamp": "00:32:26", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the other thing that they always served every meal was cucumbers, tomatoes, and eggs, hard boiled eggs. I liked hard boiled eggs and sour cream on it. They called it laban." + }, + { + "turn_id": 316, + "timestamp": "00:32:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 317, + "timestamp": "00:32:40", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I had never had sour cream like that before or whatever. It's kind of like a yogurt, a thick yogurt." + }, + { + "turn_id": 318, + "timestamp": "00:32:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 319, + "timestamp": "00:32:46", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At any rate, that was, the food was really hard to get it used to, I mean, because we were starving. And the best time of the day was when about 4:00 in the afternoon when they had tea and we could have bread. They had really good bread and butter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 320, + "timestamp": "00:33:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During this time, was there a Peace Corps? Did Peace Corps stay in touch with you while you were on the kibbutz? And like every week or so say, well, we're working on it or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 321, + "timestamp": "00:33:15", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We inquired, but we didn't hear a whole lot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 322, + "timestamp": "00:33:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you, were you beginning to get discouraged, I mean?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 323, + "timestamp": "00:33:23", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, we were enjoying it. We, we loved." + }, + { + "turn_id": 324, + "timestamp": "00:33:27", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many of you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 325, + "timestamp": "00:33:27", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were about 30 of us on this kibbutz, and we got together and did some singing with the Hebrew people and in the evenings and participated in some of their activities, although they only spoke Hebrew. And of course we had no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 326, + "timestamp": "00:33:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 327, + "timestamp": "00:33:46", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we had a real language problem. But yeah, they were, they were very helpful as best they could. And considering we couldn't speak." + }, + { + "turn_id": 328, + "timestamp": "00:33:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There were no Hindi speakers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 329, + "timestamp": "00:33:56", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, of course. But." + }, + { + "turn_id": 330, + "timestamp": "00:33:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you begin, you must have begun to lose your Hindi then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 331, + "timestamp": "00:34:02", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, we probably lost some." + }, + { + "turn_id": 332, + "timestamp": "00:34:03", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 333, + "timestamp": "00:34:04", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because you know, if you don't keep at it, boy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 334, + "timestamp": "00:34:06", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 335, + "timestamp": "00:34:08", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At any rate, um, we did do a lot of cultural things as I recall. There were some things we watched them do and they used to have entertainment in the evening of some kind. There was no TV or anything like that. We were just in little shacks with, in fact, we had bedbugs. I mean, it was pretty bad." + }, + { + "turn_id": 336, + "timestamp": "00:34:27", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But it was an introduction." + }, + { + "turn_id": 337, + "timestamp": "00:34:29", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 338, + "timestamp": "00:34:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To another part of the world." + }, + { + "turn_id": 339, + "timestamp": "00:34:30", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I mean." + }, + { + "turn_id": 340, + "timestamp": "00:34:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Finally, after." + }, + { + "turn_id": 341, + "timestamp": "00:34:34", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After 30 or 40 days and 40 nights, we were sent to India and we went to New Delhi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 342, + "timestamp": "00:34:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you flew in as a group?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 343, + "timestamp": "00:34:42", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we flew in. They had gathered all of us together. It was good to see everybody again. And yeah, the one thing I really remember about our whole group is that it was the first time I was ever with a lot of people that thought the same way I did. I mean, they must have selected us by personal psychological characteristics, I'm sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 344, + "timestamp": "00:34:59", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 345, + "timestamp": "00:35:00", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was amazing that there were so many that thought the same way. At any rate, we were sent to India and New Delhi and I think we were just there a few days and then they sent us out to our sites." + }, + { + "turn_id": 346, + "timestamp": "00:35:14", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While you were in New Delhi, did you, you got your assignment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 347, + "timestamp": "00:35:17", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 348, + "timestamp": "00:35:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you became aware of who your partner would be. Did you have, were you at all familiar with the area you were being sent to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 349, + "timestamp": "00:35:29", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, um, I was sent to Satara, Maharashtra, which was south of Pune, and it is in central India about a day and a half trip from Bombay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 350, + "timestamp": "00:35:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 351, + "timestamp": "00:35:44", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, the area was once the, I guess, the capital of the kingdom in that the Maharaja, the Marathi kingdom. But it was a very difficult area to get to. We had to go by train to Pune and then by bus to Satara and it was very windy up mountains, around hairpin curves and things like that. So very isolated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 352, + "timestamp": "00:36:10", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many of you were at that point, when you're on the bus?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 353, + "timestamp": "00:36:13", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were, there were just two of us. Another girl and I were sent to serve in Satara." + }, + { + "turn_id": 354, + "timestamp": "00:36:23", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At what point did you meet an Indian counterpart who was going to guide your way through this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 355, + "timestamp": "00:36:28", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As soon as we got there, we were greeted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 356, + "timestamp": "00:36:32", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Got to where, there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 357, + "timestamp": "00:36:33", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Got to Satara. We were greeted by a mister, Dr. Bhave, B- H-A-V-E. He was the poultry officer there, and he showed us where we were going to stay. He had temporary housing set up for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 358, + "timestamp": "00:36:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 359, + "timestamp": "00:36:52", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And as I recall, I'm not sure if we stayed in one of their little hotel, and they don't call them hotels, hostels or something like that for a couple of days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 360, + "timestamp": "00:37:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Guesthouse." + }, + { + "turn_id": 361, + "timestamp": "00:37:04", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Guesthouse or something like that, until they found a place for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 362, + "timestamp": "00:37:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They, they found the place where, they being just Dr. Bhave?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 363, + "timestamp": "00:37:12", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the government was required to supply housing for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 364, + "timestamp": "00:37:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 365, + "timestamp": "00:37:15", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was part of the deal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 366, + "timestamp": "00:37:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, it's a gift from Dr. Bhave. And, um. The, uh. So you had a week or two to settle into the setting, or did you go to work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 367, + "timestamp": "00:37:32", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't think either. We went to work right away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 368, + "timestamp": "00:37:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You didn't?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 369, + "timestamp": "00:37:35", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We went to, we went to work right away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 370, + "timestamp": "00:37:37", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where was work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 371, + "timestamp": "00:37:39", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We would go down to the poultry office. And at that point, they had, they not only had poultry, they had Brahma bulls and several other things. They did artificial insemination with the bulls." + }, + { + "turn_id": 372, + "timestamp": "00:37:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They had an office and they had bulls in the office?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 373, + "timestamp": "00:37:55", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They had a, you know, the stable. I mean, the whole. The office was on several acres of land, and they had their main interest at that point was agriculture in terms of artificial insemination for building up the breed of Brahma bulls." + }, + { + "turn_id": 374, + "timestamp": "00:38:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 375, + "timestamp": "00:38:13", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because they used those to pull their carts still. There were no poultry." + }, + { + "turn_id": 376, + "timestamp": "00:38:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 377, + "timestamp": "00:38:20", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were to start it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 378, + "timestamp": "00:38:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. You didn't, did you. you didn't know that going in or you did? And was it a Ministry of Agriculture substation or was it a regional, provincial?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 379, + "timestamp": "00:38:34", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Poultry project office. They, they were stationed throughout India." + }, + { + "turn_id": 380, + "timestamp": "00:38:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 381, + "timestamp": "00:38:42", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because later on when I moved up to Udaipur, it was the same setup. You have a poultry project. I guess Dr. Bhave had just been stationed there. I'm not certain how long he had been there. At any rate, as I recall, we were, we were supposed to go out and meet people and talk them into raising chickens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 382, + "timestamp": "00:39:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 383, + "timestamp": "00:39:01", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were no chickens to be had yet. There were. And there was nothing in sight. So we had to start from scratch there to try to get people interested in raising the chickens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 384, + "timestamp": "00:39:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any chickens anywhere in the neighborhood?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 385, + "timestamp": "00:39:16", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, just deshi, wild chickens, of course, were nothing like the breeds that would be the good egg layer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 386, + "timestamp": "00:39:23", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But when you, I don't know what the Hindi word for chicken is, but when you went to a, when you went somewhere and began talking about it, people at least had some preconception of what you were talking about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 387, + "timestamp": "00:39:38", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[coughs] Sorry." + }, + { + "turn_id": 388, + "timestamp": "00:39:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right, let's try." + }, + { + "turn_id": 389, + "timestamp": "00:39:40", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All right, I. When we went to try to begin training people to raise chickens. First of all, we were introduced to some fairly wealthy people or people that Dr. Bhave thought might be interested in raising chickens. And it was our job to try to convince them it would be worth their while to do so. And see, eggs were selling for like a rupee apiece." + }, + { + "turn_id": 390, + "timestamp": "00:40:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 391, + "timestamp": "00:40:09", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that's like a dollar in our money apiece. So people could see that they were worth, it was worth getting into, but they didn't know anything about how to raise the day old chicks to the later stage, etcetera. And it was our job to help people with that transition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 392, + "timestamp": "00:40:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any incentives you could offer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 393, + "timestamp": "00:40:33", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The government was supposed to give them day-old chicks at a fairly economical price. A very economical price. And the, the people that were interested in raising them were supposed to go through a training program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 394, + "timestamp": "00:40:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Run by?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 395, + "timestamp": "00:40:52", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Run by the state or the government. At any rate, we, it was our job to just convince them that they would be able to make some money out of this. And then if they did raise, start the chickens, then we would do the vaccinating and the animal husbandry that went along with trying to keep them alive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 396, + "timestamp": "00:41:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 397, + "timestamp": "00:41:16", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The problem in that area was, of course, nobody had any chickens and they weren't used to any other chickens other than the wild ones that ran around and just fed themselves. So they, our program taught people how to use a deep litter system in enclosed, well ventilated houses. Chicken houses that allowed you to keep several hundred chickens at a time. And you could make a pretty good profit from that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 398, + "timestamp": "00:41:45", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Eggs were used for food?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 399, + "timestamp": "00:41:48", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At that time, eggs were used as an antiseptic to put on a cut." + }, + { + "turn_id": 400, + "timestamp": "00:41:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 401, + "timestamp": "00:41:55", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Most Indians did not eat eggs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 402, + "timestamp": "00:41:57", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So there was a double agenda. I mean, not only, not only raising chickens, but convincing people to eat the eggs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 403, + "timestamp": "00:42:04", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I spent a lot of time, especially later on, up in Rajasthan, working on teaching people how to cook with eggs. And I wrote some cookbooks that are, compiled some cookbooks and things like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 404, + "timestamp": "00:42:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So within the culture of the area you were in, did eggs have any function?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 405, + "timestamp": "00:42:24", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Maharashtra was more advanced because the English had been there. So there were restaurants that would serve scrambled eggs and omelets. They were very good at making omelets. And some people ate those, but they still thought of eggs as having life because they used deshi eggs, which were the eggs that the male would have fertilized the female. And the people that were pure vegetarians did not feel they could eat those types of eggs. So part of our job was to convince them that a chicken gives an egg every day, just as a cow gives milk, and that we called them vegetarian eggs. And the chickens were not allowed to run loose. They were kept inside a house. So it was more pure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 406, + "timestamp": "00:43:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, it's kind of interesting because you're carrying a double burden. I mean, one is to teach people to raise chickens, but two is to convince people that they're worth eating, integrating into diet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 407, + "timestamp": "00:43:25", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was part of the reason they wanted us to go to India with this project, because so many people in the rural areas had such poor nutrition, their protein in their diet was nil and an egg would give you a lot of protein as well as be a way to get money in their pocket. This, the other thing about marketing eggs was that it didn't fit into the caste system. Anybody could do it and anybody could make money from it. And you wouldn't be criticized or condemned by your caste because you were doing it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 408, + "timestamp": "00:44:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the government of India had committed to this kind of program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 409, + "timestamp": "00:44:06", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, they had committed to it. They, they felt it would be a very worthwhile program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 410, + "timestamp": "00:44:11", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why didn't they have Indians doing what you were doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 411, + "timestamp": "00:44:15", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That, it's an interesting concept. They don't trust them, their own people. They trusted us more than they trusted their own people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 412, + "timestamp": "00:44:23", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did Dr. Bhave know your background?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 413, + "timestamp": "00:44:28", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If he did, he probably wouldn't have ever taken us. But they, the Indians were very open to people from other countries, at least in Maharashtra. I have to say this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 414, + "timestamp": "00:44:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 415, + "timestamp": "00:44:41", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very different up in Rajasthan. But in Maharashtra they were very open. And they really enjoyed having foreigners, quote unquote, come to their house and talk to them. They, they just, I know that they said several times that they just didn't trust so-and-so. Da da da da da." + }, + { + "turn_id": 416, + "timestamp": "00:44:59", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 417, + "timestamp": "00:44:59", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "About doing these types of things. But if we are telling them it is true, then this must be so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 418, + "timestamp": "00:45:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Let's just talk generally about your living conditions, the kind of housing you had, what you did for meals, I mean." + }, + { + "turn_id": 419, + "timestamp": "00:45:16", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we had a rough time at first. I just could not stand Indian food." + }, + { + "turn_id": 420, + "timestamp": "00:45:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 421, + "timestamp": "00:45:22", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The only thing I could eat is rice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 422, + "timestamp": "00:45:23", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 423, + "timestamp": "00:45:24", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I couldn't stand curry or anything and I lost so much weight. I was down to skin and bones. Finally, I got used so I could eat some of it. In Maharashtra they put so much spice in it. When you ate it, your eyes would water, your stomach would jump and everything else. So we had a lot of problems with amoebic dysentery and of course they gave us gamma globulin shots and all kinds of things and tetramycin and antibiotics all the time. But the whole time we were there, three years, we had the dysentery." + }, + { + "turn_id": 424, + "timestamp": "00:46:03", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you get direct medical support from the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 425, + "timestamp": "00:46:06", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Every three months they took us in and doctored us up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 426, + "timestamp": "00:46:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh. How far were you from the nearest Peace Corps office?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 427, + "timestamp": "00:46:12", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, we had to go all the way to Delhi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 428, + "timestamp": "00:46:14", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you turn your mike just a little like that? Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 429, + "timestamp": "00:46:19", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had to go all the way to New Delhi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 430, + "timestamp": "00:46:22", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How far is that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 431, + "timestamp": "00:46:22", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that would have been, let's see, about a day's trip to Pune. A day's trip from Pune to Bombay, another day's trip from Bombay up to New Delhi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 432, + "timestamp": "00:46:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you were ragingly ill, you weren't going to do that trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 433, + "timestamp": "00:46:37", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Well, we got used to it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 434, + "timestamp": "00:46:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To the trip?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 435, + "timestamp": "00:46:43", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, to being sick." + }, + { + "turn_id": 436, + "timestamp": "00:46:45", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 437, + "timestamp": "00:46:50", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, it just was something you lived with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 438, + "timestamp": "00:46:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 439, + "timestamp": "00:46:54", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The, um, the main things we had problems with were giardia and amoebic dysentery." + }, + { + "turn_id": 440, + "timestamp": "00:47:01", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 441, + "timestamp": "00:47:02", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But our housing itself, we started out, we had very poor sanitary conditions. A hole, a hole in a little hut. And, you know, the old outhouse business. And we did move into finally a house that was, it was solid clay walls. It was cooler. And we just had very simple furniture and tin plates. And we didn't, we didn't ever fancy anything up, we just." + }, + { + "turn_id": 442, + "timestamp": "00:47:32", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you do for water, I mean?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 443, + "timestamp": "00:47:34", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We boiled the water and we had clay pots and we strained the water. We'd boil it first, strain it and put it in a clay pot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 444, + "timestamp": "00:47:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 445, + "timestamp": "00:47:43", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it always tasted horrible but." + }, + { + "turn_id": 446, + "timestamp": "00:47:45", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 447, + "timestamp": "00:47:45", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We got, they used to have something called Nimbu Pani, which was a lemon, a lemon sweetened lemonade thing that you could put in water. And that helped us to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 448, + "timestamp": "00:47:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 449, + "timestamp": "00:48:01", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh, survive because I couldn't stand the water. And a lot of times we had to put iodine in it, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 450, + "timestamp": "00:48:06", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let's go six months after you were in town. And was there a point at which you began thinking? How did your job evolve, I should say?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 451, + "timestamp": "00:48:18", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After I got used to the food and got a little more strength, we had to ride bicycles everywhere. So we had to get our physical strength up to be able to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 452, + "timestamp": "00:48:28", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was most of what you did in conjunction with the woman, your partner?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 453, + "timestamp": "00:48:32", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 454, + "timestamp": "00:48:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So the two of you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 455, + "timestamp": "00:48:34", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We pretty much went together every place we went. And she was from Texas and she had a slow Texan drawl." + }, + { + "turn_id": 456, + "timestamp": "00:48:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 457, + "timestamp": "00:48:43", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And for some reason, they could understand her much better than me. I spoke too fast for them. So eventually, after about six months, I did learn how to slow way down and speak very carefully and it was easier for them to follow me. But I, uh, I think every three months, as I said, we went in for medical treatment. Sometimes we went to Bombay also, as I recall. Other times we went to New Delhi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 458, + "timestamp": "00:49:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When did the first chicken arrive in the town?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 459, + "timestamp": "00:49:20", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It took us a while to get chicken started. We did a lot of talking and they were starting to come. It took us almost several months though, several months to get that particular project going. And then I think we had about ten people that were interested in doing it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 460, + "timestamp": "00:49:38", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 461, + "timestamp": "00:49:39", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, and I wasn't there. I moved up to Rajasthan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 462, + "timestamp": "00:49:45", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After how long?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 463, + "timestamp": "00:49:45", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After about a year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 464, + "timestamp": "00:49:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So at the end of the year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 465, + "timestamp": "00:49:51", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 466, + "timestamp": "00:49:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What had you accomplished?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 467, + "timestamp": "00:49:53", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we had about ten people that were very interested in doing, raising the chickens, and they were our model." + }, + { + "turn_id": 468, + "timestamp": "00:49:59", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But it hadn't happened yet?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 469, + "timestamp": "00:50:00", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember whether, I think we at least had some of them with the chickens. The others were on order." + }, + { + "turn_id": 470, + "timestamp": "00:50:07", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 471, + "timestamp": "00:50:08", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So whether they had finally gotten, I can't remember Maharashtra as much as I do Rajasthan because that's where we." + }, + { + "turn_id": 472, + "timestamp": "00:50:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was anyone evaluating, I mean, whether it was from the Indian side or Peace Corps side, to give you a sense of whether you were moving appropriately or achieving?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 473, + "timestamp": "00:50:27", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had people come to visit us from time to time and try to give us encouragement. I don't think they were worried so much that it was taking a while to get this done, especially here where nobody ever, nobody even had chickens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 474, + "timestamp": "00:50:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 475, + "timestamp": "00:50:44", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It takes a while to do all the convincing and the government was slow in getting the chickens and all that type of thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 476, + "timestamp": "00:50:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 477, + "timestamp": "00:50:50", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So before you go through all that red tape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 478, + "timestamp": "00:50:54", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Other than Dr. Bhave, did you have any Indian counterparts?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 479, + "timestamp": "00:51:01", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I believe there was an Indian fellow who was supposed to also be working in that project, but I'm not sure if he was in the poultry area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 480, + "timestamp": "00:51:10", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did he have a job title? It's very important in some structures." + }, + { + "turn_id": 481, + "timestamp": "00:51:20", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Poultry trainee? Poultry expert? I don't know. They called us poultry expert." + }, + { + "turn_id": 482, + "timestamp": "00:51:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did people in the village perceived you, I mean?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 483, + "timestamp": "00:51:30", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, it was a big city." + }, + { + "turn_id": 484, + "timestamp": "00:51:32", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 485, + "timestamp": "00:51:32", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were, we went to the outskirts of the city, but the city itself was very big, very primitive but big." + }, + { + "turn_id": 486, + "timestamp": "00:51:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The people with whom you worked, I mean, what was their sense?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 487, + "timestamp": "00:51:43", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They seem to, as I say, in Maharashtra they were used to the English and they, they thought of us as celebrities practically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 488, + "timestamp": "00:51:50", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 489, + "timestamp": "00:51:51", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were the only show on the block." + }, + { + "turn_id": 490, + "timestamp": "00:51:54", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because of who you are?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 491, + "timestamp": "00:51:56", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. They weren't, no other foreigners were there I don't believe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 492, + "timestamp": "00:51:59", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Some people going into another culture find what's called an informant or a mentor or, you know, someone from that culture with whom they can communicate more readily. And then was there anyone who played that role that you recall?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 493, + "timestamp": "00:52:20", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hmm. Dr. Bhave tried to answer as many questions about things as he could." + }, + { + "turn_id": 494, + "timestamp": "00:52:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 495, + "timestamp": "00:52:27", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I don't recall anybody else helping us in that respect." + }, + { + "turn_id": 496, + "timestamp": "00:52:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you wouldn't go out and drink beer with Dr. Bhave?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 497, + "timestamp": "00:52:33", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh no, I don't drink beer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 498, + "timestamp": "00:52:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I mean, or." + }, + { + "turn_id": 499, + "timestamp": "00:52:36", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But, no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 500, + "timestamp": "00:52:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 501, + "timestamp": "00:52:40", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We kept very much to ourselves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 502, + "timestamp": "00:52:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 503, + "timestamp": "00:52:43", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We didn't, we didn't want to get into that kind of thing, not in those days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 504, + "timestamp": "00:52:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, yeah, but you still felt comfortable in the setting you were in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 505, + "timestamp": "00:52:53", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. It was strange having two women, for one thing, alone. I mean, that's, that's not a very usual thing in India." + }, + { + "turn_id": 506, + "timestamp": "00:53:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In India." + }, + { + "turn_id": 507, + "timestamp": "00:53:05", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 508, + "timestamp": "00:53:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 509, + "timestamp": "00:53:06", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we were very careful. I don't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 510, + "timestamp": "00:53:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 511, + "timestamp": "00:53:12", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember whether my roommate drank beer or anything like that, but I don't even know if beer was, I guess it was available." + }, + { + "turn_id": 512, + "timestamp": "00:53:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 513, + "timestamp": "00:53:19", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I didn't drink beer. I don't remember. I can't remember her drinking it either." + }, + { + "turn_id": 514, + "timestamp": "00:53:23", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Peace Corps had no hesitation, though, about putting the two of you together up in this obscure area, remote area?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 515, + "timestamp": "00:53:30", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess not. They did have a couple of other volunteers come out to see us every now and then, just to see if we were alive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 516, + "timestamp": "00:53:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To show them how bad it can be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 517, + "timestamp": "00:53:41", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "See how it's going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 518, + "timestamp": "00:53:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So were you considered to be on the, on the cutting edge, you know, a hardship kind of post?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 519, + "timestamp": "00:53:51", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, actually I thought it, Maharashtra was, as I say, a fairly, at least they had a fairly good attitude towards foreigners. So we didn't have it as hard as we did in Rajasthan when I went up there. But the hard part in Maharashtra was simply the fact that nobody had done the chickens and we had to get somebody to prove it could be done. So that was hard. We had to do a lot of visiting. We went to a lot of social functions to try and talked and talked and talked about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 520, + "timestamp": "00:54:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, what kind of social functions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 521, + "timestamp": "00:54:21", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, weddings. If somebody was having a dinner at their home, we would, they'd invite us. A lot of people invited us to places." + }, + { + "turn_id": 522, + "timestamp": "00:54:32", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, most of your day, including the social events, you were working and expressing yourself in English, not Hindi?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 523, + "timestamp": "00:54:42", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In Maharashtra, we didn't have to use as much Hindi because they spoke, a lot of people spoke English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 524, + "timestamp": "00:54:48", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 525, + "timestamp": "00:54:49", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they had quite a group of the Parsis or Zoroastrian religion that were very educated and very wealthy in their, in that area. And they were thinking of starting a project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 526, + "timestamp": "00:55:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so as you came to the end of the first year, had you, did you feel you would made progress in the use of Hindi or was it just sort of there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 527, + "timestamp": "00:55:13", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, we used Hindi, and I think. I'm trying to remember the difference between Rajasthan and Maharashtra because I, most of my positive things I think of in Rajasthan, that was our two years up there. At any rate, um, I'm trying to think whether we had a poultry fair. Sometimes we did displays like that where we had a poultry fair or an agricultural fair, where we would display ways to raise chickens and graphs on how to make money with it and all that type of thing. And do some, uh, get, put out literature and so forth of explaining about eggs and how to raise chickens. And we would also try to get people to sign up to take training classes. And sometimes I know at these fairs we would do cooking demonstrations and things. Show people how to use the eggs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 528, + "timestamp": "00:56:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just the eggs? The chickens, no?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 529, + "timestamp": "00:56:14", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At that time we weren't into meat. Later on, we did get into that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 530, + "timestamp": "00:56:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall your first Christmas? I mean, it must have been a tough time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 531, + "timestamp": "00:56:25", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, growing up with six kids." + }, + { + "turn_id": 532, + "timestamp": "00:56:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But did you attempt to have a Christmas celebration?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 533, + "timestamp": "00:56:31", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think we did. I can't even remember it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 534, + "timestamp": "00:56:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 535, + "timestamp": "00:56:37", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember it. It was, things like that didn't bother me that much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 536, + "timestamp": "00:56:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you don't recall being homesick or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 537, + "timestamp": "00:56:44", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. It wasn't. No. I was in love with my husband-to-be. That was my big thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 538, + "timestamp": "00:56:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Anything else about the first year? And did, did you feel the training had prepared you for this or that they had thrown you curves or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 539, + "timestamp": "00:57:05", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They had taught us from the beginning to be flexible. They said, you really need to be flexible. You don't know what you're going to encounter. Every situation is different. So we just rolled with the punches." + }, + { + "turn_id": 540, + "timestamp": "00:57:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did you have any sense of the role that Peace Corps was playing in your life at that point, I mean?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 541, + "timestamp": "00:57:25", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know if I got the sense then or I have gotten it later, that I think they mainly wanted us to just experience another culture and come back and share what we had learned with Americans here, because so many people have never been in another culture like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 542, + "timestamp": "00:57:40", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There wasn't any sense of a push to see that you ended up with 1,000 chicken farmers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 543, + "timestamp": "00:57:46", + "speaker": "Ruth Ann Van Hala", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. Uh uh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 544, + "timestamp": "00:57:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You know, it's kind of an American sense of a number achievement." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00223", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/GibsonRL/gibsonrl.htm", + "original_file_name": "GibsonRL_11-1-13.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/GibsonRL/GibsonRL_11-1-13.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Robert L. Gibson", + "location_date": "Houston, TX – 1 November 2013" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "Rebecca Hackler" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Robert L. Gibson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is November 1, 2013. This interview with Hoot Gibson is being conducted in Houston, Texas, for the JSC Oral History Project. The interview is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Rebecca Hackler. Thanks again for taking time out of your day to spend some time with us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good to be here. We should have done it yesterday when it was all raining, but good to be here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That would have been better, because now you’re stuck inside and it’s really nice out. I thought this might be an interesting question to start with: your nickname is Hoot, how did you get that nickname?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s a very unoriginal nickname. I’m very fond of saying I got it because of the expression “not worth a hoot,” but in actuality, it was from the cowboy movie star of the 1930s, who was called Hoot Gibson. If your last name is Gibson, you’re most likely going to get “Hoot” for a nickname. I have known several others. My dad told me that when he was younger, it was one of his nicknames. He would get called Hoot Gibson. Once I got to my first fighter squadron, I remember the operations office asked me, “All right, kid, you got a nickname?” My first name is Robert, so I said, “Well, yes, sir—Bob.” He goes, “No, come on, I mean a real nickname.” I said, “Well, occasionally I’ve been called Hoot,” and that was it. That went on my airplane, that went on my nametag, it went on my coffee cup. So, from that day on, I wasn’t Bob anymore, I was Hoot.\\n\\n There was a funny story. My dad showed up at a lecture that a couple of the guys from my squadron were giving, and he walked up to them afterwards and said, “Hey, I’m Paul Gibson; my son is a pilot in your squadron.” They said, “Who’s that?” He said, “Bob Gibson.” They looked at him, and they said, “Bob Gibson? Bob Gibson? We don’t have a Bob. Oh, you mean Hoot.” My name had changed so thoroughly that most nobody knew what my real name was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s funny. I told my husband I was going to be interviewing you today and I asked him that question, he said, “Oh, I wonder if it’s because he’s such a hoot to be around?” I said, “I don’t know.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not worth a hoot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a good story. Tell us about your interest in space and aviation as a kid." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Aviation, I was involved in literally from the time I was an infant, and that’s because Mom and Dad were both pilots. In fact, that’s how they met. My mother decided that right out of college she was going to learn how to fly. She and two of her girlfriends from college bought an airplane, which was called a J2 Taylor Cub, and were learning how to fly that airplane, and that’s how she met my dad. That’s how they got together, was through the flying. From the time I was a little kid, I’ve been flying with them. I did all the typical pilot things: soloed on my sixteenth birthday and had my private pilot’s license when I was 17. And so, [I] had been involved in flying, like I say, literally all my life. Pretty well knew that when I finished college I wanted to go fly jet fighters. That came to be because I did sign up for Navy flight training, and I think you wanted to go into that, right? Into that part of the story?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I signed on with the Navy while I was still in college, although I didn’t do anything with them other than take my oath of office and be sworn in and then be given orders to go back and finish college. When I graduated from college, I was hoping they’re going to tell me, “Okay, you’re graduating here June 7, we want you to report September 10,” or something like that, so I’d have the whole summer in California. No, June 24, so I had two weeks and then reported to [Naval Air Station] Pensacola to start Officer Candidate School. Once I finished Officer Candidate School, which was about 16 weeks or so, then it was off into pilot training in the Navy. That altogether takes about a year and a half. I started in the end of June 1969, and I pinned on my wings in January of 1971, so just a hair over a year and a half.\\n\\n From there, I got sent to what the Navy called a RAG, the Readiness Air Group, for the F-4 Phantom. I wound up getting my first choice of assignments out of pilot training, and that was in the F-4s. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to get through, but they had an unacknowledged pool of pilots in this squadron, so it was eight months before I made my first flight in the Phantom from the time I got there. Immediately, I went right on through because, of course, at this time, the Vietnam War was fairly well raging.\\n\\n I finished my training, and I got packed up and shipped from San Diego [California], which is where the squadron was and where I was based. All of the Navy fighter squadrons on the West Coast were based out of Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego. When I finished my training, I had done fairly well, and so they sent me off to join a carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin engaged in combat operations already. For a normal flow, what you would do is you’d finish the training squadron, the RAG. You’d go to an operational squadron, and you’d be in San Diego with them for six months or seven months and then hop aboard the carrier and sail across to Southeast Asia. In my case, I just packed my bags and flew over and joined the USS Coral Sea in the Gulf of Tonkin, so, golly, within two weeks of when I finished the squadron, I was flying combat missions over Vietnam." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Had you flown into and onto carriers before that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Going through pilot training between basic training, you will do four carrier landings in a basic type of jet, and then in advanced training, it’ll be a high-performance swept wing jet, the TA-4 Skyhawk, and you’ll make six landings in that airplane. Then, you receive your wings. All of those are daytime, however, and then when you go to the RAG, the F-4 Phantom RAG, now you’re going to get something like—how many landings was it? It was like 18 landings, and for the first time, you’re going to go to the ship at night. You’re going to get night carrier qualified as well. I’m thinking it’s something like 10 night landings that you’ve got to get, so it’s fairly involved to get through all of that. So yes, I was all qualified to be launching off a carrier and coming back, so at that point, I had somewhere around 25 or 30 carrier landings at that point. We were flying every day, sometimes twice a day, so I built up carrier landings very rapidly flying the combat missions that we were doing.\\n\\n This was 1972, and that was a very intense year of the Vietnam War. In fact, it was the most intense air war in all of the Vietnam War. The air war in 1972 is what finally brought them, the North Vietnamese, to the negotiating table and basically ended hostilities there and got us back all of our POWs [Prisoners of War]. It was all of the action of 1972 that brought them to the table. At this point I was all of 25 years old, flying combat missions over North Vietnam, and we went everywhere. We went to Hanoi and Haiphong and all of the high threat areas, and we were confronted with surface to air missiles and AAA, which is anti-aircraft artillery. There was plenty of threat, and in fact, my carrier on that cruise, the USS Coral Sea, had nine airplanes shot down. We had nine airplanes that we lost in combat, so it was a very intense year of warfare and explains why when I flew home after that cruise—we came back, I think it was July of 1972. When we got within about 300 miles of the California coast, we launched off all the airplanes that we could launch, so I flew back into San Diego. Dad and Mom were there, waiting, and that’s when Dad told me, he said, “You will never know how, for the last six months, I wished I’d never taught you to fly.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I can imagine that must have been heartbreaking for them to watch the news." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, Dad was not happy with it. He was really pleased and really happy that I had done so well flying and that he was the one that taught me how to fly, but I can just picture him sitting there, reading the news every night, and reading about another couple of airplanes shot down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any close calls when you were over there yourself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I never got hit. I had lots of projectiles go by me very close but never got hit. I would say not really, not really any close calls." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s tough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it obviously bothered him a lot more than it bothered me. People ask me if I was scared. I don’t know that I’d use the word “scared.” I was very apprehensive. When you’ve got tracers coming by your canopy, it’ll get your attention. Those really light up the sky, but the ones that are a lot more dangerous were the radar-guided antiaircraft guns, where they’d have a radar tracking you, feeding that information to a computer, and the computer aims the guns at you. It knew how to lead you, it knew where you were going, and that’s why when you were flying over North Vietnam, you never flew in a straight line for more than 4 seconds at a time. You were constantly jinking, what we call jinking, so you might be straight for a couple of seconds, looking somewhere, and then it’s time to change altitude, change direction, because this radar is projecting your flight path and it’s going to put a bullet—sometimes these were big bullets; the normal ones were 57-millimeter, which is golly, 57-millimeters is almost a 3-inch shell—and they could put it right where you’re going to be in 8 seconds, so you don’t want to be there 8 seconds from now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that something you had practiced training before you went, or was that something that they had told you when you got there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Both—you got told it, and we also flew missions in the simulator. Before I finished the RAG, you’d fly missions in the simulator. If you weren’t jinking, they’d shoot you down in the simulator, and they’d say, “Okay, you forgot to jink, didn’t you? So you just got shot down.” Fortunately, just in the simulator." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was sort of engrained by the time you went over there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, oh, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you do once you came back to the States?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was just my first cruise, and then I came back from that cruise, which for me was 1972. The ship had actually left the end of 1971, so I made about half of that cruise. That was the only combat cruise that I wound up making. We were due to go back in February of 1973, February 9, 1973 is when we were supposed to leave, and on January 31, the ceasefire was signed. We got delayed by a month, they gave us an extra month, and we didn’t leave until March. In the meantime, we got a bunch of new pilots. Some of our older pilots rotated out and we had new pilots, new back-seaters. The Phantom had two people. It had a pilot and a radar intercept officer in the back seat, who is not a pilot, our radar operator. So we had a bunch of new people come in.\\n\\n I got picked, even though I was one of the junior pilots in the squadron, to go to “Top Gun” on that turnaround. I’m trying to remember, it would have been August or September of ’72, I went through the “Top Gun” training course, which of course got made really famous by the movie, 14 years later. Golly, what a fascinating thing that was, to get to do “Top Gun.” My first dogfight was against [Randy] Duke Cunningham, the Navy’s MiG Ace. Turns out he shot down his third, fourth, and fifth MiGs on May 10, 1972, which was a day that I flew a combat mission as part of a big strike group from the Coral Sea, and Mike [Michael L.] Coats flew a combat mission as part of a strike group from the Kitty Hawk. He flew a strike that day as well. In fact, the Coral Sea went in first, and there were no MiGs that came up. Then the Constellation went in and got jumped by a dozen MiGs, and that’s when Duke Cunningham, Randy Cunningham, shot down his third, fourth, and fifth MiGs to become the first Ace of the Vietnam War. Then, Mike Coats and the Kitty Hawk came in after that. They’d all been shot down by then, so there weren’t any more MiGs left. Not really; there were still plenty of MiGs left, but they had been beat up so bad, they didn’t come up.\\n\\n Brewster [H.] Shaw flew that same day. He was an Air Force F-4 pilot. I saw a book written by Jeff Ethell [Fox Two: America’s First Ace in Vietnam], well, I bought the book and read it, and Jeff Ethell didn’t even mention that I flew that day, but he did mention that future astronaut Brewster Shaw flew out of Thailand, I think. We had a number of Space Shuttle astronauts that were involved in the Vietnam War and even specifically May 10.\\n\\n My first dogfight was against the Navy’s MiG Ace, and he was in a stripped-down, souped-up A-4 Skyhawk, and I didn’t shoot him down but he didn’t shoot me down, so that was a pretty big victory for me, not to get shot down by the Navy’s Ace. “Top Gun,” like I say, was really, really fascinating. Then we went ahead and left on cruise March of 1973, and we really didn’t do much of anything over there. We were still in the Tonkin Gulf, off the coast of Vietnam. We did some photo reconnaissance; we did some monitoring of what was going on, but no combat flying. We did a lot of night flying. Towards the end of that cruise, at this point, it’s about time for me to rotate from sea duty, which would be a sea-going operational squadron, back to shore duty.\\n\\n The commanding officer of the squadron came to me one day—and he just happened to be a back-seater, and he just happened to be my back-seater because he had chosen me to be his pilot, so he must have felt I was pretty good because the senior radar intercept officers in the squadron wanted to fly with the more safe pilots—and said, “How would you like to make another cruise?” I’m thinking, “Oh, no, it’s time for me to go to shore duty.” I said, “Oh, Skipper, I don’t know.” He said, “In the F-14 Tomcat.” I said, “Really?” The Tomcat was just coming to fruition then and was just getting ready to join the fleet. It turned out that they looked at the first two squadrons, and they said, “You know what, we don’t have enough junior pilots in these squadrons.” They were heavy on more senior pilots. They said, “We need some more relatively junior pilots, so we want three pilots from the West Coast and three pilots from the East Coast.” The East Coast fighter squadrons were based at Oceana, Virginia, which is right near Virginia Beach, Virginia.\\n\\n They were going to pick three pilots that had at least one cruise and were relatively junior. I had a cruise and a half. I wound up being one of the three pilots picked off the West Coast to go to Fighter Squadron 1, which was, along with Fighter Squadron 2, [one of] the first two operational Tomcat squadrons. I joined that squadron, and this time I had a normal turnaround. I joined them in December of ’73 and then we left on the first cruise the next September, September of ’74. We went to the Tonkin Gulf, and at that point, things were falling apart in South Vietnam. I remember there was a press release that North Vietnam issued that said we were there saber-rattling and brazen provocateurs is what we were for being in the Tonkin Gulf with this brand-new fighter, the Tomcat. We didn’t do a whole lot. We sailed the Tonkin Gulf, we did flight operations in the gulf, just to let them know we were there.\\n\\n South Vietnam was falling apart very rapidly. We were supposed to have left and come home, I think, in March of ’75, and all of a sudden, it developed that South Vietnam was just going to fall. We were extended an extra month to provide fighter cover for the Fall of Saigon. Over there it was April 29, 1975. Over here, because of the International Date Line, it was April 30, 1975. That’s the day Saigon fell, and that’s the day that we launched all the helicopters in to pick up the last few Americans and the last few Vietnamese who had worked with us very closely and a large number of members of their military and their families. I flew fighter cover that day, overhead Saigon, the very last day of the Vietnam War. The helicopters came in and picked everybody up, and they were landing on the rooftops around Saigon, and on the embassy grounds in Saigon. Like I say, I flew one of what we called Combat Air Patrol, or CAP, mission overhead, armed to the teeth, in case they shot any of our helicopters down or shot at us or anything like that, none of which happened. They just wanted to let us get in there, get our people, and get out, so they didn’t shoot at us at all.\\n\\n They called it a combat mission, so I had one combat mission in the F-14 Tomcat. It turned out to be my very last carrier landing because when I came back in and landed after that one, we buttoned everything up and pulled out and headed back to California. I got back from that cruise and then I did go to shore duty as an instructor in the F-14 Tomcat, but I didn’t want to be there. I had someplace else I wanted to be, and that was Test Pilot School. My dad had been a test pilot and an aeronautical engineer, so I’m sure there was a bunch of hero worship, and he was my hero. I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, and I wanted to be a test pilot. I actually had a little bit of trouble getting to Test Pilot School because the Navy had said, “F-14 Tomcat training is so expensive that once you get into the Tomcat, you can’t come out of it.” Only they had let one of my squadron-mates go the year before to Test Pilot School, and then I guess maybe they made the rule after he went. They said, “We’re not going to let anybody get out of the F-14 Tomcat. Once you’re in it, that’s all you’re going to do.” I really wanted to go to Test Pilot School. I wound up working as an instructor in the F-14 Tomcat for about nine months.\\n\\n Meanwhile my Air Wing Commander found out about all this, and he was an air wing commander aboard the Enterprise. He was a Test Pilot School graduate as well, and a former test pilot, of course. He was determined he was going to help me, so he actually called the skipper of Test Pilot School and told him, “Hey, there’s a guy that you need to have there.” I was a little bit embarrassed by it all, and I was a little bit put off by it all, Next thing I knew I got a call from the commander of the Test Pilot School, telling me that the reason I hadn’t been picked was that the Bureau of Personnel had refused to let my application go to the board for the Test Pilot School. So he said, “Send it directly to me,” so I mailed it directly to him, and then lo and behold, the very next selection board, I got picked for Test Pilot School. The thing was, I was a really good candidate for Test Pilot School because I had an aeronautical engineering degree, and many of the test pilots don’t have an engineering degree. You could have a history degree and get picked to go to Test Pilot School, but I also had, by now, fleet experience in two different types of fighters. That’s a very valuable thing for a test pilot.\\n\\n That’s what got me to Test Pilot School, was a whole bunch of help from buddies who had been to Test Pilot School. Rick [Frederick H.] Hauck had been the Air Wing Operations Officer aboard the Enterprise on my last cruise, and he was a Test Pilot School graduate. Like I say, I had a bunch of help from people to get my name in front of the Skipper of the school. That was a one-year course, and I’ve never worked harder in my life than Test Pilot School. College was not quite as difficult, even astronaut training wasn’t as difficult as Test Pilot School. I did very well in it and went to flying test flights in the F-14 Tomcats, which you always have continuing projects, even though the airplane’s operational and it’s out in the fleet now, there were several malfunctions that happened. In fact, one accident that killed my roommate. “Hoot, go do some flight testing and figure out what in the world happened here.” We also had an incident where an airplane lost three-quarters of its roll control, so what in the world happened there? You’re doing flight tests like that. I also had a major new project for the Tomcat, and that was the first reconnaissance version of it. I got to do first flight in that and all the structural demonstration, which involves high-G, high mach number, 6.5 Gs at one point, 1.65 mach, rolling turns and things like that. Did all the envelope expansion, structural demonstration\\n\\n About that time, NASA went out with the call, the very first call for astronauts in nine years. It had been 1969 since we had had any new astronauts come in, and I’m pretty sure those were the Manned Orbiting Laboratory guys. They had not picked astronauts since then because they just didn’t need any. I had not really been interested in being an astronaut prior to Space Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You hadn’t followed the space program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh I followed it, I watched it, I watched the Moon landing. I was in Officer Candidate School at the time. We were all living in the BOQ, the Bachelor Officers Quarters, and we didn’t have a television, so four of us hopped in one of the guys’ cars, went and rented a motel room for the night that had a black and white TV in it, just so we could watch Neil [A.] Armstrong get out and step foot on the Moon. I was fascinated by it, but I had no interest in doing that because I was an airplane person, and none of those had wings on them. Now, all of a sudden, one day I’m looking at Aviation Week magazine, and I flip the page, and here’s an artist’s concept of a Space Shuttle flying a reentry to come back in and land. This is like the Walt Disney series of the 1950s, the three-stage rocket to space that had the big Delta-Wing Glider on top of it, that, of course, I got to watch on TV. My mom even had the book by Willy Ley, and it was called Space Pilots. I was interested in a space ship that had wings on it and flew a gliding reentry and landed on a runway. I remember looking at that picture and saying, “Oh, man, I have got to get me one of those.”\\n\\n From that moment on, I was hooked. It really didn’t change my direction in the Navy any, and this happened before Test Pilot School. I knew I wanted to be a test pilot anyway, but if you wanted to be a Space Shuttle pilot, I knew I would have to be a test pilot as well, so it really didn’t change anything. It just really enforced the idea that, okay, I have got to get through test pilot school because I want to fly those. I guess I made that pretty well known to Mom and Dad, and I remember when they rolled out Enterprise, I think I was at Patuxent River [Maryland] then, which is the Test Pilot School or the Flight Test Center. Dad called to tell me that he and Mom had driven up to Palmdale [California] to go see the roll-out. I said, “Why’d you drive all the way there to see that?” He said, “Because I knew some day you’d be flying them.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your dad really was a big proponent and supporter of your dreams, wasn’t he?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, he was, and he was a big fan. Of course, I had to apply to the Navy, and the process was going to be NASA asks the Air Force, the Navy, the different services, to do a screening. The Air Force and the Navy were supposed to pick 45 pilots and 45 other-than pilots, and the Navy did that. The Navy picked 45 and 45. The Air Force was supposed to do that, and they didn’t. They picked 75 pilots and 45 other-than pilots and sent all those names in. I had to get through the Navy selection board first, and that was just a paper selection. I didn’t have to go interview or anything like that. That all worked, I got through the Navy selection board, and then NASA started interviewing for that the end of 1977. I remember Free Flight number 1 [of the Enterprise], whichever date that was on, I was there the very next week.\\n\\n Free flight 1 happened on a Thursday or a Friday in September—pretty sure it was September—of ’77, and my interview was the very next week because they had the big gathering in the Teague Auditorium. We got invited to go to it, the 20 pilots that were there interviewing that week. Fred [W.] Haise and [C.] Gordon Fullerton got up and told their story and showed their movies and all of that sort of thing. It was really cool. I got to go ride in the simulator with, golly, I guess it was with Fred Haise. What they were doing was they were wanting to compare the simulator with what they had actually seen on the first free flight. It was right after the first Free Flight, the week I got to be there.\\n\\n Lo and behold, let’s see, they interviewed 208 people altogether, 80 pilots and 120 mission specialists. January 16, 1978, I started the day just as Hoot Gibson, Navy test pilot, and by the end of the day, I was Hoot Gibson the astronaut. I remember I actually went in a little bit late that day because I was flying a test flight in the morning, and then in the afternoon, I was catching an airliner down to Orlando [Florida] to work with the Naval Training Center on the next upcoming F-14 simulator that was being put together. I was giving a ride to one of my fellow test pilots, who lived about a block away from me. I picked him up, so I was a little bit later. I got to my office at, I don’t know, about 8:30 in the morning, and there was one of those little yellow notes that said, “You were called by: Please call George [W.S.] Abbey.” I went, “Oh, my gosh, this can’t be.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You knew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was hoping that that’s what it was, and I didn’t know the protocol at the time. It turns out that what the protocol was, was that George Abbey would call all the ones who had been selected. If it was somebody else who called you who was a member of the selection board, it’s because you didn’t get selected. I didn’t know that at that time, but I still have that note. I’ve kept that note. Picked up the phone and called George Abbey. George Abbey told me, “Well, if you’re still interested, we’d like to go ahead and select you.” I said, “Ba daba daba, if I’m still interested!” Of course I was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course. Did you tell your parents as soon as you hung up the phone?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, golly, yes. The instruction was, “Hey, the press release is going to go out later today, so please keep it quiet. Don’t go write and tell your local newspaper or anything like that, but keep it quiet at least until the end of the day today,” and I don’t think I waited until the end of the day. I think I called Mom and Dad and told them but told them to keep it quiet, too. What a great day. Then I went and I flew about a 3-hour test flight in a Tomcat, landed from that, and let’s see, myself and my back-seater who was on that project with me, we drove to, I don’t remember where, [Washington] Dulles [International] Airport [Sterling, Virginia] or Washington National [Airport, Arlington, Virginia], and flew down to Orlando and got to be in Florida by the end of the day. That was just a really fun day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Pretty memorable, I’m sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was a great day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Then, a few weeks later, you were invited down here to Houston for basically a meet and greet, introduce you to the Center. Would you tell us about those three days down here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the phone call was January 16, that’s an easy day to remember, and then somebody from NASA—I don’t remember exactly who—got on the phone, but said, “We’d like to have you all come down here.” It was the end of January, as I remember. I don’t remember the exact dates. We were down for about three days, and of course, they toured us around and the press was everywhere. It was just a real big event because we had not picked astronauts in nine years, and these were the first group of Space Shuttle astronauts, 35 of us, 15 pilots and 20 mission specialists. First time we had selected women, so we had our first six women astronauts, and first time we had picked African Americans. In that group was Fred [Frederick D.] Gregory, Guy [Guion S.] Bluford, and Ron [Ronald E.] McNair, and Ellison [S.] Onizuka. I remember a funny story, he was asked by one of the members of the press, “How does it feel to be one of the first minority astronauts?” He said, “Minority? I didn’t know I was one.” That was Ellison. He and I were officemates for the first four and a half years that we were down here together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you tell us about Ellison? Obviously we’re not able to interview him. Rhea [Seddon] told us about some of the antics you guys were involved in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, golly, yes, did Rhea tell you about some of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A few things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had more fun at each other’s expense. Shoot, I remember one time the Roundup, our little newspaper that came out every week, had a coloring contest. They put out a picture that kids were to color in. I took a bunch of crayons and went scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, and then on the bottom of it, in very broken writing, wrote “El Onizuka,” and stuck it up on the bulletin board up there at the Astronaut Office. Ellison found it and said something along the lines of, “Damn Hoot,” and pulled it down, of course. He and I had a lot of funny little tricks and games that we played on each other all the time. One of the really funny ones that he played on me was I guess he got one of the secretaries to write a note that said, “You were called by: please call,” and he gave me some woman’s name in Bellingham, Washington. I’m going, “What in the world is this all about?” I returned the phone call. She got on the phone, and she had no idea what this was about, “Why do you have a message to call me?” “Well, I don’t know, why did I have a message to call you?”\\n\\n A couple days later, Ellison stuck up on our big bulletin board a newspaper article. This lady was entered in a mud-sliding contest, and I think she did real well in it because she was real big. She was a great, big, overweight woman from Bellingham, Washington. Ellison had tricked me into calling her and then put this up on our bulletin board. He and I were always playing little games on each other, little tricks on each other. The pictures you see of him, he’s always got this, I don’t know, almost mischievous smile on his face, but a very warm and captivating smile, and that’s what he was like. I don’t think I ever heard him mad at anybody or grumpy at anybody, just a wonderful, nice guy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned the media interest in the Thirty-Five New Guys, and I was curious, some of the women have talked about the fact that the press was so interested in them because there had never been any women selected before, and of course, the minorities, as you pointed out. What did the rest of you guys think? The 25 guys who weren’t unique, you kind of looked like the other guys." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We actually had it made. We had a bunch of briefings in those days, that we were back the end of January. They said, “We’re going to make you guys available to the press.” They had a whole day blocked out for us. The press was going to be able to come in. They’d take turns, and they’d get to have a private interview with you and all that sort of thing. The boys all sat around like this [demonstrates], saying, “Well, shoot. I guess we don’t have to do anything.” The women and the African Americans were tied up all day long, from early in the morning until 6:30 at night, and the rest of us just skated. They really weren’t interested in talking to any of us. They said there might be hometown newspapers or hometown television stations that are there to talk to you; none of that materialized. It was all the women and the minorities. It was fine with us, actually. Every time we went traveling—we reported, I guess, in June of ’78, I think it was—when we would go on field trips, they would have the press in there to take pictures, of course, same thing. They were interested in shooting pictures of the women training and the African Americans training. Like I say, for the rest of us, that’s okay. I get more than enough attention; I don’t need all the attention when we’re out training. In fact, that lets us just kind of slip by unnoticed. So didn’t bother us at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What are you recollections of meeting Rhea for the first time? I know she talks about meeting you and Mike Coats and extending her hand, which was kind of unusual. Most women didn’t do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s what I remember. That’s what I remember. In those days, that must be a different century—well, actually, it was a different century! It must have been a different era altogether because when you would meet a woman—even though I was a fighter pilot, I knew what the protocol was and how to be polite and how to do it properly—the protocol was you did not shake a woman’s hand unless she held her hand out. That was what Rhea did immediately. I was being introduced to Rhea, and I will never forget her reaching her hand out to shake my hand. I certainly don’t recall any of the other five women holding a hand out to shake my hand. Rhea, I believe, was the only one. I was very impressed with all six of them.\\n\\n I knew to be selected out of 10,000 qualified applications for a mission specialist—for pilots, there were only 1,500 for the 1978 selection—there were 11,500 qualified applications, of which 10,000 were mission specialists, and that’s because it’s a little less restrictive. Mission specialists could come from a whole lot of different backgrounds, but pilot astronauts had to have 1,500 hours of high-performance jet time. An airliner is not a high-performance jet, so it had to be jet fighter, jet attack kind of aircraft, and test pilot experience was highly desired, but in fact, it was required. We’ve never picked anybody to be a Shuttle pilot that wasn’t a military test pilot. The six women were one of 10,000 that got selected, so we were very impressed with all of them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mike [Richard M.] Mullane talks in his book [Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut] about how he didn’t really think that women should have been part of that class, that really they were kind of soft, especially when compared with the experiences you talked about, going to fly in Vietnam and things like that. Did you get that sense, being in the class yourself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I didn’t have that feeling at all. To this day I don’t see any reason why women couldn’t function in that environment. The only reason they didn’t before was because they didn’t. President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower made the decision back in the early days, when we were getting ready to think about sending astronauts to space and there was talk about who should we send. “Well, maybe we should send condemned criminals, that way, if we kill them, they were condemned anyway.” There were all kinds of fanciful ideas about who we should send and who we could send, and President Eisenhower made the decision, no, we were going to select from the ranks of military test pilots. That’s kind of the way it got started, and it stayed that way for a long, long time, obviously. It wasn’t up until late in the game that we picked a group of scientist astronauts. They had all been military test pilots prior to that point. It was a natural evolution, although at the time, when you look at it, we had the requirement and still do, to this day, that it had to be a college degree in engineering, science, or math. There weren’t that many women that were in technical degrees at that time, and it, I’m sure, was a whole lot more effort for that selection board to find enough women with the technical degrees that we could interview and could pick. It’s evolved over the years. I was on three selection boards altogether, two of them when I was Chief Astronaut because the Chief Astronaut was always going to be part of the selection board. Rhea and I were on a selection board together, maybe for the ’92 class or maybe the ’90 class." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it when you selected Eileen [M.] Collins? Were you on that board?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I was not on that one. She was ’90 class, wasn’t she?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, she was in the ’90 class. Maybe it was after that one; it might have been the ’92 class. I still remember we just didn’t have that many women to choose from that met the criteria of qualified, let alone pilot-qualified. We’ve seen that change dramatically over the years and I fully expect our Astronaut Corps is eventually going to get to the point where it’s 50-50 men and women. I know they’re not there yet, but I think it will be. No reason not to be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, the recent class, it was 50-50. That was big news." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me a little bit more about some of the other women in the class, Judy [Judith A. Resnik] or Sally [K. Ride], Kathy [Kathryn D. Sullivan], some of your initial thoughts about some of those women." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Judy was beautiful, just gorgeous, and really smart, really driven, really a hard-charger. Judy frequently was going to speak her mind, and sometimes annoyed some people because if Judy had something to say, you were going to hear it. And let’s face it, she was generally always correct. She was generally always right on, but very forceful, very driven, and very competent. Golly I flew with her a whole bunch of times in the T-38s, and she loved what she was doing. Really loved being an astronaut, loved flying the airplanes, loved going cross-country and doing all of those things.\\n\\n Sally was very much like Judy. They were very much the same sort of women, both very driven. I had pretty well pegged Sally and Judy as being the first two that were going to fly. Not necessarily in that order—I didn’t know which order it was going to be—but they were the two that really showed up in all of the training and all of the working, and worked on some of the more visible things, which did make them show up a whole lot better and made them a whole lot more visible. Very much the same. I actually dated Sally for a while." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you really? I didn’t know that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, she and I were partners for a while there, before I got tied up with Rhea. Sally was just a wonderful lady, just really, a wonderful lady, just a whole lot of fun. Easily as smart as Judy, easily as capable, whole lot more diplomatic in terms of how she would say things, or when or where she would say things, and a little bit shy. Just a little bit shy. Both of them didn’t really enjoy all the press attention. I think Sally because there was a certain amount of what I think was shyness in her; Judy because she just didn’t like it, so a little bit different reasons but they both somewhat tried to shun the press. And, they’re just not going to be able to shun the press.\\n\\n Shannon [W. Lucid] was the one of the original six women that had a bunch of flying time. In fact, I think she had, like, 1,400 hours of flying time. I’m trying to think if there was a quote somewhere that Shannon had more flight time than one of our pilots. Now that I’ve said that, I don’t think it would have been one of our pilot astronauts, but maybe one of our pilots out at Ellington [Field, Houston, Texas], or something along those lines. Shannon was the matronly one, of course, in our group. Shannon’s the only one that had kids. Let’s see, of the first six women, only two of them were married, Anna [L.] Fisher and Shannon were the only two that were married. Shannon was good old country girl from Enid, Oklahoma, and talked like a country girl. Very smart. Ph.D. in chemical engineering, or something along those lines, something in the area of chemical research or somewhere in there. Very smart, very smart lady, and I worked with her in SAIL, the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory. Shannon was in about the third or fourth group of Shuttle astronauts that got assigned to work over there. I was in the second group. Very competent and very down to Earth, really down to Earth.\\n\\n Kathy Sullivan—Kathy, you sometimes wondered if she couldn’t press more weight than you could in the gym. She wasn’t petite, but she was athletic. She got out there and ran, and Kathy was very sharp as well. All six of them had to be very sharp, or we wouldn’t have picked them out of that kind of a competition. Joined the Corps and fit right in. I flew chase on STS-2; Joe [Henry] Engle and Dick [Richard H.] Truly were the pilots on STS-2. Kathy was in my backseat. I was Chase-1 for STS-2, so I’m the T-38 that joined right up next to Columbia for the second landing, and Kathy was my constant companion in that. She had the camera and took one of the most gorgeous photos to come out of the chase program, and it was the underside of Columbia with the blue sky and some wispy clouds up above it. You really can’t see the top side of it all, but just a gorgeous photograph. A very sharp cookie, just really good.\\n\\n Anna was another MD, and it was funny that she was picked in ’78 and her husband, Bill [William F.] Fisher, was not picked in 1978. The debrief to him was, “You didn’t have quite enough technical background,” so he went out and got a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and then got picked up in the 1980 class. They were the first American husband and wife couple, because I didn’t marry until 1981. So, they were there in 1980. Anna was very shy as well, although very good at public speaking, very dynamic, but seemed always to be very quiet and very reserved. I didn’t work with Anna quite as much as I did with the other women in that group, but very smart, very sharp, fit right in as well. There’s one left. I can’t think of her. I’m trying to remember, who’s the other one?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The one who had that Corvette?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes! Yes, that’s right, her! Yes, right. I was very impressed with Rhea right off the bat. As a surgeon—I believe this may still be true; at least it was true for a number of years when we were there—she was the only doctor astronaut that we had ever picked who was beyond being an intern. All the other astronaut doctors that we picked were in their internship and were just about to finish or had just finished their internship. She had completed three years of surgery residency, so of course I may be biased, but Rhea was by far the most accomplished doctor astronaut that we had ever picked. She wasn’t as nutty as Story Musgrave, for example, who would make anybody feel lazy, looking at him with four master’s degrees and one or two Ph.D.s and a doctor of medicine as well. Story definitely had accomplished a whole lot, but I believe it’s even true that even he was just finishing an internship when he was selected. So Rhea had the most actual doctor experience, and of the two, if you were going to say—okay, something we probably don’t say anymore—who are the two that were the most feminine and the most ladylike, it would be Anna and Rhea. Rhea, just gorgeous and very polished, very polite, although you cross her or you say the wrong thing and she’ll politely tell you to go…. I guess we got together early in 1979, I guess, is when we started dating, and then it was three years later, in 1981, that she asked me to marry her." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "She asked you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I say that all the time. She just loves it when I do that, but no, I asked her. We married May 30, 1981. She wanted us to wait until after STS-1 had happened, which was April 12 of ‘81, and so then, at that point, we announced that we were going to be married on May 30. There have been a number of husband and wife astronaut couples here in the US. Most of them are not still married. Tammy [Tamara E.] Jernigan and Jeff [Peter J.K.] Wisoff are still married, but Rhea and I are [one of a select few]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think Steven and Linda, Steve [Steven R.] Nagel and Linda [M.] Godwin are still around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, Steve and Linda are still married, so that’s good, but a number of the other ones are not still married. I always say it’s because I am so easygoing and easy to get along with that we have stayed together for so long. Of course, she makes a funny comment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I did want to ask you, your class called themselves The Thirty-Five New Guys. Do you think that the women felt that they were part of the guys, or the men thought the women were just one of the guys and part of the gang, or do you think that there was some separation between the two?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I called them guys, too, and I considered them one of the guys. I believe they considered themselves one of the guys. I never heard any of them say, “We don’t want to be called guys; we don’t want to be called The Thirty-Five New Guys.” Never did hear that. I suppose it’s possible, but it would surprise me. Actually, it would surprise me to hear of any of them saying, “Well, I object to being called guys.” Never have heard that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was the first time, I’m assuming, that you worked with a lot of professional women, being in the Navy. Is that the case?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely. The military did not have that many women back in those days, which is why Mullane’s comment is kind of interesting. He felt they were too soft; he felt they didn’t fit in, they wouldn’t be able to do the job, etc, or whatever it was he said. I hope I’m not putting words in his mouth. The question that came up when you were telling me that was, “Mullane, how would you know?” There weren’t that many women in the Air Force—certainly not in the circles that we ran around. There weren’t that many women in the Navy that I had ever encountered, just because it was years and years before women were allowed to serve in combat roles and be in combat squadrons aboard combat ships, so there weren’t any women on aircraft carriers the whole time I was active in the Navy. The only times you saw women—we had Navy nurses at the hospitals. In the training squadrons, towards the end of the time that I was there at San Diego, we were starting to get women in the RAG squadrons. The F-14 Tomcat Training Squadron, the F-4 Phantom Training Squadron, we started to get some Navy women in those, but it was really rare.\\n\\n Mullane wouldn’t have had any real experience working with women and having anything to judge that and say, “No, they’re too soft, they can’t do this.” Yes, it was a change. I remember when we started flying the T-38s; we, of course, trained the mission specialist to make the radio calls. Hearing a female voice on the radio in 1978 was unusual. There weren’t that many. If there were any airline pilots at that point, there sure weren’t many, so you just never heard female voices on the radio. We’d go cross-country in the T-38s and Sally would be making radio calls, or Rhea’d be making radio calls, and sometimes somebody would come up and say, “What is this? Who is this flying?” There weren’t that many women in aviation jobs at the time, either. That has changed a lot over the years, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that challenging for you, in terms of when you were working with them, say, in the T-38s, should you carry their bag, do you need to help them up into the aircraft? Were there some of those kind of conversations going on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know that we talked about it too much, and I don’t remember ever carrying a helmet bag, for example, for any of the women. It was just standard that you’d pick up your parachute out of the parachute room and you’d sling it over one shoulder. The women would just do that themselves. I would, when we got to the airplane, usually take her parachute—whoever “her” was—and take it up in the airplane and connect it to the airplane myself. I would usually do that because they were bulky and they were heavy. I don’t think any of the women ever told me, “Get your dirty paws off my parachute, boy,” or anything like that. The only thing I remember is one day, we were going over to Building 1 or something, and one of the boys grabbed the door and opened the door for Sally, and Sally shoved him through the door and held the door herself. She was smiling when she did it and was being funny about it when she did it. That’s the only time that I saw anything that would be, “Knock it off, you chauvinist pig,” or anything like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "She definitely made her point, didn’t she?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You guys reported in the summer of ’78: where did you end up living here, for the first couple of years in Clear Lake?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I bought a house in Nassau Bay, just right over here—1907 Back Bay Court. It was on a cul-de-sac, and there were three houses in the cul-de-sac, and right next to me was Owen [K.] Garriott, and right next to him, on the other side, was Joe Engle. So this was Astronaut Cul-de-Sac, is what this was. That was ’78. Then Rhea and I married in 1981. She really didn’t like that house, and so immediately, she set about looking for another house. That had been Al [Alfred M.] Worden’s house originally, the house that I was living in. Rhea set about looking for another house, and she found another house that was two and a half times as expensive and that had been Rusty [Russell L.] Schweickart’s house, originally. We sold my house and bought that house. At the time, it was owned by Craig [L.] Fischer, who was one of our NASA flight surgeon docs here. He was selling it because he had a teenage daughter who was having a lot of trouble with asthma here in Houston. The doctors said, “You’re going to have to get her out of here,” so he went and moved the whole family to Palm Springs [California]. He hated to leave. We bought his house.\\n\\n That was a waterfront house over on, I guess it’s called Cow Bayou, which is just off of Clear Creek. If you had a boat, we had a friend that kept his boat behind our house—we had 100 feet of bulkhead out behind the house—kept his 30-foot cabin cruiser back there. We could sail down Clear Creek and through Clear Lake and out into Galveston Bay from our house. That was the house that Rhea wanted, and so we lived in that one for 14 years. We actually moved into the house while Rhea was in the hospital with Paul, giving birth to Paul, which was July of ’82. She left for the hospital from the house on Back Bay Court and by the time she came home, we had moved into the other house, on Barbuda Lane." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have all your astronaut colleagues help you move?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The astronauts moved us, yes. It was Ace Moving Company." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s what I was thinking; I couldn’t remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Ace Moving Company is what we were known as. When somebody would be moving, the word would go out, “Hey, so-and-so is going to move on Saturday; everybody show up that can help.” You’d have 25 astronauts show up to help move. Usually, it happened in about three or four hours, you’d move a whole entire house. They helped us move." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very nice. I’m guessing more showed up since Rhea was in the hospital, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. She had a difficult time with that one, and after something like 14 hours of labor, they said, “This isn’t going to work; we’re going to have to do a c-section.” They did a c-section and then baby Paul, when he was born, had lung difficulties, serious lung difficulties, and got Life Flight-ed up to Hermann Hospital [Houston, Texas]. Altogether, I don’t remember what day she went into the hospital, but [it] was like a week before she finally got released. He was touch and go for about three days, and we weren’t sure that he was going to stay until about the third day. That was kind of traumatic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s scary. But he’s doing well—I think I met him when we were out interviewing Rhea a few years ago, in Murfreesboro [Tennessee]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, he’s done fine. He’s graduated from college now and working as a waiter in an Italian restaurant, as a college graduate, still looking for that career, but yes, he’s done well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s a tough market these days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it sure is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about those first few days when you came down here to Houston, being part of that Astronaut Corps, going to that first Monday meeting, and being introduced to your colleagues." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Part of it was kind of traumatic for us military guys because you had to decide what to wear. Previously, you got up and you got showered and shaved and dressed and you put on your uniform and you went to work. I think Mullane talks about that in his book. He didn’t know how to dress or what to dress, and Donna had to take him to the store and pick out some clothes for him. All of a sudden, you had to have clothes, and none of us had any of that.\\n\\n I will never forget, I studied the pictures of the 35 of us before I showed up so that I’d know who it was, because we had only just met them for that one or two days back in January. Now it’s June, and I showed up at Building 4. Of course first had to go through the badge office and get my badge, and parked in the old Building 4 [parking lot]—now it’s called 4-South; it used to be Building 4—and walked upstairs and went up the stairs, opened the door and stepped into the hallway, and there was Dick [Francis R.] Scobee and Judy Resnik. [They] were the first two that I saw. Of course, the two of them would die on Challenger [STS-51L]. They were the first two that I saw, and walked up to them and I said, “Oh, my gosh, it’s Scobee and Resnik,” and shook their hands. I don’t remember a whole lot about the rest of that day. I guess the rest of that was finding out where my office was going to be.\\n\\n Ellison and I got put in one of the few interior rooms that didn’t have a window. Everybody else had a window. I think there were only two offices that were on this internal wall over by what was Rick [Richard W.] Nygren’s office, so we didn’t have a window. It was Ellison and me in one, and then the other one, I want to say, was Mike Coats and maybe somebody else. I’m not sure about that, but I think that’s what I found out the first day, was where my office was and that Ellison and I were going to be officemates. When the ’80 class came in, we got Woody [Sherwood C.] Spring in addition in there, in our office. Ellison and I were in that office together all the way up until he got assigned to STS-10. It was supposed to be the 10th mission to launch. What we always did was when you got assigned to a crew, you moved into a crew office. I guess on a five-person crew, it was three in one office and two in another office, right next to each other. We were constantly moving offices around. Every time we’d have another crew selection, they’d put out a new office assignment list, and you’d have to move. As I remember, it was four and a half years that Ellison got assigned to STS-10 and moved from that office. I, at some point after that, got assigned to the next mission, STS-11, which turned into [STS]-41B. When we were first assigned, it was STS-11. At that point, I moved out of that office and actually got an office with a window." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Got an upgrade all of a sudden?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand you guys participated in quite a bit of training. You were supposed to go through a two-year training period, and it ended up being about a one-year period. Would you talk about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we really did, we did a lot of training. A lot of it was just a bunch of really fun stuff that you always said, “Golly, if I get the time, I’d like to go study geology.” If I got the time, I’d like to go study oceanography, astronomy, and all of those things. We were training on all those subjects, and they would bring some of the world’s experts in to brief us on those things. A lot of our classes, a lot of our briefings with the scientists and people like that, were over here in the Lunar Planetary Institute, right down there on the water. That was always a lot of fun, going there, because that was such a gorgeous place to be training in. Somebody recently sent me a photograph of our whole class in the LPI, in one of those great, big, beautiful rooms that they had in there for training in, with marble floors and all that. We went around to all the different NASA Centers. We went down to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]. Somebody just sent me a picture of that, too. I know who it was; Nick Thomas from Astronaut Encounter, down at the KSC Visitors Center, sent two of those pictures from, I think that was 1978.\\n\\n We went to JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California], and that was an interesting visit. We got to JPL and the Center Director briefed us—and I don’t remember who it was right now. He basically told us that he didn’t believe that we needed manned space at all. Talk about what I think nowadays would be considered an inappropriate subject when you’re speaking to a bunch of manned space people. It’d be like me going there and telling him that we didn’t need robots for anything. We did get to see a bunch of fascinating things, but I’ll just never forget the director getting up and telling us that, you know, “We really didn’t need you guys; we really don’t need manned space.” It’s okay to feel that way, but just don’t say it! We went there; we went to Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California], of course, and visited up there. We went to all the NASA Centers, came down to Huntsville [Alabama] and visited Marshall [Space Flight Center]. I think we went up to Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland] as well and visited all of those places.\\n\\n Of course, we were being trained on Space Shuttle systems and Space Shuttle flight dynamics, although not deeply into it. The training organization over at JSC was pretty heavily involved in training for the first four STS flights. Of course, you just had two-person crews, so each of those two guys on those first four flights had to learn everything. They had to learn how to do spacewalks, they had to be able to go outside and winch the doors closed, if you couldn’t close the doors electrically.\\n\\n We weren’t seeing much at all in the way of simulator training. At that time, I think we had the second simulator, what we called the mission simulator. We had the motion based, and then the mission simulator also got called the fixed base simulator. I think that one came on a little later, so we really weren’t doing a whole lot of training in the simulators. They brought us in when they did, I’ve been told, because they believed we were within six months of the first launch, and it actually turned out to be almost three years. We didn’t train a whole lot after our initial training. I think after our first year they really didn’t know what to do with us at that point, and so they said, “Okay, rather than being astronaut candidates for two years, you’re hereby astronaut candidates for just one year. As of today, you’re astronauts, and not astronaut candidates.” We all picked up work assignments. After three months, after six months—pick a date, something like that—there was some amount of time when we were just pretty much indoctrination and training on what NASA was all about and all of that.\\n\\n After that, we started picking up jobs in the office. I worked initially as support crew for STS-3, which was going to be Jack [R.] Lousma as the pilot and Fred [W.] Haise as the commander, just the two of them, and they were going to do the Skylab re-boost. They were going to go rendezvous on Skylab on just the third Shuttle flight. They had this thing called the TRS, Teleoperator Retrieval System, and it was going to fly over and dock to the Skylab. It was a booster rocket, so it was going to boost Skylab up higher so that it wouldn’t reenter. Skylab came down in 1979 and we hadn’t launched yet, so they never did do the Skylab re-boost.\\n\\n At some point after that, I got assigned to work in SAIL. As I mentioned earlier, I was in the second group of astronauts that went over to SAIL. George did things like this; George Abbey would just get that camel’s nose under the tent and then take over the whole thing. Initially he had sent Brewster Shaw and John [O.] Creighton over to SAIL to help out and to fill in and to do some of the testing. Only George remembered how back in the Apollo days, the astronauts did all of the software testing in the certification lab, whatever it was back then. George wanted the astronauts to be the ones that flew the SAIL simulators and flew the simulated missions and verified all the software. George was relentless, and there was a lot of resistance to it, and George prevailed, as he usually does.\\n\\n We had a second slug of astronauts that got assigned. Don Williams, myself, Story Musgrave, six or eight of us, something like that, were in the second group of astronauts. Later on, in 1980, we brought in some of the ’80 astronauts. I believe they were doing that all the way up until the end, where the astronauts were flying all the missions in the SAIL lab. That was actually extremely valuable because you really got to know the computer system and the software system and I think some of the better astronauts at operating the software in the Shuttle itself had been the guys and gals that worked over in SAIL because you didn’t need a checklist to bring up a computer. You knew how to do it by memory because you did so much of it over there. So, that was really, really valuable training.\\n\\n I would come up with questions from flying some of the sims over there, and I’d go ask one of the engineers over there in SAIL. For example, I remember one time talking about the three inertial platforms, which are attitude reference and all of our velocity sensing, acceleration sensing. We had three platforms, and you’d look at it in the computer and they were at all these different angles. I did not understand why. Why are they at different angles? What in the world is that all about? I remember going and talking to one of the engineers and I said, “Okay, show me what they look like. What do they actually look like?” He said, “Okay, well, you know where they are, they’re up in the nose of the Orbiter, they’re on the navigation platform that’s up there in front of the crew cabin. One of them sits like this, one of them sits like this, and the other one sits like that,” and they all had accelerometers mounted on them. For me, it was valuable just to know, okay, this bunch of angles that makes no sense to you means this, this bunch of angles means this, and this bunch means this.\\n\\n That was what could be so valuable about working in that place. I kept a great big green notebook—and I’ve still got it, I still have that notebook where I’d take notes in it when I was talking to somebody, and write down what the values would be for certain things and write myself examples of how things worked. It was just a really, really great learning experience to work over in the SAIL. You would walk out of there at 10 o’clock at night sometimes and you’d say, “Boy, today was a complete waste.” Other times, you’d walk out of there at 11:30 at night and say, “This is the best job in the whole place.” Didn’t seem like there were many in-betweens, it was either one or the other, but most of the time it was, “I sure like working over here.” That was a really good assignment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I also understand you did a lot of work with T.K. [Thomas K.] Mattingly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, T.K. could be very challenging to work for. Rhea must have put you up to this. T.K. was our supervisor when I worked in SAIL. Every week, on Monday, we would have to report in to T.K. He was in charge of an area called, I want to say, development. I’m not sure it was called development or technology or what it was, but he was the big boss that the astronauts that worked down at Cape Canaveral, what we called the VITT team, Vehicle Integration Test Team, reported to. All of us that worked in SAIL reported to him, and then he had I don’t know what else, probably the guys that worked out in Downey [California] at the Flight Software Lab, Flight Computer Lab, FCL?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "FSL [Flight Systems Laboratory], I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was called FCL. I don’t remember what it stood for, but anyway, the guys that worked in those areas that were developing, basically, the procedures and actually developing the vehicle for STS-1 all reported to T.K. I also got to work for a while as one of the Cape Crusaders. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Cape Crusaders, that was the astronauts that worked with the VITT team down at the Cape and actually took part in the testing and the verification, getting a vehicle ready to go, leading up to, in my case, STS-1. I worked that part-time as well. That was always interesting, to get down to the Cape and be in the actual vehicle, in Columbia, doing some of the testing leading up to first flight.\\n\\n T.K. could be extremely demanding. What do I mean, could be extremely demanding? It seemed like no amount of data was ever enough. We would go in to report to him and all of us that were available on the SAIL team were supposed to go in for the meeting with him. It’d be T.K. and it’d be about five or six of us that would show up. We would bring the log book in, and early in the game we thought we would just give him a brief synopsis, a brief report, of what we had done the previous week, what kind of testing we had done. He would start asking questions, and you wouldn’t always know the answer to his questions, so he’d assign you an action item.\\n\\n You’d come out of that meeting with a list of 15 action items, and everybody would have their own little list of 12 or 15 or 10 action items that you had to do, because we didn’t tie up his time well enough. We figured out, finally, we have got to filibuster him or else we are going to keep getting assigned action items. So we would go in there and we would read him the log book from the previous week. We would just read it because as long as we were talking, he couldn’t be assigning action items. We would literally look at his schedule, figure out how much time he had. “He’s got two hours today. Okay, we’re going to have to filibuster for two hours.” It worked. We would get to the end of it, he’d look at his watch, and he’d go, “Guys, hey, this is interesting, but I’m out of time. I’ve got to go to”—and we’d go, “Oh, okay.” We finally figured that out, but probably what Rhea told you about was that at one point, while I was working in SAIL and had other job assignments and other things, T.K. called me into his office one day. He said, “There’s an area that I’m concerned about, and that’s external tank separation and solid rocket booster separation. I don’t know if it’s robust enough, and I want you to go investigate it. Why don’t you come back in a week, because I don’t know exactly what it is I want. Why don’t you come back in a week and tell me what it is I want.”\\n\\n I thought, “Well, okay, all right.” I went out and I studied stuff for a while and I thought about it and I looked in some of the documentation. I came back to T.K. in about a week, all ready to go to work, and I said, “Okay, here’s what I think I need to do. I need to go look at all the wind tunnel testing that was done of solid rocket booster separation.” You’re still up in the atmosphere at that point, very much so in the atmosphere. We’re going 3,000 miles an hour and we’re going to separate the solid rocket boosters and they’ve both got to separate. “So the software that goes into that and all of the dynamics from the wind tunnels that tell us that yes, we can do this. I’m going to go look into all the wind tunnel testing. I’m going to go look at all the hardware design and the hardware testing that’s gone into it and the verification effort that’s gone into it. I’ll go do that for the solid rocket boosters, and I’ll go do that for the external tank.” That’s what I did. I met the subsystem managers. Mark [K.] Craig was the subsystem manager for which one? Barney [B.] Roberts was the other one, the subsystem manager. I think he was solid rocket boosters, and Mark Craig was the external tank manager for that part of it. I must have tied those guys up for, shoot, half a day for two weeks each, something like that, just getting their take on things and what had gone before.\\n\\n I went out to California, to Downey, to go look at the separation testing that was being done for the external tank, because that was associated with the Orbiter. I went and looked at hardware and looked at how they had done the actual firing of the explosive bolts out there. I, after about two months or so of intense research, had a book this thick full of stuff. I went back to T.K. to deliver him my final report, and guess what? I walked out of there with three pages of things for me to go do in addition. I went back to work, and I went all through those three pages of things and addressed every single one of his questions or his comments. “What about this, what about that,” and spent another month and a half or two doing that. Thought, “Okay, this is the end of it this time.” I went back to T.K., and guess what happened? The same exact thing happened. I walked out of his office with another two-page thing, and I finally said to myself, “Okay, I see this is a never-ending job, so I’m just through with it.” I didn’t do anything else on it, and he never called me on it, never called me back. I think maybe what happened was about this time, he got assigned to STS-4. Might have been what saved me, was that he got assigned to where he had to start training, and he moved off of that job.\\n\\n In the course of it, I sure learned a lot about external tank separation and about solid rocket booster separation. I think I’ve got a copy of the SODB, the Shuttle Operational Data Book, and it had all those results of the wind tunnel testing and all the runs that were made. I wound up learning a whole heck of a lot from it. It’s just that there was never going to be a finish line on that little project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You could never have the exact right answer for him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it would never be finished. He was never going to say, “All right, good, I think I’m happy with it, nice job.” I don’t think that was ever going to occur." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned you were working at SAIL; you were doing this work for T.K. Mattingly. Would you talk about what your work hours were like at this point? Were you working every day? Were you working 9:00 to 5:00?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "With SAIL, it varied. I’m trying to remember now what the hours were. SAIL was a three-shift operation. They were working around the clock. We wouldn’t necessarily be there for the midnight to 8:00 AM shift, and so I guess the shifts were 8:00 until 4:00, 4:00 until midnight, and then midnight until 8:00, I guess, were the three shifts. Generally, we were working first shift and second shift, and so we would always have at least one astronaut over there, although we had different jobs. One job that we had to do was to review all the test procedures that would get printed, and virtually every day in our in-basket there would show up what was called TCPs, Test and Checkout Procedures. So one astronaut would be assigned TCP review for the whole week. It was your job to get over there, and sometimes it could be a mountain of paper that was in that inbox. You had to go through and review it for accuracy. We always wound up making little changes to it and corrections to it. That would be one of the jobs that was over there.\\n\\n There would be meetings. I think another astronaut would be assigned to the TCP review meetings, because they would get together when they had one and everybody would provide their inputs to it, and then from there, it would go to a final TCP. Then, you could run it in the simulator. The really wonderful thing about the SAIL lab was that it wasn’t simulated equipment, it was real hardware. You had the real Space Shuttle computers, you had real rate gyros, you had real accelerometers. You even had the cable trays, so you had the cables that ran from the nose section of the Orbiter. We had an Orbiter cargo bay with all the electrical wires and things running back to the aft avionics compartment as well, which is where a lot of the electronics that controlled the main engines and the fuel lines and a lot of stuff that was back there in the back would be located back there. We wanted to have all the cable lengths because that can make a difference in the electric signals getting through. It was a fascinating place to work, but sometimes we had to support three-shift operation.\\n\\n We had two test stations: we had the STS and the GTS test station. The GTS stood for GN&C [Guidance, Navigation, and Control] Test Station, and the STS stood for Shuttle Test Station, I guess. That was the whole length simulator, was the STS. The GTS was basically just a cockpit, but it still had real, genuine Shuttle equipment. It wasn’t as high fidelity an instrument panel, so some of it was simulated instruments that was in the GTS, but we had to support testing in both of those. You’d have two astronauts assigned during first shift and two astronauts assigned during second shift to support that testing. Some days you’d come in at 3 o’clock and work until midnight. I remember, before STS-1, we had a backlog. We were behind on our testing, and we were not going to be finishing the certification testing in time for first flight. The head of SAIL at the time, who was Mr. [Thomas V.] Chambers, said, “Okay, guys, we’re going to go around the clock until we knock down this backlog.” We went for six or seven days straight. Sometimes we worked over the weekends, if we were a little bit behind.\\n\\n We were not restricted to 40 hours a week. I remember Story Musgrave was our lead astronaut over in SAIL at the time. We had to knock this backlog out of our way, and that’s what was declared, we were running two shifts, two 12-hour shifts, two shifts a day. I guess it was 8:00 until 8:00, and then 8:00 until 8:00 were the two shifts. I remember I drew the 8:00 PM to 8:00 AM shift for the first week, and we went nonstop. We were knocking off three and four tests a shift. We did drive that backlog down and succeed in certifying it.\\n\\n The hours could be really extreme sometimes, so you could go a whole week and never see Building 4. You’d be over in Building 16 the whole entire week. Again, you sure learned an awful lot. I think Story threw himself in there for the 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM shift for the whole first week. I think we succeeded in one week of getting where we wanted to go, so we could back to just two shifts a day. SAIL would run the third shift, but usually what they were running was ground processing software, and we had no input on that. They didn’t need an astronaut in the cockpit while they were running the software that they use in the computers down at Cape Canaveral, but they would use the SAIL for verifying all of that as well. Those were some of the sorts of hours that we got to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Long days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You got to do some long days, yes, some really long days. I mentioned chase, earlier. I was a chase pilot for STS-1 and STS-2. I was Chase-4 on STS-1, so when Columbia launched with John [W.] Young and Bob [Robert L.] Crippen on April 12, I was actually sitting in El Paso [Texas]. I was Chase-4, so it was Chase-3 and Chase-4 that were in El Paso. White Sands [Northrup Strip, New Mexico] was the abort once-around strip, if they had had a problem that required an AOA, Abort Once-Around. Dave [David M.] Walker was Chase-3, so he was lead, and I was Chase-4. I had the TV cameraman in the back seat, and so, we were sitting in El Paso, watching the launch. If they had declared an AOA, we would have hopped right in our T-38s and gotten right up on station over White Sands to chase them when they came back in. As soon as they got to MECO, Main Engine Cutoff, we knew that they weren’t going abort once-around. We hopped in our airplanes and flew to Edwards [Air Force Base, California] to be in place to cover them, just in case they had to land on the first three or four orbits. Jon [A.] McBride and Dickie [Richard E.] Gray were down at Cape Canaveral for the launch, to chase them if they had to do an RTLS, Return to Launch Site, so then I wound up staying at Edwards.\\n\\n It was only a two-day mission, so we were at Edwards for two days. I was airborne over the alternate runway aim point, and Jon McBride and Dick Gray got to chase STS-1 when it came down to land. Then I was Chase-1 for STS-2, so I did what they did. I was down at the Cape for launch and then made my way out to Edwards. It was supposed to be a five-day mission. We were really looking forward to five days out at Edwards because we would have been on alert during the crew’s awake time. When the crew went to bed for the night, we weren’t going to be on alert anymore, so we didn’t have to hang around out at the flight line. We were going to have a great time running because Edwards is a great place to go running. We were going to get to enjoy the gym and go running and all of those great things, and they had a fuel cell failure, and they came down in two days. I only got to enjoy Edwards for two days, once again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’ve heard that the chase teams were referred to as the Chase Air Force. You guys had a patch and things, do you recall that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we did have a patch. In fact, I still have one of my jackets that has a patch that Dick Gray actually developed. It has a T-38 joined up on a Shuttle, and it was Shuttle Chase Team is what it says on the patch. I still have my jacket that had that patch on it. We got a little bit notorious on STS-1 because Jon McBride and Dave Walker really liked to be off practicing chase, so we did a lot of it. Since we were support for the upcoming mission, we had the highest priority for getting T-38s, and we wound up doing probably a whole lot more flying than we needed to. In the post-landing party after STS-1, we had a big party, all the astronauts, and it was basically to roast John Young and Crippen over the whole thing, but the chase team got royally roasted by the rest of the office. It would be, “So, here was the development: John Young and Bob Crippen are training for their mission, and here they are in the simulator, and meanwhile, the chase team is getting ready to go,” and it’d be a flight of 15 bombers that they’d show a picture of. Then they’d go back to something else and roast the crew and roast somebody else in the office, and they’d say, “Meanwhile, the chase team was down at Cape Canaveral,” and there’d be this field full of airplanes, 1,000 airplanes in this picture.\\n\\n We got really hammered by the office and because we did so much practicing, we had over-flown our T-38 budget, we the pilots, the individual pilots, all four of whom were Navy pilots. It was Jon McBride, Dick Gray—former Navy—Dave Walker, and myself, were Chase-1, 2, 3, and 4. All former Navy, and we got beat up. In fact, George Abbey sent out a note to all of us that said, “You guys are walking until you make your time for the six months come out to your allocated flight time,” which was normally 15 hours a month of T-38 time. I think because we were mission support for STS-1, we could have 20 hours a month. We over-flew that. We went well beyond our 20 hours a month, so he sent us out a memo that said, “All of you boys are walking,” basically. “Make your time for the six months come out to” six months times whatever our number of hours was supposed to be. I think I was the only one that actually abided by that. I think the rest of the boys said, “Ah, phooey, I’m not doing that.” I think I was the only one that did that.\\n\\n When it came time for STS-2, my wingman, Chase-2, was Ken [Kenneth J.] Baker, who was former Navy, but the other guys were Air Force, Dick [Richard O.] Covey and Loren [J.] Shriver were the other pilots. I was the only one who had been on the Chase-1 team, so of course, my job was to train those guys and teach them how to do it. I was determined that we were not going to over-fly our flight time, and so I made up a big matrix from the time we were assigned until the time of STS-2. How much training time we needed and how many trips down to the Cape, how many trips out to White Sands, how many trips out to Edwards we needed, and made up just a whole budget and put that out to the whole team. “Okay, here’s going to be our plan.” We actually did it without exceeding our flight time, so I got big points with George for pulling that off." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m sure you did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I kind of messed up Dick Covey. It just didn’t even occur to me, but in my first meeting with George, when George said, “Come over and let’s talk about Chase,” I had that all put together and went over and showed it to him. Then George appointed Dick Covey to be Chase-1 for STS-3, and same thing, George called over to Covey and said, “All right, come on over and let’s talk about Chase.” Covey went over there and he didn’t have that. He came back and he said, “Oh, George told me when you came over, you had a whole detailed plan of how many sorties each guy was going to get, and how many rendezvous each guy was going to get, and you didn’t tell me about that.” It just hadn’t occurred to me, but I kind of screwed him because I was so organized and ready for the whole thing and he wasn’t." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You think that’s why he was the last to fly in class? No, I’m just teasing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m trying to think, was he our last pilot to fly?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think that’s what he told me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know Shannon was the last one out of our class to fly, and she went with Dan [Daniel C.] Brandenstein on his second mission, which was his first mission as commander [STS-51G]. I didn’t remember which pilot, to tell you the truth, was the last one to fly. I guess I was the fourth one to fly, out of 15. It might have been Covey. I don’t know why Covey would have been the last one to fly. I was always very impressed with him, always very impressed with him. He was by the numbers, he was not a cowboy, he was a very professional aviator. I don’t know why he would have been the last one to fly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He had some good missions. He got to go to the Hubble [Space Telescope]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was Air Force. He was Air Force, and it has to be acknowledged that there was a Navy bias." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You agree with Mike Mullane?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely, absolutely. It certainly benefited me, but nonetheless, that’s not right. That’s not the way to do things. I think the world knows that George Abbey had gone to the Naval Academy [Annapolis, Maryland]; there was no Air Force Academy [Colorado Springs, Colorado] at that time. When it was time to graduate, you could pick which service you wanted to go into. He went into the Air Force, and he was not treated well in the Air Force. My opinion is he took that out on the Air Force. If you just look at mission commanders for the first 15 missions, STS-1 was Navy, STS-2 was Air Force—we’re even at that point—STS-3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, so at this point, we’re 9-2 in mission commanders. I agree there was a bias on behalf of the Navy, and as I said, that’s not right. When I was Chief Astronaut, there was no such thing. There was no military bias. I paid no attention to what service the people were from when it was time to put them on missions and give them job assignments. Like I said, I don’t think that was right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We had done some additional research and found out that you worked on the STA HUD [Shuttle Training Aircraft Heads Up Display] for a short period of time. Do you have any recollections of working on that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, I don’t think I did. I was one of the pilots that got one of the first opportunities to look at it, but I think it was only a couple of hops, Jennifer. It wasn’t a long program. In the course of STA training, I was probably one of the early ones to look at it. I don’t remember a whole lot about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also mentioned being a Cape Crusader. I always ask people, do you recall where that name came from? I’ve always wondered if that was something the Shuttle astronauts came up with, and if so, where the name came from." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know. I don’t know. I wasn’t one of the original group, and in fact, I was just part-time. I was a part-time Cape Crusader, and my recollection is that it was Bo [Karol J.] Bobko that I would report to. He was the one that would come to me and say, “Hey, we’re going to have some testing on such-and-such down there at the Cape next week, and we’re a little bit shorthanded. Can you go down there and do some of the testing in Columbia on such-and-such a day?” Like I say, I was just part-time down there, so the guys that were full-time, I think Loren Shriver, at the time, was one of the guys that was down there all the time, and they’d be down there every week. I just went down there now and then.\\n\\n I was down there for the annual picnic—and this is going to be a little bit self-serving—and they decided that they were going to have a Mr. Legs contest. I thought it was very sexist, but I took part in it anyway. What they had us do was all the boys that wanted to be in it, I didn’t really want to be in it, but I was the only astronaut down there and they said, “Come on, you’ve got to.” I won the Mr. Muscular Legs award down there at the Cape. I’ve still got the little medallion they gave me. They made it out of a steel washer, and they put a paper thing in the middle—I think it was 1979—it says “Mr. Muscular Legs, 1979.” They tied a string to it or something like that, so I did that while I was down there, for some of the Cape Crusader testing that was going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Those are good memories to have, good mementos." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was always fun to be down there, and any time you were down at the Cape, they wanted you to wear your flight suit because they wanted the folks that worked down there to get to see who they were keeping alive, and get to see who they were doing all this hard work for, and also give them an opportunity to walk up and say, “Hey, I’m Jim Schultz, who are you?” Just get to meet an astronaut. You were always on display because you were wearing your blue suit everywhere you went, and including in the Orbiter, when we’re doing the testing in the Orbiter, they just wanted us to wear our blue suits for all of that. That was kind of fun. It’s a whole lot more enjoyable when you’re not on display and you can just blend in to the woodwork, but when you were working as a Cape Crusader, like I said, they wanted us in our blue flight suits." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We have just a few more minutes, but I have to ask this question, just because I asked Rhea and she wasn’t sure, so I was going to ask you. I read in an article—I think it was a People Magazine article that came out when you and Rhea, either you had just gotten engaged or you had just gotten married, I can’t remember which." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had just been married." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There was something in there about how you had been contacted by a bridal magazine and they had left a message for Mr. Seddon. I just thought, “Oh, I would love to hear the story behind it,” and I’d like to hear what your classmates and other people in the Astronaut Office thought about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that that came from one of our classmates. I think it was Brides Magazine. I don’t remember exactly why, but chances are, Ellison Onizuka was behind it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Another one of his pranks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it had to do with the fact that this was very unusual in that timeframe too, Rhea kept her maiden name. Rhea didn’t change her name to Gibson. I never told her this, but I remember it even peeved me a little bit at the time, that she wasn’t going to change her name to Gibson, because that just didn’t get done very much in those days. After we married, the boys took my nametag off my locker, the little leather nametags like we wore on our flight suits that had our wings on it and all that, they had one made up for my locker that said “Hoot Seddon,” and stuck it on my locker. It really torqued me off.\\n\\n It really annoyed me, that they had put this thing on my locker, but I knew what would happen if I ripped it off of there and threw it in the trash. The next day, they’d have another one made up and it would be right back up there, so I left that stupid nametag up there for like three years, and then I finally ripped it off there and threw it in the trash. I had to leave it there because if they find something that annoys you, you’re going to hear about it, over and over and over again. I didn’t dare take it down right away. I think that Brides Magazine thing, I just vaguely kind of remember that, but I think that’s where that came form, the fact that she kept her name, and so, therefore Brides Magazine wanted to talk to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I just thought it was an interesting story, so when I asked her, she said, “I don’t remember that. You’re going to have to ask Hoot about that,” so I thought she might like hearing that answer. I thought, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d ask Rebecca if she had some questions, then we can close out and talk about some future sessions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you have time, I just had one thing I was curious about. You mentioned your mother was a pilot, and when you were talking about that, I was wondering if as you were growing up, you were aware of that being kind of an anomalous circumstance, for a woman to be a pilot, or if you didn’t really think about it. How did you process that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I knew, once I got old enough to really kind of understand some of that, that yes, this is kind of unusual. There were enough people that would say, “Oh, my gosh, your family is really unusual because your mother flies.” It wouldn’t be too unusual to have the dad be a pilot, but certainly, it was very unusual to have moms that were pilots. Yes, I did realize it was kind of unusual, but it was normal in our household. My mother flew in the All-Women’s Transcontinental Air Race twice, also known as the Powder Puff Derby. She raced in the Powder Puff Derby. Another year, she raced in, I think they called it the Palms to Pines Air Race. That was an all-women’s transcontinental air race. I remember they would race to Atlantic City [New Jersey] from San Diego, I think it was.\\n\\n They’d take off in San Diego and they had some strict rules on it that I’m sure not all of the women abided by. It was supposed to be daylight-only and it was supposed to be only visual flight conditions, and it was a handicapped race, so you could enter any kind of an airplane into it. This airplane’s normal cruising speed would be, say, 120 miles an hour. So, how well did you average 120 miles an hour or more, in getting there? Theoretically, somebody in a Piper Cub could win against some of the real fast general aviation aircraft. My mom did that two years, and then the Palms to Pines Race was the same sort of thing, it was a handicapped race. In my case, I would see, over the years, a whole lot of women pilots, so it didn’t seem unusual to me although eventually I was old enough to realize that yes, this is unusual, to have a mom that’s a pilot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think that influenced how you thought about the first female class of astronauts at all?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good point, it may very well have. Yes, it may very well have. Yes, I think there was probably some reluctance about women flying combat airplanes, and I’m not even sure I really want women in combat, although I have come to accept it. Like my dad, I don’t want any of my daughters flying in combat, or serving in combat, but I suppose to be fair and equal, you’ve got to give them the same career opportunities. That may have affected my outlook on it and my attitude on it was well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Hackler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was my one thought, thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think this might be a good stopping spot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Wow, it’s 3:30." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Isn’t it amazing how time flies?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert L. Gibson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it sure is. Boy, I sure talked a lot." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00198", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/GeyerM/geyerms.htm", + "original_file_name": "GeyerMS_8-9-16.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/Orion/GeyerMS/GeyerMS_8-9-16.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Orion Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Mark S. Geyer", + "location_date": "Houston, TX – 9 August 2016" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Mark Geyer" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is August 9th, 2016. This interview with Mark Geyer is being conducted at the Johnson Space Center for the Orion Oral History Project. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Sandra Johnson. Thanks again for taking time out of your busy day today. I know that you’re filling in for Dr. [Ellen] Ochoa. She’s out today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think this afternoon she’s out, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So we really appreciate it. We know your schedule is very busy. We thought we’d start today by talking about the cancelation of Constellation. Did you have any inkling that that might be coming?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes and no. The end of, let’s see, normal life, which is hard to describe as normal, but in December of ’08, I had three meetings in Washington, three separate meetings that I had to fly up for. They were all with Mike [Michael D.] Griffin. They were all about Orion design decisions. So it was a pretty intense December. That was the end of getting Mike comfortable with the Orion design. Mike had a lot of specific opinions about what Orion should look like, how it should function. I remember having the last meeting, I think it was like the 16th or something, it was very late in December, and he said, “Okay, I’m good; I’m comfortable that you guys are on the right plan.” Then within three weeks Mike was gone, because the President had already been elected, but it wasn’t clear whether they were going to keep Mike on or not. It was clear in January that they were not, so Mike left.\\n\\n Then we had a period where we had no Administrator. The Acting Administrator was Chris [Christopher J.] Scolese. We just kept working through the plan. Then Charlie [Charles F. Bolden] was confirmed and Lori was confirmed, Lori [B.] Garver. They also kicked off a commission, the Augustine Commission, which was intended to look at the human exploration strategy basically.\\n\\n A lot of that work was in the summer of ’09, and we were asked to generate a lot of data. We gave a lot of briefings on Orion and Constellation in general. Not to go too much into that, but you could tell [by] the tone of the questions and some of the discussion of the Board members, they were not very positive about Constellation. Since this Board was set up by and populated by people in the President’s Office, and then you’re hearing these comments, you got a sense it wasn’t good, in my opinion, regardless of what we said at the briefings.\\n\\n Then the report came out and if you read it in detail, basically said we need a Program that’s worthy of this nation and right now Constellation doesn’t have enough funding to do the job they’ve been asked to do. There was a lot more to that about the analysis they did and what the President’s people had done to the budget before the Committee came out that a lot of people don’t know, but I won’t go into the details of that. That came out and it was not positive, I would say. But we didn’t hear a lot.\\n\\n I don’t know if I mentioned this last time, I think I did. Charlie came in and Lori came in, and they were making the rounds of the different Centers. We noticed that they never mentioned the word Constellation or Orion. Here’s the new leaders giving speeches and talking to the workforce, and you can tell they’re not talking about your stuff at all. That’s not good. Even though I gave Charlie some tours at Kennedy [Space Center, Florida] of the Orion assembly area and other places, and Charlie is always very positive, really nice person, but the undercurrent just didn’t feel right. It’s just something you get.\\n\\n But we kept working on our plan. Then we came into ’10. We finished our PDR in ’09, so in the midst of this environment we actually did a Preliminary Design Review, which was huge. Then the beginning of ’10, we finished the detailed cost assessment of what we thought Orion would cost. We did that in January. We were getting ready. That’s a big part of the Agency process where they take your design PDR and then they take your detailed cost estimate and then they make a commitment. They say, “We think it’s going to take this long to do Orion.” We were building all that data up. Huge amount of work. You’re reading things in the press; there’s a rumor, the whole thing is going to get canceled, but I couldn’t tell whether it was the same rumor just repeated by many people.\\n\\n My son was on a YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] basketball team, and we were in League City at the YMCA on Saturday. Jeff Hanley calls me, so I step out; I go to this quieter area. He says, “Hey, they’re going to cancel everything on Monday.” “What do you mean everything?” “Everything. Everything is going to be canceled.” “What are they going to do?” “Don’t know.” I’m thinking are they going to say, “I want you to scrub it. I want you to relook.” No, they’re going to cancel the whole thing. Wow, okay. He says, “Yes, only a few people know. They just told us today.”\\n\\n It was the 1st [of February], so I remember I came to work. I don’t remember if I told anybody, because that was part of what Jeff wanted to make sure, not to get everybody spun up. I can’t remember. I might have told the leadership team what Jeff [told me]. I probably did, probably 10 people, but you have to be careful with that. You can get people spun up too soon. I really wasn’t sure what they were going to say other than they were going to cancel it.\\n\\n It was February 1st, and they had a press briefing. They also released a statement. Then they had question and answer later. Basically they said, “Yes, hey, we’re canceling these programs.” They talked about what they were going to do, but it was very hard to figure out what they meant, what was really going to be replacing this Program.\\n\\n The team was pretty much devastated. Historically when people cancel stuff, they feel the need to justify themselves. They find reasons to say why it was all messed up. That’s just what they do. They can’t just go, “I don’t like it; I don’t want to go to the Moon.” They had to find reasons why they thought it was horrible, which I get. I felt a lot of that stuff was not accurate, but it doesn’t matter. Well, it does matter, but it’s not going to change their opinion.\\n\\n That happened in the morning, and we listened to the questions. I just was stunned by some of the responses that Charlie and Lori said and the way it was done. That we were totally in the dark. All these people, they work for them. We’re NASA people. I wasn’t born thinking, “Gosh, I can’t wait to build Orion,” I came here to work for NASA. I just felt like here we work for them, all these people have been doing is trying to do the best they can for what they believed the country and the Agency wanted. Then I just thought we were treated horribly. That was my personal opinion.\\n\\n The team was pretty devastated. We weren’t getting any help. This was the other part of the problem I saw in the leadership. We weren’t getting any help describing to the people who worked it every day why we did this and what they want us to do now. You know what I mean? Transitions happen all the time. You guys are describing one, right? People are trying to figure out what the hell is going on. It’s hard. To your level, “It’s like well, I thought I was doing a good job. I thought it was important.” Well, yes, it is important, but then—you’re going, “Yes, I know exactly what that’s like.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’ve been hearing that all summer, yes, exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s like okay, “What do you want me to do. If I’ve now been doing that, what is it you want me to do?” Because part of it was not just the money. There was I’d say an undertone of this was old NASA, old bad NASA too. That’s the way it came across. We’re going to do new ways. It’s like okay, all these people that have been working their ass off. It wasn’t just a money thing, [it was that we had been doing something bad. Our work was characterized in a very negative way.] That was really really hard.\\n\\n I thought it was inappropriate, my opinion. The Program was here, so Hanley was still the Program Manager, and I was running Orion, and then Doug [Douglas R.] Cooke was at [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, DC]. Headquarters was so—what would I say? There was so much churn at Headquarters over this. Remember, we were still flying out the Shuttle. Gerst [William H. Gerstenmaier] and those guys with Station still flying were very busy, and all this is going on.\\n\\n I felt like we really didn’t get any help. I didn’t feel like Headquarters could help me. I thought Doug Cooke did everything he could, but they couldn’t really tell me what to do. What do you do next? Other than hey, “Just keep doing your job, and we’ll work it out.” That’s good.\\n\\n The night of the 1st I called an all-hands for our team the next day so we could talk about what we had heard and what the team should do, because we had to come up with a plan. What do we tell people on the 2nd? It’s like okay, there’s all this stuff, some of it is very negative. What do you do tomorrow? We had to do that on our own. Jeff and I talked, and he had one for his team, and then he came. Mike [Michael L.] Coats came and supported our meeting with the Orion folks.\\n\\n We had all the different Centers tied in on the phone in Building 17. We walked about what we know. Here’s what we heard. Part of the message was fairly clear. It’s the best we could do. Said, “Look, this is part of the political process. This is the President’s proposal. Congress clearly doesn’t agree.” Congress threw a fit because no one told them either, which I can’t imagine why somebody thought that was a good plan. They were furious.\\n\\n We’re like, “Okay, look, we’re in the middle of this political process. I don’t know how it’s going to end up, but we have a job to do. We’ve been given money to do work. We need to keep moving on that work.” Which is good at the beginning. That works at the beginning. I’m trying to think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There was an effort to introduce a plan B by Mike Coats that was talked about in the press. Were you involved in all that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were a couple of plan As and plan Bs. I don’t know what I should say actually. It was a very weird time. I think people felt like there was a big void in the President’s plan going forward. What did they want to do on exploration? If you looked at the budget, it was mostly commercial crew to Station and technology. There was no exploration in that plan. None. If you’re a believer that the commercial guys are going to do everything and we’re just going to do technology work, then I guess you could call that a plan. It just looked like a huge chasm. It’s like, “They don’t want us to do anything.”\\n\\n I think there were people, Center Directors and others, who felt like “Look, okay, you don’t like Constellation, but there should be some kind of plan, maybe Shuttle variant, maybe ELVs [Expendable Launch Vehicles] maybe something. We should be exploring space, so can we restructure things and do it differently?” I know some of the Center Directors talked, and I supported some of those discussions. The problem was it was so politicized back then that any discussion that there was a plan B that looked anything like Constellation was like a third rail. You couldn’t talk about it. I felt that the atmosphere was poisoned back then. Really, it was very stressful.\\n\\n I remember there were discussions. I remember Charlie saying, “Hey, there’s no plan B.” I don’t want to get in the middle of that. But I would say people were certainly trying to find some middle ground, and there was a point where I felt like really at some parts of [HQ], they did not want to hear any middle ground. That’s the way it felt, to me. It’s like, “Shut up and operate the plan. I don’t want anybody talking about any other plan.” We were like, “I don’t know what the plan is, so that’s going to be hard for me.”\\n\\n The only plan we had really was what we were appropriated to do. Congress is the only ones who can appropriate dollars, and they had appropriated dollars to build Orion. By law we were required to spend that money on Orion. It wasn’t long after this I think—two things happened in the early spring. Congress was furious, in my opinion. They could not get clear answers out of the President’s folks about what the plan was. So they were nervous that those folks were going to make us spend Orion money on something else, and they said, “We’re the appropriators. You can’t do that.” They sent the IG [Inspector General] down to watch us, even though we were just doing what we were told to do. We were doing Orion. So we had no problems with the IG. But here we are in the midst of getting slapped upside the head and putting a plan together ourselves, and the IG came down to make sure we were spending the money right. It was funny. I wasn’t worried about the audit because we were doing exactly what [we were expected to do].\\n\\n Something else happened in April. We’re given a certain amount of money. February is like three months into the fiscal year. We still had a lot of work we could accomplish on Orion in this year, and we thought the best thing we could do was keep building hardware. Headquarters changed policy in April. Some of them would argue that there was no policy before, and so they needed to have one, but it depends on how you look at it.\\n\\n They changed a policy we had been executing for years, which said that the contractor— in this case Lockheed—is at risk if the contract is terminated. They should hold back enough money so that if the contract is canceled the contractor has enough to close out its contracts and doesn’t have to come back to the government for any money. That’s like $250 million. They’re saying, “Hey, you guys have to do that. You better read your contract.” So Lockheed is basically ordered to pull out [that money].\\n\\n People argue with me, but we scared the hell out of them and said, “If you get canceled,” and here’s the President’s side saying you’re going to get canceled, “you better be able to protect yourselves for your termination liability, and that’s $250 million.” We had to show that they did it. So we basically took the budget for ’10 and pulled out $250 million and said, “We’re not going to spend it this year.” Here Lockheed is ramped up, they got all these people, they’re buying all this hardware, they had to cut it by $250 million to meet this new rule. Again others would say we weren’t meeting the intent of the law in the past, but we’ve been doing that ever since I’ve been at NASA. It’s debatable by some. So we got whacked another $250 million in the middle of the year. Lockheed had to stop procurements, and they did some layoffs too about that time.\\n\\n There’s a period of time, and here we were about two months in, where the team will keep working if you say, “Look, we’ve been told to keep working, and we believe it’s important.” They’ll keep doing that even if the bosses in Washington are telling them, “You’re on the wrong plan.” They’ll do it for a while, but there comes a point where you need to give them a better focus, something that is more near term. They’re human. Also give them something they feel like they can help contribute to have an impact on this debate.\\n\\n Lockheed is really good actually at sensing this kind of thing. They came up with an idea and worked with our guys to not just keep them working on the generic Orion, but let’s work on a streamlined design. Not changing the design, but deciding to fly—not flying all the systems, but flying fewer of the systems, but still being able to fly people, so we could fly earlier even with this reduced budget. You try to keep something in front of the people. We called that a Block 0 Orion, which is basically a streamlined version that would go to ISS [International Space Station] and could fly earlier.\\n\\n Now this team has a challenge in front of them. Let’s get the costs down. Let’s scrub content. We’ll fly Orion earlier. It gives them something to focus on. Maybe that’ll be enough for people [in DC] to go, “I want that thing; I want Orion.” We did that first in the spring and summer of ’10.\\n\\n Then a lot of people forget that we actually flew Pad Abort 1 [PA-1] in May of ’10, which was a huge test for us. It’s a very difficult test. We’d been working it for a long time. I actually had to go to Washington and convince Charlie to let us fly this flight test, because again in their mind Orion didn’t exist or it was going to go away. I had to show why we thought it was valuable to anybody. Why was this test data good for anybody, whether Orion existed or not? They finally approved it. When we flew the flight in May of 2010, I remember there were only two Headquarters people that came to the launch. One was Bryan [D.] O’Connor, and one was Doug Cooke. It was like we were on our own. First of all it’s in New Mexico." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Out at WSMR [White Sands Missile Range]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s out in the middle of nowhere. We had two people from Headquarters. The rest of Headquarters just ignored us. It’s a thing that’s happening. We had three press people come. I remember we had a press event and we were supposed to have five people come, but there was a dead [body] found on a track somewhere near WSMR, so three of the news organizations didn’t come. That’s the way it was. I remember that. It was so weird.\\n\\n The test itself was just incredible. It worked perfectly, so the team was jazzed. They were very excited, and it really helped our team. I remember looking on the Internet and other places and hardly even a blip. It’s like okay. The environment is tough. I contrast that with EFT [Exploration Flight Test]-1. I know Kennedy is different than New Mexico, but everything else was totally different; it was just like another world. People forget. In the middle of Pad Abort 1 was all this stuff going on.\\n\\n We did Block 0. We were again on our own. The Constellation guys, Jeff was doing his best to hold things together in a very difficult environment. He fully supported our approach to do Block 0, because it was cheaper. It could be faster. He completely recognized that was a good idea. It was in that summer. I can’t remember if it was August or not, maybe it was earlier, that Jeff got relieved of his job. It was partially around this term liability thing. He did such an awesome job of not taking the bait and being bitter and arguing with the people in Washington. He was always trying to say, “Hey, what can we do to help? Is there a way we can restructure this to help you?” He was awesome. He was very good at supporting all the programs, all these poor people that were worried about their jobs. In the end he got frustrated with Headquarters on this term liability. He didn’t think it was—well, I won’t speak for Jeff.\\n\\n He made some comments about how—I can’t remember his exact wording—but it pissed him off enough. They said, “You got to go do something else.” They relieved Jeff. That was hard. I don’t know that I was ever worried about my job. It’s different than what we’re talking about. I didn’t feel like I was going to be on the street. I don’t know, I don’t know, but you work at a job, and you came here to NASA to do something, now Jeff is basically persona non grata, he’s gone. So I’m worried about that a little bit, but on the other hand when he got relieved I was actually more determined to keep this thing going. I don’t know. I was really upset when they asked him to leave, but I figured it would happen eventually. I figured we were all on that track. We were all going to be relieved eventually." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand you went around though and encouraged everybody, raised morale, “We’re moving forward.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s a good point. Actually I think it was Mark [A.] Kirasich’s idea. The thing about Orion is we have people at nine Centers, and Lockheed has facilities and subs [subcontractors] in a lot of different places. We knew it was really important to get out to the sites and talk to them. They could hear it from us. The message was pretty simple, said, “Hey, the political process is working its way out. We believe that what we’re doing on Orion feeds forward for any exploration plan. The work you’re doing is valuable for engineering and technology. We’re being told to keep going by Congress.”\\n\\n The longer we lasted, the more that people were going, “I think this has got a shot.” Often when a big thing gets canceled, it happens pretty quickly, but we went months and months. Congress was so pissed.\\n\\n That was really important. Actually what we did when we went out, I remember Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] was one of the first ones. Kirasich suggested, “Hey, maybe we should go see Pete [Simon P.] Worden.” He was the Center Director. Pete is not a real big human spaceflight guy. He’s more technology [focused]. I always liked him. I respected him, but he’s not really [into] human spaceflight. It was a great idea because we got to have a conversation with Pete about what he was hearing and his vision of spaceflight, which is not necessarily Orion. But he had some ideas. It really started a dialogue where we could stay in sync.\\n\\n There’s some point as to whether he trusted us that as we were working through this we were going to keep his people in mind. Then we did that with [Marshall Space Flight Center Director Robert M.] Lightfoot, we did it with [Kennedy Space Center Director Robert D.] Cabana, we did it with—it was [Center Director] Woodrow [Whitlow], I think, at Glenn [Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio]. [Center Director] Lesa [B.] Roe at Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia]. We’d see their people and then we’d sit down with the Center Directors. So that was really really huge. It was good for me that they were going, “Yes, you guys are doing a good job, keep going. We support you guys.”\\n\\n When the budget cuts continued to come, then it was a way for us to have a dialogue, and there was a trust between us. I remember one particularly difficult time where we actually laid off—I think we laid off 3,000 people. A lot of them were in our building, in 17, people we worked with, but it was happening across all the Centers. I remember we walked through [the Ames cuts] with Pete Worden. His main thing was, “Are you treating Ames fairly?” So we showed him. It was honest. We showed him what we cut at JSC, and he wanted to see the percentages. It’s one way to talk about it. You could see that Ames actually percentage wise was coming out better. They were still getting hit.\\n\\n I remember him saying, “I really appreciate it.” At the end he says, “We’re with you,” which was huge. I remember him saying that to me in the middle of all this crap, and I think, “Wow, that means a lot, coming from Pete.” That was really big. It helped me. I know it helped the team, but it helped me a lot too. That was really good.\\n\\n Then the authorization act came out where Kay Bailey [Hutchison] and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it [Bill] Nelson?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, God, I can never remember, because I met the guy actually several times. [Richard] Shelby and all those guys, they came up with this plan. It was basically hey, we need an exploration plan, and here’s what it is. If you remember, that was a really big day, and I remember getting called by somebody I knew. I was on vacation. I’m in a restaurant, and they called me and said, “Hey, this is going to get passed tomorrow. This is what it says.” I said, “Okay, cool.”\\n\\n It had a thing called MPCV [Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle] in it and a thing called an SLS [Space Launch System] in it. It was an attempt to say, “We’re going to keep exploring.” That was huge. The interesting thing is that originally I assumed that MPCV was Orion, and it would be simple. That was not the assumption at Headquarters, so we had to go to Headquarters over a period of several months. This would have been late ’10, early ’11, to show why we felt Orion met the requirements of MPCV, and why it made sense not to stop the Orion contract and start a new MPCV contract.\\n\\n That was a good lesson for me because it seemed obvious to me when I looked at the requirements and the language, but we had to go back to simple rocket equation kind of things to build it up again. SLS had a really hard job to show what the configuration ought to be for SLS. This was all happening about the same time.\\n\\n I would say early ’11 we got approval that we were MPCV. I can’t remember the exact date. I have it somewhere. Then we were required to put a budget together, and that’s the budget we’ve been held accountable for since that day. I think I had a month and a half to put it together. Lucy [V.] Kranz did a great job, but there was all sorts of weird constraints on it. It was flat. You’ll see in the charts. It was hey, here’s your money, and it’s flat. No DDT&E [Design, Development, Test, and Evaluation] is ever flat. It’s like okay, I get it; we’ll be flat. Here’s how we’ll do it.\\n\\n One of the funny things. People worry. You read in the press. Gosh, I read that they’re not going to launch till 2021. We picked that date in 2011, so that’s been our plan since 2011. It’s not like oh, we just had bad performance. When you smash the budget and you cut it like that, you got to spread it out. That’s been the plan since 2011. That’s where that came from.\\n\\n So that was the really good news, we were in, back in the plan, but we had a very challenging budget. The target date at that time, if I remember right, it’s coming back to me, was we agreed with SLS that we could launch in 2017. We felt like with the budget we had in ’11, we could be five, six years away from launching an unmanned flight.\\n\\n Remember, Orion originally was in ’14 and then ’15. It was a couple-year delay based on the fact they whacked our budget. We said ’17. That’s where that date came from. That was great. Huge news for us. New rocket so a lot of our requirements changed. Not a lot, but there were environments changes from SLS and other things, and we were no longer going to Station at all. That was a big change. Now we’re just going to deep space around the Moon. So there were some requirements changes, not huge.\\n\\n But still we looked at it, and we go, “Man, this is five years from now.” This team is pretty tired, working hard. It was clear to us that we really needed a near term milestone to keep the team excited, and we really thought it would be important for the country to show progress by having a launch. That was really our rationale, that it could save the Program if we were launching.\\n\\n We came up with this idea, and again I’ll credit Lockheed with the specifics. We came up with the idea of launching the crew module [CM] basically, which we felt we could get ready and do a very high altitude test. We felt like we could do it in 2013. In late ‘10 I think we proposed that we could launch in 2013.\\n\\n But we needed an ELV, and we needed approval to do it. Make sure I’m piecing the right pieces together. It made a lot of sense here, and technically it made a lot of sense too, because if you can fly more often and test your systems rather than just doing more analysis and building the full system, you can actually reduce a lot of risk. It’s better to fly and test, fly and test, than try to get it perfect and fly once, so it made a lot of technical sense.\\n\\n I got in trouble originally for proposing the idea. Actually Lockheed, who did a great job, they came out and talked about it early as, “Hey, here’s an idea,” which I thought was perfectly reasonable, but Headquarters didn’t like it. They didn’t like Lockheed talking about it. I remember I got called to Washington to a meeting. It was with Lori and Gerstenmaier, Doug Cooke. I think those were the principals, those were the key guys. Of course I had talked this with Doug. He knew what we were trying to do, and Gerst also. Lori was very upset about what we were working on, and she asked, “Who has been working on this?” I said, “Well, I’ve been working on it, and here’s why I think it’s a good idea.” She says, “Yes, I know you’ve been working on it.” Her real intent was to push on Doug and Gerst for having worked on it. So she got pretty mad at them. That was the environment; there was really not much support in Washington for the people who were going to finally decide." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was Charlie’s opinion?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The one time I heard from Charlie on this issue he was upset that Lockheed had really gotten out in front, I think, that it looked like a Lockheed thing. My sense is he felt like Lockheed was pushing for more money, when it was a sensitive political time. I knew he was upset about that. That was my sense, but I never talked to him directly that I remember. I would not have talked to him directly.\\n\\n It’s funny, I got e-mails and I had conversations with Mike Griffin maybe once every three weeks about something he wanted me to do on Orion. I think in the first three years I might have talked to Charlie twice. It’s different, just different. It’s different how they manage. That was fine. I understand it’s different.\\n\\n We really felt like this was the right thing to do. We did it in pieces while we couldn’t get full approval. The first thing we had to do was restructure the crew module work to basically focus the crew module work not on everything to build the perfect crew module for ’17 but on a test flight crew module I would say. We could use that crew module for either an EFT-1-like thing if we ever got approved or an ascent abort test, this AA-2 that we’re working on now. It applied to both.\\n\\n I put in a contract mod [modification] to restructure the crew module for this test flight CM, but I had to get that approved, and we got that approved. That was early in ’11. We got that approved. So that was huge because that was most of the work. I had to get the team turned around, so that got approved, I wouldn’t say under the radar, it was open about what it was, but it wasn’t overtly an EFT-1 thing. I had to do it to make EFT-1 possible, but I would also use it for AA-2 if EFT-1 was never approved, so I was honest about that.\\n\\n That was something I had to do, stick my neck out. “Hey, I’m going to do this thing.” Gerst had to approve it. Gerst had to justify it, because by that time Doug had retired, I think. Gerst had to get it approved. He did, he did. It took us another nine months to get the rocket approved.\\n\\n We had this rocket idea. So I have to get a rocket [for EFT-1]. SLS was not very supportive, not because they didn’t think it was a reasonable idea, but they did not want themselves to pay for it. They had their own problems, they’re starting from zero building a new rocket. They were afraid that if we got this approved the money was going to come out of SLS, so they said, “Fine, but don’t take it out of SLS.” I understand that completely, because they were starting from zero.\\n\\n It used to be OFT-1. It was Orion Flight Test-1. Then it was a discussion we had with the team, and we worked with [Daniel] Dumbacher where we said, “Actually this is an exploration flight test because there’s ground ops systems like recovery we’re going to do. There’s actually this interstage adapter that SLS is going to build that’s exactly like they’re going to fly on EM [Exploration Mission]-1. And then of course Orion has a lot of work in this thing.”\\n\\n It really was more than just Orion, so we named it Exploration Flight Test-1. So that helped a lot. Then the environment got a little more positive, and we were able to get it approved in the late fall. By then we were clearly not in ’13. We weren’t going to fly in ’13, but we could fly early ’14.\\n\\n That’s how it was. I remember there was a time in that summer I thought we’ll never get this approved. But we were working [hard]. That’s part of what you need to do. You got to have a vision, then you do the things that you can do today that keep it enabled in case things change. And it worked.\\n\\n Then the hard part, once we got it approved then, was actually executing the plan. It turned out that when we got EFT-1 approved we took reserves out of the EM-1 plan to make that happen, and we pushed the AA-2 flight past EM-1. That was part of what we had to do to make it work. It put a lot of pressure on EM-1. It wasn’t long after we’d gotten it approved that I knew we weren’t going to make ’17 for EM-1. That caused some consternation I know at Dan’s level, although I think Gerstenmaier understood it.\\n\\n It’s hard to explain to people. They just see EM-1 moving, but if you look at EFT-1 the amount of risk reduction we ended up doing on that flight, most of the risk reduction was actually prior to launch. It was getting the factory ready, the subcontractors lined up, and then the design issues we found even before flight that if we had not done, we’d be on our happy [clueless] way to a ’17 launch. We’d have a heat shield that didn’t work, and we’d have software that wasn’t going to work. All those delays would have lined up with everybody else waiting for us. That’s the [hard] part. People know it, but they forget it.\\n\\n That [benefit] was [much] more than just the fact that [Orion worked great during the flight test]. We learned so much getting to [the flight] that now we’ve taken 1,000 pounds out of the crew module for EM-1. All these things we wouldn’t have learned if we hadn’t built the first one on EFT-1. Wow, this one is heavier than I expected. Here’s why. Oh, now we understand the loads better so I can take that out. Here’s manufacturing things that looked cool when we did it but now it’s actually hard to make, so we got to change tooling. All those things we did to go from EFT-1 to EM-1 were huge. They wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t flown EFT-1.\\n\\n Now EM-1, if you look at the Lockheed progress, they held the pressure vessel to the same date for two years. In a year and a half we’ve only moved the delivery date to Kennedy by 14 days. A year and a half, which for human spaceflight programs is really incredible. Now ESA [European Space Agency] is a struggle. It’s their first time. They’re learning what it means to go to deep space compared to low Earth orbit, and they’re struggling with some of that. They’ll do fine, but that’s going to be the pressure on EM-1. Anyway, that’s why. Those are the technical reasons why it made a lot of sense.\\n\\n Emotionally when it actually launched and worked—I talked about PA-1 where we were just there with two guys from the New Mexico news and Bryan O’Connor, who was huge. I have so much respect for that guy for coming to that launch in the middle of all that. He was just awesome. But then EFT-1, we were everybody’s buddy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was a big deal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes, [Barbara Zelon (our external communications person)] and PAO [Public Affairs Office] did awesome. All the video and how they got it out. Then the reaction. I never would have expected that compared to where we were on PA-1. It was like night and day. That tells you what launches can do for you, especially if they work [well]. This was almost perfect.\\n\\n That was a huge day. At that time I was thinking about February 1st of 2010. I thought about that [day in the context of EFT-1] and how well it worked. I didn’t want to say that at the press conference, but I certainly thought about it. All the people that worked so hard and that hung in with us when we went through that. It was a really really big deal. Trying to think what else would be good to say. There was a lot about EFT-1 about how we tried to do some contracting differently that a lot of people forget, to save money." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk about some of those affordability initiatives you came up with?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. So I really wanted to get the ULA [United Launch Alliance]—this is the rocket guys—cost and the Lockheed cost down for the flight, because crew module is pretty expensive. It’s a first development. It’s a very dense piece of equipment, and we’d been working with them a long time.\\n\\n The stuff that was only going to happen once, which was the rocket and the integration with the Delta IV, I wanted to pay [as little as possible] for that. I wanted it to work, but I didn’t want to pay a lot for it. We actually came up with this idea, we called it “buying data.” I don’t want to buy a certified launch on a Delta IV Heavy. I want to tell Lockheed, “Here’s the objectives that I want, and here’s the data I want from the flight. I will let you use our Orion that you’re building for me, this Orion capsule, I’ll let you use it. You instrument it. You put it on a Delta IV. You integrate it. You go figure out how we’re going to take the data, how we’re going to reduce the data to get this information I want. I’m going to buy data. Here’s the objectives. Go do it.”\\n\\n It was a different way of coming in as opposed to us managing the whole launch and us doing the integration and us going and buying the rocket and having LSP [Launch Services Program] certify the rocket. Who knows what we would have paid for all that? It wasn’t things I cared about. I’d say, “I want it to work, but I don’t want to pay for all that other stuff.”\\n\\n Lockheed, they integrate payloads all the time. That part was very low risk. The rocket, ULA does an awesome job. They’re not real real cheap, but they also have high quality. So I was confident they could integrate Orion. It was the heaviest thing they’d launched. It had different aerodynamics, so there was some work there that was new for them. What we agreed to with engineering and with LSP was that we would only focus on those things that were fundamentally different. There were wind tunnel tests we had to do with this new shape, and there was guidance and navigation algorithms that were different that LSP did some independent look at. Those are the only things we really delved into.\\n\\n Then LSP could have certified this rocket for me, but we agreed we didn’t want to pay the money for that. I had to get Ralph [R.] Roe and Gerstenmaier to agree we didn’t want to do that. They were cool with it. LSP gave me a rough look at the engines and other things, and that was about it. We took some risk there. If it had blown up they would have gotten all over me. “How the hell can you do that? It’s a huge launch.” But you have to take some risk somewhere. We got a really good deal on the Delta IV Heavy and the integration. We were able to do a lot of that in a fixed price contract too. The more you can do, [the better].\\n\\n It was some innovative contracting mechanisms and techniques to try to not pay money for things that are not fundamental to the work of Orion. That was a big deal. Those are the biggies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your feelings that day after it was all done? Certainly there were tons of interviews that day. There’s videos of you being interviewed by NASA PAO. But what were your feelings? What do you remember from that day?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I couldn’t stop smiling. I remember that. It just was a really really incredible feeling. I remember [my ISS experience] when we had worked so long with the Russians. There was a time in ’96 we thought the whole Station was going to get canceled again, because the Russians didn’t have any money. We gave them some money and other things happened. I remember when FGB [Functional Cargo Block, Zarya Module] launched, and we docked with the Node [Unity]. That was a really big day. That was one of the most fun exciting days I can remember. EFT-1 was different because of the struggles [we went through] and because of at some point feeling like we were on our own. You know what I mean?\\n\\n It’s one thing when [the work is hard, but] everybody is supporting you. There was a point where we felt like we were by ourselves. When it works, there’s a little bit more satisfaction I guess. I don’t know how to say that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Isn’t there that phrase? The best things in life are the things that you have to struggle for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That were hard. Absolutely. Yes, I think that’s true. It made it a lot sweeter because of how bitter things were for a while. I know how that feels. This feels a lot better. That was good.\\n\\n My favorite memory, my family got to go. My wife and my boys got to go to Pad Abort 1. That was nice. They were young. My whole family got to go on EFT-1. I would see them every day. I went to a couple of gatherings with people, and that was fun just hanging out with people. My favorite moment was we went to dinner, just the five of us, and said a prayer. We were just really really happy. That was really fun. Because they were there, and they were there when it all went to hell.\\n\\n I don’t know if I told you the story. On February 1st, [2010], the evening of the 1st, I go home, and I’m in the den. My daughter is on her computer. I don’t know how old she was. She was maybe middle school. I’m talking to my wife, “What am I going to do tomorrow?” My daughter says, “Hey, my friend just texted me that Orion got canceled.” I’m like, “Oh, crap, I didn’t tell the kids.” Here I was consumed by this thing. I was like, “Oh my gosh, okay. Well, here’s the deal.” Had to sit them down, talk about it.\\n\\n My daughter, she says, “Well, in your meeting tomorrow,” it’s funny how kids are, she’s in communications [as a career], so she also has a sense for these things, “You should play this song.” It’s “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley. It’s about everything’s going to be okay. So we did. At the all-hands [on February 2nd, 2010,] we played the song. It’s an innocent [view]. People, look up, it’s going to be [okay].\\n\\n I thought about that too on that day, after all that. That was a good [idea]—focus on the right things. Yes, so that was a big deal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s something that people don’t consider when they’re looking at overcoming challenges, the impact that it has on your personal life as well. That obviously must have had a big impact on your family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was hard for them. I go back to work every day, and I’m trying to do something about it. They’re just at home going, “What’s going to happen to Dad? He’s working on this thing.” Yes, in some sense it’s harder for them.\\n\\n That was just awesome. The ego part, their friends are just like, “Wow, your dad does that? I saw your dad on the news.” That’s fun. That doesn’t last too long. I’ve been there too. Pretty soon you’ll be on the news for something that’s not good. That’s cool too. A lot of their friends came to the launch, and they were excited. That was just a really fun day.\\n\\n But now I don’t know what’s going to happen; who’s going to win [the presidential election]. Even depending on who wins, I don’t know that either one of them really cares about NASA. You could look historically on either side, you’ve see things that weren’t necessarily positive for us. Even though Orion succeeded on EFT-1, we have a ways to go. If you’re not a supporter of that kind of thing, you can find reasons why you want to stop something. I worry that that’s still possible. It’ll be an interesting year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We had talked with someone over at Lockheed. They had mentioned that some of the players that were naysayers are back in play again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They can be. I think they won’t have the same role, but they could be advisers. Then the question is what’s Congress look like again too. They’re different. It was interesting that we had Senator [Ted] Cruz here yesterday, which surprised me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I heard a little bit about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He came specifically to talk about space and about JSC and about transition. It’s interesting to be up here on the ninth floor too and to see how you interact with Headquarters and Congress in a time like this. There are rules. What kind of messages Ellen can and can’t talk about is really interesting. Still figuring that out.\\n\\n Here the [Orion team has still] been working [very hard]. It’s not like they put their feet up after EFT-1. They’ve been killing themselves to get EM-1 out. Like I said, they’ve been really doing a great job. Here they are now. They got ESA to work through, which has been a challenge. I don’t think people realize how complicated it is to work with a partner; how much time it takes from the management team, because your whole interface is at a much higher level now. Where if it was all Lockheed then the integration headache is Lockheed’s, but now you pull out a piece and give it to ESA. Now the integrate headache is at the higher management level. Kirasich spends a lot of his time talking to ESA. I don’t think people realize that.\\n\\n There’s a lot of extra stress on that, and then there’s a transition coming. So this team has been smacked upside the head a few times. It’s natural to have a twitch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think I’d be a little gun-shy as well. We talked about so many of those obstacles that you faced. If you had to pick your greatest challenge while you were working on this effort, what would it be?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would say it’s not let your personal feelings dominate the fact that you need to provide a positive vision for your team. I don’t know if I said that right. You may feel a lot of things like anger, hurt, [and] irritation. When you speak to your team, when you put a plan out, you need to really focus on—people want a positive vision. They want to succeed. They need you to give them that vision.\\n\\n I’m a sarcastic person by nature. It’s easier for me to make fun of Headquarters, “This is stupid and did you hear what they said.” You can’t do that. You cannot do that when you’re the boss. At least you can’t do it to other than just your friends. You can’t do it to your own management team because they’re dying too. You have to put things in a positive light.\\n\\n Even if I fundamentally disagreed with the approach of the new administration, I had to say, “Look, we don’t set policy. That’s what they get paid to do. They get paid to set policy. I don’t get paid to do that. But I feel like there’s still a debate, a dialogue, on what the details of the policy should be, and I want to make sure that we support that. I think our work here is doing that.” That kind of thing. … I’d say that’s the hardest part. You got to be careful of your own stress level and your own way to release that. You know what I mean?\\n\\n You have to do it. No one else is going to do it. You have to do it. I thought Jeff [Hanley] was always very good at it, but then they took him away. Doug, he had other things; he was consumed by that. Bill was busy with Station. There was a point where it was just us. I felt like we had to do that.\\n\\n I really relied on people like Kirasich, who had some of these ideas. “Look, I think we need to go out, talk to these people.” People like Lockheed, who said, “Hey, here’s an idea of how to focus the team.” I didn’t come up with those, but I could tell the ones I thought would work. “Oh, I think that one will work, and I think I can sell that one.” But they often generated the ideas. That was the biggest challenge.\\n\\n It was obvious to me it was critically important, but it was hard for me. It was hard for me. I had always had bosses who usually did that part. Then my job was just translate that part to the team, go, “Here’s what I think they mean.” But up here, you can’t make any sense of it, then you’re like, “What do I say?” I can’t say, “That’s just stupid, and I don’t know what to do.” You can’t do that. That’s not going to help anybody. You had to put it in a context, even if you don’t know. Not “Well, I don’t know,” but “we’re going to do this today. We’re going to check, see how that works.” That’s okay too. Be honest with the people. I don’t have trouble being honest. To me, when you said the hardest thing, the hardest thing was creating a positive forward image. We were on our own. Having to do it ourselves, that was different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything that you would point to as your significant accomplishment in working towards EFT-1?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was providing a steady, calm vision. That’s what people tell me. That was the role that I provided. Yes, all the stuff is going on, cancelation, term liability, Doug leaves, Jeff leaves. All the stuff is going on. “Look, we’re on this plan today. We’re going to do what we can do,” was very helpful. That’s what people tell me. The calm positive vision was really important to them.\\n\\n They did the work. They did the work. If they hadn’t executed the plan it wouldn’t have mattered what I did. If Congress hadn’t passed the authorization bill none of this would have mattered either. It still would have been canceled. I got to recognize that too. Some people say we saved Orion. I say, “I don’t know. We didn’t save Orion. Congress, the authorization act, saved Orion, but I think we could have screwed it up if we’d done a bad job.” If we said, “No, we’re only going to do what we always did. It’s going to take forever, and we’re not going to try hard to get EFT-1, we’ll just launch in ’18.” I think the whole thing could have gone down the tubes. I think we did a part of it, and this team did a good job for the part we could do, I thought, yes. That was very satisfying.\\n\\n I do struggle with worrying about the legacy in the long run if something happens to Orion, but I have to let that go. I can’t control next year. I can’t control five years from now. Who knows? I think we’ve just got to recognize what the team did in that environment, which is good, important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I imagine it’s one of the proudest days of your career." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. I don’t think there’ll ever be another one like that. I can’t imagine. I hope there’s nothing as painful as 2010. It’s hard for me to imagine you’ll have as high as 2014. Yes, I don’t think that’ll ever be the same. That’d be fine with me. If other things went and they were easy, that’d be cool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think we’ve touched on a lot of the themes that we were looking for in the Project. We appreciate you sharing those details with us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thanks for asking. The way you asked me made me think of it in a different way. Some of it is still emotional. It’s funny, it’s been so long. But still I can feel it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have no doubt that it is. It’s probably still there in your heart and in your mind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I got to watch this year not to get too tied up in that. I got to do the same thing here that I did there, for the Center. “Let’s do our job. Let’s figure out how to make sure the messages are accurate. We don’t set policy, but let’s try to influence as much as we can.” We’ll see. We’ll see." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s trying times, that’s for sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Mark Geyer", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Thank you. Appreciate it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you again." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00332", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/LenoirWB/lenoirwb.htm", + "original_file_name": "LenoirWB_11-18-04.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/LenoirWB/LenoirWB_11-18-04.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "William B. Lenoir", + "location_date": "Staunton, Virginia – 18 November 2004" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "William B. Lenoir" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is November 18th, 2004. This oral history is being conducted with Dr. William B. Lenoir for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Staunton, Virginia. The interviewer is Rebecca Wright.\\n\\n Thank you again for letting me come into your home and visit with you this morning. I would like to start with you sharing with us some information about how you learned that NASA was opening up the second class of scientist-astronauts, and why did you decide to apply." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s an interesting story. Let me back up a bit from there. I went from high school to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts] as a freshman in the fall of 1957; subsequently got a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and joined the EE [Electrical Engineering] faculty as an assistant professor. After ten years of being at MIT continuously, my intent was to be a university professor and continue my research and continue my teaching. My research had been in the remote sensing of the Earth’s atmosphere from satellites, which in 1964, when I was doing it, was all theory; none of it was fact yet. My intent, as I said, was to continue with that career, but after ten straight years at MIT, it was obvious that it was time to get some broadening and go spend a couple of years somewhere else, and my intent then was to come back to MIT.\\n\\n So I looked at what the opportunities were, and the Earth Resources Institute at the University of Michigan [Ann Arbor, Michigan] was one; the Goddard Institute of Space Studies [New York, New York] was another; and there were several other universities that were after me to come join their department. I was communicating with them, filling things out, and one day, thumbing through Science magazine, back at the back there was a little bitty coupon that said NASA was looking for applicants for science-astronaut; “Send in your name and address, and we’ll send you some more information.” [When] I thought about it, and I said, “Gee, you know, my research deals with this sort of thing. Let me see what this is all about.” Honest truth is, before that instant I had never thought about it. Was not a close follower of the space program. People are disappointed to hear I didn’t grow up wanting to be an astronaut. I had given it no thought.\\n\\n It was like magic, though, that one little probably one-inch-by-two-inch coupon turned into a ream of paper that came back, “Here, fill out these forms.” I joke about what I call the “have you ever hads,” the medical history. It was pages and pages of three columns, both sides, of “have you ever had” this, that, or the other. I think I took the first six or seven seriously, giving them a lot of thought, and then I quickly went into the “if I’ve never heard of it, I’ve probably never had it” mode, and filled it all out. But that’s how I thought about it. That’s how I got the information back, and I filled all those forms out, and I mailed them back.\\n\\n I’ve forgotten how many people applied; this was in the group that came on board in 196[7]. I’ve got a vague recollection it was ten thousand, but it might have been more and it might have been less, I don’t know. But their process was they took all of the applications, along with why you were applying, all of your references, your résumé, etc., and they sent them all over to the National Academy of Sciences, who sent back a list of those that they thought were very well qualified scientifically, and I think that was a list of seventy people.\\n\\n Then they took the seventy of us—I think it was ten at a time—to San Antonio [Texas] to the Air Force’s [Brook’s] School of Aerospace Medicine for a physical, a six-day physical that was the darnedest thing I’ve ever been through. In retrospect, I realize now it was about a three-day physical, and they stole another three days’ worth of baseline data from us that had nothing to do with selection. But in those days you could get away with that, and they did. It was interesting. I was fairly naïve about the whole process. I made no attempt to game it, to learn about it. To me it was just one of several possibilities, and I went into it fairly naïve.\\n\\n I remember at one point where, after a series of X-rays of everything, the surgeon came in—neurosurgeon, I later found out—and asked was I unconscious when I broke my face. And I said, “You’ve got me confused with somebody else.”\\n\\n He said, “You’re Bill Lenoir?”\\n\\n I said, “Yeah.”\\n\\n He says, “Well, were you unconscious when you broke your face?”\\n\\n I said, “I never broke my face.” And then he told me about on the left side of my face in three spots where it had been broken. I thought back, and I said, “Oh yeah. I was playing intramural hockey as a graduate student, and I took a check and I hit the ice real hard with my face right there [gestures],” and I told him, “You know how in comic strips how you see the black with the stars in it? That’s what I saw immediately, but I got up and skated off and actually finished playing the game.” I wasn’t unconscious. I went to the infirmary the next day, because it was obvious that my eye had no white; it was all red, and my face was black. They said I had a concussion; “Go home and sleep it off.”\\n\\n So I went home; I slept it off. Two days later I was playing a hockey game. I never gave it another thought.\\n\\n He said, “You’re very lucky, because usually they don’t heal that well.” I later found out I was also very lucky because I didn’t realize had I said, “Yes, I was momentarily unconscious,” I would have been immediately eliminated, because I knew nothing about if you were going to be a pilot, you could never have been unconscious like that.\\n\\n Anyway, so they did that, and they took a bunch of X-rays and tests of my kidneys, because I had had a kidney injury when I was in college, playing intramural football; no problems there. They put me in an altitude chamber—these were all extra tests—and ran me up to 43,000 feet with a rapid decompression to make sure that this face thing hadn’t constricted any passages, and so all that worked out fine. I thought it was all fun and didn’t think much about it. On the debriefing, they told me I had a hernia that was minor, but it was there, and they pointed out I had a black mole on my back they didn’t like the looks of, and so on.\\n\\n So [I] went on home, and the next step was, everybody that took the physical was invited to Houston [Texas] in the same group for interviews, three days’ worth of interviews. In our group of ten at San Antonio I met—I wish I remembered his name—Morefield, I think, something like that; was an M.D. at Mass[achusetts] General Hospital in Boston, and others were from around the country. So I got to know him.\\n\\n When I went back home, one of my classmates was at the Harvard School of Medicine [Cambridge, Massachusetts] and doing quite well, so I called him up. I said, “Hey, Jerry, here’s what they said. What do I do?”\\n\\n He said, “Let me get back to you.” He did, and he says, “Here’s what I recommend. You want to go over to MGH [Massachusetts General Hospital] and have it fixed.” He says, “I could get you the Chief of Surgery to do it, if you would like, but to be honest, I’d recommend the Chief Resident.” He says, “The Chief of Surgery is probably the best guy there, but you’re hardly going to get any attention of his. The Chief Resident is an excellent doctor, excellent, topnotch, just getting started; has virtually no private patients, so you can get all of his attention.”\\n\\n I said, “Sounds good.” So I went over and had the operation and talked to him and told him, “While you’re at it, take the mole off my back.” So he did.\\n\\n An interesting sidelight of that was that when I went in, the way they did things then—I don’t know anymore, because I hardly ever am sick, and I don’t think I’ve been in a hospital since—they gave you the sedative, the succinyl choline, the curare that relaxes your muscles. It makes it so you can’t move, and then they knock you out with the sodium pentathol. Well, they got me totally relaxed, and then they gave me the sodium pentathol and wheeled me in. The problem was, they didn’t give me quite enough, and so I wasn’t out when they started.\\n\\n Afterwards I was telling the surgeon this, and he obviously wasn’t believing me, and I repeated a couple of the jokes they told, and his immediate comment was, “I’ll send the anesthesiologist right in.” But I had the illusion that I was trying to communicate, and I couldn’t. I had the illusion I could move my right big toe, and so in my mind I’m wagging hell out of my big toe, but nobody’s noticing, and I don’t know how—it felt like it hurt, but it probably hurt as much because I knew what they were doing as anything else. But anyway, so we got that fixed.\\n\\n Then I think I’m out of the hospital like a day or two, and it’s time to go to Houston for the interviews. I’ve just had the stitches out; I can hardly move; it hurts. So I flew down, and you did three things there, probably four. There’s probably record checking and all that stuff, but you had an interview with the selection board that was chaired by “Deke” [Donald K.] Slayton. You had a medical debriefing of your San Antonio experience. And then you had a backseat ride in a T-38. Again, I was naïve. Had no idea, didn’t try to game anything, didn’t give it any thought.\\n\\n It turns out that the intent of the backseat ride was to see how you did and if you had any problems with that. It was fairly random as to how you were scheduled. They had no idea I had been in the hospital or had anything fixed, and so the first thing up for me was the T-38 ride. Thank God, as newcomers, they already had the parachutes in the airplane, because I’m not sure I could have carried mine out. I walked around with the test pilot, and he showed me some things, and then I climbed up the ladder, doing my very best to look casual and not at all in pain. Got strapped in, and the crew chief was leaning over, helping me, and I strapped it in real tight, just like he said, and that wasn’t hard, because that felt really good, strapping everything down tight.\\n\\n Then we went out, and we had an hour-and-twenty-minute flight, pulled a whole bunch of Gs, flew upside down, and I had a great time; I loved it. I realized afterwards that when the pilot reported back on me, he must have had some good things to say, because I was just looking, and when we were upside down doing a loop or something out over the Gulf [of Mexico], I noticed there was a regatta going on, and I called it to his attention that, “Hey, they’re racing down there, and so-and-so’s ahead. Looks like they’re rounding that turn,” just holding up a casual conversation. All that finished, and I loved it. That was great.\\n\\n Then the next thing I had was the interview, and Deke Slayton chaired it. Chuck [Charles A.] Berry from the medical world was on it. Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.] was on it, and Owen [K.] Garriott, who was on the previous science-astronaut class, whom I didn’t know, and I knew nothing of any of them. If you had asked me, I probably didn’t even know we would have been the second group; I don’t know. And probably one other I don’t remember, but we were going down the list, and Alan Shepard was summarizing. He was the Chief of the Astronaut Office. Deke was the Director of Flight Crew Operations at the time. But Alan was going down, summarizing the case, and he was telling me, “Let’s see, and from the physical it says you’ve got a hernia.”\\n\\n And I said, “Not anymore. I had it fixed.”\\n\\n And he says, “Oh, when?”\\n\\n I said, “Five days ago.”\\n\\n He says, “Oh, wow. Maybe you shouldn’t do the T-38 ride then.”\\n\\n I said, “Too late. I did it this morning.”\\n\\n He says, “Oh, you should have told us.”\\n\\n I said, “Well, I didn’t want to tell you. I wanted to do it.” In retrospect, I realize, boy, I’m really playing to this fighter-pilot mentality without even having a clue.\\n\\n He said, “And there’s a mole on your back.”\\n\\n I said, “No, I had them rip it off while they were there.”\\n\\n The other thing they didn’t tell me—I didn’t find out probably for ten years—was in that report from Brooks [Air Force Base], there was a summary from the psychiatrist, and we did a bunch of that, definitively recommending that I not be selected because I was dishonest and couldn’t be trusted. What was behind it was that I was asked a question, if I knew my best friend was cheating on his income taxes, would I turn him in. I said no, and that was the end of the conversation, we went on to something else, but it was based on that. Had I known that was in there, I’d have been terrified. Had I known it was in there, knowing what I know now, I’d have thought it was great, because you’d be hard-pressed to get a better reference to a fighter pilot than a shrink saying, “Don’t take this guy.”\\n\\n Then we went through the interview, and we talked about some things, and Alan said at one point they hadn’t decided about the airplane, that the T-38 flying was either going to be required or optional. And I said honestly, “Well, in my case, then, it’s the same, because if it’s optional, I’m going to do it, and if it’s required, I’m going to do it, so I don’t have anything to think about; there it goes.”\\n\\n We went on, and then the medical interview, and then went on home. There’s probably more stories around that that were interesting.\\n\\n Then at one point in the early summer I’m sitting in my office at MIT, and I get a phone call and it’s Alan Shepard. Having sat on subsequent boards, I realize I should have known immediately, it’s Alan Shepard; it’s good news. Other people call the ones that don’t make it. But I didn’t know, and he told me I was selected, and I said, “I accept,” and so on. I went down and I told my boss, Alan [H.] Barrett, who’s a professor of physics at MIT, and we immediately went out and had lunch with a beer or two.\\n\\n I went home and I told my wife, my first wife, and she said that was great, and then she asked a very practical question. Since I said we were going to move to Houston, she said, “How much does it pay?”\\n\\n I said, “You know, I don’t have a clue. It never occurred to me to ask. I’ve accepted a job. I assume they pay.”\\n\\n Then we moved. So that’s the “making a short story long” answer of how did I find out about it. I set out to do a two-year sabbatical away from MIT somewhere and wound up with an astronaut career, and learned a lot along the way about myself that that was much better fit than academia would have been, although academia would have worked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about arriving to Houston and what you found and how your training started to prepare you to become an astronaut." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We moved sometime in the summer of ’67. I’d like to think it was August; could have been as early as July; I don’t think it was as late as September, but it was still summer. Of course, Houston summer runs till about November, anyway. But I was born and brought up in Miami [Florida] so I was used to hot, humid weather, not to be confused with liking it.\\n\\n We were new, and it was still in the pre-Apollo times. As a matter of fact, the Apollo fire happened in the middle of my application process, and it’s interesting, in retrospect, that it made no difference whatsoever. I never even thought about it as being a factor in whether I applied or not. So, very much heroes. People want to know astronauts; they’re heroes in the Houston area. The area around NASA Johnson Space Center—it was called the Manned Space[craft] Center then, MSC—was fairly new; several new subdivisions. First thing we did was we spent three weeks in a motel right across from NASA; I forgot what it’s called now; it was a Ramada then, I think. We bought a house in El Lago [Texas], first house that we bought, and people helped us out along the way.\\n\\n One of the stories I like to tell was I got to know Paul [J.] Weitz pretty good. He was in the pilot class right ahead of me, and he was talking about when he came down. Same story, staying in a motel. In those days motels didn’t always have TVs, and his didn’t, so he went out to buy a TV one Saturday. Went up to the shopping area that had—it’s the Foley’s shopping center, I think of, that had only Foley’s in those days. There was nothing else there, but somewhere on an intersection right by the interstate there, there was a little TV shack. He went in there and he bought a TV, and he was getting ready to leave, and a Texas downpour comes, and there’s water collecting under the underpass.\\n\\n So, Paul, being fairly smart, decided not to go out in the rain, and so he’s chatting with the owner, who asked him, “Where are you from?”\\n\\n He says, “I’m from Whidbey Island [Washington]. That’s up near Seattle [Washington].”\\n\\n And the owner says, “Oh, Seattle.” He says, “It rains a lot there, doesn’t it?”\\n\\n Paul looks out the door and looks back at him, and he says, “You kidding me? It’s rained more here in the last hour than it rains in Seattle in a month.” But that was typical of the kinds of things that we ran into. And like I said, people went out of their way to help us.\\n\\n I remember our first pilots’ meeting, all pilot meeting, where the astronauts met every Monday. The first one we went to, we all went in, and Deke was there, ostensibly to welcome us. I’ll never forget Deke’s comments—and if you’ve talked to others from my group, you’ve probably heard the same thing—[what] he said, “Well, we didn’t need you, we really don’t want you, but welcome aboard.” He was literally that blunt, and that was the wonderful thing about Deke. A nicer guy never walked the face of the Earth. He never lied to you. I mean, he always told it to you right up front.\\n\\n So there we were. We immediately christened ourselves XS-11 since there was eleven of us, and we were all going to go off to flying school. Only one of us was a private pilot, and that was Story Musgrave. The other ten of us weren’t pilots at all. Story wasn’t jet-qualified, so we all had to go. Don [Donald L.] Holmquest was still doing his medical residency, so he was going to do it later. That left ten of us.\\n\\n Because of the Vietnam War buildup, the Air Force didn’t want to do it the way they had done it with the previous class, everybody at one Air Force base, and so we went in twos to five different Air Force bases, and the choices were Williams Air Force Base in Phoenix [Arizona]; Vance Air Force Base in Enid [Oklahoma]; Reese [Air Force Base] was in Lubbock [Texas]; Randolph [Air Force Base] in San Antonio; and Laughlin [Air Force Base] in Del Rio [Texas]. San Antonio and Phoenix were the ones that everybody wanted, and we got together and decided what’s your first, second, and third choice, and we went and said, “Oh, gee, everybody wants Phoenix and San Antonio.”\\n\\n We got together and decided, “Okay, Bill [William E.] Thornton ought to get Randolph in San Antonio, because he just came from there and he owns a house there, so that makes sense, and the rest of us, we’ll figure out how to deal with it.” Phil [Philip K.] Chapman and I played a hand of draw poker, best hand wins first choice. Phil won; he went to San Antonio.\\n\\n I lost and went to Del Rio, Laughlin [Air Force Base], which was very fortuitous. It was a great place to learn to fly. None of the distractions of San Antonio. Great bunch of people. Tony [Anthony W.] England and I went there, and we were each put in a different whatever they were called, squads, class, or whatever, but we were the class of 69-06, and there were two halves to the class. They did that so that it wasn’t quite so unwieldy, and that way one class flew in the morning, did class in the afternoon, and the other class did it the other way around, and then after six weeks you swapped back and forth. So we were in different classes and didn’t run into one another.\\n\\n Because of the notoriety, we had a meeting with the wing commander, a full colonel who was the ranking Air Force person on base, and being military, of course, they had to do everything military-wise. We’re not military; how do they treat us? Well, we are civil servants. What’s our GS [General Schedule] rating; they look it up, and so they told us that Tony England was the equivalent of, I think, a captain, and I was the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel. In that regard, I was the third-ranking guy on the base. The colonel was telling me, “This could be a little bit embarrassing.”\\n\\n I said, “I don’t know why. I’m just here to learn how to fly. I’m not going to do anything stupid. Treat me the same as any other student pilot. I’m probably not going to be real anxious to do all the Mickey Mouse, but I won’t embarrass you. Just treat me like a student pilot and ignore me.” And by and large, they did.\\n\\n What I found in flying school was that I wondered how I ever lived without this. I took easily to it. I wound up finishing first in the class. At graduation they gave out four awards, and I got three of the four. The one I didn’t get was best officer, but I remember just beforehand when Colonel Goade, the wing commander, called Tony and I in to see how it went, and he told us that I was going to get the best flying award, the best academics award, and also the Commander’s Cup, which was the big silver thing for everything.\\n\\n And I said, “You know, Colonel, that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. To be honest with you, none of that’s going to mean anything to me in my career. The Air Force invented that so you can encourage your students to take another step up, to reach out, and so on. Why don’t you just say that Tony and I are anomalous here, and we’re ineligible, and give them to the next guys.” He thought about it, but said no, they were going to do it this way. So I got those, and to this day, I still think there were a couple of Air Force second lieutenants, or first lieutenants by that point, that should have gotten an award that didn’t.\\n\\n But I loved flying, and came back and checked out with the NASA T-38s and started flying them around, and had a lot of fun doing that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was some of the other training you had? You also went through jungle training and desert training. Do you remember much about those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, just after we came back from flying school—oh, let me back up a minute. When we first got to Houston, we had six months to kill, because the Air Force wasn’t ready to take us, and so we had a big bullpen kind of office. We were all ten of us in there, and we got introduction to this, that, and the other, and we kept our research going on the side.\\n\\n I remember at one point we had a party for our group at my house, and Brian [T.] O’Leary, who was from somewhere, I don’t remember, was talking to me right in front of the fireplace. I had a foot up on the hearth. He was renting an apartment over in Nassau Bay, and he was asking me about the house, and I told him. He said they were renting, and he wanted to rent until after flying school to make sure that he graduated, and it just stopped me cold, and I just looked at him, and I says, “You know, Brian, the thought of not making it through just never occurred to me.” There’s probably a lot of future look there, because I went through very well, and O’Leary discovered he didn’t like flying and resigned right after his first solo, and so there was probably something there.\\n\\n But just after we got back from flying school, then they sent us off to various survival schools, the idea being that if you were in an Apollo capsule and had to make an emergency letdown, you could be anywhere in the world, and it might not be accessible for several days to the rescue crew, so you had to survive. And the idea for us was that we were brought on board for what was then called the Apollo Applications Program, which was a lengthy post-Apollo program of Space Station-like activities. It subsequently got a lot smaller and became Skylab, but that’s what that was all about.\\n\\n So the first thing we did was we went up to, of all places, the area outside of Spokane, Washington, for desert survival. I don’t think of that being a desert, but it is. It’s a desert; they grow some potatoes up there. We spent some time there, and like most survival schools, you spend a couple of days in class being lectured as to what you do, this, that, and the other, and demonstrations of this, that, and the other, and then you go out in the environment and survive.\\n\\n One of our interesting stories was, as we were driving to the desert for the survival on an old converted school bus, the sergeant that was taking us out there, who was in charge, was up front, and as we neared it and went through a gate where we’re going to get off the bus and go on to four-wheel-drive pickup trucks to take us in, there’s a couple of picnic tables and a bunch of people, and I guess he knew the region.\\n\\n What happened was the local farmers had heard that there were astronauts coming, and so they’d set up a picnic and a bar, the whole nine yards, and the sergeant takes one look at that and says, “Oh, gosh. I wish they hadn’t gone to all this trouble, because these guys are not going to go out there and drink alcohol, with what we’ve just told them about going into the desert.”\\n\\n Of course, to a man, we got off the bus and went right to the bar and started drinking. I was talking to one of the farmers, and he said, “Hey, anything we can do for you?”\\n\\n And we had big, heavy parkas and stuff, because it was going to get cold at night, and I said, “Gee, no.” I says, “Well, wait a minute. You got a case of beer?”\\n\\n And he says, “Yeah.”\\n\\n I says, “Here. Wrap it in this,” and I put it in the back of one of the pickup trucks and got on the pickup truck. There were three of us; actually, there were five of us, and we were going out to two different sites.\\n\\n They dropped the first three off somewhere, and then Story Musgrave and I were going to be the next two, and the sergeant that’s in the back with us said, “You’re up here around the corner.”\\n\\n I says, “Where?”\\n\\n And he turns around to point, and I threw the beer off the truck. So we got set up there, and I went back and I got the beer and applied the number one lesson that we learned, and that was I got the highest rise I could find, got on the north side of it, dug down till I got to cool sand, cool, damp sand, and put the beer in there. We drove them crazy. They would come through every now and then to check. We’re sitting there drinking beer.\\n\\n “Where did you get the beer?”\\n\\n “Oh, I don’t know.”\\n\\n And at one point, we decided, “You know, this is too much Mickey Mouse,” and so we just got up from the campsite that they had set us into, and we wandered off into the desert, and again drove them crazy. We could hear them. They’re trying to find us; they couldn’t find us. So we just survived on our own. They chewed us out, probably, a little when we were done, and then we got done there.\\n\\n Then our next survival school was Panama, jungle, where, same story, you spend a couple days being briefed. The equivalent of the farmer’s thing was the Governor General of the Canal Zone hosted a dinner for us on his boat as we cruised up and down the Panama Canal. The very first day, we walk in and sit down, and the sergeant that starts briefing us starts off by saying, “Which one’s Lenoir?”\\n\\n I said, “Me.”\\n\\n He looks and he says, “I heard of you.” It turns out survival school instructors apparently are a tight-knit group. So that was all that was said.\\n\\n We learned about stuff, like what’s one of the things I learned in the jungle, and that is that when I was in Miami as a kid, I had eaten rattlesnake. That’s pretty good. In the jungle training, what I learned is eating boa constrictor is a little bit like trying to eat rubber bands. So we learned all that stuff, and then we go off and we get in a helicopter, and we’re hovering about ten, fifteen feet over the Chagras River, and we have to jump out—splash—and then we’re supposed to swim over to a little area where we congregate, and they do the final briefing, and then we break up into three different groups.\\n\\n What they didn’t tell us, that we all figured out very quickly, was that after we had done all that—and a couple of the guys were not too wild about the water, and so it was troublesome to them. We tried to take care of them as part of the group. I was brought up in Miami; you know, I probably swam before I walked. But what I wasn’t used to was after we got out of the water, you have to stop and get the leeches off of you, because there’s leeches all over you.\\n\\n So then we went, and they said that the game was that we were going to do the same Air Force survival, and the game is, you are supposed to survive. You had been given a map, which we learned didn’t fare very well once you got it wet, and you’re supposed to get to a place downriver within two days, three days, whatever it was, and you meet on a dock. You’re all wearing these floppy hats, and you’re supposed to avoid and evade the locals, the local Indians, like you would if you came down in Vietnam, something like that. And you need to know that they’re paid a dollar a hat for getting your hat, and so your objective is to show up with your hats.\\n\\n We were assigned three different routes. They said, “Now, in the real world, you’d go down the river, but we don’t want you to do that. This group, you’re going to go down here. This other group, you’re going to go up a little. And the third group,”—that’s Story and me—“you’re going to be the furthest away from the river.”\\n\\n So we’re talking to them and I’m thinking about that, and I say, “You know, there’s mountains and stuff around here. The further away you get from the river, the more you’re going to go up and down. With the drainage things, and up and down, up and down, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. These Indians probably aren’t dumb. They’re staked out. They know exactly where we’re going to come.”\\n\\n So just as he said, “Okay, now head out,” the heavens opened up, and it rained.\\n\\n So we walked out; we rounded a corner, and I pulled Story into the bushes, and we sat there for a while, and I said, “Let’s let everybody settle down and get away,” and then we swam across the river to the other side. And I said, “They know exactly where we’re going to be over there. Let’s see if they can find us over here.”\\n\\n So we went over there, and some of the things that happened was, one night in our camp, apparently a couple of big wild pigs came rooting through. Boy, they raised hell. Another night, I’m lying in my homemade sleeping bag, which was made out of a parachute, same as our tent, when I felt across my feet a spider that must have been this big around [demonstrates] walked up and over one foot and up and over the other foot and kept going. We had toucan soup one night when we got a toucan and ate him. Had iguana; great stuff.\\n\\n And a little bit early, we got down across the river from the pier where we’re supposed to meet them, and nobody’s there yet, and we didn’t want to sit out in the open there, so I walked up a little further and run across a guy fishing. And I’m talking with him, and he’s telling me that he’s the vice president of a local country club, which is just downriver a little bit.\\n\\n And I said, “Oh, okay,” and then it hit me. I says, “You got any beer in your country club?”\\n\\n He says, “Yeah,” and I told him the story of Spokane. He says, “Come with me.” We went up there, and he got us a couple of six-packs of beer.\\n\\n So we swam back across the river, and we were the first people there. We were the only two that arrived with our hats, and when the sergeant and his group come on a boat down the river, there we are sitting on the pier, dangling our feet, drinking beer, waiting for them, and, boy, did that make our reputation. That was something else.\\n\\n Then we also did a sea survival; actually, two different ones, one at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, which was not very far from my home. As a matter of fact, the big B-52 hangars in Homestead Air Force Base I helped build. I used to be an ironworker when I was in high school, and so that was kind of like going home. We did all kinds of water stuff, get towed behind a boat on a parachute up to about five hundred feet, release, and then parachute down; and swim underwater and go down—all kinds of water stuff, which to me was kind of like Disneyland. “Hey, this is fun. This isn’t work.”\\n\\n Then we had a different kind of survival at Pensacola Naval Air Station [Pensacola, Florida], which dealt with if your airplane goes in the water, how do you get out of it, and things like that. The memorable part of that was the “Dilbert Dunker,” where you’re in like a seat, and you’re strapped in, and you’ve got your mask and helmet on, and this goes down a set of rails into a deep pool. It goes down about, I don’t know, ten, fifteen feet and then flips upside down, and then at that point you’re supposed to unstrap and get out. A couple of the guys that weren’t really comfortable in the water were really spooked by that. I went first, because I didn’t mind the water, and to me, it wasn’t bad. You went down there, and you got upside down, and you stopped, and you thought about it, and “Oh, look at this,” and you unstrapped, and you came up and said, “See, guys? It works.”\\n\\n So those were our survival schools, which were a lot of fun. We kept trying to tell them that, “You know, there are times in the year when there’s winter, and we could be coming down anywhere. Shouldn’t you send us to survival school at Aspen [Colorado] or Vail [Colorado] or something like that?” We could never sell that one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Didn’t do that one? It’s a good idea. Once you completed training, what were some of the first duties that you were assigned?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first thing that I was assigned, I’m not sure whether there was a temporary one or not, but the first long-term thing I was assigned, to follow the design of the airlock module for Skylab, which was then still called the Apollo Applications Program, along with Bruce McCandless [II], who was the older astronaut that was doing that. Most of the rest of my group, I think maybe all of it, was assigned to be support crew for Apollo, which meant that they weren’t in a flight profile, but they supported. They did the odds and ends from an astronaut perspective, and then they talked to them during a mission as CapComs [Capsule Communicators]. I think because of my engineering background; most of the rest were either doctors or scientists, real scientists. I was an engineer, but I was assigned to engineering duty of watching and overseeing, from an operations perspective, the design of the airlock module.\\n\\n Then a short while later, the multiple docking adapter got added to that list, and at some point, it might have been a year later, the workshop module, built by Douglas [Aircraft Company] out on the West Coast, was added, which then wound [up] completing all of the Skylab modules, except for the command module that was going to be a part of it.\\n\\n So that was my job, so I got off the track from the rest of the guys and spent a lot of time flying to St. Louis [Missouri], which is where the airlock module was built. Got a lot of experience flying the T-38s in and out of St. Louis, and subsequently in and out of Denver [Colorado] at Martin [Marietta Corporation], who was doing the multiple docking adapter.\\n\\n One of the stories I tell about Denver was on one of my trips there—these were back in the days when a little bit more—I don’t know whether it was legitimate or not, but a little bit more was done entertaining astronauts. I think there was both the desire and it was okay, and I’m sure somehow it was allowed as a business expense. But they took a couple of us skiing. I had learned to ski in New England in college and had only skied in New England. And I’m going up on the chairlift at Winter Park [Colorado] with one of the local engineers who is just as apologetic as anything, apologizing over the terrible conditions this day. He says, “You know, the ice, everything is just terrible. You should be here on a good day.” I think he’s kidding me. I’m looking around, and all I see is powder. He’s calling it ice. What he means by ice is there’s a real light crust on top, and I tell him after our first trip down, that he just doesn’t understand ice. Ice is thick stuff that’s an inch thick and it’s blue. It’s the reason you’ve got the sharp metal edges on your skis, and that’s New England. But that was my introduction to skiing in the Rockies, which is the best place in the world to ski, as far as I’m concerned.\\n\\n But those were my assignments, was to do the engineering oversight, from an operations point of view, of those three subsequently Skylab modules. At some point in the middle of it, the program changed from what used to be called the wet workshop to the dry workshop. The idea with the wet workshop was that it would be launched on a Saturn I, and the Saturn IV-B upper stage would be used, and after it was used, you would set up shop inside the hydrogen tank, which would be your workshop. The dry workshop decided to use the extra Saturn V that was left over when the Apollo Program got shortened, and launch that S-IV-B empty, so you could outfit it and didn’t have to haul all that stuff in. And about that same time frame, the name got changed from Apollo Applications to Skylab.\\n\\n So that’s how I got into the Skylab business; how I, other than as an observer, had very little to do with the Apollo Program. I felt comfortable about it, because Skylab was the reason our class was there, and I figured that ultimately we’re going to fly in this thing, whereas the guys that are supporting Apollo are never going to go to the Moon, and so this was more fun, and it just seemed more fun to be out in front doing some engineering work than it did to be kind of on a third- or fourth-tier crew helping others get their job done. Although they had a lot of fun and did a lot of good work, especially supporting the lunar science." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were named as a science pilot backup for Skylab 3 and 4. Tell me about that announcement and your thoughts and then what your duties were in those positions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were three different Skylab crews, and interesting, if you go back, you can get confused in history, because NASA at first called the first launch Skylab 1. That was the dry launch of the workshop, and as I recall, that was the Arabic numeral one. Skylab 2 was the launch of Pete [Charles] Conrad [Jr.] and his crew for twenty-eight days. Skylab 3, [Arabic] numeral 3, was the launch of Al [Alan L.] Bean and his crew for fifty-six days, and then Skylab 4, [Arabic] numeral, launched Gerry [Gerald P.] Carr and his crew for fifty-six days with the understanding that it was likely to be extended maybe as much as eighty-four. Subsequently they’ve gone back and renumbered the manned crews, one, two, and three, with Roman numerals, and so you can get confused.\\n\\n But the assignment, I was still naïve and had no idea how it all worked. Deke Slayton came down off the mountain and made an announcement and then crawled back up on the mountain, and to me it made sense, because I’d been working Skylab, which seemed to say that, hey, I was right about that was the better place to be than Apollo. There were only two from my group; that was myself and Story Musgrave. The first crew that was announced was Pete Conrad, Joe [Joseph P.] Kerwin, and Paul Weitz. Joe was a Navy flight surgeon; he was a doctor; and it was felt important, because nobody had ever been up that long before, and you needed to have a doctor. Story was his backup, so if anything happened, he still had a licensed M.D. on board.\\n\\n The third crew was Al Bean, Owen Garriott, and Jack [R.] Lousma, and I backed up Owen Garriott. The fourth crew, or third, depending on how you want to look at it, was Gerry Carr, Ed [Edward G.] Gibson, and Bill [William R.] Pogue, and I backed up Ed Gibson, and so we only had two backup crews, even though there were three. The first crew, because it was different with the M.D., had one crew, and then Vance [D.] Brand, Don [L.] Lind, and myself backed up the other two. It made sense.\\n\\n It was a bit of a problem, because shortly after the announcement of those crews, Deke announced that the other nine of us were going to be released; you know, fired, RIF’ed [Reduction in Force], or whatever, because, frankly, with the programs being cut back, Apollo ending, Skylab being down to three missions, there was no need for them. So Story and I got to stay, and the other nine guys had to go. Never really understood what happened there, other than, obviously, there were some politics. Somebody who was connected and some congressman or senators or somebody complained, and that firing never went to fruition, but basically they had two extra years of hiatus than I had, because—well, actually, it’s more than that because of the training—and so I got deeply involved.\\n\\n Basically, in those days the premise was that the backup crew is as ready to fly as the prime crew as you can possibly make them. Obviously, if you get into a bind and there’s a priority problem, the prime crew gets priority. But we didn’t have any of those, so we were basically as ready to go as the prime crew; in theory, right up to the end, the problem being that as you get close, you can’t substitute just a crew member, because then you break up the crew camaraderie. If you’re six months before flight, well, sure, you can develop it again. Before the missions, I couldn’t get either Owen or Ed to take up my offer of an all-expense-paid ski trip, figuring maybe they can break a leg or something, but they didn’t bite, and so we did all the training that they did. It was interesting; it was a lot of fun.\\n\\n It was different than Apollo, because you weren’t training for a short mission, where basically every minute of every day has something in the flight plan. We were training for a longer mission, where it was admitted that we don’t exactly know what we’re going to be doing in weeks two and three and subsequent, and how it will work out. So we had to train with that in mind and learn how to deal with that, and then also we were in a much bigger spacecraft that you just couldn’t build a simulator around, and so we had a makeshift simulator around the walls of a room, that had the control panels that weren’t in their right geometric configuration at all, because you just couldn’t get there from here. It worked out well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did your training change at all from the first manned Skylab mission before Gerry Carr’s group went? Was anything handed down from Pete Conrad’s crew that changed your training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes and no. As you probably recall, the first unmanned launch didn’t go as planned. Part of the meteoroid shield deployed prematurely and was immediately ripped off by the airstream. Actually, both of the solar arrays deployed early. One of them got stuck with some of the metal that was from the meteoroid shield, and it didn’t fully deploy. The other one did deploy, and it got ripped off, and so here’s this sick bird with no power up there, and no Sun shield, and so that was the thing. Originally Pete was supposed to launch the next day, and that was put off for five days. Everything went in five-day cycles, because the orbit that it was in precessed around once in five days, and so things were in five-day cycles that way.\\n\\n So they waited five days, and I don’t remember whether they launched in five days or in ten, to be honest, but in the meantime, there was a whole bunch of different teams put together to deal with all kinds of things. The first was, how can we get it cooler in there, how can we shield the Sun. There were three different schemes. One of them was to use a scientific airlock that went out the Sun side and basically deployed a big umbrella. I wound up working on that. There was another one that once they got up there, they would put a big shield over it, and to be honest, I’ve forgotten what the third one was. I worked on what was called the parasol, as the crewman doing it, working on that engineering team, and my job, obviously, was to make sure that it was doable by the crew. Pete and his crew were very busy doing their stuff, and so they basically had no insight into all the different things going on.\\n\\n Subsequently it was decided that the parasol would be the prime thing, the first thing that we would do, and in helping with the design and making sure it was doable, I had also worked to build the flight procedures; how do you do it. They had never seen the hardware, had never done it. I had done it a bunch of times in the simulator and on the 1-G trainer, and then I went to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] and briefed them on it, took them pictures. Actually, in my pod I actually took the flight hardware, which there wasn’t time to obey all the right rules for how you’re supposed to do stuff, and how do you get it there. I was going to the Cape in a T-38. I could put a pod on it and take the flight hardware, and I did. And so a crew from the launch center met my airplane, and they put it in bonded storage right away and took it out and loaded it, and I went into the crew quarters and briefed Pete and Joe and Paul on it and how it all worked, and answered their questions, and that was my support in that time frame.\\n\\n One of the big lessons—and it didn’t all come from Pete—was in learning how to deal with longer-term space flight and crew adaptation. It was a well-kept secret that about half of the crews got sick, or whatever you want to call it, in Apollo. Not even the astronauts always knew what happened; that was considered a medical, private thing. When Pete and his crew went up, there were no expectations of them, because their workshop is broke. It’s not even clear they can salvage it, so anything they do is great, and they’ll be heroes. They got the parasol up and that worked, and started to get cooler in there. They did some EVAs [Extravehicular Activities] and pulled the other solar array loose, which got a lot more power, because up to that point the only other power was on the arrays that were on the multiple docking adapter. So now they got half of the lab’s power going, and then they did some experiments as well, which included the medical experiments, which is why Joe was there. But they were a raving success because they saved the machine.\\n\\n When “Beano” and his guys came up, the mentality tends to be continuous on the ground, and so Pete and his guys saved the machine. You know, they didn’t do a hell of a lot other than that that we had originally intended, and so again there’s not a lot of expectations and a lot of pressure on Beano and Owen and Jack. And they got up there, and in retrospect, they started nice and slow, and they got into it. They stayed ahead of the ground as they developed, and right up to the very end, the entire ground team could not keep them busy. Didn’t matter how much you sent them, they did it, and they pioneered some things, like whatever it was called, the work bin, where, “Okay, here. Just send us up the list of things you’d like to get done at some point, and if we can fit it in, we could.” And at the end of every day, they were done; the bin was empty.\\n\\n Unfortunately, that same mentality on the ground carried over for Gerry, and Gerry and Ed and Bill were expected to hit the deck running and be just like Bean. They weren’t given the time that Beano and his guys were to get slowly up to speed, to get over any discomforts that they had. Bill Pogue got sick. There’s the infamous story where, unfortunately, on the recording of the intercom [intercommunication system], he and Gerry are conniving how they’re going to throw it all away, because one of the Skylab experiments dealt with the metabolic take-up of astronauts, and for three weeks before the mission, all during the mission, and for I forgot how long after the mission, you were restricted to the Skylab diet. Everything that you took in was measured, and they knew what was in it, and everything that came out of you was saved for later analysis. So by the rules, this bag of puke is supposed to be brought home, but they didn’t want anybody to know that Bill had been sick, and so they apparently threw it into the trash airlock, which went then into what was the oxygen tank, and it was gone forever. But unfortunately, they talked about it over the intercom, which they had forgotten was recorded, and so Alan Shepard had to formally reprimand them.\\n\\n They never did get on top, because the ground kept waiting for them to be just like Bean. I recommended that we give them a few days off, because I was part of the support crew on both of those, taking my tour as a CapCom as well as supporting some of the other things that you’re going to ask about later. I recommended we give them a couple of days off, and every time I recommended it, it was agreed, but before we could execute it, it got, “Yes, but we need this, that, and the other,” and pretty soon it’s all full again.\\n\\n So they never got on top of it, but that was one of the things that Pete brought back was that you need some time to get adapted. He brought back some very practical information about the EVAs and the need to be restrained, commented on some of the screws that had backed out, and in zero-G, screws tend to back out, but torquing them down doesn’t always lock them in. So there was a bunch of engineering things, but from a crew perspective, it mostly dealt with how do you work for the longer term and how do you grow with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Skylab was a twenty-four-hour operation. How did that affect your ability to do your job? Were you on call the entire time the crews were up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, all three of the missions had three people on board at a time, and they were all on the same shift, and their shift was sunk to Houston mostly for the convenience of Houston, so that their nominal workday was eight to five or six, although an astronaut’s workday is a lot longer than that, and they would sleep at night.\\n\\n Then on the ground there were three different teams in work at any time. There were actually five, but they took different times. There was the execute, there was the planning, and then there was the late-night shift, so stuff was going on all around the clock.\\n\\n During Skylab [3], Beano’s flight, I was also still training as a backup for the next mission, so I supported that as a CapCom, talking to Bean and the guys, helped be an interface for the solar science community in talking with primarily Owen about the solar science, and then also talking to Owen and Jack about the pictures of the Earth they were taking as part of the Visual Observations Program.\\n\\n At the same time I was in full-time training to be a backup for the next mission. During the last mission, of course, I was no longer training, and so I was more or less full-time supporting that. Then I took up all three of those things again. CapCom; I spent a lot more time working with the solar scientists to make sure that we could get what they learned into it so that it wasn’t always predestined.\\n\\n One of the things we learned on the very first Skylab mission was, there were two X-ray experiments, one of whom came into it with an anti-manned bias and built everything automated. Another came in, and he had listened to some astronauts who said, “Hey, we can intervene,” and he had automation, but everything could be intervened. You know, it’s kind of like a camera now that’s automated only, or you can get in and change the settings. What we found when we got up there was the Sun was a different animal than we thought in X-rays. It was a lot hotter. The guy that had everything automated didn’t get nearly the data he could have, because he had guessed wrong. The other guy was able to make all the changes and have the crew redo things and do some things manually, and so there was a lot of interacting with them of what have we learned, what do we want to do differently, what do I need to tell the crew so that they really understand what you’re thinking.\\n\\n Then during that mission we also pioneered actually having one of the scientists—they had a term that they called a czar, and I forgot; I think it was for a week. I think there were six PIs [Principal Investigators], and they had to work as a group, and they sometimes had competing requirements. They got together and decided that they weren’t going to ask NASA to adjudicate their differences; they would do it themselves. They had what they called a czar. One of them was final say for a week, then another, then another, and so they took turns, but that was the final say, and he was the boss.\\n\\n So the ground team had grown up distrusting the scientists and not allowing them to talk directly to the astronauts, and we set it up so that I think it was once a week, but I forget, where the czar would come online and talk to the crew for a pass or two, and this was back in the time frame before the TDRS, Tracking [and] Data Relay Satellites, where you’d have anywhere from five to ten [to] twelve-minute passes as you went over specific ground sites, so you could talk for that long, and then you can’t communicate. So we set that up, and then on the Visual Observations Program, I would brief Ed, and Bill Pogue on the last mission, on what it was we were trying to do, what we thought they were going to come over. None of this was an official program, but we would send them up a list of sites and when they were going to come over, “If you got a chance, get this kind of a picture. Tell us what you see about this, that, and the other.”\\n\\n There were a variety of different things that we were looking for to take advantage of the viewpoint from space and the fact that there’s a human there. It’s one of the things that we had learned what—I’ve forgotten who called it; I think it was Gerry Carr—“the picket fence effect.” You know, if you stand outside a solid fence that the pickets don’t quite touch, what do you see? You see a fence. If you’re driving by it in a car, what do you see? Well, you see right through it, because your eye and your brain integrate the picture looking through those little slots, and eventually you get to see everything. If you take a picture of the Earth, you see a hazy Earth. If you go over it with eyeballs that are continually looking at it, you see much more clearly, because it’s like the picket fence effect; you’re looking through it better.\\n\\n And so we were trying to take advantage of that. We were trying to study the oceans. We were looking for some geological features, and we had three different scientists that were working with me on it. Bob [Robert E.] Stevenson was at the Naval Research Institute; actually, it’s Scripps [Institution of Oceanography] in La Jolla [California]. He was looking at it from a Navy perspective, studying the oceans.\\n\\n One of the interesting things that he had seen earlier was what looked like what he called a backwards eddy. You get eddies where, you know, you flush a toilet and things go around, and it looked like there were a couple cases where there some going the wrong way, and he wanted to know more about those, because they had some interesting implications to the Navy, in that if that was true, then you were going to have a zone where sonar didn’t penetrate; i.e., a submarine could hide. So we set up a big program to find those, and we had trained on that.\\n\\n Then two geologists, Lee [Leon T.] Silver, who is played up real highly in all the Apollo stuff, and Bill [William R.] Muehlberger at the University of Texas [Austin, Texas]. Lee Silver was at Caltech [California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California]. And they worked with me, picking out geological things to look at. So that was that program, and that was pretty much where I did it.\\n\\n Now, on the last Skylab mission, it was eighty-four days long. I went into it without really thinking ahead, and I got myself in a bind where I had a critical job, or so I felt, and there was me. I didn’t have a backup. I worked eighty-four straight days, sometimes twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight, just because that’s the way it jammed up, and I loved every minute of it. I felt like I was doing something worthwhile and, you know, I was part of it. Then, unfortunately, that program ended, and there it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your thoughts at that time, knowing you were working in a program that was ending? Did you have curiosity?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To be honest, I didn’t think much about the ending. I tend to get engrossed in what’s going on and not think too deeply into the next step. I didn’t develop those abilities until later, and so right up to the very last day I was trying to get in as much as we could on Earth observations and to squeeze in the last solar work. There was going to be plenty of time to think about it later, because there obviously wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to do.\\n\\n One of the things you had asked was about the potential of a rescue on the middle mission, and my role on that was to get out of the way. Basically the idea was that there was a backup command module, so that we needed three, and we had four. One of them, the other one that was never used—it might have been used for the Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project], I don’t know. Otherwise it’s in some Smithsonian [Institution, Washington, DC] somewhere.\\n\\n It had three couches, and underneath the couches there was some deck where you could get. In order to make room and have the weight and center mass and everything right for returning three crewmen, it was decided that a crew of two would go up and do that. The center guy, which was me, would not go, and his couch would not go, and so whenever there was training for rescue, Vance and Don did that, and I went off and did something else, so that was real easy to support; it’s just kind of get out of the way. Luckily, that never happened, although as crewmen, I’m sure both Vance and Don had mixed feelings about that. You don’t want anything to go wrong, but you sure do want to fly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were at MIT, you said that one of your areas was remote sensing. Did you feel like some of the theories and some of the areas that you had thought about, you were able to apply to your Skylab experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In a general sense, yes. Specifically, no. At MIT I was in the Radio Astronomy Group, and I was doing radio astronomy just like everybody else. The only thing is that my subject was a lot closer than theirs. I was doing theory around radio astronomy of the Earth from orbit, whereas they were doing radio astronomy of Venus, stars, and other things, and so I was looking to how do you look back in radio spectrum at the Earth and infer what the temperature is as a function of height, way up, and if you have a map of what that is over the Earth, then you can really make much better predictions. It took, I think, fifteen years before the ability of the hardware to be built caught up with what that was. But the idea of sensing the Earth, in general, was what drove that whole Visual Observations Program, and I felt like I was very much in the middle of it.\\n\\n I had maintained my connections to MIT. I had resigned as principal investigator on two things that were going to fly on Apollo Applications, and became a co-investigator; let somebody else pick up the principal role, since I didn’t have the time. But I was a co-investigator on a whole handful of remote-sensing programs, some on manned spacecraft and many on Nimbuses and things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Another thing that you mentioned was that the investigators worked out their issues and had this czar that took turns. Were there issues that had to be worked out between what the PIs wanted and what the ground crews wanted and what your Skylab crews wanted to do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not very often. Occasionally there was a disconnect between what the PIs wanted to do and what the ground team wanted to do. Some of the things required reorienting the spacecraft. The solar experiments were lucky, because since the spacecraft had solar cells, it was oriented to always point to the Sun, and so obviously we pointed the solar telescopes in the same direction, so the Sun was always out there. The Earth experiments, if you weren’t going to have a person look out the window, but you were going to take high-quality stuff out a very high-quality window, well, then you had to reorient the spacelab [Skylab] so it pointed toward the Earth.\\n\\n Then there was the discrepancy between not just the orientation, but crew time. One guy can only do one thing. He can either do solar science; he can do Earth science; he can do some medical experiments, or he can do housekeeping things as mundane as eat dinner or clean up, because with only three people, everything that happens up there, happens by one of those guys. There’s nobody that’s going to come in after you and clean the restroom or any of that, and so it just takes a lot of time. So usually it was around crew time.\\n\\n I’d say the teams worked together very well, especially the Flight Directors. There was Don [Donald R.] Puddy and Neil [B.] Hutchinson, Chuck [Charles R.] Lewis, Milt [Milton L.] Windler, and Phil [Philip C.] Shaffer, and when Chuck Lewis got sick with some gut problems for a while, Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz came in and subbed for him for a while. But those guys, in their heart, wanted it all to work, also, and the only reason it was up there was for doing these experiments, so they bent over backwards to try to make it work, and it was a good team. The key thing usually was getting whoever thought they had a disagreement together, so they could talk to each other and understand what each other’s needs were, and why what you wanted to do was really going to mess me up, why what I was going to do was going to mess you up, and if I could understand yours, then maybe I can think a little bit about mine. “Well, if I do it differently, then you can do it.” It almost always came to a decent outcome.\\n\\n We discovered that letting the PIs actually talk to the crew worked out just fine, that it wasn’t a problem. It took a while on the first mission. That’s one of the things that Pete learned that the ground hadn’t learned that, “Hey guys, I can either do the work you want me to do, or I can talk to you; but I can’t do both. So every time we get a ground contact, don’t call me and make me talk to you, because I’ve got to stop what I’m doing and talk to you.” It took a while, but eventually they caught on. What really helped was when Beano and his guys got so far ahead, was that the attitude in the control center was, “Hell, let him run. They’re doing better than we are.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you transition from your Skylab duties when they, of course, went away because the program went away, to your duties to be part of this NASA Satellite Power Team?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first thing I did was coming out of there, there was a NASA summer study at Snowmass [Colorado], which is right next to Vail. It was summer, so you don’t have to get suspicious; it was summer. I told them they had the wrong time of the year. Being an Earth observer, I went and I gave a talk, and I think it was a two-week summer study, and I had a couple things that I was presenting. I took my family—my wife, my son, my daughter, and my dog—and we drove out, rented a place in Snowmass for a month, and so I worked for two weeks, which was really nice, not bad work, and then stayed for another two weeks, just us.\\n\\n My dog was a white German Shepherd, and at one point he got into a skunk and learned what skunks were. I saw it happen. He saw it, he ran up to it and grabbed it and gave it one shake, and then he threw it down and then he yelped, and then he went running around the blacktop trying to scrape his nose. Everybody said tomato juice is what you use. Well, that dog was pink when we were done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But was the smell gone?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, mostly. As I’ve learned with another dog after that—but whenever they get damp, the smell comes back for months.\\n\\n And then I gave what was called—I called it a dog–and-pony show. Everybody wants to always hear from the astronauts, and so for the local community I talked for a couple hours on Skylab and showed some slides and stuff, and I had referred to it at home as dog-and-pony show, and somehow my daughter picked that up as its official title, and she wanted to go see the ponies. No, it doesn’t work like that.\\n\\n But that was kind of in the interim right after Skylab, and then I thought I was going to do just like everybody else, which was sit around the office without much to do, get back more deeply into my research. At that time I was still officially an assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT, on leave. It wasn’t till a couple of years after that I got a phone call from the head of the department wondering if I was ever going to come back, and I said, “Gee, I don’t know.” And he told me something I hadn’t realized, and that was, did I realize that I used up a slot; that the department only has so many slots, and by being on leave, I’m filling one of them. And that afternoon, I resigned. I said, “Hey, that’s not fair. You need more people,” and so I resigned. I hadn’t realized I had done that to them.\\n\\n So I anticipated getting more deeply back into the research, because I’d gotten out of it pretty much, when Jack [Harrison H.] Schmitt called, Jack, who had been one of the last on the Moon, and then had gone to NASA Headquarters [Washington, DC] to be Assistant Administrator for Energy Programs. This was in the time frame of that first big Arab thing with the oil, and everything’s expensive, and we’ve got to do this, that, and the other. In my group, Joe [Joseph P.] Allen had gone to Headquarters as Assistant Administrator for Legislative Affairs, a job he was really good at. Joe was really good with people and could work politics in a way that I couldn’t. I don’t even think it right. I’m just an engineer, basically.\\n\\n Jack called me and said that there was a bunch of people that were talking about satellite power, getting a satellite up, big satellite with solar cells, turning it into electricity, turning that into microwave energy, beaming it down to the Earth, receiving it, detecting it, and then turning it into AC power and putting it out on the grid, and he was putting a team together to look at it. Would I lead the team for him? I said, “I don’t know. Let me come talk to you.” Another excuse to fly to Washington. It was the flight, not Washington.\\n\\n So I flew up, and I talked to him about it, and I agreed to do that, and I put a team together that had—golly, I’ve forgotten names now. Somebody from Lewis [Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio], who were into the solar cell stuff and some of the microwave; a guy from Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama]; Hugh [Hubert P.] Davis from JSC. What was his name? Somebody from [NASA] Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California]. Gosh, I’m terrible with names. He was crippled. Because they worked on some of the power sides of it, also. I don’t think I had anybody from the Cape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Anybody from Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I don’t think so. Basically, the whole concept was there’s a satellite with solar cells. Okay, so I need somebody in the solar cell side. Then there’s the detection of that and turning it into microwave energy and beaming it down and then receiving that, so I need somebody on the microwave end of it. Then there’s the receiving and turning it into regular power; well, any engineer can deal with that. Then there’s, hey, look at all this megatons of stuff that has to go up; that’s Houston and Marshall.\\n\\n We met for two years, and we looked at that, and it was really interesting. I started it fairly naïve, with no idea how to proceed, and kind of figured it out as we went along. We involved Boeing [Airplane Company], who were doing some systems studies on their own; Raytheon [Company], who were doing systems studies; Spectrolab [Inc.], who made solar cells, were part of the Raytheon team doing studies. What was his name at Rockwell [International Corporation]; was a forward thinker. He’d done some pontificating on it, and we talked with him.\\n\\n Then we met and we just hammered some stuff out and looked at it from a perspective that said if the end result is we want to put power on the grid for people to use in their home, then the key measure is cents per kilowatt-hour, and it’s real easy today to find out what’s competitive. We can look at various projections as to where it may be going, and do high, medium, low, and all that.\\n\\n Then the question is, how much would this cost? Well, what would it look like? How would you get it there? And so we put all that together. We identified what we knew. We identified what we didn’t know. We did a real rough sketch of programs that would let us learn what we didn’t know but needed to know, and then we took some optimistic guesses at what things might cost and projected that it would cost—I’ve forgotten the numbers—so many cents per kilowatt-hour, which wasn’t immediately competitive, but it wasn’t out of the question. But we had obviously made some very optimistic assumptions along the way, and we had said that.\\n\\n We wrote three reports, submitted them. I was called up to testify to the House and the Senate, which was a brand-new thing for me. It was a big deal for NASA, because they wanted the program to go forward, because they didn’t have anything. They had Shuttle coming and nothing else, and so they wanted it to go forward, so it mattered to them. Jim [James C.] Fletcher was the Administrator, and George [M.] Low was the Deputy, and when Jack said I was going to brief the Senate, because they wanted to be briefed, immediately Fletcher and Low got in the loop, because they wanted to—so I had to dry-run this thing, and I hate dry runs.\\n\\n I’m reminded of a friend of mine, the same Jerry Grossman who was my college classmate, who was at Harvard, who advised me medically. He was drafted by the Air Force on the Berry Plan, so that he ducked it initially, but eventually he had to go in. This was around the Vietnam [War] time frame. Jerry was both an engineer and a medic, and he was real big in computer-aided diagnosis, so he did a whole bunch of computer stuff for the Air Force, and in some cases it was leading-edge. At one point he had to brief the Secretary of Defense, and Jerry was one of the least military people you can imagine, and it terrified everybody in his chain of command. “My god, we can’t have him talk to them.”\\n\\n “He has to. He’s the only one that understands what he’s doing.”\\n\\n Everybody from him up had to have a dry run, and he was telling me afterwards—I had dinner with him once when I was in flying school—he was saying that the first thing he would do is, he said, “I don’t really understand why I’m doing this dry run for you, because you have no assurance whatsoever that what I’m about to tell you bears any resemblance to what I’m going to tell the Secretary.” Well, that didn’t make them real confident.\\n\\n Then he gets up to Washington to brief the Secretary and finds out he needs a certain uniform, dress blues. He doesn’t own a set of dress blues, and so somebody arranges for him to borrow. It’s a little bit big, but he’s doing it, and they’re waiting around in the outer room for the Secretary, having coffee. Jerry excuses himself to go to the bathroom. He goes to the bathroom; he stands to the urinal, and he’s going to the bathroom, and he realizes he doesn’t hear anything. He looks down, and he has peed all over the front of his coat. At that instant somebody comes into the restroom and says, “Come on, the Secretary’s ready.” So he goes to brief him. [Laughs] So I’ve always thought about that when I did all those dry runs, but I never had the guts to do it.\\n\\n It was really interesting, because at one point they were really adamant as to, “You’re going to brief the Administrator, you’ve got to follow our rules. We need all of your stuff the night before so we can make the right viewgraphs. You can’t do it on other stuff.” So I sent them up, and I got them back the very next morning; a couple of them are wrong, and so I didn’t say anything, I just substituted my own home-done one that didn’t have the right overhead or anything, but it was right, and I briefed them.\\n\\n The interesting thing was, that I learned then, it’s very difficult to brief both Jim Fletcher and George Low, if you do it the way I did it, because I sent my charts up the night before. I start talking. Jim’s the lead guy; he’s looking at it right now for the first time, and he’s hearing me talk. George has read everything the night before, and he’s got six detailed questions he wants to ask. Trying to deal with both of them was really interesting. But I really respected George. He’s one of my heroes.\\n\\n We got all done, and George had some questions, and he pointed out some things that weren’t quite the way it ought to be, and maybe if we did this or that. He was also paying attention to keeping it right, doing it with integrity, but seeing it this way instead of that way. Why don’t I go home and think about that, and let’s talk about it again in the morning.\\n\\n So I came back the next morning, and Fletcher wasn’t there. Low was, and I went through the stuff very quickly with him, and one of the proudest moments was when I was all done—he hadn’t said much when we went through. When I was all done, he just looked at me and he says, “Outstanding.” And that was all he said.\\n\\n Then I was off to brief the Senate, which was interesting, and the House. That was the first time I had ever done that. And that was the upshot of that, and to this day, I think what we said—and I probably somewhere in some crate somewhere I have a copy of those reports—was still true. Most of it is still unknown, and it’s probably not very practical, certainly not with today’s cost of launch, and we had to assume that we could get the price down, way, way down. I always thought about it, as an ex-radio astronomer, that you look up at the night sky, and it’s wonderful here. You know, if you had a whole bunch of these things around the equator, you’ll look up at the night sky and you’re going to see these, and they’re going to block stuff, and I’m not sure we really want to do things like that.\\n\\n But anyway, that was an excellent mix of engineering and management for me, in an unofficial way, where I was in charge and had to figure it out as I went, without the slightest idea of how to get there from here when I started, and it went out pretty well and got well received." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like it. Before we move into the areas of how you impacted the Shuttle and that era, let’s take a break and change out some tapes and just stop for a few minutes.\\n\\n [Tape change]\n\nI’d like to start this tape by asking you how your tasks and your assignments were transitioning into the new era of the space agency, which was the Shuttle era. How were you involved, and what were you learning about how you were going to be involved with the Shuttle Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Let me back up a minute in order to tie this together. One of the things that I’ve been trying to do as I go through here is mention people by name. Unfortunately, sometimes I forget the names of those that I wasn’t real close with, but I try to do that because I think, outside of the astronaut corps and some well-known people, Flight Directors, John [W.] Aaron, etc., the people that are the real heart and soul of the program don’t ever get any credit for it and hardly anybody knows them by name, and all of them have names and they’re real people, and so whenever I cross paths with them, I try to mention them by name.\\n\\n Way back in 1969 when I got back from flying school, shortly after that in the Astronaut Office on the third floor, back by the coffee, a guy came in and says, “Hi, I’m Dick [Richard H.] Truly,” and he stuck his hand out, and sure enough, he had on the yellow badge, and it said “Truly,” and I probably said some joke like, “Truly?” We shook hands, and that’s when I found out about the MOL, the Manned Orbiting Lab, astronauts coming from the military, and met Dick and all of his cohorts, which included Al [Albert H.] Crews who was too old to have been an astronaut, but he was out at Aircraft Ops [Operations]. Subsequently, Dick Truly and Bob [Robert L. “Crip”] Crippen became my very best friends to this very day. I wanted to go back and mention that that’s when I first crossed paths with them. I did a lot of work with Dick Truly around the Orbital Workshop. He and I were both the engineering guys on that.\\n\\n I worked with Bob [Robert F.] Overmyer on the airlock module with me as well, and then subsequently Bob and I flew together. But in this time frame, coming now into the real Shuttle Program out of the Satellite Power Team—and this was in 1986; I did the Power Team from ’84 to ’86—we’re beginning to get a little bit more serious about the Shuttle, and the astronauts are having a bigger role. I was assigned.\\n\\n If I’m not mistaken, at this point George [W. S.] Abbey was the Director of Flight Crew Operations. We went through a variety of things here after Deke retired. We had Kenny [Kenneth S.] Kleinknecht for a while, and then somebody—I’ve forgotten whom. Somewhere along the line, George came up, and they invented this god-awful thing of George and Gene being parallel and Cliff [Clifford E.] Charlesworth being over them, and George and Gene never did get along.\\n\\n But anyway, so I was assigned; I think I was assigned. I was the type that if I wasn’t assigned, then I assigned myself something. I don’t want to sit around here and wait for somebody to call and not be doing anything. Where can I add value? And I know of at least one of those where I wasn’t doing anything, and I asked Crip, I said, “Hey, where can I add value?”\\n\\n He says, “Hey, I’ve been working on these CRT [Cathode-Ray Tube] displays. Why don’t you give me a hand here.”\\n\\n But one of the things I got into then was the Spacelab, and I don’t know whether that was ever an official assignment, but I took it on, and my mentality said it makes a lot of sense for me to do a little bit of stuff around Spacelab, because I have just come off from Skylab, and I have a lot of experience, short of being on the crew myself, but none of them are available right now, and so it makes a lot of sense. So Joe Kerwin and Paul Weitz were also follow-on. It turns out that Ed Gibson, who had flown eighty-four days on the last Skylab mission, had retired, and he was under contract to ERNO [Entwicklungts Ring Nord Organization, Space Division of Eum, VFW-Fokker-Mannheim] in Bremen, Germany, for working on the Spacelab Program.\\n\\n So I worked with that and tried to envision operations there and how some of the discrepancies between the way they were doing it their way and we were doing it our way in the Shuttle, which ones could we live with and which ones couldn’t we live with. I remember getting embattled in something around a computer, and I can’t even tell you I remember what the issue was, but I was dead set that we were right and they were wrong, and of course, they didn’t want to listen, so they wanted to do it their way.\\n\\n We went over to a preliminary design review that was real interesting. It was, I think, two or three weeks. We started in Nordvik, Holland. We rented a car and got around there, and then we drove from there to Bremen, and then we drove back, and then we went back to Bremen and back to Nordvik and home from there. But in one of the Bremen things, the German computer software designers were fighting us because they didn’t want to do it our way, and at one point they got to, sitting there at the table, just talking back and forth very quickly in German. [Imitates] Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, as though we weren’t even there, and when they finished, I said, “Excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom.”\\n\\n And so one of the guys on our team, Gunter Sabionski, came too, and I said, “Gunter, what did they say?” He’s excellent in German, so he told me everything that they had said, and I said, “Okay, we can’t live with that,” and so we went back. We wound up prevailing, and to this day I think it was the right thing to do.\\n\\n So I saw that through the preliminary design review, and then did a first rough-up of how would you activate it in an engineering sense, you know, how you use it depends on what it is, and—let me get the order right. Then I think is when I helped Crip around some displays, and I’ve sort of picked up the SM, the system management, set of software, to dig into that. Found a couple things I didn’t think were right; wrote some change requests; defended them to Glynn [S.] Lunney and convinced Glynn we needed to do those, and then those got in.\\n\\n Then I think it was in 1978—might have been ’7[7], but ’78, when George asked me to follow the remote manipulator arm in Canada. Don Lind had been following it, and Don is a—basically, he’s a scientist; he’s a physicist. He’s not an engineer; he’s not a practical operations person, which is what I’m all about. So when I started that, that was quickly my conclusion, was that, “Nice idea here, but this isn’t the way to implement it.”\\n\\n I think the Canadians, by and large, liked me. There was a couple of areas where we crossed paths, and one where I just couldn’t get them to agree with me, and I wound up ramming it down their throat, and it was the way they implemented their eight-ball, which was different than the way the Shuttle did its. I told them the way they did it is absolutely right for a crane-type operation. My problem was that if we had eight-balls that were different; it was yaw, pitch, roll versus pitch, yaw, roll, if you know what that means. That was a training problem, and it was also a potential safety problem where in the heat of the moment, a crewman might think wrong; think the other one and do something wrong. They’ve just both got to be right, and there’s no way in hell we’re going to change the Shuttle. Therefore you’ve got to be pitch, yaw, roll. They didn’t agree. We wound up going all the way up to whoever it was, Lunney or Charlesworth or somebody, and they went our way. So it got rammed down their throat. They did it. They resented it for a while, but I think, by and large, they appreciated the new approach, where we were looking at, from an operations perspective, and I helped them with some of their engineering things.\\n\\n “How do we certify this thing? Let’s don’t just certify it as a piece of hardware, but let’s certify it as a complete system that’s got the human operator inside, so we’ve built the procedures and everything.”\\n\\n The first trip I made up there, I went with Lou [Louis V.] Ramon, who was in the Flight Crew Support Division, dark, bearded person, Middle East descent, which I have to pay attention to in order to even think it, because I don’t notice things like that. One of the stories I tell was, I’m very active in MIT alumni activities, and when I was President of the South Texas Alumni Association for MIT, we had a meeting and one of the new graduates was there, a fellow named Sam Denard, and we talked and got into a whole bunch of stuff, and later I was talking to somebody about Sam, and he was saying, “Yeah,” and he said something about him being black. And I said, “Black? We’re not thinking of the same guy. Sam’s not black.” Well, turns out Sam’s black as the ace of spaces, and I hadn’t noticed. So normally I don’t notice things like that.\\n\\n But anyway, so Lou was with me. We had to make a connection in Chicago [Illinois] to Toronto [Canada], and this was way, way back when. Well, Lou, even at that, set off all kinds of alarms in their mind, and we’d almost be strip-searched; and he always would. After the first time I went through with him, I said, “Hey, we’re going through one at a time. I’m going to pretend like I don’t even know you.” And I decided, “This is dumb. We’ll lose a lot of time connecting in Chicago; can’t get there from here. We’re going to take T-38s.” And so I came back to Aircraft Ops and says, “How do I work this? Don’t have a clue.” So I got them to help me some.\\n\\n I worked it with the U.S. State Department and the Canadian equivalent of the State Department, and finally got an agreement through where we could, on official government business, fly T-38s into Toronto, Montreal [Canada], or Ottawa [Canada], all three places where they had some space things. What I tried to sell was, “Hey, we’re government employees on official government business. We’re flying airplanes that don’t have long ranges. Especially in the wintertime, I want the guys returning—especially since it’s going to be me a lot of the times—to be able to focus on where’s the weather the best, not where is Customs. So what if we just waive Customs, and we’ll promise you that we’ll shoot anybody that breaks the law?” Canada went along; the U.S. couldn’t.\\n\\n So still, the very first hop down, you have to clear Customs, and people have pointed out that—you know, when you fly in and out of Toronto, you clear U.S. Customs there. My answer is, “Yes, you do, but the airplane you fly in clears when it lands.” And so I was told yes, I could clear, but I’d still have to do Customs for the airplane when it first landed. But we got the deal going. We go in and out of Canada like we didn’t exist; they don’t care. But we still have to do Customs, and so we made a note of where the bases were, where you could get Customs, and which ones were fast, and which ones weren’t.\\n\\n Sometimes we’d bring back beer, and I was always honest. You can bring back the equivalent of a six-pack, or wine or booze or whatever, and I always told them what I had. A couple of times there would be two or three six-packs of beer in the pod; gets it nice and cold. And I’d tell them which was over and supposed to—nobody ever made me pay duties. They said, “Yeah, that’s fine. Go ahead.”\\n\\n But anyway, that was one of my big contributions, was getting the ability to use the airplanes so that I didn’t have to go the commercial route.\\n\\n One of the times when I did do a commercial flight, though, I was making a connection in Atlanta [Georgia] on the way home, and I sat, I think it was, with Lou Ramon, I’m not sure. In Atlanta we had several hours to kill in the bar, and on the little cocktail napkins in a ballpoint pen roughed out the first set of flight procedures for the RMS [Remote Manipulator System]. Drew the little pictures of how the talkbacks would change and everything. When I got back from that trip, I handed them to the procedures guy for the RMS and says, “Here’s the first cut. Why don’t you pull these up and let’s see what it looks like.” Somehow those have gotten lost to posterity. I wish those napkins still existed.\\n\\n But we did tests up there. We learned some things; learned how it works, how it doesn’t work. We certified it for its use in their simulation environment and looked at the flight hardware, and in the process, in 1978 we had the Thirty-Five New Guys come on board. John [M.] Fabian, Sally [K.] Ride, and Norm [Norman E.] Thagard were assigned to me, and so I got them involved in some of the RMS activities in Toronto. They were really good guys, and it’s interesting that when their group first flew the STS-7 with Crip, those were the three on their group that flew on that flight, and so I always felt pretty good about, “Well, it can’t be too bad to have worked for me.”\\n\\n But the RMS came along. It was a really good machine, and it has behaved well, and to the best of my knowledge, is still doing quite well and still pretty much under the same procedures as we had back then. I’ve occasionally gotten a question from a current astronaut; “Lenoir, somebody told me to call you. Maybe you know why it’s this way.” At one point I was asked, “You know, there’s a limit to the minimum clearance you need on either side. Why is that?”\\n\\n I said, “Well, that’s because that’s what it was certified for.”\\n\\n And, you know, “Well, why that?���\\n\\n “Because when we were doing it, I thought that was a good number and it would pass, and so we picked it. We made a mental note that it’s probably better, and it probably is, but you’d still have to certify it to that.” There’s a lot of corporate knowledge that’s gotten lost along the way.\\n\\n That segued into the In-flight Tile Repair Program. Prior to the STS-1, there was the issue of the tile and whether it would stay on and what do you do if it doesn’t. I’m going to run up against one little issue here that’s probably no big deal now, but I treat these whole things seriously. There’s some classified information in here that I’ll skirt around and you can decide whatever you want about it.\\n\\n So the question was what do we do about it; what can we do about it. There were three concepts. One involved the Manned Maneuvering Unit being built by Martin Marietta; another involved the RMS; and then a third involved a combination of ground sitings and MTV, Maneuverable TV, a Max [Maxime A.] Faget kind of a thing.\\n\\n Basically, all those were melded into one from a crew perspective, and I was in charge because of the RMS activity. So I transitioned from being purely an RMS guy to now spending a lot of time in Denver on their simulator, doing it with the Manned Maneuvering Unit. We pulled that whole thing together. I kept Crip and John [W.] Young involved. We had procedures. We did things on the zero-G airplane that tested the material, tested your ability to attach, and all of that.\\n\\n Basically had a program, and that’s one of the examples I use of how a program ought never be run. There was a long period of time where the official contract documentation and reality at Martin were 180 degrees out of phase, where the program is contractually cancelled, and we are full steam ahead working on it. The contract is fully up to date, and we’re full speed ahead, and we have stopped, and it’s always because the contract lagged reality. I’ve forgotten what it was; it’s like thirty-something people were employed full-time by Martin just to keep the paper chasing around; not adding any value to the program. That wound up going away when at some level it was decided we’d accept the risk, and that worked out fine.\\n\\n At some point around there, the assignment of the first six flight crews to Shuttle was made by George, then that’s because the first six were considered the Orbital Flight Test. The ALT, the Approach and Landing Tests, had happened somewhere in that same time frame, and I was only peripherally involved with that because Dick Truly was, and he was a good friend of mine. I used that to scrounge some flying time and some touching near it and things like that.\\n\\n At that time, and I assume they still do, for flights or anything where there’s risk, a crewman is assigned as—handholding might not be the right term, but is assigned the spouse of one of the flight astronauts to take care of and, in good times, to make sure that he or she understands what’s going on and how it’s going, and in bad times, is there to help get through the issues. Dick’s wife, Cody, was not the easiest person for some people to get along with, but we were good friends, and so whenever Dick flew, I was the person that would work with Cody. And we’d joke about it and have a good time.\\n\\n So I managed to go out and see some of the ALT things while I was doing these other things. But once the crews were announced, the first six, as I said, were considered Orbital Flight Test, with the premise being that it’s operational after that. Then, obviously, things change as you go. The first four were two men in Columbia with ejection seats up front. The fifth flight was also on Columbia, but it was the first four-man crew. The ejection seats were still in, but they were disabled. Then the sixth flight was the first flight of Challenger; four men with no ejection seats.\\n\\n The assignment to the fifth crew was Vance Brand, Hank [Henry W.] Hartsfield , Joe Allen, and myself, so Joe and I were the first two from our group to be assigned flight assignments. Subsequently when Fred [W.] Haise retired, before STS-3 where he was to command, Jack Lousma moved up to command, and Gordon [C. Gordon] Fullerton moved from four to three, and Hank Hartsfield moved from five to four, and Bob Overmyer moved from six to five. So our crew, in fact, was Vance, Bob Overmyer, Joe Allen, and myself, and Joe and I were the first mission specialists.\\n\\n I got into a debate with Vance around the ejection seats. They were going to be disabled; were, in fact, disabled, I think, and were not going to be used, and Vance was comfortable with that. My take was, why the hell should you lose four people if you could only lose two? If I’m one of the two that you’re going to lose, I’m going anyway. Why shouldn’t two of you get out? But Vance was never comfortable with that, so we flew with hot seats, but there were no procedures or plans to use them.\\n\\n Then we trained as a crew, and subsequently, parts of our mission were called the first operational flight, because we, in fact, did operational things. We launched two satellites that were paying money for it. Back in those days, the Shuttle was going to be the be-all and end-all launch vehicle for everybody’s everything, and a lot of the reason it’s the way it is today was for some of the military launch requirements. So our two big things were to launch two satellites and to perform the first spacewalk, and then we had a bunch of other “dogs and cats,” as I call them, and some student experiments; a whole bunch of engineering tests to run, data to take, and so on.\\n\\n The training was fairly straightforward, and we were clicking down the flights. Crip and John did their thing, with the big unknown there of nothing’s ever been done before. Will the tiles stay on? Rockwell had a hell of a time getting them to stay on on the ground. Will they stay on with the rigors of space? And the answer is, fine; that worked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where were you on that first Shuttle flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was just an observer, kind of just like I was on Apollo 11. I was in the viewing room in the control center. Had gotten into some loops based on some classified data that gave us a little bit of insight into what was going on, and I was in that loop only because of the In-flight Tile Repair Program, so that I was supposedly smart about some of that stuff. But there were no issues.\\n\\n Then Joe [H. Engle] and Dick did their thing, and Jack Lousma and Gordo; of course, they landed at Northrup [Strip], at White Sands [Missile Range, New Mexico]. Nobody’s done that since. I guess Columbia, when she went recently, still had some of that [gypsum], I’m sure. They never could get that out.\\n\\n The memorable thing about Ken [Thomas K.] Mattingly [II] and Hank Hartsfield was that they landed on the runway, on the hardtop, at Edwards [Air Force Base, California], and the President [Ronald W. Reagan] met them, and one of Ken’s comments was that he didn’t like that kind of a thing, because you’ve been in space, you’re a little bit disoriented. You’re going to walk down the stairs, and the first thing you’re going to do is shake the hands of the President of the United States, and he was worried that he was going to walk down and just fall flat on his face. Hank’s comment to him was, “Well, then there’s only one thing you can do.”\\n\\n “Well, what’s that, Hank?”\\n\\n And so he says, “Nice shoes, Mr. President.” [Laughs] So we used to joke about that.\\n\\n Then our turn came, and unlike the others, we launched to the second of our intended time that was picked, I think, like a year ahead. We didn’t have any delays; we just, you know, click, click, click, click, click. Boom, off we went.\\n\\n Help me get started on that, unless—is there anything up before that that I should have talked about but missed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We can talk about it while we talk about your flight, because I want to talk about the EVA training that you went through and some of the simulations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I should go back, because in that same time frame with the RMS, I also became the lead astronaut for EVA, that Rusty [Russell L.] Schweickart had been, and then he retired after Skylab. He was the backup to Pete Conrad. He retired somewhere in that time frame, and then I picked up the lead EVA for the Astronaut Office; I don’t know why. I had trained for it in Skylab, for one thing, so I had the training and everything.\\n\\n One of the stories I like to tell was we had the big water tank back in Building 220 in the back of JSC, and you had to be qualified there, and I remember for a requal [requalification] at some point after a long down period, I was scheduled for the requal there. I’ve mentioned I was brought up in Miami and I’m very comfortable in water. So I went there, and I was told that—I think it was fifteen feet deep, maybe twenty; I don’t remember—okay, everything’s down on the bottom, that you dive in and you go down there and you don your scuba gear down there. Then you do all your exercises and stuff, and then when you’re all done, you doff it down there and then you come back up and you come on out.\\n\\n But before I start, when I jump in, I’m supposed to tread water with my hands out of the water for a half hour. All right, I’m easy to get along with, so I do that, and then we start the whole thing. I go down; I get it. I get the stuff on. I do my stuff. I interact with them, and we’re all done, and we’re debriefing, and I asked them, “What was that all about?”\\n\\n He said, “Oh, that’s just to get your heart rate up, because we don’t want you to come in there real cold. We need to get your heart rate up.”\\n\\n I said, “Oh, I probably should have told you that I came here from having just run ten miles.” [Laughs]\\n\\n And he said, “Yeah, you probably should have.”\\n\\n So I was the lead EVA person, which meant that primarily I worked up the procedures for the emergency cargo bay door closure. That was the only emergency EVA we had was if they didn’t close—they’ve got to close for you to come home—then you go out, and basically you winch them closed and you tie them down. I worked up those procedures and spent a lot of time in a water tank doing that, and so to that extent it was natural for me to do the first EVA, but the real reason was that we wanted to do an EVA as soon as we could so we got all the things done before we needed to do an EVA, and we could do some engineering tests on it. But we weren’t comfortable doing it before we had a crew of four, and so logically, the first crew of four, whoever they are, are going to do the EVA, and that happened to be Joe and me.\\n\\n Of course, as it turned out, we didn’t do an EVA. We had two unrelated suit problems that made his suit inoperable and mine questionable. His had a problem in the pump, and there’s a single pump that moves both the oxygen and the water, and the Hall effect switch in his pump circuitry had gotten wet and it wasn’t working, so he was clearly no-go. I think, as I recall, the space suits are supposed to hold 4.3 pounds per-square-inch pressure, pure oxygen. Mine was holding 4.1, and it was rock solid, and it was solid there, which is safe. The ground did what was the right thing to do, which was to say, “We don’t understand this. We don’t have to do this EVA, so let’s don’t.”\\n\\n Of course, we tried to talk them into it. It was made more difficult by Joe being inop[erable], because now I’m trying to talk them into not only are we going to go EVA with a suit that you don’t really understand, but there’s only one person going to be out there, so you don’t have a buddy system, so clearly that didn’t work.\\n\\n What we did was we put me in the airlock and closed the door and we did a partial decompression, trying to see what was going on with my suit, so I got in near vacuum, although I was never outside, and the suit held lock-tight. Subsequently, post-flight we found out that there was a spacing washer, spacer, in the pressure regulator that had been omitted, and so instead of holding to 4.[3], it was holding to 4.1. It would have been perfectly safe there. Knowing what the problem was, there was no issue; but not knowing, there was, and so that’s just the way it worked out.\\n\\n As an engineer, I can say after the flight that it’s a hard thing to admit, but we learned far more from Joe and me not doing that EVA than we would have if everything had gone well. The problem with his Hall effect switch and the circuitry we found early. We could have found it on a mission that we needed an EVA. The quality-control problem around mine, we could have found when we needed to do an EVA, and we probably would have done it, but a lot of people would have lost a lot of sleep about that. So we learned a lot more, but that wasn’t the most comforting way to do it.\\n\\n Our main thing was launching the two satellites. That was one of my main jobs. The other job was to invent the mission specialist role for the ascent and entry portion of the flight, that clearly two people can get a Shuttle into orbit and back, because they had proven it, and they had done it four times. On the other hand, if you’ve got another set of eyes and ears and a brain, you’d be stupid not to use it. The seating is such that there’s the two forward seats with the commander and the pilot, and then the two seats behind them are skewed a little bit so that the left of the after ones is actually between the commander and the pilot. On the STS-5 configuration, that was the only other seat. There were only three seats on the flight deck, because there wasn’t room for the fourth with the ejection seats in there, because they’re huge. Subsequent missions, you do have four seats up there.\\n\\n So Joe and I agreed that I would do that seat on going uphill, and he would do it coming downhill, and so that that way we both got it, and we didn’t have to have somebody else tell us how to do it or who was going to do it. I took the lead in inventing the role from the ascent perspective, and a lot of that carried into the descent perspective. Joe was a very excellent scientist and also a very good person for dealing politically with people. Less so was he an engineer, whereas I was, I thought, a very good engineer. Not the world’s greatest scientist, although I’ve got my union card from MIT, and, God knows, I’m the last person you’d send in to deal with something politically. I used to take advantage of that when I was at Headquarters. In our meetings I’d say something outrageous just to make sure the lawyers would be uncomfortable ever having me go testify or go to court, and I’d do it intentionally.\\n\\n So I did the ascent and basically invented that role, along with Vance and Bob. They’re going to do their thing; how can I help? Well, the obvious thing is I’ve got a checklist, and I read and tell them what to do and look over their shoulder and make sure that it did happen and help them interpret the feedback from that, and in the event of off-nominal caution, warning, or whatever, immediately get out the book and work us through the malfunction procedures and help us get through other things, so that I would try to back them up, which meant that I needed to learn their systems so I knew how they worked.\\n\\n As an engineer, I always liked to do that. It’s like I tell my wife; we go out to buy a toaster, and most people are looking at it for how it works. Well, if you leave me alone for five minutes, I’ve got it apart, because I’m going to figure out how it breaks and then how do you deal with it.\\n\\n [Officially I was MS (Mission Specialist)-2, and Joe was MS-1; however, we reversed roles for entry with Joe performing the MS-2 Orbiter duties. MS-2 was MS with Orbiter duties (flight engineer) during ascent and entry. We jokingly called me the MS-2/1 and Joe the MS-1/2.] So we invented and then performed that Flight Engineer role, if you like. We launched two satellites and didn’t do an EVA.\\n\\n The satellite launches went off wonderfully. That was another case of never been done before, hasn’t been invented, and so preflight, we had to look at the schematics, work up the procedures, work with the customer for how it goes. I can remember my clients at Satellite Business Systems. Subsequently that was a part of MCI [Inc.], but he [Mike Lyons] was the Vice President of Engineering. It’s interesting, when I got to Headquarters, I hired him. So he was the guy I dealt with, and the thing was that in those days—again pre-TDRS—I think we only had communication with the ground something like 15, 20 percent of the time. We never had communication with the ground crossing the equator. These things were going to get launched crossing the equator. By definition, we are not in communication with the ground, so when I coined the term Orbital Launch Director, that person really was the Launch Director, the final say for whether you launched it out of the Shuttle or not.\\n\\n We would go through simulations, and I knew, I think, more about the system than the trainers did, and so I spent as much time training them as they spent training me, and I helped Sim Sup [Simulation Supervisor], oh God I went blank for a minute. Chuck [Charles W. Shaw]— Air Force major who was one of the Sim Sups putting in the malfunctions, and I would tell him the things that I thought we needed to look at, and sure enough, we’d see them, and not too surprisingly, I’d be ready.\\n\\n But one of the things was in the mission rules was the temperature of the solid rocket. This thing that’s back there spins. It’s spin stabilized; it has a solid rocket, and you point it right with the Shuttle, and then its spin table spins it up, pushes it off on a spring, and half an orbit later, it lights off. Its ignition sequence got initiated when it left, and you can’t turn it off, so you want to be gone. But it’s got to be pointed right, and one of the mission rules was the temperature of the rocket engine needed to be, I don’t know, 55 degrees, plus or minus 5, or it’s no-go.\\n\\n “Mike, how did you get that number?”\\n\\n “Well, that’s what analysis says it’s supposed to be.”\\n\\n Says, “Well, you realize if it’s 56 degrees, when launch time comes, I’m not going to launch it,” and we won’t get a shot again until day three, cause you’re on day one. TELESAT is on day two. Your second chance, and their second chance, also, comes up on day three. Who knows if we’ll still be in orbit?\\n\\n “Let me think about that. Okay, Bill, yeah, we’ve got new numbers. It’s 65.”\\n\\n “Roger, Mike.” If it’s 66 degrees—we did this, I think, three or four iterations.\\n\\n Finally in the last iteration, he said, “Bill, launch. It doesn’t matter. If it’s off-scale high, launch.” So I had to pick on those things that they had decided, based on nominal analysis, what it should be, and they then translated that to those are our limits.\\n\\n I say, “No, what are your real limits? Beyond this, it won’t work right. That’s what it’s supposed to be.” So some of our training was training them how to deal with their own equipment.\\n\\n We got up there, and everything was perfect, and it went off just fine. Then Joe was the Launch Director on the next day’s one, and so I supported him from the background. Then the EVA was going to be on day three, if we didn’t need to do a backup one of those. On our mission, I think as early as day two, Bob Overmyer wasn’t feeling good, and he admitted it, and, you know, he filled a couple of bags. I never stopped giving Bob credit. We had a bunch of engineering tests to do. Sitting up in the pilot’s seat, taking data, doing this, that, and the other, he never missed a step. He didn’t feel worth a damn. He’d puke his guts out, and he’d get back to work. And he felt crappy for two days.\\n\\n About a half a day or a day after he started, I felt bad, and talking later to Bill Thornton, Bill was saying that he thought what happened was I had myself so psyched up for the two launches that I didn’t let myself get sick, and that as soon as the second one was gone, I relaxed, and my body said, “Wait a minute. We don’t like this,” and so I got sick is the only way to call it. The real way I describe it is for about a day and a half, I felt like I had a low-grade hangover. Just like Bob, I could do anything, but I really didn’t want to do anything other than “curl up on the couch” and sleep it off, and basically that’s what happened. We postponed the EVA for a day. I just kind of sacked out in the middeck, and then we gave it a try on the fourth day for the EVA, and that didn’t work.\\n\\n Both Vance and Joe had slow days, but they didn’t have days like Bob and I did. Vance had an early slow day or two, where you could just tell, this isn’t the same Vance. And Joe kind of ran himself out of gas the last day, because he wasn’t sleeping real well, and some combination of that and he was making adaptation, and he needed to get some sleep, because I remember at one point he says, “Hey, Bill, take over.” He was doing a student experiment. “Here, finish this for me.” He says, “I’ve just got to get some sleep.”\\n\\n “Okay.” And so it was an interesting thing—I’d never seen it before; and maybe I could figure it out. So it worked out fine. But that was interesting, and it was consistent with data all the way back through Apollo that said about half of the crew will exhibit some kind of a transition. You can call it being space sick, space adaptation syndrome, you know, all kinds of names that it’s had, and basically, it’s just your system’s got to get used to it. Your brain’s getting data from your eyes as to where things are; it also gets data from your ears, as to which way’s up and what’s going on; and for a while, in space, those aren’t telling it the same thing.\\n\\n Even today I have days where I realize this is a day where my brain won’t listen to my ears, and at least I’ve figured that out, and I don’t close my eyes a lot in the shower when I’m standing on one foot. So you go through that. No big deal once we learned it, and that’s what had hit Bill Pogue on Skylab [4], but we hadn’t learned as much. I think that that’s consistent with what the Russians have learned. I’m not inside of what’s going on now, but I can’t for a minute believe that’s not the same thing that’s still happening, because humans are humans.\\n\\n Anyway, that was pretty much our mission. It was pretty much as planned. We launched, like I said, to the second on November 11th. We landed five days and a couple hours later on the sixteenth, and came home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any thoughts you’d like to share on the launch and the landing? I mean, you waited fifteen, sixteen years to fly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I tend to be fairly relaxed. I sleep easily; I can sleep anywhere, anytime. In the Skylab training, when Vance and Don and I were doing a command module test at the Cape for—I’ve forgotten whether it was for Bean’s crew or for Gerry’s crew. It was a suited test in the command module in a vacuum chamber. The vacuum chamber is pumped down, so the command module is in a vacuum, and the engineers outside are taking a million measurements. And then we’re supposed to evacuate the inside of the cabin, and they’re making a million measurements. We don’t do a damn thing. Well, when you don’t do a damn thing, I go to sleep. The flight surgeon called and made Vance wake me up. I used to run a lot before I got a bad hip, and my heart rate was getting into the thirties, which they don’t like, and the flight surgeon tried to cancel the test. They talked him out of it, but only if Vance would keep me awake, because then he’d make me move and do things, and my heart rate would stay in the low forties. So I tend to be fairly relaxed.\\n\\n When we got strapped in on the pad, we were not in space suits. We were not in what they do today; we were just in our blues. We strapped in, and “Ox” [James D. A.] van Hoften strapped me in. A story on Ox was, much later, when I was at Booz Allen [& Hamilton, Inc.] and consulting, Ox worked for Bechtel [Corporation]. As a matter of fact, he was the senior VP [Vice President] that was in charge of putting in that new Hong Kong [International] Airport [Hong Kong, China], and one of my senior partners [Bruce Pasternack] was in charge of consulting for Bechtel, from Booz Allen, and he met Ox one day at a big senior management meeting, and Bruce went up to him and says, “Hey, maybe you know a partner of mine, Bill Lenoir.”\\n\\n And Ox looked at him and says, “Know him?” He says, “I strapped him into the Shuttle.”\\n\\n But Ox strapped me in, and then as soon as he got out and they closed the door, and we’ve got two or three hours to kill, I unstrapped, curled up, and went sound asleep. Vance woke me up a half an hour or so before launch. I strapped back in, talked him through the checklist, and based on previous history, I fully expected we’d get up somewhere close, and we’d wave off; we’ll try it again tomorrow. We counted down, and you could feel the—just like the crews before us said, you can feel the main engines when they come on. You hear them. Actually, at five minutes you feel the hydraulic pumps come on, and then you feel the main engines come on, and just like it’s supposed to, the stack rocks over and then rocks back, and when it gets right there, [indicating vertical], is when the solids go. That’s why the main engines light at seven seconds before; it’s because that’s a seven-second period, and it will keep going. It will do that for a while till it settles out, but you catch it right here, point it straight up. Then you blow the bolts, light the solids, and sure enough, there was this bang, and off we went, and it was a rough ride, is the best way to describe it.\\n\\n I remember at one point Overmyer said to Vance, because the crews before us hadn’t commented on how rough it was, and Bob said, “This is really rough.” I mean, it would shake your teeth. Bob said, “This is too rough, Vance. I’m afraid we’re going to come apart.”\\n\\n And on a whim, I just said, “Relax, Bob. No use dying all tensed up.” You know, I’m the scientist and he’s the test pilot, and he was reminding me of that later. And sure enough, in two minutes it all got quiet and peaceful. The solids went away, but they were a really rough ride. Then riding on the mains, the [ride] was like an electric engine [imitates sound], and you don’t feel it. People say, “What about the G-load?” The G-load’s nothing; you pull more Gs than that in an airplane. The Shuttle won’t take more than 3 Gs, and if you fly an airplane the way I fly it, you’re out there intentionally pulling 7 or more Gs a lot. It’s not like Apollo, where on reentry you might pull 10 Gs.\\n\\n So that’s very nice, and we got up and, boom, main engine cut off right on time, and so now we’re in zero gravity, and we’re coasting toward our first OMS [Orbital Maneuvering System] burn to circularize, and my first reaction was, “Uh-oh, something went wrong. I’m not in zero-G.” I’m firmly in my seat and everything. I took the checklist, and I held it out in front of me and I let it go, and it just stayed there. I says, “Well, it’s okay after all.” I’d strapped in so tight, it just felt like I still had G on me.\\n\\n Then we got organized and went into our “Okay, let’s secure things. Let’s make sure that we’ve got the pins in the seats, and all that stuff is taken care of, and we don’t do anything dumb, and we get ready for the burn and secure things. Get the doors open after the burn.” Then we moved right into the first sequence for the first satellite deploy, and that was good to get that off successfully. Then we had dinner and went to bed.\\n\\n There were four of us, and there were official places to sleep, and we told them we didn’t need all that stuff. Bob slept in a real sleeping bag that was designed for that purpose. He did it to test it out for the engineers. Vance didn’t like moving around a whole bunch, so he would tether himself with a little clip or something to a handrail so he’d be right there, and one night he scared hell out of himself. When you’re relaxed in zero-G, your arms are up here [gestures]; they’re not down by your side, but they’re up here, and I’d learned in all of my EVA training, because one of the reasons I did so well at it was that—a pressurized suit has a certain shape whether you’re in it or not. That’s the zero-energy shape. Don’t try to relax the way you want to be; relax the way the suit wants to be. But Vance was sleeping, and he kind of woke up in the middle of the night, and here’s something right out in front of his face, and it scared the hell out of him. It was his own hands.\\n\\n I got myself in a little zone in the aft part of the flight deck, up over a panel, where there was a side panel end. It was actually the RMS place, where the RMS would have been, but we weren’t carrying one, that you could bend it [yourself] just a little bit, and you’d fit right in, and then you relax out. But if you were relaxed, you didn’t fit back out the opening. So I just kind of freely bounced around in there, being real careful that I wasn’t going to hit any switches or anything, and that’s where I slept. Joe was comfortable just wherever he was; he’d just go to sleep. He might wake up in a totally different place, but that didn’t bother him. So that’s how we slept and did that the first night.\\n\\n The food was the food. After having been back up on Skylab with that awful mess, the regimentation was worse than the real stuff there, but the food was good, not great, but good; but then just like flying an airplane. You don’t fly airplanes for the food; to get somewhere. We weren’t there for the food.\\n\\n I think you or somebody is always asking about spare time. Well, in five days, we didn’t have any. I still maintain to this day the main thing that you need for using spare time is a window where you can see the Earth, and you can amuse yourself for months, just looking out at the Earth and watching it go by and seeing different changes and everything. You don’t need a deck of cards or anything like that. But we spent some time looking out. We took a lot of pictures. I still had my old Earth observations mentality and had some specific things that we were going to try to get.\\n\\n Some of the things that we did way back in Skylab we specifically went after. I remember we went after Lake Chad in sub-Saharan Africa, because we’d documented that pretty good back in Skylab, and then ten years later we look at it, and it’s obvious that the water in that area is going down; it’s decreasing. So you could see some very interesting ten-year differences there.\\n\\n But that’s pretty much it. We didn’t have a lot of spare time, and then it was time to come home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was the landing? Was it what you had prepared for?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. We landed on the concrete at Edwards. At least I think—yes, we did. I was in the middeck, and Bill Thornton had talked both Joe and I into doing some tests for him both on ascent, on orbit, and on entry, where he was monitoring how your eye movements go and how you react to that, so he had sensors on. You’ve probably seen some pictures of both of us looking rather stupid with this thing out in front that’s going back and forth, up and down, and we’re following it with our eyes, and I was really concentrating to do Bill’s thing right, because I had a lot of respect for him as both an engineer and a medical doctor, and thought that he was really on top of a lot of the problems, whereas the medical community, I thought, were out in left field on some of them. So I was concentrating on that.\\n\\n The only thing I was aware of was it got a lot warmer in the middeck than I had anticipated it would. It really got warm in there, and I could hear them on the intercom, but I wasn’t watching anything, and Vance really greased it on. It was one of those—no jokes. “Hey, tower. Are we down?” And then one of our tests was to do a maximum braking test, and so Vance really got on the brakes, you know, smoked the brakes. But we were supposed to, and we landed nice and sharply, and got off and it was over. We walked down the stairs and “machoed” it out of there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After that flight, you worked on mission development. Can you share what that task was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Within the Astronaut Office, at any given time you’re divided up into sections. You’ve got a bunch of people that are assigned to flights or backups that are training. Then you have other people that are taking care of things that astronauts have to get dealing with. Nowadays, or at least in those days, there was two other parts. One dealt with the piloting aspects of it, and then the other dealt with the mission aspects of it. The piloting dealt with getting to and from orbit, and the mission aspect dealt with what did you do when you were in orbit.\\n\\n So I led a small group of astronauts that followed the various things that we were being asked to do or to deal with in orbit. I was the directorate member of Leonard [S.] Nicholson’s Control Board for Mission Development that had the vote for FCOD [Flight Crew Operations Directorate] as to whether that’s right, wrong, or indifferent, and I tried to take it seriously and worked real hard at it. I got other opinions, and I think I developed a lot of respect, that unlike some of the people before me, I wasn’t just coming in shooting from the hip with no knowledge. Things were well thought out, and I’d give them answers when they needed answers, and everything worked well.\\n\\n But it was making sure that as the missions got integrated, they got integrated from the flight crew perspective as well, so that it was a workable thing and that they didn’t interfere with one another or involve something that’s not the right way to do it. It was fun and interesting and got me a little bit into the NASA management scheme of things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In September of 1984 you left the astronaut corps. Can you tell us why you made that decision?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I had been assigned as the lead mission specialist on the Spacelab D-2 mission, the German mission. Bonnie [J.] Dunbar was another one, and had started taking German at my request. We had some ideas in the Astronaut Office that weren’t always popular, and in some cases, in retrospect, weren’t always right. But in that time frame, we were concerned about the people that wanted us to be off somewhere else doing a lot of training, long times in your flight, where some of the mission specialists, in particular, needed to be part of the launch crew and couldn’t be gone for that long.\\n\\n So we drew a line in the sand—John Young was the director of the office then; George Abbey was the head of FCOD—that said three weeks was the longest continuous time that it was okay for an astronaut to be away, and in particular what we were thinking of was the Spacelab missions where you would be in Europe, that we just didn’t want somebody to have to go over there for six months and then go native on us and come back and not really be an astronaut anymore. That got all the way up to the Control Board, with Glynn Lunney presiding, and I made the pitch, told them what the answers were from our perspective. And to this day I’ll never forget it; John Young and George Abbey were there, sitting behind me, letting me make this whole thing, and Glynn looked at them and said, “What do you guys think about this?”\\n\\n And George’s answer was, “We can deal with it anyway.” So Glynn disapproved it, and I decided that, based on principle, that I really believed what I was saying, so I went to George’s office and asked him to take me off of the D-2 crew, that I really felt like I had said the right thing, and he ought to take me off that crew, and I’d go on a subsequent crew.\\n\\n But at the time I knew George well enough to know that—well, there’s an old Army term, that I had just shit in my mess kit. So I was forty-four and already aware that if I’m going to have another career, it’s not getting easier by waiting, and so I had begun to think about what am I going to do next. In retrospect, I think if I had stayed, I would have flown again. George would have rubbed my nose in it somewhere along the line, but I would have flown again. I didn’t want to be like Story and fly seven or eight times and retire there.\\n\\n Then out of the blue I get a phone call from a headhunter who said he was representing somebody in the consulting business who was looking for an astronaut to run a business, and I said, “Who is it?”\\n\\n And he said, “Well, I can’t tell you until we get any further.”\\n\\n And I says, “Well, then I guess we don’t go any further.”\\n\\n He said, “Well, then I can tell you. It’s Booz Allen.”\\n\\n And never being one that obeyed rules very well, I asked him who it was, who was the contact, and I called the contact; basically worked directly with him. The headhunter got his money when it was all said and done.\\n\\n But it was Booz Allen. They were looking for somebody to come up at the principal level and start a space business for them. I interviewed with them twice. They offered me a job, and I accepted it. It was one of those “I take this now, or this isn’t going to stay open,” because they’re not going to be able to stop. And it seemed to fit with where they wanted to go and the capabilities I had, although I didn’t know how to get there.\\n\\n So I accepted the job, and then I left NASA, and I went into the consulting business. Again, fairly naïve from a business perspective, and first thing I discovered was that there had been a small space business there that they wanted me to take over and build, and it took me a year to finally deal properly with that. The answer wasn’t to build that; the answer was to get rid of that and build the right space business. They were into what they called space commercialization, and they had a couple of contracts with NASA Headquarters, going around talking to companies, GEs [General Electric Company], 3Ms, etc., trying to sell this to Shuttle, that you should be doing research in space, and trying to help facilitate all that.\\n\\n I told my boss, a senior Vice President named Pete Wood, that, “Pete, I really believe in commercial space. I really believe in it, but not this decade, and we don’t have the patience to wait. That’s not the right place to take this business. The right place to take this business is around what I call space operations. There’s a whole bunch of people that deal with engineering, all kinds of contractors, consultants that are under contract to NASA, all around engineering. Nobody is helping them deal with the operational issues, and that’s what I’m all about.”\\n\\n He disagreed with me, and we decided, in a friendly way, to take it up to his boss, who was Gary [D.] Mather, who was the president of the technical side of the company at the time. Gary agreed with me; decided that Pete wasn’t going to be behind it enough to really nurture it right, so he reorganized and had me report directly to him.\\n\\n Several months later, Pete Wood retired and left, and the first thing I did then was I had ten people I had to get rid of, because they were the wrong people. They didn’t have the skill basis I needed. A couple of them were not easy to get rid of; some of them were. One of them was a female, who was not very good, to put it bluntly. There was a couple of males that weren’t very good, either, but they were easy to fire. Females weren’t that easy to fire in 1984. She was one of these “New Agers.” She wanted to do her thing and wasn’t always kept under control, and so I came up with what I thought was a very innovative way to deal with it, after having talked once with the lawyers and concluded, “God, I can’t deal with this.” I transferred her to one of my principal colleagues named Joyce [C.] Doria. Joyce tried to make it work, and Joyce fired her. That worked out fine. There weren’t any big issues there.\\n\\n One of the guys I fired, helped him find a different job within Booz Allen, in contracting, and he subsequently several times came back and thanked me. I had two of them thank me for firing them, because they were really in the wrong job and I told them that, and then they went in a different direction and succeeded.\\n\\n So then I started to rebuild and went out to build a business, with no idea how to do it, but what I discovered was my instincts around business were very good, and that even though I didn’t have the school learning, my instincts were pretty good for how to compete, how to build things, how to get there from here. I had my sights set pretty high. At one point Pete Wood, before he left, and I went, just after NASA announced the Space Station Program. Reagan had approved it. Phil [Philip E.] Culbertson at Headquarters was the new Director.\\n\\n An interesting side on Phil Culbertson was that Phil was the NASA Headquarters person around Earth resources. Back in ’74 when I went to the Earth Resources Conference right after Skylab at Snowmass, when that was over, Phil took a hike, camping hike, and he climbed up into the mountains and camped and hiked and fished for a day, but was going to need a place to stay when he got back the night before he flew out, and we were talking over a beer before he left about this. I says, “Hell, I’ve rented a place that’s got more room than I know what to deal with. Come there.” So he hiked up, and he slept there, down in like a bunkroom with our daughter, who was three or four at the time, so we joke about that.\\n\\n So I got an appointment with Phil, and we went over and talked to Phil and his guys, and right at the end—we’d spent about an hour or two there—Phil said, “And NASA’s decided to do the SE&I, the System Engineering and Integration, itself in-house.”\\n\\n I said, “Excuse me?”\\n\\n He said, “NASA is going to do the SE&I in-house.”\\n\\n “Oh, okay. Thanks, Phil.”\\n\\n We went out side and I said, “Pete, that’s the best news I’ve heard.”\\n\\n “What?”\\n\\n “That SE&I in-house.”\\n\\n He says, “Why is that? There’s no work then.”\\n\\n I said, “That’s going to fail. They can’t possibly do that. But it’s going to take them long enough to admit that they’ve failed before they reach out for help, that we’ve got enough time to get credentials so we become a real player.” And that was the strategy behind my business building. Pete never understood it. He left.\\n\\n I hired Hal Emigh from Rockwell, who was the head of their Payload Ops Group that I had worked with, as a principal to help me build business. He was a great business builder. We got a bunch of small jobs, real small jobs, a little here, a little there. Admittedly, the only reason we got them was because the prime company wanted the astronaut, and so I was making them pay for that, but in the prospect, I got a subcontract with TRW [Inc.] on a military contract that was studying space assembly, maintenance, and servicing, because the military was looking at doing a lot of that stuff. It was just a small $15,000 thing, but I got into the water tank at McDonnell Douglas and did some stuff for them. TRW loved me; the Air Force loved me. And when you wrote up on your quals [qualifications] that Booz Allen had this contract, it didn’t say $15,000; it just said that we had this contract on space assembly, maintenance, and servicing, and our role was—and I touched almost everything. So it wound up looking real good.\\n\\n We built up a whole bunch of those. They put out a RFP [Request for Proposal] for a Headquarters support contract. We bid as a prime and won, and that was the first real thing that made our business, and then they announced defeat on SE&I, and I had told Pete way back in ’84 that what would happen is it would take them a while, but they would finally admit defeat, and there were two things they could do, since they had the four work-package contractors. They could pick one to be the prime contractor, like we had done in Apollo, and the others would be under them. Or they could say none of them could do it, and it would be somebody totally different. The right way to do it is the former; therefore the way they’ll do it is the latter. But to be honest, that won’t work, either, but that will run five or so years, and then they’ll go to the other. And that’s exactly how it’s played out.\\n\\n When they announced they were going to get an SE&I contractor, the obvious players were TRW, Lockheed [Aircraft Corporation], were the two big ones, and Grumman [Aerospace Corporation] was the third one, kind of a dark horse. Rockwell, Boeing, Martin, who else—they couldn’t compete. So I went out and I marketed TRW and Lockheed, and they were both very interested. I brought something that no others had, which was the space operations aspect, and they were very receptive.\\n\\n Then I remember I got a call from the guy at TRW. At this time Ed Gibson was working for them. It was Ed’s boss, who said that he really wanted us on the team. I said, “Oh, great. That’s really good. And we get space operations, right?”\\n\\n And he says, “Well, there’s a problem with that.”\\n\\n I says, “What’s that?”\\n\\n He says, “Well, we’re going to team with Lockheed, and they’ve got that, and they won’t give it up.”\\n\\n I said, “Well, then we don’t have a deal, because that’s who we are, and you’ll want us on board, a little here and a little there, and I know how that’s going to play out, so I’m not interested in these other things.” Ed told me that I was making a big mistake. I mean, TRW and Lockheed are teamed, the two best SE&I places in the country.\\n\\n Grumman called and said they wanted [us] on the team, and I said, “Well, let’s talk.” So I went up and I talked to them. By that time they knew that TRW and Lockheed were teaming, and I told them that TRW wanted us on their team also, but I didn’t tell them I’d turned them down. So they wanted us, and I said, “I want space ops.”\\n\\n And they said, “Okay, you’ve got it.”\\n\\n And then I said, “And I have a partner who’s really big in the computer world, and so I want the TMIS, the Technical and Management Information System, as well.”\\n\\n And they said, “We can’t give you that. Grumman Data Systems is going to do that.”\\n\\n And then I bluffed. I said, “Well, then we don’t have a deal,” and I went home\\n\\n The next day I get a phone call, and he says, “Okay, you get them both,” because they recognized they needed us in space ops. I had somewhere along the line here made partner at Booz Allen, so my other partner was very thankful that I had gotten him this job.\\n\\n And so we worked with them to write the proposal. Fred Haise was the lead of it, and Dick [Richard L.] Kline was his deputy, and I had known them both. Dick Kline had been, oddly enough, one of the people way back who was at Grumman, connected to Raytheon, back on the satellite power stuff, so all these guys I had known for a long time.\\n\\n I sat on the red team, and I sent Bill Brooks up there to lead, and admittedly maybe Grumman had gotten the impression that they were going to see a lot of me, like every day, and I had a business to run. I couldn’t be there, and so I sent Bill Brooks up there, and I would keep getting these phone calls. “Lenoir, where are you?” Okay, that didn’t work. So I sent “Tucker” [Henry J.] Pierce up. “Lenoir, where are you?” So I brought Tucker back, and I sent Bill [William] Bastedo up there, who was much lower level than them. They were principals, and Bill was an associate that I had just hired away from Sy Rubenstein at Rockwell. And they didn’t call; I said, “That worked.”\\n\\n So one of the very first review teams, red teams, I was up there for with Fred, they were presenting their thing, and they’re presenting the overview of what the proposal’s going to look like, and they’re talking about how this is systems engineering and integration and why Grumman is the best job for this, the Grumman-Booz Allen-Ford team, and he finished, and I says, “Excuse me. I’m in the wrong room.”\\n\\n Fred says, “What are you talking about?”\\n\\n I says, “This isn’t SE&I. This is about manned space operations. That’s what NASA needs here, is about manned space operations and integrating and operating the Space Station. It’s not SE&I. TRW and Lockheed will have us for lunch around SE&I. This is manned operations. It’s more important that you build airplanes that land on boats than that you build unmanned spacecraft.” And so we built that into our theme. We said that’s what this was all about, and we sold it to NASA. We had a good set of orals, and we won. The biggest single job that Booz Allen had ever won, I had just won, which was in ’87, so that was three years in; it was about the right time.\\n\\n Got that going, and hired Ed Gibson. Ed gave me a call to congratulate me. The way I had built the business was that in building up to that, I would promise myself, and then when we won, I would try to hire somebody that could actually do it, and they wouldn’t complain that they didn’t get me. They still got me, but not as much as they thought. Certainly here was this thing, where our role was built around me, and I needed to move on and run the bigger business. So Ed called to congratulate me, and I asked him if he was interested in a job. He said yes.\\n\\n I says, “Get on an airplane, and let’s talk about it.” So he came over, and I hired him. He moved to Reston [Virginia], and took over lead of that part of the contract. I ran the whole contract, which had both of the pieces, the information system and the ops. Ed ran the ops and one of Steve Gottlieb’s guys ran the information systems. Then [I] subsequently hired Bo [Karol J.] Bobko to do the Houston stuff, and I hired Luther Powell in Huntsville to build Huntsville business. That didn’t pan out, and Luther left after a while. I guess that’s how that fit out.\\n\\n But we wound up with about a hundred people working on that before too much longer, and that was going great guns. I had a big business, self-sustaining, within Booz Allen, one of the largest businesses. Very profitable, doing very well, with a five-year strategic plan out in front of me that had how we were going to grow the business, anticipating what was going to happen. Remember what I said was one of these days NASA was going to get to the right answer, which was that one of the primes needed to run it, and that we needed to make sure that we didn’t get clobbered by that.\\n\\n Then in ’89 I got a phone call from Dick Truly. Parallel with all of this, in ’86 Challenger blew up, which was an unfortunate thing. I felt that much more than Columbia, because except for the two payload specialists, I knew all five of the people on board very, very well. Judy [Judith A.] Resnik and I were very good friends. El [Ellison S.] Onizuka had worked for me for a while. So had Ron [Ronald E.] McNair, for that matter.\\n\\n Coming out of that, NASA did a whole bunch of reorganizing, because the senior management was all screwed up. Jim [James M.] Beggs was on leave because he was under indictment. There was no Administrator. Bill [William R. Graham], who was from the spook world, was the Deputy. He didn’t have a clue what it was all about. Jess [Jesse W.] Moore had been the AA [Associate Administrator] for Space Flight. He had just moved to Johnson as the Center Director. It was just all turmoil.\\n\\n Reagan brought Jim Fletcher back as Administrator, and Fletcher brought Dick Truly over, who had retired from NASA, gone back to the Navy, and had been the first Commander of Naval Space Command, and he was living in Dahlgren, Virginia—I had visited him a couple of times, he and Cody, there—and had set up Naval Space Command, so he was brought back to be the AA for Space Flight, and his job was to get the Shuttle flying again.\\n\\n Partly for some money and partly just as a friend, I did a lot of work with Dick, some consulting and then a lot of just discussions over beer with Dick by himself or Dick and Crip, Jay [F.] Honeycutt and some others, around what they were doing to get back into flying. Dick asked me if I would be on a committee. They were putting a committee together that was going to look some stuff over and give them some advice, and he was a little bit afraid of it, and it couldn’t have any NASA people on it, but it sure would be nice if he had a friend on it, and so I was on Al [Alton D.] Slay’s committee that looked at all the safety aspects and did that.\\n\\n Then in 1989 just after George [H. W.] Bush was elected, George Senior, Dick called to say that he had been asked to be the new Administrator, and would I be interested in going up to the White House with him to be sworn in. I said sure, and so I came on over and went up, and he was kind of briefing me that the President would be there, probably the Vice President. The President’s whatever you call his horse holder, Chief of Staff, John Sununu, would be there, and he’d introduce me, and I didn’t tell him anything about that. So when we went in there, and then the President and Sununu came in, Sununu walks into the room and says, “Bill, how are you?” Comes over and shakes my hand, and I hadn’t told Dick that I used to play lacrosse with John at MIT. John was from MIT. And so we were reliving some old lacrosse stuff. Neither one of us were very good.\\n\\n Dick got sworn in, and in the car going back, he told me why he really had asked me. He wanted me to come over and be the Associate Administrator for both Station and Shuttle, and to combine them; at that time they were in two different things. And I told him, “Dick, I can’t possibly. I’m just getting to the point now where I’m starting to make some money, and I’m starting to save. You know, I don’t have much for retirement. It just doesn’t make any sense.”\\n\\n Then he called again, and at some point the President’s Office got involved. It’s like I tell people, when that level asks you, there’s only one question. It’s, “Yes, sir. When do I have to start?” So, boom, there I was.\\n\\n Because of the way it was set up, I came in immediately as the emergency AA for Space Station, and Dick had the authority to make an emergency appointment into the SES, which he did—Senior Executive Service—as the AA for Space Station. [James B.] Odom had left. Jim Odom from Marshall had been the Administrator. Dick clearly wanted the two combined, and I totally agreed with him that it would be like taking the Shuttle Program and trying to put half of it off over here and half of it off over there, where anytime they disagree, it’s got to go to the Administrator for resolution, that didn’t make any sense.\\n\\n At the time, George Abbey, as Deputy AA for Shuttle, was the Acting AA for Shuttle, and the big picture was that Dick needed me to get in as AA for Space Station, because I think two days after my first day, the House was slated to vote it out of existence, and so I immediately went up to the Hill, unpolitical me, and talked to God knows how many people and did what I later have referred to as the annual “It’s time to save the Space Station” trip. But we won a narrow vote, and so I did save the Space Station.\\n\\n The jobs that I agreed with Dick to take on when I took it was, I said, “There’s a couple of conditions. One is, I want some objective. I don’t want to just come on and do it.” There were three of them. One was save the Space Station. The other was to get the Space Shuttle under schedule control, so that we could fly so many times a year; and to get the Space Shuttle under cost control, because cost had not been an issue with him getting it back to flying status, and it just kept going up and up and up and up, and it was out of sight, and it had to get under control.\\n\\n I said, “Okay, and another condition is that you have to be willing to fire me if it’s the right thing to do, either because I’ve screwed up, or because it’s the only way you can keep something from getting to you is hang it on me and throw me overboard.” And he said okay. I didn’t really believe him, but he said okay. Because I think that’s important.\\n\\n So I came on. We saved the Space Station. We went through the rigmarole of getting into the regular SES, and for reasons that I didn’t totally understand, you can’t transition from having been an emergency appointment into the real SES from that job, and so we invented another job at the SES level that was an assistant to Dick that I filed my paperwork for, and to nobody’s surprise, he selected me, and so I got into the SES. Came in as an SES-6, which wasn’t too surprising, since that was a third of the pay that I was getting before I came. Took a bit of a pay cut. Then he made me the AA for Space Shuttle as well as Space Station, and so at that point I have two hats, and one of my first jobs was to put a staff together and generate the paper that turned that into one hat.\\n\\n I hired Mike [Michael] Mann away from Tommy [Thomas] Campbell over in the Comptroller’s Office, because Mike was an analyst over there who knew more about Code M, Space Flight’s budget, than anybody in Code M did. So I said, “I can’t live with the Comptroller knowing more about my finances than I do,” so I went over and talked to Mike and convinced him to come over. Great guy. So he became kind of my comptroller, if you like, and started building a staff.\\n\\n I hired Dick [Richard H.] Kohrs to run the Space Station as Level I, and Leonard Nicholson to run the Space Shuttle as Level I, and let them run their own business and would get with them strategically and make sure they were headed the right direction, but I didn’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of that. Hired Mike Lyons away from now MCI to head the group that had the unmanned launch vehicles and stuff like that in it, since he’d done a lot of work there, and then Mike [Mann] ran the financial side of the house.\\n\\n Along about in here, I had to ask George Abbey to go away. Dick had asked me if I would give it a try with George. One of the things that Dick had done when he first came in as AA that I really respected was, unlike recent history and some other natural tendencies on NASA, the first thing he did when he became AA was he assigned some responsibility and fired some people over Challenger at the Center Director level, so that Jess Moore was gone, [William R. Lucas] at Marshall, Dick [Richard G.] Smith at the Cape, and put some new people in. He removed George as being Director of Flight Crew Ops, but brought him up to Headquarters to be a special assistant or something, and ultimately became Deputy.\\n\\n George is an enigma. George is an extremely smart person, very sharp. Very good team player as long as it’s his team and he’s in charge. Not a good team player on anybody else’s team, and I could never get him to play by my rules, which were, “We’ll talk everything out in the open. You must talk. You cannot walk out of here with an opinion you didn’t say and then later bring it up. And then once we decide, you support it, or in good conscience, if you decide you can’t support it, you quit. But you don’t try to undermine it.”\\n\\n Now, Forrest [S.] McCartney at the Cape was another one that I had a lot of problems with, but Forrest bought into that, and I have to say Forrest was absolutely the right integrity. He often didn’t agree with me. Often we did things the other way. Never once did he work out of channels around it. George was always working out of channels, so I asked him to go away. I fired him, but I did it in a way that says, “Why don’t you find another job within NASA or without.” So Dick helped him find a role on Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford’s committee that was doing some special study or something, and I asked Tom [Thomas E.] Utsman to come up from the Cape and be the Deputy.\\n\\n We did a lot of good work, I think. We put a good management team in place. One of the things that used to bother me when I was an astronaut and I would support the various control boards, was I would hear things like, “The board decided this; the board decided that.” I’ve never been in the military, but apparently I have a military bent to me, because my reaction would always be, “The board didn’t decide a goddamn thing. The board discussed an issue in front of the chairman, offered some opinions, said what they thought, and the chairman of the board decided something.” But the chairman of the board is accountable. You can’t hold a board accountable; the chairman is.\\n\\n So I reinvented the Management Council for Space Flight, and that involved the Center Directors. There were four Centers that report to the AA for Space Flight. That’s the four you would guess; that’s Kennedy [Space Center, Florida], Johnson, Marshall, and Stennis [Space Center, Mississippi]. The four Center Directors, their Deputies, the Director of the Space Shuttle Program, and the Director of the Space Station Program, and me and my Deputy, is the Space Council. I make the decisions. I’m only saying this because just the other day I read something in Av Week [Aviation Week] about how “The Space Flight Management Council decided such and such,” and I [said to Craig Couvoult at Av Week], “Goddamn it, Craig, that’s not the way it happens.” We would discuss things.\\n\\n I remember once Jay Honeycutt had been a good friend of mine when he was George’s horse holder, and then he went off to run a part of the Shuttle thing at the Cape, and when [J.] Wayne Littles—he was the Deputy at Marshall—when he went to the Harvard fourteen-week thing, I put Honeycutt over as Acting Deputy at Marshall, as a way of broadening Jay, and he thought that was great. But that allowed him to come to one of these meetings, and he’d been to a whole bunch of meetings, and he had commented to me afterwards, he said it was the damnedest, most profitable thing he’d ever been to, that it really did stuff, and it wasn’t like he’d seen before.\\n\\n We’d talk about strategy. “What are we going to do in two years?” “Aaron Cohen, you’re the Director of JSC. Who are your top three candidates to replace yourself, and what are you doing to grow them so that when the time comes, it’s really hard to make a choice? The next time I’m down there, I want to meet your top twelve people, comers, and I want to meet some youngsters that are comers. I want to talk about how are we going to develop the next generation, rather than letting it happen. How are we doing things?” Never once in three years did anything that we discuss ever leak, and so that really worked.\\n\\n At one point I went to Dick Truly and I said, “You’re right about the Shuttle and costs. I want to institute not just let’s get it under control and cap it where it is, but I want to take cost out, and here’s my plan.”\\n\\n And he said, “Hmm, okay. You’re sure you can do that safely?”\\n\\n And I said, “Yeah, and my chief cohort in making this work is going to be Mike Mann. He’s the only other person, other than you, that knows what the real issue is here, and I’m going to proclaim a program that we’re going to take 3 percent a year out of the Shuttle cost for five years. In fact, the second year I’m going to up the gain to 5 percent, but I think that would give people so much heartache right now that it would be hard to get people on board, so we’re going to go for 3.”\\n\\n Leonard almost quit over it. As a matter of fact, probably would have, but I had to tell him that he didn’t have an option to not do this. He could stay and do it or leave, but it was going to get done.\\n\\n I had talked with Mike Mann, because I had done some consulting at Booz in the aerospace industry, and I said, “What’s going to happen is everybody’s going to fight us tooth and nail, and we’re going to beat them up and make them do it. Then they’re going to start seeing some early results, and then they’re going to get to be a believer. Then our role has to change, because they’re going to want to go too fast, and so we’re going to push, push, push, and then we’ve got to get out in front and try to slow them down.” And that’s exactly what happened.\\n\\n So we started taking some money out. We had it controlled, and just to make sure nobody was going to be hollering, my instructions to Crip were to take so much money out and demonstrate that he made it safer along the way, so nobody could say, hey, we’re going to make it unsafe. Well, it’s hard to demonstrate that it’s safer, but—and I learned something very quickly, how it doesn’t work. You don’t take processes and make them simpler and think that that’s going to matter, because the contractors all have a list of things, and when things get happening sooner, then just other things happen, but you still spend as much money. You get them where it really matters, and you say, “You don’t have as much money this year as you did last year. Let me know how you’re going to spend it.”\\n\\n We did that, and it worked, and I’m convinced we did, in fact, make the Shuttle cost less. It was, I think, four billion and going up, and it was about three billion a year, operations, when I left. No, it got to three billion a couple of years after I left as part of that, and it got safer, because we made sure that we paid attention to things like that. And some of it was just in getting back to flying, you did whatever it took. Sometimes you’d do things so many different ways in order to provide redundancy that the danger is that they’re going to overlap in a way that is not good, and so by simplifying you actually do make it safer.\\n\\n My last full year, we flew eight times, which was the first time that we’d ever met the eight. We did six the year before, which was, I believe, the first time we ever flew as many as we said we were going to fly. Because that was one of the other conditions with Dick when I came on. I think at that time we were claiming twenty-four flights a year was what we were going to build up to, and I said, “Dick, you and I both know that’s absolutely BS. I won’t take the job unless my first trip up to Congress, I can tell them the real number’s eight. I don’t want to go from twenty-four to twenty to sixteen to twelve to eight. You and I both know the answer is eight. Let’s tell them it’s eight. If we need it to surge, we could do ten now and then, but eight’s the answer.”\\n\\n So he said, “Okay.” So I went up and we took one big step down to eight, which we actually got to the last year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let me get you stopped just a second, because—\\n\\n [Tape change]\n\nYou were telling me about the challenges of being an AA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and in describing it, I’m probably going to keep going back and retracing some steps. It’s not as easy to do it chronologically. Being an astronaut is largely at any instant in time fairly unidimensional, in that you’re focusing on one thing. Over a career, you touch a lot of different things, but in any instant, you’re training or you’re following a design or something of that nature.\\n\\n Being an AA is multidimensional all the time, and at any instant you are constantly working multiplicity of problems, all simultaneously. So if you take a train of thought and run it through, then there’s a whole bunch of other things that were happening in those same time frames that you have to go back and talk about. So I’ve kind of talked at the high level of starting as an AA and then getting into the Shuttle, in taking on both the schedule and the money things and getting that under control and a little bit of that.\\n\\n A reflection is that that’s a very tough job. As a matter of fact, it’s in the Prune Book, whatever—you know, The Fifty Toughest Jobs in the World [The Prune book: The 60 Toughest Science and Technology Jobs in Washington by John H. Trattner]. The AA of Space Flight is one of them, or at least it was then. And I believe it, because you touch so many different things. At that time I had 50 percent of the NASA employees reported to me, and 60 percent of the NASA budget I spent. In my three years I spent $25 billion, and I’d like to think we got our money’s worth, but there are days when I’m not so sure.\\n\\n It’s a hard job. I think in one way I’m probably fairly typical, in that I was at it for three years. I think that’s a fairly typical time. It’s not enough. If you’re trying to change anything that touches the culture, in engineering terms, you’ve touched something that has a three- to five-year time constant, or in physical terms, has a half-life of three to five years, which says that you don’t just edict something and it happens. And I’ve made a lot of money in corporate America doing the same thing. A really good change program takes three to five years to pull it off. You have to not only decide what you’re going to do, but you have to know how to do it. Then you have to get the people on board so all the who’s are there, too.\\n\\n That’s the hard thing. NASA’s got a whole cadre of mid-level civil servants who, rightly or wrongly, feel threatened whenever change comes in, just like any company feels. These people inherently don’t like change and will fight it, because they feel threatened by it. It’s fairly natural. You have to make them see it. You have to make them feel less threatened by it, and get them on board, and that takes time. Three years isn’t long enough, especially if you come in as cold as I did, really not having a clue how the hell to do this job or even what it is.\\n\\n Basically, I’m an engineer. To spend the majority of my first year up on the Hill talking to congressmen and staffers isn’t something that I would have thought I could do. I found out I was good at it. I was good at it because I didn’t lie to them; I told them the truth. If you’ve heard the name Dick [Richard N.] Malow, he in those days was the Clerk of the House Appropriations Committee that dealt with space. He was a Democrat. The Democrats were in the majority then. He was hated and feared by everybody at NASA. I developed a rapport with Dick by telling him the truth. Hardly anybody realizes it, but my last two years, Dick and I met monthly at the McLean [Virginia] Hilton over a beer. We took turns buying, since neither could buy the other’s, and we would talk things. I would tell him some bad stuff coming up. He would tell me the budget hit coming up. I never lied to him about things. He would tell me when he vehemently disagreed, and I would tell him when “That’s tough, I’m doing it anyway,” and I think we respected each other, and I never had problems with Dick.\\n\\n Kevin [F.] Kelly, who was the Senate counterpart, who was the Chief Clerk for Barbara [A.] Mikulski in the Senate, was pre-law. He went to law school and got a law degree, but he was technically challenged turning on a light in a room. I could not communicate with Kevin. He got the impression that if I opened my mouth, I was lying, somehow. He and Dick Kohrs got along great. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out working the Hill, I’m going to work Dick Malow, and Dick Kohrs is going to go talk to Kevin Kelly. On the other hand, Stephan Kohashi, who was Jake Garn’s guy on the Republican side in the Senate, was a very reasonable guy and easy to get along with and technically could understand. Dick Malow’s problem was that he thought he was the Chief Engineer of the Space Station, and he was a fairly decent engineer, but still.\\n\\n There was just so many different dimensions to work, and I came in fairly cold, not really understanding how it all worked. It took me a year or so to figure out how it works. Then it took me another year to figure out how to deal with it, which only left me one year to actually do anything, which isn’t long enough if you’re trying to change a culture that you’ve got to stay with for three or five years. So I started and pushed in a direction far more times than I actually succeeded in pulling something off, and oddly enough, the Shuttle Cost Control Program was something that lived on beyond me, because we did it right. We recognized that people were going to get on board; how to get them on board; how to keep them under control.\\n\\n In retrospect—personal opinion—later I think they stopped paying attention and they took too much out. They had to put some back in, and they’re hovering around, and you have to be aware that you’re never right; you’re never exact. The best you can do in a management sense—this is Lenoir theory—is to oscillate, or if you sail, tack around the middle line and never get too far away from it.\\n\\n But from a NASA perspective, if you’re dealing with a flight safety issue, you don’t ever want to get on that side of the line, so the game is to tack and get up near it, but never cross it. Unlike management, where, okay, well, we had a bad year; we lost some money. You can maybe survive that. Having a bad year and losing some crew is not something that you want to take. So it’s a little different, and you have to offset it, but nonetheless, you’re never stable. Things always need to be different than they are or different than they’re headed. If they’re headed in one direction, you need to be working to turn it around and get it headed in the other direction, because you’re going to keep doing that.\\n\\n It took me, like I said, two years to figure all that out, to get my team together. Mike Mann was a very good member of the team. Dick Kohrs. Bob Crippen was the Shuttle. Toward the end I asked Forrest McCartney to leave. To this day I think Forrest would tell you that he doesn’t like me at all. He didn’t think that was the thing to be done; didn’t see why he needed to go. I told him it was absolutely no prejudice. I’d get him another job. He could work for me. I felt that strongly about him in a favorable way, but my personal opinion was that one of the issues that we had coming out of Challenger, was that Center Directors and other key people had been in their tenure for so long it was hard to tell the difference between Dick Smith and Marshall. They became one and the same. Therefore my rule of thumb was five years is all you get, and then NASA ought not be done with you. You’ve got a lot that NASA can get, but it’s time for somebody else to pick up the ball and run with it, maybe tack a little bit, do it a little bit differently. I was having those conversations with Aaron, also, when I left, and I noticed shortly after I left, Aaron also retired. The others I had named. Roy [S.] Estess. I didn’t actually name Jack [Thomas J.] Lee; Dick did just before I got there, but I named [J.] Wayne [Littles], his deputy.\\n\\n So I fired Forrest, in his words. I asked him to move to another job. I actually offered him one up in Headquarters, but he refused it and did retire, and appointed Bob Crippen in his place.\\n\\n So that was part of that whole thing of okay, now, what’s our succession plan here, and how do we plan for it. We got that started, but we never did get far enough with that, and I don’t believe it held. Certainly when George Abbey got back into the picture, that’s not the thing that George wanted. George wanted to make sure there was nobody to take the place of key people, and that’s one of the problems today—personal opinion—is that JSC doesn’t have the depth of senior management talent that it should have. The talent is there, but the experience and the growth isn’t. So we did that.\\n\\n The key thing I noticed when I got back, I took on a Space Station problem. I had been the Vice President at Booz Allen who had opened the Reston office to support the Level II Space Station work at Reston. Well, Reston was the wrong answer. Remember my earlier story. Well, now—a little bit like Jim Fletcher. In Jim’s first term, when Skylab was up, there was an opportunity to try to get a Shuttle flight early to reboost the Shuttle, and we used to joke that, well, the easy answer is, “Hell with it. It’s not going to reenter on my term.” Not your first term, Jim, but it did reenter on your second term. So here was my comment about how this was going to play out, and now suddenly I’m the AA, and I’m already smart enough to know this is the wrong answer.\\n\\n In summary, Reston was a stupid idea from the beginning, and always was. It was not the right way to do it. We could not get the right level of engineer. The only people that you could coerce to move from Houston or Huntsville to Reston were mid-level engineers that you promised a two-step increase. Hell, those aren’t your lead engineers, and so you wind up with your mid-level engineers at Level II supposedly leading the show, with your really chief engineers back at the Centers supposedly being led by people that they rightly ought to be looking down at. So I moved to close Reston.\\n\\n Learned an awful lot about politics. Luckily, I had learned some of it early. One of my first things was that I told Dick [Truly] that I had a different idea for how to deal with budget problems than he and others did. The typical NASA thing is you ask for x; you get 90 percent of x. So you take all of your programs and you give them 90 percent of what they asked for. I told him my philosophy was I’ll ask for x. If I get 90 percent of x, I’m going to reexamine my programs. I’m going to prioritize them; I’m going to start at the bottom, and I’m going to cancel them until I’ve killed 10 percent. But everybody else gets funded full. It became real when I went to him one day, and I says, “Dick, orbit maneuvering.” Was it orbit maneuvering vehicle or orbit transfer vehicle? I forget; one—OMV [Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle]. “I’m going to terminate the program for the convenience of the government.”\\n\\n “Okay.” And he said, “Why?”\\n\\n I said, “Well, (a), I don’t have the money; (b), it’s a program I just reviewed a review—I’ve forgot what review it was [requirements review]. Hell, it doesn’t even have a firm set of requirements, and we’re supposedly going to be off cutting hardware. That’s a prescription for disaster. That’s going to cost us billions more than we think. It’s a billion-dollar program. I need the money. It’s not well founded. I’m going to terminate it.”\\n\\n So, naïvely, I terminated it, and interestingly, you know who the President of that part of TRW was, where that was terminated? A fellow named Dan [Daniel S.] Goldin, who never forgot.\\n\\n The lashing I never forgot was the next day I was asked to come up to the Hill and talk to Judge [Howell T.] Heflin, the senior Senator from Alabama. This was a contract out of Huntsville. He gave me hell in sort of a nice way, and basically, he didn’t say it quite so crudely, but his message was, “You’re just an engineer, and you don’t understand politics. This is not how you cancel a program. I don’t find out about this in the newspapers. You need to come talk to me, preferably before you’ve done it so I can either be in the loop or feel like I have been in the loop.”\\n\\n “Yes, sir. This will never happen again.” And it didn’t, but I learned a lot there about how to deal with some future things and how to cancel stuff.\\n\\n The other thing that I ran into when I first touched the Shuttle, when we made me the AA for Shuttle instead of Abbey Acting, Dick had gotten it back to flying, and I believe he flew four missions; maybe it was only three. The Flight Readiness Review for the next one I was in on, and I went down to chair the Flight Readiness Review. At the time, and I don’t know how it is now, the hierarchy is that the Flight Readiness Review, two weeks before a Shuttle mission, is chaired by the AA for Space Flight, and he is the accountable government official that approves that flight for performance, and at that point, subject to whatever conditions there are, you empower the Program Director to proceed and execute the mission he just talked to you about, assuming no more changes. I went down there, and I was absolutely appalled at the level of engineering discipline that I saw, that in the time I had been gone, the engineering had just sunk.\\n\\n I’ve stayed, over the years, involved at MIT, and even though I’m a EE grad, I’ve done a lot of work with the Aero[nautics] and Astro[nautics] Department at MIT, including five years ago helping them reinvent themselves, and I’ve talked with them about a lot of stuff. At the time I was aware of one of their issues that they had, and that was that we’re teaching kids how to be engineers, and that includes using the computer-aided design techniques for engineering now that everybody can use. A friend of mine then, who subsequently became the department chair, told me one of his concerns was he didn’t think that the graduate engineers really understood what was going on under this stuff. They knew how to do it, and they knew, okay, the answer is this, but they didn’t have a good feel for it.\\n\\n And that’s what I saw, was guys who would come down there and they would describe a problem, and they’d tell me, and, “It’s okay,” and, “We’ve run the analysis, and it says this.”\\n\\n I’d ask them a question about it, “Does it feel right to you?” and they’d just give me a blank look.\\n\\n “Feel? What does that mean?”\\n\\n One of the examples that I have used several times was somewhere on about the second or third flight, we had a military mission, DoD [Department of Defense] missions, as they were called, that was high-inclination daylight. It launched into a 57-degree orbit, which meant that coming out of the Cape, you went pretty much right up the coastline. What that means is that Air Force C-130s had an easy time staging out of somewhere in North Carolina and New Hampshire somewhere, to stay under it and basically to film the entire ascent. What came back was that the body flap, the back flap on the Shuttle, appeared on the film to be oscillating thirteen degrees. Spec [specification] says three. So there’s a problem. Obviously—this was, I think, the third mission [for me as AA], something like that—you don’t fly the next mission until you understand it and have approved it for flight. So my question of Rockwell was, “Well, what’s your take?”\\n\\n And the answer is, “Well, we don’t think it’s real. We think it’s an artifact, looking through the plume of the solids.”\\n\\n And so my reaction now was, “Oh, okay. That sounds credible. What’s your analysis say?”\\n\\n “Our what?”\\n\\n “Your analysis.” Hadn’t done any. So I said, “Do some.”\\n\\n Next time I talked to them, they still hadn’t. Now I would give Bob Minor a real hard time, and I’d try to embarrass him publicly around this, and at one point I said, “You know, Bob, this just isn’t that damn hard. If you guys don’t do it, I’m going to get co-op student to do it. It’s not that hard.”\\n\\n Very shortly I got a call from them; said that they had done the analysis. They’d made all the worst-case assumptions about the solid plume being a lens, etc. The biggest thing you could do is to create a half a degree.\\n\\n “So what’s your conclusion?”\\n\\n “It’s real.”\\n\\n “What, do you have any more?”\\n\\n “Yeah, and it’s always been real. We’ve always been doing that.”\\n\\n “Well, Bob, you’ve got a different problem now.”\\n\\n “What’s that?”\\n\\n “Well, you’ve either got to fix it so it doesn’t oscillate more than three, or you’ve got to certify it for thirteen, because we ain’t going to fly until you’ve done one or the other.” And apparently they’d gotten out of the habit of doing that stuff, and they’d wave their arms, and you’d just go off and fly. So they certified it for thirteen. Concluded that yes, it’s okay after all. But it was that rigor.\\n\\n We had some things around launch winds. “What’s really happening on the pad?”\\n\\n “Well, the limit says this, but it’s 2 knots over that. We’re still go.”\\n\\n “Why are you still go? Tell me about it. Show me your analysis.” Hell, the people talking didn’t understand what it was you were trying to do. It’s got to do with that twang at the start, that it’s not that the wind’s going to blow you over, it’s that it’s going to affect it in such a way that when the mains light, you go over—you don’t come back. You’re here [gesturing] when the solids light. Well, you’d like that not to be the case.\\n\\n So I just thought that the engineering was not rigorous, and that’s another failure on my part was, I tried to start it [a fix]. I got a Chief Engineer at Headquarters; hard to get. I got Chet [Chester A.] Vaughan to come up from Houston. Good guy; did good stuff. I put him in a lot of stuff.\\n\\n We had a problem somewhere early in there with the infamous hydrogen leaks. We were doing a tanking for a mission, and hydrogen was leaking. The sniffer sniffed hydrogen all over the pad. They shut down, secured, and we waved the launch off. Then I was at the Cape for the launch; went back home. Got a call that they got it all figured out, and they fixed it. They’re going to do a practice tanking; tell me about it tomorrow.\\n\\n “How did it go?”\\n\\n “Still leak.”\\n\\n Second time, pretty much the same thing; still leak. I picked up the phone, and I called Bob Swinghammer at Huntsville, and I says, “Bob, get your butt on an airplane, go down to the Cape, and lead them through it. Help them figure it out, because they’re just shotgunning this thing.”\\n\\n At that point, there probably weren’t six engineers in all of NASA that I had a lot of respect for. That doesn’t mean I hated the rest, that just meant I either didn’t think they were very good, or I didn’t know them, in most cases. But Bob was one who’d been around since I was an astronaut who I really respected. Chet Vaughan, Henry [O.] Pohl. Max [Faget], of course, was gone by then.\\n\\n So I sent Bob down there, and he did it rigorously, got out the fishbone idea, the fault tree, whatever you want to call it. Walked them through it. They’re in a meeting, and they’re identifying all the things that, if something happened on this branch, what would it look like? Does that look like what we’re seeing?\\n\\n Then at one point, they got to one, and said, “Yeah, that would look like it.” At that point, a junior Rockwell engineer in the back row raised his hand and said, “You know, just before all this started, we replaced a seal on that joint.”\\n\\n “Well, maybe we ought to go look at that.” So they took it apart, and sure enough, it was a stainless mesh seal. Part of it had folded back over. Click, click; now we’re off and flying again.\\n\\n But it was that lack of engineering rigor that to this day still exists, and that was one of the key things that I learned, which I didn’t like, but again, three years, taking a couple of years to come to your conclusions, wasn’t enough time to solve it. I would do it a lot differently today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there talk of bringing in more international partners with the Space Station while you were still there, specifically the Russians?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I inherited the team that was ESA [European Space Agency], Japan and Canada, and while I was there, I signed the agreement with Italy. Some people don’t know that Italy has two roles; part of ESA and a separate one that built whatever we wound up calling the mini-modules that they built. There was a mini pressurized logistics module." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think Leonardo. Maybe that was it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s gotten more important as we’ve gone downstream. But I negotiated and signed that agreement with them. What happened was one of their Ministers, Bertusi [phonetic] or something like that, came to me and said that the government wanted to beef up that industry, and they had a half a billion or a billion dollars to spend; could I use it?\\n\\n “Can I use it? Let me get back to you. What if we built one of these. It ought to be about that much.” And so we put it together and signed it.\\n\\n Brazil came after me. There was a couple of times when our international group came to me and said that we were under pressure from the State Department to include the Russians, and my answer was always fairly adamant, said that “I don’t have enough time to deal with that. I think I know how that was going to go, and that’s going to cost me money. I don’t have any money. If they want us to pursue it, tell them to send money.” And it went away, and so they didn’t get on board when I was there. As soon as I left, they came on board. Now that it’s fully integrated, it’s clearly the right answer. We’re behaving about right. The first five or so years, it was a disaster, I think, but now it’s gotten to where it’s a good answer, so it probably was worth the five or six years of hell getting there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you first took this job with Dick Truly, you told him that it would be for a specific time. How did you know when you reached that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I told him there was a couple of things that were going to matter, was I wanted some objectives, and clearly fulfilling them would be enough reason that I could leave. I’d promise him three years. I would also promise him that I’d consider up to two more, and that because of where I was living and what I was doing and the pay cut I was taking, I was going to be living on a negative cash balance. I was willing to spend my savings for my country, so to speak, but I was really hesitant to go into debt. Therefore, when I went broke was another reason to leave.\\n\\n Well, it turns out I met the goals, three years came up, I went broke, and Dick Truly got fired, all pretty much at the same time. So I had begun to think it was time to go back, what am I doing to do?\\n\\n I guess it was actually January when I got the call from Dick saying that he had been fired. I had worked with Dick as a part of the U.S. Space Council from the NASA perspective, where we worked with the Air Force. When we were working one-on-one with the Air Force, that was a great arrangement and things went well.\\n\\n When we got into the Space Council, I never liked that. That was always political. It was all about politics and not about space. Mark [J.] Albrecht was the lead staffer. Dan [James D.] Quayle was the Vice President in charge of it all, and it’s all about politics, and I never liked that. As a matter of fact, I have smelled March Albrecht’s hand in this earlier incident that I was talking about in Quayle’s book. We were never political. I mean, Dick was—I don’t even know if he considers himself Republican. I consider myself an Independent. I’m really apolitical. But we were working for what was best for NASA. We don’t think that was opposed to or contradictory of what was best for the country. It might not have always been what was best for the Vice President, and we’d be first to tell you we didn’t give a damn. And that probably didn’t help us.\\n\\n But Dick got fired, and I told him, gee, I’d been thinking of going, anyway, and I suggested that as a show of support and that we weren’t just going to take this sitting down, I would immediately announce my resignation, which I did and then found out that that wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did. If I had hung on for a couple of months, it would have made a difference in retirement and stuff like that. But I said, “Hey, come on. We’ve got to do what’s right. I don’t like the way this has panned out. You brought me here. I’m leaving.” So I announced before he left, and if I’m not mistaken. No, he left before I left by a little bit, and Dan Goldin came on, and that seemed anomalous to me.\\n\\n I’ve never been a big Dan Goldin fan. At one point before I left, he came over and talked to me for a couple of hours, and I told him what I’d learned; I told him about inertia and culture and time constant and how much inertia there was in the NASA Headquarters, how hard it was to change direction, etc. He thanked me profusely and said it had been a most interesting discussion. He wanted to come back and talk some more, and I said, “Absolutely. Anytime.” And he never called back. And I left and never looked back.\\n\\n I went back to Booz Allen and went into a totally different area. That was in ’92. I didn’t touch space again until ’97. Learned that I can do financial consulting, I can do international consulting in Latin America, and then eventually came back to aviation and space.\\n\\n So that’s how that all played out, and when I look back on it, I tend to look back more on the Headquarters as a job that was clearly undone and in work when I left, and unfortunately, most of it didn’t go to completion, and there’s a lot that needs to be done there that unfortunately probably won’t get done.\\n\\n If we want to get somewhere—the thinking and the mentality that got us to the Moon in Apollo doesn’t exist anymore. The humans that did it don’t exist anymore, by and large. But the talent that’s available is the same thing. It’s there. It could happen, but the setup will not let it happen. Can you imagine today—do you remember Apollo 12, got struck by lightning going uphill? They got into orbit basically with all the circuit breakers popped and dead in the water. They tried a few things. John Aaron did his famous “SCE [Signal-Conditioning Equipment] to Aux[iliary],” etc., and it all worked. They did a quick checkout, and within a few orbs [orbits], they lit off for the Moon. Can you imagine the NASA today doing that?\\n\\n So anyway, I think back on that, and I think the biggest accomplishment at Headquarters that I think I’m the proudest of, it’s probably got to do with getting the Space Shuttle under cost and schedule control and on firm, solid engineering footing and management footing. It hasn’t always stayed there since, but it was on pretty solid turf at that time. Then as an astronaut, it’s hard not to think of having invented the mission specialist role. That’s something that has left a lasting footprint, that’s still done pretty much like we invented it, and really mattered, as opposed to doing something that is very enjoyable and very much fun, but doesn’t leave a real lasting footprint." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’ve been reviewing my notes and seeing if there was any other areas, and I don’t really have any. Do you have any other thoughts, or do you want to take a moment and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m afraid to look at my notes here, for fear that I’ll—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—see what else you want to reflect on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—go on for another several hours. Let me just take a quick look here. Probably not. There’s all kinds of war stories. You know, the old pilots’ adage, “They get better every time we tell them.” That, and the other one was, “The first liar doesn’t have a chance.” They’re two of the sayings.\\n\\n But there’s a whole bunch of people. We’ve mentioned Don Puddy, that I wish we could capture what’s in his brain before that’s gone, and others. One of the challenges that the Shuttle has even today, even as old and seemingly obsolescent as it is in a lot of people’s minds, is that there’s a lot of corporate knowledge that is gone. We do things such and such a way. Why? Well, we’ve lost track of why. In some cases it really matters; there’s a lurking danger that this is circumventing. In other cases, it was fairly arbitrary and we picked that because we had to pick something. And not knowing the difference can be a little bit scary if you’re trying to expand things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have a loosely related question to that. I did have a note of that earlier that I was going to ask you. All of the things that you learned during your training with Skylab and working with that, were you able to apply that when you were looking at Station as a manager? Did any of that come back to help you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did some. I did some work most recently on a review committee for Booz Allen, who did some cost work for Bill [William H.] Gerstenmaier, when the Space Station all went to hell around the budget, and that was one of my conclusions, was that all of those Skylab lessons learned, 99 percent of them are going to have to get relearned, because in a way it’s like bringing up kids. You bring up kids, and you learn something by experience. It sure would be nice to tell your kids, so your kid didn’t have to go through that turmoil, but it doesn’t work that way.\\n\\n There’s a lot of that in the management of the space program, too, is they just can’t listen and deal with—let’s don’t plan it out to the minute. For God’s sakes, let’s give them a list and let them figure it out. Let’s give them some time up front. Let’s understand adaptation to space. Let’s understand how to work with the PIs. There’s a whole bunch of things that are Skylab lessons learned, and somewhere there’s books that literally are titled Skylab Lessons Learned, that have gotten away from us.\\n\\n The thing I think that bothers me most is that when we developed Shuttle, that happened largely in the seventies, and you remember that Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo was a sixties program, that when [John F.] Kennedy said we’re going to go to the Moon and back, no American had ever been in space. Talk about guts. The experience that developed Mercury and then Gemini and then Apollo, all to support the Apollo goals—because those first two steps were needed to learn so we could get there—that experience and those people were the very senior people that led us into the Shuttle. Like I said, that was in the seventies. We’re now in what I call the Os, which is thirty years later. None of the people that developed Apollo are still around and available in a meaningful way. Virtually none of the people that developed the Shuttle are around and available in a meaningful way.\\n\\n Whenever we do whatever it is that we’re going to do next, it’s going to be with a blank sheet of paper, starting all over again, and it’s going to be important to budget it, both time and money, understanding that there’s a whole bunch of lessons that are going to have to get relearned, and that the way we’re talking about it now in some of the going-to-Mars studies just strike me as not very well informed and not working the real issues.\\n\\n We’ll continue the NASA thing. We don’t have enough money, so we’ll do a system study, and we’ll outline what it is we’re going to do. For God’s sakes, why don’t we identify the technologies that aren’t good enough yet, put money into them, and maybe one of these days they’ll be far enough along. If we had the money that we’ve spent on studies over the years, had instead developed it in technology, we’d be another generation into a couple of things.\\n\\n But I worry about that, and that’s partly the agency has ossified. The people with experience are gone, and the people that are there now just aren’t the same. And it’s not that they couldn’t be, it’s they’re not the same because they didn’t have the same set of experiences. They didn’t deal with the Apollo 12. They didn’t launch STS-1 for the first time, hoping like hell that the tiles stayed on. Those people just aren’t going to be around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It will be a very interesting time the next few years to watch and see what happens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and there’s not enough money, anyway, and so it looks to me like we’re going to do—I’m a pessimist—we’re going to do the same thing we did under [George W.] Bush’s dad, and that is we’re going to announce a program to Mars. I mean, we put one together. Dick set up a whole program around it when I was there. I told him I didn’t want anything to do with it, because there wasn’t any money in it, and the same thing’s true here. We’re going to kill a couple of trees, write a couple of books, and do nothing. We’re going to talk more about the Shuttle being obsolete, and we’re going to edict it gone by a day when there won’t be any other way to get there, so of course, it will keep flying. We’re not doing anything different. One of these days, we will." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess till then we’ll look forward to that day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you again for all the time you gave me this morning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William B. Lenoir", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it’s been interesting. It has been interesting and fun, and it will be interesting to see how it turns out and whether it looks like it makes any sense and has any degree of coherence whatsoever." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00165", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2020-071.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Marion, G. Toby (1971-1975): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2020-071", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2020-071", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Toby Marion served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan from 1971 to 1975 in an education program. As a science teacher, he took experiment kits (provided by the United Nations Development Programme) around to middle and high schools in Kapisa Province and taught local science teachers how to use them. Marion then extended his service to teach three semesters of engineering in Kabul. In the interview, he discusses his reasons for joining the Peace Corps, what Afghanistan was like in the early 1970s, the comfortable standard of living he enjoyed on $90/month, and how his group was encouraged to dress professionally in order to garner respect. He speaks about the life-long friends he developed, of the satisfaction of becoming fluent in Farsi, and how impressed he was with the world knowledge of illiterate local villagers. He also recounts a 46-day hike across central Afghanistan, and shares how the Peace Corps influenced him to become an internationalist. Interviewed and recorded by Candice Wiggum, February 3, 2020. 3 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).", + "dates_of_materials": "3 February 2020", + "extent": "3 digital files (audio; stereo; 69 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "002. Afghanistan.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Afghanistan. Marion, G. Toby (1971-1975): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Afghanistan", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2020-071", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2020-071-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/13jfl3t07f561re5b115j837e17ic80f.pdf?odc=20240104074012-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/1e949dc9-4693-45c4-9cff-d2171e13b082/e6207288-2c28-4ba2-827a-4de985021da3/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzIwM2VfMzlkYmU3ODk2YzAzOWI2ZDI0MWQ4MmE3YjRjNGYzZmE0MTQ0NTAwN2U2NTQ5MWQ2MzE4YjMxZTJlYTRlOWUxN18vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS8xZTk0OWRjOS00NjkzLTQ1YzQtOWNmZi1kMjE3MWUxM2IwODIvZTYyMDcyODgtMmMyOC00YmEyLTgyN2EtNGRlOTg1MDIxZGEzL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Oakland, California", + "length": "30 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed October 4, 2022, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "G. Toby Marion Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Candice Wiggum" + ], + "respondents": [ + "G. Toby Marion" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:02", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Today is February 3, 2020. This is Candice Wiggum and I am interviewing Toby Marion, who is a Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan from 1971 to 1975 as a science teacher. So welcome, Toby." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:23", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:24", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And let's start off with why you joined Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:28", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I graduated from college in 1970. And the month before or two months before we graduated was the first draft lottery and I ended up getting a high number. So I was out of danger or chance of becoming drafted for the Vietnam War. And I went and got a masters degree in chemical engineering, which was my subject. And as I came out of that in this at the end of 71, I had job offers from industry, from Chevron and some chemical companies. And I also was pursuing getting a teaching post in Africa because I had met a Nigerian fellow at MIT where I did my master's and thought I had that all lined up until I realized that they were expecting somebody to be paying my way. And I was expecting to come on just as a junior teaching assistant. And so that fell through. And so I applied to the Peace Corps. I was offered Western Samoa and Afghanistan. And after some review of that and talking to friends, I decided to go to Afghanistan. There was no problem in my family. My older brother had joined the Peace Corps and had gone to Guatemala. My father was an officer in the Navy in World War Two and had actually discouraged me from joining Rozzi when I was in college because he said, well, you don't need you don't know if you'll need to serve, but why don't you just wait and see and go to university and see what happens after that? So anyway, I guess I joined the Peace Corps because at that time we felt two things. One, that there was a need to serve the country one way or another. And I was opposed to the war. I wasn't going to be doing that. And to to see the world. I couldn't see myself working in an oil refinery immediately at the age of 21 or 22 with a long life ahead to do that kind of thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:02:28", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And, and how soon after you got accepted did you go to training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:02:34", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was fairly quick because I ended up working for Union Carbide Corporation in New Jersey the summer of 71, and they wanted me to stay on. In fact, that was even a bit enticing because they were going through a 30 percent layoff. But they liked me. So they wanted me to stay there and they let me stay as long as I wanted. So I stayed for five months and made pretty good money. But I was able to leave them in October and join the Peace Corps in November of 71." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:03:02", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, great. Great. And where did you train?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:03:06", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was kind of weird. We had what was called a priest in those days, a priest invitational staging in Denver. And so they flew us all out to Denver. And this was a four day meeting. And it was bizarre because I walked into my hotel room, we shared rooms and I looked at a guy that I recognized, like he lived next door. And he, he ran track at Cornell and I played tennis at Cornell. And we'd seen each other running around the track in the springtime for the last three or four years. So anyway, we joined we were only a dozen in our group or maybe 13, I don't recall. And the presentational staging was very hierarchical, shall we say. They had returned Peace Corps volunteers. They had staff members, they had a psychologist and a doctor. And we went through a whole series of different presentations which were trying to give us a feel for what the culture and society of Afghanistan would be like. And there was also a chance, I think, to wash out at that stage if anybody had, you know, freaked out, but nobody did. We just, you know, worked all day long and went out and partied at night and then bang, they put us on an airplane and we flew to Rome where we got 20 hours off and we all are 28 hours off.\n\nWe all ran around and saw the basilica, the Colosseum and whatever else. And then we got on another plane. We went to Tehran, spent four or five hours waiting in Tehran, drinking rum and coke at the bar. And then we got in a plane and flew to Afghanistan. And we saw this landscape like nothing we'd ever seen before. It's just solid brown mud houses and mostly nothing but Rocky Mountains. And we landed and went straight into classrooms and we were all completely wiped out. And the classrooms, the downstairs, they said, welcome. This is pretty big compound in the middle of. And they said welcome and you're going to be doing this, that and the other blah, blah, blah, and then they sent us upstairs to language lessons, which was unbelievable. So we sat down and they gave us language lessons and they taught us a bunch of sentences by rote. And then we after" + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:05:16", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is without any sleep or" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:05:18", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Without any sleep, without any food, nothing. So we went straight then to our homes where they had homes booked for us. And they were typical Afghan homes, very basic made of concrete, which is unusual in that time. Only the big cities had concrete buildings and we had a cook and a houseboy and the cook came out and they spread tarpaulins or whatever, you know, coverings on the floor. And we sat cross-legged, we ate rice and chicken and had a meal. And then we collapsed, exhausted our beds, you know, early, early evening and about three o'clock in the morning, we all woke up with dreadful jetlag. And it was blackest night. And before we gone to bed, we said, what was that language all about? We can't remember. Even one word from what we'd done is how why do they do that? And so we wake up at three o'clock in the morning and blackest night in the distance, you start to hear donkeys braying and things you've never heard before in your life. And pretty soon cock, you know, cock a doodle doing and all of a sudden, bang, all those sentences came right out. We were able to repeat verbatim everything we learned in those language lessons because it had sat in the back of our heads. Anyway, that was that training went on for four months, nine to five language because I was in a group of a dozen science teacher trainers, the United Nations, I think it was you. NDP had developed boxes, big boxes, about four feet high, two feet wide and three feet. OK, they developed boxes with all the equipment inside to do the experiments in the physics, chemistry, biology textbooks, the schools in Afghanistan at that time were based on the French say system, which meant that the students took something like 12 or 13 different subjects every year, all throughout their progression of middle school and high school.\n\nAnd so this meant they had a little bit of physics, a little bit of chemistry, a little bit of biology every day. Now accompanying these textbooks, of course, were accompanying the textbooks, were descriptions of experiments, but none of the students had ever done the experiments. None of the teachers had ever taught the experiment. So what they did is they sat there and they memorized what was in the textbooks. So if it was hydrolyzed water into hydrogen and oxygen, they sat there back and forth and they said, well, you, you hook up a battery and you put a wire in the water and you energize it and it splits into hydrogen and oxygen. And after a while, you collect so much hydrogen and you take a match and you turn around and you put the match to the hydrogen and it pops it makes an explosion because hydrogen is highly flammable. And so they would memorize this in Farsi, which was their language, and but they'd never done this. So what we did is we went I had nine middle schools, seven high schools in the province of copies. And I would go to all of these different schools and teach the teachers how to do these experiments. And of course, we came with the equipment and then gave that equipment to the schools, or in some cases, the schools had already had the equipment delivered to them. And this was kind of exciting for everyone because they they'd never seen a foreigner before. And B, they were now able to do what they were supposed to be doing in their in their curriculum." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:08:51", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And was this all schools around Kabul, outside of Kabul?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:08:56", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All of us. Everything was out of Kabul. Yeah. Because Kabul itself is relatively advanced. It had had its moments in history. It had had a king in 1919 that turn back the clock and kicked the women out of the schools and so on and so forth. But basically they had had various movements to get modern education. So all the provinces all around the country is where we went." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:09:20", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. And how did you get around?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:09:24", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You got around through public transport, which was basically busses and trucks and Russian jeeps and the basic mode, the Russian jeep, for example, which is about the same size and looked the same as a jeep from a World War II movie. One time I counted there were 17 people in that jeep. It was absolutely astonishing. The driver would sit way over and the left hand side and there would be three other people next to him. And then in the second row, there would be five people crammed in. And then the back there were two opposing benches and there would be two people opposing each other. And then there'd be five men standing up on the back on the bumper holding on. So these things were, you know, right down to the their shock absorbers, you know, and going over bumpy roads. The busses were equally bizarre. They were rather small. What we would be bigger than a minivan, but a lot less than a, it would be like a small school bus and they would be filled with people. And sometimes they would have sacks of grain with them. Sometimes they would have a goat with them, sometimes they'd have a chicken with them. And then on the roof they would have a rack that had a high rail all the way around and up. There would be all kinds of produce and what have you. So sometimes you'd end up in one of these busses, like I worked in Panjshir Valley, which is one of the high school districts, which is a very rugged valley, because I was living at 5000 feet and we would go up to seven or 8000 feet to the schools and it would be switchback roads through the most bumpy, rocky roads you could possibly imagine. This is one of the places where the Soviets stubbed their toe and their 10 year war with the Afghans. And that, like many places in Afghanistan, the terrain is unconquerable. You know, there's no way to go in there and take anything over. It's just impossible." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:11:15", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So I imagine you had lots of frightening experiences on the Jeeps in the bus. Did you ever have any really dangerous ones?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:11:24", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really. I think probably one of the most frightening things we had happened was during our training period, the first Iran Pakistan war, maybe the second it was a 71 war, 72 war. And so all the Americans were evacuated from Pakistan up through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan to a place called Jalalabad. And we had which is right on the eastern border there, are close to the eastern border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And it's sort of. For that country, it's sort of like a Florida in the sense it has palm trees and it's warm and it's relatively lower latitude and significantly lower elevation. And so we went down there and the town was just filled with Americans from USAID and from the embassies and consulates who had been evacuated because this war had started, which didn't last very long. But it was concerning, you know, and I'm sure that the way things are, I'm sure my parents back in America and other people would be thinking, oh, they're over there in a war zone, you know, which of course, you're actually very, very far from anything. But the only other time that I had a really frightening experience was actually during a holiday where I traveled overland, going west to Iran and I took a bus from Tehran to Isfahan going south. And at that stage, they used to say about Tehran, if you visit from the east, it's like Paris. And if you visit it from the west, it's like a dump, which is overstated in both cases. But Iran was vastly more developed than Afghanistan and everything about the place was very well developed. And I got on a bus and I was heading south and it was it's icy and cold and snowy in the middle of winter. And this bus came around a corner and he lost control of the bus, started skidding on the ice. And as we came around the corner coming towards us was a massive 40 foot Mack truck, you know, with a great big whatever on the back. And everybody in the bus started saying Allah Humma Salle ala Muhammad, you know, which is like a Shia Muslim expression of save me God, you know. And that literally scared the daylights out of me. And the, the bus driver just grabbed the wheel and turned it left and right and got it immediately back under control and turned back into his lane. But for a moment there, I thought, this is going to be the end. You know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:13:55", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So now you've been for four months in Kabul?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:14:01", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In this training house in Kabul. And then we moved to Kapisa and we were taken out there and introduced to the, the authorities and given our marching orders as to which schools we'd visit and what mean. And we were introduced to counterparts as well. I had two counterparts and they were young Afghan men who were a few years older than I was. So they were probably 25 and 30. And I was at this stage, you know, 22. And we went about our business. We set up a schedule with schools we'd go to and we met with ourselves as to how we do this. And they were kind of waiting for me to, you know, lead the way because we had already been through the kids and how to do all the experiments in our training program with the U.N. and in Kabul. So it wasn't like, you know, opening a box and figuring out how to put things together for the first time. And so off we went." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:14:58", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you say we, so there is more than one of you that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:15:02", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Me as the Peace Corps volunteer and my two education counterparts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:15:05", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And you went to different schools in the area?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:15:07", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right. And a couple of them were day trips, you know, so one of the first things we had to do was find housing. So I found I was based out of basically Gulbahar, which is a fairly large town at the mouth of the Panjshir Valley. And in Gulbahar, the Germans had built it as an aid project, a textile plant. So they had a big compound there that had concrete housing and had running water and electricity and so forth. And the governor of the province wanted me to live there. But I guess being me, I was a bit headstrong. I didn't want to live there. I wanted to live, you know, the real country experience. So I moved a couple of miles south where I found a house that was right on the main road. There's only one road in a province like that. It runs down the middle of the province. And it was a mud compound, which is what they all are, about 30 meters square with six meter high walls. And along one wall was five rooms. There was a kitchen and a living room and then a stairwell up to the roof and then another room, which is a bedroom and then another room, which we used as a storeroom or could have been another bedroom. The first three all had glass doors, louver doors that you could open and get into the garden. The garden itself was big, big enough for a vegetable garden.\n\nAnd then in the far corner was the so-called bathroom. And that was the only place where there was any concrete. There were two rooms to the bathroom. The first one was a room with a concrete floor, and then it had a table and wooden bukhari. Bukhari means steamer. Actually, it means where? To make steam, so it's a little wooden stove that you put wood in the bottom and it heats what's basically a large bucket of water and the chimney goes up through the middle of it. And this is how you heat the house as well. But there's no water. There's another simple bukhari, which is you just burn wood and there's a stove pipe that goes out the window and that heats the room up. So anyway, that was the bath bathing room. And then the next room along was the toilet, which was just it was raised up a couple of feet. And it's just a flat mud floor, adobe type floor with a hole in it. So you squatted there and did your business and it was off the ground a bit because on the back side of the house underneath it's open and there's a person who comes around and collects your refuse and they use that to fertilize the fields, which is one of the reason why it's dangerous to eat any vegetables without cooking and washing and so forth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:18:03", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, tell me more about how you lived, how to cook, how to, you know, what was your daily life like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:18:11", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, we had a unique feature to our experience in Afghanistan, and that is that at the time we were told we were one of only two out of 55 countries where the volunteers made a lot more money than the local people. So our salaries worked out to about 90 dollars a month. Which, you know, in retrospect, if I had gone into industry, I would have been making a thousand and fifty dollars a month, that was what a couple of my offers were at. So I was thinking I'm really lowly paid. But in fact, I think the prime minister of the country made about a hundred dollars a month, you know, so it turns out that the house rent was about six dollars and fifty cents and all the vegetables and meat and fruit and whatever that you could possibly buy was about six dollars and fifty cents a month. And we had a manservant who had been recommended to us by the by the Germans because they all had servants. So we had a man servant. He cost six dollars and fifty cents a month. So for about 20 bucks a month, we had everything we could possibly need. And the man servant, he brought water from the stream, which is called a juy in front of the house, and then boiled it in order for it to be safe, for us to use for, you know, tea and drinking and cooking and so forth. And he bought all the food and vegetables and he did all the cooking and he washed our clothes and we just did our business.\n\nWhen we got there, we were told, if you want to earn respect from the locals, you need to dress appropriately for a teacher. If you have long hair and you wear jeans and scruffy clothes, they said you'll be identified with what the Peace Corps euphemistically called WTs, which is stood for world travelers, which is means hippies, which there was a train, metaphorically speaking, from Paris to New Delhi. And these busses went along every day and people could, for a fairly nominal amount of money, buy a ticket on this bus and get on and get off wherever they like to go all the way through Europe and Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan all the way down to India. And a lot of these people were, you know, what we'd been a little bit like in our latter years at college, but they were big time hippies and they had long hair and they often times went native with their dress and they smoked a lot of hash and some of them got into more serious drugs. And a lot of the women were, quote unquote, promiscuous. So are the men, of course. And so they were really looked down upon. So they said you don't want to in any way be identified with those folks. So what you need to do is go to used clothing bazaar in Kabul, where they shipped out containers full of used discarded suits from Germany. And these were usually worsted wool suits and they were three piece suits and they were in great condition. Relatively speaking, they'd been cleaned and pressed and they cost about ten dollars a pop.\n\nSo we all went nuts. We got our hair cut short and we went to the bazaar and we came back with three or four of these beautiful suits which you wore with the shirt. Nobody wore neckties. And if you put one of these things on and went on a bus into the countryside or whatever people would, and you're a foreigner, people would treat you with respect and they would offer you their seats or they would help you to get your luggage on and off the bus or whatever. So anyway, so our daily life, it was just what you'd expect from people working in education. You'd get up, you'd have breakfast, you'd head off. I had a bicycle so I could ride my bike to the local schools, which is just one more mustardy high school, just a couple of miles down the road where I'd get to hitch a ride on a jeep, which is basically an open platform taxi to go to Mahmud Iraqi, which was the next high school, which is a couple of miles down the road, like five or six miles down the road. And this form of community taxi is universal in the Third World, throughout the Middle East and India and South America and whatever. It's just very common. You know, if you need a ride, you go out in the road, you put your hand up, and if it's one of these, it stops and it says fifty cents, you know, and on you get, off you go. So and so we go and we teach.\n\nAnd then at the end of that, they give us a lunch, which was typically, again, you spread a covering on the floor and six or eight teachers sit around and they'd have a big bowl of soup. And with that had been cooked some chicken or some lamb. Beef really wasn't never. It never was it lamb? Some, some chicken, some beef, some mutton or some camel meat and maybe a few vegetables and some fresh onions. And then each person would get one of these big breads, which were very substantial, maybe two feet long or eighteen inches long and ten or twelve inches wide. And they were shaped sort of like a horseshoe. And they were thick, very rich, delicious wheat bread. And you take half that vegetarian half, then everyone would tear one half into little pieces and chuck it into the bowl, which would then absorb all the liquid and then with the other half you. Tear off small pieces of bread that could form like a spoon in your hand, and you you'd be given by the host your chunk of meat, so you'd grab a little bit of your meat, then you'd scoop in and scoop out some of this wet, moist, soaking bread with your dry bread and you'd eat that. You always eat with your right hand because your left hand was used for personal hygiene purposes. And the meals were actually very simple, but highly nutritious. And I mean, never saw fat people in Afghanistan, that's for sure. So we'd have the lunch and then at the end of that would be done. We go home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:24:05", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At what time would it be done?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:24:08", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I really don't recall specifics, but early afternoon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:24:11", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I was getting at. Did you have a lot of time afterwards?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:24:15", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was a fair amount of time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:24:16", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you usually spent that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:24:17", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not enough. Once I played volleyball with the guys at the school and they were really good volleyball players, we had a great time. And this one fellow teacher who was about my age had an older brother who'd gone to college in America. So he was knowledgeable about what things were like in America because he'd heard all these stories from his older brother. But we would typically go back with where my house was, was on a local bazaar. The little town was called Bakuham, and there would be maybe 12 or 15 shops, five or six or seven on each side of the road. And one would be textiles and one would be fruit and one would be meat and one would be, you know, pens and pencils and what have you. And sometimes I go out there and sit with the locals and chat with them and have a lot of experiences. I know politically there were some interesting things that happened. This was during the time of Watergate. And I picked up like immediately in November of ‘71. One of the things you went out and bought was a shortwave radio. It was about the size of a lunchbox and it had a long antenna that you'd pull out. And BBC World Worldwide was where we got our news. And I still get my one of my primary sources of news from that today, because it's the most, I think, independent and also very efficient." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:25:52", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it covers more of the world." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:25:52", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, and it's quick. It's absolutely the quickest to an international issue. So I'd been listening to that for years. And when Watergate came down and one thing we had in the Peace Corps was a free subscription to Time magazine and a weekly copy of the New York Times News of the Week in review and getting mail back and forth from the states took three weeks. There was no telephones and there's no TV in the country at that time. And so you really were isolated. But once a week we'd get delivered. We'd have to go into Kabul to pick this stuff up. So oftentimes we would go in on the weekends or somebody would actually not too often would anybody come out our way. But for a while, I had had a roommate, by the way, who was working on the Food for Peace program. They had a terrible drought I this time, and people were dying of starvation. So we sent in lots of wheat with USAID and lots of Peace Corps volunteers to help to distribute that. Anyway, it was fascinating, the whole thing of Watergate, because I'd be listening to BBC and they'd be saying, well, the president is being investigated for, you know, this break in and that he claimed he knew nothing about it, but it kept building and building and building.\n\nAnd I'd be sitting there at one stage having read an article in time about what was happening, what was likely to happen, and these local shopkeepers who were illiterate at that time, Afghanistan was 92, 96 percent illiterate, something like that. They said, well, it doesn't, they listen to the BBC as well. They listen to the Persian language service. They'd say, well, it doesn't really make much sense what's going on in America. They're talking about putting your Nixon on trial, but they said he's the king. You can't put a king on trial. You have to take him out of being king first and then you can put him on trial. And I'd be reading TIME magazine saying, well, there's severe constitutional crises involved here and that it said that a sitting president can't be called before the courts. You know, he has to be impeached first. You know, so I was saying, you know, the wisdom of people is not related to their literacy or to their wealth. It is something that a culture develops over millennia. And people understand basic principles of government, whether they know what democracy is or whether they know what a written constitution is, is pretty fascinating." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:28:26", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Speaking of that, did you make friends there? Did you have people that you would go to their homes and visit and what was that like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:28:35", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, quite a few. I hesitate slightly because there's one family I got really close to. And this was the fellow who was the director of the culture program in the training program. And he came from a family that was his father had been a had been the private secretary of the king. And he had two wives and he had 13 sons and four daughters. And I became good buddies with this guy. And I ended up going to their house once or twice a month for three years. And they treated me like a like a son. They were they're very hospitable people. So they treated, you know, a lot of people that way. But as it turns out, we became very close friends. And in the end, he had a lot of his family emigrated to the states as not refugees, but political asylum. Asylum. Yeah. And one of his one of the brothers I got to know all the brothers and sisters very well from his half of the family, which was about half of the 13. Seventeen children and four or five of them live here in the Bay Area and one lives over in Lafayette, and I see him rather regularly, so I got to know that family very intimately. Had many, many, many meals at their house, both just with the family or in big parties and with the family, was always interesting because it was predominantly men. But the guys would go into the kind of private dining room off the kitchen, which is big enough to seat a big table, I don't know, eight or 10 of us around the table. And guys would all eat in the sisters and the wives would stand around behind and they would serve us, you know, and when we finished and got up and left and they'd sit down and they'd have a meal and have a women's party, so to speak, and stay as long as they liked, etc., but so it was pretty exciting. To get to know that family and to see how they operated and" + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:30:41", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was culturally was most interesting to you or most challenging to you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:30:48", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess the thing that happens when you join the Peace Corps, there's two language groups in Afghanistan. One is Farsi speaking. They call it Dari and the other is Pashto or Afghani, or spoke to the Afghans actually as a culture group. And one of the things that's so distressing about our current war in Afghanistan is that we're on the side, which is against the Afghans, because the Taliban are the Afghans, basically, and that's also the majority group. And there's a large it's more than, say, half the people in Afghanistan and there's an equal number over the border in Pakistan. So it's an artificial border that was drawn through there by the British several centuries ago. Anyway, the Farsi speakers are and they call it Dari because that's kind of a nationalist thing. But it's different in the sense that the language which the world thinks of as Farsi developed in Iran, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and in the Soviet socialist republics that were in the center of the north of Afghanistan. So, yeah. So it's quite a big language group spread over quite a large area. Now Iran intends tends to be overwhelmingly Shia. In Afghanistan is overwhelmingly Sunni, and they're different ethnically, but they speak the same language. And so that's interesting. But fundamentally, it's like English and American, except that in America we are, you know, children of Britain, if you will, whereas in that part of the world, the language developed in the 10th century, the 9th, 10th, 11th century when Islam brought Arabic into older language group.\n\nAnd Farci is an Indo-European language, it has a grammar that's not unlike Spanish, except there's no masculine and feminine and it has a huge amount of Arabic vocabulary, kind of like we have a lot of Latin vocabulary, even though the language is more fundamentally German rooted, you know, English with the Norse and the Vikings and so on and so forth. So culturally, the most interesting thing is to learn a new language and to see how people think about things. And every time you do that, you learn a new way of thinking about things and you also reflect upon, well, why do we do it this way? And they do it that way. Yeah, yeah. So step by step, it's just an absolutely amazing. You also question your own ways of doing things and realize that. It ain't perfect what we do. You know, it's just how it developed or in some cases it is perhaps a better way to do things. But nonetheless, you have to take seriously what the other people think when you're a minority of one living in a large cultural environment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:33:54", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what was. What's their biggest curiosity about you? What did you get asked the most about your comment at the most about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:34:06", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, a range of things. The students were just amazed to see a foreigner, right? So after we'd give a lecture, I remember one time in particular, the students would all come and gather around, you know, and be asking questions. At one point they said, would you would you just talk, just say four or five sentences in English, you know? So I sort of stood back and said, well, OK. And I said four or five sentences in English. And they all started laughing and talking to each other and going tchalkchalkchalkchalk, because that's what I sounded like to them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:34:39", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All sounded like gobbledygook." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:34:39", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right. And they all laughed and very respectfully, OK. This wasn't ridicule. Yeah. Yeah. And then the other said, well, would you write something on the board, you know, just write. And so I would write and they thought it was so interesting that I wrote from left to right and not right to left. And B, because all the things stuck together, you know, so that that's the sort of simple stuff. Yeah. The other things people were interested in way of life in the West. And what we had, there were some who basically said, how can the world be round when you can see as far as you can see and it's flat. You know, this is high school students. Right. And then the third thing, which would always come up again in a very academic and respectful way because we traveled a lot. So the two high schools that I went to that were close, that was that. I went there and I came home. But the other places I went to were always far away. It took a day to get there and you'd spend two or three days there. You'd sleep in a room in the school because that's the only place you could sleep and they would attend to you sort of day and night, you know, bring you lunch and your dinner and your breakfast.\n\nAnd then you'd finish your work and you'd go back. But as a result, you spent many evenings talking to people and I ended up learning the language quite comprehensively. So as time went on, we could talk about anything. And the three things that they always came at me for were Vietnam, apartheid in South Africa and Palestine and Israel. And they were opposed to the American positions and all those. And they would say, well, you know, why does it make any sense for the American Americans to be using these B-52 and dropping bombs on rice paddies? Right. Or how can America support segregation of a society based on the color of the skin? Or how can America support the taking of the land? And the Palestinians who we like, the Jews, we respect the Jews. There are people of the book like we're all people of the book. But it's not fair that they've taken Obama. So, you know, and most of these cases, I went there being opposed to the war in Vietnam as well. But when you get attacked like that, even if it's academic, you end up saying, well, we're not doing it for evil reasons. We're doing it because some people believe that that's the best way to hold back the tide of communism, which is against the way we live.\n\nSo you find yourself basically giving reasons why you're not against what you actually are against. So you get tied up in knots over that. And of course, later on, actually, it had already happened. The Pentagon Papers came out and more recently we saw the movie The Post, you know, which really puts it in black and white that, you know, the government knew what we all knew as college students, that they were lying through their teeth to us and they had to be stopped through public action, you know, but anyway, that's a very hard thing to deal with when you're a foreigner in a in a primeval environment like that. So anyway, these people, they'd be nice. You know, they come and I'm also talking about age gaps because the people I'd be having dinner with would be 40, 50 years old. And they'd been teaching for 20 years. And they were the literate ones, the knowledgeable ones. They read history. They would constantly be talking about, you know, the Russian Revolution and World War Two and telling jokes about all those things. And, you know, I was learning a lot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:38:25", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you date all over there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:38:27", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. I dated American girls and I had an Afghan girlfriend for a while, which was dicey. But." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:38:35", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well I was wondering about that, you know, what was it what was it like to because I know they're very protective of their women. Well, foreigner to date, Afghan. He must have been interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:38:46", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I mean, the people that we got to know where the upper echelons of society and these are people who had traveled abroad and so on and so forth. So you were careful about what you did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:38:55", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, interesting. Any adventures that you had?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:39:04", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I should yes, I had one terrific adventure and it kind of comes on. I did two years of this job of teaching high schools and middle schools. And then my buddy Yuri Zagarynch, who was in the same program, had found out that Kabul University's Faculty of Engineering USAID contract with Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey was coming to an end and the professors were coming out and going back to New Jersey and that they could use help. And so he and I both had actually been graduate students at MIT. So we had reasonable credentials and had studied engineering. So we went we talked first to the Peace Corps and then we went to the faculty of engineering and talked to the head of the department. And I read up and I got a job as a professor at the Faculty of Engineering. So that was beginning in the autumn of 73. And I taught three semesters there and I taught things like thermodynamics and chemical process topics and chemistry. But between the finishing of our first assignment and the beginning of the second in the summer of 73, we took a hike through central Afghanistan.\n\nSo, no, I got that wrong. We did it the following summer after we'd already been there because one of the guy who organized it with us was also a teacher, a professor there, a young Afghan guy. And so we headed out to Afghans and me and Yuri and with packs on our backs. And we took a bus trip up past Baghlan and a little bit west of that in the center on the north side of the Hindu Kush Mountains. And we headed off and we hiked through the central mountains of Afghanistan for 46 days. And we lived off the land, you know, and it was those places have been this is a medieval country anywhere. And there it was exactly the same as it would have been like 2000 years ago, except that in any given village, there would be a few people with watches and there would be a few people with actually many people with shortwave radios. And that's how they were connected to the outside world." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:41:18", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And where did you stay?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:41:21", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we camped, so we had sleeping bags and we used tents. Occasionally we carried very lightweight tents, mostly sleeping bags, just slept in the open area. So one time I remember we went to a little place called Putinato, and we had hiked all day long and we didn't know if we were going to find water or not. And we got there and we did. And we bought up like thirty four eggs and they didn't have wheat bread there. They had barley bread because it was too cold. It was 10000 feet. It was too cold for the wheat to properly mature. Yeah. And so they brought barley bread and a couple of huge chunks of butter and we cooked a gigantic omelet and we ate this bread, barley bread and this omelet. And we were just amazed and just wonderful. And then we we had a shotgun with us and a great big six six shooter, you know, because Abdullah Cauca was our our guide, basically. And he had organized this because in theory, you could be at risk. So you needed some form of protection. I say in theory, because a country like Afghanistan, literally, it had a population in those days that was said to be around 60 million and there would be one or two murders a year in the country.\n\nAnd now maybe there's more you don't hear of. But that was the news. So another time we headed off. And of course, this is just a situation where you head out of a village and you one time we contracted for a donkey to carry our good packs and the donkey was pregnant, so had a great big belly. And we got about half an hour out of town and the donkey was not going to do it. So the guy apologized, gave us our money back and headed back. And so we had to pick up these heavy packs, which we added some food and things to. Yeah, yeah. So as you go along, you'll see the odd sheepherder and you're talking about a landscape that's just brown and very hilly and shrubs, but no forests, no trees, just absolutely brown as far as the eye can see. And so we'd see a herder and Abdullah would go to him and say and have a chat. You know, we're not talking about a one minute chat, like a 15 minute chat. You know, this guy would say basically, well, you hike along and this is the main trail and there'll be trails going off the left and right.\n\nBut you want to. See this rock in the distance or had just to the east, you know? Yeah, and so we hiked from like nine o'clock in the morning or eight o'clock in the morning until 4:00. And it was going to be sun setting, you know, at 6:00 and. Our water had run out and we were getting scared, and about that time we started hearing the falling of water just falling of water, you know, and this was like the most amazing thing we'd ever heard. And we got closer and closer and there was more and more. And we've been told there was a spring in the middle of nowhere. So we got down into this valley and sure enough, it was a steep, steep cliffs on both sides and a flat floor that was probably 100 yards wide. And at one end was a waterfall that came down into disappeared into the earth. It was just one of those wonders of the world. Yeah. And it was fresh, beautiful water. And of course, as we did every night, you scrounge around and you get driftwood and brush and so forth, or cowpats, which are dried up completely there like, uh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:45:07", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Like peat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:45:10", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, like peat. Yeah. And we would start a fire and we would boil the water and make tea and we had bread with us and we had hard candy that we would eat during the day just to give us something in our mouth. And we'd have some boiled eggs or some, you know, whatever leftover from the last place we'd been where there had been any people. And anyway, that was a marvelous night. They were just amazed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:45:36", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You must have been so thin and in such good shape?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:45:39", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you just had one nail on the head. I figured out by the time we finished that 46 days, I got down to about 146 pounds, you know, and even playing tennis in college, I've not been below 155. You know, I've been 165 to 175 at that point. And it was kind of weird because Yuri and I would see each other at parties over the next couple of months. And typically we'd be off in the corner with a big plate of food, slowly eating, eating rice and lamb. But as we got to the end of this, we finally got the Bamyan, which is one of the most beautiful central places, which had those fabulous, huge Buddha left over from the six and eight centuries that were blown up by the Taliban. And the big international sad story. Yeah, and it was suddenly they have these famous lakes that are formed by I think it's calcium carbonate is basically a mineral that forms on the edge around these big lakes. And then they're just crystal clear. Dark blue against the sky is one of the great scenes. And so we arrive and around the edges would be grass, you know, like grass, like the greens of a golf course, you know, because the water would be seeping over the edges of these lakes and it would constantly keep wet the grass in the summer. So it was just and after being green." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:47:08", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That must have blown your mind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:47:09", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The green and the blue and that we can have as much food as we want. It is really amazing. But it was a great experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:47:16", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, sounds like it. Did you come home directly after that or did you when you when you got out of the Peace Corps, did you travel more than just that that big hike?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:47:26", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Looking back on it, I think between when I extended, I went back. You get a trip home when you extend. So I got a trip home. My brother was down in Guatemala and my parents gave me a ticket to go down to see him. They sent me down to see him. So I went to Guatemala and saw where he lived 8000 feet to Tony Kapone in the north of Guatemala in Indian country. And then I went back to Afghanistan. Teaching in the university was a fascinating experience because you discover, as all teachers do, except for a few, I suppose, that you have students that are smarter than you and are brilliant young people. So, you know, and I spoke Farsi perfectly at that stage so I could and it was engineering and mathematics and so forth. So that's not as difficult to teach language wise than, say, philosophy or history. Yeah. So I could explain to the students whose English was very weak, you know what, you know, problems and resolution of issues and so forth. And then and had some students that were really brilliant and asked really difficult questions or saw right through to the end of most typical assignments, you know, very effectively. So that was that was fascinating. And it turns out one of my students, who's about two or three years younger than I am, is in Dallas. And he had an American mother and Afghan father, and he works in the electric power industry, although he semi retired now. But we we've gotten in touch in the last two or three years by chance. You know, he was on Facebook or dinner or something. And he saw my name and he wrote me and he said, Are you the Toby? And that was in Afghanistan in the late 60s, early 70s. So, yeah, very cool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:49:12", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's, that's the nice thing. Now, about Facebook, you can keep in contact with people. Back then it was much harder." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:49:20", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But anyway, teaching was interesting and I learned a lot from that. Two things stick out in my mind. One was one day I was in the library at the Faculty of Engineering and I was in the back researching something, Ministry of Industry, and asked us to test some coal to see what quality coal it was. And one of the lab technicians and another guy from the faculty, not professors, but guys who work in sort of the administrative area we're talking, didn't know I was back there and they were in Farsi and they were saying, wow, it's amazing what's happened, what's, what's happened in America with, you know, Nixon being kicked out and Americans are losing the war in Vietnam and America is finished. And that'll be fantastic. The future belongs to the Soviet Union because they're the only power. They have the power. They have the strength, they have the discipline. Whereas America is just dissolved into trouble and will be able to take back Palestine from the Israelis. And, you know, the world, the Muslims will once again, you know, have a chance in this world. And eventually I got up and left and they saw me come out and their eyes were like, whoa.\n\nThe other thing that was interesting, which is, I suppose a little bit I don't mean to be outspoken about this, but we finished this school assignment and then the faculty, the, the minister of industry, one of his people called to get the results. And I talked to this guy for about a half an hour on the phone and explained how you do it. You know, you take a call sample and you basically put it into a thermal environment where you treated at very high temperature for a certain period of time and then basis. How much burns off and watch? You can you can establish the carbon content. And therefore, is it a hard cold or a soft, cool and high, high energy content or not? And at the end of the half an hour, he asked me my name and I told him my name. No, no, no. I want your name. I told my name. I said, no, no, that's not your name. What's your. He didn't know I was an American. Yeah. So I thought that was the best test I had on my leg, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:51:39", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, it must have been difficult contemplating coming back home as you reach the end of it. Or was it easy?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:51:46", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, you talk about how does it affect your life? Basically, I said I want to be an internationalist. And in our group, it ran the gamut. I had this fellow friend of mine who'd been at Cornell with me. He was the opposite. He said, I'm going to go back and I'm never going to go abroad again. And he became a very successful lawyer in the Midwest, you know, and God bless him. But I said I wanted to be an internationalist. So I interviewed companies in Iran. This is 75 and several. One was a Dupont subsidiary. And then I interviewed the Bahrain Petroleum Company in the Persian Gulf. And I got offered a job by then, which was Caltex oil at that time, California, Texas Oil Company, which is now 100 percent Chevron subsidiary. But this is one of the old companies that was involved in the first development of oil in the Persian Gulf in the 1930s. And so I just wanted to go overseas again. And at that time, this is one of the few companies that could do that for me, because mostly the American way of doing things and most of the countries in the world were doing these things is they don't send youngsters overseas.\n\nYou know, you got to go work for a company for 10, 15, 20 years and establish a reputation, whatever, before you consider sending it abroad. So I took that job because I want to go back right away, probably a bit compulsive or impulsive of me, insofar as when I went back to New York and lived in Manhattan and worked for Caltech at 380 Madison in New York. I fell in love with New York when it came time to go abroad, which is what I'd promised to do about fifteen months into the company. I was scratching my head, said, What the hell am I doing this for? You know? But I did. And I ended up being once again bitten by the bug. And I spent most of my career next 38 years, most of it overseas. How did you meet your wife? I met her in Bahrain. So she's an English girl and she was a teacher and I was an oil company engineer. And we met and got married there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:54:01", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what did your family think about it? Sounds like your whole family or international." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:54:06", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, my dad had been, he joined the Navy after three years at UCLA. He was in the Navy during World War II, and he came out and finished there and got a doctorate at MIT. And then he stayed in the naval reserves, flying planes. He was an aviator for twenty years and then his job was in technology. And he went abroad to many countries around the world because they were selling partial oxidation, which is a way to create syngas, which is a precursor to fertilizer manufacture and using partial oxidation. You can do that from anything from natural gas to that, you know. So it's a very useful technology. So he I mean, India, China, South America, Africa, he was overseas for one or two trips a year throughout the time I was growing up. So my mom always said, kind of, what do you want to do this for? She said, you'd be really happy just going and living in Pennsylvania and joining a golf club or tennis club and, you know, raising kids and what have you. And I said, oh, mom, in retrospect, she was right and I was right, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:55:29", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:55:31", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The world, one of the things about people our age is that the world has changed dramatically and maybe it does for everyone. But in my life it was like every single stage was at the point of cutting the cutting edge of change. You know, like even the whole expat experience, like I was an expatriate throughout the period when we lived like kings, right? That's just economically speaking, you know, we got our salary, we got cost of living allowance, we got education, we got cars, drivers, we got home leaves and airplane tickets. And that's all washed away largely, right? Yeah, the same thing in Japan. I was there 83, 86, and we had tremendous. Operations there, because we've been handed a quarter of the market after World War Two, so when I went to Celtic Soil Japan, it was the largest borrower of finance from the big American banks in the world. Know, we provided the capital to Nippon Oil Company and all kinds of wells and No. One oil, no oil company in Japan. And we sold out a few years after I left, you know, because they didn't want us there, really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:56:48", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:56:49", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, it was all like after World War II, that supreme allied commander came in and they carved up the market, gave a quarter of it, ExxonMobil, a quarter of A to shell a quarter of it to us who were newcomers and a quarter of it to the oil companies that had existed prior to World War Two. So if you look at all these things culturally, whatever, it's all been changing throughout my life. So working and Caltex, for example, I found myself as I got to be senior, sort of scratching my head because basically none of the local countries want to have an American foreign boss when you get down to it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:57:27", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:57:29", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But we had a cadre of a couple hundred people that moved around from country to country around the world. And it was a cohesive team, but it was also built on the old fashioned hierarchical corporate structure, which has disappeared because technology has made it possible to run on specialties and a little bit of management. You know, you don't need, you know, multiple layers of vice presidents and general managers and managers and supervisors and all that stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:57:58", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What's been, you know, Afghanistan has had a tumultuous history since you left. You know, how have you reacted to that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:58:09", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mostly I'm sad. In 73, Daoud Khan, who was the cousin of King Zahir Shah in Afghanistan, overthrew the shah, the porch on the shores in Afghanistan. Partitions were there, those kings that reported to him in the ancient times. This was actually predictable since nineteen fifties when the U.S. turned down Afghanistan's request for a military arrangement, you know, a treaty. And we chose center, which is based on Turkey and Iran and Pakistan, and therefore we drove Afghanistan into the Soviet bloc with India. So 90 percent of all military officers were trained in the Soviet Union from the 50s until 73, and 10 percent were trained in France, Britain and America. So needless to say, the entire army was Soviet trained. And so, as I discovered at the faculty of engineering, when I looked at the transcripts of the guys who got in there and their engineering degrees from the Soviet Union, they would have, you know, modern communist theory as their elective. And that's a bunch of propaganda. And my counterparts would say, no, no, that's not propaganda. When the students go to America and study, the advisors says take a course in American history. So that was the elective that they would always take, you know, something about America. So that's just what happens. So with this pro Soviet military, it was just a matter of time before something like that would happen. And then in 78, 79, there were three more coups. And the third one was led by a guy named Babrak Karmal, who was. There were two communist parties. One was called Parcham, which means flag, and the other was Shola-e Javid, which means eternal flame. Parcham was pro Soviet soldier. Shola-e Javid was pro China, and he actually announced his coup from Tajikistan on the radio and then was flown in by the Soviets as they invaded Afghanistan.\n\nAnd as we know, it was a 10 year war without success because places unconquerable and of course, the people suffer. And as we know from Charlie Wilson's War and Tom Hanks, the U.S. supported, you know, the anti Soviet activity and gave missiles and what have you, guns, money. And then as soon as that the Soviets were driven away, we wash our hands of the place. So we'd spent 10 years talking about how godless Soviet Union needs to be defeated. And we are people of religion and all this kind of stuff. And then as soon as that ended, we walked away from it and. Eventually, I guess this led to a situation where the precursor of the Taliban became the Taliban took over, and then they started rolling the clock back and stopping girls from going to school and allowing al-Qaida to establish training bases there. And that led to ultimately 9/11. And then since then, we've been fighting this war that miss well, sadly, there's nothing I don't think there's anything known about it. You don't read in the newspaper anything about the cultural divisions within the country and that we're supporting the minorities against the majority. And therefore, you know, it's, it's like no hope for success. And now, recently in his Washington Post articles, the last few months, it's coming out that, well, maybe we didn't ever know what you're doing there, you know, so, so I feel very sad about what's happened in Afghanistan, particularly for the people who are progressive and then want to modernize the country and they want to educate their women and they want to, you know, try to catch up to the modern world.\n\nAnd I've never been back. And I always assumed I'd go back many times. But by the time my brother ended up actually working there for a while and credit unions helping them establish some financial infrastructure, and he asked me to come back on Christmas 10, 15 years ago. Just out of the blue at the last minute, I said and I said, I'm sorry, I just I don't want to go to a war zone, you know, it's just not the time to be doing that, you know? So I respect what you're doing and you have some infrastructure and support and what have you to be doing what you're doing, because that was in a USAID contract. But. No, it's tragic what's gone on there, and the country's been in many ways, if not wrecked and certainly degraded, it used to be very elegant in a 19th century sort of way, you know, beautiful trees and avenues and structures and excellent food and vegetables, fruits." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "01:03:27", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But. What impact do you think Peace Corps has had there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "01:03:34", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had a good reputation of doing things that needed doing, teaching English were always a big one, teaching like science as we did nurses, agricultural extension programs, which was typically farmers that would go and help people to do things. And overall, I think the attitude of the people was that we're there to help, were there not to take advantage or propagandize, and therefore it's a positive thing. Yeah. I think. I think an interesting question also is what do we get out of it? And I've always been convinced that Peace Corps volunteers get more out of the experience than the countries that they go to get. But I mean, there's we read quarter of a million Peace Corps volunteers explosives in the U.S. today. They certainly have a much broader understanding of the world after they experience than before. And that adds to the body politic. You know, the country." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "01:04:45", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. Well, then I've always thought such a huge percentage of the State Department ends up being populated by former Peace Corps volunteers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "01:04:55", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Is that right? I've never, I've never seen a statistic on that. My experience was that the Peace Corps volunteers sort of went left or right. I don't mean that politically. A lot of people ended up in industry looking for oil companies and banks and traders and all this kind of stuff. And a lot of people ended up working for the federal government or local governments or State Department or whatever. So it is a leg up, I think, in terms of that process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "01:05:23", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what impact do you feel like it had on your life?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "01:05:29", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it made me an internationalist. It made me want to live and move all around the world. It enabled me to see other points of view more readily. And in some ways, as I got older, it's kind of like became a bit too difficult, you know, in the sense that sometimes I see things that I think I mean, I was at a party in in Hong Kong where we lived for 19 years before we retired in 2015. And it was a party for put on by the consul general people. He wasn't the consul general himself. It was one of the people who worked for him, for the new generals and admirals. And the military does this every year. They take all the newly promoted generals and admirals. They send them on a trip around the world and they meet all kinds of people. And I was talking to this one guy who was an army general of logistics, and he found out that I'd been in Afghanistan. The Peace Corps asked me a whole bunch of questions and he said, why aren't you involved in this? You know, this is this is a war. This is an all out thing. We should be using all of our resources. If you speak the language and understand the country and what have you, you should be involved. You know, and I remember thinking at the time, I'd love to be involved, but I learned long ago that the country is just too complex and too, you know, politicians don't listen to each other. Sometimes they don't listen to the State Department. Sometimes you have different factions within the State Department. You have the gaps between state and military and on and on and on. It's just for any one individual to influence this kind of thing. It's only possible if you make that your life endeavor. And even then, the chances of you necessarily being listened to is small." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "01:07:19", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The chance of your heart being broken is large." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "01:07:21", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. The Iraq war. I mean, it's just when I heard about it for the first in March of ‘82, you said that's a bunch of baloney. I said not even the U.S. government could be so stupid as to invade Iraq. Anybody who's been in the Middle East or understands anything about that knows it would be a fiasco. And in ‘83, one of my best buddies came back from a meeting in Washington and he said, oh, no, it's a done deal. It's just a matter of what month they're going to invade. And I was absolutely blown away. And of course, it turns out it was a terrible fiasco and based on completely false information and it has accomplished nothing other than to set the whole region on fire. So, you know, so I tended to I read a hell of a lot and I vote and I write some letters to the editor from time to time. But I haven't really contributed anything to world peace." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "01:08:17", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything else you want to say? Any, any other things you want to add?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "01:08:27", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess only that I support Peace Corps as a, as a very viable program and a very good thing, and I think it's extremely important to keep up high standards. The one thing that happened that was kind of interesting at the end of the time that I was in the Peace Corps is that there was a change in the attitude of the volunteers coming in. I think I mentioned that to you the other day. You know, instead of being told where you need to cut your hair and dress conservatively and we did it immediately, the volunteers were like, no one's going to tell me I can't wear jeans and have long hair. That's who I am, you know. And if you're going to do something like Peace Corps, I think you need to go into it wholeheartedly. And I think most volunteers do. And I think it's a wonderful program and I'm very positive about it. But I think it's really important that it have good goals and good jobs and good benefits for the countries in which we operate, because that's where it's really appreciated and that's why it does something good. So." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "01:09:27", + "speaker": "Candice Wiggum", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, great. Thank you. Thanks, Toby." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "01:09:29", + "speaker": "G. Toby Marion", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you. Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00228", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HartmanHL/hartmanhl.htm", + "original_file_name": "HartmanHL_5-7-02.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HartmanHL/HartmanHL_5-7-02.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 7 May 2002" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Sandra Johnson", + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "Kevin M. Rusnak" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Harvey L. Hartman" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 7, 2002. This oral history with Harvey Hartman is being conducted in the offices of SIGNAL Corporation in Houston, Texas, for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Sandra Johnson, assisted by Kevin Rusnak and Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.\\n\\n I want to thank you again for joining us today to share your history and experiences during your more than thirty years working with NASA in the JSC Personnel and Human Resources Offices. I want to begin by asking a little bit about your background, where you went to college, and how you got started in this direction." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. I grew up in Nebraska on a farm, Seward County, Nebraska, eastern part of the state, and wound up going through Seward High School, a smallish high school, graduation class of about seventy-five folks, and then on to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and I have a degree in political science from the University of Nebraska. So that’s kind of the early start of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you left the university, you joined the Navy right out of the university?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "While I was at the University of Nebraska, I was part of the Navy ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] program, and that provided a commission upon graduation, and I went to active duty. I had a two-year commitment. I actually stayed four years at that point. I initially went to the East Coast to drive ships for Uncle Sam, and was assigned to the USS Mullinnix, a ? [Forrest]-Sherman-class destroyer there on these East Coast based out of Norfolk, Virginia, and spent a little over two years there.\\n\\n At that point I was due to be released from active duty, but I extended for an extra couple of years but went back to Nebraska. You wouldn’t think the Navy would be there, but it was. The Navy was really fairly flexible in a lot of ways around that. My father had just died, and I really needed to be back there around a little closer to home to help my mom and my brother with what we were going to do with the farming operation and things like that. So I said, “I really need to go back to Nebraska.”\\n\\n The Navy said, “Well, if we find you a place in Nebraska, would you consider staying for a couple of extra years?”\\n\\n And I said, “No chance of that.” But they actually came up with two possibilities, and one of them was recruiting duty based out of Omaha, Nebraska. So I spent a couple of years doing officer recruiting in the Midwest, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, a little bit of Minnesota, that sort of a thing, for a couple of years before I left the Navy then at that point." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what made you decide to leave the Navy?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was a hard choice, really, because the Navy was really a very good experience for me. It was the kind of opportunity that gave you a lot of responsibility very early on, taught you a lot of leadership skills, a lot of good life skills that you learned out of that whole thing. I loved it. I really had a good time. I liked going to sea. I liked sailing ships. I’ve never been seasick a day in my life, so I must be a match somehow. The Navy gets a lot of good folks out of the Midwest to be sailors.\\n\\n But as I look at it at that point, my next assignment in the Navy, the offer they made me was a good one for a junior officer at that point. It was to be the executive officer on a minesweeper based out of Yokosuka, Japan, a good career assignment in the sense of a growth. But I was looking at probably the next three tours were probably sea tours, and we’d just had a brand-new one-year-old at home, and all of sudden, you started thinking about, “Wait a minute. Is this really what I want to do, and what I want to put my family through?” and we elected to …. [say] “Maybe there’s other things we ought to explore.”\\n\\n So the Navy was very, very good to me. I learned a great deal. In fact, I stayed with the reserves for another ten years after that. In fact, my deal with the Navy, at least mentally my deal with them was, as long as you let me go to sea two weeks a year and it’s fun, I’ll stay with it. They stopped doing both, so I left the Navy reserve at that point." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In 1966, you took the Management Intern Option Federal Service Entrance Exam. What prompted you to do that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as I said, as I was looking at my options as my second tour with the Navy ended. I looked at a variety of things. With a political science degree, you immediately look around and say, “Gee, where could you work with a political science degree?” I took the law school test. I had been accepted at the University of Nebraska law school, and, in fact, I even had a small scholarship for that purpose, and I’m ever so grateful that I wasn’t led to go there. I [would have] been a terrible lawyer. I really would have been. But we gave serious thought to that, and we were looking at other possibilities. The Navy assignment was a very real possibility.\\n\\n But government service had always been an interest to me, and that appetite really got whetted as an undergraduate student, and my hope is that maybe you had the same experience, and I hope this for everybody, that somewhere in the course of your undergraduate career, there’s somebody who really lights a fire in you and a passion about something that you’re good at and that you care about.\\n\\n I guess when I was a sophomore, I had a political science instructor, who also was a state senator, and one of the most powerful state senators in the state of Nebraska, who really was a patrician politician. He was very well off, Senator Richard Marvel from Hastings, and he had traveled widely, and he was well educated and that sort of thing, and he just thought it was one of his duties, was to not only be a legislator, but to teach. He really made it come alive. It wasn’t just a book. He matched the politics that was going on in the state and in the area at that time with the theory that you were finding in the books, and that really kind of excited me and got me moving down that road and probably got my interest in government. When you see good role models like that, you say, “Yeah, I’d like to be able to do something like that.”\\n\\n So that got me thinking about that, and at that point that was 1966. This was a year, really, after the big buildup in Vietnam, and the government was expanding rapidly at that point. That was [President] Lyndon [B.] Johnson’s Great Society time, so we were in the guns and butter business, and the government was expanding not only on the military front, but on the other sides as well. So they were out looking for lots and lots of folks. So there was a lot of publicity about that, and in the recruiting business I’d spent a lot of time on the campus, a lot of time with placement offices, a lot of time with recruiters from other organizations, and, in fact, had run across NASA recruiters in the course of my travels, too. We spent some time on the same campuses, and that kind of got me intrigued about it. So I checked that out, and at that point what you did was you took a test. Not much of that goes on anymore, but you actually took a written test to jump the hurdles, to be considered for government employment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us a little bit more about that process, of taking the test and you had to do after that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was, you know, you’re not that far from being out of school, so taking a test is, how hard is that? That’s probably one of my core competencies, is to be able to take tests. So that part of it wasn’t that difficult. The one piece, though, that I do remember was that they had an oral interview process that went with that, except it wasn’t an individual interview, much like you and I are having; it was a group interview. There were a couple of three panel members from different agencies, and I think every agency must have ponied up a couple of three interviewers, and they put us in teams of, like, six or eight or nine candidates in the same room at the same time and interviewed us all together. An interesting interview approach.\\n\\n I guess the theory behind that was to not only watch you individually, but to see how you worked in a group kind of a setting. I’m not sure I would recommend that today, and, as a matter of fact, I don’t think I ever did that again. But it was kind of an interesting process, and out of that I must have said something right or done something right or didn’t do something wrong, and screened into it at that point.\\n\\n What was happening at that point, again, was because the government was growing so rapidly, once you screened in through that process, all of a sudden the offers started just flowing out from everywhere. I think I had probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty job offers out of that, the kind of thing that people thirst for right now when maybe the job market isn’t quite so hot, and most of them were cold ones. It was, at that point, a telegram or a letter that said, “We’re proud to offer you a job,” you know, almost “Dear Occupant, We’re proud to offer you a job.” Some of those were from agencies you said, “What is it these folks do, and why would they be interested in me?” But one of them was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and that was interesting.\\n\\n The other reason, I guess, that matched up was maybe even at that point—I probably hadn’t even refined it in my thought process that much yet—but we pretty much had a WOM strategy at work: West of the Mississippi. We had lived on the East Coast. We’d been in Virginia. We’d been up and down to Washington a few times, and we’d kind of decided, “Hmm, I’m not sure that that’s where we want to go,” although that’s clearly where most of the jobs were. Since Houston [Texas] was west of the Mississippi, that was a nice fit, along with just the fact that at that point NASA was an extremely attractive employment opportunity. It was where the action was in government." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you mentioned that you had met some NASA recruiters before that, so—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, right. So you knew a little bit about that, and you said, “Yes, this is intriguing. This is doing something that makes a difference. These are good folks. This is about doing things well. It looks good.” So all that kind of dovetailed together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Quite a change, Houston from Nebraska." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was. I have often told the story that we’d never been to Houston before in our lives. We rolled into Houston in August in an un-air-conditioned car, with a one-year-old crying in the back seat. Probably our lives were saved by the fact that my wife had an uncle and aunt who lived here. He was a Texaco executive, and we stayed with them for the first week. We’d probably turned around and driven right back out of town if it hadn’t been for that.\\n\\n In fact, I’ve told folks that I told my wife, Carolyn, at about the end of September, I said, “Look. It’s really been bad. But if we can stay just a year, it won’t look so bad on the résumé.” But by the end of that year, we had been hooked on the work, on the people, on this place, and Houston has been home for us ever since." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your impressions, before you came, of the Manned Spacecraft Center? How did you think of it? Once you got here, was it what you thought it would be?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think so. As I said, I think NASA was very high-profile at that time. The programs that NASA was working on looked challenging. They looked exciting. It was about doing things well. There was a lot of energy around that. The country seemed to be very interested in supporting that sort of a thing. So all my preconceptions fit that, and it really matched up from the time that we got here.\\n\\n As I say, we got here in 1966. The site had been built a couple of years earlier. So here’s a brand-new campus with little pine trees about that tall all over the place. So it’s brand-new facilities, lots and lots of young people engaged in doing something exciting and working very hard at it. So, no, I think that all matched up pretty well. It really did. The kinds of people you ran into very early on were people who you felt had the same kind of motivations that you did, to do a good job and to make a contribution." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you began your year as an intern, and it began by rotational assignments. Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the way I came to NASA was part of this intern program, and a part of that deal was the first six months you just spent in one-month rotational assignments in different organizations. At that point, we may have had a little more luxury of having a little more people capability, and so you could spend a little time growing some people. There was a class of, well, I think it was, like, a dozen or fifteen. It was one of the larger ones. They tended to vary anywhere between eight and a dozen folks, something like that.\\n\\n We rotated to different organizations, procurement, the resources organization, flight operations, that sort of a thing, to get an appreciation for what the work was like there, what was expected of you, for them to get a little look at you and say, “Hmm, is this somebody we’d like to add as part of our team?” that sort of thing. Then at the end of the six months, you put together your wish list of your priorities of what you’d like to do, and the organizations kind of said, “Yes, this is who we’d like,” and generally matches were made, and you wound up going to work then for the next six months, in most cases, for your career position in the area that you had chosen.\\n\\n It was a good experience. It gave you a chance to meet lots of people and to see different aspects of what was going on here at the Center at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So did your wish list match up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It did, although I have to tell you, initially as I came in here, I thought, well, really, what I want to do is finance. I think that’s where I ought to be. I’ve looked at the papers, and, boy, all the job offers are to be a controller, to be a financial wizard. That looks like that’s really where there’s careers and there’s money. But I wasn’t very good at that, and I really didn’t much like it. Apparently it wasn’t a fit from their standpoint either.\\n\\n But one thing I was interested in and had some experience with was dealing with people. So there was a fit there. I really liked the people that I worked with. So I was led to be in the right place at the right time. So my choice was to go to work for the personnel organization. At that time Jack [R.] Lister was heading that, and it really was a good match." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your first assignment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wound up being a personnel specialist supporting the flight operations organization, headed by that unknown aerospace engineer by the name of Christopher Columbus Kraft, Jr. He didn’t stay unknown very long. Truly a special, special leader. But I supported a couple of organizations within Flight Operations, the Mission Planning and Analysis Division, and the Flight Support Division. The mission planning crowd was doing all the trajectory work for all of our flights, and a lot of the software associated with it, onboard software and that sort of thing, The Flight Support Division was basically building and developing the next-generation control center activity. So it really felt like you were right in the middle of everything that was really quite interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What type of duties did you have working with them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think in those early few years, I think I spent most of my time going out and helping them hire more people. We were hiring people right and left. We’ve laughed about the fact that I think the first year we sent out a job offer list with 300 addressees on the list, saying, “Welcome. A job offer at the Johnson Space Center for young engineers.” So a lot of time was spent on hiring people and getting them here and getting them situated and getting them assimilated into organizations and helping them take care of the problems that they had.\\n\\n I think, also, probably part of it was helping an organization figure out who it was,—most of these organizations were very, very young—and sorting out the leadership capability within there and helping them get their arms around the size of the task that they had. When you think back and when you look at it, it really was very courageous on the part of a lot of those leaders to step up to that and say, “Yes, I think we can do this. Yes, I’ll take that assignment on, to build a trajectory for a lunar flight,” and things that had never been done before. So, getting people engaged around those tasks, there was a lot of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it difficult finding people at that time, engineers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely not. Absolutely not, and, you know, it never has been. There’s always been good folks, always been a lot more than we could ever hire, because so many people just get drawn in by the mission and get drawn in by the work. The exploration of space is just an inherently exciting business, and it’s always attracted people, particularly young people. So, no, we’ve never had that problem. We’ve had a lot of people, you know, use innovative ways try and get our attention and say, “Hey, me, over here. I’ve like to be considered,” kind of a thing. But we’ve always had an awful lot of good folks. No, that was not a problem.\\n\\n Hanging onto them sometimes was, because the market was competitive for engineers, and at that point in particular, many of our contractors were paying more money than on the government side. So we sometimes lost people to the contract side with some regularity, and we had kind of a running battle with hanging onto our folks from the military, picking them up as well, often in uniform. I spent a good bit of time writing draft deferment letters for young engineers who said, “Oh, please, oh, please, help me get a draft deferment so I can stay working here on the space program,” and at that point a lot of draft boards considered that was just as important an obligation to the country as serving the military as well.\\n\\n [Randal F.] Randy Stone, our Deputy Director now, often tells me how much he appreciates me writing his draft deferment letters for him, and some of those I don’t even remember, but we did a lot of them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That Flight Operations Directorate had some interesting personalities." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It really did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have any memories about any of those people?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From very early on, from the first time you met him, you knew that Chris Kraft was somebody special. There was a natural leader. He’s one of my heroes, always has been, and one of the very special people of the world. But Chris was a wonderful, wonderful leader to work for, and I learned so many lessons from him. But, yes, there were some interesting people.\\n\\n [Henry E.] Pete Clements, who at that time was an Air Force major assigned to NASA, and he led the Flight Support Division, putting together the control center thing, “Prince Henry,” as many people called him, was one of the wonderful, delightful people of the world, with an incredibly clear sense of purpose, but a light touch to it and a wonderful people touch.\\n\\n John [P.] Mayer, who led the Mission Planning Division, was a brilliant guy, could be sometimes irascible and kind of hard to deal with. John always used to say, “This place is getting more like the government all the time.”\\n\\n I’d have to say, “John, it is the government.”\\n\\n He’d said, “No, no. I mean it’s getting like the government.” But John was a wonderful leader and, again, another person who took on an incredible task and an incredible responsibility.\\n\\n [Eugene F.] Gene Kranz, who was leading the Flight Control Division, at that time. [Robert F.] Bob Thompson, who was leading the landing and recovery effort. It was an unusual team. [Sigurd A.] Sig Sjoberg, who later became the Deputy Director as well, who was Chris’ deputy. It was an incredible team, and a few others around the edges—the [Rodney G.] Rod Roses of the world and the [Peter J.] Pete Armitages, who had come to us through the Canadian routes. It was quite a collection of people. It really was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you were in that position during Apollo and the Moon landing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where were you when all that was going on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes. I was a worker bee at that point and in a supporting kind of a role. But you couldn’t help but be caught up in that. We got here just at the end of the Gemini Program, and were here throughout Apollo. I can remember when we had the [Apollo 1] fire, driving, hearing it on the radio, driving along Highway 3, and just taking the breath right out of you. I’m, like, you know, how could this happen? What are we going to do? You know, that sort of thing. And watching how the organization recovered so very quickly from that.\\n\\n You know, people like George [M.] Low, who provided just incredible leadership. Dr. [Robert R.] Gilruth, you know. At that point being a pretty low-level worker bee, I didn’t see very much of the Dr. Gilruths and the George Lows, but you came to have a real appreciation for what they’ve done. I know Chris speaks of Dr. Gilruth in almost reverent tones every time he’s talked about him. If he has a high regard for him, so do I. So he did provide us some wonderful leadership. It was special being here during that time, and especially as you got closer to actually doing it and realizing, “Hey, maybe we have pulled this off.” So, while you didn’t sit on a console, you still felt very, very much a part of that team. It was very, very exciting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you had a supervisory position at that time, from ’69—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, at about 1969, I became the leader of a group of personnel specialists, four or five folks, basically the first-line supervisor … of the group of people doing what I was doing before. So at that point, I probably started working a little more with Kraft and a few of the other directors as we were helping them solve their people problems. So from that point, really, from ’69 through ’73, those were really kind of early leadership roles in the HR [Human Resources] program, and the first part of that was, again, still getting the right team and the right people in place and then hiring the folks.\\n\\n Then as time played out there, it also meant tuning down the program as the budget squeezes came, and we wound up having to go through a period of layoffs, and that was a really very, very tough time. We spent a fair amount of time trying to help the organization do that in the right way, because we were still trying to fly. We were flying a couple of flights a year, and at the same time, you’re running layoffs in an organization. To keep people focused on getting the job done and making sure that we didn’t hurt anybody in that process, while at the same time having to do the piece that isn’t very much fun, which was adapting the government’s very regulated and very mechanistic layoff procedures to an organization like this, in a way that made some sense, was consuming a fair amount of time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how did you adapt that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "First of all, we got as knowledgeable as we could about that business, and we had some folks within the HR organization, the Carl [P.] Maxey[’s] and the [Richard A.] Dick Kuhn’s of the world, who had had some experience with that in prior military organizations, as civilians. People like Jack Lister and myself and other folks hadn’t had experience with that, but we got as smart as we could, as quickly as we could about, okay, what are the rules? How can we adapt them and tailor them to the NASA situation, do it right to make sure that we honor people’s rights and that we honor the laws and the regulations that apply, but do it in way that fits this particular organization?\\n\\n So we got smart about it. Then we spent a fair amount of time with the managers talking about it, “Here’s the potential impacts. Here’s what could happen. Here’s your options,” really, a fair of amount of helping them sort through their options and working it one step at a time to do it right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the impact on the morale during that time? I know in ’68 there was the possibility of a RIF [Reduction in Force] that actually didn’t occur, and in ’70, of course, it did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Really, it was in 1970 that we started that, and it was, as I recall, it was like four major layoffs over the space of ’70, ’71, ’72, ’73, so about every nine months we were going through a major layoff thing. It was not a good time. It was demoralizing, and we lost good people out of that, not only folks who you wound up having to lay off, because the government process is very regulated. It’s very veteran, non-veteran oriented. It’s also very seniority-time oriented. So we lost some young folks that you really hated to lose. You really did. Now, we got some of them back in a variety of forms.\\n\\n Lynn Heninger, who spent a fair amount of time with NASA as the number two guy in legislative affairs in Washington, did a wonderful job of that, always reminded me that I laid him off in 1971. Here was just an outstanding young man, a financial guy, who had been a helicopter pilot, been shot at more than his share of time in Vietnam, and I had to tell him, “I’m sorry. We’re going to have to lay you off.” So we hated losing people like that.\\n\\n But in many cases, those folks who cared so much about NASA and what we were doing, they found ways to re-engage. Some of them we were able to hire back. Some of them popped up other places. But it was a tough time on morale, to try to maintain that, coupled with the declining flight schedule. As our plans for Apollo kept getting curtailed, curtailed, and curtailed, and the shape of Skylab, behind that, was uncertain yet in where that was all going, it was a tough time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the Personnel Department help the people that they were laying off by helping them find other positions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think we did what we could at the time, certainly not as much as we do now or as companies have done much later. We had active out-placement efforts to try to help people find jobs. Most of them wanted to find their job back in the same office that they were in, and that was probably the hard part, because they really were valuable contributors and you hated to see them go. But we tried to place as many folks as we could with other people, and our folks were sought after. There were a lot of good folks that were picked up by other people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During those times of the RIFs, you moved in to the Chief of the Institutional Personnel Management Branch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, understand, those were [just] more supervisory positions, a larger cluster of them … [people]. For a while, we had two groups of people caring for the operational needs, the operational personnel needs of the organization, and eventually we consolidated that into one, and I took that role on. At that point, it’s all the operational HR needs—it’s all the hiring; it’s all the pay-setting and administration; it’s all the employee relations; it’s all the employee benefits kinds of things. Those were all kind of hooked together in one place. It’s really getting the HR people linked close to the organizations, understanding their needs, and helping them get their people problems solved. That was fun.\\n\\n Part of that was building a good team of folks who are competent, who are good at what they’re doing, and helping them really connect with the organization. From the very beginning, and Jack Lister gets a lot of credit for this, was the one who taught me this lesson, and he was really good at it, was connecting with the organizations, understanding what organizations’ needs were, being responsive to them, staying close to the customer, learning the organization. We put a real premium on our people, spending a lot of time out with their people. Know what your organization is about; talk their language; know their business and get real close to them so that you can help influence things from a people standpoint, so that the people needs are properly taken care of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In 1964, the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] was established. It wasn’t until ’72 that the Equal Employment Opportunity Act was actually passed, and I think ’73 was when NASA developed that office. What are your memories of that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From the very beginning, NASA, I think, was relatively color-blind about the race-gender kind of issue, because we had minority and we had female engineers at that point, but not many of them, because the pool wasn’t very large at that point, and we weren’t doing very much actively. If we found somebody that fit, we did that.\\n\\n By ’73, that whole affirmative action wave really started to get a little bit stronger, and it also became a federal initiative. So our response to that was, we need to do the right thing here to help organize that in line with anything else we do, find a way to tailor that to the NASA setting, and to make that work for NASA as well. So there was a big emphasis, I think, at that point, on, number one, making sure that we were doing all the right things. Number two, though, was start building the feeder pools, start looking for how we can increase the potential pools that we would draw people from. So, a lot of student programs. We created a lot of student programs and particularly emphasized minority and women applicants to try to help grow that pool and increase our chances of finding the good kinds of folks that we really wanted to join our team, plus taking a look internally to our own staff, and say, “Are we doing the right things by the people that we’ve got internal to the Center?”\\n\\n So that got started, I think, at a fairly early age. I think we kind of did that right at the beginning, not in everybody’s eyes. Obviously nobody was completely happy. That was a relatively contentious time, rather the fallout of a contentious time, from the sixties and really into the seventies. It was exacerbated here at Houston and maybe at many of the other NASA Centers, because in the layoff activity, one of the byproducts of that was to create a fairly strong federal employee union movement, to protect the people, kind of a thing. So a lot of things got all wound together with that, and the affirmative action activity kind of got also woven into that, as unions saw that as a horse to ride.\\n\\n So we got a lot of help from lots of sectors in how we ought to do that. So there were some contentious times there. There were some times where you had to really negotiate and pick your way through that, to make sure that the outcomes were right for the Center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any direct dealings with the union personally?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. A good number of us did, and we negotiated union contracts and, again, tried to do those in ways that helped the Center get its job done. Yes, I spent a fair amount of time doing that, too. That was interesting. That’s a different aspect of the HR business, and I think because we had people of good will on both sides, that generally worked out pretty well. It was a little rocky going in the early seventies.\\n\\n Jack Lister gave some excellent leadership to that. Carl Maxey was invaluable at that point. Dick Kuhn was another one who was very skilled in that area, and then for many, many years, [Robert F.] Bob Hall, who worked with me and others to guide that relationship and to try to honor the principle that employees have the right to belong to a union, and unions have a stake in the role of this thing. How do we do that and work together to make this whole thing work out? Bob, in particular, was probably the best that I’ve ever seen at that. He was really good at doing that. But he and I and Dick and some other folks negotiated our fair share of contractual activity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It must have been interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was fun. It was fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In ’73, the Personnel Office reorganized. What was the reason behind the reorganization?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think Jack was always looking for the best way to put together the combination of people that he had, coupled with what’s the best way to provide service to the organization. So he was forever kind of reshaping and retooling that around people and around the emerging needs. At that point, we were coming out of the period of the layoffs, and we were going to be heading into a new period, which was a fairly austere period as far as hiring was concerned, but already starting to ramp up to support the emerging Space Shuttle Program. How are we going to put our resources together in the best way to help the organization to get people where they need to be, the right people, to be able to do the next program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So your title changed at that point. Did your duties change at all, or was it—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was pretty much the same. It was pretty much the same, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I believe around that time also you became an Education for Public Management Fellow at Cornell [University, Ithaca, New York]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[Laughs] Yes, that’s a big title, but I went to graduate school for a year at Cornell. It was a wonderful experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it really was, and that was another one of those things where people really sometimes take care of you more than you think you deserve or you recognize. I remember being mildly interested in it. NASA had a fairly active program at that time, and still does. They always sent a few people away to graduate school each year to different kinds of programs. This was one of them that was out there. There was a cycle every year that that call came out. In fact, I helped go find candidates for it for each year, that sort of a thing. But I didn’t give it very much thought.\\n\\n I can remember being at lunch at the Singing Wheel over on Highway 3, an old barbecue joint—the red building is still there, although I think it’s been empty for years and years—and getting a phone call from Jack Lister, my boss, at lunch, and he said, “You want to go the graduate school for a year?”\\n\\n I said, “Sure.” [Laughs] I said, “Well, let me think about that. Let me talk with my wife about that and see what we want to do, but, gee, that sounds kind of interesting.”\\n\\n He said, “Well, I’m sitting here with Dr. Kraft, and we’re putting together a list of names. If you’d like to go, we’d like to have you go.”\\n\\n Well, that’s a hard offer to turn down, kind of a thing, and I’ve always appreciated Jack being willing to, in effect, give up one of his people at a time when there was plenty of work to do, and he was going to have to find some other way to get my job done. But he was really making an investment in me for the future, both he and Chris, and I’ve appreciated that. So we talked about it and said, “Yes, this looks like a good experience and a good opportunity,” and so I did a one-year program at Cornell.\\n\\n It was the best of all worlds. It isn’t there anymore. All good deals of the world disappear eventually. There were about a dozen of us that were there from different government agencies, Secret Service, EPA [Environment Protection Agency], Department of Defense, at that time Health, Education and Welfare. It was a real mixed collection of people. But we were allowed to take whatever courses we would like to take. We could take them for credit or we could audit them. We didn’t have to get a degree at the end of it. It was a year in residence, was really what it was. You make the most of it, and the only requirement was we had one coordinating seminar. It was run out of the Business and Public Administration School, and it was a core seminar that one of the professors there taught. But all the rest of it was build your own program.\\n\\n Well, it was just delightful. I took an astronomy course from Carl Sagan. I took a bunch of courses in Cornell’s Industrial [and] Labor Relations School, which is one of the premier ones in the country, took some courses in the business school, took a couple of history courses that were just delightful, constitutional law, a few things like that. But you really were putting together whatever program you wanted. Some folks really went over the top and tried to knock out a master’s degree in nine months there, which was really very, very tough. We chose to make it a little bit more of “make it an experience to broaden yourself,” and it really did. It gave me, I think, a broader foundation and a better awareness of so many areas. So it was a rich experience. It really was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So after that year you came back in the same position?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Came back and still was leading the team of operating personnel specialists. We called it the Personnel Management Branch at that point, but it was the biggest cluster within the personnel or the HR organization, and, again, the operating people, the people who do the hiring and the staffing plans and the employee relations and all the pay and benefits of that whole world. So, yes, I did that then for another year, again, still focusing on helping meet customer needs and put together the best team of folks you could find to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You headed the personnel management evaluation teams at two different NASA centers in 1975." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you want to talk about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was fun. At that time NASA decided that one of the things they needed to was do a better job of evaluating how HR programs were being put in place. Up till that point, it was not uncommon for our oversight agency, which was at that point the Civil Service Commission, later the Office of Personnel Management, provided the third-party assessment of how you were doing. They tended to be very nuts-and-bolts, very “Have you dotted the i’s and cross the t’s right? Did you fill out this form right?” As I said, it was very procedural oriented. It wasn’t focused very much on outcomes.\\n\\n NASA said, “Hey, let us take that over. We’ll do that piece of it as well. But we’d like to focus a little more on the outcomes and on how well we’re doing the HR business.” So we put together that, and at each Center then, about, I would guess probably at about three a year, Centers, or something like that, we would take a team of folks for a week or so to a Center and precede that with doing some surveying questionnaires and try to find out what kinds of issues were on people’s minds, what was hot, where were problem areas, that sort of thing, do a lot of interviews with people to try to gather data to put before the management of that Center and say, “You know, here’s what your people situation looks like. How do you want to problem-solve that?”\\n\\n It wasn’t as good as probably what’s been done later, because we were still probably a little more prescriptive, “You need to do this,” “You need to do that,” kind of a thing. We probably got a little smarter later on, which is put that in the hands of the folks who have to live with that and have them do something with it. But that gave me an opportunity to spend some time at Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama], spend some time at Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland], to spend some time at [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, DC], and, really, to see the insides of their operations. So, yes, that was fun. That was fun. Plus, work with a team of folks that you didn’t know before you showed up on site, and you had to weld into a team in a couple of weeks and turn out a product. So that was a lot of fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find anything out that you could bring back to JSC?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, you always found good things. You know, we like to think that we had most of the good things in the world already in place. But, you know, you’d always find different ways to see it, different ways to do it, plus an amazing number of people that you ran across, that you ran across later in your career as well, that you’d built some working relationships. So it was a very rewarding kind of an activity.\\n\\n I think that played out partly because the funding started to dry up for that. We just didn’t have enough people at the time or the energy to go do that. But it was probably a good developmental experience for an awful lot of people. You didn’t stay locked in your own little world. You got out to see, hey, there are different ways to do these things, and there are different settings. When you go to Marshall, it has a whole different set of needs and a whole different culture. Goddard’s a different world. Headquarters was yet a different one. So you picked up, I think, another appreciation for—much as we weren’t sure that it was true, there is life outside the Johnson Space Center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also had an opportunity to go to Ames [Research Center, Mountain View, California] as the Director of Personnel. How did that come about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was a Chris Kraft deal. Got a call from Chris Kraft and from Jack to come to his office and spend a little time up there. And he said Hans Mark, who was the Center Director at Ames at that point and went on to be Deputy Secretary of Defense and a couple of other kinds of jobs like that, and a really interesting character, was Center Director then, and his Personnel Director was going to be gone for a year, and he was looking for somebody. He didn’t think he had anybody internal to Ames that he wanted to do that. He wanted an opportunity to look at somebody new, and did Chris have anybody that he’d like to give a developmental experience to.\\n\\n Again, it goes back to I’d been working with him for nearly ten years, so he knew who I was and what I could do and what I couldn’t do, and he was another one who really believed in giving people opportunities to go try yourself out at something a little bit different, particularly if it was a challenge. So I really owe to that Chris and, again, to Jack Lister, who said, “Okay, I’ll give him up for a year. I just gave him up for a year to go to graduate school. He’s back for a year, and I’m giving him up again.” But he was willing to work around that, and so it was a reminder, again, that leaders need to keep watching for opportunities for their folks, where there’s a chance to develop them a little bit further. It was a rich experience.\\n\\n This was a whole different part of the world. Ames was the research side of it. It’s west of the Sierra Nevada, so they’re not real sure there’s anything east of that, you know, kind of a thing. A rich cultural center, in the sense that that place had been there since 1940, with some wonderful, wonderful capabilities and some great people. Really picked up an appreciation for them. Prior to that time, I was pretty sure, well, those researchers, they’ve got to be all nerds and kind of crazy, and who’d want to hang around with them? There were some wonderful people doing some very, very good work there.\\n\\n So that was a good year to find a new setting with some things going on that were interesting and, for the first time, to have an opportunity to run your own organization and to be the top leader in an HR organization. So that was fun, to really kind of—I’d been watching Jack Lister do that for ten years, and all of a sudden I realized, hey, there are some things to this business that I don’t know, and I probably spent my fair share of time on the phone getting some advice and counsel from him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you also implemented a career management program while you were there? Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that was a period of time where there was a, I think, a growing interest in helping people sort out their own careers. Up until that point, the organizations kind of told you where you needed to work and that sort of thing, and I think that the balance was starting to shift a little more towards, let’s put in place systems and processes and provide people tools to help them make good career choices. So I did some work with some of the universities out there and with Lawrence Livermore [National] Laboratory, [Livermore, California] had an interest in doing some of that as well. So we tailored something that worked for the Ames Research Center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And that position prepared you, I suppose, for coming back and for your new position as the Deputy?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, when I came back, Jack decided that—up until that point, he had never had a Deputy Director, and he said he’d like to go do that because he had some things that he wanted me to do, plus it was time to recognize and grow some of the people we had in our own organization, to backfill into my job. So we went that route, and then from that point on, really until Jack retired in 1990, I shared the leadership with him for that organization, and it was a chance to make some contributions at the Center level as opposed to maybe at the organization level down below that.\\n\\n It was a chance to get involved more with the strategy of the organization. It was a chance to work on lots of different projects. There really was more work there than one person could handle, and so Jack would do the things he liked to do, and he let me do some of the things that I liked to do, and it was nice relationship." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also served as Manager of Special Projects?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that was on the title. That probably just made the title look longer and a little bit better, but it basically was work on any kinds of assignments that really had kind of a Center-wide emphasis to them and where the HR organization needed to play a role. So it could have been just about anything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In 1978, the Civil Service Reform Act went through, and you had to help implement some of the civil service reform." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the civil service system moves about at glacier speed in terms of the structure around it, the processes, and the rules and regulations they have, but every now and then it kind of breaks free a little bit, and under President [Jimmy] Carter, he took on the task of trying to make some reforms in the process. There were a number of them that were there, and, of course, they then presented opportunities for us to see, again, how we could tailor that to the NASA environment and to the JSC environment. Probably what I spent more time on than anything around that was trying to help improve the hiring processes so that we had a little bit better [system]—but mostly an awful lot of time around performance appraisal, performance management, and at that time the notion of merit pay for our management team, to try to put some variability into the pay process.\\n\\n That was a mixed experiment. We tried that. I’m not sure it produced the results that the visionaries had for it. It didn’t produce the wide discriminations that you were looking for. People kept saying, “I want to have the opportunity to really distinguish between my mere mortals and my true stars,” you know, kind of a thing. But when it came time to do that, the greater emphasis was, “Jeez, these guys are all really valuable to me. These people are all pretty valuable. I don’t know whether I want to make those kinds of choices,” and it tended to gravitate back towards a more core kind of a thing.\\n\\n Performance appraisal systems were the same thing. People kept saying, “We need to distinguish more about performance. We need to be harder on that. We need to go to maybe even some forced appraisal systems.” And that’s all bold talk in the planning rooms, but when it goes to putting it in practice in organizations with people who have to deal with folks one on one, and when you look at what the impact’s going to be on the total organization, a lot of that tended to move right back towards the Center.\\n\\n So there was a lot of work on that. There aren’t going to be any giant monuments created to civil service reform. But, hey, the goals were right, to try to make the system more responsive and to try to help government be better. There was no question about that. It’s just hard to bring off in what is essentially a tenured situation, just like universities." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also worked closely with the Department of Defense." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. That actually went back to the early days, when I was a personnel specialist with the flight operations organization. One of the things that I found when I got there was that a deal had been struck to provide—it was called the 128 Program. The Air Force gave us 128 young Air Force officers to be trained as flight controllers and flight operations people. They really were a cadre of people who worked right alongside our flight control teams, our NASA people, and our contract people in flight operations, and we had some wonderful, wonderful, bright, young military officers.\\n\\n The Air Force’s notion was that they were going to train here and then move into a military space program. That played out as the Manned Orbiting Laboratory and other projects got cancelled and those folks probably wound up in Minot, North Dakota, and other kinds of places that they hadn’t really intended. But, gee, we got some awful good work out of it. We hired a number of them. In fact, they left the Air Force and came back and said, “I want to be a flight controller,” or, “I want to be a mission planner,” that sort of thing, and we picked up a number of people that way.\\n\\n Then as we moved into the late seventies, that kind of resurrected again. As we got into the Shuttle era, the Air Force got very interested in that and having a role in that and how that would play, and so this time my role was different. The first time, it was kind of administering a program that was already there and helping make sure that they were at the places they needed to be, and efficiency reports got written, and that sort of thing.\\n\\n This time it was more in the deal-cutting. “What kind of arrangements can we strike with you? What do you want out of this? Where do you want officers? …Where do you want … insight? Where do we have needs? Where could we benefit from having some military people who know their systems and can work that?” So, spent some time negotiating that from the NASA side and with the military people, and it really started taking on a larger-than-Houston scheme, too, because we were also talking about putting people at Vandenberg [Air Force Base, California], and we were working with the people at Kennedy [Space Center, Florida], who had some of the same common interests.\\n\\n It was probably Kennedy and us that were working that particular need at the same time. So it was between here, Kennedy, and Vandenberg, that we spent some time lining all that out and trying to come up with an arrangement that would serve the Air Force’s needs and that would meet our needs. We probably wound up with twenty-five to fifty Air Force officers coming here for assignments in Shuttle Program offices, in operations organizations, that sort of a thing, to help meet their needs and ours. So, yes, that was a fun one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During that time, too, the first Shuttle class was chosen. Do you have any memories about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Our good friend Duane [L.] Ross had a lot to do with that. Here, again, my boss, Jack Lister, was, I think, in front of the times, because he worked very closely with the senior management folks and said, “Hey, I think we can put together a process that will work to help recruit and select astronauts.” George [W. S.] Abbey had a big role in that at that time as well, and George has always had a really solid appreciation for HR organizations and giving them room to do things, and I think he knew that Jack could deliver on that.\\n\\n So we put together that process, and a younger Duane Ross was the operational leader of the team of folks that supported that whole astronaut recruiting and selection process, and Duane has supported that ever since. Every single astronaut that we have here right now, Duane has touched somewhere in the process of coming through that. But, there again, it was the genius of Jack and other folks to say, “Let’s find the right person to do this job,” and Duane was clearly it. He understood operations; he understood customer support; he understood how to do this sort of a thing; he understood the business and did a wonderful job.\\n\\n So we put that whole thing together, worked out of some trailers near the water tower, down—I don’t even remember the street designations—by the Acoustic Vibration Facility and the water tower, that area as you’re going towards the Gilruth [Center]. There were some old leftover trailers from the [Army] Corps of Engineers that we worked in for that first year and, literally, were inundated with thousands of applications. Jack was part of that first board. I served on the second board in 1980 that picked the class of 1980. What we put together were teams, mostly a team of astronauts, managers, HR people to sift and sort through that and find the folks who were going to help us fly the Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The criteria changed somewhat from we looked for in the early astronauts to this group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, right, and I didn’t know very much about that process. The early part, I think, was clearly [outside] the HR purview. That was probably done by [Donald K.] Deke Slayton and other folks that we just didn’t have much insight into. By the time we got to ’78, ’80, we did change that process, and particularly we said, “We know we’re going to need different kinds of people.”\\n\\n That’s when we created the notion of there are pilots and that there are mission specialists, and within mission specialists there are five or six different brands of them, from earth sciences people to astronomers, to life sciences, to engineers, that sort of a thing. So, yes, we created that whole process, kind of made it up as we went along, but all geared towards what do we need out there to help get the job done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course, the first class was the first one to have women and minorities in it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes, it was, and here I think the George Abbeys of the world deserve credit for recognizing that that was an important consideration, that our astronaut corps needed to look a little more like the face of America, and working to make sure that we had enough people in the pool to consider, good folks. We’ve always had lots of good candidates to consider. We wind up passing on a lot of people who could do the job. The trick is making sure the ones you get can, are good enough to do it as well. You’re going to leave some good ones on the table. So our goal was to try to build that pools as broad and as wide as you could, so you had choices." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also served as the chair of the steering group for the NASA employee teams." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s probably one of those things that fell under Manager of Special Projects, the deal that you asked about earlier. There was a point at which the quality movement was taking shape in the private sector, the quality movement and employee involvement kinds of things, to try to—if you remember, that was the point at which your Chevys and Fords were falling apart on you a week and a half after you drove them out of the showroom, and they were realizing something had to be done to shape up our organizational outputs to compete in the world market. That’s kind of where the beginnings of that were.\\n\\n So you started casting about. What were they doing? How did they do that? One of the things that clearly came out of the Japanese experience was a lot more teamwork, a lot more of employee input into work processes and designs. So this was a NASA adaptation to try to find a way to put that idea to work here. It really, I don’t think, was that big a deal in many respects, because NASA’s been about teams from the very, very beginning. They weren’t called NETS [NASA Employee Teams]. They weren’t called quality circles or anything like that. But take a look at the movie, Apollo 13. It was just teams everywhere helping to go solve a problem. That was a way of life with us. So when we talked about, “Well, we need to put together NETS,” people would say, “Why would we do that? We do that anyhow.”\\n\\n “Yeah, yeah, but we’re going to have to have some of this as well.” So we probably relabeled some activities that we were probably doing, plus we probably created some new ones. We probably created in some settings new opportunities for some people to have a voice in how the work was being done in their organization, and that was healthy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Also, during that time period, the late eighties, you were the Director of Human Resources Development for the Center, the Chief Employee Development Branch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did that differ from what you were already doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This was another one of those Special Projects deals. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, another Special Project. You found a lot of those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’ve always had an interest in the training and development business, the growing people for the future, and there was a point at which Jack and I had looked at what we were doing with our training and development activity, and it wasn’t where we kind of wanted it to be. So we did some organizational changes at that time, and I agreed to go lead that effort as well as do the Deputy Director job for a while, to change the look and the face of that organization, and it was a fun thing. It was another one of those things, “Well, why don’t you go over there for a year and see what we can do,” and five years later, it’s a done deal. But it was a delightful experience. It really was, because, as I say, I have a heart for the training and development activities. We’ve always had a strong support of that sort of a thing, and to be able to get more systematic and more aggressive about providing the kinds of skills training that organizations need to help be able to get their job done.\\n\\n If you think back to the mid-eighties, PCs [Personal Computers] were just beginning to show up in sizable form, and folks were scrambling, “What do I do about this? How do I learn about using this CAD/CAM [Computer-Aided Design/Computer-Aided Manufacturing] capability?” and things like that. So there was a lot of opportunities around data training that we had never done.\\n\\n Student programs. Student programs were always important to us here at NASA, and it was an opportunity to go work that and extend that and really make that come alive, and then a chance to also do a fair amount of work around the leadership and management training issues, which we hadn’t done nearly enough about. We had relied on growing our leaders on the job, and we needed to supplement that with a little bit more formal kind of an activity. So it was a chance to put all of that together and put together a good team of folks to go do that. We probably didn’t have our strongest players in that organization, and so this was an opportunity to reshape that a little bit and engage some new people in that, and it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you actually doubled the Center’s training capacity during that time period." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, probably at least, because we did that. We really expanded our cooperative education efforts and got it a lot more targeted. I think the main thing we really did was to line it up a lot more with the needs of the organization. We weren’t doing just whatever seemed like nice stuff to do or somebody sent us a course and, “Gee, let’s offer this” kind of a thing. It really was focused a lot more on plugging into what the organization needed and trying to go solve their problems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the people that took advantage of those programs, did you have a lot of people that wanted it, and it was a good response from people working there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think NASA folks have always responded positively. There’s a curiosity among an awful lot of folks out here who just want to see what’s over that next horizon a little bit, so are more than willing to get involved in a training opportunity. “Yeah, I want to learn something more about the capability. This new computer’s coming out here, and it’s got new capabilities. You know, we need to get somebody in here to tell us how to do that,” or, “We’re getting a little thin on this skill in this organization. We’d better go find somebody to come in and start beefing up our capability.” “We want to learn more about what’s going on with program and project management. What are other people doing? How are they doing it?” That sort of a thing. So there’s always been a healthy curiosity, I think, and a healthy interest. Now, it was never hard to find folks to go do that. I think the real trick is matching it up with what the organization really needs, and getting the biggest bang for the buck." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also helped develop—I know when we talked to Mr. Lister, the training was very important to him—the programs where people could go to the local colleges and to the junior colleges and the secretaries on that level and all those types of programs also." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Right. We did a lot of encouraging people to work on advanced degrees. We certainly did, with our support staff, encourage going to junior colleges. Get that degree. That’s never a bad investment.\\n\\n We worked a lot of cooperative arrangements with schools in this area. We sent people off on graduate study to organizations, particularly where we thought we’d invest in an individual or we needed a capability that we didn’t have before. So, yes, that was always a big deal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’ve talked to some people in here that had involvement with the Sloan Fellowships. Did you have any involvement with that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. While I was in the training organization in particular, my folks would run the process that would collect candidates for that, and then all the time Jack and I were together running the organization, that was where we would spend a fair amount of time with senior managers, saying, “Hey, are we doing the right things on developing this person, this person, this person? Is this somebody who’s going to be a program manager? Maybe they ought to be thinking about getting something else in their background. Is this the right time in their career?” That sort of thing. So we would do a fair amount of that sort of a thing.\\n\\n We probably did more of the Sloan, the full-year kinds of programs, earlier on, really, in the sixties and the seventies, than we did later. And part of that was the pace of life, I think, picked up even more, and we got thinner and thinner on people to have available to you, and folks’ lives changed to where they said, “I don’t want to be gone for a year. But if it’s just an eight-week program, I’ll go do that.” So the movement tended to start to shorten down to where people said, “All right, yes, I need the development experience. I know that. But don’t make it too long,” and so we started shopping for other high-quality executive education programs that would meet that need, and that’s a trend that you see a lot of in industry, too, where they want it packaged in shorter doses, on target, get in there and get out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I imagine a year away was somewhat difficult on families." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Everybody who got into that, for the most part, said, “You know, I don’t think I can unplug from here for a year. It’ll be so hard. Who’s going to do this?” Dah, dah, dah, dah. But everybody who came back said, “It was a wonderful experience. You all need to do that.” That kind of thing.\\n\\n So I don’t think anybody who ever did one of these programs came back and said it wasn’t a good investment of their time or wasn’t grateful for the fact that NASA sponsored things like that. But it’s hard, and it’s increasingly hard to get people to do those kinds of things, because it’s doing something different. It’s a change of pace. It’s unplugging from the known worlds and from all those responsibilities that you have. So it’s not always easy to do, and it’s hard to get people to let good people go, to go do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course, you had someone that you were working for that was willing for you to do that twice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, he was, and I’m forever grateful for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the late eighties, the … [culture] surveys. You’ve talked about the earlier surveys." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, and that built a little bit on that. But by the late eighties, there were a couple of folks in NASA Headquarters, —a guy by the name of Lou DeAngelis, who was the Training and Development Director for NASA in Washington, probably pushed this notion and found a receptive audience … [with] some key NASA leadership to do some studies that looked at what the NASA culture was and to help understand it at each Center, and then out of that, what do we need to do to make that as strong as possible and to help make the organizations as effective as possible.\\n\\n Lou found a partner in Warner Burke out of Columbia University [New York City, New York] and his organization, who probably gave it some good academic underpinnings, and out of that we wound up surveying, oh, I think, a couple of three times, every couple of three years, within NASA, surveys of people to find out how they were feeling about different kinds of issues. Then what we would do out of that is take that data and work that with management teams and say, “Here’s what the folks are saying. Here where they think we’re doing well, and here’s where they think we’ve got problems that need to work on. Do you believe this data? Is it right?” We ran focus groups of our own folks and said, “Survey says—. Does that sound right?”\\n\\n “No.”\\n\\n “Why would they say that?”\\n\\n “Well, it’s because of this, this, and this.”\\n\\n You get some depth to the data, and then the next question you ask them is, “Okay, what should NASA do about that? What should JSC do about that?”\\n\\n “Well, here’s an idea. You ought to do this. You ought to do this. You ought to do this.”\\n\\n You start bubbling up some of those ideas, and then the senior management teams would looks at that and try to craft some initiatives that were responsive to helping move the organization to make it a healthier and stronger organization. So that was kind of fun, too. Yes, that was a lot of fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember any specific changes that came about because of those surveys?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think that’s really kind of hard to say. I guess I wouldn’t recall any off the top, although I know organizations—certainly we shredded it by organization so you could look at that and you could see where maybe you had some real pockets of unhappiness around certain issues, and I’m sure there were places where leaders took that into account in subsequent steps. I think probably what it did more than anything was it got us listening a little more closely to people and what they were saying and what they were doing. I think we got some better dialogues going on in organizations as organizations took that back to theirs and said, “Here’s what it says about our organization. What do you think?” I think you got a little bit more of a cohesive team trying to problem-solve what does it take to make this a better organization. That was probably the healthiest outcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In 1987, it became a little bit more difficult to hire workers because of the hiring freeze, the Graham-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act. How did that affect your job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, actually it always seemed like there was hiring restrictions, partly because we had so many folks who wanted to come to work for us. If we could have hired every individual, good-quality people who wanted to come to work for us, it’d be wonderful. We’d also have thousands of people all over the landscape out here, because everybody wanted to be involved in it. But I don’t remember that point as being the hardest point at which the hiring started to dry up. It really started a little later. I think ’90, ’91, and ’92 is where things really started to slow down a good bit. Then Mr. [Daniel S.] Goldin came on as our Administrator in ’92, and we went into some fairly active reshapings of the organization. That’s really where we put the clamps on for about four or five, six years, for entirely too long, in my judgment. But maybe we needed to do that to create the capability to reshape organizations. But it had a lasting effect on us that I don’t think was entirely healthy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We talked about the morale earlier as far as the RIFs were concerned. What was it like during that time period?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think to kind of pick up from that eighties time period, the post-Challenger [STS-51L] period was—I think there was a sense of quiet determination and resolve to go fix what needed to be fixed, to make sure that that never happened again or anything like that, and to get back to the business of flying. So I think a lot of people kept asking us at that point, “Morale’s down, right? Morale’s down.”\\n\\n I don’t think it was really down. It never really was. Solving a problem is what this group of folks is really good at, and this was a biggie problem to be solved. Certainly a lot of people grieved over the loss of friends and colleagues and crew, and what could we have done to not have that happen. But I never sensed that morale was down over that. We came through that and refocused efforts and really got back, and it was a really special experience to get back, to return to flight and to be flying again.\\n\\n As we moved into the nineties, I think maybe morale drifted again a little bit there about “Where’s NASA going? Are we going to fly a zillion Shuttles forever, or what’s going to happen? Where are we going?” So I guess I wouldn’t say morale was down so much as it’s kind of a feeling of uneasiness. What’s the future hold? Where are we going? What are we doing?\\n\\n Then as Mr. Goldin came on board and really kind of served as a catalyst, I think, to raise those questions, to lay those out on the table, and really actively work those in his own inimitable style, it had two effects. One, probably the initial early effect was, “Who is this guy and what is he doing to us?” But I guess I’ve always felt that as painful as that was, he took us through a process that we needed to go through. We needed to go through a re-looking at what business we were in, what we were about, how we were doing that, and where we were going, and making us relevant to the needs of the country.\\n\\n We don’t exist as an entitlement to space flight and to exploration. You’re going to have prove your worth. I think we kind of lost some of that. I think we got kind of disconnected. People were still of good will, but somehow we weren’t on target probably as much as we should be with what the country needed and wanted and connecting into the country’s priorities. He put us through that, sometimes in very painful kinds of ways. But it was a necessary kind of a thing to go through." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also spent a number of years chairing the Exchange Council." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was a fun thing. That’s another one of those Special Projects. [Laughs] I got involved in that, I’m not quite sure how, probably I think in the early eighties sometime. Well, I know how that happened. [Leslie J.] Les Sullivan … worked in the flight operations organization for Chris Kraft. I had worked with and for Les a number of times over the years, and he was chairing that, and he said, “You know, you really need to get involved in this. We need some people input in this,” and he was very stealthily setting me up to replace him so he could go off and do some other things. I wound up chairing that activity for a number of years and really, really did enjoy that.\\n\\n That’s basically the entire welfare, recreation, and association kind of a thing for employees. It had a whole bevy of things with it—all the cafeterias in the cafeteria system, although I never picked a single menu, so I just want to make sure that that’s real clear. I didn’t take beans and wienies off the menu. [Laughs] They were still on there, nor did I add any of the other new ones. But all the cafeterias at the Center, our vending and concession kinds of programs, all of our retail store outlets, all the Gilruth Center activities, and all the sports activities around that, were all kind of clustered in that, scholarship programs for young people, things like that that were clustered in there.\\n\\n Exchange activities are a wonderful little world unto themselves. They’re called non-appropriated fund activities. They’re kind of a separate little world. They’re not run with tax money, but they have to be green-money operations. So it’s the money that you make has to sustain the activity. They are parallel to base exchanges, post exchanges, in the military. NASA and the Veterans Administration have these kinds of things through some specific enabling legislation. Partly it was modeled after the military thing, and when NASA was set up—“Well, gee, it ought to be like, it’s kind of military-like. Maybe we ought to give them this authority.” And it always gave us a way to provide those kinds of things for our employees.\\n\\n It was fun because it was kind of its own little profit center. You really had to pay attention to the bottom line and make sure you were making money and that you were spending it wisely and you were doing the things that supported the organization and helped that. It was typically staffed by a collection of individuals from around the Center who served on the Council to represent the Center at large and to make sure that we were responsive to the needs. Then we typically had an exchange manager who was a civil servant, whose full-time job it was to manage the non-appropriated funds staff, which ranged anywhere from forty to seventy or eighty people, depending on what we were doing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have an involvement with the scholarships in the program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes, that’s maybe where Les got the hook in me initially, was, “Why don’t you come serve on the Scholarship Committee. You’d be good at helping evaluate these kids.” We’ve had a long history of providing scholarships for sons and daughters of employees, modest ones, you know, five, seven hundred dollars a year, whatever it was, something like that. But every year we picked a few, and it was one of those kinds of things where parents could say, “Yes, I can get some help right here for my son or daughter going to college.” We’ve seen some really neat kids go on to get Ph.D.’s and that sort of thing.\\n\\n Eventually I also got involved in the NASA scholarship program, which was when [James A.] Michener got involved with writing the book Space, and he got hooked on space, as so many people do. He gifted us with—I think it was $125,000, 100 or 125,000 dollars of the proceeds of the book, and he said, “I want to set up a scholarship fund for the sons and daughter[s] of NASA employees that I’ve picked up such a huge respect for.” But that was nationally, for all NASA employees. The first one I was involved with just was for the JSC people. But this other one was nationwide. But he specifically stipulated, “I want the people in Houston to run it,” which was kind of interesting. I think because he had spent so much time here and probably because of his Texas roots. So I was involved in from when that was set up and at one point chaired that. That was a nonprofit board of directors that we created to run that activity, and I chaired that board for a while, too, and that was fun. Man, you saw some outstanding young people from all over the country. We’ve helped educate a good number of folks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also were on the board of directors for the Manned Space Flight Education Foundation for Space Center Houston." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Another Special Project. Right. [Laughs]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What are your memories of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was a fun one, because that kind of got started in the early, mid-eighties time frame, and the threads for that came from lots of different directions. Increasingly, there was less and less space on the Center that we were able to open up to visitors, to taxpayers. You’ll recall at that period of time the front gates were wide open, and you could drive on the Johnson Space Center and park anywhere you want and walk on the streets here. You could eat in our cafeterias. You could roam around in Building 2, where our artifacts were and that sort of thing, and walk over to the control center.\\n\\n But we were starting to feel the pinch, in that more and more laboratories were needing extra space, and our ability to show the visitor very much was declining. It was going downhill fairly rapidly. There wasn’t any money available to build anything. Nobody even wanted to ask for money for programs, let alone buildings, let alone Visitor Centers or visitor kinds of buildings. That was going away, so there was a thread there around that.\\n\\n Even at that point there were some folks who were a little uneasy with, “Gee, we’ve got an awful lot of people just rumbling around inside this facility wherever and whenever they want to,” you know, kind of a thing, probably played out mostly from somebody who would came stalking in and saying, “I just got back from lunch, and there’s a camper from Iowa parked in my parking space.” [Laughter] Yeah, that happens. That’s right. They’re taxpayers. They get to be here, too.\\n\\n We started looking at what could we do to do something about that, and we cast about and looked at what other places had done. Particularly the Kennedy Space Center had done a number of things at that point. The decision was kind of made that maybe what we ought to do is go start something entirely different. This was the Reagan years, a lot of privatization emphasis. Is there a way that we could do this that would be offline? Is there a way that just wouldn’t be a demand on the federal budget?\\n\\n We create something called the Manned Space Flight Education Foundation, Incorporated—“Ms. FEFI” to all of her friends—as a nonprofit 501C(3) corporation, to go about designing, building, and operating a Visitors Center for NASA. I was one of three directors that signed the charter for the original incorporation papers with Texas. Carolyn [Sue Leach] Huntoon, [William R.] Bill Kelly, and myself were the original three directors of that. We set up a board of directors that was, I think, eleven: six NASA folks and five outside people, people here in the community who had an interest in that.\\n\\n We set about raising some money. We raised about $5 million in the local area and nationally from foundations and that sort of thing. Then we went out and floated bonds for about $70 million to go build the facility. We found a little neighborhood company in Glendale, California, called Disney Imagineering to help us with that, and Disney became our owners’ representative and became our designer. They held two roles with that. So once they finished the design, they stayed with us as the owners’ representative to make sure that the design intent … was carried through. We spent a fair amount of time with those folks helping them understand what NASA was all about.\\n\\n It was interesting talking to them initially, because they said, “This is neat. We’re about doing imagination. We’re about doing imaginary things. This is real stuff. This is different.” I remember specifically they said, as we were talking about site locations, there was some preference to, “Well, we ought to get it off of the NASA property, maybe over on I-45 some place, where it would be highly visible,” and that sort of thing, and they specifically said, “No, you don’t want to do that. It needs to be on the NASA property. It is the real thing. It needs to be where the real stuff is,” and that was good advice.\\n\\n But we wound up striking a deal where NASA provided the license to do that and the property to do that on the front of the Center. And then in a couple of years we raised that money and we built that facility, opened it in ’92, and had all the fun that goes with a building process and the early learning and operations processes, and also that sometimes your eyes are bigger than your wallet as we went through some tough times. And we realized that maybe we had sized the facility a little larger than—maybe we were swimming in the same bathwater of, “Oh, gee, we’re a wonderful organization. Everybody will want to come see us,” and the numbers didn’t pan out quite where we thought we were, and we wound up doing some refinancing to contract that and get it where it is.\\n\\n But we’ve got it on a good footing now to where it’s providing what we set out to do, which was two things: one, tell the story of human space flight in a compelling way to our customers and to our taxpayers and to everybody who’s a constituent; and, number two, to inspire young people, get more people interested in careers in science and technology, math, that sort of a thing. I think we’re doing a pretty good job of those. You only need to go over there, and I was over there last month when there were 3,500 young people in the building one morning from school districts all over the area. The energy that’s in there and the excitement is just—it’s wonderful. It’s doing what it set out to do. Or when you see somebody with a camper from Iowa stopping and saying, “This is really a special place. I’m proud of what our country has done,” then it’s doing what it set out to do. So that was a neat experience. I was with that board from ’86, from when we started it, through ’96." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’re going to stop for just a second so we can change out our tape.\\n\\n [Tape change.]\n\nOkay. We were talking about Space Center Houston. The expectations, you kind of mentioned that the expectations when you all started out was a lot larger than it ended up being. You were mentioning that you felt like it did still—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So how did you guys let that happen? [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Do you feel like it lives up to the goals that you set out as far as education and that sort of thing, but—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It gave us a different game to play than we originally envisioned, and we did that with some of the best help that we could find. You’d mentioned while we had the break here, that Bill Kelly had been to talk to you, and Bill was real involved in this as well.\\n\\n We went looking for the best help we could find. When we started with Disney, Disney brought us to a guy by the name of “Buzz” Price, and Buzz did all the projection work for Disney and for a lot of other folks, at Orlando [Florida] and in California and in other places like this. This is not a guy who’s just some yahoo; I mean, he had a long proven track record, had good help with this, and he did a study for us, and he said, “This is a slam-dunk. You guys will see 2 million people here, no question about it,” and we’ve seen 800[000] to a million a year. So it never quite materialized at the level that he projected.\\n\\n So we sized the facility for 2 million in many ways, and as that didn’t materialize, then it made it harder to do some of the things that we later wanted to do with new exhibits and new features to the facility. So it forced us a few years downstream to have to go through kind of a difficult period where we had to reshape the organization and re-do our financing arrangements and things like that. That was not any fun. That was a painful, painful time, but to get it back on a sound footing, so that we could do the job that we wanted to do, which was to tell the story. I’ve seen other ones as well. I think these guys do as good a job as any with doing that and telling that story well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have any idea or any opinion why you think that we only have a million instead of the 2 million people?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think maybe Buzz overestimated the drawing power of this. We certainly didn’t disagree with that. It drew us and drew a lot of our folks. But Houston is not Orlando. It is not a destination resort area. We’re kind of out on the end of the spoke. We’re not at the hub of the wheel. It isn’t California. It presents a different dynamic maybe than they had expected. Now, I think our leadership that we had there, both in the board and in the staff folks, did very well to adapt to that in the very best way possible, by looking for lots of sponsoring organizations, whether it’s Southwest Airlines or Coca-Cola or DuPont or Southwestern Bell, any of those folks, who really came in and helped us in substantial ways, both financially and with their skill and their capabilities, and new things like rotating exhibits in there that keep giving the place a fresh look, putting more things in for younger people.\\n\\n As we did it initially, it was probably geared more towards an intellectual kind of a thing and an older student. We realized we needed to catch those younger students as well, and so we adapted to that setting. I’m proud of what they’ve done. I think they represent NASA well. And who would have ever thought it? If we hadn’t done that, we sure would have slammed the gate shut post-Oklahoma City. We sure would have slammed them with an extra set of locks after 9/11. Having made that move to move Space Center Houston to our Visitor Center off-site really was a move that paid off for us later on to provide a more secure setting now for our folks. So, yes, I think sometimes it takes a while for an idea or for something to really to play out, but I’m proud of it and I’m proud of what it’s done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s a wonderful place.\\n\\n In 1990, Jack Lister retired." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yep, sailed into the sunset." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Then you moved into his position as Director of Human Resources." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What sort of changes did that bring about? You mentioned earlier you got a taste of it when you were at Ames, and you appreciated what he did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. It was one of those mixed-feelings times. On the one hand, I really felt like, man, I’m really ready to do that. I’ve been in this organization now for, at that point, twenty-three, twenty-four years. I’ve got lots of ideas about things that I want to do, that sort of a thing. But wait a minute. Jack’s always been here. Jack’s been the leader of this organization ever since I’ve know him, for twenty-four years, and done a masterful job at leading the organization and putting together a really first-rate group of folks. So it was a sense of anticipation, a sense of trepidation in some respects, that, gee, I can’t even imagine what this place would look like without Jack here.\\n\\n But it was an exciting time, and it gave me an opportunity to work even more closely with some of the senior management at the Center, with Aaron Cohen, who was the Center Director at the time. I have just the utmost respect for that man. People of great integrity need to look to an Aaron Cohen as a model. He was truly a remarkable man who devoted his life to the Johnson Space Center, to NASA, and to its programs. He was a wonderful man to work for. I truly enjoyed him.\\n\\n He was really the first Center Director that I reported directly to. Up until that point, I had worked reasonably closely with [Gerald D.] Gerry Griffin, before him, Jesse [W.] Moore, who was here just a very brief time, but had a very tough job at a tough time. But, Jerry, I had worked with him and, of course, I’d worked with Chris when he was a Center Director, before he left in ’82.\\n\\n But this was the first time, okay, now this is your Center Director that you’ve got to take care of. And so I had a chance to work with him. I had a chance to work with Carolyn Huntoon, a chance to work with George Abbey more directly, and that’s a very satisfying thing, to be able to work with a senior management team and help them get where they want to get.\\n\\n So that was an exciting transition to make. But in many respects, things didn’t change. Our team of people initially stayed pretty much the same within the HR organization. I moved into Jack’s office. I probably didn’t even move the desk, just moved in and sat in the same location. But Jack’s presence is everywhere in that organization, in the way he shaped it to begin with, and it was just my responsibility then to pick up the baton for the next leg of the relay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During the time there was the threat of the furloughs, and that was right when he was leaving and you were taking over. What do you remember about that time period?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I remember I was the only guy working while everybody else was off. [Laughs] There was that three-week period there where the mechanics of government broke down, and we did have the threat of furlough, an awful lot of people were pretty sure they were going to miss paychecks, and it was a relatively unhappy time. In effect, we kind of had to lock our people out, and an awful lot of people saying, “Yeah, but I’ve got work to do.”\\n\\n “No, you can’t do that, because if we let you work, then we’re liable for paying you, and we can’t pay you. We haven’t got any money to do that.” I think myself and just a handful of other folks wound up being the ones to be there to kind of deal with whatever needed to be done. But it was one of those kind of goofy times, where people were saying, “This isn’t really happening, is this? Would we be doing something this dumb?” kind of a thing. Eventually sanity came around, and it all came back together. But it was kind of a pre-retirement program for an awful lot of folks, where they got to try it out for three weeks and an awful lot of them said, “No, no. I think I’m going to keep working.” [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, during that time there was a lot of budget cuts and, of course, in ’95, President [William J.] Clinton was trying to cut the federal budget. A buyout program was implemented." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes, and this was really part of Mr. Goldin’s, I think, reshaping the agency and reshaping the direction that we were going. As he was doing that, it was, if we can’t hire very many folks, how could you reshape the people that you’ve got? How could you create more capability to hire people? One possibility that became available, and it was a build-off of a downsizing of the DoD, was where they first came up with that notion, is, “Well, let’s offer some incentives to people to consider leaving. So if you will retire, or if you resign, or you’ll leave, we’ll give you a separation package.”\\n\\n Well, that conjures the connotation of “golden parachutes.” Well, these were probably more Saran-wrap parachutes. There weren’t any big silver-lining parachutes here, because the government, in its own inimitable way, had to make it very egalitarian. Everybody will get no more than $25,000. And then the system’s set up on, we’ll do it based on how much time you’ve had with the organization, the seniority theme. Well, pretty soon it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that a secretary making $25,000 says, “Hey, a year’s salary. Color me gone,” and a senior scientist making $100,000 said, “Why would I leave for three months’ pay?”\\n\\n So we wound up with some unintended consequences out of that, that we probably got some turnover, but we got it in some of the wrong quarters, and we had to get a little bit clever about, “Okay, how do we district this so that we don’t get effects that we can’t stand?” But it did create a way to downsize that was much preferable to what I had experienced following the Apollo period, where we laid off people. That was a difficult period of time where you’d just wrench people out of the organization. This was more of, can we incentivize people to consider leaving the organization, and then we have to choose, where do you think you can stand that?\\n\\n Didn’t always work. We lost some good people out of that, people who left early incentivized by that. But it did create some additional turnover, which gave us some opportunity to hire a few folks. But mostly it gave an opportunity for the agency to reshape where do you want those people, and that was kind of always a tension was going on, particularly between JSC and the agency Headquarters, which said, “Gee, we need to take a lot of people out of the Johnson Space Center.”\\n\\n We were saying, “No, you don’t. Yes, we’re good team players. We’ll play, but, no, we don’t want to lose a lot of good people, because we’ve got a lot of things. If we’re going to fly Shuttle safely, if we’re going to build Space Station, if we’re going to go exploring Mars and places like that, we’re going to need some folks here.” We were kind of playing a dual game of educating them as to what they needed to keep here while we were staving off ripping out very many people from the organization. So it was constant strategy-education kind of an effort and an execution of that policy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also implemented a number of awards for the employees in the nineties, I think, the Go the Extra Mile Award, the Time Off Award." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and, again, this got into the business of, can we find ways to recognize people who do good work and, Lord knows, we had a lot of them. Often though most of the folks we got are not 4.0 Ph.D.’s from Harvard and Stanford; most of them are ordinary kinds of folks doing extraordinary kinds of things, and you wanted to find ways to recognize those folks and, in some cases, to motivate people to higher levels of performance, or to motivate them in certain directions, such as team awards, to motivate teams to work productively.\\n\\n My good friend Duane Ross was a key co-conspirator in a lot of this, because Duane was responsible for the awards program and has been for, I think, somewhere back to the landing of colonists at Jamestown [Virginia] in 1620. It seems, I think, he’s been doing this forever. But he’s got a wonderful sense of how to do that and do that in thoughtful kinds of ways. One of the things we created, some new capabilities came along in the regulations that let you do things in different ways, and so, again, our bent was to try to find things that help the organization get its job done and do its work well, and one of them came along.\\n\\n They came up with something in the regulations that they called On the Spot Awards, which was you can give out 25 or 50 or $75 in cash for something well done, that sort of thing, on the spot when you see that. A lot of people labeled that, “Well, we’ll have an On the Spot Award.” But we don’t want to recognize the procedure or the way you do it. What we want to recognize is what you do, and what we were looking for was, what do we want to really recognize? We want to recognize people who go the extra mile, and it just happened to have a nice little acronym with it, GEM. So, for us, it became GEM awards as a way for line supervisors to do something. We can’t give out a $50 gift certificate to Carrabba’s [Italian Grill]. We can’t give you a jacket with SIGNAL Corporation on it, that sort of a thing. But we could give out some very small cash awards, and we tried to do that in ways that we tried to gross it up so that you didn’t get to see $37.12, but that you got a set award. So we kept looking for new ways to do that.\\n\\n Flown flags was another example. Again, that really ties right into the heart of what our people care about, which is getting the job done, doing a mission, that sort of thing. I can’t even imagine how many little flags we have flown on Shuttles over the years. But there’s an inventory of them from every state, from every country, American flags that had been flown and then present them to individuals, and they mean a great deal. I’ve got a flown flag that Chris Kraft gave me, that flew on Apollo 17, went to the Moon. That means a great deal to me. That hangs there as a mark of my being part of a team that did something extraordinary. So you always look for things like that to try to find new ways to recognize and incentivize people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also began a new employee evaluation system in ’96." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Again, it’s kind of the cyclical thing. You’re always looking. Evaluation systems, in particular, in any organization are kind of the bane of their existence. Nobody wants to be evaluated unless you’re being told you’re perfect and you’re outstanding. So the trick is to find ways that you get some communication going between employees and their management about what’s expected, and how am I doing towards those, and what can I do to do it better. So we’ve worked on that. I can’t tell you how many systems I’ve worked at over the years and how maybe my philosophy changed from, well, we need to be hard with these things and call them where they are and tell you you’re a turkey and tell you you’re a star, kind of a thing to, no, the name of the game is, be real clear about expectations, and then give people good feedback on how they’re doing towards meeting that, and what can I do to help you get there and do the job better.\\n\\n Yes, it seemed like about every five to ten years it was time to go back and revisit that. There’s only two kinds of organizations on appraisal systems: ones that are unhappy with their system, and they’re in the process of changing it; and those that are just about to change it. It seems that nobody stays very happy with them for very long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you want to talk about TQM [Total Quality Management]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "TQM. Again, that’s another wave that moves through, as we talked earlier about quality circles and that sort of a thing. I think that was a real emphasis on helping organizations produce outstanding results. Never much of a problem with this organization. It’s always had high standards, always had high expectations, always focused on producing outstanding results. So part of that is wading and sifting through a movement, a cult, if you will, to see what’s in there that’s useful for this setting to help it get its job done. In some ways, the TQM process was good, again, to get us to think about what are the basics, what are we focusing on. We want to turn out a quality job. We want to make sure we did it. We want to make sure we involve our people in that process.\\n\\n But all those almost always bring bureaucratic baggage with them and their own language and a wave that goes through an organization. For managers, for HR people helping lead efforts like that, keeping your eye focused on the long-run goals are what really matters, helping organizations do the important things, get to their vision, do their mission, is what’s really important.\\n\\n It’s a lesson I learned from Skip LeFauve, the President of Saturn Motor Corporation, a guy that we brought in, we created something, we called it the Leadership Series, where we brought in practitioners to talk to our management team about what’s this business of leadership about? How do we get to be better leaders? We’d bring them in about quarterly, every three months, four months, six months, whatever it was. And Skip came in and talked with us about his experience at running Saturn Motor Company, which was taking General Motors and going and doing something new and different.\\n\\n Skip made a point in there that’s really always stuck with me. He said, “Leaders really only have three jobs, and it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re working at NASA or at Saturn or wherever you are. They have three jobs to do: get the mission done, take care of the people, and grow the next generation of leaders. These are the only three things that you’ve got to do.” So when you see something like TQM come along, you say, “Is this going to help me get the mission done? Is it going to help me take care of my people? Is it going to help me grow the next generation of leaders?” If you can kind of look at those waves of things that come through there against some enduring principles like that, you’re probably going to be all right. So TQM had some pluses for us, and it had some baggage with it, too, that we probably could have done without." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As you mentioned earlier, you worked under several different Center Directors, some directly and some not so directly. You do have a somewhat unique perspective because you worked under seven of the eight JSC Center Directors. Is there anything about any of those directors you’d like to mention?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They all shared in common just an incredible passion for this business and for doing it well and for just being, I think, models of public service. Any of those people could have stepped out of there for much higher paying jobs, much more prestigious jobs with all the trappings that come with that. But all of them, in one way or another, really modeled what it means to be a public servant, to do a job on behalf of the people of this country, that needs to be done, and often those jobs were really, really tough, more than glamorous.\\n\\n People keep thinking, “Well, Center Directors, they get all the glory. They get to meet all the dignitaries. When Prince Charles comes, you’re going to tour him around, and when the President shows up, you’re going to take him around and present him with an astronaut flight suit. This has got to be a really neat job.”\\n\\n The more you work closely with those guys on a day-to-day basis, and particularly in the last ten years, as the Director, when my office was on the other end of the hall from the Center Director, and I wore a lot of carpeting out going back and forth there and see what goes on in their lives day to day, you realize what a really tough, tough job that is, and the challenges, and the amount of sacrifice they … [make] to do those jobs.\\n\\n So, they were all special in so many ways. But, clearly, Chris Kraft has to stand out among those as a giant. He is a leader in the finest sense of the word, maybe because I encountered him at an early and impressionable age. But Chris wasn’t all that much older. He’s probably fifteen years older, fifteen, twenty years older. But he always set an incredible example as a leader and being real clear about what needed to be done and being willing to tackle any job and being very good about using all of his people to get that job done. When he walked into a room, you knew he was the leader in charge. There was no question about that.\\n\\n To watch him listen to somebody, talk to you about a problem or something like that, he’s a very quick study and had probably one of the best BS detectors I’ve ever seen. I went to an awful lot of meetings with him, where if anybody tried to blow smoke at him, Chris knew that in heartbeat and would zero in on you with those laser-like eyes and would take that apart and get down to what really needed to be done. He was really, really good at that.\\n\\n He was incredibly loyal with his people. He really believed in his people and he gave them room to go do their jobs and to do them well. And he took care of his people, too. I count him as a kind of a lifelong friend and in a special way. He and Betty Ann have always [been] really, really special people. He really embodies, I think, the heart and soul of what JSC is about.\\n\\n But they’re all special. It’s just that I probably caught him at a very formative time in my life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You retired in ’99." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I retired in ’99, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you feel like, during your years, more than thirty years there, what do you feel is your most significant accomplishment or your greatest challenge? Or maybe that’s the same thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Again, going back to Skip LeFauve’s principles, get the job done and do the mission. I think we put together over the years, both as a worker and as a supervisor and later as a leader and the senior manager of an HR team, we did that job as good—we played the hand as well as it could be played. We provided the Johnson Space Center with an outstanding people program. It’s really probably in the last—maybe I knew it intuitively earlier, but probably within the last ten to fifteen years that it really became crystal-clear that HR organizations are most effective when they line up with the business needs and help an organization to win in the workplace, understand what needs to be done, and helping them get to that point is so incredibly important. This organization did that, partly intuitively really early on and maybe more planned and systematic later through the years. But I think that’s a biggie.\\n\\n Taking care of the people, we had some wonderful people. I had the opportunity to work with some really, really neat people through the years. We had an awful lot of them in the HR organization. There was any number of times I’ve told people that I wouldn’t trade a single [one]—given the opportunity to say, “You can take 10 percent out of this place and send them away and replace them with other people, would you do that?” there were an … [awful] lot of times in that organization where I wouldn’t have traded a soul. They were just all good, good folks, and that’s really important.\\n\\n Probably one of the lasting satisfactions is to see so many of them still there and doing some wonderful work. Greg [W.] Hayes, who followed me, we hired in 1973. I just really loved watching and shaping him and so many of the other young folks who came along and help make that place even stronger. So that’s a piece of it.\\n\\n The other piece of it is being involved in something that really has made a difference. NASA’s about doing something worthwhile and going someplace and doing something. It’s not about making a better Dorito. This is about something that makes a difference, and so you can really sign on to that, and you feel like you’ve invested yourself in something that’s worthwhile.\\n\\n The opportunities, I guess, to provide so many other young people with a chance to get involved, through our student programs and that sort of a thing, our cooperative education programs, I’m really proud of those things as ways to engage so many young people in it now.\\n\\n Thirty-five, forty, forty-five years ago, growing up on a farm in Nebraska, trying to figure out what you’re going to do, knowing that you’re not going to be farmer, real sure that I’m not going to be a farmer, but what’s life going to hold? God has blessed me richly with wonderful opportunities to do some incredible things, and I just couldn’t have asked for a better script, almost, had I written it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s wonderful. We’ve just got a couple of minutes, and I was just real quick going to see if Jennifer or Kevin had any questions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Jennifer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I do, but it might take more time. So I’ll just ask one question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had mentioned earlier that the relationship with the union in the 1970s early on was pretty rocky. I was wondering if you could describe some of the issues that were raised by the union, some of their concerns, and some of the solutions that they wanted, and some of the solutions that you and the HR department—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re going to test my recollection here. Obviously, that formed up out of a concern for employees saying, “What can I do to help save my job?” Well, the government allowed unions to be formed, and it provided, in effect, another layer of insulation, if you will, another protection for you, if you would. Government unions can’t bargain over wages and can’t strike, so mostly what you wind up doing is haggling over procedural kinds of issues, the processes by which you do things. So unions tend to want to put in place processes that are very protective of people, more concerned about that protective stuff than concerned about “Is this going to make it harder for us to do our job?” So most of that haggling was probably over those kinds of things. People would see, “You really need to give us more notice on this,” “This needs to be structured,” “It needs to be done only seniority.” You know, we aren’t going to pick our management team by seniority. You know, those kinds of things. We’re going to pick the people who can do the job. So you start, okay, well, then how can we honor your concerns and how can we get what we want to get. So you just start looking for common ground. Later, much, much later, it became called, I think, mutual interest or common interest, whatever, trying to find those common grounds that you have and build off of those things.\\n\\n I think once we got through the contentious layoff phases and probably the early years of active affirmative action, when you’re trying to sort out what shape that would take in an organization, by the later seventies, things got to a point where I think we were much more in a partnership kind of arrangement, where we could talk with folks and we could work with them and try to be respectful of their views and their concerns, while also maintaining the areas of prerogatives that management needed to be able to do to get its job done. Again, that’s a tribute to a lot of the people like [Robert F.] Bob Hall … and the Carl Maxey and the Dick Kuhn of the world, who worked very hard at, I think, doing that well and treating people with respect out of that, that we wound up with a much stabler situation than many other parts of the government, still have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’ll let him ask a question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’d like to ask one as well. You mentioned a couple of times a few things about the culture of NASA. I was wondering if you could describe your perspective on the culture here at Johnson Space Center and how as a human resources person you could take advantage of that and, I guess, in some cases, how you might have had to work around that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. Every organization has a culture. Your organization has a culture. The church you belong to, the Rotary Club, the company, whatever it is, has a distinctive culture. JSC’s, from the very start, I think, was a very goal-oriented culture: get a job done, get a job done. It was a culture that had high expectations because we were given one of the highest challenges to begin with that you could ever have.\\n\\n It also had some underlying things that kind of came out of that, mainly from the kinds of folks who initially staffed and ran that. One of them was a real emphasis on competence. From the very beginning, this organization placed a high premium on competence. If you were good, then you had standing to debate an issue, to talk about how we would do something, particularly in the early days. It was not uncommon for a green GS-9 engineer to challenge a forty-five-year-old branch chief, GS-15, and say, “No, that’s dumb. We can’t do that that way. Let me tell you what’s wrong with that,” dah-dah-dah-dah, and get to the board and start drawing it out. So there’s always been the organization, I think, placed a premium on competence, no matter where it was in the organization, is the highest value, not hierarchy. That was important.\\n\\n Accomplishment has always been—you’ve got to get a job done. You’ve got to get results. That’s been a biggie. There’s been a “can do” spirit about this place. “We’ll find a way. Somehow we’ll find a way.” And I think woven in there is a little bit of the spirit of Texas. There’s a little bit of the frontier independent mentality in the Johnson Space Center, that’s now very nicely represented by those longhorns that are out there. It’s just another reminder that there is a special spirit about that.\n\nThere’s a special spirit of pride. I remember from these culture surveys that one of the questions was, “Are you proud of your organization?” Our people blew the top out of that, compared to any other NASA organization, and most of NASA— feels proud of what they do, but within that, JSC’s out the end of it. “Are you proud of your organization?” They’re gone if they don’t feel proud. It’s just so much in their bones, and that partly comes because we’ve got this wonderful collection [of people]. We owe that to the Gilruths and Krafts and the Lows, who had the foresight to put together the design people, the operating people, the people who have to do it, the astronauts, and the program people, all in one place, close beside each other, and say, “You guys go solve this. You go figure out how to do this kind of a thing,” and that was a real stroke of genius from the very beginning.\\n\\n Now, we’ve strayed from that occasionally, and we’ve paid the price on that. You know, in the early eighties, the mid-eighties, some of our early attempts at Space Station design with, “Let’s let all God’s children have a stake in this thing, no matter where you are on the planet,” and we had trouble with that. We kind of got away from that principle. We kind of came back to it as we got to a working one, and maybe we’re finding our way to expand that now internationally a little smarter than we’ve done in the past.\\n\\n But the design of this place around putting together the people who can do the job all in one place was genius, and that helped produce, I think, this incredible pride in it. So there are things like that competency, the professionalism, the “Get the job done,” the “can do” spirit, the pride, all those things are really bedrock kinds of things. What do you do from that? You make sure that your strength doesn’t become your weakness as well.\\n\\n It may be a bit of a weakness for us, because people kept saying, “The Johnson Space Center’s arrogant.” Maybe at times we overstepped that, and we were pretty sure we could tell the rest of the world how to run as well, although Chris Kraft was fond of saying, “It ain’t arrogant if you can do it.” And he’s probably right, but I think you can overstep that to the detriment of your organization. That would be a case of that pride where pride is in the past and not pride in what we can do in the future. You can get hung up on being really proud of all that stuff back there, but you’re going to have keep on tackling those high mountains. So, yes, in fact, that’s part of what we did with that culture survey thing.\\n\\n I remember one of the things we did was to put together a little card of ten points for supervisors that said, out of this, “Here’s the kinds of things you can do as a manager that really drive those numbers up for you in terms of your people feeling like they’re engaged, being used, challenged,” and just ticked off some practices that came out of that. So you do try to build on those strengths out of the culture and make that work for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You bet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we’ve kept a couple of minutes past what we promised, so we’re going to let you go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Harvey L. Hartman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But we want to thank you for being here today and sharing your—" + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00764", + "metadata": { + "category": "NASA JSC Space Shuttle Program Tacit Knowledge Capture Project 2008", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SSP/wallacero.htm", + "original_file_name": "WallaceRO_5-28-08.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SSP/WallaceRO_5-28-08.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "Tacit Knowledge Capture Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 28 May 2008" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Rodney O. Wallace" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 28th, 2008. We're in Houston, Texas to speak with Rodney Wallace, who is currently Technical Advisor to the Space Shuttle Program Integration Program at United Space Alliance. This interview is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Tacit Knowledge Capture Project for the Space Shuttle Program. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal. Thanks again for finding time in your schedule to visit with us today. Tell us how you first came to work with the Space Shuttle Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I started my career in 1971 with the Boeing Company in the Phase A/Phase B timeframe of the Shuttle when concepts were being developed. I worked there until Boeing lost their part of the contract; the program took a different direction in the configuration. Then I went to work for Northrop [Services] and supported the aerodynamics group at [NASA] Marshall Spaceflight Center [Huntsville, Alabama], who was working on the ascent aerodynamic part of the Shuttle Program. After a while, there was a need for a civil servant position here at JSC, and that's how I came to JSC in the Engineering Directorate, working in their ascent aerodynamics. I worked basically through STS-1 and up until [Space Shuttle] Challenger [STS 51-L accident]. I'd been out of the Shuttle effort for a little while when Challenger happened.\\n\\n Then I went to the Shuttle Program Office in the Systems Integration Office to help out after Challenger, since the program was staffing up to have a bigger presence in the Program Office. I was a systems engineer there and eventually became an office manager in one of the divisions of the Systems Integration Office. I worked that until after Columbia [STS-107 accident]. During that time my office had changed titles, but it basically did the same thing. It was doing engineering integration, making sure design environments and that kind of activities were worked properly.\\n\\n After Columbia, I took a short rotation back to the Engineering Directorate and worked in the Shuttle and [International Space] Station Engineering Office, which looked after the chief engineer functions for engineering. Then in February 2005 I came back to the Shuttle Program and I was the Systems Integration Office Chief Engineer until I retired in 2007. Then I came over to USA [United Space Alliance] and have been in this position ever since. So that's how I got to the program and my life in it so far." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your roles with the program have varied some, even though your basis has been a constant. Share with us the details about some of the challenges that you've encountered along the way and some of the lessons that you've learned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The real challenges to me were the accidents that we had. The challenges were getting to the point of trying to understand what happened and getting past the question of, “Could I have done something different that would have prevented the accidents?” The lessons learned out of those, trying to reconstruct what happened, is that you never have enough engineering flight data to really know exactly how things went. Program is a balance of spending money in the right places, and putting flight instrumentation on vehicles is a very expensive part of the program. It has to be managed very carefully. But, in the end, when you need the data you never have enough to really do what you need to do.\\n\\n Some of the other challenges were—as the Shuttle Program went along and we were going to head into the Space Station era, we partnered with Russia. So they changed the inclination that the Space Station was going to be at. The Shuttle Program had to adapt some increased performance capability, basically change the configuration, to be able to support Space Station. That was a very extensive effort going through lots of different aspects to gain enough performance to support the Station. We had to come up with the ideas and work with the Shuttle Program Manager to manage the selection of the things that would be implemented. The biggest change was changing the external tank—the second time that we changed the external tank. Made it quite a bit lighter. We changed the way we flew the vehicle in several ways.\\n\\n Taking that decision process through the implementation process and then getting the analysis that needed to be done to certify the new configuration that it was ready to go fly—doing that in, if you will, a stepwise sequence—we didn't implement everything all at one time. That's a lesson learned: when you're making major changes it's better to take stepwise steps in implementation as opposed to just doing it all at once. STS-1 was a new design. Everything happened all in one flight. Best engineering judgment that we had at the time—we were ready to go, but we learned stuff when we flew the first time. When we did the performance enhancements for Space Station, taking the stepwise approach, making sure we understood the piece parts was very key.\\n\\n Other challenges I've had over the time were management changes. I've worked for every Program Manager that the Shuttle Program has ever had, and when you change the Program Manager you had to adapt to the way he did business. That was usually not too big a change. In the early days the Program Managers came out of the engineering organizations and then eventually the key operations people came to be the Program Managers. So growing up in the engineering world, I had some adaptation to the new Program Managers.\\n\\n However, the two accidents changed management in lots of different ways. First accident [Challenger], they just changed out the Program Manager and Center Director and we moved on with a person who'd already been working on the program. However, after Columbia they basically eliminated everyone that had had a significant leadership position in the Shuttle Program. Matter of fact, I was one of the few office managers that was still in the position. Then the people that they brought in—I think that was devastating to the Shuttle Program. There were people with very strong personalities that led things in a way that I didn't think was beneficial to the whole program.\\n\\n Any engineer or any manager in that position been there as long a time, you have to get over the fact that you don't get selected for a key position. You either leave or you decide that your experience is needed to carry on the program and you support whoever is there. In the Systems Engineering and Integration Office there have been multiple office manager changes, and so I had to deal with that quite a bit. But in any case, you contribute your skills where you can and your experience and you support the new leadership. I think that's the key lesson learned, is you’ve got to put yourself out of the way and make sure that the whole effort is moving in a good direction. Leadership can't do it by themselves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were mentioning step-by-step sequences. I'm thinking that it takes a great deal of planning. Could you share with us some of the ways that you were able to instill good planning, and some of the recommendations that you could pass on to someone else? What are important steps in making sure that the planning is well done?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In any endeavor of a major configuration change, it's all in the planning. Task planning saves time, saves money. It also reduces technical risk, because if you're not changing everything all at once, then you get to understand the effect of each. All the flight design changes we made in a package, so we could understand how the flight design was going to change, how much we were really going to get the improvement that we needed. The super lightweight tank was put in at one time. So we stepped up to the full configuration of changes that we were going to make.\\n\\n We increased the performance capability by about 15 to 17 thousand pounds of payload to orbit more than what we were going to be able to carry to the 51.6 inclination. In the manifesting of all the missions you still had missions that you had to carry out, but you wanted to step up to these things as you could. So you had to plan what you were going to be able to fly to meet the performance capability that you had. Leading up to the fact where you've tested the whole thing, before you take on a major Space Station payload increase." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I imagine along with the planning you have budget concerns. Can you share with us some things about how to make a program efficient when you've got so many elements to consider?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Each office in the Shuttle Program has its own budget, and you have to plan for that every year and plan your task accordingly with your contractors to be able to spend the money efficiently. Planning all your tasks and getting your ground rules for the task agreed to beforehand such that you don't have to rework things. Rework costs money. So you set aside reserve budgets to be able to deal with surprises along the way.\\n\\n It's all in the planning and agreements on ground rules, and making sure that not just your office management has bought into a task, but that it fits in with overall Shuttle Program's approach to budgeting. We had to be careful, because in the systems integration world you could do something that would make the elements of the program have to go do additional work, too. You could affect your own budget but you could affect others' budgets, too. That was something you always had to be aware of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You used the word, and it's one that we'd like to talk a little bit more about, and that's risk—how every aspect has some underlying risk. Talk to us about risk mitigation and risk management and how you believe that it needs to be instilled in every faction." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Flying spaceships is a risky business, and there's always risk in every part that we do. What we've learned out of the Challenger accident and the Columbia accident is we did not know as much about the vehicle as we thought we did. The hazard reports, the fault tree evaluations that occurred after Columbia was a significant improvement in risk identification, and gave a tool to the Program Managers to be able to make decisions that could reduce risk. You have to make some kind of change to really reduce risk.\\n\\n Understanding the risk, or quantifying the probability of the risk, allows you to make better decisions, but it doesn't change the risk. With the external tank and the foam that came off that damaged Columbia—since that accident there's been multiple changes in the design of the foam pieces on the external tank. We have learned what the failure mechanisms are of the foam and how to mitigate those.\\n\\n It all comes down to really understanding the risk and then making wise decisions about design changes that allows you to actually mitigate it. The risk management systems that are in place today—the SIRMA [Shuttle Integrated Risk Management Assessment] and all of the PRA [Probabilistic Risk Assessment] work that's going on—overall system PRA plus the debris PRA work that is going on—keeps the risk in front of the Program Managers constantly, and I think that is the best that has come out of the Columbia accident." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you give us an example of a risk mitigation activity or management activity that definitely impacted the Shuttle Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The performance enhancement program that supported the Station Program was an excellent management program—being able to take an already operating system that would not support the performance requirement of the Space Station. We needed to figure out how to change it. There was a very systematic approach taken of coming up with ideas: assessing the performance gain, how much it would cost, what is the technical risk involved of being able to really pull it off. All those assessments were done and a series of items were selected to be implemented, which ultimately provided the lift capability that Station needed.\\n\\n Through that management activity, also, there was a complete recertification of the vehicle. Bringing all the elements of the program, going through their recertification papers and doing the structured reviews, the preliminary design reviews, the critical design reviews—design certification reviews all the way up through the program, even to the Agency level, was a very excellent activity. That would be, I think, one of the finest examples we've had, other than building the Shuttle the first time.\\n\\n The other thing in a risk standpoint—understanding the failure mechanisms and the vulnerability that caused the Columbia accident has got to be the most risk mitigation that's been done. Although there were signs that we had problems all along and should have been noticed and should have been acted upon differently—even by myself and a lot of others. What we've done since the accident, understanding how—if you had a piece of it [foam], it is very light material, and intuition would tell you that it couldn't possibly cause any problems, but it does. Learning the failure mechanisms that makes it come off, figuring out the design changes that would help it stay on better—because it's always going to come off—we're trying to limit the size it comes off.\\n\\n That was one thing that surprised me, being on the ascent side most all of my career, never really studied the Orbiter that much in terms of the tile and how they actually certified the tile and the RCC [Reinforced Carbon-Carbon] material for impacts. Basically they didn't. The requirement really wasn't there. It was just: “Don't generate debris.” That's easy said, but as we found out—and as we knew for a long time—that was a very difficult, if not impossible, thing to do.\\n\\n What we've learned is the vulnerability of the tiles and being able to model the vulnerability of the tiles and RCC. And then we look at the debris sources that can come off of all the elements, and then we've stepped up to the analytical analysis of being able to predict the trajectory if something comes off and where it's going to hit and how much energy it's going to have. By doing a lot of impact testing on the elements side, they've been able to determine models of what the damage would be for a certain kind of impact.\\n\\n Now, with those models and knowledge in place, then we have a better way of characterizing risk. We know that in certain phases of flight we just cannot lose something from a particular place, and that's the place we have to concentrate on to make a design change to reduce the risk. I would say we've beefed up our risk mitigation approaches and management processes significantly because of that accident." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Speaking of management processes, as you mentioned, you've worked for every Shuttle Program Manager. You've worked for Boeing, USA, and as a civil servant. So you've seen a number of management styles and methods. Give us your thoughts on those that have worked well and those that maybe have not worked as well as they should have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If a manager comes in with the idea that he knows everything, he's doomed to failure. He has to figure out that the Shuttle Program, or any endeavor as large as the Shuttle Program, is only as good as the weakest person in it. He has to figure out who are the knowledgeable people and listen to them, and not come in to be dictatorial and say, “This is how everything's got to be.” The most successful Program Managers were the ones that listened well, asked hard questions, expected answers that were supported by data. One thing that the Program Manager has to do is provide enough money to allow testing, statistically significant testing, to provide a good answer. One test does not always provide a real answer.\\n\\n The Program Manager who has grown up either in the engineering side or the ops [operations] side has a better chance of being effective than a person that is just brought in to take the place of somebody who's moved on to another activity. Bob [Robert F.] Thompson, the first Shuttle Program Manager, was very good. He obviously had had lots of experience prior to becoming the Shuttle Program Manager. But since he was the first one he had a lot to contribute from his past.\\n\\n Now you take [N.] Wayne Hale [Jr.]—Wayne Hale grew up operating the vehicle and learning about it, and I thought Wayne was an excellent Program Manager. He had a more philosophical approach to things. He wanted you to come show him data. Wayne could be hard at times when he didn't like what was being told to him, because ops guys want to make things work. He didn't want to know why you can't do something; he wants to know why you can. During the Columbia recovery and Return to Flight activities, when he was the manager we wanted to do things quickly and effectively. But sometimes when things took longer than he thought they needed to take, he still had to back up. At times he would have to back off. When a manager knows when he's reached his limit and knows that he's got to step back and get back in the rational world of listening to folks—that's a good trait for a Program Manager." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Listening, asking hard questions, and looking for answers that have data that supports it. I think those are three really good aspects for that. Following that line of thinking, if you were tasked to train the next group of leaders coming in, what are some of the elements or attributes that you would be looking for in those people? What would be some of the lessons that you would like for them to learn from you or from others that you've gathered so that they can be the leaders that the Agency needs next?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's not just classroom training that needs to take place—whether degrees or through the management training that happens, the leadership development. I think it's experience that is the key. So for the next group of the leaders—for, say, Constellation—I would suggest that they get testing experience and hardware experience. If you're going to manage a program that's going to be all made up of hardware and analytical activities and they all need to be validated—and testing is how you validate the data that's going to be brought to you—I think they need to have a broad experience in technical area management. Whether that's a single discipline or whether they move around and do multiple discipline management activities, particularly if they get into the systems engineering integration world, they have the bigger picture. Which a Program Manager has to have; he has to have the complete picture. Any steps that you can get for a large program, if you can work in multiple sections of the program where you can get a better perspective of the overall activity that you will ultimately lead, is I think very key.\\n\\n A Program Manager is going to have to know how to deal with requirements. Some have done well with requirements. Others didn't quite know why requirements had to be there. But the requirements are how you structure the program. It tells everybody that's building something or analyzing something what they have to meet. I think that is very key. So you have to be able to manage requirements.\\n\\n Somebody wants to change a requirement, you have to make sure they're changing in an appropriate way. Mr. Hale did not like waiving requirements, which is saying, “Well, for whatever rationale we can come up, we really don't need to meet that requirement for right now.” I agree with him, I don't think waivers are the right thing to do. If we have a problem we ought to make a change either in the requirement or change the hardware in some way. I think that's something the Program Manager has to deal with.\\n\\n In the Constellation side, the program management are going to go through the design certification process. They're in the throes of that—the requirements reviews, the preliminary design reviews, the critical design reviews and design certification reviews. The program management needs to be trained in that—how to pull that kind of review off and what the purposes are. That's how you ensure that the vehicle is ready to go fly. I think that is a good training activity for a new leader.\\n\\n The leaders have got to start from the first day they go on the job—on their path to the leadership—they have to figure out who are the smart folks, observe what they do—not just what they do right, observe what they do wrong. The best experience I ever got was watching folks that really knew how to make this business work. I don't necessarily think we've always picked leaders based on their on-the-job training. In on-the-job training, I think you learn so much more than just what you learn out of a book. I think to me that's key. I would try to structure a training activity or an experience activity for whoever the Agency picks to get on the leadership role." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Being on the contractor side currently, can you share with us some of the differences in decision-making and/or requirements and recommendations, now that you've seen both sides—a couple times you've seen both sides." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I've seen both sides; I've seen multiple roles on the contractor side. USA—my role is basically to apply my experience and give recommendations to my management. But on the contractors as a whole, they're tasked to do specific work to get the vehicle ready to go fly and execute the flight. Their decision process is a little different. We get paid based on our performance, so you have to keep in mind what the customer needs and wants, and you try your best to make recommendations to the customer that would be beneficial for the whole program that are sometimes taken or not taken. The leadership is on the NASA side and the execution is on our side. It is different, but you're after the same objective.\\n\\n There's also the support contractor role. I worked for Northrop in Huntsville supporting the Marshall Spaceflight Center. Support contractor is a different role. You really are following the lead of your NASA counterparts and helping them get the work done that they need to get done. That's the same as at JSC with Jacobs Engineering. They're following the leadership of the NASA folks and helping them do the tasks that need to get done, and then identifying tasks if something is not getting done. That's part of the job. Hopefully you get funded to do those tasks that you feel like need to get done. But the contractor world—it's a lot to do with funding and whether you get to do that.\\n\\n The thing here at USA—which is complex, makes me think twice—is the way NASA has structured Constellation. You have Shuttle money and you have Constellation money. And if Constellation would like to have some particular Shuttle experience they're having very hard times getting the mechanisms that allow that to happen, and I find that troubling, because the new program needs all the experience that they can get." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you expand on that a little bit? Because we're looking for recommendations and suggestions for new management processes or new methodology." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That is a key one. There needs to be a process developed that will allow Shuttle experience on the civil servant and the contractor side to be utilized to assist Constellation during this phase. NASA has taken an approach to contracting and doing a lot of the work that was normally contracted out, doing it in-house at multiple Centers. That's fine, you're covering highly skilled civil servants. But a lot of them don't have the experience in the hardware that's needed. Dealing with the multiple programs—you got three programs—hadn't noticed that that was as big a problem for Station and Shuttle. But for Constellation right now it appears to be a significant problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were just talking about programs, but you mentioned you worked at Marshall and you've worked here at JSC. Are there quite a number of differences on how management and planning, the basic aspects we've been talking about, between how one Center does compared to the other?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Marshall and JSC operate in, I would say, significantly different approaches. Over the years it's always been a battle between the two Centers to see who was going to be the lead Center. JSC, in one management system, was the lead Center for Shuttle. So Marshall had to answer our Center Director. But in the management Marshall is more process-oriented. They structure things in a particular way, and once they set up their structure that's how they function. JSC is more program-oriented. Programs lead the way and everybody else tries to get in line and get their piece of that pie. Marshall appeared to be more structured about how they included their technical expertise. They would have project offices and then also have a chief engineer's office, which was not part of the project. It was in support of the project from their engineering organization. They just functioned a little differently. But they build a lot of stuff, manage a lot of hardware. That's a capability that the Agency needs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What would you consider to be the hardest or maybe the best lesson that you've learned through your years of experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The best lesson I've learned is that systems engineering and integration, is key to the success of any program. The project elements of a program have their piece of hardware to go build, and they can get that built and delivered, and then it might not necessarily function with the rest of the elements like everybody thought it would. Having the people that are systems guys that can look across elements and make sure that things are going to work together, [that] can bring up problems that can be solved before they're problems, I think is key.\\n\\n Through the Shuttle Program, Bob Thompson realized that right up front. He had Owen [G.] Morris, who was the systems integration manager, and he had Max [Dr. Maxime A.] Faget, and he had those two guys beat against each other till they came up with good solutions. Other Program Managers didn't feel the need to have that organization to be as strong as it had been over the years, and I think that led to some misjudgments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What advice would you share with someone getting ready to enter the space program or even a similar program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Be well educated. Apply your expertise and look for other opportunities. I think to advance you have to have the big picture perspective and you need to have multiple opportunities. You can't just stay in the one spot. I know lots of guys over there that have been in one division, one branch their whole careers. While they're outstanding at what they do, it doesn't always lead to opportunities, and it doesn't always lead to providing the biggest impact for the overall program.\\n\\n I think there's been lots of smart people that stayed in one place that if they had broadened their horizons would have made better leaders than the leaders that we chose. But they didn't choose to have that experience. So I would suggest that a new person coming into a program get the broadest range of experiences that you can get. I think you'll be happier over your career by not doing the same thing all the time. If you're good and it's recognized and you advance, then it's even more." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm going to let that lead into my last question, which is: what would you recommend to improve management performance?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have, probably, a little different idea about management than some people. A manager is only as good as the people that you have working for you. My first rule of management is to take care of the people that work for me. Know that the person that works for you is not the same every day. It's not just his expertise or his technical know-how; it's everything else that's going on in his life. That can have just as big effect on the overall team as anything. So you have to encourage them to take care of their family and themselves first and then the work will catch up. Because you can't have people working for you that are divided. When they're at work, they need to be at work. If they feel that you're supportive, then they're going to provide their best efforts.\\n\\n Other part of management is making sure that planning is done first. You can't spend your money wisely on a plan that you're willing to say is not the plan. You save schedule in the long run by doing advance planning and allowing the work to be done one time and not having to do multiple reruns of the same activity because somebody didn't think of the right things. If you have a broad-based experienced team that reviews the plan before it starts to execute, I think you save time and money in the long run." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds good. I know you have made some notes. I’m going to give you an opportunity to look through those and make sure that we didn't miss anything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As you grow in your experience and knowledge and have data at hand, don't be afraid to tell your leader that he's not correct. If your leader is dissatisfied with that, if you have data to support it, don't be shy about going above your leader. You have to have data; don't just do it because you don't like what the leader said or did. You have to have data and rationale for why it was wrong or why something else needs to be done. It's all based on data and sometimes that's hard to get. A gut feeling, intuition is never as good as data. Fight for data, even though you have a gut feeling there's something wrong. Management can put you down for your gut feeling, but they can't put you down for requesting data. So I think that's key.\\n\\n I did talk about the fault tree and the hazard work. I thought it was the biggest improvement in the risk management activities. I think we did fairly well with the performance enhancements for Space Station. But developing a process that allows you to assess the—I call it the “bang for the buck.” You're getting the most for the money that you're going to spend. If there was a formal process where all decisions were run through—that required money—I think that would be an improvement." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are there some elements to that process that you feel would be important?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's assessing the cost of what it is, it's the improvement that's going to be realized, it's the technical risk of actually realizing the improvement, and then if it's a risk reduction activity—how much risk does it really buy you. If right now my risk is 1 in 100 and I can make a design change that costs little and I can get to 1 in 1 million—that kind of assessment is what you want to be able to do. As far as someone that's coming into the program, you have to get to know your leaders at all levels. They need to get to know you. Once they know you, that's how they get to trust you. I think having your leader trust you to do your jobs correctly and provide good advice is key." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there a way that you have seen that works when people start to instill trust in others and vice versa?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The people that I worked with—if I trusted them, I think they trusted me more. If they weren't quite as reliable and I didn't feel like I could trust them, then I felt that they didn't trust what I was telling them quite as much. I think trust is key." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is that something that can be taught to others? I know it can be tested." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know if that can be taught. I think it's more of a goal. You need to start as a goal to gain trust from either somebody working for you or who you're working for. Getting to know the leaders—shaking hands, whatever it is, whether you see them outside of work or whether you get exposure to them through your technical work—so they'll know who you are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any other thoughts you'd like to add as a closing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You had one question [about] who else you might want to interview. I've jotted down some names. Bert [James B.] Jackson [Jr.] works here. He was the guy that put the configuration management process in place originally for Shuttle. There's some retired people I know that are still around. I think Dick [Richard H.] Kohrs and Owen Morris are still around. I think Dick Kohrs has got an office over in Building 1 somewhere helping Constellation. I thought he was one of the best Program Managers we ever had. Owen Morris was the initial systems integration manager and I think he's still working with Dick. Others come to mind are Lambert [D.] Austin [Jr.], Don [Donald E.] Prevett, Tom [C. Thomas] Modlin [Jr.] and Jene [A.] Richart—one of the guys that used to work for me, he's been there a long time. Probably good folks to interview." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right, sir. Well, thanks so much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney O. Wallace", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're quite welcome." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00148", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2020-041.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Stierman, Donald J. (1969-1972): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2020-041", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2020-041", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Donald J. (Don) Stierman served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras from 1969 to 1972 as a teacher trainer. He enrolled in the Brockport Teacher Training Program (at the State University of New York – Brockport) which was designed to train Peace Corps volunteers for Latin America. There he earned a bachelor's degree in physics and a teaching certificate while experiencing rural Honduran life, improving his Spanish, and gaining cultural awareness. Assigned to the teacher professionalization program in Honduras, Stierman worked with elementary school teachers to replace memorization with experimentation. He also introduced science fairs that were replicated countrywide. Stierman recalls the challenges of getting permission to marry his fiance, a Peace Corps nurse, and their life in Tegucigalpa. He coached and refereed baseball in his free time. The Peace Corps influenced him to earn a PhD in geophysics, specializing in earthquakes. When he returned to Honduras in 2002 as a Fulbright scholar, he found that skills he had learned in the Peace Corps were still helpful. Interviewed and recorded by Gail B. Gall, September 11, 2019. 1 digital audio file.", + "dates_of_materials": "11 September 2019", + "extent": "1 digital file (audio; stereo; 39 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "039. Honduras.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Honduras. Stierman, Donald J. (1969-1972): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Honduras", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2020-041", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2020-041-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/bpc7676088ax80ld456s3po2d4rx535k.pdf?odc=20231115173645-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/fcc3559a-2021-460a-b4a6-3d488df39a85/92aebce7-1f0e-44b9-8976-dc7beb4bbdd9/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzIyYWRfZDQ2ZDZhYzJhMzJjOWIxMmMzNTFkZDg1ZDM2MWU4YzYxNWY2YTE0ZTJiNWQxYWExNDdlMWU5NGNkNGYwMGIzN18vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS9mY2MzNTU5YS0yMDIxLTQ2MGEtYjRhNi0zZDQ4OGRmMzlhODUvOTJhZWJjZTctMWYwZS00NGI5LTg5NzYtZGM3YmViNGJiZGQ5L21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Lesterville, Missouri", + "length": "18 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed February 4, 2020, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Donald Stierman Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Gail B. Gall" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Donald Stierman" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:02", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, today is September 11, 2019. This is Gail Gall from Honduras 15, and I am interviewing Don Stierman from Honduras Group 13, who trained in Brockport and served in the Peace Corps between?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:22", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "1969 through 1972. September 1, ‘69 to August 31, ‘72." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:30", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And we are in Lesterville, Missouri. And we will begin with probably the most common question is why did you join the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:44", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My Uncle Horatio spoke Spanish. Aunt Rose spoke Hungarian, and they hosted some refugees from Hungary after the 1956 revolution. They hosted some refugees from Cuba after the Cuban revolution. They also had several they hosted some exchange students from Peru. And I became fascinated with Latin America. I took Spanish in high school and was relatively good at it. Then, after three years of college as a physics major, I decided I wanted to be a teacher and they had a program in which they were recruiting teachers. I would get a teaching certificate and I would get a assignment in Honduras or Peru, which was all the things I wanted at that time. So that was that was an offer I couldn't refuse. We were also great admirers of President Kennedy and the Peace Corps always sounded like a good idea to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:01:50", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great, great. Before joining the Peace Corps, we talked a little bit about your aunt and uncle and their activities. Any other childhood or education or other experiences that you think contributed to your joining the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:02:06", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was the oldest of eight children. The house was getting kind of crowded. And when I was in college, I was working three different jobs. And this would be a way to kind of break that pattern. And I could get out of town and finish up my education at Brockport State." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:02:28", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that was quite the I assume then that getting the teaching certificate was a big motivating factor." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:02:34", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was. You also have we so we had to take the 18 hours of education courses. We took Spanish every semester because we were going to be teaching teachers. So we had to do this efficiently." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:02:48", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So was your degree then from Brockport?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:02:51", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My degree was from Brockport. It was a Bachelor of Science and Physics." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:02:55", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, all right, great. So how did you hear about this offer about the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:03:01", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I saw it in a brochure or an advertisement." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:03:07", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And where were you studying before that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:03:09", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. It's a small Catholic men's college." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:03:15", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the name of it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Loras." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "L-O?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:03:17", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "L-O-R-A-S. Word in Spanish, parrots. Named after a bishop who was one of the early bishops in town." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:03:31", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, OK. And so you're your training was actually part of an undergraduate degree program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did you have any training specifically related to Honduras or was mostly the language around you had intensive Spanish, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:03:50", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Also, the spring break before our final summer, they arranged a trip for us to Honduras to spend a week there. My mom didn't want to invest in another member of everybody and then have people drop out right away. So they took us, right. They took us to Honduras. I got off the plane in Tegucigalpa, got in another plane right away to San Pedro Sula, got on another plane to Santa Barbara. So I went from a four engine to a big two engine prop to a DC three, like my dad flew with the Second World War. He was a navigator radio operator. So it's really an interesting progression of aircraft. Yes. So I spent several days in Santa Barbara with Craig Wanky, who was a Peace Corps volunteer, and he wickiup and got to visit a couple of other places, sort of a couple older volunteers. And I realized this is going to really change me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:04:53", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You realized then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:04:55", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. But I still like it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:04:58", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok. All right. So you really had more prep than those of us who didn't get there until we were ready. So this question is a little inappropriate about like your reaction when you were accepted. But basically when you decided to change and study Brockport, was there much of a reaction among your family and the people that were close to you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:05:22", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really. That my parents were supportive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:05:25", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:05:26", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I like to say we are the family admired John Kennedy. We thought that he thought maybe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:05:32", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yup, yup. And so did you have a preference aside from Latin America?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK. So is there any particular with a particular people trained for this Peace Corps assignment, this Peace Corps program at Bridgeport Fort Brockport that focused on you becoming teachers in Latin America? Well, I was there. So aside from the general teaching, learning how to teach with a teach you how to teach in Latin America much cultural information and things like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:06:20", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We have had several of our language teachers were from Latin America. OK, so there were there were times when we would have discussions on the culture. But we were trained as a group, mostly, mostly specialty classes. It was all the Peace Corps for the education, psychology, the developmental psychology, the teaching methods. The only people in the room or the instructor and teach for trainees." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:06:55", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how many people were in your group?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:06:57", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Started out with 50 and 25 went overseas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:07:03", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so there was a slow attrition over?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:07:06", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Several people got offers for graduate school and decided they'd rather do that. People dropped out little by little." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:07:16", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. OK, what do you think the training adequately prepared you for what you were going to be doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think it did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And were there any particular Honduran host teachers with you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:07:34", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not, not at Rockport, an Ecuadorian and some Costa Rican. And we had a couple of visitors down the road, Stevie Yorkeys was from Honduras, I forgot exactly what role he played in Rockport. She was there for the last summer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:07:59", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:08:00", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He later became interim director in Honduras." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:08:03", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, good. Good. So your initial entry into the country, would that be going back to the trip to Santa Barbara and your impressions there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:08:16", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You spent there. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:08:18", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So how did let's get a little bit more picturesque about like what the physical environment was like that struck you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:08:25", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And which was the first thing that struck me was they had only got electricity only about five hours a day, two hours right before sunrise and then three hours starting at sunset. So electricity went off like at night or 93. The place is very quiet. You know, at night, very, very little vehicle traffic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:08:54", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:08:55", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh. Also, the fact that the water was not on all the time. So there was a large pila store water and the water did come on. Craig would fill it up and you would hope and then Daddy come on again before he had to fill it up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:09:17", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, yes, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:09:19", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The water was just too hot to be able to drink. The water was an issue. Had to boil it first. This was before bottled water." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:09:29", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have those iodine, the tablets to put in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:09:33", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we had iodine tablets in case we couldn't get boiled water." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:09:35", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. And did you meet any co-workers, like Honduran teachers while you were there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:09:44", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not on that visit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:09:45", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, and did so when then when you came back now as a volunteer, where were you assigned?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:09:54", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was assigned at the National Teachers cut teachers college. Yes, we will give you a preference. OK, and I got there in the middle of the semester. So the first class, I thought was a five or six week class for elementary school teachers, try to teach them some science. Meanwhile, I was told this is what you're going to teach next semester. So I had time to find the equipment I wanted to use in the teaching and I had time to develop some physics laboratories" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:10:34", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the Peace Corps help facilitate any of that for you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:10:37", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was all done with the school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:10:39", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "With the school. And how did you feel about the resources that the school had?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:10:44", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They had all a whole cabinet full of stuff, mostly in Europe, and the instructions were in made. It's hard to understand, but they were back to figure out what most of it was. The thing was, a lot of the physics being taught at that time was mostly by memory. You would tell them formulas and they would revert to take them back. So I was trying to get more hands on stuff going. Hmm. And so this was this cost a little bit of an uproar because students were used to memorizing stuff and then regurgitating it instead of doing things, certainly experiments. And so some of the students complained to the director. And then we had a long discussion about what really science is a nice thing was three semesters later, one of the freshmen was assigned to teach optics. There was also French volunteers there. And the students complained that all he was giving them was memory. So they had to come over to like the experimental side of things. We did things like a contest to try to figure out how to protect an egg.\n\nShe could drop it off the third floor balcony. Oh, yes. Yes, right before we dropped the gavel, we would experimentally drop stuff from the third floor and see which room first. It seemed always had time. I had some tricks about how you can get a piece of paper to the same velocity as the book. You put a piece of paper on top of the book next year out of the way. So those type of experiences, these. We're flabbergasted that they could do these things. There was one time in class. This is how we break through this. I told them now, Plato said heavy things fall faster than light things, right? Right. There's Plato, right? Of course, he's a smart guy. Then there was the question. Galileo says heavy things and light things fall at the same rate. Is he right? Oh, yes, Galileo was right. So I wrote down that these people disagree with each other. They can't both be right. You tell us telling me my Galileo, you know, my Plato and somebody says I was doing experiments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:13:15", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you really were able to change the perspective of learning?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:13:20", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. And several of those students went on to get their keys in physics." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:13:26", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Awesome. That's really impressive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:13:29", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Come on. Came out of at the university. And when I visited there on my Fulbright, they still had in the library the physics journals that I had gotten monthly when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, say they found them useful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:13:49", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I bet. Yeah, that is great. And did you. Was it how did the workday work for you in the daily and where you lived and things like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:14:05", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I lived about. 20 or 30 minute bus ride from the from the school, so typical workday, I'd have to be out catching one of the mini busses. Seven-thirty, eight o'clock. Take the trip across town from Comayaguela to Tegucigalpa. And then the school day usually ended mid-afternoon when I had an evening class that would usually be just one day a week. So I have evening classes were mostly the primary school teachers trying to get a parking lot of. A lot of the teachers did not have teaching certificates at that time. So the whole project was to try to get every teacher into Honduras to have one Honduran teaching certificate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:14:57", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, so you did have a goal like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:15:00", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Was that was the big overall?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:15:01", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. And were the teachers who would they selected based on merit or any particular qualifications?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:15:09", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not sure how they were selected. I mean, I was I was given a roster and these are teachers. This is supposed to teach them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:15:17", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what was your impression of them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:15:20", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some were very good. But all of this being used to memorizing stuff. Yeah, I went out to visit with teachers supervisor. He says today you're going to see the anatomy of a fish. I says, all right. He says, that's what this guy always teaches when I come to observe him. And the students were very good. Copying down into their put knows exactly what the teacher told them. Right. But instead of going out, getting a fish and dropping it open to see what it looked like, they would draw all these, label all these parts. And they were all saying." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:16:02", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So this is so there was no fish?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:16:05", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To break the rope. Trying to get people to observe and draw conclusions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:16:11", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So basically the scientific method?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:16:13", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. They would memorize the scientific method and not use it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:16:17", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hmm. And did you have any colleagues in among your your other professors or teachers that you developed a relationship with?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:16:29", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, we get invited to all the parties. Arturo Suarez taught math." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:16:36", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:16:38", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:16:39", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, he was assistant director." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:16:41", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know about that picture of somebody looks like. Oh, OK, Mark, maybe." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:16:56", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:16:57", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can’t remember all the names now and then we'll spend 50 years, yeah, kind of jumbled up with the mathematics teacher and I got along real well. He was also trying to teach me about things. He had just gotten his master's in mathematics from the University of Florida. OK, so he was trying to get people to think mathematically differently. The other physics teacher and I didn't get along real well, he just kind of standoffish. I think he felt threatened, but I was replacing somebody who had been teaching physics and who was in the states to get an advanced degree. So I was put into a slot that was already there. They didn't say I was substituting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:17:46", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:17:47", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I got invited to the teachers’ parties. I played with the faculty against the students in soccer. Uh huh. I coached the basketball team. We developed a photography club and I taught how to how to develop film and how to make photos. Oh cool. The students came with initiatives on this. Ask how we how we could do this. They found out I knew something about photography and there was a dark room in the school with equipment that was not being used or anything, and it was a camera. So I lent them thirty bucks for a camera and they paid me back with money they collected by taking each other's I.D. cards. You needed pictures for all kinds of stuff in Honduras and the students found out they could do it cheaper than having it done on the street. The students were they were pretty cool, but they took a lot of initiative. But most of them were college age, a little older, some were married. And they, they got into the real support through a competitive exam and they all had scholarships. And so that was a bit of it to them. This was a high motivation to just to do well and stay there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:19:12", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. Great. What about your you know, your vacation time, your work and living arrangements?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:19:21", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ok, I got married about four months after I got in country with a Peace Corps volunteer in a different group, and she was in group fifteen. She was a registered nurse. And so we leave about the same time in the morning for our jobs. Sometimes we'd be on the same bus for a while and we get off about the same time. We didn't have a refrigerator for the first year, but we could get cold stuff from across the street or we watch something on the way home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:19:55", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh. Did you have an apartment or a house?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:19:58", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had we have lots of. On the front of the block look like one solid wall with doors in it, and some had windows or painted different colors, there were different heights, but they're all there. There was no gaps in it. It was kind of like being in a trailer where you walk in one end and in the other end was the bathroom and the pillar and the small patio. OK, and so there is a living room, dining room, a kitchen in the bedroom. And there was a volunteer leaving the country just about the time we were setting up house. And he was a very large person and he had a very large bed. He sold it to us at a at a bargain. So we had a almost as big as the bedroom." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:20:53", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, and did you guys take any trips and vacations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:20:59", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We went to Guatemala. We went to pick it up and we went to Panama a couple of times. A couple of Linda's friends came to visit us and we met him at the airport, got on the same plane, went to Panama, took a bus back from Panama, stopped at Puntarenas in Costa Rica. Yeah. So we got we take our vacations out of town." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:21:26", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, all right. And. Did your relationships with Peace Corps staff or change over time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:21:40", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When we got into country, the director did not approve of us getting married. Oh, but he, he was replaced within a month by another director that was hanging around. And Henry Reynolds, we wanted to talk to him. He looked at the director's guidebook." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:22:04", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:22:05", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We should frown upon this. So he frowned and he was just good luck." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:22:14", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's great. That is great. So did you extend for third year then? Did I hear properly that you were there for three years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:22:22", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. OK, what happened was I figured that I was just getting to learn things well. Mm hmm. And meanwhile, they were sending in a new physics teacher. And so I stayed around with him for a while." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:22:39", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you had a team teaching?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:22:41", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we, we. He taught different classes, but I was able to tell him where everything was and how to do certain things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:22:47", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, good. Was that the fellow that had gone away to study?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:22:53", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was still studying." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:22:54", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, so if you look back on your tour of service, who knew there'd be someone mowing the lawn today? What do you think were your main accomplishments?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:23:05", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well. I think I did help great reporting, at least in physics, and we threw a science fair one year. Mm hmm. I. There weren't any prizes, but I gave the students an assignment to do a project and then and then to discuss or at least do an exposition of what they learned. Mm hmm. And there were some very good ones. One person I gave a brochure of, this is. What caught yours look like a failure, this nutrient in that nutrient, and she went out and found corners and looked just like the pictures." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:23:47", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, cool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:23:48", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so this is what that was. That's that kind of thing was very useful. Well, the students thought this is such a good idea. They organized the science fair for Tegucigalpa. And so they went out and got prizes for this for the best presentations, did all the judges. Awesome. And then schools outside Tegucigalpa said, wait a minute, why don't we have this for us, too? So for a few years there, they had regional science fairs. And this is something I started with this we support. And then these being all teachers, they went out and did their way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:24:28", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. And do you have any regrets or feelings of things you didn't accomplish?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:24:38", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I do I usually don't set a lot of goals. I mean, I try to do the best I can. If I had it back when I ran track, then I would try to break a certain time. But when you're trying to teach. How do you I mean, it's hard to we didn't have any test. Students took, you know, as I did. I don't think I had any real regrets of things I didn't accomplish. I didn't have any unreasonable expectations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:25:14", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so how did your Peace Corps experience influence the future?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:25:20", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I probably wouldn't have gotten into Stanford if I hadn't been in the Peace Corps. There was a return volunteer there to put an ad in the Peace Corps newsletter looking for graduate students. And this was in the geophysics department at Stanford. And I had just read a report in TIME magazine about earthquake detection. And Linda, my wife had gone to Peru to help pick up after the 1970 earthquake in Peru. And she came back with some interesting stories. I thought it would be a very good idea to learn how to predict quakes. So when I applied to Stanford, a couple of my references at Brockport told me that Stanford is a good place if you get a chance to go there. I applied some other places too. A couple offered me assistantships, and Stanford didn't accept any. So we counted our pennies and Linda was going to get a job. She already had talked to Stanford Hospital and they said they take her. So she was going to work and support me in school. After I got there, they gave me a job of changing the diaper on the seismograph, something I had done back at Morris College and a very good job at it. I went out in a couple of projects and one of them, they were building a concrete block house to house some instruments next to the San Andreas Fault. And I was the only one there who knew how to build a concrete block Houses doesn't have on the farm. And so the guy who took me under his wing preferred hard work to a lazy brilliance. And so I worked with little things that took a lot of work. And yeah, he had a good time there and learned a lot. So but I wouldn't have gotten in if I had been in the Peace Corps. I don't think I would." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:27:21", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so we're almost to the top of it. And one of the questions this is it's how do you assess your service in light of Peace Corps’ three goals? And three goals listed here are, A, provide technical assistance where requested, B, to promote better understanding of Americans, and C, to promote better understanding of other people by Americans. So we'll just go back to the top of the list in terms of the goal of providing technical assistance." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:27:55", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We're required in an academic setting. It is to teach the class well or you don't. And so I think I did well in that, especially since when I go back for later visits, I am warmly greeted by my former students." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:28:12", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Isn't that great? And to provide better understanding of Americans?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:28:20", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know we did have a lot of discussions on cultural differences that time, there was there was protests against the Vietnam War and the students would take me to the protest, but we'd stand in the back room because they said if they see a green go up in front, somebody come up and hit you. And then all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:28:42", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because you were a gringo?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:28:43", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. And I'm a six foot two, so I stood up above everybody else. We also played a group of Americans played in the National Basketball League in Honduras. And I was one of the better Spanish speakers. So I got elected to be the representatives and went to all the meetings of the league teams. And that that's where I learned a lot of the cultural differences, for example, that in Tegucigalpa there were groups of called Arabased and they were mostly Palestinians. There were also a group of Jews. And they had businesses that competed. And one of the teams was mostly Autobus and the other one was mostly the Jews. And I hadn't realized that until I went to those meetings that there were those kinds of social or cultural differences. Yeah. Later I learned a lot more about the Lebanese and Palestinian influence. And in Honduras, I went to a geographers meeting about 20 years later and someone was discussing how the culture of the Palestinians was to help other people out. If you're successful, you give loans. So I hadn't realized that that's the way it was working there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:30:10", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the north, in the north coast. They called the Lebanese and Palestinians turkos. And the Latinos would put a little tone in their voice when they talked about the turkos. But that was so, I mean." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:30:24", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They also used that term." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:30:25", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. And so in terms of promoting better understanding of other people by Americans?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:30:33", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I learned an awful lot about Latin America. I knew, for example, during the Salvadorian conflict that we weren't getting the straight scoop from Washington. Ronald Reagan was claiming that there were arms being smuggled overland from Nicaragua to El Salvador. Well, if I went out on a ride in the couple of months later, they would ask everybody, see, a big gringo. I was tall, skinny guy, right? Them, you know, people out there see things you can't sneak it by. And if there would have been arms being smuggled, there would have been evidence, people would have seen it there. We've been witnesses. So I understood a little bit about that way at that time that we're just not getting the straight scoop flying." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:31:32", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so do you, but do you think that there was some link into how the Hondurans felt about Americans?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:31:38", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really don't like really kind assess that, OK? All right. I got invited to there. We got invited to their parties. I got invited to join a local softball team with our Arturo Suarez, got us into their thinking, OK, if you guys want to send some ringers there, as we were, we were pretty good hitters." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:32:01", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The and he understood I thought he was Peace Corps staff at that point." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:32:05", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Peace Corps staff. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:32:06", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So it's interesting for me to hear the influence of sports participation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:32:13", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I think I would, I would, I would coach the basketball team at the end of the year, but then we went out to visit another school. I'd have to be referee. And so I would have to tell those students to give you five start and after five minutes you come in and that I have to go out and be referee. They were friendly game." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:32:38", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, well. And they trusted you to be the referee." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:32:41", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was the only one who knew the rules out. Well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:32:44", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's important. So have you continued any involvement with your country of service or contact with people from that country?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:32:52", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I made about seven or eight trips to Honduras between 1993 and 2002. One of my graduate students did a thesis based on working work he did in Honduras. He did a land use study in order to help protect water quality for one of Tegucigalpa major reservoirs. And this became important because it prevented the dumping of a lot of sewage into the basin. He was Panamanian, he spoke Spanish and he went back to Panama and was teaching and one of their technical schools now. Oh, great. So I've been in touch with him from time to time where Hondurans geologists tend to lead off. And he did a thesis there and he went back to Honduras, has a master's degree from Toledo, and he's teaching at a couple of different schools there, Unitech. And then when I went on a Fulbright to Honduras, I spent a semester at the Universidad Pedagógica. I taught geographic information systems. And at that time, Mario was working for COPECO, which is the Honduran equivalent of FEMA. And I investigated a half dozen geological hazards. And a couple of them I wrote up these reports for the, um, delivered them to the Geological Society of America at meetings. So it was very interesting to go back after so many years and now with some geological experience to be able to read what's going on. Yeah, but I was a Peace Corps volunteer. I couldn't see all the stuff I can see now when I read geology. And I think it was useful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:34:50", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great, great. So this is just this big open bucket question about what has been the effect of your Peace Corps service on your life?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:34:59", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "How. It really changed my life. I wouldn't have gotten into grad school, I got into. Hmm. My wife and I got really close. We had our rough spots now and then. But usually she's also a very generous person. And you can tell when you watch her work that she learned enough Spanish that when she was in Toledo, she would have Spanish speaking clients. Mm hmm. And when she was on home care. Yes. Yes. So I think it was I think it was it really helped make me what I am." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:35:42", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. Great. Is there anything else you'd like to add?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:35:48", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I've met Peace Corps volunteers on some of these trips, and I think. They're having a lot harder time doing they're doing their job, they're living allowance is probably not enough. All right. I know the prices are going up and so on, and they seem to have a little bit Peace Corps out of Honduras now because it's got too dangerous. So I think the Peace Corps, we were we were there at the golden era. And it was a time when relationships were quite close, I think, in the 1980s with the U.S. involvement in Central America. Americans really aren't well liked in a lot of places there anymore. I found out that some of the contacts I had as a Fulbright. But by then, I had become a little better knowing my way around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:36:51", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. Great. Well, this has been very, very good. You you're obviously very comfortable with speaking and we're ahead of time. So is there any other thing that you'd like to say?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:37:07", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really think that service to others is a good way to develop your own character skills. You still try to get involved with the university, it's becoming formal. We now have a service learning projects, right? Yeah, some of the ones I get involved with, I'm a I'm a gardener, so I give advice on gardening and so on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:37:39", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So it you're what you're interested in your strengths?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:37:42", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Also, I've gotten involved with a number of environmental issues, trying to stop a deep injection well for liquid waste in Michigan, looking at the loss of well water when they pumped it out of a quarry in Michigan. I've been having lunch some more landfills and you can believe that that's awesome of working with engineers to solve human problems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:38:10", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. I like that. Working with engineers to solve human problems. It sounds like a motto." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:38:16", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the model is the one that John Hall, the engineer, says, tell me what the bad news is and I'll fix it. Great. Great. I'm the one that finds the bad news is a geologist who investigates what the ground is, what's going on underground, and then you'll fix it and usually does. A lot of my former students work for him. So I see my students out there in the environmental field. Some are partners in the companies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:38:44", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, great. So you've helped contribute to a new generation of leaders?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:38:50", + "speaker": "Donald Stierman", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the new generation of problem solvers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:38:53", + "speaker": "Gail B. Gall", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Problem solvers. Good. OK, I think we can finish up. So this is Gail Gall finishing the interview with Don Stierman on September 11th, 2019, in Lesterville, Missouri. Thank you very much." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00247", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HooksIF/hooksif.htm", + "original_file_name": "HooksIF_3-24-09.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HooksIF/HooksIF_3-24-09.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "location_date": "Boerne, Texas – 24 March 2009" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Ivy F. Hooks" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is March 24, 2009. This oral history with Ivy Hooks is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Boerne, Texas. Rebecca Wright is the interviewer, and she’s assisted by Sandra Johnson. We appreciate you letting us come into your home this afternoon and take your time. This is a continuation of your oral history that we started earlier this month, and I’d just like to see where you want to start today and what topic you would like to begin with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought I might want to talk a little bit about involvement with the different programs and how that felt as a person working in that at NASA. I’ll probably repeat some things from last time. But when I came to work, the first job I was given was to try to come up with the lunar lighting, and I talked about that last time, about what the lighting would be like on the Moon. I’m a student; I went and looked things up in the library. There were math models. So that’s how that began.\\n\\n I left that job and went to work in the area where they were doing cost models, and the leaving was because it was not a very pleasant place to work; it was not going well there. It was in the same division, another section. I worked on cost models for a couple years, and I learned a whole lot, and I talked quite a bit about that. But then I was told by the deputy division chief I needed to get out of what I was doing and get back into technical. It was Caldwell [C.] Johnson. You guys have done interviews with Caldwell. He said, “You need to get back in the technical world,” and so I ended up going to work in a branch that had been in the same building and in the same group with us—we were all in the same division—but they’d gotten moved out to Ellington [Field] for space reasons or some reasons.\\n\\n So I went out to Ellington Field to work with them. I walked up to the building, and somebody was dropping teeny-tiny models of parachutes off the second-floor balcony, and that’s where I got introduced to the guys that did the flight dynamics and flight mechanics and those sorts of things. At that time, our branch chief was Milt [Milton A.] Silveira. I actually got to work with some of the brightest engineers I think NASA ever had. So when I would be told to do something, here were all these people, and you could ask questions of, you could talk to. They would come to me for the real heavy math problems, because my degrees were in mathematics and physics, so we worked very well. Most of them were engineers, but probably the best dynamics engineer I ever knew in my life was a man named Joe [D.] Gamble, and his degree was in civil engineering. He just was very, very smart—no problem, he could learn anything, could do anything. He was my officemate for a long time. That was a really wonderful environment to work in. It was a group of people who loved to solve problems, who would go find problems that people didn’t even know they had to work on.\\n\\n [Our group] was trying to build empirical models for parachutes and could we have steerable parachutes. One of the issues on the Apollo flights—not on the first ones where we were just launching the unmanned and where we were launching off the launch pad that was closer to the water—but on the subsequent ones. When we were going to the Moon, the issue was, we’ve got to launch from a launch pad that’s further back, and if we have an abort, if we can’t control the parachutes, we’re afraid that depending on winds, we would drift back on water. Well, control or not control, we didn’t even know how to model the parachutes and how much they would drift back. So there were people doing modeling, and they were doing things with the controllable parachutes—you know, like the parasail things. We were also taking every piece of data—I was working with Joe Gamble on this—and modeling having three parachutes and different winds and all the conditions.\\n\\n The computer programs were—for that day and age, on those programs—were very complex because we could do this with multiple bodies. So we could have the parachute and the vehicle and the suspension risers and all. I remembered one time, I kept going and turning in my computer runs. Of course, the way you did computer runs in those days, which is just so foreign to today’s world, was you would write on these little green pieces of paper that had blocks on them what you wanted cut in a computer card. You’d take those over to the key punch ladies, and they would type all that in. The cards would be cut; you’d put them in a box, and you’d haul them over to the computer center. We didn’t haul them to the computer center; we had to put them out for the driver to pick up and take in there. Then he would come back the next day with our computer runs or not.\\n\\n One time, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my computer runs. They kept coming back and failing and coming back and failing, and I was just sure something was wrong with the computers, right? Finally, one of the guys said, “Let’s look at a couple of things. Let’s just look at a couple of things.” Well, I had to put in numbers to indicate the angles relative between these vehicles, and the sum had to be 90 degrees. If the sum wasn’t 90 degrees, it didn’t work. Well, I’d put in 45 and 55. It didn’t work. So it was crashing all the time, and I was sure that was a computer problem. From then on, I looked really hard to find out what the problem was before I would go over and tell the computer people it was their problem.\\n\\n But one time, I got a job back—and they were in metal trays at that time—and when I picked the tray up, it rattled. It rattled because it had gravel in it, which meant the guy had dropped the tray. Well, now, the cards have to be in the order that they’re in. So he’d stuck a card upright and said, “box dropped” or “box jammed” or something. I went, “Start all over.” You can’t sort those cards again; you had to start all over.\\n\\n So they were really fun times. The group that I worked with, they pulled a lot of pranks on each other, teased each other. They didn’t pick on me badly. Whatever picking on they did on me was exactly the same as they did each other—you know, the other guys. I was just one of the guys, and that was a very fun environment to work in. We all helped each other, worked together.\\n\\n Another thing that I worked on that happened early in that period was something that they call plume effects—and I may have mentioned this earlier, too—but it’s the exhaust that comes out of an engine. If it hits something, what does it do to the thing that’s hitting? For Ed [Edward H.] White’s walk in space, there was a real fear of what’s going to come out of the plumes if the reaction control jets go. They gave me the job of running this computer program that could make some of these predictions, and I discussed that last time. It was another technical thing that I got involved with that nobody else knew anything about, and I didn’t either. What difference did it make if I didn’t know anything about it? Neither did anybody else. I certainly could not have created that program, but I could set it up and run it, and I could make estimates from it and do things with it.\\n\\n So that really—I’m thinking back to Gemini—that was the only thing I remember doing in the Gemini program, was that particular job for White’s mission. It had a lot of meaning because I happened to go to the same church he did; I knew him. Not close friends or anything; I just knew who he was and all. It makes it more personal when you’ve met the people.\\n\\n What we were really working on in our group was Apollo stuff, and mostly the Apollo abort stuff. This worrying about coming back and hitting on the land was a big thing. For the Apollo 8 flight, when we just circled the Moon, I was in the mission control center in a back room looking at the winds to see if there was any problem at the Cape because of that. Because what we did was we finally came up with a model, we came up with a way to estimate if we had certain winds that if we had a pad abort, we would have the crew in danger of landing on land instead of in the ocean. Of course, there were no winds that morning, so there was no problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I remember reading you being recognized for what you created that lasted through the whole Apollo program. So that’s pretty remarkable." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes, they could just keep using that over and over. In fact, we in the Engineering Directorate came up with it. The guy I worked with most on that was John [E.] DeFife. We worked on that and came up with that, and then we taught the Ops guys how to use it. We didn’t ever go back over and do it again, because it was very straightforward thing to do. You just plotted a plot, and if you were on one side of the line, it was okay to launch; if you were on the other side, please don’t do it, it might be a risk. Your hope is that you can make something that you can use for the whole mission, and yes, that was used then for all the missions. That worked out real well.\\n\\n The other job they gave me was the Apollo launch escape system. For every flight, you had to do this set of calculations. You had to set the motors, the little thrusters, so that when it came off the pad, it would pull it off right, and depending on the center of gravity of the spacecraft itself, which you didn’t know ‘til not too long before—when they got it all together down at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] and ready to go, almost. I learned how to run that program. I came up with my numbers every time, and I said, “I hope I did this right,” but we never knew. We never had to do one of those aborts. I worked on a lot of things that never happened. If they’d happened, it would have meant we didn’t do the mission, so you didn’t want them to happen, but it’s like, “Was I ever right?” You don’t really know were you ever right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you feel like those projects that you worked on were extremely necessary?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes, oh yes. In between doing those things, we were working on future spacecraft things and simulations and improving our ability and looking at what we might do next. I mean, by the time Apollo launched, engineering is virtually done, and so you want to go to the next thing you’re going to go build. You want to start thinking about that. We were doing that, and then things would pop up. Like on one of the unmanned flights of Apollo, they didn’t get the response out of the Command Module that they thought they were, and it was a plume hitting. They reasoned that they were making the Service Module go away, and that when they did that that the plumes could have hit the Command Module, and therefore, it reacted strangely. I may have mentioned this one earlier, too, because the way we got that was we got the data from the flight of what each vehicle was doing, and it’s on a big oscillograph trace, so I could run it from one end of Building 16’s hall to the other, the longest direction you could go, and crawl on my hands and knees and measure and get the numbers. That was a case where I could go do a prediction and say if it did this, this is what you would have seen, and then I could go measure it all, and it was.\\n\\n That said, some of the predictions we were making were correct. But it also made a lot of people around the Center a lot more worried about this whole effect of these plumes, and you just can’t ignore them when you’re designing or building things or when you’re working missions because of all the problems they can cause. It’s kind of like—recently had the carpet upstairs done. They had 17 years of whatever the dirt was under the carpet up there, and then they opened the doors with one of our giant winds going. Instead of a black piano, I had a white piano. That’s kind of the way the plumes work, you know; it’s what all is it going to mess up. I didn’t do any design on the escape system; I had no control over any of it. I just ran those programs and got those answers and provided them to somebody.\\n\\n I must have been at home when I heard about the Apollo I fire. I just remember being sick. You know, the only feeling I could feel was sick, and feeling what those people had to go through and how frightening that must have been—and having no clue at the time, of course, how we could have ever gotten in this mess. In fact, not really understanding that until a lot of books were written later, as to how we could have made those kind of mistakes. I didn’t feel any responsibility; I hadn’t worked on anything to do with it. I didn’t feel in that sense, but just as part of NASA, and that’s all.\\n\\n When we had the first launch and Apollo 11 went to the Moon, somewhere I have written up where my thoughts are on that. I actually tried to write down what I felt like, and I can remember—I lived over in Friendswood [Texas] at that time—sitting in front of that not-very-big television set, watching Neil [A.] Armstrong say, “One small step for man.” I decided that what I felt like probably was maybe what a sail-maker might have felt like who worked on the ships for [Christopher] Columbus. Those people worked on things than went on board ships, and those people went off around the horizon—for them, further than going to the Moon for us, almost—having no idea if they could come back or not. Knowing that some of what they’d done might make a difference about whether they made it and made it back, and then being there when they returned and knowing that your contribution at least worked. I think that’s the kind of detachment feeling of that. Awed, just awed that we did it, awed that it worked.\\n\\n I mentioned last time I’d worked on, again, the plumes effect on the Lunar Module as they controlled and set down. We didn’t know until they did simulations how long they were going to burn the jets, and so we hadn’t built the protection for the area right underneath those jets that would take care of it. So we came up with a solution for that. We called them the coal chutes; we put a deflector. You want a plume to go somewhere else, you put something in the way and deflect it. We did that, and that worked perfectly. Never was a problem with that. That took care of that little problem on the landing.\\n\\n It was so exciting at that time to be involved with something that was good news. I mean, let’s face it, whoever started the saying “no news is good news” knew what they were talking about. The news media just focuses on negatives all the time, and the worse, the better. I knew a lot of people in the news media closely at one time in my life, and some of them were awful. “Oh boy, a train wreck! Maybe somebody died; I’ll be on TV!” It’s like, “Ew.” Anyway, not all of them were that way. A lot of them just reported the news, and that was it. But it really is. The only thing that I ever really saw in the papers that was really positive, unless you count the funny papers, was the NASA programs.\\n\\n I went out and did a lot of speaking for NASA at schools and at Rotary Clubs and at garden clubs—anything they needed somebody to speak at, just about—but I did a lot in colleges and university and a lot in public schools. It was just so much fun to see the enthusiasm. I mean, fourth-graders—it was astounding to me how much they knew about the space program and how much they knew about technical things. They cared; they were interested; they wanted to know about that, and they all wanted to go be astronauts, or at least build something. It was a great time to have been at that place. You just feel really fortunate to have been there and gotten to do the things that you did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess also as an engineering or a math and physics background, to see students look at those and want to aspire to go into your field, as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Apollo 13, I know where I was. I had gone to Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] to meet with some folks up there. They were the ones we got the programs from to do all the plume analysis with, that particular group, and they were the ones who were advising me on how to do some testing in wind tunnels, where we were trying to simulate plumes and do things like that, which really hadn’t ever been done very much. So I went up there to meet with them. Well, I didn’t make very many trips for NASA for a long time. They let me go to Fort Worth [Texas] once in the first probably ten years I worked for NASA. It was sometime in the early seventies. Up until that time, I probably made one trip for NASA. A woman I worked with at NASA had moved to California, and as she was moving, she told our boss, “You need to send Ivy on a trip out to California so she can come visit me.” “Well, we can’t do that.” She said, “Why not?” “Well, we can’t send you by yourself. I mean, something could happen to you. You know, you’re a girl, and you can’t travel by yourself. We can’t travel with you or our wives would have hissies.” So that was kind of the attitude.\\n\\n But anyway, I went to Langley, and I’d never been up there. The other thing that was going on near that time was an awful lot of race problems. So I landed I guess at Newport News [Virginia], and then driven out to the Chamberlin Hotel, which is at Fort Monroe. They closed it so you can’t go out there. But at that time, you went on the military base and then went on out to the hotel.\\n\\n It was rainy and dark, and I had driven through Hampton, Virginia, which at that time was horrid. Horrid, horrid. They had a lot of riots, and things were torn up and all. It’s dark, and it’s night, and I don’t know anybody. I’m driving a rental car and wishing I were not alone. I pulled up back at the hotel, but there’s nothing there, except you pull under this portico, but there’s not a desk or anything there. Obviously, you have to go up an elevator to get to the level where the desk is. I’m standing around there for a few minutes, and finally this black man shuffles up. “Can I help you?” So I told him I needed to register. He helped me with my bags. He did the shuffle better than anybody I’ve ever seen outside of a movie. So he got a very good tip. He did it really well.\\n\\n I parked the car, went upstairs. There was just nobody around the hotel; it was almost deserted. I went up, and I got my room—it was on the second floor—I went up, and I got in the room. It was a small room, and you kind of had to squeeze between the bed and the TV set to get to the window, which I wanted to open because it was kind of stuffy in the room. When I opened the window, I realized that you could open that window and walk out and go to any window in the whole hotel on that floor. Okay, well, this can’t stay open at night, so I’m looking. In the closet, I find a fan, and it’s the kind that has kind of a cloth blade on it. I mean, it was 50 years old if it was a day. This was a really exciting trip, okay?\\n\\n Then I go down to eat dinner. There all people in the restaurant; they have now come out of meeting rooms and things. Every one of them is a Catholic priest. I am in a sea of Catholic priests. I had my dinner, went back to my room and the phone, and I called home, and I got told that the spacecraft had a problem [Apollo 13, April 1970]. I was like, “Oh, no. Oh, no.” Not only that, I’m here, and I can’t get any data. I don’t have anybody I can call. The only thing I can get is what’s on TV that anybody else could get, which wasn’t a whole lot at that point, not that I could have done anything anyway. Oh, that was an awful night. Being there and being not with anybody else and nobody to talk to.\\n\\n This was long before cell phones, and you had to make real long-distance calls and pay for them, that kind of stuff. It was horrible. Of course, we didn’t know a whole lot more the next day when I got out to Langley, except that [the crew] was okay and they were working at bringing them back. But you realized that you just expected everything to go okay. Not only did the public think everything was going to go okay, but we did. We just weren’t ready to have a problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you at Langley the entire time that the [crew was in space]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, no, I think I got home about the time they were landing. In fact, that may have even been something they told us on the plane. I can’t remember now; it’s been too long ago. But I’ll tell you, knowing they were back and on that ground safely was [a relief]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Through your years, did you have a lot of interaction with the crews?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was different at different times. We were in the same building with them for a little while during a couple years when I was working on advanced projects. You’d mostly just see them coming down a hall or something, and other than that, there really wasn’t that much. Then in ’72 when we were doing—or maybe ’71, I guess—when we were selecting the prime contractor for Shuttle, Fred [W.] Haise [Jr.], Joe [H.] Engle, and—they were all on this source evaluation board stuff. So I was at this table of about 20 people, and we were working aero and flight dynamics, and I was doing sep. [separation] systems, and you know, everybody had their own thing. I think Fred Haise was at our table. At the table on the other side was Joe Engle; he must have been at the aero table. They weren’t at our table; they were at another table. The aero and the aerothermal were together, and Joe was with them. Then the other guy—[Russell L.] Schweickart, his chair was always right behind me. Apparently he was known as a ladies’ man, so they all thought that he would flirt and tease and everything, and he may have, but I just put him down or whatever. It didn’t make any difference, anyway; it was good, fun humor, when you’re locked up in a building, rereading all those pages over and over and over and writing hundreds of pages to justify. Because we were all there, we would talk to each other some and all.\\n\\n It was either Schweickart or Haise that went, “Somebody has got to be kidding. Has anybody looked at this page of this cockpit layout they’ve got? Just hundreds and hundreds of switches.” Good God, you can’t fly an airplane that’s got hundreds and hundreds of switches. I have no idea whose proposal it was in that was that way, but then they got to comparing how hard are the layouts—from the standpoint of what would make a good layout, how good or bad are the layouts. They would just be marveling.\\n\\n Then, of course, the contractors had their ideas about doing different aborts off the pad and everything, and all this kind of stuff. Fred Haise [said], “You couldn’t do that. You couldn’t go off the booster, go over on your back, twist it around, come back, come back and land.” This was the time when still had a reusable Orbiter and a reusable booster; it was before we ended up with the configuration we have now. Joe Engle says, “It’s a piece of cake. I did it down at Galveston [Texas] on the beach the other night,” flying a T-38 down the beach (makes airplane noises) up and around. So then Fred looks at him and says, “Bet you couldn’t do it in a fog.” Who was going to win that battle? Which was the first time I’d been around the astronauts enough to start seeing their senses of humor.\\n\\n At some point in there, Fred invited several of us to look at a film he had. The astronauts make films when they’re doing all their training, and then they make up funny films out of their training for right before their launch party, I guess, or at some point in that time—or they did back in that era; I don’t know whether do it anymore or not. But it was the only party I ever got invited to look at it. It was just hysterical. I mean, it was so funny, because they’d be out there in those spacesuits, running around the fake Moon rocks. I remember the takeoff on the Clairol or one of the commercials—you know, “the closer you get, the better he looks.” Well, they’re doing a take-off on that in their spacesuits, coming toward each other, with the music in the background and all. Those were the fun things that, of course, never got publicized. I’m sure PAO [Public Affairs Office] would think it was horrible to publicize that because we’re wasting taxpayers’ money. Well, no, you’re keeping sane is what you’re doing, because these people are risking their lives, and they have to do some things to let off steam and to have some fun with it. That was fun to get to see that as well.\\n\\n Then after Skylab, I was at the hospital visiting Fred Haise, because he’d been injured in an automobile or motorcycle or something accident. I don’t remember what he did, but he had been injured. Jack Lousma and his wife, Gracie, came into the hospital at Galveston. Jack had been in space about 154 days. She said, “I don’t know when he’s going to know he’s on the ground.” He said, “This morning, I was putting on my aftershave, and I just let go, like you do in the spacecraft. Crash!” She said, “Yes, and that isn’t the only thing he’s done.” Those stories are neat, and it’s fun to get to know those people a little bit better and all.\\n\\n When the first six women were selected, it was really neat knowing that we were finally going to have women in space. I went to all the parties, the dinners, that they had when they were interviewing all of them, and of all the women they interviewed, I’m absolutely convinced they picked the six best. There was another one or two that were superb but for health reasons or other reasons didn’t get picked, but they had good candidates, too, to pick from, and that made it really nice. They were all so different, but they were very supportive of each other, it seemed to me, that they recognized that—well, the whole astronaut corps does that, and they did it very well, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were on Dr. [Christopher C.] Kraft’s staff at that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I was on the staff when they selected [the Class of 1978]. I guess probably the week I went on staff was the first week they all started coming in for all their exams and physicals and everything, and so every Wednesday night, we’d go down to the Gilruth Center and have a barbecue dinner, and John [W.] Young would make a speech, and somebody else would talk, and we would meet everybody and visit with them. That was senior staff—a few members would go down and meet with them to get to know them a little better." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have input in the selection at that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, no. I was just there because I could. Because I was on staff. That’s a perk. Another perk was, Prince Charles [Prince of Wales] came to lunch one day. It was on a Sunday, and I could have gone to lunch with Prince Charles. I decided I’d rather come to San Antonio [Texas] for the weekend. Looking back, I think, “Ivy, you really should have gone, so you could have said you actually met Prince Charles,” but. I’m not a really great fan of Prince Charles. I guess I figured, “What difference does it make? All you can do is tell people that, and then it’s like you’re name-dropping, so what difference did it make anyway?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you on staff long enough to see the women go through their challenges of being accepted as part of the workforce and in that position?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really. I went on staff; we went through the selection process. They were picked in January, I think is when we had the orientation dinner, and they knew they’d been picked. Then they didn’t come back until July, and by that time, I had gone to flight software." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you stay in touch with them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I saw them off and on around campus and all. Kathy [Kathryn D. Sullivan] came and lived with us for three months. At the orientation dinner, she sat at our table, and after dinner, I told Bruce [G. Jackson], “She’s a graduate student. She has no car, no furniture, no money, and she’s going to come here as soon as she graduates, so she has no place to stay or anything.” I wrote her a letter and said, “If you don’t mind sharing a bathroom with a sixteen-year-old and having a cat litter box right outside your door, I have a bedroom for you.” So she accepted. The first thing she did was go buy her a car, so she had that immediately and started looking for a place and all. But she sort of lived with us for about three months. It was hectic because they were going through all their initial training and more testing and more everything—you know, running, running, running. They were on such a high. I mean, everybody was on such a high. It was a fun time to watch them.\\n\\n I was at something with Judy [Judith A.] Resnik one time, or in the room with her talking—I don’t remember where this happened and how it happened—I don’t think I was talking directly to her. She must have been up on stage and people were asking questions. I wanted to take her out and wring her neck, because somebody asked her about ERA [Equal Rights Amendment], women’s rights, or whatever, and she was just totally flippant about [it]. She’d done just fine, and she didn’t need any of that stuff. I thought, “What a silly, stupid thing to say. You are sitting here making alliances right and left. You are a politician of the first degree”—and she was; she was very good at it—“and you’re saying none of that matters. It does, too. If you had not been as pretty and been female, you wouldn’t have gotten where you are. You don’t think that, but I can guarantee you it would have been that way.”\\n\\n But occasionally, you run across that with women—“I did it all myself, and nobody ever helped me”—but it’s not true. Nobody ever does anything all themselves. Well, [Albert] Einstein probably did, and [Isaac] Newton, but you know, the rest of us rely on other people to help us. We rely on other people; they rely on us, and we work together. Whatever we produce is better than we could have done singly, and whatever success we have has a lot to do with those other people. I don’t even know how deeply she felt about it. I kept thinking, “I really ought to go talk to her,” and I just never found the time, kept putting it off. Then there was no longer a chance to talk. But I never heard anybody else say anything like that or ever intimate that. I don’t know if that was the mood she was in that day. You cannot take one thing that somebody says when they’re asked a question in a public forum and make anything out of it.\\n\\n But I know Kathy, when she decided it was time to—well, it was after she’d decided to quit being an astronaut and she’d gone up and gone to NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. She made that decision on her own, but then she came back and said, “Now, I need to leave NOAA, and what am I going to do, and how do I make that decision?” Bruce spent a lot of time talking to her, and I just sat back and listened. “It’s what matters. What do you want to do?”\\n\\n “I want to make kids love science. I want to make them want to go into those kind of careers. I want to do that.”\\n\\n So he said, “So why are you considering going to work for a company like Lockheed when you’ve got opportunities to go do the other? You might not make as much money, but what difference does that make, if you’ve got enough you’re happy with?” There were others in that corps, that that’s really a lot of what they wanted to draw out was that love of science, that love of exploring, the love of learning. I think they had a big impact on the county over the years, but now, I just don’t know if we’re getting there at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I know that one of the things that you said before is that was one of your drivers, that you just had a love of learning, and so you moved—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Curiosity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—from Kraft’s staff, and you moved into software." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’d left my own section, and they’d replaced me, because that’s the name of the game when you leave. I went over to Kraft, and because I was a jack of all trades—because I did systems-type stuff—every other division in Engineering was structures, propulsion—and Dr. [Maxime A.] Faget didn’t think that you could manage in one of those unless you were an expert in one of them. So it was obvious I couldn’t stay in the Engineering Directorate. So I started looking for where to go.\\n\\n I decided I’d call Ops and talk to them. I didn’t want to go to Ops, but I thought it might be a fun thing to talk to them. So I went in and had an interview with George [W.S.] Abbey and Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz. I said, “I’m leaving Kraft’s staff, and I have to find a place to go.” Of course, by that time, I’d seen a lot of them, because being on staff, you were seeing a lot of those guys. I think it was Abbey who just blurted out, “But we don’t want you.” Then poor Kranz tried to fix it by saying, “Well, we don’t mean we don’t want you, but we don’t want anybody who’s like a GS-14 because we want people who are like GS-12s, that we can mold.” I said, “Okay, fine.” I’m sure they both went back and worried for two weeks that I was going to go file a suit against them or something. I hope they worried about it, anyway. I had no intention of doing anything that silly.\\n\\n I went to program office and said, “Have you got anything?” At that time, somebody said, “Well, you can go to work in this group.” I went to that group, and I don’t remember what it was called or who they were, what they did. It was a bean counter–type group, and there were guys that had been technical but never really did anything very technical. I believe that if you want to soar with the eagles, you’ve got to go get with the eagles; you can’t go running around with the buzzards.\\n\\n So I went to Dr. Kraft, and I said, “I’m going around interviewing, and I don’t have any idea where I need to go and what I need to do next.” He said, “That’s easy. Everything is going to be run by computers, and the more you know about computers and the more you know about software, no matter what you decide to do with your career, the better off you’ll be.” So he said, “I think you should go talk to Dick [Richard P.] Parten.” He was the division chief of flight software. One of the jobs you have when you’re on senior staff is to play hostess—or host—[and] to take senior staff around to the different places where the equipment was being built and things. We’d gone down to the Cape and seen things there. He had been on that trip, and I had met him and talked to him, but I didn’t know him. I knew some of his people, because obviously I had software for my sep systems, and I had worked with the John [W.] Aarons and some of the people from his group. So I’d met some of them over time, and we were in change boards together all the time for software and avionics.\\n\\n I didn’t really know Dick, but I went in, and I said, “I’m over here because I’m hunting a job.” He said, “Oh, that’s great, because I have a job. I need somebody to do verification of flight software. This is how I work, this is what I want you to do, this is how you would report.” I mean, (makes swooshing noise) laid out, clear as a bell. You knew what your responsibilities were, who you were responsible to, what was expected of you. It sounds like a good deal to me. It was. It was a good deal, and it was a great job, and it was really fun, and it was really interesting. It was the first time I got to really work with the IBM [International Business Machines] people. Some of those were just awesome people. It was kind of fun to get on the other side. I’d been writing requirements to get the software to do things I wanted, and it wasn’t always working out. Now I was on the side having to deal with those requirements coming in from other people to work with and to make sure we’re doing it right.\\n\\n I had no idea how to verify flight software, so I went back to the library. There wasn’t anything in there. I said, “Well, that’s okay; I’ve verified other things before, and I have written requirements for and gotten deliveries of software and tested this stuff myself, so I can figure out what we maybe ought to be doing.” Then I went and looked at all the things that IBM had set up to do and how they were doing it and then just got in the middle of it. Again, you’re at the front end of things that nobody’s really done before. Nobody’s built a fly-by-wire airplane; nobody’s done these kind of things with software before that we’re trying to do and the whole mission and people’s lives depended on it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you talk some about—because you were so instrumental in the verification of I think the particles when it separated and how important that was and some of the work that you had done on the plume work. Did that help at all with that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In a way, it does because all those things require that you look at all different cases that something could happen. What can be the cause and effect, and what could be going on around you, and what the environment is. What else could go wrong at the same time that would change your conditions? It’s the ability to kind of just try to see big pictures and to try to walk through every scenario you can of what might happen. So yes, a lot of that just keeps playing over and over and over. It even came out of the doing the cost model stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was different this time? What was different with the Shuttle in this type of separation that was different from the others that you had done before?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I didn’t do the separations before, except for the approach and landing. I was looking around to see, but we don’t have an Apollo in here. Okay, everything on all of the vehicles that NASA had ever separated before, they were stacked up. On the bottom is the booster, the one that’s going to go off first, and it burns and pushes everything up until it burns out. Now it’s not pushing anymore, okay? So everything’s going to want to start falling. Then what you do is you sever the connecter here and fire off this one, and it goes, and this one falls down, and you do that two or three times; however many times you’ve got stages to do it. Now, you have the Shuttle, and you’ve got the Orbiter. Of course, you see I don’t have any of the real Orbiters except on the 747, and then I had an Orbiter/747 model, but it got broken by the cat.\\n\\n So I’m looking at an Orbiter here, and when it flies, it has the tank under it; we’ll just let this be the tank, okay? Then on that are the two boosters, and they’re firing, and so is this. When the boosters quit firing, if we do nothing but let go, well, first of all, you have to understand that the thrust vector is such that if we were to see this in the sky, it would look like this. That means that we’re flying up, and we’re pushing up. Pushing up means we’re pushing into those boosters with the main engine, because it’s thrusting through that tank. This thing would just want to go hit those boosters, so we have to get the boosters out. They have to be pushed away so that we can’t hit them. The other thing is they had to do it really fast. Rockwell came in with—their solution was to use jets that you’d fire back toward the Orbiter and tank, and then that would push the boosters away, except literally, they were going to fire these big hummer jets that had a lot of solid particles in them right back at this Orbiter with these dainty tiles and a tank. It was apparent we were not going to do that that way.\\n\\n I went to Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama], who were building the boosters, and said, “Don’t use those solids that have all those solids in them. I need as little stuff in them as possible. I’m going to need you to cant them out and do other things with them so they won’t spray on here,” and they said they couldn’t. Even Rockwell said I didn’t know what I was talking about. So I went to Bob [Robert F.] Thompson, who was program manager, and said, “You’re going to destroy the Orbiter with sep system, so it’s got to be changed, and I need to run some tests to prove how bad that is.” I had people at Marshall who were working on the tank and the boosters who totally—the tank in particular—who knew they were going to get blown away with those jets who believed me and people who worked in materials at Marshall who believed me. So I worked with them, and we got a few tiles and some carbon leading edge, and we got some boosters. We took them to Tullahoma [Arnold Engineering Development Center, Tennessee], and then we ran a test and showed it would all be gone if you did what they wanted. Then the next day, everybody could reduce the solids.\\n\\n The way I actually knew how bad this was going to be—I hadn’t even started looking at it yet, when a rep came in and said, “Do you know that you can’t do that separation that they’re telling you?” I said, “Haven’t even looked at it yet.” He said—because it was right after the contract was awarded—and he said, “You need to see what it looks like when a Titan separates,” because a Titan has a center, and then it has two side rockets, and they do, they blow toward the center and push away, but they’re all just all-metal. So he showed me films, and I mean, it’s just nasty, dirty stuff. You can go down where they fire off off the launch pads with this stuff, and it just eats up launch pads. It was obvious you couldn’t do that. Other suggestions had been mechanical systems, to make them move out in a way, and you’re like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, not going at mach 4,” none of those dynamic pressures, that would never work. So it was, you know, how do you solve it?\\n\\n The other thing we ran into with the boosters—and this was a really hard problem. On Titan, if you had trouble with the booster, you could blow off the front end of the booster—the nose cap—and since it’s just like a big rocket that you could fire—a firecracker-type thing. If you don’t have a front end, you don’t go any further; it just quits going. So people wanted to talk about, “Well, we need to do thrust termination in case something goes wrong with one of the boosters, so then we can push them away,” and all this kind of stuff, and you’re going, “You’re doing all this dynamic blowing-up stuff, and you’re going to push something away—yes, right—that’s the size of this building.”\\n\\n So we looked at thrust termination, and what happens. This is the thing you have to do in so many things you do in space and other things—a lot of things are a tradeoff, but if you build something so that it can come apart, there’s the risk that it would come apart when you didn’t want it to, or that if you tried to use it, it wouldn’t work exactly as you thought because it’s such a one-of-a-kind. If we had tried to do thrust termination, it looked like we would have destroyed all the stuff on the Orbiter doing it, and then we couldn’t bring the Orbiter back in because it would get too hot coming back in. So that didn’t look like it was any good at all, and then they could go off when you didn’t want them to and other things.\\n\\n I went and looked at all the reasons that a solid rocket ever blew up, because they said, “Well, solids blow up a lot.” If you looked at how many times they blew up and what blew up and what caused them to blow up, it could have all been prevented. It was either somebody didn’t want to spend that much money, or they were willing to take the risk or whatever of whatever they were launching, but if you designed them right, they shouldn’t be blowing up. So that said, there’s such a small probability it would blow up, and then there’s such a big probability that the thing might not work at all or it might destroy the Orbiter anyway, so we didn’t do anything with it.\\n\\n When the solid did blow up, that was not a good day. In fact, I thought that the main engine had gone. When I saw them replaying it on TV, I thought the main engines had gone, because Lord knows, we had so many problems with main engines. It never occurred to me that the solid would blow up. I thought when I had left work in sep systems and gone over to Kraft’s office and all that things were in shape at Marshall and everything and it would never blow up. I have no idea why anybody stacked a booster like this so that rainwater could go in and then freeze. I have no idea why anybody would have launched, having been told that when they got those boosters back, when they’d been real cold, that they had leaks in those seals, because that’s what will make them blow up.\\n\\n But the people that operate things are not the people that did all the engineering, so they don’t know the trades, and they don’t know why you did things or anything else, and they just, I guess, think, “I didn’t have a problem last time, so I’ll do it this time.” But it was like, I still couldn’t have done anything different. I could not have made thrust termination work. By the time they had known that booster had gone, you wouldn’t have time to anything. It was still going to be ass over teakettle. You don’t go into space believing that nothing can go wrong. In fact, every time we go, I’ve marveled at how many things go right, because there’s just so many chances for something to go wrong.\\n\\n In building anything—like when they started working on Constellation and I was talking to them, they said, “We have a requirement for the Constellation program that the vehicle, the crew vehicle, have good handling qualities.” That is something you ask for in an airplane, and it is actually pretty well-defined for airplanes. I said, “Well, first of all, you don’t have an airplane, you have a capsule. It doesn’t even have handling quality. Why did you want that?”\\n\\n “Well, because the Shuttle’s so hard to fly. You didn’t build it right.”\\n\\n You’re like, “Okay, the amount of time that Shuttle ‘flies’ like an airplane is milliseconds compared to its whole lifecycle, and it wasn’t out there for somebody to go do joyrides in, or loops, or something. We’ve never had anybody turn us down to be an astronaut because they didn’t want to practice flying.”\\n\\n But that’s kind of the disparity between the Ops world and the Engineering world, is they don’t understand what you do to make decisions about what you can and can’t make happen. You want to go take giant leaps doing things—going to space, going to Mars, going under the ocean—it isn’t going to be all perfect. So you make decisions. You don’t make them by yourself. You and your peers argue and fight and debate and “what-if” and “why couldn’t you do this?” and that is the great joy to me of engineering. That is one of the most fun things about working in engineering, is that together, can we make it better?\\n\\n For the most of my career, it was so neat because people I worked with, it was never personal, and it was never “get somebody.” It was what can we do to make it the best we can with the money we have and the time we have and everything else we have, and it was always a team. It was really a wonderful team thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about the interaction between the Centers? You mentioned having to talk to Marshall, and you’ve talked about going to Langley. How did all of those Centers come together, or how did you reach the consensus?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "On Shuttle, there was some conflict between Centers. There’s always conflict because of the money. You know, it gets divided up, and it’s who goes and says they need the money the worst or convinces somebody they’re doing the best job. It’s very hard for the small Centers, like the Langleys and the Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] and all that make small projects, because JSC and Marshall, with our big stuff—and Kennedy [Space Center, KSC, Florida]—we just suck up all the NASA money. So it’s hard for them to like us—to like the manned space program. I don’t blame them.\\n\\n Our money just flowed and flowed and flowed. We could have never built anything if we hadn’t had those Centers originally to do all the research that let us build everything, and yet, once things started being built, their research money always was going down the tubes for something else for manned space. So there was that, and certainly, I’m sure, that was between Center directors more than anywhere else, but it was people who were working on a project, and their project wasn’t going to get funded because we had something we had to spend money on on the manned program.\\n\\n I truly never had a problem, and I loved working with the other Centers. That was more learning, right? So that was the joy of it. We didn’t have all the resources to do everything we [wanted]. In Apollo, we worked with Marshall because they had the launch vehicle, and if you were going to do aborts off that launch vehicle, you had to have all the conditions. For years, I talked on the phone—mainly that, and then we got faxes! Boy, that was really exciting. Otherwise, we mailed stuff with people that I didn’t meet for years, to get data, and to work back and forth. Those were the experts, so you went to them.\\n\\n Then, of course, I met the Langley guys with the plume stuff, but that was all during Shuttle. Then Marshall had the boosters and the tank, and we had the Orbiter, and they had the main engines in the back of the Orbiter, too. So none of us were going to fly without the other, and I was in charge of separating things, so I was right in the middle of all of it. They were going to make it all stick together, and I wanted to make it all come apart. It was necessary to know as much about those things as possible. The section head I was working for when we first started on Shuttle was Jim [James C.] Young, and he was head of the aerodynamics section, and he had been at Marshall before he moved to Houston, so he knew everybody. The people I had learned the most about plumes about in earlier years, the experts, there were a lot of them with Marshall. So I went to people to help me and acknowledged the fact they were the experts and learned tons and got lots of help, and together, we just did lots of really good things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, talk to us about how it all came together for the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft and your participation with that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was funny, funny. They started talking about we needed to fly the Orbiter before the first flight when we launched the whole thing and brought it back. There was talk around about—oh, there were all kinds of drawings on people’s walls. Rick [Richard L.] Barton just had walls covered with funny drawings and a slingshot-looking thing with the Orbiter sitting on it, a new airplane built just to carry it up and drop it off. Then they had it hung under a C-5A—that makes really long legs on a C-5A. Then they had it on top of the 747. They kept doing all these drawings. Then they said, “Okay, now, Ivy, to make this work, we have to separate, so what are you sep guys going to do?” I said, “We’ll look at all of your ideas.” I figured they weren’t going to build another airplane for it, so we looked at the C-5A and the 747. The C-5A has a T-tail, and up here’s another piece of—it’s like this. Well, with the Orbiter sitting on top of that T-tail, the wash from the Orbiter was going to do something to that thing—who knew what? We hadn’t run any wind tunnel tests or anything. But we went like, “We really don’t want to fool with that T-tail if we don’t have to, because we’ll have to look at a lot more things than we would if they used the 747.”\\n\\n I was at Downey [California] one day, and they were having a telecon on the subject, and Bill Schlish, who was my counterpart on separation systems out there, left the room, went to a telecon, and came back. He said, “Well, we’re going to go with the 747, and we’re going to buy it from Continental Airlines and have them move their tail for us.” The Continental ads were “Let us move our tail for you.” So we all giggled about that a whole lot, and a few days later, they came back, and they had done the 747, but they weren’t buying it from them; they bought it from American Airlines. You could always barely see “American Airlines” on the side if you looked real good under the paint. So then, here we go, we’ve got to separate something else.\\n\\n We needed wind tunnel data; Boeing had a facility they thought they could get some data in, and of course, they had 747 models, which was handy. So we took the Orbiter models and the 747 models and did some testing; I didn’t go out on that test. Rockwell came back. When you’re doing wind tunnel testing, there’s always an error. I mean, you know there’s error, and you have to take out all the error out of your calculations, and they call it a tear. The tears were bigger than the data. We can’t do anything with the data if we have to plus or minus a hundred to everything you’ve got here. It took a while to get some decent wind tunnel data.\\n\\n Then everybody decided it would be really neat if we could practice this—since this is done by the crew—if we could practice. Of course, we were running simulations and putting our wind tunnel data in and seeing how we thought it would work and how it would do everything. So they actually did some at Boeing where they actually have a two-plane simulator. A.J. Roy and Fitz [Fitzhugh L.] Fulton [Jr.] and all, who were going to fly the 747, they went up and flew that part, and Joe Engle and company and all flew the Orbiter part. For all the separations, it was absolutely the easiest one on the planet to do. We had the tail cone on that first time we were flying it around before we did a sep or anything to make sure, because we were worried about the effect on the tail, that we really hadn’t gotten good wind tunnel data—how good was the wind tunnel data that it would affect it. It turned out to be fine, so thereafter, we could pull off the tail and fly the Orbiter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you monitoring the actual testing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Every time they flew, we went out—a couple of guys and I went out—and we were getting loads off load sensors between the two to know that they were pulling apart at the rate we are trying to pull apart. They would go up and fly through the pitch-over maneuver; you could tell that the lift between them and all was exactly what it was supposed to be. Then, of course, we had some of the best pilots in the world flying—didn’t hurt anything to have that, because they were cool. The first flight, we lost a computer. [C. Gordon] Fullerton was in the right seat, and he said, “Computer” whatever number—big X. I’m like, “Ugh, I’m so glad we simulated hundreds of these,” you know.\\n\\n Then when we got on the ground, as soon as I got back to Houston, one of the safety guys came up and said, “You know you were one failure away from losing your vehicle.” I never understood how the software worked. This was before I went to flying software. I thought we had those four multiple computers, and they were all listening and all talking, so they would all get the same data. Turns out that one particular computer, if it failed, you were not getting one of the signals that you needed to say that it had released. Because we had it set up that you had to get a signal that said it released before the elevons would start moving on the Orbiter. So when it failed, nobody else was getting that signal, so it was one signal away. Anything else had gone wrong, we wouldn’t have gotten it.\\n\\n That’s during the time I was on Kraft’s staff, we were flying these flights. It didn’t happen until I was already up there. So when he said, “You need to go to flight software,” I said, “Yes, I think I do. I think I need to go over there and make sure that everybody else in Engineering understands what they’re really doing over there, because it doesn’t work like I thought it worked.” Of course, I’d simulated all these things of a computer going out in the SAIL [Shuttle Avionics and Integration Laboratory] and in the SMS [Shuttle Mission Simulator] and all these things, but they always made one computer go out, and it wasn’t the one that had any of those measurements on it, so you never saw the loss of the measurements. I said, “Wait a minute, that’s a bad way to simulate this, guys. Since different computers do different things, we ought to make different computers fail at different times to make sure we’re getting it all. Or at least run all the traps for it.” But it’s so complex, you don’t get it all at once." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think sometimes people don’t realize just how complex the Shuttle really is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Any spaceflight. Any spaceflight. People—we get complacent. We get very complacent. The San Antonio paper had a FedEx plane displayed on it this morning—it happened in China, I guess, or Korea." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Japan, I think, was where it went down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was overseas; it wasn’t local. But you know, one of the pilots was from here. I’m sure they may not have done that if one of the pilots hadn’t been from here, but again, you’ve got to remember those things don’t just stay up by themselves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you certainly have such a history as part of the design elements of the Shuttle. Watching the Approach and Landing Tests must have been very personal and gratifying for you to see, and then of course, the STS-1 launch. Can you share with us what it felt to know that your spacecraft was—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Was doing it? What it was supposed to do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just doing it, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Out at Edwards [Air Force Base, California], we were inside a room to call sep, to say we had the right conditions. So we were on a console like the Ops guys. We had to call, “Go for sep.” Then we would drop our headsets, run through the building, run up the stairs, and get on the rooftop, and I never could find the Orbiter coming down until the dust was coming up. Then I’d see the dust, you know. So okay, it did it, but I didn’t see it. Then I’d go watch the playbacks.\\n\\n We had had a lot of questions about, “Was that really going to work?” and everything from [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, D.C.], and we had at that time a computer called an Adage computer. We could actually take our trajectory data and do a 3-D drawing on the screen. This was, you know, in the seventies; this was way out, then. You would actually see the Orbiter and the 747 flying along and doing the pitch-over, and then you’d see the Orbiter come off and go like this, or this one go this way, whichever way we did it. I guess these guys peeled off and these guys went straight. Then we could, because it was three-dimensional, you could see it from head on and all other directions. I got so tired of the questions and I was tired of cutting out little paper airplanes and pasting them together to show them how it was going to work. So we did the film. We put the camera under a hood and took a picture of the screen and played it in Kraft’s conference room one day for the folks from Headquarters. No more questions. You’re like, “Guys, that’s just based on the same trajectory I’ve been telling you works, so if that trajectory is wrong, this is not right.” If the simulation’s wrong, the result doesn’t mean anything. You’re having to trust my simulation, but you didn’t trust it until you could see a picture.\\n\\n Then when it did separate, that evening, everybody’s all over us: “It looked just like the pictures! It looked just like the pictures!” My guys and I were the center of attention by the Headquarters guys being told—because they were all on the roof the whole time, watching. “It looked just like the movies.” I said, “Oh, I’m so glad it looked just like the movies.” It would have not been good if it had not looked just like those movies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about the STS-1 launch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was in the control center because I was on Faget’s staff at that time, and we were in the back in the viewing area, and we had the hold. We didn’t launch. They said, “We have a computer problem. Backup won’t load.” I said, “Oh, just go without it.” I never liked the backup computer anyway. I thought it was an extra piece of redundancy that probably wasn’t ever going to do any good. It cost a lot of money. Dr. Faget came by me, and he said, “You’re wrong. It’s your system”—because I’d just come off flight software work—“It’s your system that didn’t work.” So a few hours later, we heard yes, it was. We had updated the primary with patch at some point that had to do with timing. Everything has to do with clocks; if you really want to mess up software, do it with clocks. It had to do with timing, so when they tried to load the backup computer at the Cape, which happens at T minus nine minutes, and bring it online, it just skewed and missed, and it couldn’t load.\\n\\n We had had that problem in SAIL one time, that we couldn’t get the backup to load. We could never figure out why. Nobody figured out why, so they just restarted and went through it, and it loaded fine. But it only happened once every 75 times you did it, on the average—or once every 59 or something. I think 59 was what they calculated, but they had to do it in SAIL 75 times that day to get it to hit the same problem again. But it was so embarrassing.\\n\\n We had been told when we had our review, from the folks that came in from other Centers to do the review on the flight software, that we had not done enough testing where we went across the time barriers. So you run on a certain set of software when you’re sitting at the Cape—the VU software—the Vehicle Utility. Before you get ready to launch, you’ve got to load the GPCs [General Purpose Computers] with the guidance nav [navigation] for launch. Then you’ve also got to load up the SMS computer with the right stuff for launch that’s all the housekeeping stuff and the arm and the payload data and everything. You load all that up, then—that takes a while, and you go through all these long checkouts. Well, you can imagine, if you’re a crew sitting in there waiting for them to that, that’s not fun; if you’re in the control center waiting for things to happen, that’s not a fun time. What we do is we do it some, and then we would just take a snapshot that you could start from all the time and not go through all those pieces. They said, “You know, you really probably should have done some more of that. At some point, you’re going to get caught on that.” First day, get caught.\\n\\n We all went home, and we came back the next day, and of course, it launched beautifully. It was truly amazing. When those SRBs [Solid Rocket Boosters] came off, oh! Of course, I didn’t know if we damaged the tiles. We had no way of knowing for sure what we’d done would ever really fix everything. I got a call from one of the other buildings saying—I think it was 44—“Get over here; we got pictures for you.” The Air Force had taken pictures of the Orbiter as it went up and as the separation occurred, and really shot some of the underbelly and everything. It all looked good, and it looked just like the movies, too, which we had, of course, done the same thing with, ultimately, to look at that.\\n\\n The hardest separation is the booster, no doubt about it. You’ve got to get out and away. You don’t want that motor firing any longer than it has to because you don’t want it strafing your Orbiter. You just—(snaps) as fast and as hard as we could kick them, we kicked them. But then you got all the aerodynamics in play of all these vehicles and the tank trying to go through. The tank pushing on the Orbiter—that dynamics and that simulation—were comfortable, but what the boosters were really sensing and feeling, and especially with sep motors going off and hitting the plume as they came back through the main engine plume and that kind of stuff, what all that would do—we just multiplied every number by some huge number and said, “It still works.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So your confidence level was high, considering it was NASA’s first time to launch a new spacecraft with a man in it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was like, “Are we really going to do this? Guys, why are we doing this? We’ve never done this before!” Again, there really wasn’t much option. We had an autoland but the crew has never used it, doesn’t want to use it, and we didn’t even make the wheels where they’d fall down. They have to punch a button to do that on entry. I said, “Well, why don’t you just let it?” “What if they fall down too early?” It’s like, “Guys!” So there are things that we didn’t do to—at one time, I imagine all that was in the plans, and at some time, you run out of money, you run out of time—the ability to put everything in there that would do it both manned and unmanned, totally. I wasn’t party to those discussions. That was way above my pay grade at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you involved with STS-2 as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think with the second mission, I think I was in Bangkok [Thailand]. I think that’s where I was, or somewhere else. No, I’m trying to remember even STS-2, ‘cause I have no memories like STS-1. The launch was scary enough, and that’s my separation stuff, right? The tank I wasn’t worried about, as long as we didn’t have an abort. An abort would have been a really scary day because then the tank gets to be a real fun thing to get rid of, too. So that went fine, but I’d also worked with all the aerodynamics guys all those years and worked on—we also have reaction control jets all over the vehicle that move it around in space, and then when you’re coming back in when you’re real high angle of attack, you blank at the tail and you blank at the elevon, because you’re coming in like this. The angle of attack is so steep that the air is just blocked, so you can’t get to any of these surfaces. To control it until we’re ready to pitch over and start flying like an airplane, you’re still using the jets, and they’re in the nose, and they’re back here. We did all the work on those, since we did all the jets. Dave [David B.] Kanipe and Barney [B.] Roberts did a lot of that work in my section.\\n\\n On orbit, you could be firing this jet here, and it would cause the vehicle to do this, but when you’re in reentry, because of all the flow coming over, our tests would show you could fire that jet, and you might go that way. We had to do lots and lots of work on this. We had that part to deal with, plus all the reentry, plus, unlike airplanes, that taxi and lift off and go around and come land, or just taxi a long time, this thing didn’t do anything. It starts, you know, halfway around the world—a hundred miles up—and it comes in and lands at a spot on the desert. It was scary. That reentry was really scary. It probably would have been scarier if I’d known more things about more pieces and parts, but just what I knew was scary enough from the aerodynamics standpoint, and the whole control system and everything.\\n\\n When it landed safely, I felt like I’d been holding my breath for two weeks. I think everybody did. We went over to a friend’s house that were all in the software group that night, and it’s the only time I’ve ever seen Bruce drink so much that he said, “We need to go home.” He never over-drinks; he never over-drinks. He just doesn’t drink that much. But he was responsible for that up and that down arrow; he had a lot to worry about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was a day for celebration, wasn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You left NASA in ’84." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’d gone to flight software, and about three months before the first flight, I left and went over on Faget’s staff. The organization had changed. Parten had gone up to the division staff because [Howard W.] Tindall had retired. I was working for John Aaron as the division chief, and I loved working with him as a peer, but I hated working for him. It was just very unpleasant. So I thought, “This is crazy. I’m not going to hate coming to work every morning. This makes no sense.” So I found out that they needed somebody on Faget’s staff. I don’t even remember how I did that or who I went and talked to. I have no memory of that, but I knew it was time to go do something. So I went over on Faget’s staff and was over there for nine months, and that’s when first flight happened, and got him retired, and then Arnie [Arnold D.] Aldrich came and said, “Come over to the program office. We need you to fix the MMDB,” as they called it then—the Master Measurement Database.\\n\\n I had told Tindall when he was still there—he said, “Why don’t you go fix that? It’s a big mess.” I said, “Yes, not until they beg me.” You go tell them you’re going to go fix a problem they have that they don’t admit is a problem yet, you won’t get any help. So I went over to fix that. Then Arnie took off and Dick [Richard H.] Kohrs took over, so I was working under Dick Kohrs. I stayed over there for a year or two I guess. Let’s see, ’82—a year or more, anyway. Then it became real obvious that to really pick the problem, that part of the software—because it really gets used by the software—needed to go back and be back in the same division as flight software, so it took it back over there. Bruce said, “Why are you doing that? You didn’t like working there before.” I said, “Yes, but I promised I would fix this problem, and part of fixing it is to take it back over there, and then I’ll do something else; I don’t have to stay.”\\n\\n So I took it back over there, and then John did a reorg and put me in charge of flight software instead of the MMDB. I had the MMDB sort of fixed; he and John [R.] Garman messed that up because they wanted to go with IBM software for part of the fix, and even IBM didn’t use that software. But you know. They wouldn’t listen to other people, because they’d been on Apollo 13; they were the smartest two guys on the planet. That was a long time ago, guys! Anyway, they swapped us, and now I’m in charge of flight software. I found some really great challenges almost immediately—things that were screwed up that nobody was watching, and causing problems.\\n\\n I had a reputation that you could come to me and tell me there was a problem—anybody could—and people would. People who may not have ever said anything to whoever else was managing something, or they would, but if they didn’t jump on it right then, they just would never bring it up again, or you know, if anybody said anything to them like, “Well, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” they’d just shut up. Why would a contractor do otherwise, you know? So they came, and they said, “We got a real problem.” We had a problem with the compiler. I didn’t even know what a compiler was. As far as I was concerned, it was a black box; I had no idea it was software. We got that fixed.\\n\\n We didn’t exist. We had a person trying to get attention at one of the contractors—not local—but that finally got sorted out. But there were challenges and all, and there were just challenges about how complex we’d made some things, and paperwork, and other things. Got those things fixed, quit signing documents that I didn’t need to sign, quit getting documents I didn’t need to get, or just get the secretary to throw them away when I couldn’t get myself off the list.\\n\\n They had these red documents, and they were manifests, and they were flight schedules, and they would put them out every few months. They never released one that was right, because you couldn’t, because the way they had to put them together was so archaic that things would change. I mean, it was just horrible. So I called, and I said, “I don’t need to get these. They’re not any good anyway; if I need to know this, I will go find out what the latest is.” I knew where to go find out, and I’m not going to look at these because they’ll just confuse you. “Well, you have to, because you’re at that level. You’re branch level, so you have to get them.” I said, “Okay.” So I just told the secretary, “Don’t get them into my office. I can’t help it if they won’t quit cutting down trees.”\\n\\n Before that, when I had the MMDB stuff, we were printing up for every flight—you could have backed a truck up to that Building 30, dumped all the paper off of it, and then printed these things out and put it back on and shipped it to Kennedy, to all over our Center, to every other Center, and out to Rockwell and every other contractor, with all this data. I said, “Nobody needs all that. Most people need a page or two out of it. Why are we printing all of this?” I went looking, and there was no reason for any of it. I mean, 155 copies went to KSC; couldn’t even find out who they went to. The propulsion division was getting 30. I said, “Come on, guys. Every one of you needs a different page. You can get one copy and take your own pages out.” So I started figuring out what it was going to cost and how much paper it was going to take if we kept going at the rate we were going, if we ever flew the number of flights we were talking about.\\n\\n I said, “Well, okay, the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to microfiche.” The first thing I did was I just cut down the number of copies and said, “If you need more copies, you have to come justify getting them.” Nobody came, okay. Nobody. I just slashed it by huge numbers. Nobody showed up. Nobody called; nobody complained. Then I said, “Well, let’s go to the next step, and let’s just go to microfiche,” and then I left for the day and left a temp on hand who could say, “I don’t know.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a great plan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But my guys loved that I would do things like that. We were flying flights; software wasn’t changing very much between flights. We still had board meetings, and we’d still look at new software and stuff. Then I looked, and there was all this software that had been approved to be put on whenever we had time. I said, “We can’t do that,” because the way they wrote their changes, they’d take the existing write requirements and redline them. Well, in the meantime, this change happened and that change happened and another change happened, so the existing book didn’t look like this book. You wouldn’t dare just go apply that; you’d have to go back and figure out everything that was affected. So I decided that wasn’t going to work either. Some of those changes have been out there for years. They always came from the guidance, nav, and control guys, because they always wanted to do it a little bit better. But the fact was you didn’t need to. People were running out of things to do, and so they were refining and refining and refining.\\n\\n Bob [Robert W.] Moorhead was head of the avionics then. I went up to him, and I said, “I want you to flush the queue. Just send back everybody’s change that’s been approved that’s never been scheduled to be put on a set of flight software, and if they need the change, they can redo it against current documents and come back.” You know how much came back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Zero, huh?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I’ve taught that lesson to lots of people. You got to be really careful about that. You can’t go apply changes that were approved at one point to something that’s changed itself. It doesn’t make any sense. So that’s the kind of thing I was doing. It was really not very technical or exciting, I can tell you.\\n\\n Then we had a flight. There was a software problem. My guys, who were supposed to get called by the IBM guys sitting on the console; they should have called the guys that worked in my section that were responsible for that piece of software and told them, and then we would have gone up both sides of the ladder at the same time. Well, they didn’t; they just went over everybody’s heads to John Aaron, directly. So my guys—I came in, and I don’t know anything’s happened; nobody’s told me anything—and they’re like, “Oh, we had this problem, and John got the call, and we didn’t know about it for”—or actually, “We heard it from somebody else in the hallway. It’s our job and our system,” and na-na-na-na-na-na. Oh, their feelings were so hurt. I said, “Okay,” so I sat down with IBM and said, “That isn’t protocol, and that’s not what you’re supposed to do. These people have that responsibility, and they have a right to get that phone call first. You’re going up our side, and we’re going up ours, and then we’ll all cross.”\\n\\n It’s next flight or two flights later, and I’m driving in. I live right outside the back gate, and I’m driving in; I have the radio on, and they say, “We’ve had a computer failure.” I went, “Uh-oh. I wonder why we had a computer failure, and I didn’t get a phone call?” So I drive in, and I park. I go inside, and I go into Building 30. Here’s this mass of about ten guys. Arnie was in there, Arnie Aldrich, Bob Moorhead and John Aaron and the top five or six guys from IBM and a few other people, and they’re just hunkered. None of my guys are in there; they’re all standing in my office, waiting for me to walk in the door. Of course, they grabbed me. I said, “What’s going on?” “Oh, well, we’re having to run all these special tests on software because the computer failed.” I said, “Well, it sounded like the computer failed because we kicked it with an 850-pound jet that we weren’t supposed to be firing under those conditions.” You know, because they fired one of the big RCSs [Reaction Control System] instead of one of the little ones. That will knock a computer wire loose if anything will. Well, they’ve got to prove it isn’t software. I said, “Well, did they call you this morning?” “Yes.” I said, “What happened to my phone call?” “Well, we didn’t want to wake you up.” “Oh,” I said, “Thank you very much.”\\n\\n I had two section heads working for me, and they were the ones that were always—I mean, I had three, but I had these two that were already giving me trouble. One, I inherited, and the other one I got forced on me. So. (sighs) I said, “Oh, that’s nice.” They said, “They’re out there, and they’re deciding what cases to run,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, “Fine. What are you doing? We have other software for other flights; we have jobs to do. Go to work. I’m going to work. There’s more power out there—first of all, it’s not the software, and secondly, we don’t play in that arena. Just let them go do theirs.” “Oh, we’re at the center of attention. We have all this stress. We’re going to be the heroes again.” They love the stress. I don’t love stress. I have to have a little stress, like deadlines, to get things done, but I don’t like that other stress and that “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” stuff.\\n\\n I just put everybody back to work, and I went to work. I never said anything to anybody, except to myself: “I’m leaving. They don’t listen. They don’t care. They don’t think I know anything, they don’t want to talk to me, and my troops are so screwed up. I can’t fix them. They’re 50 years old. I mean, they were older than I was, and I didn’t pick them. I’ve done all I can do; I can’t make anything better at this Center. If I can’t change anything and make anything better, out.” That was when I started looking to leave. We had seven GS-15s in the division, and five of us left, or maybe it was seven and six of us—it was huge." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All about the same time, you left?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They all left before I got out the door. Three of us walked with 20 years, and two took early retirement. I think it was three and two. It was me and Bill and Fred—well, I bet Jack left then, too. But I think he and Stan [Stanley P.] Mann—maybe they were the two that took early outs. So years later—or six months or a year later, I asked John Aaron, I said, “Didn’t it bother you that all your people left at one time?” “Oh, no, it just happened.” I said, “How come you always treated me like you did?” “I didn’t trust you.” “Why?” “Because you didn’t do things like me. You didn’t do what I would have done.” I said, “John, if I would have done what you would have done every time, we didn’t need but one of us. Then you’re redundant.” I said, “Was I ever wrong? Can you name one time I ever led you astray on anything?” “No.” Off and on, I worked with him from ’81 to ’84. What do you do? You don’t do anything about it. You leave. Pick up your marbles and go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "After 20 years, you had a lot of lessons learned on what to do, what not to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first time I became a section head, I told the people that worked for me, I said, “I don’t know that I know what to do to do this right, but I know a whole bunch of things to not do that I’ve learned from other people messing up. So I’m going to avoid those and make my own mistakes.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I believe one of the things that I’ve heard you say was that effective communication is so important." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you share with us some of the ideas that you have used for effective communication during your leadership time, or maybe just in your interpersonal skills of working with all types of personalities and skills, to pull them together?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I won’t tell you I don’t mess it up regularly, either, because like everybody else, there’s at least once a day in the household where somebody didn’t hear somebody. “I thought you said.” So one of the cartoons I use in training shows BC with his monorail and his other friend with his two rails, and trying to meet up. BC said, “I distinctly said ‘monorail,’ and the other guy says, ‘Did not.’” I said, “That is one of the rules; write it down.” When I’ve had trouble with people at work, when I had to get rid of a secretary one time—well, John made me write her up. I’d already exchanged her for the other secretary, but he said, “You have to write her up.”\\n\\n When I sat down with the write-up—why she wasn’t going to go from temporary to permanent employee—she said, “Well, but, but, but I didn’t know; I didn’t know that.” I said, “How many times did I bring you into my office and tell you you had to get that work done?” She didn’t like one of my guys, so she didn’t want to do his work. I said, “I need his work. You have to do it. I don’t care if you like him. You don’t get to pick.” How many times she didn’t come in on time and how many times she didn’t do these other things, and I wanted her to make it up, but she never did. You know, it was just one thing after another. I had never written it down because I’d figured out a way to get her out of my office and into someone else’s—get rid of my problem. But when I had to write her at that eval, it was like, “Well, you didn’t tell me.” I said, “Yes, I did, over and over and over again. You didn’t hear me, but I told you.” But put it in writing is especially shocking.\\n\\n Somebody was talking about this—but I can’t remember who I was talking with—oh, it may have been a friend of mine that used to own a store there—that owned Gayle’s Just Pretty Clothes there on Bay Area Boulevard for years. That’s who I met yesterday for lunch. She was talking about having told employees over and over and over, and they would say things like, “Well, you didn’t tell me today.” I said, “Put it in writing; post it everywhere.” She said, “Well, I did that for the kids, because they would call me at work about things that they didn’t need to call me about,” so she said, “I wrote everything down, said, ‘This is the list that tells you what to do. You know, if you have this question, this is the answer. So don’t call me about that. By the way, I’ve got the same list at work, so when you call me, I’m not even going to discuss it until I check and see if it’s on the list. If it’s already on the list, you won’t get a call back.’” She said, “That cut down on the 50,000 times a day of picking up the phone and calling Mommy about something.” I think we don’t think to put things in writing often enough, when we should, and it would help people.\\n\\n I liked it when NASA went to an eval [evaluation] system, so you got written down sort of what somebody expected and sort of how well they thought you’d done. But I found most the bosses didn’t do it well. I mean, they’d tell you to go do it yourself or something. I felt like you owed people telling them what you expected. So I’ve tried to do that, but I think a lot of times, I’m very lenient with people. I know I am. I kind of expect the best, and so many times I’ve gotten it, that sometimes I trip up, and I know that can happen too. By putting it in writing, there isn’t a debate about what it said, what I heard as opposed to what was said. I don’t have that problem anymore. There’s not enough of that.\\n\\n In all these meetings to discuss things—I mean, I don’t know how much you look into these types of things. But, I’m very interested in communication in general and how people communicate, and how they remember and how they don’t remember, and what works and what doesn’t. Study after study after study says that a meeting is the worst place in the world to make a decision. The bigger they are, the worse they are. I think a lot of it is because nobody wants to make decisions. They don’t want to be responsible, and so they want to put things off. I’ve seen people who would just put off decisions forever in board meetings and things. You’d go, “You know, this is costing a lot of money putting this in limbo”—and eventually, if you don’t make a decision, it’s almost made for you. So I think that that’s a part of it, too.\\n\\n If I put it down and say this is the decision and put my name on it, then I’m responsible. I didn’t ever mind doing that, but I also didn’t mind coming back and saying, “I made the wrong decision.” I think I told you before, that’s because being female, that’s easier. It’s hard for guys. We’re supposed to do it. So heck, I always thought that was a plus. Because people need to be able to move forward, and limbo is to me the most uncomfortable place in the world, and I think it is for a lot of people, because they’re just spinning their wheels, wasting time and all. By having these big meetings and discussing things forever and on and on, nobody’s responsible, then I can’t be held accountable. But it’s not really true, although NASA doesn’t hold people very accountable for anything. I mean, they really don’t. You have to hold yourself accountable. In that, there was a lot of, in the old days, at least an awful lot of holding yourself accountable." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find the culture changing quite a bit from the time you walked in the door to the time that you left?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. In the early days—well, I wasn’t even aware of what was going on for a long time. It takes you a long time to even start piecing things together, especially when you’re off in your first real job. You’re not smart enough to do any of that, but I saw things change as we went through Shuttle and stuff. As the Shuttle was getting built and was starting to fly and all, then the engineering workload wasn’t the same anymore. There weren’t new things to work on. When you’ve got no people coming in or you’re in Engineering, you need to be working on new projects or working on payloads or working on something—or doing research, or doing something, not going and sitting in meetings. The meetings just got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because everybody goes and sits in a meeting because “That’s my job.” Well, that’s nobody’s job. You could just spend all day going around to meetings and never do any work—ever. I think we actually have people who have spent years over there doing that and have never done any work. Couldn’t do any work. Can’t do any work.\\n\\n Then Space Station came along, and three-quarters of Engineering wasn’t needed. I mean, you don’t need the aero, and you don’t need aerothermal. You don’t need some of those things because it’s not going to lift off, it’s not going to reenter, so it’s a somewhat different ballgame. But nothing was done to change any of the balance of the Center in skills or anything, so you’ve got people sitting there who knew how to do that other stuff, probably dreaming up new vehicles that they could go fly, and hopefully building new models and things to get better at that kind of stuff. I don’t think at any Center, there was any direct effort at “how do we get ready for the future?” Then they made JSC an Ops Center, so it killed Engineering, and the same thing at Marshall, essentially. So we didn’t have any Centers to build things anymore, and we have none now.\\n\\n Poor Langley is now building its first cradle-to-grave vehicle I bet in 25 years, and they have not a person who’s ever done it before. So the guys that are retired are back in working with them. You get all excited about the ops and what’s on television and everything. If you don’t have the right people there to put the emphasis—and by the time Kraft left, he had populated every job with an astronaut or a flight director, including head of Engineering, and it’s never changed. Then there were no Centers of excellence for anything. Every Center had to be on everything. You’re going to build something this big, and you’re going to divide that between eight Centers, and you have no travel money. It doesn’t work.\\n\\n The whole Space Station layout was the biggest mess in the whole world. Karen [M.] Morrison, who recently died—at only age 58—she was over at the Space Station early on. She had come into our organization in about ’74, I think. She was a UT [University of Texas, Austin] grad and then worked at TRW [Thompson Ramo Wooldridge] and then came to NASA. She said, “Ivy, I just got an MBA [Master’s in Business Administration] over at U of H [University of Houston, Texas]”—and she was an aerospace engineer, she’d gotten in—she said, “If I’d ever proposed what they proposed for managing this Space Station program, I’d have been kicked out of graduate school.” It was unworkable. Calling things “work packages.” Part of this thing is yours and part somebody else’s and part somebody else’s. Nobody’s responsible. They really did it, and wanted to divide that stuff up so they couldn’t cancel the program. Well, it’s still up there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking back over the years that you were there and all the different areas—as you call yourself a jack-of-all-trades—if you had to pick one, what would you consider your most significant contribution to what you did there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Really that design of the sep systems, and I didn’t do it by myself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have one that you would consider the most challenging time or the most challenging project that you had, as far as all the different aspects?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Getting that test run on the sep motors, to show that there really would be a problem was just—it was terrifying; it was exhausting. Then when we fired the engine off and we finally got to go down there and see what happened, and we see all these tiles destroyed and huge pieces of metal melted and everything else, I just sat down on the floor. We were on a witch’s cap test facility, and I just kind of backed over to the cap and sat. Then here come the guys that have been telling me that I was wrong and that nothing was going to happen, and they said, “How are you going to fix that?” How are you going to fix that? I felt like the Little Red Hen, because that’s what I was. That’s what they meant, too. They weren’t going to help. The others were, that had participated and gotten involved, but it was mine. It was my baby, and I was going to have to go fix it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you under a lot more pressure because of the Shuttle Program being behind schedule?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. The main engines and the tiles kept everybody else so that we never were that pressed. Some of the hard things were you had to put in what trips you needed to take, and then you had to justify them 55 times, and you had to be at certain things at Downey at certain times. You had to meet face-to-face with people. Then people would want to argue about them, and you’re like, “Okay, I won’t go; I don’t care.”\\n\\n I really got in trouble one time, because it said, “What’s the most significant thing that will happen if you don’t get to take this trip?” and I said, “The Shuttle will never fly,” or something really tacky. I wasn’t dating him or anything at the time; he was my boss’s boss. Oh, he was not amused! I really was in trouble. It was like, “Oh.” Well, I just got tired of answering those stupid questions, you know? I’m an integration manager—my job is to be there at those meetings once a month. We go through everything we have to go through—that’s when we do it. Lord, we didn’t have cell phones, we didn’t have e-mail, we didn’t have any of this stuff. The only way you could talk to somebody is pick up the phone and call and then mail things back and forth. Like I said, faxes were wonderful.\\n\\n That’s the other thing. I don’t care how good we get at this; there is a certain amount of face-to-face time you have to have, and not having it costs more than getting it. I have not seen any of these video things that have worked a damn. Sorry. It might be, if you just want somebody to lecture you on something, but to have a meeting where you’re trying to talk to people and communicate, go back and forth? We’re not there yet. Kids are doing better with their text messaging than some of the other stuff. They may actually get better at it. They keep trying to find shortcuts to communicate. But they want to communicate all the time, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing, even though 99 percent of it is like meeting necessary.\\n\\n We would hold quarterly meetings on the separation systems. The various contractors involved and the various Centers involved and everybody would all come in for a day or two of meetings, to go through all the status: where we were, and where the problems were and everything. I objected so badly to so many badly-run meetings and waste of time—you go sit there for four hours, and they never even get to your topic that you went for. So I had taken a time management course, after my section told me I didn’t manage my time well, I went and took time management. I came back, and my meetings had set times. You would speak at this time on this subject, and you had this long. You don’t get through? Too bad. So people could just come in and out when they needed to be there and do their own work and everything.\\n\\n People were just astounded that anybody could even do it. I’m like, “Anybody can do it.” It just takes discipline. It only takes once or twice before they realize that if they don’t fit the agenda, they’re out, and they’re not going to talk about their subject, and then we’ll have to deal with it next month—or next quarter or whatever—or you’ll just have to write a report or something. Some really cruel thing, “Write a report.” Amazingly, then after that, there are no problems, if they believe you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Speaking of time, I’m noticing that our time that I promised that we would watch for is getting close to the end. Before we end, I want to give you a second to think about some of the things that we haven’t had a chance to talk about, to see if there’s some other thoughts or stories.\\n\\n While you think, I’ll take a look at these ideas and, I know one of the things that we did want to talk about was something that Bruce Jackson had shared with us when he was your boss’s boss, was he gave you a special gift to hang into your office, and I didn’t know if you wanted to share the story behind [it]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, since lots of people know about it, I might as well tell it. I was in an office with one, two, three, four, five—four or five male engineers, okay—we shared an office. They all had Playboy calendars on their desks. They all had pin-ups [photos] inside the big cabinets, those big cabinets that had big doors, so when you opened the doors, you’d get the pinups. They’d always had that; I mean, that was just the way it was. I didn’t pay any attention to it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was back in the early sixties, or seventies?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This would have been in the late sixties, early—yes, late sixties. I guess it could have even been early seventies. Yes, we may have already started on some Shuttle stuff then, so it could have been early—yes, it was probably early seventies. I never paid any attention to it. You know, they’re there; it’s okay. I didn’t care. I grew up with four brothers. What is the big deal here? So I just never made any big deal about it, but I came back—I’d been on a trip—I came in, and I walked in the office that morning, and they’re all in a huddle. That either means that they’re going to pull a trick on me or that they’re telling a dirty joke that I’m not supposed to hear. So they just kind of back away and snicker, and I go sit down at my desk. My desk faces outside. I sit down at my desk, open things up, and I’m waiting for whatever the next thing is.\\n\\n The next thing I know, they’re gathering around my desk, and they’re ahem-ing a lot. “What is going on?” They’re pointing to the wall beside me, and I look up, and there is Burt Reynolds’ Cosmopolitan picture torn out of the Cosmopolitan magazine. I had not seen it before; I had only heard about it, and I hadn’t seen it. I just broke up laughing, and I said, “Who did it? Who did this? Who put this in here?” “Not us. Not us.” Now, they were adamant it was not them, which meant it wasn’t them, okay, but they weren’t going to tell me who it was. So I waited until everybody else had gone to lunch, and one of the guys was still there, and he can’t keep his mouth shut—and we won’t mention his name. If he ever reads this, he’ll know who it is, and so will all the other guys. But anyway, I just kept bugging him. “Who did it; who did it?” “I’m not going to tell you. I’m not going to tell you.” I just kept nagging. Finally, he told me it was Joyce. Well, Joyce [H. Koplin] was the division secretary, and her office was right next door to ours.\\n\\n So I went over to Joyce’s office and sat down and said, “Do you want your picture back?” Of course, she’s a very good professional secretary, and she just looks me straight in the eye and says, “What picture?” So I start in on her, teasing—I said, “Look, I think it’s really funny, but how in the heck did you get that picture? And why did you bring it in there?” She said, “Who told?” so I tattled. She said, “Well, Mr. Jackson asked me to do it.” I said, “What?” She said, “Well, I was talking about having seen it at the beauty shop one day, and he said, “You know, that would be so neat if Ivy had that picture over her desk, because all those guys have all those pinups in that room. Ivy could have her own pinup. So you think you can get it?” So she did. She tore it out of the magazine, brought it in, put it above my desk. So it stayed there.\\n\\n Well, one day, I came in, and we’re back to the same huddle again. I go to my desk, and Burt’s still there, so I go to work. Then the guys started ahem-ing, and I said, “Okay, what is it now?” Well, Bass [Redd], Bruce’s deputy, had come in, and he had decided it wasn’t nice—now, he never decided this for all those years before, but now that I have a picture up, it isn’t nice for them to have all those women’s pictures up there, all those Playmate pictures up there, and share an office with me. He makes them take all theirs down, so now I have the only picture on the wall. I took mine down and took it to have it framed. The frame shop I took it to—there were two women who owned that frame shop—I like to have never gotten my picture back. They kept making excuses for why I couldn’t have it back, because everybody was having so much fun with that picture. Then I took it home and put it in my guest bathroom, and that’s where it lived for a long time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On a different note of exhibiting things, we noted that in ’76, you were part of a NASA exhibit about women and science and engineering at the [Houston] Museum of Natural Science. Do you remember being at that and why that exhibit was done?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know who started the whole thing or put it all together. I had already known at that time the young woman who was head of the planetarium there, and she was very big on getting women into science and stuff, so we’d talk a number of times. I don’t know whether she’d talked to other women at NASA. I can’t remember whether she called me, whether she called somebody that was in the Women’s Office or something, and wanted to put something together so that we could come out and do panel discussions and talk to people and all as they brought kids through the facility and talked to other people. I had forgotten about it until I saw that written up, and it was like, “Oh, yes, we did do that, didn’t we?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That must have been fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ivy F. Hooks", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was fun. It was fun. Coming over here to San Antonio and talking to all those junior high students was fun. What you’d like to know, of all those kids you talk to—maybe I’ll talk to the San Antonio paper one day and say, “You know, I did this at about this timeframe. Are any of those kids still around, and did any of them go into science? I’d like to know.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’d be a great time to do that, and then ask them about that. Well, if you don’t have anything else you can think of—thanks." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "oral-history-at-the-national-archives-00026", + "metadata": { + "interviewee_name": "John Constance", + "description": "John Constance, whose storied NARA career spanned 35 years from 1972 to 2007, begins his interview describing his internship in the Office of the Archivist when the National Archives was still part of the General Services Administration (GSA). He then joined the agency’s National Audiovisual Center, which was responsible for marketing and distributing educational films to the public. John discusses the training received and his surprise run-ins with the rich and the famous. He then talks about his transition to Director of Policy and Program Analysis and eventually to Director of Congressional and Public Affairs. Along the way, he covers NARA’s independence from GSA; the agency’s first Inspector General; advocating for and obtaining agency appropriations; the financing of Archives II; fielding questions from Capitol Hill and the press; building personal relationships with Congress; working with the Kennedy family; and his appointment to the Senior Executive Service.", + "file_url": "https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/john-constance-oral-history-interview.pdf", + "collection_url": "https://www.archives.gov/about/history/oral-history-at-the-national-archives", + "original_file_name": "john-constance-oral-history-interview.pdf", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04 22:30:15", + "publisher": "U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION", + "date": "August 24, 2023" + }, + "broad_source": "nara", + "collection": "oral_history_at_the_national_archives", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Stephanie Reynolds" + ], + "respondents": [ + "John Constance" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. I've got the recording going. Welcome back. This is part two of an oral history with John Constance. And today is Thursday, August 24, 2023. And I just want to do a quick recap here of what we spoke about last time. We covered your internship with the Deputy Archivist, Herb Angel; your work and experiences with the National Audiovisual Center; the acquisition and marketing of films; a detail that you took with OMB and the Department of Education; and, of course, your run-ins with the rich and famous: Elizabeth Taylor and Clint Eastwood as well as several Supreme Court Justices. So that's what we went over last time. Did you think of anything that you wanted to add or clarify from last time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, but I think, and I might have mentioned this, I had the benefit early in my career of some excellent bosses and mentors. And as I look back over my career, that really made a big difference. So for that, I am very grateful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, sometimes it takes having some mentors or some really bright people to help you along and get you into those right places, right, who know your skills and where your best fit would be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. And I've tried to emulate that since then and even in retirement. I'm always looking for folks that need a hand or need some advice, and I continue to find that very gratifying." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm sure everyone appreciates that you've helped out. Okay. So kind of leading off where we were last time, we were just starting to get into when NARA became an independent agency from GSA. Do you remember anything from this time? Maybe some of the changes that were happening?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was involved in this sort of transformation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I followed the independence movement kind of from afar. I was still working for the National Audiovisual Center, but I had an awful lot of excellent contacts downtown with people that I had worked with through the years, and through that and through those contacts, continued to kind of stay abreast of what was going on in the independence movement, given the fact that a lot of that was coming out of Congress. And that was certainly a first love for me. I was following from that perspective. I guess the Archives Act was actually passed in October of 1984—that was when the act was actually passed and it was not going to become effective, and the Archives was not going to actually be independent until April 1, 1985. Thus, the emblem of the National Archives and Records Administration has 1985 down there as the effective date on the seal. You know, as soon as the bill passed, my mind started kind of spinning towards where I could be next in my career that would be logical for me and also kind of fulfill what I hoped it would be. And that was not just to be part of a satellite of the National Archives at the Audiovisual Center, but actually be downtown and kind of directly in the mix. So I remember at some point in the winter between 1984 and 1985, I made it my business to come downtown and see Adrienne Thomas. And Adrienne Thomas, at that point, was really moving into the role of policy and program management under the new independent agency. She was going to be the head of policy, and she was going to report to Jim Megronigle, who was going to be the Deputy Executive Director reporting to Claudine Weiher, who was going to be the new Executive Director. There might have been some other fancy titles there about Assistant Archivist for Administration is maybe what Claudine's title was going to be. But in that chain of command, it was clear to me that, number one, I had the most long-term contact in that chain with Adrienne. I had worked with Adrienne literally from the time I was an intern at the Archives. So I came down to see her. The only thing I remember about that day was that it was snowing in Washington and a number of people had not shown up. So it was rather quiet in the building. And I went to see Adrienne, and I just said, “You know, let me just lay it out. I'd really like to be a part of the new independent National Archives, and I'd love to have a role down here.” And she was very encouraging from the get-go. And that made me feel very, very good, and she said, “Let me see what we can work out.” Well for the second time in my career, I had pictured a position of some authority, just as I had when I went from intern to a permanent job and was asked, could I type? Well, it wasn't quite that austere, but what they had available for me was a program analyst job, not supervisory. I would come down to work for Michael Kurtz, who was going to be head of program analysis. Well, I didn't know too much about program analysis, but they knew me well enough to know that my head kind of worked that way and that I would basically be able to learn on the job. And I came down in the spring of '85 to work for Michael. And a couple of things I do remember about that—I remember about this uncertainty every day coming into the office. What in the heck am I doing? And do I really know how to do this? And Michael was very good. He was a very good teacher his whole life. And he was quite helpful to me in that role. So, you know, I can't remember how many months. I mean, it wasn't a lot of months that I was in that job when one of the other supervisors who was on the same level as Michael kind of crashed and burned. His name was John Kelly. And I can't remember what he did or what he said or what happened that kind of spun him out of favor, but the next thing I know, I'm sitting in front of Adrienne Thomas again and she's saying, \"We need your help in running the Directives Management Branch.\" Okay, so here we are in something else that I don't know a whole heck of a lot about, but I had written procedures manuals for the National Audiovisual Center and the Department of Education and had a lot of on-the-job training. I went to a bunch of classes. I did a lot of practicums, and I learned how to write procedures—not the most exciting writing in the world, but once again, it works kind of the way my head works, kind of one step at a time, and what's the logical next thing to do and what are your choices and in which direction should this flowchart go? Et cetera. Et cetera. So I took over as head of Directives Management. Well, the significant thing about that for the National Archives at that moment in time is that here we are a small portion of GSA, and now we are our own independent agency. So all of the reports through the years that have been generated by GSA on our behalf, that we were just a feeder to GAO and the Congress and you name it, all of a sudden, all those reports were our responsibility. Second of all, we had no procedures on how to do anything from procurement to finance to property management. You know, you name it in terms of what you would have to do to run an organization. We didn't have any of those procedures. So it was going to be the responsibility of this Directives Management Branch to, first of all, establish a system for directives. Second of all, basically start writing this gargantuan, massive volume of how the agency was going to operate and do it quickly, because we were doing all those things on a daily basis but didn't really have any directives or policy to point to as to what we were doing. We certainly had some of GSA's material. We had picked up some employees from GSA in the transition. None of them were happy. None of them. You know, again, just picture GSA, who is all ticked off about the fact that the Archives was breaking off and being this independent entity. They weren't exactly going to give us the cream of the crop, shall we say, when transition occurred. In fact, they were going to take the opportunity to dump a number of folks that had not been the best. And now there were exceptions, but the people that I had reporting to me were not a chapter in the best and the brightest. So consequently, I had a big job to do and I had some people who were retired in place. And then I had a bunch of old loyal National Archives folks who I knew that I could rely on to do an awful lot of the work, and a portion of the writing I was going to do myself. I picked up along the way Shelby Bale, who had been a long-time editor for the National Archives. He certainly did not see himself as a directives writer, but he basically knew how to write. But, you know, he was suddenly going from being the guy who edited Prologue and edited scholarly articles to writing an article on how to buy toilet paper and how to control real property. He wasn't very happy. So again, my recollection is that it was a challenging time. But just like any elephant that you have to eat, we cut it into very, very small pieces. We attacked it. We established a system of goals and accountability and timeframes. And within, I think, 18 months, we had ourselves a procedures manual, at least one that was going to serve us until something else or something better came along. So, as I look back at my career at the National Archives, having been involved in writing that manual, there was nothing that we did at the National Archives for the rest of my career that I didn't at least know something about. I was there when, due to some pretty high-profile thefts of records from our research room, we developed what we coined as the \"clean search room\" or the clean research room policy, where people were no longer going to be able to bring briefcases in. We set up a system of lockers. Gentlemen had to put their jackets away. Women couldn't bring large purses. You couldn't bring your own note material. And we provided paper and pencils. Et cetera. Et cetera. And so, in terms of writing procedures and writing directives, everything from basic administrative jobs in the agency to things as important as serving records to researchers, I was involved. So from then on in my career, when I went up the chain in the policy group and eventually ran the policy organization, I pretty much knew all the policies. And when I moved on from there later on to Congressional Affairs and I had to go on the Hill and talk about what the National Archives did, I was always doing it from the basis of something that, once again, when I looked at it initially, I said, \"You want me to do what?\" to something that when I look back on it in my career, it was a foundational skill and experience that I had that I really didn't appreciate. The other thing that it did, it taught me how to supervise difficult people. When you've got a staff of people and I had, I guess, 12 people that were reporting to me and at least 4 or 5 of them, the GSA folks, didn't want to be there. You know, they didn't like me, didn't like being shoveled over to the National Archives. They certainly knew why they were there. We knew why they were there. And so consequently, it did teach me a lot about supervising people who are hard to supervise, and that was a valuable experience as well. There were times when I was in the middle of it that I thought, oh, my God, you know, another day of this, and I'm going to climb up there where the eagles are on the corners of the building and jump into Seventh Street. But anyway, it was all quite an interesting endeavor, shall we say." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have any lessons learned from having to supervise difficult people?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, one of the things about that was I did a lot of listening and they needed somebody to vent to, which I figured out later on they were angry. They felt like they had been betrayed by their former agency that they had put a lot of time into. And everybody has different abilities. Everybody has different skills. And there had not been a lot of attention given to the skills that these people had. When these transitions were made, they just kind of wanted them out and we got them. So listening—and not just listening, but actually hearing what people say to you, I found to be important. And also, the silk glove along with the hammer—I mean, we had to discipline at least two of those people because of lateness, absenteeism, and insubordination. And so you listen, you listen, you listen, and you try to adjust things, but at the end of the day, it was starting to affect the morale of everybody in the organization that these folks aren't showing up. And when they are showing up, they're not working. So again, I was writing the manual on disciplinary actions, so I didn't have to go too far to find practical examples as we were writing those manuals as to what to do and what works and what doesn't work. And, you know, first letter, second letter, and three strikes you're out kind of thing. So anyway, it was interesting. And I can't say that I was or ever became friends with any of those individuals, but several of them did produce and did help with what the eventual goals were for the office. So anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For these, the manual and all of these policies and procedures that you were helping to create, where did you get the information from? Were you completely starting from scratch or were you starting with GSA's policies and then creating it or gearing it toward NARA? Or how did you go about creating those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For the general administrative functions, I started out looking at what GSA had. They were a big organization, and they were an organization that was not known for their efficiency. So first of all, we had to scale a lot of their policies to something that was more reasonable for an organization our size. One of the things that I still think back on from time to time and laugh about—I had a couple of people that worked for me that came up with a catalog of all of the reports that independent agencies are required to submit each year to go to Congress, to all these other regulatory agencies, and there are literally hundreds and hundreds of these reports that are required every year. And I looked at that list of reports and in talking to our staff, I said, “We don't have the staff to do those reports in a million years.” And I said, “You know what? Why don't we do this? Let's not submit any of those reports the first year and see what happens.” And that's what we did. And about, I would say of the hundreds and hundreds of reports, maybe for 40 of them the responsible agency followed up with us and said, \"Hey, where's your report?\" And for those 40, we said, \"Oh, okay, fine. We're working on it right here. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.\" But, you know, we didn't know what they were talking about. We would say, \"Could you send us GSA's report from last year?\" And they said, \"Sure, we'll send that to you.\" So through that means, we kind of worked our way through. But there were like literally 500 reports that we looked at [LAUGHS]. This is the lovely grind in Washington, DC, that laws are written, regulations are written from laws, responsibilities of the night watchman in terms of taking care of all these numbers, and does anybody ever read them and does anybody ever care? We found out that in the vast majority of cases, no, but we pared it down through one year of mismanagement. We pared it down to those that were important. So there you go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So NARA didn't get in trouble for not submitting some of these reports?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. And you know, I always thought there was probably some guy on the end of a bunch of those reports saying to himself, \"Boy, thank God, I only got ten of these this year.\" [LAUGHS] So anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So then you were the Director of Policy and Program Analysis, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. And I had a couple of people. Then I had, you know, folks that reported to me who ran directives and who ran program analysis. And that was fun. I mean, I enjoyed that job a great deal until I got into Congressional Affairs. I think I enjoyed that job as much as any job because I just had three branches reporting to me. It was a small number of people. I guess our total staff contingent was probably 25 at the top. And everybody worked together. Well, I mean, I can still say that the folks that were my branch chiefs in those years were good people who worked hard, and they really did a good job and so that was enjoyable. And it really started to lead me in the direction of Congressional Affairs. There was an interesting dual track that also came out of independence. Some of which were good, and some of them were not so good. And the dual track was this—there were some people who came over from GSA or who we received some pretty strong direction to hire, that the top echelon of the agency did not think were the right choices. And I won't go into names here, but we did have an individual that came over as head of Congressional Affairs. Claudine Weiher and, I guess, Bob Warner and then Don Wilson did not feel that they were the right choice. And it was really a big matter of trust because the sensitivity of congressional affairs is such that since it's where all of your appropriations come from, it's where you're enabling law came from. It's where amendments to that law are vitally important for your long-term existence as an agency. The first element that you've got to have in that relationship between Congressional Affairs and whoever's on top is trust. And that trust wasn't there. So here's the dual track. I became kind of the shadow Director of Congressional Affairs long before I had the title. I was called in and asked by Claudine Weiher and Don Wilson to do things like track legislation that would be of importance to the National Archives and to identify laws on the Hill that we really needed to know about and really needed to weigh in on, things that had to do with the Government Printing Office, things that had to do with possible mission creep along the lines of the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian or whomever else that would start to pinch our toes, given the fact that we were the new kid on the block. And there was a lot of concern that, in these early stages of the existence of the National Archives, we would be taken advantage of in the legislative process and end up not having either the responsibilities or the money for those responsibilities that we would have. So I set up a system and, basically, it was a subscription system that you could get in the very, very early stages of database scanning based on keywords that would pop things up that we would be interested in. And very quietly, when things would pop up along those lines, I would go to the front office and talk to them about what was going on, what we thought we would establish, some strategies about what to do about it. And I would quietly, you know, make contact with folks and kind of move those things ahead. While at the same time, the person who was technically the head of Congressional Affairs was going through the day-to-day routine of guests coming to the Archives and showing people around and the mundane kind of day-to-day track with our finance people about our appropriations and those kinds of things. And it wasn't a great surprise to them that there was more going on than just what was coming out of their office. But anyway, I chose not to spend a lot of time thinking about the rightness or wrongness of this and more along the lines of what I was learning and what I was gaining and how much I liked that process. And at one point, actually, when the individual and the other office kind of moved on, there was some esoteric term, and I can't even remember what it was, but we changed the name of my office to basically include legislative affairs. I think we might have called it Legislative Affairs. I can't remember. I remember arguing with Claudine in particular about what we were going to call it. But before Congressional Affairs was a separate and independent office, it was eventually kind of officially combined with my job in policy and program analysis. But I do remember that in those years, they did not want me to have the whole job because they also, I think, valued my work that I was doing in policy. So I was kind of doing both. But once again, you know, it was a good place to do both given the fact that I was working on the day-to-day policies. At the same time, I was on the Hill trying to explain to people what we did, how we did it, and why we did it the way we did it. So that was kind of a cool transition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now this was all before you officially were in Congressional Affairs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And let me tell you, if I could. One of the big mistakes that I've always thought that the agency made in the upper echelons, in coming out of independence—and it took a number of years for the chickens to come home to roost in terms of what caused the agency such upheaval. But it eventually happened, and when it happened, that’s how I got the independent job of Congressional Affairs. You know, there was a lot of hubris, for lack of a better term, involved in becoming an independent agency. There were a lot of victory celebrations. There was a lot of beating our breasts and, you know, and Huzzah! Huzzah! We have slain the dragon. We have broken out from our bondage. And, in fact, the buttons that were created as part of independence said, \"Free at Last.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So there was a sense in the agency that this had been a generational battle within the Archives. The shoes didn't fit from day one in terms of being part of GSA—they were the guys that took care of the buildings and grounds and bought the cars. They were the administrative arm of the federal government. And I think the Archives spent an awful lot of time with a great deal of anger about that, and when those chains were finally broken—and they were broken by the most modest of individuals, Bob Warner, who was the Archivist that deserves all the credit. He was the most mild-mannered, kind individual. And he did it with basically his own negotiation skills and his ability to bring people together. He had a cadre of people working for him who were, shall we say, the guerrilla warfare team. And I was kind of on the edge of that after we became independent. But that hubris to say, \"We've done this and we're, you know . . .\" Unfortunately, in some respects, we just kept on fighting. GSA had been the enemy, and then suddenly Congress and our oversight committees became the enemy. GSA had been telling us what to do since 1949, and I think suddenly there was a sense that, hell, now Congress is telling us what to do. Who do they think they are? Huh? And that got us in trouble. A couple of the guys really, really had been the behind-the-scenes heroes on Capitol Hill, staff people, very powerful staff, people who had done an awful lot on a day-to-day basis to see that we were going to become independent. Two of them in particular: Ed Gleiman. Ed was with the House Government Operations Committee. And in all those years, he eventually became staff director and chief counsel of the Senate Committee on Government Affairs. He reported to David Pryor of Arkansas. Ed put an awful lot of blood, sweat, and tears into independence. He was one of the behind-the-scenes guys who really believed in independence, but he realized that the National Archives had not been the best managed place with or without GSA over the years, but thought that Bob Warner was the right man at the right time and could really, really lead us into a very good place and worked very hard behind-the-scenes, along with a cabal of people from the history world and the federal history world that were kind of behind-the-scenes. And Ed did a lot of that work. The other guy that did a lot of that work was a guy named Bob Gellman. Gellman, I think, spent his whole career with the Government Operations Committee, again, our oversight committee in Congress—GSA's oversight committee—and then, of course, our oversight committee. And the first thing that we did when we became independent is, I think, we forgot to thank those guys. We had a party. We had pictures taken. We had them up there at the front for all the celebrations. And I remember Ed Meese, who had been a very important part of the President's team in shepherding this independent legislation through for President Reagan. They were all up there, and they all made the picture. I think it was also John Daniels, whose wife Maygene had been a GSA intern with me and who eventually worked for NARA. John was another behind the scenes staffer that enabled independence. Anyway, they were up there in the phalanx of the photograph, and they all got thanked on that day. But in the days that followed, not only were they no longer thanked, but I think in the minds of a lot of people in the Archives, they became the enemy. They were once again, all of a sudden, \"Oh, my God, we're out from under GSA, and now we've got these oversight committees that are all over us in terms of what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.\" And so a lot of resentment, well, it built over a period of time. And this is months and years, but it built over a period of time. And finally the last critical mistake was when John Glenn became the chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. John Glenn was our oversight chairman. And John Glenn's baby was the inspector general legislation. You know, all of the Cabinet agencies had inspectors general for a number of years. The State Department, the . . . you know. And I don't know what the origin year was. I'm going to say, I think it was sometime in the late 1970s that all of those folks, you know, received IGs. But anyway, John Glenn wanted all of the independent agencies—not just the Cabinet agencies that already had IGs—he wanted all of the independent agencies to have inspectors general also in order to be the internal watchdogs within the agency. Well, this was his legislation. He loved it. He felt very proud of it. He got it passed, and it was signed into law in 1988. And then he turned to all the agencies to implement it. Well, I was not at the other agencies. I don't know how the other agencies responded or reacted. I was just at the National Archives, and I can tell you how our upper management responded and our upper management responded in a most negative manner, and with the singular determination that we might just go through the motions. We might look like we were doing this, but I think our top management had no intention of hiring an independent junkyard dog, as these guys affectionately refer to themselves, to walk the halls of the National Archives and be our internal auditor, an honest-to-God auditor. So, it's kind of difficult when Governmental Affairs was our oversight committee, okay? John Glenn was our oversight chairman. So whereas maybe an independent agency that was outside of his jurisdiction or someplace else in the government, it wasn't going to be as evident that we were basically playing rope-a-dope here and just going through the motions. The National Archives had a very well-educated workforce. What that gives you are several things. Number one, if channeled in the right direction, it can really, really make you the best. And I think an awful lot of what has been done at the National Archives has been the best. On the other hand, it also gives you a lot of people with more than an average amount of opinion as to how the agency should be run. There was an ownership in terms of the professional community in the National Archives and, through that ownership, there was always an opinion about the Archivist of the United States, and an opinion about how we were doing our job or not doing our job. There was always an opinion about what we were asking for in terms of funding, what we weren't asking for. And these people were smart enough and sophisticated enough, is probably the more appropriate word, to establish their own channels on Capitol Hill. The Archives had whistleblowers before I think they even coined the term. We were a hotbed of whistleblowers. And so consequently, when we would do things that weren't really to the letter of the law or with the intention for which Congress had wanted things to be done, there always seemed to be someone within the Archives who would pick up the phone or go to Capitol Hill or whatever, and tell the people who are interested in those kinds of things, the things we were doing wrong. Well, at some point, in the run-up to implementation of the new IG Act, it was clearly reported from some of our whistleblowers to the Hill what we were doing, that we were playing fast and loose with the implementation of this, and we were not looking for a junkyard dog, but a lap dog—someone in the agency that we could repurpose into our walking, talking mannequin of an IG. And we took a couple of different approaches. I won't go into all the details, but suffice it to say it was really clear that we weren't playing straight with the committee on this implementation, and we named someone as our first IG that didn't really meet the test of what was expected on Capitol Hill. And we paid for it. We paid for it dearly. Senator Glenn had a staff guy by the name of Steve Katz. And Steve was very sharp. And one of the things you find out about Senate staff—the United States Senate has 100 senators. They're dealing with the same number of issues, with the same amount of complexity that’s being dealt with by 435 Representatives in the House. So if you have 100 people doing the same policy work, legislative work, that you have 435 people doing over on the other side, by necessity, senators typically delegate a lot more authority to their staff. There are big exceptions, particularly in the appropriations world, Armed Services, you know, over in the House. But typically, boy, there were and are some very powerful staff people in the Senate. And Steve Katz was one of those powerful staff guys. And he knew that we were messing with him. And he was going to see that we were hurt by that attempt, so he developed a request from Senator Glenn to GAO—then the Government Accounting Office, now Accountability or something, whatever they're called now—but GAO to basically do a review of the National Archives and our implementation of the IG Act. And they came in. They had done some of their own work, but I think Steve really was way down the road in terms of what he thought and also knew had happened in this implementation. And he got them to do this report. I was sitting at my desk. [LAUGHS] One of the things is that when you're the parent agency of the Federal Register, you're also part of the publishing wing of the federal government. The Federal Register and the Government Printing Office (GPO) are kind of joined in a very close working relationship. So the guys at the Federal Register would see things long before anybody else would see them because if something had to do with the National Archives, they had folks at GPO that would say, \"Hey, do you know about this?\" Well, I get a phone call from somebody, I can't remember who now, at the Federal Register and they say, \"Hey, John, do you know about this GAO report?\" And I said, “Well, I know that they've done a review of us and a review of our IG implementation. And this person said, \"Stay right there. I’ve got something to send you.\" So I said, “Okay.” So back in those days, he didn't turn to the computer. I mean, he handed staff this blue-covered GAO report and said, \"Run this down the street to John Constance at the main building. He needs to see this, because it's about to be published this afternoon.\" I will never forget receiving that report in my office and looking down at the boldface headline that read, \"Mismanagement at the National Archives and Records Administration.\" That was the headline. And I thought, oh, man. So I ran down the hall and saw Claudine and Don Wilson and Jim Megronigle and everybody and their brother and said, \"Here it is. We’ve got a problem.\" So not to lay out all the details, but the explosion was loud. I was still only the legislation guy in the policy office and not officially congressional or public affairs, but I worked together with the press office for what was a pretty miserable couple of weeks. I took Don Wilson into a hornets nest of a meeting with Glenn’s staff. We were heading towards a public hearing, but Don Wilson preempted the bloody next steps by resigning as Archivist of the United States and taking a job with the foundation for the Bush Library in Texas, the George H. W. Bush Library in Texas. I learned more in one month than I had learned in my whole career about congressional affairs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so that was pretty horrible. Claudine Weiher resigned also. I think she went on a long period of administrative leave, and Trudy Peterson became the Acting Archivist of the United States." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The theme there is, I always thought that it really grew out of the post-independence celebration and then hubris about, boy, you know, here we are with somebody else telling us what to do. And unfortunately, that really is the way things work. And had we continued to befriend Ed Gleiman and Bob Gellman and others, had I—and I will send this out there as a personal failing—had I convinced our upper echelon that I didn’t think I had the leverage in those early days that I eventually had, but if I'd convinced them that we’ve got to get the bad news up there with the good news, it would have really truncated a lot of whistleblowing and really helped us in what was a difficult time—I mean, becoming an independent agency, particularly when it's all you really wanted for Christmas for a long time, and suddenly you got it and, wow, it was a lot more complicated, I think, politically, small P, capital P, both, than the agency thought it was going to be. So there you have it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. So you think by not continuing to really thank them for their efforts and then us kind of giving the appearance of not following through the IG Act, those were some of the big mistakes that we had made?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I would say they were critical and close to fatal. I mean, there were some moments that I think a lot of the people that had assisted us in becoming independent were very disappointed. I mean, people in the history community, there were a lot of people that were very, very disappointed in that. What came out of it were several things. One, Trudy Peterson was named the Acting Archivist. When Bill Clinton became President of the United States, he decided that he was going to get hold of the executive branch of government in a rather creative way. He put White House liaisons in all of the independent agencies, certainly. I mean, given the fact that all of the Cabinet agencies had both his appointees at the top, as well as individuals down through the echelon who were Schedule Cs and political appointees, he pretty much knew how he was going to get a hold of the Cabinet agencies. The independent agencies, particularly one like the National Archives who did not have a political appointee at the top as such, our legislation made it very clear that you were not to be appointed Archivist of the United States for political reasons, that it was going to be basically your professional background that led to your appointment. That has been followed in some following years, not followed in some following years. And that's a whole different discussion for a different day. But the way Clinton decided he was going to handle this for the National Archives, he was going to park a White House liaison at the National Archives. Our White House liaison was a young woman by the name of Maryanne Smith. And Maryanne came in with a pretty clear portfolio that she made clear to us, that she wanted to be in on everything. She wanted to be in on every decision, every discussion, everything, and she expected to be. One of the fortunate things that happened to me in my career in those years is I hit it off pretty well with Maryanne Smith. My colleague, Mike Gillette, who was head of congressional archives, also hit it off quite well with Maryanne, and he made it known to her that I was competent, had a good heart and was somebody that she could count on (and that the White House could count on) to be a straight shooter. I already had a good relationship with Trudy Peterson. I worked with Trudy off and on for a number of years, and she trusted me. And she also felt that she didn't know anything about Capitol Hill and was more than willing to take my direction. She had watched me work with Don Wilson and Claudine and everybody in the spin-out from the GAO report and felt that the advice that I had given was good advice. Had they listened to some of the advice that I had given, things would have worked out better. But nevertheless, she knew the mistakes that I had made and that I had admitted to. She knew that the direction that I had suggested was generally true North. And so I already had a good relationship with her. Well, Maryanne Smith told Trudy at one point, “You know, one thing you absolutely need to do is have a Congressional Affairs Director and a Congressional Affairs Office and not have it part of your policy staff. John Constance needs to be a separate entity as head of Congressional Affairs for the Archives. He needs a separate office. He needs staff. He needs basically to concentrate all of his time on congressional affairs and not do both that and policy.” Well, that was absolute music to my ears. Trudy talked to me about it, and she said, \"What do you think?\" And I said, \"Oh, my gosh,\" you know, I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven, because that's really what I had wanted for a long time. And whether it was that Claudine and the Archivist totally trusted me or wanted me to be busy enough in a variety of different pursuits or, you know, they didn't see—I mean, not understanding what the job could be and what the office could be for the agency. They always kind of held it back from being an independent office. So anyway, Trudy was kind enough to then, obviously, turn to me. I wrote all reorganizations or my staff wrote all reorganizations. So she said, \"Write me a reorganization that basically blasts this out of policy, makes it separate and has it reporting directly to the Archivist of the United States.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because Maryanne said that's the only way this will work. “When this guy goes to Capitol Hill, when he opens his mouth, they're going to think that it's the Archivist talking. Well, hell, it might as well be, if they're going to think that anyway. And so let's create an organization chart that shows that that's true.” So that's what we did. We wrote that, and I got an administrative assistant and a legislative affairs person who worked for me and then eventually two. And we were on our way. And those are the moments in my career that I thought, wow, it's all been worth it. I mean, I'd always been a political guy. I grew up in a political family, loved politics, loved a lot of things about it. In recent years I've had second thoughts about that! [LAUGHS] But anyway, I still love things about it, not everything about it anymore. But, I thought, boy, this is going to be fun. And it was. It really was. That was when I started getting up every morning and saying to myself, they are actually paying me to go and represent the National Archives on Capitol Hill, and to try to advance our mission and try to advance our budget and try to explain the inexplicable, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And, I mean, that was great. I mean, that's the portion of my career I feel the most fortunate to have had. So. . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's no small feat. . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": ". . . to explain our mission, and you were talking about the budget. Do you have thoughts on our budget over time? It seems like back then we were kind of, I don't know, flush with money and today it seems not so much. Do you have any thoughts on the budget— and what were your skills to get us more money?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let me suggest this. Let me look, you know, because it would be an interesting story. And I might be one of the few people that can tell you about what that budget history really has been, because I think there is an impression at the Archives now that is reflected in what you said, and that is that we were flush back then. I think that, yes, by virtue of the creation of the Archives, we had an awful lot of good evidence as to what we needed to do, how we needed to do it, what we needed in the way of consolidation and new buildings and whatever. But the National Archives, as you well know—the record-generating federal government had a big head start on the National Archives. And so back in those days—and I don't know what the number is now that we quote—but back in those days, it was 5 billion pieces of paper. And so, yes, we had some good appropriation years back then. But the imbalance between the money and the mission has always been stark for the National Archives, in my opinion. If you look at the preservation of all these records and then the expectation of the digitization of all these records, throw in the declassification of all these records and the enormous tsunami of records that are out there, it's always been difficult to rectify our mission with our resources. And time and time again I heard people look across the table at me on Capitol Hill and say, “You know, I get what you're saying. I get what you're saying, but we don't have all those resources to give you. You're a small agency. Yes, you have a big mission, but this government can't afford to do what probably needs to be done.” Every time in the history of the Archives that we have had a gargantuan task, we have figured out some other way to do it other than through appropriations. Let me give you one example. When the Pentagon Papers were released by The New York Times and, suddenly, there was this huge scandal involving the Vietnam War and the fact that the source for an awful lot of Daniel Ellsberg's writing associated with the Pentagon Papers came from records that were still classified. And so suddenly—this was in the Nixon administration when I was still, you know, a young lad—but I was there when Herb Angel, and a young Bert Rhoads and a couple of other people were musing about where in the world were we going to find the manpower to do this gargantuan job of declassifying all these records? This was like '70—I guess it was in the summer of '71. And I'll never forget, Herb Angel spun around in his big judge's chair, and he looked out at what was the park that was across the street from the Archives, which is now where the Navy Memorial is, and that was a big park with a statue of, I don't know, General Hancock or somebody. And Kann’s department store was behind there. And it was a pretty well-known hangout for the relatively small number of homeless people that were in Washington, DC, in those days. And I always remember, Herb looked over into that park and said, \"Well, we can start recruiting right there,\" and got a big laugh in the room. But what they eventually did is that they went to, I don't know whether it was Fort Meade or someplace, and they got military reserves who were doing summer duty. And they brought these guys in, literally, by the busload at no expense to the Archives. I mean, they went to the Department of the Army. We said we need a lot of people that can read documents. We need a lot of people. We can give them the guidelines. They don't have to have a great deal of skill. But if they're Army officers, first and second lieutenants or whatever, chances are they've got the educational background or the experience that we need. And I can't remember how many of these people they brought in, but it was busloads. And that's how they started that declassification project that summer under the gun from Congress who had set up some mandates, but not a lot of money for the agency to do it. So once again, it was a classic case of here's the mission and here's the money. So that's been the Archives problem for years and years. I'd like to think that when I was there—and that's one of the reasons I don't want to get my mouth out over my memory here— but I do think that in the years that I was there and the years that I left, I mean, I think it was kind of the high-water mark of appropriations, at least in that era. We had a wonderful relationship with the appropriators in those years—Mark Hatfield and Ted Stevens and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Pete Domenici. They were people who really did understand and appreciate what our mission was and were more than willing to help fund that mission. Stevens in particular, about the digital. Mark Hatfield, being a scholar himself, had just written a book about the Vice Presidency and used the Archives for that. Pete Domenici was a brilliant guy and loved the National Archives. David Price of North Carolina was an appropriator on the House side and a guy who had been a college professor, wrote books about the Congress, and had used the Archives extensively. So we had a very, very good relationship and a good run with a lot of great, great people in those years. And then politics and necessity and the big cutting government waste, fraud, and abuse, and all the horrible things that happened under that aegis in some of the later years, and through no fault of the succession of Archivists of the United States we had or the person I helped hire to be the head of Congressional Affairs, John Hamilton, who is still the head. These guys did a wonderful job over the years. But it is the ebb and flow of Washington politics that either helps you or hurts you when you're an agency the size of the National Archives. So . . ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So we don't understand all of the intricacies of it, I guess. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, again, I'd be happy—again, not to prolong this in one of the next sessions—but we're at the stage of these interviews that I can start telling some war stories that may be entertaining. But I think that in terms of laying down a little bit more of the history that really is worth laying down, I'd be more than happy to do a little looking at the appropriations profile and make some comments along the way about that. I think John Hamilton is going to be the guy that can tell the real story of the last however many years. That also might be, looking at the old clock on the wall, this might be a good transition point, as they say." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And between now and the next time, I will once again see what I can do about making this computer work. The sound works so that I don't have to continually have this ceiling fan growing out of my head when we talk. [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. That is not a problem at all. [LAUGHS] In fact, my internet went out halfway through our talk, but I've been recording you on my phone. We've got the whole text message from the internet provider and everything saying there’s a power outage in the entire area. So . . . [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, my God. Well, again, your smiling face, as still as it was, was still projecting on my phone. So, I mean, one of the ways I worked my way through college was as a radio announcer. And one of the things that radio announcers try to do is make each other laugh when they're on the air, and they do some outrageous things to each other. And I am very adept at just keeping on talking and hoping someone's listening. And so when you went from your video to your still, I thought, okay, here we go. I'm just going to keep on talking and see if I can hear her breathing on the other end. [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was another reason why I kept saying, “Oh yeah.” “Wow.” “Okay.” “Yeah.” Just so that you knew I was still here. So again, technology. It's great when it works." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely. Well, thank you again for your time. And send me some dates when you get a chance. We'll figure out what works." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wonderful. Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you again for today and enjoy your time. I think you were meeting a friend or something, so enjoy your time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'm still in the fundraising business for one thing or the other. And I'm going with a friend and someone who he thinks might be interested in one of the causes I'm working on. So anyway, we'll see." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, well, good luck with that. But yeah, I'll send you an email with some more dates and we'll get something set up here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Great. Thanks so much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you. Have a good day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "John Constance", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you, Stephanie." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Bye-bye." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00708", + "metadata": { + "category": "Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) / Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) Recovery Project 2012", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SCA-SRB/DeLeonM/deleonm.htm", + "original_file_name": "DeLeonM_4-10-12.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SCA-SRB/DeLeonM/DeLeonM_4-10-12.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "SRB Recovery Ships Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Manny De Leon", + "location_date": "Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida – 10 April 2012" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright", + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Manny De Leon" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is April 10th, 2012. This oral history is being conducted with Manny De Leon for the SRB [solid rocket booster] Recovery Ships Oral History Project. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal. We are here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station [CCAFS] in Hangar AF in Florida. If you would, just give us a brief overview of how you became involved with the space operations and then how you became part of the SRB recovery ship operation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I went back to school at Embry-Riddle University in Daytona Beach [Florida]. When I was graduating, Thiokol Corporation [Morton Thiokol, Inc.] came up, did interviews, and hired me. I actually had been in Florida for all of the first ten Shuttle launches. I either drove down, or we would rent a plane, fly down and be over the river, over the land, and watch the launches that way. Then I hired on after STS-10 and was working here doing external tank engineering for STS-11. STS-11 through 51-L [the Challenger accident] I was working in the VAB [Vehicle Assembly Building] and at Vandenberg [Air Force Base, California]. Doing external tank engineering in the VAB, and then for Vandenberg we were activating the launch site for West Coast Shuttle launches, which of course never happened because when Challenger happened they abandoned West Coast operations. Retrieval operations needed engineering to continue so they borrowed some engineers, including me. I came to marine operations at that time and have been here ever since." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were some of the first things that you started working on when you walked into this operation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In this operation most of the [Kennedy] Space Center [Florida] was concentrating on redesigning flight hardware, and nobody was working on the GSE [ground support equipment] processes for it. [NASA] Marshall Space Flight [Center, Huntsville, Alabama] was doing a lot of it, but there was a lot that was falling through the cracks. My boss saw a need, and we started working on, specifically, assembly GSE for the solid rocket boosters. We designed and built some new equipment to do just that, because in the past when they stacked SRBs it was hit-and-miss. I don’t know how familiar you are with SRB assembly, but there’s an instrumented aft skirt. On top of that there are four segments that join together. They are hermetically sealed; they actually make one huge 1,000 psi [pounds per square inch] pressure vessel. Then there’s an instrumented section on top and parachutes on top of that.\\n\\n Well, the four segments that go together weigh in excess of 250,000 pounds, and they fit together in tolerances of tens of thousandths of an inch. So the fit is difficult and critical. It used to be it wasn’t really a well thought out process. Before Challenger it was a lot of work to get them together. That’s what my particular set of projects concentrated on, figuring out, characterizing how to make them fit better. We spent a lot of time and effort making new hardware to do that. After return to flight [STS-26, first launch after Challenger], we went back to our duty of SRB retrieval and handed over the GSE stuff to the folks that do GSE, but they continued to use our equipment till the end of the program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you give some examples of some of the new equipment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My particular project was called a sine bar. It was actually with some consultants, specifically Walt Whippo in Cocoa Beach here. He did the conceptual part of it and then we implemented it with him. It’s a very accurate—you determine the shape of this twelve-foot diameter booster to within a few thousandths of an inch by measuring an arc that’s thirty inches across. You know in a perfect 12-foot diameter circle—144-point-something actually according to the drawing—in this 30-inch arc what the three points that define an arc would be. So you measure very accurately and then you measure the next thirty inches. You go all the way around the booster, and you mathematically tie those together and then generate a shape.\\n\\n You do that for the top of the segment that you’re going to stack on and you do it for the bottom of the other segment. You figure out where the match is and most of the time where it isn’t. When they fill SRB rocket segments they do it vertically. It’s a huge 250,000 pounds of propellant pour. And the cure is not completed in the vertical, they actually cure it on its side. They call it a bread loaf effect. It takes a shape because the propellant finishes curing on its side. It takes a shape that isn’t round, and it’s sufficiently so that we tried different tools. We ended up with what is basically a funnel, a huge strong funnel that we attached to the bottom segment, and dropped the top segment on top of it.\\n\\n They used to lift the booster at two points, and although it’s a very slight deflection, it would cause the booster to change shape. So we started picking it up at four points and then varying the load to try and match the shapes as close as possible. Then you could shoehorn them together. Rick [Richard P.] Tubridy was part of the group of people that designed the set of shaping tools, things to try and force it to be to the right shape just before you join it together, and what they call the FJAF, the flight joint assembly fixture, to shoehorn them together. That was the biggest project I worked on during that time.\\n\\n I also did a bunch of computer work for different assembly aids. One of the things we didn’t know—nobody had ever characterized what the events were during a field joint mate. There’s an interference fit, and there’s three O-rings in there. When the joint comes together, nobody had ever actually taken a really close look at that process. The reason they made it a priority was because as some of those O-rings went in you would damage them. So we created some measuring equipment that very accurately measured the vertical displacement of the relative position of the joints as it was being mated, measured forces on the crane as it was coming down, and figured out what all the processes were as they were being mated. It was good work; it was interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very interesting. How did your role change after those issues were addressed and into return to flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Once we did return to flight, we tried to keep doing different work with the sine bar, since it measured a large circle. We actually went and did a job for the [U.S.] Navy at the Kittery Shipyard [Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Maine]. They have issues with submarines that are very large cylinders, and they had us measure one that they were having some issues with.\\n\\n Outside of that, we stopped doing non-Shuttle engineering. After we came back to return to flight and we started having a reasonable flight rate, we didn’t have a lot of time for anything else. Booster retrieval, disassembly, and refurb [refurbishment] was our reason for being here, and we just did that. In this facility we have the ships, we have all the people that man the ships. We’d go out before the launch, wait for the launch, bring the boosters back, disassemble them here in house.\\n\\n On the other side of the hangar we have a facility where we would refurb parts of it. Parts of the pressure vessel, once we disassemble them and inspect them, would go back to Utah where Thiokol Corporation—nowadays it’s ATK [Alliant Techsystems, Inc.]—refurbished them. Everything else—the aft skirt, the instrumentation, the thrust vector control system, the parachutes—was refurbed here on the Space Center. Since we never developed a good fair use specification we always took everything back to bare metal as if it had just been built. Inspected it, and if it passed, then started priming, painting, reassembling, working towards a new launch. Most of that was done here on the Space Center, a lot of it here on the Hangar AF complex." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that prior to Challenger you were working at the VAB, and now you were here. What was your role, and how was your role defined after the return to flight? What exactly were you starting to do? You mentioned you were a diver, so they were glad to have had you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s the reason they kept me here at the hangar. As an External Tank engineer I was a process engineer. I prepared the External Tanks for flight and dealt with problems in that process. We started doing validation for the tank facilities at Vandenberg. Then Challenger happened, and I came down here to the hangar. My title is engineer primarily, diver is a sideline. All of our divers, all of our retrieval personnel that aren’t ship’s crew—and ship’s crew is a very well-defined group, because you have to have a Coast Guard certification to do this—the rest of us who went to sea to do booster retrieval were considered retrieval crew, not ship’s crew. There were only three that were full-time divers. When we weren’t doing Shuttle launches, they were doing maintenance of the dive equipment, the recompression chambers, the small boats that we use offshore. The rest of us would go back to our primary job, in my case engineer. We had welders, we had technicians, we have safety engineers from across the [Banana] River. We say ‘across the river’ to distinguish between workers on KSC proper and we Shuttle workers who are on CCAFS, where hangar AF is.\\n\\n My primary engineering duty was dealing with disassembly of the boosters. When we received boosters back from a launch we started the process of taking them apart and setting them up for Thiokol and NASA personnel from here, from Marshall primarily, but also from Houston [NASA Johnson Space Center, Texas] to do some postflight performance assessment. I would deal with all the ground support equipment, was involved in setting them up for that. Then once they got done with the assessment, start the refurb process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you share with us some of the changes or the evolution in the processes of when you first started in that role to, as we closed out the Shuttle program how that might have changed or improved? Or some of the things that you tried that didn’t work as well as you had hoped?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the process has been very similar from the start because the hardware hasn’t changed a lot. Before my time here they made a big change due to SRB redesign driven by the Challenger incident. When we recover the boosters there’s 200,000 pounds of booster in the water, and they float vertically. We can’t really bring them back, something that big, towing it vertically. So we have to cause it to float and lay down in what we call log mode. The way you do that is you shove a plug up in the bottom end, push air in that forces the water out, and then it’ll rise up and lay down in log mode.\\n\\n Originally, just before I came to the hangar, they were trying very hard to do this with an ROV, a remotely operated vehicle. It was a plug that had motors and cameras built into it. They were going to basically, from the ship, drive this plug down up underneath the booster and shove it up in the booster. That never really worked well. We ended up having to come up with an alternate means, until they basically gave up on it and started doing a manual-type plug. The same function, just a lot smaller, because it was powered by divers.\\n\\n We’ve made small changes to that ever since, but again the basic function is still the same. You have to plug the booster, you have to dewater the booster, you have to tow it back, you have to recover the parachutes. Parachute recovery has changed. Before Challenger, we used to separate parachutes by hand. When the booster splashes down you have the booster floating in the water, and these 115-foot diameter parachutes, three of them, hanging off of it. It used to be a manual operation where you would physically separate the parachutes from the booster. I think there’s 36 connections, and they’re just below the water level. So when the weather was bad, when there were seas, it was a very difficult, time-consuming operation for divers. You have to hang on with one hand, uncover this connector, and with one hand do a two-handed operation where you push a thumb set, slide a cap, and then pull the connector apart.\\n\\n In fact I think Challenger was when they were going to try and fly the first automatic disconnect. On the forward deck of the forward skirt they had a system where, as the booster hit the water, the parachutes would be separated. They had a pyrotechnic nut on each of the six connections on the top deck of the forward skirt that they would pyrotechnically sever. There was still some load on the parachutes, so the parachutes would just pop off and separate and float so we could get them separately. That was a big change.\\n\\n STS-63 they figured out that was a real problem in high crosswind splashdowns. The booster would be coming in with good horizontal speed, and if you had a high wave, the booster would hit the top of the wave. It would trip the booster, so it would start to fall, but at the same time the sensors would think that it had already splashed down so it would let go of the parachutes. You’d have this tremendous weight impacting on the water, and we lost that set of booster hardware. Those two boosters, most of them were ruined, not reusable.\\n\\n So they came up with a new method of doing it whereby the parachutes don’t completely separate, they just go on longer tethers. The divers then still have to separate it, but we don’t have to actually do a connector. We could tie to the parachutes and cut them. We’ve improved lots of small things about the process, but those are the major things, that and being able to do underwater photo and video. That was never a priority for some of our local management; they didn’t like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk about that, because that hadn’t had a record before you came. How were you involved, and how has that technology changed to allow you to do more documentation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Before I came down we had some limited—but because the technology wasn’t there, the cameras were huge and bulky, and that interfered with the dive operation itself. Our local management didn’t put a priority on it. A fellow named Wulf Eckroth used to do that, and then he left the company, and I started. I picked up where he left off and had the good fortune that we changed management, and they were very willing to allow us to take photos, take videos, make a visual record of it. Since then, as technology has gotten better the cameras get better. You can do photo, you can do video, and you can do it with a minimal interference with the job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you walk us through either a mission that you remember or just the process of how you train someone as part of the dive team to record this documentation? I understand sometimes you immediately use it when you’re back on the ship. Just to give us an idea of how that whole process works and how valuable it is to training and for safety." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The dive team has been very stable. We have folks that have been here almost since the start of the program. There was actually very little turnover for the retrieval team, because it’s good work. We enjoy going offshore and doing this. Everybody who’s here does it because they want to. It’s not just a job; it’s something we want to do. So training actually, the first group learned by doing it. There wasn’t anybody around to learn from. For those of us who have come since, we joined the group in small numbers so there were a lot of people around to help out the new guys. You go out, and you talk about what you’re going to do. They give you a job. You go work it. You have enough people around that are doing their job and keeping an eye on you, making sure that you’re getting yours done. As you do this a few times, you go offshore, you do your work, you are part of the group. It’s an OJT [on-the-job training] program really, because there really aren’t a lot of ways you can train to recover a 200,000-pound object offshore. There aren’t any." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there a minimal amount of time that you have to put in certain training procedures before you’re actually used in a mission?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, absolutely. To join the group of divers you have to be at least a certified scuba diver, advanced scuba diver. That’s the most basic requirement, and you have to have logged thirty dives, a fair number of dives. You can’t just have gotten your cert [certification] and expect to come do this work, because scuba is really just an operational aspect that gets you to the job. So if you’re not really familiar with what you’re doing underwater, your concentration is going to be there rather than on your job. There’s a minimum experience level.\\n\\n After that, of course you start training. We have a physical fitness test that you have to do every quarter. You have to pass that. You have to dive with the group. We used to do more training dives, but unfortunately we’re not doing enough of that. You would have to go out on a certain number of training missions. We do go inland to blue holes, to freshwater dives to practice. You have to do a certain number of those, and three deep dives with the group before you would actually be able to go offshore and do the booster retrieval. Then when you’re at booster retrieval you get the least complicated work, which is pushing the DOP [diver-operated plug]. Physically it’s a lot of work, you just hold on and swim. The installation of the DOP is not difficult, but you have to be aware of what’s going on inside the booster. You have to watch that the plug seats before you latch it. Then there’s a process to seal the connection and attach the air hose.\\n\\n So for somebody who’s just getting started, there’s a job that requires you to be there and then gives you the opportunity to watch and see what’s going on. And it’s also an evaluation. We’ve had divers that came out and ended up not being able to do the work because just it was an overload for them once they were underwater." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It certainly is a different type of activity than a scuba diver would do, because you’re actually doing work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the scuba is just a means to get to your work, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many divers are on a retrieval team?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Typically we take out eight divers. We’re all retrieval crew and divers. We try and break that up. The underwater work takes anything from twenty to thirty minutes of work underwater. The first part is the hardest, installation of the plug. Depending on the weather we will send typically four people to do that and hold the rest of the work for the last four. If there’s bad weather, if the booster is surging, if you have issues with the nozzle—every splashdown is different—the nozzles get torn up. If there’s problems installing the DOP on the first dive, you have a second team that can do that. We’re limited by Coast Guard regulation to no decompression dives, so we have a limited amount of time underwater. We have basically the two dive teams to do the work, and if we don’t get it done then we have to wait a day till all the divers are fresh again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Has that happened on occasion?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you give us any examples?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t remember the exact mission, but there was one where the seas were such that the booster surge was tremendous. The thing weighs 200,000 pounds, but it’s still just floating in the water. You have this object that’s going up and down in the waves, and because of its mass, if the waves are the right period and intensity, it creates a situation where it reinforces the motion of the booster. The booster will go up and the wave will drop out from it, and then the booster will fall. Of course 200,000 pounds, the mass, it doesn’t just go back to where it started, it goes beyond there. If you have the right sympathetic situation, the wave rise again gives the booster more flotation, so it goes farther.\\n\\n We’ve seen 15 feet of the booster going up and down. It isn’t real fast, but it’s irresistible. Like I said, the first thing you do is push the plug down. The plug weighs 1,600 pounds. You can’t get between it and the booster, or you will be hurt, so you have to swim the plug down with the booster going up and down. On top of which, the booster out of the water acts like a sail. If you have a lot of wind, in addition to the wrong conditions in the waves, the booster will travel because of the sail. And as it’s high, the wind can push it so it’ll actually also have a kick. It’s doing up-and-down and side-to-side motion.\\n\\n You’re trying to push this 1,600-pound object down the side of this moving booster. When you get underneath it, you have to hit the nozzle hole. You show up down there with the plug and all of a sudden the nozzle just picks up and goes over there ten feet. You go after it over there, and now it’s over here. Now it’s up and now it’s down. We’ve had occasions where you just expend the divers. You’re not only swimming down, you have to swim to keep up with the booster as it’s traveling. You get to the bottom, and you chase it around to the point where you run out of time. So you leave the DOP and let the next team try it, and we’ve done that. I recall one launch where we couldn’t get the DOP in and the weather got worse, so we just called the operations and we waited for a day. The weather got worse, and we waited for another day. Then the weather cooperated, and we could get the plug in. We did the job and came home.\\n\\n That was unusual thankfully, but there were several occasions where you get the DOP down in there and for whatever reason couldn’t get it seated. Once you push the air in and you have the booster laid over, you have a check valve in the hole where the water comes out. We put a check valve in the hole where the air goes in just to make sure that once you disconnect it’s not a path for water. Well, the check valve broke. So we got the plug in, we have the booster, we’re pumping air to it, and nothing’s happening.\\n\\n We had to physically go back down to the bottom of the booster, extract that plug—having planned for such possibilities; we carry a spare onboard—take the spare and put it in and then do the rest of the retrieval. It’s always something; very few trips went without some issue. Like I said, the first operation separating the parachutes, there was always issues with the parachutes tangling with the booster. Usually it would only take a few minutes to separate them. Sometimes the parachutes would be tangled with themselves once you got them off the booster, and it was very often that we would have two parachutes tangled up on deck come up together. Occasionally we’d have all three parachutes in one big ball. It was never one trip that was the same as any other." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You just train the best you can." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, you deal with it as it came, because that’s all you could do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When issues would come up, how was the communication between the divers and the people making the decisions? Explain that process, using that scenario that you just talked about. Things changed, so you had to go back and rethink, and go back and redo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, before every operation we generally categorize them as hazardous operations. Anything that has a hazard or risk to the people or the hardware, we’ll have a pretask briefing. We do our pretask before the trip, before the mission, the specific job. But once the divers get in the water, there really isn’t any communication. It’s just us doing the job, and you deal with the problems that come up as best you can. If you can’t, then every individual has the opportunity to call a timeout and just say, “No, I don’t think this is going right. There’s a risk to person or hardware,” and we all have to respect that call and just stop and regroup.\\n\\n We’ve had very few occasions where that happened. We usually would attack a problem and figure out that we weren’t going to overcome it, so we would go back to the surface and we would have another pretask. If we knew what was going wrong, we could figure out how to deal with it, or at least the next thing we were going to try. Then the next team of divers—or if the problem was on the surface, if the problem was with a parachute, that group would go do it. But during the actual operations there’s not a lot of coordination that you can do with the divers underwater.\\n\\n We do have an underwater communications system, but it’s cumbersome so we give it to the safety diver. There’s one diver whose only job is to watch out for everybody else. He doesn’t have a physical work job, he is just there to make sure that nobody gets in a pinch. If somebody does get caught by something, there’s somebody that sees it and can start to do something about it. He is typically the one that wears the com [communications] unit, and he can talk to the ship, relay, “We’re at the aft skirt, we’re installing the plug, we’ve got the air hose connected.”\\n\\n Thankfully there were very few occasions when he had to call up and say we have a problem. One time he actually had to call and say we’ve lost a diver. One of the divers had to abort. On the way down he couldn’t clear his sinuses so he had to go back to the surface. We also have what we call a standby diver, somebody that can jump in the water if we have a circumstance where a diver has to abort and can’t finish the job, or if something should happen and you need an extra set of hands. On that one occasion—and that’s the only time I can ever remember that it happened—the safety diver called up and said we had a diver abort, and they sent the standby diver in after the other diver came to the surface. He was all right, just sinus squeeze is something that happens.\\n\\n Once you’re underwater, the team has to know what they’re doing and be able to communicate with each other and attack a problem, because we’re on our own." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the team of four you said that one was the safety. Is one a lead?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the lead is nominal. You have certain tasks that have to happen, and anybody can do them, but somebody has to decide who’s going to. We take turns, “For this dive you’re going to be the lead.” That person says, “You’re going to hold on to the float ball.” As you push down the diver-operated plug, it’s got a flexible hose on the end of it so that when the booster is in the horizontal that hose has a weight on the end. We call it a catcher’s mitt; it’s a metal grate. That hose is pulled down by gravity, so it seeks the same place as the water is. You draw as much water out of the booster as you can.\\n\\n In order to keep it out of the way, we have a float ball attached to it. Somebody has to, when you get to the aft skirt, take that float ball and force it up into the nozzle. Somebody has to, after you’ve done all the pushing, get up under the plug and blow air to make it go up. Somebody has to drop the legs on the DOP to seat the DOP in place; somebody has to inflate the seal bag. Tasks that have to happen.\\n\\n The lead, what he does is he assigns somebody. One person could do it all once the plug is there, but it’s easier and more reliable to break up the tasks. That allows one person to be doing it and a couple other people to be watching, in addition to their tasks. Everybody’s workload goes down, so you can do your job and be a backup for everything else that has to happen. The lead and the two working divers—or if the weather is bad you’ll have three working divers, if the weather is really nice you can have just one other working diver. The lead is a nominal position. You make the decision beforehand, but when you get there, everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing. You can be doing it and watching and making sure everybody else is okay and that they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The teams of four, do they train together or do you mix?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, everybody [mixes]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do the boats have specific divers that work one ship compared to the other ship?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. The captain and the first mate and the cook were pretty much always with the ship, and a lot of the crew would stay with the ship, just ended up that way. Most of the ship’s crew and the retrieval crew, we just went where we were told. We deliberately mixed it up so that everybody can work together. We don’t have one group start doing something different and then you get somebody else [to] join them and now you don’t know exactly what’s going on. You make the whole process transparent to everybody else. Everybody knows what you’re doing, and how you’re doing it. We have the same expectation from each of the groups." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us how the photography mixed into this process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it used to be a sideline. Wulf and I would take cameras down, and when we weren’t in the middle of doing something else we would take pictures. Occasionally they would actually allow us to take the video camera. As we got farther into the program the postflight assessment folks wanted some of that video and pictures, so we started doing a specific dive before the retrieval dives that were video and photo assessment. They didn’t use them often, but occasionally.\\n\\n You’d have the boosters here in the building and they would see a ding, a loss of paint, a bent piece of metal. They’d use our photos and videos to try and get an idea of when that happened. If it was something that we did to it during the recovery process, if it was something that was done at splashdown, or the real concern was if it was something that happened during flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did your group use the photo and the video documentation that you were starting to accumulate?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not a lot, not for work. The nice thing is that being at sea, being with the ships, being on the water is very photogenic. So most of the use there was just because “I’m in the picture,” me and the booster. We archive it, we have kept it for reference, and occasionally we use different shots when we’re trying to describe something to somebody. If we have a new vendor for a new part that’s going to go on a ship or for recovery, we did have to talk to new vendors because the whole Shuttle system was designed in the’70s and built in the ’80s. A lot of the ship’s systems, a lot of the hardware we were using, we kept using past the time that anybody else in the world was using it. We’d have a piece that would break and nobody in the world made it anymore, so we’d have to find something to substitute for it. We’d take our videos or pictures to somebody and say, “This is what we used to do. We need a product from you that does something similar.”\\n\\n The other use is the biggest use. We used to go do lectures—schools, dive clubs, universities, the Propeller Club in the Port [Canaveral, Florida]—pretty much anybody who wanted us would ask for a diver to come out and talk about the process. So we’d have a set of pictures of the launch, of the dive, of the different things that happened on the ship as part of a PowerPoint presentation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there processes and/or technology that you developed that is being applied in the commercial world or industry? Or that maybe you perfected?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really. We have adapted a lot of industry equipment to do what we were doing. We have not actually developed a lot, because our application is unique, there’s nobody else doing this. The Ariane [rocket] folks asked us for a little expertise when they were starting to launch their program. Actually it was NASA folks who were asked by Ariane to cooperate. They talked to us about what we did and how we did it, and they ended up doing their own thing using Russian divers once they got boosters back. Their first problem was they weren’t getting boosters back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What are some of the other modifications or changes that were made to the ships that impacted operations? We’ve got a GPS [global positioning system] that works well. How did that assist in what you were doing as part of your normal operation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Improved technology improved the operation. Originally the ships themselves, the hulls, keels were laid about the same time as the first launch. The first launches were recovered using the vessel called the Bering Seal. It was a vessel of opportunity, but the ships have been the same ever since. They were built to do this, and very little modification done to the actual vessels. We did install flume tanks. The ships are shallow-draft because they have to come up the river, but for an oceangoing vessel, for stability, what you want is a very deep-draft vessel. Our girls just aren’t, so you have this ship that floats like a cork on top of the water, which made them a very bad place to be in bad weather.\\n\\n In fact NASA used us for some trials for space sickness. The NASA doctors figured out that space sickness and seasickness are very similar, so they wanted to try some new drugs on us. They characterized our vessels, and it turns out that before the flume tanks, we were the number two worst vessel to be on for conditions that would cause seasickness. The one that was worse is the Coast Guard recovery boat. I think she’s like in the seventy--foot range, the one that you see in the videos off Alaska where they physically tie themselves in and they can do barrel rolls on top of the water.\\n\\n As part of that they decided that maybe the ships needed some improvement, so they put in some flume tanks, which is basically a tube that runs across sideways on the ship and has baffles that have a mass of water in it. So as the ship rolls one way, the water goes with it, and the baffles keep it from coming to the other side quickly. It damps the roll of the ship, and it really has helped. It doesn’t eliminate the roll, but it used to be when you were on the bridge the ship almost had a snap to it. You would roll from one side, and it would just jump, just snap back and forth, and it’s dampened that a lot.\\n\\n Other than that, the technologies have improved communication more than anything. We go out the day before launch, and it used to be we had radio. You would communicate from the ship to shore, and you would try different frequencies. If you didn’t have good communication, you just didn’t have good communication. Not a lot you could do about it. When they launched, somebody here would radio a countdown. Terry [A.] Widdicombe used to sit at the desk and radio the countdown and we would know they launched. If the weather was good we would see it. If not, not even bad weather, just overcast, you wouldn’t know it until you’d hear the booms of the boosters coming in.\\n\\n We had our radar sets. If the weather was good you could see the boosters of course, but in bad weather you’d find them on radar once they pop up. When they first hit the water they lay down, but they’re still hot. The opening on the pressure vessel is at the back, in the nozzle, so it burps air, takes on water, and the air, the volume that’s inside of it, cools. Then they go back vertical. When they’re horizontal, with our old radars they were very hard to spot. When they go vertical you’d be able to see them on radar and you’d be able to know where you were going. Nominally we are seven miles from the impact point. When you launch, you throw something 140 miles away. All things being perfect, you know exactly where it’s going to hit, but nothing’s ever perfect. You have different densities of air. You have layers with winds going in different directions. So there’s an error zone, one in ten chance it’s going to be this far.\\n\\n The ships, I think there was a one in six million chance of them falling that far from the projected point of impact. We’re nominally seven miles from impact, but we’ve been as far as fourteen miles away and as close as three. When they impact, even if it’s dark or totally bad weather, you always know they’re almost about to hit the water because you hear the sonic booms. There’s these two very loud noises, booms, that come down that are associated with the boosters about to impact.\\n\\n When that happens you know they’re out there in the water. You know you have to go. You know what direction you’re going to go, but you need things like radar to be able to see them in bad weather because you don’t know how far you’re going to go. You don’t want to run into them obviously. Things like GPS make the job easier, they make things run more smoothly. Nowadays with satellite TV [television] we actually watch the launch, which was something we could never do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember about what mission that was or what year?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "STS-85 we were still using radio because it was a bad weather launch. I remember we had marginal communications, though we could hear that they launched. It was probably around STS-100 that we got SATCOM [satellite communications], and it was not long after that that we had satellite TV." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you involved at all when the ships began to bring the ETs [external tanks] in from [NASA Michoud Assembly Facility, New Orleans] Louisiana?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really. There was no retrieval crew, it’s really just a minimal ship’s crew. I did some photos and video for it, but primarily the ship is a shuttle. It drags the tank from Port Canaveral to Michoud and hands it off at either end to tugs [tug boats]. Although we have plenty of bollard capacity, we can pull; we can’t really control something that big, especially when you get it in a channel or near fixed objects.\\n\\n We need tugs to move the external barge more precisely, so we rented tugs to bring the barge from the VAB to the port, and then we would take the tow from there to Michoud. Tugs would line her up, so really we were just towing. I never made that trip, it was all just ship’s crew and back then I was just retrieval crew. Nowadays I do have my Coast Guard cert, but too late to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What other areas would you like for us to know about the operations that you’ve been involved in, or other aspects that you think most people don’t know that you take care of?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It seems like it’s always a surprise to folks that NASA has a little navy. I wish we could do more. We have a lot of capacity; we have a lot of talent. We have a lot of people that can do a lot of stuff, but we’re constrained. We can’t really go out in the port and solicit work because we have a very unfair advantage. There aren’t many ships that are as available as these, and with effectively a low overhead. We used to do—in fact we still do Navy jobs and marine fisheries and NOAA work. They basically pay for the vessels during that time, so they get us cheap. But you can’t really do that in the real world because that’s very unfair competition. We can only do it for government customers, other government agencies, so we have a lot that we can do and that we can’t." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Jennifer, questions you have?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I had a couple. You said that you can’t really pinpoint where that solid rocket booster is going to go every time, but is there a specific region or area where you know we need to head that direction?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it varies for each launch, for each mission. The last launches we did were all International Space Station so they were all about 130 miles off Jacksonville [Florida]. There’s actually a website that the postflight assessment folks put together. They have a map of all the impact points. When Shuttle was going to Mir the azimuth was lower, so we were still the same distance from the Cape because a Shuttle launch is going very close to the same orbit. The boosters have the same power so it’s going to be the same distance from the Cape, it’s just a different azimuth. The ISS [International Space Station] were the most northern, then we had the Mir missions. There were a few Department of Defense missions, satellites the Shuttle carried up were at a different azimuth. Then there were a few purely scientific launches where we went due east. There’s a band about 140 miles away from the launch pad. It just depends on exactly where on orbit they’re going.\\n\\n Even for an ISS launch it’s a moving target. Our charts show the window opening. They’re going to land at this spot. And for every minute, that spot moves over ten miles or so—for five minutes it’s ten miles. It’s a ten-minute window, and we have three sites. They shoot for the center, which is the nominal launch. They let the window open, and in case they have bad weather they can back up. If they see bad weather coming they can just target the launch window opening, but they prefer to go for nominal because that uses up the least energy to get to the Space Station. Then there’s up to five minutes after that where they can still launch and still make the intercept with the target on orbit.\\n\\n So long story short, there’s no one place. They calculate it for each launch, and they calculate it for each window opening, midwindow and window closing. We know where that is, they tell us. But there’s no Xs out on the ocean that we can point at and say that’s where it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One thing we haven’t talked about is life on board the ship. What’s it like? How long are you typically out there? What do you guys do to pass the time when you’re not getting that SRB?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Satellite TV has been a great thing. We go out the day before, and it used to be we would come back as soon as we got the boosters, which means we’d be out the day before. We’d have a day of operations if everything went right, and then we’d be coming back for a day. So the minimum trip used to be three days. When you leave the dock, you have to have everything you’re going to need because we’re 140 miles out. You can’t call Ace Hardware and have something delivered; you can’t call the pharmacy and have something delivered. The captain has impounded stores for medications. We have everything onboard that you’re going to need to do a recovery, so when you leave the dock you’re ready.\\n\\n Basically all you’re doing for the first day is traveling to where you’re going. Those of us who aren’t ship’s crew and aren’t standing watches—people bring books, used to be we’d bring videotapes, watch movies. We’d read; folks would play cards. On the many occasions when we had launch delays, folks also brought fishing poles. Fishing is something that a lot of people like to do. It’s always been on a noninterference basis. If you go out, everything’s ready. There’s nothing to do for recovery until they actually do a launch, so we’re sitting on station. They delay a day, folks throw a line over the side, some of our guys, do it at every opportunity. When they’re not doing something they’ll throw a line over the side. They always catch, but very few occasions do they get a lot.\\n\\n Then there’s some of us that don’t really care about that. I mean I like fish, I like catching, but the gear and the baiting and the waiting and the cleaning and everything else, I’m plenty happy to pay for my fish. Everybody would bring their collection of movies, and in the early days we didn’t have that many so we would watch the same movies over and over again. If you had launch delays, you’d see the same movie four or five times. Later on, folks got their collections of DVDs. Nowadays we have satellite TV, so most of the time if the weather is good enough you have real entertainment.\\n\\n After STS about 90 it was a four-day trip minimum because of budget considerations. It used to be three days. We would go out day before, do our thing, about a day’s worth of work, and come back. Our arrival back here is when disassembly starts. Because of the time of day of launch and the amount of time it took to tow back, a lot of times we’d show up back here with boosters in tow on an off-shift. Used to be priority was to get them apart, so they would plan on that and they would have people here to do the disassembly whenever we arrived.\\n\\n They, for budgetary reasons, decided that they had defined booster performance well enough that they didn’t need to know as soon as possible. So we would tow back at a rate such that we always showed up here at the start of first shift. Instead of towing back in 24 hours or so, you would tow it back in 24 to 36 hours. You would set the rate to show up at a good time for everybody else, so the later flights we were out a minimum of four days if the launch went off on time and everything worked right.\\n\\n But for weather, when you’re offshore you don’t have any choice. The weather is what the weather is. We were off of Jacksonville waiting for a launch one time ten days. We went out, and the launch was delayed a day. Then the launch came up, it was delayed two days. We went like that, one day, two days for eight days before they finally launched. Then we got the boosters and we actually ended up being out ten days in bad weather. It’s just a bunch of people on ship. We know each other; we’re just hanging out. Have you guys been on the ships at all yet, had a ship’s tour?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not yet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They’re big, but when you got 23 other people that you know and there’s no gym—there’s a lounge, there’s a mess deck. One of the biggest problems is that there’s a walk-in fridge. If we’re not out too long there’s always food in it. One of the biggest problems is eating too much. And there’s nowhere to exercise. We had a couple folks trying jogging around the ship, and it just doesn’t work well. There’s not much distance you can go. With a ship in seas it’s almost hazardous to do. One fellow brought aboard a rowing machine. People have tried that. But again, with the seas it’s hard to do any motion that requires you to do repetitive action lined up with a machine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you guys have any traditions when you take off or when you come home?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really. It’s another day at work. Which is cool when the weather is good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you tell us how long you can dive for? I was looking through my notes and I didn’t see that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s variable. It depends on how deep you go. The regulations are that we can’t plan a decompression dive. If somebody were to get stuck and you ended up staying so deep that you had a decompression obligation, that just happened. But you can’t plan that. If you look at the Navy dive tables, it changes. If you only go down 100 feet, I think you have 20 minutes.\\n\\n Nowadays we don’t use the Navy dive tables, you use dive computers. They go with you, and based on where you are right now and where you’ve been on this dive it figures out how long you can stay right where you are. Typically we’re at about 120 feet, which is about 15 minutes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s a short amount of time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. And if you have problems, you call it and the next team tries to get it done. They have the same amount of time, and hopefully based on what you got accomplished they can finish. If not, you wait till the computer says that you’re able to dive again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you do after you put in the plug? Do you come back up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you need to do other work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we have other work to do, but as far as the recovery goes, the last thing you do when you install the plug is put a hose to it, an air hose. The booster sits in the water and you’re pumping air into it. Water is coming out, and in about twenty minutes it starts to get vertically unstable and it ends up laying down. During that time, the divers are back on the ship. There’s one boat, a small crew, that stays out to hook up the booster to the ship for the towback. But everybody else, we’re back on deck and we’re covering the parachutes that we already recovered. We’re putting away our dive gear, we’re cleaning up the small boat, we’re cleaning up the deck. We’re separating the parachute from the frustum that we had pulled on deck earlier, just basically finishing the day out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Has there ever been a time when you’ve been on one ship, and the other ship needs some assistance and you’ve gone over to help?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. There’s always a little bit of a rivalry there too. It’s not that there’s a lot of push to it, but it’s always fun to abuse the other ship for taking longer than you did. And there have been occasions when things break. Early on we were towing and one ship’s air compressor failed, so we actually had to use the compressor from the other ship during the towback, hooking onto the other ship’s booster.\\n\\n We have had occasions—thankfully it was a false alarm, but we had a diver that we thought had a decompression hit. Pretty much everything stops. We have enough people on each ship to work the recompression chamber for a diver, but the more people you have on hand, the better off you are. We sent our ship’s EMTs [emergency medical technicians] over there and a couple people to help operate the [hyperbaric] chamber. Again, thankfully it ended up not being a real problem. Got him on deck and started to get him out of his wet suit, and it turned out he had just put on too much weight. It was too hard to breathe in the wet suit. As soon as he opened up the wet suit it was like oh, I guess that wasn’t a heart attack." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I just have one other question. Walking around here I’ve really only seen men. Is this primarily an all-male crew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Manny De Leon", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. It was not intended, that’s not a deliberate thing. In fact when we were working on validating Vandenberg we had a girl diver out there. When that operation shut down, we had the two ships that we were using here, and they had one large vessel that they were going to use out at Vandenberg, Independence. Brought her here and her crew came with it. They had not ever done a dive out there, but she was on their dive team and the whole team was becoming booster divers. They were going to come up here and dive with us, but it ended up never happening because of Challenger.\\n\\n At different times we have had a lady cook, not assigned to the ship, not a regular, but a fill-in. On the Freedom we had a lady engineer, and on Liberty we’ve had a lady engineer, but all of those ended up being short-term. The one who was assistant engineer on the Freedom just got tired of it. She went over to safety engineering.\\n\\n The other lady engineer we had actually on the Liberty was here for a while, but she ended up going over to the oil patch in the Gulf of Mexico. Different work, better pay. We only ever had the one girl diver. Actually the girl engineer on the Liberty passed the PT [physical fitness] test. She was becoming a diver, and then just ran out of time, ran out of missions. So yes, it has been predominantly all-male, but never on purpose. We have taken female observers and had different lady ship crew, but just worked out that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, thank you for your time and for all the help." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00245", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-MR-2011-002-002.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Herberger, James (Jim) (1962-1964): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-MR-2011-002-002", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-MR-2011-002-002", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "James (Jim) Herberger served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia from 1962 to 1964 as an insect specialist. He had recently graduated with a bachelors of science in entomology. He joined alongside his wife Judy, a social worker. Herberger trained at Arizona State University in Tempe, and discusses the overall young age of the trainees and the high attrition rate. In Bolivia, he worked at an agricultural experiment station in the town of General Saavedra, outside of Santa Cruz, which felt like a frontier area. He describes how he and his friends built a raft and took a trip down various rivers to the city of Trinidad. Herberger also shares his thoughts on what the Peace Corps meant to him, other young people, and Bolivians. After returning to the U.S., he earned a PhD and became a expert in weeds and weed control, including co-writing three scientific books that led to the development of quarantine protocols for exotic species. Interview by Sharleen Hirschi Simpson, June 23, 2009. 2 tapes (web streaming files combined into 1 file).", + "dates_of_materials": "23 June 2009", + "extent": "2 audio cassettes (mono; 106 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "009. Bolivia.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Bolivia. Herberger, James (Jim) (1962-1964): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Bolivia", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "MR-2011-002", + "transcript": "RPCV-MR-2011-002-002-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/fw72015kpjy61oov7853r2j3ps134840.pdf?odc=20231115173842-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/576f49c1-8700-4b2e-83af-ca0d9295abd1/270e9c09-e236-4e48-95c2-b449ec23276c/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzM0MDNfMzAyM2FlNjk4ZmVkYmVmM2JkZWM3MTc4ZDY5OGFhMmQ0NDZkNDg4YmIzYmVlOGY3OWNhMmFjYTM0N2M1YTFlM18vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS81NzZmNDljMS04NzAwLTRiMmUtODNhZi1jYTBkOTI5NWFiZDEvMjcwZTljMDktZTIzNi00ZTQ4LTk1YzItYjQ0OWVjMjMyNzZjL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Branson, Missouri", + "length": "33 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed November 30, 2010, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "James (Jim) Herberger Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "James Herberger" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:03", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is June 23, 2009, and this is Sharleen Hirschi Simpson interviewing Jim Herberger, and I'm going to start out by just having you tell us what you're doing now exactly. Well, not exactly, but." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:20", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "OK you want me to be in? What I'm doing now is I live in Wooster, Ohio, and have 10 acres and acres of woods on it and has a couple of ecological pieces of property on it, which are on an acreage, and I do certain things to those areas because I have a small blueberry patch of about one thousand plants. And so I in addition to take care of this 10 acres, I raise blueberries and during the summertime, we pick about eight thousand pints of blueberries and we sell them at the Wooster market sale on Saturday. And in addition to that, we have our friends over to pick their own. We don't have outsiders except Britain's pick. During the wintertime, I spend a good deal of time working on the blueberries and pruning those blueberries, and in the summertime, the work that I put into blueberries, I don't do any of the picking. I have Amish girls and my two daughters, one who lives in Germany, comes home and the other who lives with me and how they take care of the blueberries. And my particular job on the blueberries is that I take care of all the weed control under these blueberries. And so I am doing an experiment which is now in about sixth year where I've put a groundcover underneath these blueberries and that ground cover protects the area from weed infestation. And I hope to present the information about this to one of the weed society meetings are occurring here. In addition to that, I have a large lawn, which is probably around two acres. And so I have to maintain that. I maintain several ecological areas in the woods, which I replenish the trees. I manage the trees in one section and other sections I leave. To in the wild, I don't do anything to so that you can walk through, we can take people who walk through the woods and look at these different areas and see what minimum management is, sort of what I call high maintenance management. And then we can compare that to. The area which is not managed at all. And so my purpose in this is to teach people, my grandchildren and so forth, plus anybody else who is interested that the management of ecological areas has certain benefits to it requires a certain amount of work and one can observe the results from this sort of activity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:04:34", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is this kind of an outgrowth of what you're what you were doing at the university before it? What were you doing before you retired or just retired or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:04:45", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I began this as a fruit farm in 1976. So what is it? It's about twenty, twenty, thirty three years and it's the. So for 26 years, I've been doing this sort of activity when I got out of the Peace Corps, Judy and I. I took an international job and spent time overseas and was active and stayed active in agriculture, in the pesticide business, and so I spent the next twenty five years after leaving the Peace Corps. I went back to the university, got another I got an advanced degree and after that and got a job in industry and international and after that. Nineteen seventy six, we moved to, what, 16 years after 13 years after leaving the Peace Corps, we moved on to this small farm. Uh. At the university, when I worked in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:06:20", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is Ohio State?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:06:23", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This is Wisconsin. I got my first degree at Ohio State, my master of science in entomology, so I was an expert and a specialist in insects. And basically my specialty was bees. So and I'd always been interested in be so fascinated with bees, even as a sort of child I can remember. I could have only been six years old and I had the story and I wasn't afraid of bees. I used to capture them all the time, try to make me make my own beehive and so forth. Then when I went to Ohio State. I was going to become a dentist and I took a course in shark anatomy and decided that dentistry wasn't really for me. That's when I went into an entomology and I worked on a method where I manufactured bee venom and sold it to doctors while I was at Ohio State, and this was quite a unique event and after I had done this, you know, I made a lot of money off of it. And about the time I finished up my degree at Ohio State, I was ready to move on and that was about. The same time that Kennedy began the Peace Corps I figured that I would go into the Peace Corps. Went into the Peace Corps as an entomologist and was stationed on an experiment station outside of Santa Cruz, north of Santa Cruz." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:08:52", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could we digress back a little bit to after you got in the Peace Corps and what happened when you first got into it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:09:04", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, first of all. I was thinking on the way up here. Before when I found out about the interview, I was thinking about our tour group. I think I was 26 years old, I had my degree from. Last week, Judy was twenty four years old. And. It struck me when I think about the total group. When we all met in Arizona, you didn't know who you were going to meet. You were assigned by, in those days, a telegram and received a telegram, our first telegram. We were assigned to go to Borneo. And then that was the time. Then I said, didn't know where Borneo really was. I really didn't know too much about or New York, someplace out there in the Pacific. There was a place called Borneo. And I proceeded to go to the library and try to find out what is Borneo like. And that's what I learned about long houses. And I learned about people who shrunk kids and I learned sort of. So you probably know the and I read the book, some of which intrigued me, was the woman who is the great anthropologist" + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Margaret Mead" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Margaret Mead's book, who did all of her well, she did do all the work, but she wrote a major, major piece of work about that particular the Polynesian type of islands in which she was getting her degree. So I was trying to get up and and and so I decided, well, if you wanted to go to Borneo, you could go to Borneo, or if not, you could let the Peace Corps know and they'd see if they could go to some other place in Borneo was far enough away and adventure to adventurous enough. And I was young enough. Judy was young enough where she just scratched her head and said, why not? We’ll go to Borneo. And so we decided.\n\nAnd then we got another telegram several months after that and said, we've decided we're not going to send you to Borneo. We put together this group is going to go into agriculture and they're going to be an agriculture group. And it may have been one of the first agricultural groups. And, well, that was fine, too, because I considered myself, I got my degree in from the College of Agriculture at Ohio State University. And I said, fine, it's you know, that's okay with me. We’re going to send you to Bolivia. That was good. Spanish. That was good. Sounds a little bit better than Borneo. And of course, I immediately thought it's a jungle and a but who knows what I was going to do and what the plans were. So when we got off in Arizona, we took off and I believe it was June twenty seven. And when we got off Arizona, which was in the evening, got off the plane around four o'clock, you're traveling with the sun. And we landed in Phoenix. And the pilot's comment as we were getting off the plane was, we're in the evening cool. It's really cool out there. It's a hundred and four degrees. That's a nice thing. And it's like this place here when you walk out, you got off the plane.\n\nIt was like walking into an oven. And I thought, OK, so that's it. You know, I hadn’t traveled twice first to travel to the place like Phoenix, Arizona. So and then there's the I can't remember the accommodations where they picked us up at the airport. But anyways, we wound up housed at the I think they put us in because we were married. We didn't go with we weren't with the group. The group was then divided. They had the group divided into women, men and married couples. And so we roomed initially underneath the stadium and I guess it was Scottsdale at the old stadium. And I don't think it's there anymore. And we had there was a couple who they were engineers. They weren’t Marj or Wayne. There was another couple in there. But they didn't stay. They left probably within a week. They decided this particular group wasn't for them. And I think that is. So anyway, we're in the stadium. And it's terribly hot and it's not air conditioned, and the first thing that struck me was how the mosquitoes here are terrible. I could get around the mosquitoes and of course, I'm an entomologist. And I was struck right away by the fact that there were so many damn mosquitoes. And I'm thinking, you know, mosquitoes are not a place that you would think you were in Phoenix, Arizona. And so I had a little bit of difficulty trying to figure out who, you know, is going to be a reason why there so many damn mosquitoes around here.\n\nAnd sure enough, the reason for it was they watered the football field. I think they watered it every night. They didn't water it during the daytime. They put so much water on that field that we're in over water pools. That was a good place for mosquitoes to breed. And so we were continuously invaded by these sort of mosquitoes at night in the middle of the desert. Now, getting back to where I started this whole thing, the thing that struck me when we first got together was how young everyone was. And I was struck by the fact that I'm expecting to see people my you know, up to twenty six, all manner of degrees from the university. You know, they have all specially trained. They spent some time. And the thing that struck me was there is a lot of young guys and women here that are, you know, 18 years old. And since when I think about that now. I. I think that if somebody looked back and looked at our group. He compared it to other groups that were being put together at the time, at that time, in any of the groups that were prepared subsequently after that, they would, uh, I'm pretty sure about this. We were probably the youngest group of volunteers that was ever put together.\n\nI don't think there was because we met other groups, Dominican Republic. Later on, we met that group. We met and talked to people, we knew the ones the people in Bolivia I. And so we knew. And when you look and see how many young people that were in our group that they had, I'm convinced that we had one of the youngest groups were ever put together in in the Peace Corps then and from then until now. I think if somebody did some historical looking at that, they would see that all these people, because it was an agriculture group, you'd ask him, well, you know, what is your name, which is sort of qualifications. How did you get in these four? And so what you learned very quickly was they all worked in agriculture. At least they knew agriculture. These social workers, some of the social workers and yourself as a nurse were I'm not saying you had agricultural experience. My wife didn't have an agriculture experience, but I think the women in the group were. Leaders in a sense that they either hadn't done overseas or have worked in Third World countries. We call the place we're going is Third World with that term, I used to think about that term with what that really means. And I think that with, you know, almost everybody, even the older ones, Funke, several other people who were in a row, they came from historically, if you talk to them and say, well, where are you from? Around. I'm from Oklahoma.\n\nAnd I’ve got a piece of property out there, and I've done all this and this and this and this and that. And of course, when they put a biblio together, you learn that each of these people, especially the young people, the qualification that they had, they were all leaders because they worked in starting either a very young age or while they were in high school, they worked in some sort of Future Farmers of America, 4-H, Farmers Union, Heifer Project type of work. And they had been involved and they had you know, I'm sure they had references that when they were asked these references and they were checked up by the FBI, whatever checks did, the checking thought, well, you know, these people are not your normal, your ordinary high school person and graduate. There are these people that are going and are interested in the Peace Corps, are people who have done something, done something or. Right. And they are 18 years old and they're looking for assignment in this agricultural group to go overseas. And so I think it was a special group of young people. I think the leaders in a sense that they could. They've worked hard, they had a lot of energy, they had a lot of energy that they previously come from, was associated with agriculture and so forth.\n\nAnd so that was when I looked at the group. That's what I how I felt our particular group was. And I think looking back on that particular group of individuals, we had quite a few. And of course, they let us know. And then we started out with something like fifty five or fifty six people. And we eventually, Judy and I were we were first married and then the natives got married, I think when they took a break. So we and then there was another, Kaufmans, who were married also at the time. So was a very group with varied experiences. But there was a group that I thought was quite unique. And I think if we look at these people who were in that particular group, their lives later on, are an example, exemplify the types of people they were, and so that when you meet these people. After they come out of the Peace Corps and they went in different directions. Some of them did certain things when they took certain avenues, and I think all of them got something out of it.\n\nAll of them were people that you probably only meet that many people once in your life that have have sort of those the qualities of comradeship, friendship. Good memories of their time together and so for now, out of that group of 56, I think there was something I'm not sure about the number, something like thirty three and only disappointing part of that group, which was put through a rigorous training for psychological evaluation. The only part that was disappointing to me was when we lost people and somebody said, well, so-and-so is gone and we lost people, we lost a few, let's say. I think if you left this is the first couple we met the two engineer and the engineer and his wife, both in degrees, I think, from Oklahoma. And stick around for a couple, four or five days, and we're gone, but then there was another group that left and they left when we were going to ship out and go to Puerto Rico. They called everybody and individually and said, well, you can take the next step and we're going to send you to Puerto Rico. Or they said to us, here's your ticket and you didn't make it, he didn't make the grade and you're not going to go on to Puerto Rico. So that was very disappointing because I'm a person that when you see some of these young people who really put their hearts and souls into succeeding. In something they believe and then somebody in valuation. Yes, well, you're not going to go, you know. You're going to you didn't make the grade, and I guess that's why I never became a manager where I handed out tickets to anybody, because I that would be a dreaded job for me. I don't think I would have done that, but that's the way it was. And then when we left Puerto Rico, we went through another situation and said, well, you're going to go to Bolivia or you didn't make the second level of this screen that we put you through. And here's your ticket home. So there were a lot of not only not a lot, but there were a good number of disappointed, hardworking. Strong minded leader, people at the age of 18 that said, well, I'm sorry, after these screens and evaluations, you make it great. So for us, that made it we were very happy. I mean, we were excited, you know, like it was like, well, you know, we cut the we've cut the mustard, whatever the mustard was for these evaluations. So, uh, and then when we finished when we finished that and they sent us on home and you and I'm sure the same thing happened to all of the other ones that made it somebody, would you try to explain to him? Well, that this group is going to go down, but they were intensively screened and people were dropped for whatever reason. They didn't explain to us why they were dropped back. I asked one of the doctors one time why such was dropped, because I thought, you know, it's a terrible thing. And so I said there was you know, you always have these good training, like and I said, well, it's heavy duty.\n\nIt's heavy lifting. It's, uh, it's an experience where there they're screening. They're taking our people there because I made it to the bridge and Judy made it. But, you know, we made it we made it through all is this heavy screening. It did. And you spent the rest of your life trying to figure out where we an experimental group. And I could think we were we were an experimental group in the sense that we went through a heavy screening and and why people like ourselves. As far as the psychologists were concerned, I think we tried to figure out why are these people why do they want to go and what are the reasons they're what motivates these people and what gets, you know, what makes them different than the people that don't want to go and are not motivated, you know? And so what are the characteristics for the psychiatrist or the psychologist? It was a great sort of study group where they could go in and say, well, you know, they did this test and this guy had these characteristics and so forth and so forth. And we can because we're smart enough and know enough, we can separate those out that have really good motivations and they can carry and do everything and we can separate out those that don't have we don't make the grade and so forth and so forth. When you go through life, after you've been through the Peace Corps, figure out screens that are set up, you can see that in many cases that screens are set. And people think when you do a screen and it give people tasks, that they can run an evaluation and they can't judge their human value, but they can judge a person by what he says, by giving him a Rorschach test, where they can judge a person by a conversation with them, discussing something and so forth. And I'm a person that says. They only go so far, and then if something else, there's other characteristics that psychologists and especially psychologists can't do, there's other parts of the human nature." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:30:15", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So all in all, did you feel like that screening and training was too rigorous or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:30:24", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I know this is why this also was a special group that was in this training period. It was rigorous. Nobody ever expected to do the sorts of things that they asked. I tell people that it didn't make any difference whether you swam or didn't swear, they told everybody in the group, all of us had made it to Puerto Rico. You are going to all go into the pool and you are all going to be swim at the end of this course. And of course, some people never swam in their whole lives before. And as I recollect ourselves, was one of those people. She did not swim. She says, I don't swim. I never swim. I don't like the idea of swimming. And so I'm you're looking at a handicapped person as far as swimming, because I've never done that. I don't do those. I never did that sort of thing. And they said at that time in Puerto Rico, when we were at camp, they said to her that we don't care. Going to swim underwater in this the whole length of this pool. OK, so now didn't say no, I'm not going to do at. She told us that she didn't know how to swim, but she said, OK, I'll give it a shot, and she eventually did what they could do. Then they said one of the things that you had to do in the pool and you take the people who never swim and have a real fear for water. They said, we're going to tie your hands here first. We're going to tie your feet and we're going to throw you in the pool. And we expect you to float. We're going to show you how to float. And we're going to show you in this what do we call this? We call this survival technique in the water.\n\nAnd they're sending us to Bolivia and we're an agricultural group. But we're going to show you how you survive in water. And so the first thing you did was take your feet and go in to the pool and you tread water for 10 minutes. Then after 10 minutes, you come out before you can come out of the pool. They threw a little rubber thing that sank to the bottom of the pool and you had to go down and grab that with your feet tight. You had to grab that with your hand and bring it to the surface. So they had two parts to the initial part. Well, once you did that and some of us had no problem doing it and it was simple, people like ourselves, you know, I'm I don't I can't remember she did, but I'm sure she did do it. The next thing they did was a. Now we're going to tie your hands behind your back. Your feet are tied. You're going to tread through this survival technique in the water for 10 minutes, and then we're going to throw that little pieces, whatever it was, and you're going to swim to the bottom with your hands tied behind your back and your feet tied, and you're going to pick it up with your mouth and bring it to the surface. I don't know if everybody passed that. And I was one of the people who passed it. And I felt like Will and I never learned this stuff before swimming, OK? But I was I've been swimming since I was four years old. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, and then underwater, I can't remember that. I can't remember the fact that.\n\nSomebody passed out. I can't remember who it was, but they had to swim the length of the pool under water and they said, guess what happened? So-and-so passed out underwater. I said, What do you mean passed that? I never heard it. And they said, well, they had to go and get him. He was underwater swimming the underwater part of the of the of the of the pool. And somebody the guys, the instructors, one of the instructors had to go in and pull them out, get them out, passed out underwater. They watched this very carefully because they knew what our limits were and they knew that they didn't want to mess up. Now, in that particular camp, when we were in Arizona, Judy and I camp together. We had a trailer, and I think there was another married couple in that area where I think may have been the Hoffmans, it would have been better when we got to Puerto Rico, they said no more. We're splitting up the married group people and all the women are sleeping in this big tent that they had down below. And the men are sleeping in this big hall up above. And we're all going to get up at six o'clock in the morning. We're all going to go through this routine training every day and so forth. Was a carryover from Arizona because that's what we did in Arizona. And we get up early and make sure you try to get you to bed at night and then intermittently in between all this physical training course. And that, of course, is being so forth. So this this went on. And then they that that was the sort of out Outward Bound type of training, survival training that was down to the ocean, dressed us all up in overalls, coveralls, not coveralls, said, OK, you've got to go. And we had this beautiful swimming pool. You know, you're not just going to swim in the swimming pool. You're going to go out there in the Caribbean and you are going to tie the bottom, take these coveralls off. You're going to tie a knot in the bottom of the pant leg. You're going to flip this thing upside down and you're going to make airbags out of the of this these coveralls. And I thought, OK, somebody's done that. Right. And you'd say to them, well, you know, what are we doing this for? And the instructors would say, well, you know, you learn this technique. You can survive in the ocean for twenty four hours, you know, and they tell us you could do it. So then as part of the training at camp was going through the jungle, so you go out and spend one day on a one day trek, you go out in the morning and then in the afternoon.\n\nYou would come back to the camp. And Judy was like Lunelle and a lot of the other women and said, you know, that's everybody's got to do it, I'll do it just like everybody else. But the one thing she did, which was sort of a habit of women, was on the first day trek. I said, Judy, we have three pair of shoes. Why are you taking three pairs of shoes along with you on this one trek? And I guess you'd been used to going if she went someplace, she'd pack extra clothes. And so she had picked three pieces that, you know, she was going going after all whole day. And she said, well, you know, I'm going to wear this shoe doesn't work, that I'm going to put on another pair of shoes. And I don't want I don't you know, I. So I said, Judy, after the trek was over, I was carrying all the shoes, I wound up carrying on all the shoes. I said, you know, when I tell you something, I said, you know, be sensible. You're not going to keep you're not going to do, you know, it doesn't make any sense to do that. So. So. And then we went from a three to a one day track to a two day track, and then we had a three day trek, which they sent us out and they said.\n\nThey said you're going to meet up in such and such a time. It's about so many miles away and we are going to pick you up at 12 o'clock. Three days and we expect you to be in the plaza be. And so they gave us maps and they gave us a compass and they gave us food and they gave us survival gear. And sent us out. I went out with the married people because I was married and there were two other couples from another group that were at the camp because we weren't the only, as I recollect, we weren't the only training group there. There was another I think the other group there or the two groups there. So I went out with this married couple and Judy got sick and she didn't go, so I'm with this with this married couples, but I'm by myself. Judy stayed back and. So we go where we got lost the first day, we never we know where the hell we were and then of course, we've got we've got one of the couples, one of the guys saying, well, I know where we are. You know, we have to go this direction.\n\nAnd we know where we were. I mean, this was through the mountains on trails, I think it was. After two days of being lost. People who were claiming they knew where we were. Didn't know they didn't have the slightest clue what they did, and I said to them, I said, you know, the first people we come to, I'm going to wave down the first car and I'm going to get in that car. And I'm one of the things in my survival kit is I have American money and I am going to pay somebody to take me to that location, which they have marked out for us. So because, you know, they got the other the other two couple that I was traveling with said, oh, no, no, you can't do that. You can't do that. You know, we got to we got to stick to the to the plan, you know? And I said, you can stick to any plan you want. You can do anything you want, but that's what I'm going to do. And sure enough, when we came to the paved road, we asked around some houses and said, is there anybody around here that can give us tickets for a few bucks, take us down to wherever we're supposed to go? We are back to camp, and, of course, you had to go through a debriefing and the debrief and they said, we understand that you people took a car to your place and they said, yeah, that's right, we took a car because we didn't know where we were.\n\nAnd I said and I came to the conclusion we were never going to get there at the base we were going. And because we were so damn lost, we would never make it. And they said, oh, that was acceptable. That beat that passed the grade, you know, you're sick. And it says, well, I've come to the to the crossing and I took this. Why it wasn't the way you were supposed to, wasn't the planned way or where you were supposed to do it. You're supposed to do it on your own. So it was rigorous. The training was rigorous. I don't know if we lost any. Yes, we did lose some people at that particular camp because then they sent us because we were an agricultural group. They broke us out of the camp and they sent us to Mayaguez. And then I had Mayaguez then we had another training part. Now, I'm not sure of the days, but I'm thinking this this training is going on for about two or three months because I think when we went home at the end of Mayaguez, then we hit those people again were said, okay, you've made it or you're not. And most, of course, as you gradually took people off, a higher percentage made it first. People had to me, that was a high percentage, but then as we went through these gradients, let's wait, and then he said, well, we're going to send you home for two weeks and we're going to meet you. You go home and meet with the family and tell them that you made it. And when they were going all meet in Miami and the close to the to the leaving out of Miami, the 22nd of October, that's an easy day for all of us to remember, because we went down to Miami. We went out a couple of a couple of days early because Judy had some relatives there that had a motel and we stayed with them and.\n\nAnd then we met at the Miami airport and October 22nd, and I believe that was the day, because when we got there right away, you could notice that the military all over the place and sort of like, is there a military base here or, you know, everybody's in a hurry, everybody's in. And so when we met with our representatives who were taking us down on the flight, they said, well, we're on a whole position here. The president is going to do a speech. Of course, the speech was that he was going to go back. Of course, what happened then was. What do we do, Washington Peace Corps central headquarters? What do we do about these people who are supposed to go to La Paz and they didn't know, they said, well, we're not going to send them to La Paz because we don't know what the reaction is going to be in La Paz, in the capital. We don't know how they're going to react to. What's going?\n\nAnd so they took this down to a hotel and the beach and Miami Beach, which was a luxury hotel, and we just spent three to four months and is tough, rigorous screening training program. And I thought this is more like it, you know, I mean, we're in this hotel. We're on the beach. They don't know what to do and how long we're going to stay here. They don't know and so forth and so forth. And so I think we stayed at the hotel and I always remember the day it was the Royal Hotel or something. I can't I can't exactly remember. But it was the first class hotel, at least as I was concerned about hotels, whether it had been the best hotel I ever say that. So they told us, I guess we were there for three days, just relax and take it easy. And they were waiting to find out, you know, what to do with us. And so. Then we got the word three days we were sending you.\n\nUp to Brattleboro, Vermont. What the hell was in Brattleboro, Vermont? And that was a real surprise because it was a training for international living that the Peace Corps had contracted with these people to train future groups. And they had a group there, the Dominican Republic group, that was at that place. But they had enough room in this big white mansion, in this gorgeous setting. It was October that these were turning the meals were fantastic. We had these local women come up and they cooked all these meals for us in the morning. And this this is really great. If you want to go and walk, walk down, you walk through this natural wooded area. And so for us, for me at least. And I think for everybody. For the whole group. It was it was it was it was quite a different previous six months that we've been from the beginning of July until the 20th to the 25th of October, the end of October. It's been great. So and of course, everything was up in the air. They need to ask people what, what what's going on, what's happening. And they said, well, we're just you're. You don't know what you're. So we were having a pretty good time, but the problem was there was a Dominican group there and they were going through this sort of this rigorous training.\n\nI mean, you know, I mean, you didn't have time to sit down with people. I mean, after 10 o'clock, you did this at 11 o'clock. You did this in the Dominican Republic group was doing the same thing. They were getting up at six o'clock in the morning. They were running for a mile down the road. They were in a Spanish class. They were in a history class. They were in and so forth and so forth. They were going through sort of a rigorous training. And there we are. This group has already been trained and we're not doing anything. You know, we're just sitting and enjoying this time in the best season to be in Vermont. I mean, you couldn't ask for a more wonderful place to be, and it wasn't too cold, too hot. These were turning away and so forth. So they came to us and said, oh, well, you know, this isn't good for the morale of the Dominican Republic. They look they're looking at you people doing nothing but enjoying the countryside. And and they're working their butts off, learning this thing, learning Spanish and learning the history of the Dominican Republic with all the stuff that we've gone through.\n\nThey're learning it for the Dominican Republic, OK. And it's that good for morale. They're just to say, how can it be, you know, how can we treat these people better? Oh, how come they got it better than us? You. Oh, they're having a good time. They're not doing so. They came to us. And as I recollect, I could be wrong about this. But my recollection was they said, well, you're going to go back into training. And we said a lot of us said this guy said, I'm finished with training. I we've trained, we're trained out. We had six months of this already. And we're not going we're not going to do it. If you want to give a Spanish course, you won't take it. You didn't give us Spanish courses. That that's why I don't mind it at all, because it's not like you can improve on you can get better. But I said we're not going to get up and run with these people and we're not going to go through the physical thing. They put people through it. And of course, we went to Boston and we really had it. It was really good. And then sometime about I guess it was sometime in December, they said, well, we're going to ship you down. Things have settled down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:51:48", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wasn’t it in November because I thought we got to Bolivia for Thanksgiving?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:51:52", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought we were. It may have been. It seems to me we spent two weeks up to. At least it was I have fond memories of a place to be so. So anyways, they put us on a plane and a few of us, I guess, had been overseas. The majority, 99% of us hadn’t. They put us on a prop plane, they didn’t fly anyone by jet in those days. And the stopping place on the way down from Miami was Panama City. So, again, this prop plane was on the plane or flying down to. So I put Panama and pick up gasoline there and then push on, go to La Paz and I'm not sure. I can't remember if we made the full jump or we stopped it someplace. And then, of course. You would you'd read the history of Bolivia, the geography is. And when you fly in at eleven thirteen thousand, thirteen thousand feet on a prop plane, you land in this place, we’re out of the plane and you say there’s La Paz down there. It looks like the Grand Canyon.\n\nThere's no trees and and on the Altiplano, which is flat up there and where a lot of the Indians lived and worked the land, and you could see that there was quite a bit of agriculture going on the planet and that and the first thing you wonder whether we would ever put a city up here, like I mean, there is not much there. You know, it's sort of like and then, of course, you drive down from the airport at the bars and you go down this winding road and you stay there in, know, briefing, session, debriefing. Maybe you're being you're being introduced. You meet your managers, people, and the everything is set up so that, you know, where are you going? You know, which, of course, we knew which group we were going to be and some group, some part of the group is going to, of course, being coached by another part of the group has been to bond to the group, which was the lowlands. I don't think so. So we had these two groups coached by the group.\n\nAnd Santa Cruz. So you try to you try to absorb this, in this environment. It's all new, and so if you're at this altitude, 11,000 feet in this city, and first thing that struck me was that, first of all, they had this strange habit in Bolivia. Of course, you never learn this in books where the taxis drove around at night and without lights, except when they came to another cross street, didn't turn their lights on for a little bit. Then they turned the lights off. And you drive around in the middle of night, lights off. OK, I guess that’s the way they don things. The other thing that struck me was you see these policemen in little boxes and they have manual switches and they're changing lights at the intersection of the important intersections. And perhaps I've never seen that before. You know, where you have a guy with sort of a railroad like my miniature railroad where I have a switch and I can do I could switch the tracks and so forth. He's out there directing traffic in in in his gloves and his little hat and so forth. And the official uniform. So and then, of course, we picked up Jeeps in the past. I think they had something like 11 Jeeps, powder blue Jeeps, and they did not they don't they don't look too much different than the Jeep that you see on the road today. It looked quite modern and quite nice. And then they teamed up, I think, four people to a car, to a vehicle. And then they drove down to the next drop off, the drop off point was Cochabamba. We all went to Cochabamba.\n\nAnd of course, you introduced to. We think the setup to have you, imagined for you, that your manager, the guy that they had was responsible for you, you know, he had previously been sent to Bolivia, worked with the extension people and you were assigned and you were taken around Cochabamba and you're taken off to the big cow place, and this is where Batignole, is that guy's name, was that the tin guy? This is where he lives in this big mansion. You learn that he owned all the tin and made a lot of money. And in the first thing he did was leave Bolivia settle in another place, OK? And he's got this huge farm in the Cochabamba area. And that's some of the people who are going to work on this farm because there's still cows. So part of the group was left there and we spent a week there and then we went down in Cochabamba and struck you about Cochabamba, this meeting with this climate is fantastic. You could put a sweater on at night. Very comfortable. You walk out in the daytime and the temperature was seventy six degrees and I thought, wow, this is great. These guys in Cochabamba , they’ve got it made. Yeah. And I knew where I was when I was going into the jungle. OK, not these guys in Cochabamba , they joined the right group, they got the right system. They’re in the with these cows and so forth and. I’d like to stay in this climate. So we all piled in , those that were going to Santa Cruz, all piled in. Some were going to be stationed in Santa Cruz, some were going to be stationed in Portachuelo, some of them are going to be stationed at General Saavedra, and some of them were going to be stationed at Montero, was that the city?." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Guaveda first, then Montero?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, so. Get to Santa Cruz and they introduce you to your counterpart. We are supposed. I had a counterpart who became my friend and I still communicate with him. And they introduce you that they take the group they went which to take them on to take us to General Saavedra, Peter Roycraft.\n\nRose Van Epps. And Judy and myself. And they don't have too bad a facility, they just had this sort of brick house and put on a slab. It had a bedroom, it had a sitting room and it had a tiny kitchen. They said, oh, this is where you’re going to stay, and your meals are going to be prepared, if you want, at the commissary with, all the technicians have breakfast, lunch and supper on this campus grounds. And the technicians here that you're working with, they have their own houses and my fellow that I worked with who was a man biologist, he was. He lived right next door and also comfortable house to give us this place was totally screened in. And in the course of the show, the air is coming and you have the ventilation is green and there are no windows because there it never snows in Santa Cruz. And, uh, uh, we the system was that you worked with your technician and if things worked out, we're happy. If you're unhappy, you had to tell, who's who was our?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "01:02:16", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ralph Kurtz." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "01:02:17", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You had to tell Ralph. Well, look, it isn't working. I need to be. And that didn't bother him, if you told Ralph, well, it is isn't working out for me because it's just not my cup of tea. I'm not I don't feel I'm doing what I thought I was going to do, I think can do better service elsewhere. They were they were quite flexible and saying, OK, you can we'll see. We'll see what else we can line you up with. And so I think initially we went through that sort of period of trying to adjust to our environment, to the people we're working with. And, uh, and we made the adjustment that was fine. If you had difficulty making an adjustment, the Peace Corps was smart enough to say, well. Let's see what else we can come up with and we'll accommodate started accommodating. And I've often thought of this was people who say, well, what, just like what was it like in Santa Cruz? Trying to get an idea what this country is about, because nobody knows. And you go back and say, well, Bolivia, where's that? And you go back afterwards and say, what was it like? And I said, I used to tell people after getting out that Bolivia, Santa Cruz area, was like the frontier. I can that I could imagine myself. Imagine what it was like in the late eighteen hundreds in the United States in the middle of Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma. It was frontier. In other words, you were on the side. You were on you were in an area where horses walked, roamed, walked around the General Saavedra. And it's like, well, who owns those horses or somebody owns these horses? OK, but, you know, we you know, and we the pigs would find a shallow in the middle of the road going to General Saavedra. And so if you had to watch it when you were driving your Jeep that you didn't run over pigs that were sleeping in, wallow in the middle of the road. And so and so Judy used to go down because she was preparing her meals.\n\nAnd every Monday they slaughtered a cattle, a cow in Saavedra and she'd bring home this great big piece of meat. And because you could buy a kilo. Well, how did they measure it? Mean you go down to the market and you look at a piece of meat hanging up and you don't know what part of the cow came from. You don't know whether it came from the hind quarter, the front quarter, unless you're a butcher, you didn't know what I and you said, well, give me a kilo of that. That looks that looks pretty red and doesn't have too much fat on. And so we would buy a hunk of meat and then she'd come back and try to put it into something, you know, stew, so that we wouldn't get disease from it. But I mean, nothing was refrigerated. So that's why they always that's why they only killed cows once a week. And you had to be there because there were people said, OK, this is cow killing, this is Meat Day, we're going to get meat. The other thing that struck you is on this experiment station, your counterpart was my counterpart in the kind of person people I worked with were all graduates college from Cochabamba, they all graduated from the agricultural college in Cochabamba.\n\nAnd there was another level below them, which were the regular fire me that did most of the labor. In other words, when you did an experiment, you went yours to other people with you. And, you know, they did all the hard stuff, you did sort of all the analysis, we would go my counterpart was interested in sugar cane more so we used to go to cane fields and then they would take measure of a certain amount and try to get some sort of statistics on how much corn bread was a sugar cane or and whether or not how many he was interested in biological control, how many of these bores, which are small larva, which eventually become laws. And so he would see how many are infected with the with. And then he would try to raise these parasites that lived. And so that was his that was his research project was to help sugar cane people biological, which he later went to Riverside, California, and got his master's degree in biological control at Riverside in California, and then later wound up spent the rest of his life in sugar plantations in Brazil working on biological control..\n\nBut anyway, the thing that struck you was that you'd see little children that were probably two to three years old. And you noticed it right away of the, not the technicians, but the children of the workers. This working group would see their children would come up to our house at 6:00 a.m. and they would have red hair and you'd say that's not right. There aren’t red haired adults in this area. You’d say, well, what is that all about? And of course, right away, you know, their extended stomachs and so, it’s parasites. And these babies are suffering from protein deficiency. And when you have a protein deficiency, you get red hair, you know, maybe black, you have the right protein. When you’ve got parasites, you’re eating everything up. So they have a saying in General Saavedra, again, it strikes you like it must have been like this in the frontier of the United States. They tend to say, well, how many children do they have? And they’d give me a number. You’ve got more children than that. And some of them made the comment, well, we don't count children to six years old because we don't know what they're going to make it within that period, the 50 percent chance that they won’t, that they’ll die from something, from sickness.\n\nSo one of the things that Judy did while she, well she was a social worker. She set up classes of cooking class. And said, here's the thing, I'm OK, I'm going to show you teach you some of that. So one of the first things I'll never forget was all these lemonade lemons on this experiment station. We're in the tropics raising lemons, grapefruit, sugar cane. And so she says, I'm going to teach you how to make lemon pie. And she had all these women that, you know, you get in a group of women and you're an American and you're down there and she said she used to teach these women and they just, their eyes couldn't believe how she made this sort of lemon pie and how wonderful it tasted besides. And they had no concept of ever knowing that you could make lemon pie from lemons. You know, that old saying, if you got lemons, make lemon juice. Well, she said we're going to make lemon pies. So those are the kinds of things that when they said, well, what are you going to do in the Peace Corps? He said, well, you know, when I see that I can teach somebody something, they're going to buy into it real well and that's what's going to happen. And so that experience for us was know a great experience. And then there were all the funny things that happened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "01:11:53", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you like to elaborate on one or two of those funny things that are memorable, particularly?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "01:12:00", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the first time I went out with my technician was we're going to go out to a field and the technicians are already the farmhands. This is the bottom echelon. They're already there. And they cut cutting the cut sugarcane. And this is my first, this is my first adventure going into a sugarcane field with my counterpart. And, you know, I’ll never forget this. So either way, I'm driving the powder blue jeep, I'm driving into the sugarcane and it's down the road toward Montero and just before we get to the sugarcane field, I have sunglasses on and Oscar turns to me and says, take your sunglasses off. It’s a bright, sunny, hot day, we're going to be outside. Why should I take off my sunglasses? And he says, well, when you get to the field and you have sunglasses, they’re going to automatically think you work for the government and they don't like government people. I said, OK, took off my sunglasses, put them in my pocket, and when we got to the field it worked OK. So these are the stories. These are the sorts of things that uh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "01:13:42", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about the?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "01:13:43", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The other funny one. I want to tell you about the other funny incident because we all got we got a big kick up about it. Every month you get paid. And so we’d always wait for pay day, you know, Ralph is coming today. And so, Ralph had come out and you had this suitcase of money, a briefcase that was filled with Bolivianos. And the first time we got paid up, we were only making seventy five dollars a month. And he comes out with the suitcase of money and he opens it up. And I mean, he's just got bales and bales and bales of money in this thing. And he starts, I made seventy five dollars and Judy made seventy five dollars. We get one hundred and fifty dollars and he's piling all this money up. And, you know, it's like Reno, Nevada, one million dollars. You've made one million dollars. You know, we were playing poker. You see this great big pile of Bolivianos worth one hundred and fifty dollars. But I mean, it looks it looked like a million dollars. And we used to get the biggest kick out of that because you come out and say, OK, here it comes, all the money. And then and then, of course, every day in Santa Cruz, the Boliviano was in such a flux that you really never knew from week to week unless you went into the exchange place what it was worth, to go down and say, well, this week the Boliviano was deflated, inflated, whatever, you know, it's like, well, that's the way. So I got that. That's just very you know, it's sort of interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "01:15:31", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you do any traveling around Bolivia while you were there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "01:15:33", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There, um, that was telling everybody this morning. I have a. For some reason, I was collecting butterflies, so I used to go on excursions and collect butterflies and insects and so I made several trips into the jungle with another entomologist who was in General Saavedra. He didn't have a degree, but he was he collected insects because it was a commercial thing. He could collect insects and put them in alcohol, which they had plenty of. And then he could sell them to people who were coming to it and never seen beetles that were five inches long and butterflies that were iridescent and beautiful things, you know, and you could sell. There was a market for that. And if a tourist came through or people who were collecting insects, there was a market for that. So he and I used to go. And then sometime in the first year, Norm Coble was living in Santa Cruz and he was at the extension working, with the extension people there. And myself, I went to Norm Coble because I had been up to a river about 60 miles from us and they said they had balsa wood and they and they were the oil people forded this river and had built this massive wooden bridge. I mean, it was something to behold. This wooden bridge, I mean, it was unbelievable. And why were up there on whatever reason we were there to see it, to see the bridge and to see the river because it was the closest river around us. Somebody said, well, there's a lot of balsa wood in the jungle.\n\nAnd for some reason there's a young boy. One of my favorite books was that I read, didn't read too many books to speak of, but one of my favorite books was Huckleberry Finn, and it always struck me with Huckleberry Finn and Tom. I think it's I think it's caught with Tom is when they built this raft after the murder of his relative and they went down this river, they had this adventure on the Mississippi River. And the basic story is that he is he's with this Negro and that, you know, so that struck me as sort of like, oh, God, if I was Huckleberry Finn, that sounds to be like one of the great adventures a boy could have, is to go off and winds up at his aunt’s house. And but he goes through all these adventures and meets all these different people. And he has this is just a marvelous book to read. So I thought, well, you know, we ought to try to go down this river. And I said, not knowing whether he's going to bite or not, said, Norm, let's build a raft and we'll take it down the river. And we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. He said, okay. And so every Sunday and Saturday, every weekend, we travel 60 some-odd miles, about an hour's worth of driving down to this river. And it was a learning process. We learned where the little balsa tree was like, what it was and where you can get it.\n\nAnd so we started gradually putting this piece of work together and we wound up with a raft that was probably almost 30 feet long and probably almost, I'm going to say, 15 feet wide. And on that basis, it had something like twenty eight logs. And had we built a little lean to with a galvanizer. Drew it and he said, we’re gonna put four bunks in it and we're going to take four people and we got to decide who else can go. And in this interim time, Tom Stachelek was, I always enjoyed Tom because he had a sense of humor and he always made me laugh. And I, like people made me laugh. And Tom used to tell these stories about all of his adventures up in Cochabamba. You get me going. And I'd have, you know, just for being an 18 year old, I thought, this guy is something else. I mean, he's seeing more in life. And in a period of six months in in Bolivia, he's seen his whole life in Swank's world where Swanksville, or something like that. He says, oh, yes, still today Swanksville, tomorrow the world. I used to get, I used to get the biggest charts. And so he came up with all this sort of, he had a plastic that a black plastic piece of plastic that looked like a coin. And he used to go around and say, yeah, I love to go up to the Indians and say, you know what, what is this thing. It looks like a black 50 cent piece. It had no markings whatsoever, but it was plastic and he didn't know what this is in America? The kids would look at him and say, no. What is that? It's black gold. It's black gold, it's plastic. It's like the graduate student reminded when I saw the picture the Graduate Student, reminded me of a guy telling the story to the young graduate Dustin Hoffman that, oh, this is what you want to do.\n\nYou got to get into plastics. You know, it's sort of like American philosophy. You know, we're up there, we're now and this is the next go to the next ship. It's the next computer chip. OK, so Tom was a great guy. You can go on a trip with him and you could laugh and he kept you going. So I think I asked Tom, who else do you think would be interested, we could take four guys? And he came up with John Sykes. I wasn't I wasn't a friend at all of John Sykes, an 18 year old group and they sort of hung out together. You know, they all had they all had a common thread. They're all the same age. They had similar experiences in agriculture. And so they had a common language. And so they had that they had that sort of camaraderie in that particular group in Cochabamba. So I said, John Sykes, you think he’d go? Yeah, he’s from Florida, he’s a good swimmer, he gave me all the reasons why we should ask him. And he said, yeah, I’ll go with your guys. And so we went off on this great adventure. Now on this great adventure, I mean, you know, we thought it going to be easy money and we thought we could shove off from shore and we're going to go to this faraway place called Trinidad and that where they got five nurses down here and we're going to get to meet all these nurses and all the rest of the Bolivian group. You'd say to them, as I said to somebody, you'd say to them, where are you go on vacation and they say, well, we're going to Argentina, we're going to take the train across Brazil, we're going to Peru, we're going to Machu Picchu. That was their vacation. We're going down this river. OK, so what are you going to do? Well, one of the things you're going to do is you're going to have a lot of time to kill. This is a long distance, long distance. And you're going to go on three rivers, the Yapacaní, the Rio Grande and you're going to wind up on this Mamoré River and then eventually you're going to get to this town, Trinidad. But what do you do? You play cards. We brought a card deck with us and that's how you kill time, you sit around on this river and it floats by itself, like Huckleberry Finn down the river, and you don't have any problems.\n\nIt's just like the river carries. This is where we're going, you know, it just sucks us right now and takes us to Trinidad. And so you have to have something to do in all this time that you're killing. So you play cards. So the story about the cards is very interesting. We’re playing cards, killing time one day, and somebody drops a card and it falls through the cracks, and we lose the card. And I believe we were playing hearts. I think that was the name of the game. And so we've lost the card. There's three of us, we've lost the card, what do we do now. This is how the mind of a Peace Corps person works. What do you do? Well, it's the three of clubs. Throw away all the other threes and therefore we continue playing the same game, but we don't have any threes anymore. So as we proceeded this deck slowly dwindled down to, it didn't make any sense to play anymore. So things like that would happen. We eventually wrecked the, on the first day we ran up a lot of junk and a lot of junk in these rivers due to soil erosion along the river banks and then trees would topple in. And they would stay where they fall or get waterlogged and sink And it would be like when they, when you look at petrified wood and you say, well, where did this petrified would come, you know, there was a forest and somehow all these logs of trees got under water.\n\nAnd then through the millenniums, they became petrified due to pressure and other circumstances that go on under water. So there was a lot of junk called junk in the river, and we when we built this raft, we didn't think about navigation. We thought that it's going to be like the Mississippi and in the Mississippi you can put a boat in and Ohio and Cincinnati and you'll never see a piece of junk sitting in the middle of the river. And so you don't worry about, we got on this raft thing, we don't have to worry about junk in the river. You know, it's going to be nice and free of anything which again, going to float down to Trinidad. Well, you learn the first day that you have all kinds of problems because you can't navigate. So the first thing we did was put oars, put an oar on the front and an oar in the back. Norm built the oars and John built the oars. And we cut up planks. I mean, we were really, you know, sort of like working well, we need oars, we got to build this fulcrum in the back and we got to be able to stick this piece of wood in it. And we've got to do this. Well, that's the first thing you learn, OK? And then as you proceed down the river, you learn all this stuff, and go through all these experiences. Tom Stachelek almost drowned, and then he had to leave us because he got mono, and so you learn it was a process of learning, but people ask me, well, about death. And I say to them, well you know, when you're twenty five and another person is 22 years old. And Tom was probably 18, 19.\n\nAnd John is the same age. It's like youth today, you don’t think about death. You say I can survive, I went through a survival course, I survived the Peace Corps and, you know, I mean, this is a piece of cake, as the English would say. This is a piece of cake. We're going to go down this river. And what you find out is it isn't a piece of cake and if you do it over again, you’d do it a lot different than the first time did you did it. And it was all first we there none of us had this experience before. So those are the sort of things that were memories that you have to say, well, hey, nobody else ever did this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "01:30:39", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Probably not. So if, uh, let's look at this, for example. Do you recall anything particular, like at the end of your first year? Anything that stuck out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "01:31:01", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, no, I, I, I consider myself fortunate that I really liked the technician I was working right off the bat. My Spanish was so bad and was, it was wasn't a good thing for me. I wasn't, there were other people in the group you could speak. Norm Coble, he could sing or speak. And so I always I used to use those people as my crutch. People like, you know, what is what is he saying? You know, normally converse very well, you know, with other people converse very well. But I was a person who could get by, you know, where's a glass of water? Where's the beer? Where something? I could learn all those little phrases, catch phrases that you use. I learned all of those. So, uh, the, uh and the thing that happened to me, which I didn't make any difference to me, but my technician wanted to learn English. And so if I tried to speak Spanish with him, he'd say, no, no, let's talk English. I'm here to learn from you, because my plan is that I want to go on to a university in the United States. That's my goal. I would love to do that. And who am I to say, well, I'm sorry.\n\nThat's, uh, you know, you're in the Peace Corps. You're not going to say that to somebody, OK, it's OK with me. I don't I'm not I'm not going to back teach. I don't care less, you know, if you want to learn. And I was there to teach. And if somebody said to you, OK, I want you to show me or do this or thing and you do that, you just say, OK, that's why I'm here. I'm here to show you I have ideas, I can do things. And there certain things you do and certain practices and so forth and so forth. And that's what you did. You were down there saying, I can help, I can do something I can. And I think everybody had that in the back. And said, you know, I'm here to that I'm not I wasn't down here, I knew it would help me, but I wasn't down there. I was down there for what Kennedy, the spirit of the Peace Corps, was that we had advantages in the United States and that, you know, by making a one to one basis contact. You could change the world, OK? We believe that that was an idea that you if you met people, you could be friends with them.\n\nYou could get them to understand you. You could understand them. And for me, it was an experience where I really valued culture. I came away with that total experience. What really happened to me was that people used to say things, you know, they'd say this and say that. And I and I'd say to them, you know, you got to look at it. You've got to look at this as a cultural thing. You can't go and you don't go into these places and say, well, when I went back to Wisconsin University, I took an economics course. And they say, well, those Indians are living such terrible, but they got the lowest income of anybody in the world at that time, 1960s. They had if you looked at they made a hundred and the pounds they made some guy wrote his economic and he and the Indians. Philosophical feeling. I look back and one of the great achievements in my life was that, after the Peace Corps I had been involved in international agriculture. When I went to graduate school at Wisconsin University, I met a professor who asked me what I was interested in. And I told them three things I was interested in, and that was business, international work and plant science, weed science, because I wanted to become a weed scientist, I'd been an entomologist and I wanted to become a weed scientist. I think that's the other thing about Peace Corps people. When it's time to change course, they go ahead and change the orders and you go on to do other things. So I said, well, I want to be a weed scientist. And he said, that's a great idea. I've just come from Rome, where I was the head of the first weed science group in FAO. And one of the problems that I was faced with was that we had a budget of sixty nine thousand dollars a year, this is 1968. We have a budget that we got a hold of and we can spend this money. And I hit up the first section in Rome. And I'm back here now, and this is going to go on this section, this weed section, is going to go on now. And he said to me, I have an idea of. And we're sitting across the table from each other, first time I ever met him and called him up on the phone to have this interview and I going to meet him. And he said, I have an idea. He says one of the major problems we face with science on a global basis is that our resources are limited. And so when we want to, when I was in Rome, people would come in from India, South Africa, Timbuktu and say we have the worst problem in the world. And to research it and to help out our agriculture, we need the money that you have to do the research that's required so that we know how to resolve this problem.\n\nHe also said that he said, I didn't know whether the guy from India was had a worse weed problem than the guy from Zambia. I didn't know whether the agriculture in South America and the guy that came in and said, we have this particular weed and it's rampant and it reduces our crops by 30 or 40 percent. There was no way for me to know. There's no book I could lift off the shelf and say I can weigh these things and I can say, well, we're going to proportion out the amount of money that we have, the limited resources that we have. And this problem is crucial to starving people in India. This problem may a crucial one step down from India, this problem over here in this part of the world. So he says, one of the things I like to do is to find out if we are faced with a world wide problem where we have 8,000 plants, because that's a number that's thrown around, we have 8,000 plants that cause major losses and weeds. And he said to me that most people don't realize it, but if we would take any endeavor in the world, any activity, whether it's farming, whether it's working in health practice, whether we could take all these endeavors and we could, and I could take you to places in India, he says where the total life of a family living in an agricultural setting, the total life of that family depends upon one or two hectares of farm.\n\nThey leave a substance life, and so when the child, a child is four years old, one of the first things he's ever taught is how to pull weeds by hand. And he says, I am sure I can show that there is more human energy in the world for controlling weeds than any other activity that you can think of. And he said, so when you have limited resources and you have plants that are diminishing your food production, those two things, a farmer, he may, when you talk about subsistence, he may survive or he may fail, he may starve. That's what it's like out there in those places. And you've experienced that. You've been in Latin America, you know, with these small farms or like, you know, how these people struggle in agriculture to produce more and better quality food. You you've experienced that. We hit it off right away. I sat back listening to and thinking this is the greatest idea I ever heard of. But sure, I'd like to be part of that. Now, I spent my next, this is 1968. Our final book was printed in 1997 and it's almost a period of 30 some odd years doing research towards this goal to find whether it's 8,000 that are causing 90 percent of the losses in the world or whether it's another fixed number. And so I was gathering data for the next worldwide on this and we printed three books in this 30 year period. And the last book drew on data that had been gathered, started to be gathered in 1968.\n\nAnd I joined this professor now. The plants that we have identified in these three books, you can go and you can Google “world weeds.” It comes out it comes out to you probably get 10,000 references. All quarantined or wherever they are. The Australians have this all the time where they want to keep certain plants out. You want noxious plants. They call them exotics. You don't want those plants introduced into the environment. And because you don't know what they'll do, they could do tremendous damage. So all quarantine operations and plants are one of the basic, one of the basic reasons that it appears that they used the three books that we produced, they use these books as a base for determining we don't want that plant. So somebody will send in a plant and say, can we ship this in? We're a nursery and we want this aquatic plant that grows in in in Africa or grows in Latin America. And we want to ship it in so we can sell it in the marketplace to aquarium people and they can put this great plant. It grows, it thrives. So they go to that book and they say, what does the three books that we published, what does it say? It is listed at this point in that list and if it's listed that way, that plan could not be shipped in the United States." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "01:45:21", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And your entree to that was your Peace Corps experience, would you say?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "01:45:24", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I wouldn't have done that. I wouldn't have wound up where I am today if I hadn't gone through that experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's like life takes you on this journey, a journey and fortunately for me, it worked out. You know, as a result, the final result was, you know, you couldn't ask for a better story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s great, I'm glad you put that on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "01:46:01", + "speaker": "James Herberger", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ok." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00757", + "metadata": { + "category": "NASA JSC Space Shuttle Program Tacit Knowledge Capture Project 2008", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SSP/halenw.htm", + "original_file_name": "HaleNW_5-28-14.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/Administrators/HaleNW/HaleNW_5-28-14.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Headquarters Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "N. Wayne Hale", + "location_date": "Houston, TX – 28 May 2014" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Sandra Johnson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "N. Wayne Hale" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 28, 2014. This oral history session is being conducted with Wayne Hale in Houston, Texas for the NASA Headquarters Oral History Project. The interviewer is Sandra Johnson, assisted by Rebecca Wright. I want to thank you again for coming in again on this rainy morning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My pleasure. Glad we broke the drought." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, no kidding. Last time, when we ended, we were talking about your move into the Flight Director Office. I want to start there, and just talk about some of those issues around that. First of all your opportunity to do that, and what do you think were the determining factors in choosing the people that were going to go into that office?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good set of questions. Let me start a little bit earlier. When I came to work in 1978, the Mission Operation—or I guess it was Flight Operations Directorate in those days—under Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz realized they were getting a large influx of fresh-out-of-college young people, and so they decided they needed to put together a plan to indoctrinate them, bring them on board, and make sure that they were presented to senior management. So we all had to put together a career plan.\\n\\n At about a six month or one year point, I think we all had to go in front of Gene Kranz, which is very intimidating, and tell him what we’d been doing. His whole senior staff with him, tell him what we’d been doing in our first, I guess it must have been year, at NASA and what our career plans were. I still have a copy of my slides that I made for that. In those days, you know, it was viewfoils [transparencies]. My career goals were to get certified to be a front room operator in Mission Control, to advance to be a flight director, and then go on to senior NASA management, in that order. I think I did pretty well in that, but those are pretty broad. I think everybody who went through that little program probably had about the same goals, so I wonder if they got tired of hearing those goals.\\n\\n It was pretty clear from the day that you walked in the door in the flight control team, Flight Systems Division, that aspiring to be a flight director was what you wanted to do. That was the road to advancement. There are line management jobs—in those days, a first-level supervisor was a section head, and then the second level was branch chief, and then you had your division chiefs, and on up to the directorate head—but you wanted to aspire to be a flight director. They were the heroes. I should say there were a lot of people that came in that wanted to be astronauts, and repeatedly applied, over and over again, to be an astronaut. My eyes were so bad I knew from day one that that was never going to be an option for me, but flight director was, and that’s what I wanted to do. All my peers kind of felt the same way.\\n\\n The first step in getting to be a flight director is it became very clear that they wanted people with some level of supervisory experience. It wasn’t just enough to be a good or outstanding front-room console operator—and that was a prerequisite—but they also wanted people that had supervisory experience. They picked people from the ranks of section head or branch chief level, really mostly section head. I don’t think anybody ever sat me down and told me this, but it was pretty obvious. We all talked about it—who got selected, how they got there. The first flight directors for [Space] Shuttle had come out of the Apollo era, and so the first selection—and I can’t remember exactly when the first selection of crewed Shuttle flight directors came—it came after I got there, but we all paid very intense attention to that, at the parameters.\\n\\n First step was to get to be a section head, and so after a few years—let me think about this a minute. I started in ’78, and in the early ’80s, about 1982 or ’83, I was a GS [General Schedule]-13 and eligible to start applying. Every time a section head vacancy came open in the Flight Operations Directorate, I would apply. I think I applied seven times before I was selected, and I don’t think that was very unusual. There was a lot of intense competition among the young troops to move up. While we had a lot of good camaraderie, there was a lot of competition. Don’t mistake that.\\n\\n Tommy [W.] Holloway was the chief of the Flight Director Office at the time I became eligible to apply, and it was a very formal process. There was an announcement, you had to turn in an application, you had to have some endorsement letters, as I recall, and it all went to Tommy. Of course it went to NASA Human Resources first, and they screened people for qualifications, but he had a large number of folks to choose from. The selection year came about every two years, as I recall. They’d select the flight directors. The year that I was chosen he had elected that he wanted to select three, and I was fortunate enough to be among those. We had an intimidating interview." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall anything about that interview?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Other than I was quivering in my boots? It’s something that I really wanted and something that there was a big competition for, and how does one put one’s case forward in an appropriate way? I remember—I’ll tell you a little story. Ron [Ronald D.] Dittemore and I, of course, were very close because we started in the propulsion systems section together. He came a year before I did, and we worked for several years there, getting our certifications and working as propulsion system officers on the early flights.\\n\\n He was, as I said, about a year ahead of me, and then he applied very quickly for one of the flight director jobs, and in that first round that he interviewed, Gene Kranz was the interviewer. I think that would have just petrified me, but Ron went and he did not get selected the first time. He applied, and we debriefed that. “Why do you think you didn’t get selected?”\\n\\n He said, “Well, I think I answered one question wrong.”\\n\\n “What was the question?”\\n\\n “Which flight director that you’ve worked under do you think is a good flight director, and which flight director you worked under that you think is a bad flight director?” That’s testing your powers of observation—also giving the boss some feedback into what the troops think about his direct reports—and we hadn’t worked with very many flight directors. This is like after STS-2 or something, and we’d worked with just a couple of flight directors, who all had gone.\\n\\n He said, “Well, Neil [B.] Hutchinson is absolutely great.” Gene did not like Neil Hutchinson, so that was kind of the kiss of, “Well, young man, you need to go back and study some more,” or words to that effect, I think, were the response to that question. As we got older and had more experience, we were able to answer that question better, so that was kind of an interesting time. I was fortunate because by the time I started applying, we had much more experience and I had a much broader range.\\n\\n As I recall, I was all ready for that question, and Tommy Holloway did not ask it. Shocks. Tommy Holloway, I think, is one of the most astute people I’ve ever worked with. He’s very low-key, soft-spoken, got this “I’m just an old Arkansas country boy” kind of demeanor, but smart as a whip and did great things for the Agency. I was fortunate to get to be mentored by him in my early years as a flight director. I’d worked with him when he first got to be a flight director. I was the propulsions system officer, so we’d worked together for a number of years.\\n\\n In the early part of 1988, Tommy selected Bob [Robert E.] Castle, Rob [Robert M.] Kelso, and myself as that class of flight directors. We were the first post-Challenger [accident, STS-51L] flight directors. Previous to Challenger by a little bit, I think late 1985, they had selected Ron [Ronald D.] Dittemore and Michele [A.] Brekke. Somewhere along the line, Michele—who could have been the first woman flight director—opted out of the office, and she never was certified and never sat on console as a flight director. She had a long and distinguished career in other areas, but that was not what she did.\\n\\n There were only about two or three people that I know of in the Shuttle area that were selected to be flight directors and didn’t actually complete the process and left the office before they were certified. Rick [Richard N.] Fitts, who was an early mentor of mine, he’d been my second or third first-level supervisor when I was young, Michele Brekke, and then Bill [William H.] Gerstenmaier, interestingly enough, was selected to be in the Flight Director Office. He spent about six weeks in the office and they decided he was more valuable doing something else. He went off to do a more programmatic kind of a job, and of course his career did not suffer from not being a flight director. Have I answered your question?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I think that’s a lot of good information. You were talking about the time to be certified and that certification process—maybe you can talk about that a little bit, just about what that entailed and how long it took for you, and the group that you were with, to go through that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was selected in unusual times because we were down, not flying, because of the loss of Challenger in early 1986. In those days training had several different components. The first thing was go to the training library. This is kind of pre-personal computer-based training, so there really wasn’t any computer-based training. We’d go to the training library, and they had a whole catalogue of workbooks on every given subject—trajectory, propulsion, electrical systems—and in various levels. You’d have a first-level workbook, and then a second-level workbook, and so forth. They said, “Get one of everything and read them all, and when you’re done, come see us.” That was kind of the first part.\\n\\n The first part of training really was take every workbook on every Shuttle thing—EMU [Extravehicular Mobility Units] spacesuits, RMS [Remote Manipulator System (robotic arm)], things that I had never really had an opportunity to work on—and take those to work with. Then there were classroom trainings that were offered by the training division. They said, “Sign up for all of them.” Typically there would be a little bit of, “Class is full, we’ll have to put you in the next class in another month,” or something, but we got priority to take all those classes.\\n\\n So we took all the classes, and then Tommy Holloway told us that we needed to go visit all the NASA human spaceflight centers. At that particular time we apparently had some travel money. I always thought that was one of the most valuable things we do because as flight director selectees, trainees, the doors kind of opened wide to us. So we went to Kennedy Space Center [Florida], obviously, to Dryden [Flight Research Center, Edwards, California; renamed Armstrong Flight Research Center, 2014], we went to Stennis [Space Center, Mississippi], we went to Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama], we went to NASA Headquarters [Washington, DC]. We met with Mr. [George W. S.] Abbey when he was doing his role at NASA Headquarters. He was very happy to see us. Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland], because Goddard is by there and they run the network.\\n\\n We kind of made the world tour. He gave us a nickname of the Martin Short/Steve Martin movie—The Three Amigos had come out, so they called us the Three Amigos. It was kind of cute, so it was the Three Amigos World Tour. We went to all these places and just learned a lot. People were very open. On that tour I met the new NASA test director selectees that we would be working with for launches in the firing room, which were Al [Albert D.] Sofge and Mike [Michael D.] Leinbach, and I’ve known them ever since 1988. Who you met, who you got to know, was very important.\\n\\n Then you see the facilities and the capabilities, what they can do. I made many, many trips as an ascent/entry flight director to Dryden, and knowing the geography and what they could do was extremely important. Same thing for the Kennedy Space Center because we’re responsible for the landings. We went two or three times to White Sands Space Harbor [White Sands Test Facility, Las Cruces, New Mexico] on the northern strip, and that was all very important. Later on travel money got squeezed and we couldn’t send people, and I always thought that that really lacked in the flight directors’ training, if they couldn’t go and see.\\n\\n Some of the tours were really funny. I remember I went to Goddard, and they’re strongest in all the network equipment. Tracking network equipment is not very compelling, visually, so we’d walk into a room and there’d be big racks of computer equipment. Here’s where we do this and so, here’s where we do this and so, and so forth. Then, they took us down—it was one of the most memorable parts of this trip—to this big, empty room. They showed us, “This is where our mainframe computer used to be.” It’s kind of like, “Oh, thank you for showing us this.” It was really cute.\\n\\n Whenever we came across something that was a little humorous, we would say, “Well, yes, we saw the room where the mainframe computer used to be,” and that became a watchword among us. But it was very good to see all the facilities. Really valuable, not just to be a flight director, but later in my career as well, having been all these places and seen all this stuff, and met the people. There’s no substitute for face to face. You can talk in telecoms or email or what have you, but there’s no substitute for face to face.\\n\\n I remember Mr. Abbey, at the time, was very involved. We had an explosion—I think it was a Kerr-McGee AP plant, aluminum perchlorate plant—and there was a national shortage of aluminum perchlorate, which is the main constituent for the solid rocket booster fuel. He was in negotiations with the Department of Defense because they used that on their missiles, rockets. We weren’t flying, but I remember that we talked with him at length about that particular subject. There was a shortage, and they had to bring on a new plant because they had a very bad accident, blew up the whole plant, Kerr-McGee. We were immersed in the issues of the day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also were coming on in a time, because of the accident, because of the Challenger—there were some technical changes, but there was also a cultural change after the [Rogers Commission] Report came out. Can you talk about that, and moving into that position during that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a very interesting time because it really was a bigger cultural change than I realized at the time. So looking back on it, it was a huge watershed moment. When I came to work, whether NASA had put it out or whether the popular press had exaggerated or something, the basic belief was we’re going to fly the Shuttle like an airliner, we were going to take teachers and journalists. We’re going to fly Walter [L.] Cronkite [Jr., broadcast journalist] and John Denver [singer-songwriter], and everybody could go into space on the Space Shuttle.\\n\\n We would be flying—I remember some of the early predictions were once every two weeks, which of course was not anywhere near we ever got to. But we were gearing up, and so there was this pressure, in the middle eighties, 1984 to 1985, that we’ve got to get the flight rate up. We’re bringing new Orbiters into the fleet, we’ve got to train people faster, we’ve got to plan these flights faster. We’ve got to train the astronauts faster because we’re going to move from two to three flights a year, to six to eight flights a year, to 10 to 12, and I think the plan for 1986 was maybe 15 flights that year? It was either 12 or 15, I can look that up.\\n\\n It was a huge number of flights a year, and I think in the calendar year, in the 12-month period right before Challenger, we flew nine, which was just a huge workload. The discussion was, how are we going to support this flight rate? We were going to do multi-purpose support rooms. The Mission Control you see on TV is just the front room, and we would have a front room for every Space Shuttle mission because we’d have them going simultaneously. We’d have a countdown on one while we were flying the other, all these other things.\\n\\n We would have a front room for every Space Shuttle mission, but in the back room, the staff support rooms, they would have to support more than one mission. How would we do that? How could somebody divide their time between watching Atlantis and Discovery, or whatever you might have? There were very serious questions about whether we could do that. That was the challenge that was before us. That was the task that we’d been given to do. I was young enough not to do anything but salute, “We’re going to go do this.”\\n\\n Then Challenger was lost, and that was a huge blow to everyone. It was a huge emotional event. The report that came out was widely misunderstood, if I can digress for a minute about that. We all watched the Rogers Commission hearings, we all read the report that was published, and the bottom line that I and most of my peers drew from that was we had one rogue manager out of Marshall who made a bad decision because there was schedule pressure, and therefore, we should all be vigilant not to let launch fever, schedule pressure, talk us into making bad decisions.\\n\\n That’s the entire lesson we learned out of Challenger, plus the fact that the president said we’re not going to haul satellites, we’re only going to do things that require people. We put pressure suits and parachutes and an escape hatch on the vehicle, and went back and examined every possible thing that could go wrong in the Shuttle so that we in Flight Control could do a better job.\\n\\n We were all children of Apollo 13, because that was one of the great mythos value stories that they taught us. In Apollo 13, Mission Control saved the crew and saved the day. They would have died if we hadn’t have been there, so that’s what Mission Control is. Therefore, we need to be ready to save the crew in every possible circumstance that could happen. That’s what we thought we could do, and of course in Challenger there was nothing Mission Control could have done.\\n\\n That was a shock to the system. We now realized there was a class of problems that we were not going to be able to solve, so I think a little bit of the hubris went out of us at that point, and the realization that yes, we could, in fact, lose crews without being able to do anything about it. Again, this lesson that don’t let launch fever, schedule pressure drive you to do stupid things, was what we learned.\\n\\n Much later I read Diane Vaughan’s book on the Challenger launch decision [The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA]. I know if you read that book, it’s a powerful book. It talks about how she started out at the same place, having read the media, and then did her research and found out that that was not the case at all. That was not the case at all, and I’ll leave that whole discussion for later because it’s a different story that I wish I had learned at the time. I think all of us in the Agency took this one rogue manager thing, that we’ve got to be on the lookout—particularly those Marshall guys because, as you know, there is a huge inter-center rivalry between Johnson and Marshall. It’s not good, but it is there.\\n\\n We had this period in 1986 and ’87, where we literally pulled everything up by the roots in Flight Control and looked at every possible thing that we could look at. All the failure modes and effects, all the critical item lists, all the crew procedures, all the ground procedures—what have we missed, what could we improve, how could we train to do better? We brought these new systems online, contingency aborts and bail out and all these things for launch. We did a huge amount of work, all to get ready to go fly again, and we were always chasing the flight date as it was before STS-1.\\n\\n Everyone thought pre-flight would happen earlier than it actually happened, and there were delays, and we got put off. In the middle of this, I got selected to be a flight director. It was kind of a good thing for my training that we were in this down period because people had more time to help us, to train us. Then, for Discovery’s return to flight in September of 1988 [STS-26], I drew the great assignment of being the color person, commentary person, for the AP [Associated Press] Radio Network. I was sitting in a little trailer out behind Building 9 with the radio announcer, kind of giving color commentary on the launch, and I’m thinking, “What am I going to say if this goes bad,” kind of a thing. Of course, everything went well and it was good, but we did get a lot of media training, I should say.\\n\\n That’s one of the things they recognized early. They put us through media training, which I really appreciate because I used that a lot. Flight directors were expected to do a change of shift press briefing. I went over and watched a number of those change of shift press briefings after we started flying again and before I actually drew a flight assignment, to learn how to do that because that’s an art. They also had some videotapes of spectacular failures that flight directors had at press conferences. “Don’t do this,” kind of a thing. “Thank you. Yes sir, I won’t.”\\n\\n That whole period, from January of 1986 to September of 1988, when I look back on it—on the one hand, we were not doing what we all came to do, but it was a really good time for me to get this new level of training. So a very busy time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Between talking with the press for STS-26 and then the first flight that you worked as a flight director, which was STS-28, I believe—during that time period, during the flights, did you follow other flight directors and shadow them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely, yes. That was one of the things that we had to do. We had what they called OJT [on the job], or shadow assignments. We would go sit with another flight director on integrated simulations, and certainly we sat with flight directors during flight. That was all very good training. You learned that what you do in integrated simulations is not necessarily how the real world works. They try to make it as close as they can, but there are some differences, and certainly the level of tension is much higher.\\n\\n Working in the middle of the night, I don’t think people that tune in on NASA TV necessarily understand how difficult it is to work a midnight shift, and if that’s when the crew’s awake and activities are happening, staying on top of things, because that’s something else we had to learn to do. We had a lot of discussions about how do you soundproof your bedroom so you can sleep during the day, so you can be chipper when you’re on the night shift." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned in another interview, the quote from that is: “Once you get to Mission Control as a flight director, you don’t have time to do research.” Following these other flight directors, I would think everyone had their own style in how they made decisions, and if they had to make a decision quickly. Then when you were doing it, how did you learn that? Was that something that’s innate to you personally, and do you think most flight directors have that, or is that something that you learned in training, too?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it’s both. They selected flight directors with certain characteristics, and being a quick study and being able to assimilate a large number of facts and situational awareness and come to a conclusion is one of the hallmarks of being a flight director. Because the clock is always ticking.\\n\\n I got a great lesson when I moved out of the flight director office. Aaron Cohen, who, of course, had been Orbiter project manager, director of engineering, and then center director for Johnson Space Center—I had a chance to talk with him one time and he said, “The really nice thing about being the program manager, project manager, is you can come back the next day and say, “The decision I made yesterday wasn’t right, and I want to reverse it.” You’ve got a lot of latitude. You’ve got some time to go home and sleep on it and think about it and learn new things maybe, and come back a few days, a few weeks later, and turn things around. You may have wasted a little bit of resource, but better to make a good decision.\\n\\n Whereas the flight director was always about, “I don’t care what the optimum decision is, I don’t care necessarily what the best decision might be if we knew all the facts, here’s what I know and here’s the time when I’ve got to make a decision,” and boom. I can work all the time that I want to gather more information, but when the clock says, “Time to decide,” you have to decide. You have to make the decision based on what you know, and not look back. Go forward.\\n\\n A lot of flight directors failed in other management jobs because they kept that flight director style. It��s hard to change after you have been immersed in that. “I’m in charge. The program, the Agency, the nation, has delegated me the responsibility.” Flight rule number one in the book is “The flight director will make whatever decision necessary to ensure crew safety and mission success.” I used to be able to quote it exactly; I’m embarrassed I can’t right now. It was tattooed on our chests: you will do the best you can, learn the best you can, and make the right decision, and then you move on.\\n\\n Very interesting management style, and people were looked for with that characteristic trait, then that was honed into us. Lee [Alan L.] Briscoe was very funny. He became chief of the office. He was a very good flight director, I thought. Later on, we had to all take these Myers-Briggs personality tests, and interestingly enough, all the flight directors came out on the side of making decisions with little information—I forget which one of the four letters that is—intuitive, I think. You’re comfortable making decisions with not a lot of information.\\n\\n Lee Briscoe was on the other side. He was one of the guys that needed a lot of information, and so he would always pull us up short and make us ask more questions. We’re like, “I know what I want to do, Lee. Here’s what we’re going to do.” He’d be chief of the office. “We’ve got all the facts, and I need to decide.” “Well, have you thought about this?”\\n\\n Used to drive us nuts, and after we had the personality test it began to dawn on me that that was part of his basic personality, and he always wanted more. Not that he couldn’t make a decision required—he was very good—but for those of us that are kind of out on the other end of that psychological spectrum, “I’ve got all the information I need, I’m ready to make a decision,” you have to bring yourself back in a little bit and say, “Well, I’ve got another set of minutes, let’s ask a couple more questions.” Sometimes that’s literally all you had. During the launch phase, that’s what ascent/entry flight directors do.\\n\\n During the launch phase, the whole thing takes 8.5 minutes, and you have sometimes seconds to make decisions in some of these cases that they would give us in training, which fortunately we never had. You train and train and train and train, and it really hones you to make those decisions quickly. As a matter of fact, as an ascent/entry flight director, I was always disappointed—relieved and disappointed—when the flight dynamics officer would sing out, “Nominal MECO [Main Engine Cut-Off], no OMS [Orbital Maneuvering System]-1 required, no action required.” It was like, I trained for six months to be able to handle anything, and I didn’t have to say a word, and there were no decisions to be made. Everything went fine, but what a waste of my time, to have done all that training. That’s a good thing, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had to poll your systems experts in flight control, but did you often have to go above, like you mentioned?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Here’s the analogy that I used: when you’re working in the Shuttle Flight Director’s Office, when you are the ascent/entry phase—it’s a sports analogy—it’s like full-court press basketball. It’s run all the time, be on top of the game, never rest, never quit. It’s full-court press basketball. Being an orbit flight director, where you’re going to repair the Hubble [Space Telescope] or plug a new piece into the [International] Space Station, it’s a little more like football. You huddle up, you talk about what the play ought to be, you go out, you execute the play, it went good, it went bad, you come back and huddle up and think about the next play. That gets as close as I can get. Then Space Station is like baseball, to carry that it that extreme.\\n\\n When I was an orbit flight director—and of course, you start out as being an orbit flight director, that’s the first rung of the certification ladder—you get told in no uncertain terms that there are certain decisions that you need to call the program about. I can remember very distinctly having the Shuttle program manager’s phone number on our phone list, and on a Sunday afternoon or something, having to call the program manager and say, “Well, we’ve had this situation happen. We could do this or we could do that. The flight rules say do this, but if you’re willing to take a little more risk with your Orbiter and the refurbishment, we could do that, which would be better for the payload.” You’re very cognizant of the fact that you have upper-level management.\\n\\n Every day the Mission Management Team would meet—almost every day, anyway—and they would come back. The flight director stays on console, the missions operations director, who is the chief of the Flight Director’s Office—I got to do that a couple of times—would go to the Mission Management Team Room and they’d talk about the strategy for the day. Then they’d come back and the MOD [Mission Operations Directorate]—I can remember several times, the mission operations director would come back and tell the lead flight director on console, “Here’s what the MMT [Mission Management Team] wants you to do.”\\n\\n There’d be this big, “They want me to do what! What are you talking about? This is not what we agreed to do.” We had some interesting times that way, but everybody’s aware that they work for the program. Other senior managers, like the center director, Mr. Abbey, I think I told you, was notorious for coming in just a little after 2:00 in the morning, and come and sit in the console next to the flight director. Just to check the pulse of things, I think. You were always aware senior management was watching you.\\n\\n We’re all talking on headsets. We’re all trained that you speak on the loop. You don’t talk to somebody with the mic [microphone] not keyed, even though they might be as close as you and I are. You are on their comm [communications] loop, the flight director loop or whatever, and you key your microphone, and you talk. “What do you think we ought to do, Payloads? What do you think we ought to do, FAO [Flight Activities Officer]? What’s the plan?” Then, you have this conversation.\\n\\n It’s because those comm loops get routed all over, and you know that there’s a squawk box sitting in the chief of the Flight Director’s Office, sitting in the Mission Operations Directorate’s office, sitting at the Center Director’s Office, and at NASA Headquarters. Everybody is listening to the flight loop, saying, “What are those nutty guys down in Mission Control getting ready to do?”\\n\\n I don’t think it necessarily inhibited you because you get accustomed to that thing, but always in the back of your mind you know that people are listening. Many times you would have a little rehearsed speech. You hoped they were listening so you could say, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do, and here’s why we’re going to do it. Everybody listen up.” Sometimes you found out nobody was listening. That’s okay too, but you had it and it was recorded. They kept those tapes.\\n\\n After Challenger, I was told as a section head for the prop [propulsion] section, that I should go listen to the comm loop tapes for my propulsion team and report if there was anything that would be untoward if we released those to the press. Apparently there was a thought that all these comm loops would be released to the press. I don’t know that they ever were. I had to sit down and listen to five or six hours of audiotapes of what my guys said to each other on their comm loops in the countdown and after the accident. You know that that could very well be you on those comm loop tapes, and I think that was always in the back of your mind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk about that first flight, as much as you can. Since it was a DOD [Department of Defense]-classified mission, if you can just give us what details you can of that first experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can’t say anything about the payload or the operations because that, as far as I know, is still classified, but we can talk about the process. The first certification you get is as an orbit flight director, which it’s means it’s not launch, it’s not landing, it’s the on-orbit phase. Typically we’d have a flight director that did launch and landing, and in the middle of the flight, what I did for many years, we’d come in and check on things, go to the MMT meeting, bother people on some other flight director shift, as operators, talking about what are we going to do for the landing or whatnot.\\n\\n Then you had three other flights directors, three or four. For very long missions we’d rotate a team off, but three 8-hour shifts—ostensibly 8-hour shifts, give or take. There would be an Orbit-1, 2, 3—or an Orbit-1, 2, and planning flight director. Planning being the guy who’s there during crew sleep. Everybody, of course, had their own team. When you were first certified, you got your orbit certification. Your first job typically was to be the planning team flight director.\\n\\n So I was planning team flight director for STS-28. What that entails, of course, is every night the crew’s going to sleep. You come in and you see what had happened during the execute periods of the day—what had gone right, what had gone wrong, maybe there’s some new requests. I’m speaking in general terms now, not specifically about STS-28. Maybe there would be some requests from some of the principal investigators on the little science experiments we’d carry, or maybe the primary payload had some stuff they needed done. You would work with your flight activities officer and the whole team to build a new plan for the next day, or modify the existing plan the next day, as required, while you’re monitoring the Shuttle.\\n\\n There were really only two rules for the planning team flight director. Number one rule is always have the plan ready when the Orbit-1 flight director shows up. I saw that happen a couple of times, when the planning team got behind for one reason or another on some flight, and the Orbit-1 flight director, typically the lead flight director, he’s overall in charge, on the Orbit-1 shift would stroll into the Control Center, and, “The plan’s not ready. The crew wakes up in three minutes and we haven’t finished reviewing the plan, and we’re going to have to teleprinter it up to them.” Oh, my goodness, it was bad. That’s rule number one, get your plan done.\\n\\n Rule number two is don’t wake the crew up. You’d always be watching some little thermostat or some silly parameter that’s one degree above the alarm that’s going to set off the system alert tone, to tell the crew to switch from the A-heater to the B-heater—there’s always something. You’re sitting kind of on the edge of your seat, that, “Is this going to wake the crew up?” Some of those limits you could change from the ground. Some of them you couldn’t. The ones that you could change from the ground you wanted to stay on top of.\\n\\n The really funny alert was, particularly in the early days before we had a whole TDRS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite] network constellation up there, you worried about losing comm with the crew. In the dead middle of crew sleep, your sleep typically being eight hours, give or take—at four hours into crew sleep, there would be a time tone that would go off. If that time tone went off, that would tell the crew that somehow communication had been lost with the ground, and they needed to go switch their radios around and regain comm. If you lost track of things and didn’t have your comm officers turn that alarm off, it would wake the crew up in the middle of the night. They would not be happy if they really had comm.\\n\\n The other thing we also knew is the crew didn’t sleep a lot of times. You could see the toilet flush, you could see lights come on, and they’re up. We know they’re up, but we’re not going to say anything to them because they’re big boys and girls. Particularly the first night—crews were notorious for not sleeping the first night because they’re so excited, the adrenaline’s high, or they were suffering from space adaptation syndrome [space sickness], and they were not having a good night.\\n\\n For whatever reason, the first night or two a lot of crews did not sleep very much. Some crew members I don’t think ever slept at all, but it’s a personal thing. We’re supposed to tell them to sleep, and then you’d write a little note to the flight surgeon, “When you have your private medical conference, remind them that they’re supposed to be asleep because they need their rest,” kind of like mother hen stuff. You didn’t want to say that on the open radio because, again, it gets broadcast to the world, but the surgeons got a private medical conference and could say things to them that won’t go out to the whole crew.\\n\\n I drew the planning team on STS-28, classified flight. I personally hated working classified flights. The overhead that comes with security is painful, and it is against the culture of NASA, being a very open civilian organization. It was just a real pain to do all this security stuff, overhead. At the end of all those flights they gave us a debriefing, and we didn’t do a very good job, apparently, because things leaked out that shouldn’t have. Again, I don’t know the particulars, but I remember being deathly afraid of Brewster [H.] Shaw. He was the commander of the flight.\\n\\n Brewster is a very intimidating individual, and he looks at you with those icy blue eyes that he’s got and says, “Oh, really?” Then you just go, “Oh,” like back in third grade, I did my long division wrong. We really wanted to do a good job with Brewster and his crew. The big thing that happened on that flight was the space radiation guys. I’ve written about this—as far as I know, it’s got zero to do with any classification thing. There was a solar flare and STS-28 was a high-inclination flight, which takes you into areas where the Shuttle crew may get a little bit higher dose of radiation than it would on the more equatorial flight.\\n\\n In the middle of the night I get this call, this disembodied voice, “Flight, this is SRAG,” the Space Radiation Assessment Group, “and we’ve had a solar event and we should talk.” There’s a flight rule—it’s in the book, you can see to this day—that says if you get a prediction of a certain amount of radiation, you’re supposed to terminate the flight. You’re supposed to do an emergency de-orbit. A little less, you might wait till the next planned landing opportunity, but you terminate the flight early. So this is a serious thing.\\n\\n I spent some really quality time with the guys, and I was really worried that this flare, I was going to have to wake the crew up and say, “Start emergency de-orbit prep [preparation],” and all this stuff. We finally got some more data and they said, “Well, it’ll be a little bit less, it’s down to the land the next day level.” Here I am, it’s 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, and I’m thinking, “Oh, do I need to start making phone calls? Tell the program manager, call the director of mission operations, start waking everybody up?” They said, “Well, wait a minute, flight, we’ve got some more info.”\\n\\n We piddled with this for two or three hours, and the story got a little better and a little better and a little better, but it’s still going to be terminate the mission early. The lead flight director comes in, Chuck [Charles W.] Shaw, and of course he comes in early because when you’re a lead flight director you come in ahead of everybody, you want to get everything. Comes in early, and I give him, “Chuck, this is what’s going on.”\\n\\n He immediately goes racing down the hall to where their room is, beats on the door. It’s a locked door because they do things back there that had some implications, and he goes in the room and he comes back and says, “We’re not de-orbiting early, we’re going to stay on orbit.” “It’s your call, Mr. Lead Flight Director.” I had the flight rulebook out and opened to the page, we’re talking about all this, and it was really interesting. Then, to finish up on the story, we stayed on orbit and did the mission, and landed.\\n\\n The flight docs [doctors] who meet the crew at landing—I think we landed at Edwards, pretty sure we landed at Edwards—take them in a little trailer there, they give them the medical exam. The flight docs said, “Well, we think you boys have been exposed to some significant radiation, and here’s what might or might not happen to you,” and really kind of scared the crew, I think. Then a few days later they got the dosimeters, because we carried individual dosimeters on the crew, as normal. They got nothing. It was all a normal background. The crew was furious because, A, we didn’t tell them during the flight—which looking back on it, maybe we should have—and B, they were furious with the flight docs for scaring the bejeezus out of them when they landed, and then C, they were furious when it came back and it was a non-issue.\\n\\n That was really baptism by fire. Now, that’s got nothing to do with what we did on the flight. It’s just there, that’s my story from STS-28. I learned a whole heck of a lot, and I had to go to no press conferences, which was a good thing, because we didn’t do press conferences for those classified [missions]. That’s the only silver lining on working a classified flight, is no press conferences. Do I rattle on too much? I’m doing okay?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, you’re doing great. You had 40 Space Shuttle flights as flight director, so I believe you still hold the record for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In terms of number of flights supported, that’s true. I think the Space Station guys probably had more hours. They can’t count it the same way because it’s one big mission, but yes, I still hold the record. Paul [F.] Dye was really chasing me—he was really hoping we’d get one more Shuttle flight. I think if they had authorized just one more Shuttle flight and he got assigned, he might have paced me out, but yes, there it stands." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If you don’t mind, maybe talk about some of those missions that stand out in your mind, or anything that you’d like to talk about? Maybe close calls or things that you had to make decisions on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There’s so many stories. And to be frank, after this time a lot of the details run together and I couldn’t tell you which flight did which. You remember the first couple and the last one, and then the funny incidents in between, or really interesting incidents. I remember STS-33. Fred [Frederick D.] Gregory was the commander, and Story [F.] Musgrave was on the flight. It’s another DOD-classified flight, and it had just fallen out that we were in orbit over Thanksgiving. I’ve told this story before and you may have heard it from other people, but I had the Orbit-2 shift. I wasn’t the lead flight director, I was the other orbit flight director.\\n\\n I remember we celebrated Thanksgiving at my house early because I had to be on console at noon or one o’clock. So we had family, and we had turkey and dressing and the whole stuff at about 10:30 in the morning, which is tough, because I had to go to work. I went into work, I came into work, and the toilet was broken. The Shuttle potty was broken. I spent all Thanksgiving Day trying to get people to come in because they were all off. The engineering staff, the support people—it’s Thanksgiving Day, we had the potty broken. There’s a long story about that, but it was very interesting.\\n\\n Finally, some guys figured out how to make the thing work by taking the front panel off and using some vice-grips to move a valve inside of it that had stuck. But that’s an important thing. They only had one toilet on the Space Shuttle, and the alternative was to use the Apollo bags, which nobody wanted to do. That’s very unpleasant. We had a lot of problems with the toilet over the years.\\n\\n I had a couple of learning experiences. My first assignment as an entry flight director was on STS-31, which was the Hubble [launch] mission. Again, as you go through, you get certified as orbit, then you get certified as entry, then you get certified as ascent, kind of the top of the heap there. Somebody else—I can’t remember now who launched, was it Linda [J.] Ham?—was the ascent flight director, and then I sat with Bill [William D.] Reeves, who was the lead orbit flight director, many of his shifts.\\n\\n Particularly during Hubble deploy, which was just vastly interesting. This was before we knew Hubble had its mirror problem, of course. It was a very important mission to the Agency. We didn’t understand how important at the time, but we knew it was important. Watched him through the deploy, working with the Goddard guys to get the telescope out and activated, and then I did the entry.\\n\\n The entry day was really dynamic. The weather in Florida was out of limits, not even close. The weather at White Sands was out of limits, not even close. The weather at Edwards was on the limit of being acceptable. Loren [J.] Shriver, who’s the commander, a really great guy, good stick-and-rudder guy—the entry flight director is very interested in how good a pilot the commander is, as you might expect. We had the wind blowing and it was really strong, and we had a flight rule that said it’s a big glider and they do this energy analysis. We launch a [weather] balloon and we get the wind profile and we run the simulation of what the Orbiter’s going to do as it glides back in.\\n\\n One of the key parameters is given a perfectly flown landing pattern, how far down the runway will you touch down? The guidance and the crew training all said the nominal touchdown point is 2,500 feet from the threshold of the runway, which is quite a good margin. Then, we knew that there were uncertainties and the wind would change and how the pilot flew it, but we felt that covered us for everything.\\n\\n They said under certain circumstances, if it’s really important to land, if that landing analysis says you land as close as 1,000 feet from the threshold of the runway, that is okay, you can still proceed and land. Then, if the circumstances are even more severe, you can land at a reduced speed. In other words, you use more energy, so when you come across the threshold of the runway, you’re going slower. If you land 10 knots under the normal planned landing speed, 185 knots versus 195, and you’re only 1,000 feet down the runway, that’s the limit. And that should only be used judiciously. I don’t remember exactly how the flight rules say it, but that’s a go day, but it’s at the limit.\\n\\n We had a go day at the limit. I think that the landing, the touchdown prediction was something like 1,100 feet at 185 knots, which is really right on the ragged edge of being go, but I was the newly minted entry flight director. We’d been through all this training, I knew the flight rules—how can we not land? We need to land. “Go for landing.” Well the wind picked up, and so Loren actually wound up landing at, like, 750 feet from the threshold at, like, 170-something knots. It was not a good day to land.\\n\\n In other words, the flight director, me, set the crew up in a bad situation. That was one of the first lessons I learned, is rookie flight directors are dangerous because they tend to follow the rules and don’t really understand all the implications. After that landing, I was scared silly because they could have come up short. They didn’t—Loren was very good—and other than getting a good finger-wagging from the chief of the Flight Director Office, we kind of went on.\\n\\n It came to my next flight as entry flight director, STS-37, and a similar kind of situation set up. Clobbered at KSC, clobbered at White Sands, Edwards is kind of on the margin. We launched these balloons and the analysis came back that it was okay but right at the margin, and Steven [R.] Nagel was the commander. The second time, this is my second entry flight, and I’m getting a reputation, see? I said, “Okay, we’re going to go.” This was a lakebed runway, so I know we’ve got a lot of margin. The wind shifted, the energy state came down, and the crew landed 750 feet short of the threshold, on the lakebed. On a lakebed runway, it’s just a stripe on the sand.\\n\\n We did a lot of things different after that. I had a lot of explaining to do. And again, I’d followed the rules, for the second time, and made a poor decision. My first two landing set-ups, the goal of the entry flight director is give the commander a good day to land. I learned a lot from that. And after that I became a lot more amenable to waving off for a day, saying, “This just really isn’t a very good day. We ought to just give the crew an extra day and let them think about it.”\\n\\n Which flight was it, was it 113—I think we set the record for the number of wave-off days because I just didn’t like any of those days. We finally, after three or four wave-offs, got to a situation where it was acceptable, it was good enough, made me feel good. We gave Jim [James D.] Wetherbee, I believe that was STS-113—we set the record, you can check, for the most number of wave-offs.\\n\\n Crews wave off for one day, they kind of liked it. You got practice, you got to put on the suits, you got to do the checklist, you do the drill, come down, and then you don’t burn, and then you get the afternoon off, and you can sit and look out the window. They generally had a very busy flight and it’s off-time, and they can do what they want to do. They liked that, the first day. More than one day—it’s a little like going to a baseball game. One extra inning is okay, but not more. There are dozens of stories like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned learning those lessons from those two experiences, and after the flights, you had debriefings, of course, with the press, but you also had internal debriefings. The lessons that were learned after every flight—how were those put into the flight rules? How was that information disseminated to everybody else that might not have been part of the debriefing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good question. Of course, we had all kinds of debriefings. The crew would have three or four weeks of debriefing—how was the food, how was the primary payload, how was this, that, or the other, how did the landing go? We had different folks who would debrief them on everything, and then the flight directors would go. We had a series of meetings called Flight Techniques. Back in Apollo, they called them Mission Techniques.\\n\\n Those meetings would occur monthly, or maybe more frequently if you needed them. You would come back and you would say, “Here is something that came out of the crew. Here are the items that came out of the crew debrief on topic X.” Then you would assign, as chair of Flight Techniques—which rotated among the flight directors—action items to the various people. “We need to change this checklist, we need to improve this flight rule,” and you would assign action items which then all got tracked. They had a due date, they had an assignee. Sometimes it involved a study, sometimes it was just write a change request for a checklist or something, and they would get fed back in.\\n\\n You would always discuss—in this big forum that had lots of people that maybe worked the flight, maybe didn’t—but they were all in Mission Operations, the Flight Crew Office—and you would talk about how it went. What went well and what didn’t go well. That was, I think, how you tracked all this stuff.\\n\\n To change a flight rule, a little bit of bureaucracy involved there. You had a Flight Rules Control Board. So flight techniques would say, “We need to examine how far down the runway should we land.” You might have some studies, talk to the weathermen about how the winds can change, how the balloons may not measure things exactly right. To the guys who did the simulation, “How accurate is the simulation?” To the pilots, “How well do you think you’re going to fly, what are you comfortable with?”\\n\\n You’d have a series of meetings and you’d talk about all these subjects, and you’d come to a conclusion. “We need to change the limit from this to that.” Write a formal change request, send it to the Flight Rules Control Board, who would look at that, typically have to give a presentation, “Here’s why we’re changing it, here’s what we talked about, all the experts agree.” After the Flight Rules Control Board approves it, it goes to the program manager. The program manager gets a package, typically before every flight, of his board, the Program Requirements Control Board. A lot of rules are kind of trivial. “We need to change thermostat set point from this to that,” kind of thing. Some of the rules were significant. “We want to change the way we do a launch abort.”\\n\\n The Flight Director’s Office would send two or three flight directors to this big board. It’s got the program manager, safety, engineering, the whole gamut of folks in this board meeting, and say, “We want to change these rules. We’ve got presentations on these five because they’re significant. We have these other 12 that are not so significant that we can talk about if you’re interested, but they’re pretty straightforward.” And then you go through a presentation and explain why you’re proposing this change. Sometimes the program manager would argue with you, particularly if he’s a former flight director, and sometimes it was just, “Okay, thank you very much,” sign it off, “Next,” kind of a thing.\\n\\n Could we take a five-minute break here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure, not a problem. You were talking about some of the landing things, and that made me think too about the Shuttle auto-land, and some of the issues and how that had to be improved over time. I was reading on your blog about STS-53, and that was an interesting story. I was wondering if you could share that with us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that is a very interesting story. There had been this capability built in the Shuttle autopilot to auto-land. The pilot or commander does not fly the Shuttle until it goes subsonic. That’s about the time the commander takes over. It’s all flown automatically down to that point, which is a very short amount of time to fly. We’re talking two to three minutes from the time the Shuttle goes subsonic until you’re actually wheels on the ground. It’s not a very long time to fly, but that’s what they live for. It’s a big deal.\\n\\n There were certain deficiencies or concerns with the autopilot early on, flying that last part of the landing all the way to the ground. The crews traditionally fly it, and they’ve done a good job. There were some instances that were interesting, and STS-53 is one of those, but we never certified auto-land. We were worried that under certain circumstances—after we commit to landing, you basically are coming in. You do the de-orbit burn, you don’t have a lot of options. You could switch ends of the runway, and that’s about it. There’s not a lot of other places to go land the Shuttle.\\n\\n We practiced these emergency landings all the time. We were to land the Shuttle at Orlando International [Airport], or something like that. But there’s not a lot of options, and clearly, if you go to a runway that isn’t set up for the Shuttle, then you don’t have a lot of the navigation aids the crew are used to, and all this kind of thing. We got worried about we might need auto-land, and particularly when we’re facing the very long Shuttle flights, the extended duration Orbiter flights, if the commander had problems.\\n\\n There was a case on one of the early flights where the crew didn’t hydrate properly and they didn’t pump their g-suits [anti-gravity suits] up, and the commander almost passed out, which was scary. That was a very early flight, and we all knew about that. We made very sure that the crew drank all the water they were supposed to and had their g-suits pressurized and all this kind of thing.\\n\\n There was always a concern, particularly as we got these longer and longer flights, there’s some vestibular things that happen, some vision changes that happen with people, and we were concerned about them landing. We wanted to make sure we had a viable auto-land system, and the program manager gave us direction to test that out. For STS-53, we worked very, very hard to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s so we could do an auto-land test. An auto-land test—you’re using a real Orbiter with the live crew. They’ve got to, no kidding, be right on the mark, or it could be really bad.\\n\\n Dave [David M.] Walker was the commander. We worked very hard with him to train on how to monitor this automatic system, this landing, and if it’s not doing the right thing, how to manually take control back without getting into a worse situation. We did a huge amount of training, and just a couple of weeks before the flight, we were set to do this auto-land test, practiced, practiced, practiced. Had written all the rules and all the procedures and briefed everybody on what we were going to do. Had the blessing of the program manager and the center director and the chief of the Astronaut Office and everybody else.\\n\\n Jed [Jeremiah W.] Pearson, who was the associate administrator for human spaceflight, former Marine Corps general, as I recall, reviewed it and said, “We’re not going to be flying any more of these long-duration flights. We don’t need to do this. We’re going to knock this off.” Devastating. The team was all set to do this. We were all ready to do this, we were so excited about doing it, thought it would be a good capability.\\n\\n The general, for whatever reason—I never talked to him about it; he was briefed at a higher level than the flight director—said, “No, we’re not going to do any more of those so we don’t need to demonstrate this auto-land thing. It’s risky.” He made that call. His prerogative. That’s why we have senior-level managers to assess the risk. But we were devastated. We went off and did the flight, another one of those classified flights, can’t talk about what we did on the flight.\\n\\n Got ready to do the landing—it’s one of those classic days. You look back on it and you say, “If some novelist were to write this, I wouldn’t believe that it could happen.” We were watching low clouds at the Kennedy Space Center. The weather was good, but the clouds were coming in at about 3,000 feet, and our limit was you had to have a broken ceiling no lower than 8,000 feet. That’s to give the commander enough time to get the visual landing as you’re flying on instruments and as you’re diving down for that final approach.\\n\\n You want to break out of the clouds in enough time to see the visual landing aids and the visual picture, in case those electronic instruments are off. They were never off, but we worried about it. The rule was 8,000 feet minimum ceiling, and we had this line of clouds approaching. They were down around 3,000 foot on the bottom, and so, if they got to the Shuttle Landing Facility before landing, it was going to be a no-go. We’re working with the weathermen, “What’s the wind? How fast are the clouds breaking?”\\n\\n Finally, we came to the conclusion that it was going to be an unacceptable landing time, so I waved off and sent them to Edwards, where conditions were beautiful. Clear sky, unlimited visibility, though it typically is out there. A little bit of wind, but not bad. Lo and behold, in the time that we waved off and got ready to go around again, those clouds stopped. It was like Mother Nature was playing with us. Too late to go to KSC, turns out that the conditions at landing time were beautiful. It would have been great to land at the Kennedy Space Center that day. But it’s in the rearview mirror, you can’t do anything about it.\\n\\n We go to Edwards, and Dick [Richard N.] Richards was flying the Shuttle Training Aircraft, and one of the things you want is the report from the Shuttle Training Aircraft pilot giving you, “I’ve just flown this same approach in the STA, and here’s what I saw, and I think it’s a good day or not.” We had this one cloud, and the wind is blowing moderately. We had this one cloud that comes over and obscures, just plops right over the visual landing, its 3,000-foot bottom. Dick Richards flies the approach, “Oh, it’s a great day to fly except this one cloud is right over the visual. You should not come here today because it’s right over the visual landing aids.” We said, “It’s an hour and a half till we land, that cloud’s not going to be there, and it’s the only cloud in the whole sky.”\\n\\n Well, guess what? It stayed there. All the way down to de-orbit burn, Dick Richards is yelling at us over the radio, “No-go! We’ve got a cloud over the landing edge. You can’t land here, no-go!” I’m thinking, “Eh? The wind is blowing, we know what the winds are, how could that cloud not be being blown by the wind away?” The weathermen, “Oh yes, it’s going to move flight, it’s not going to be there.” I gave them a go for the de-orbit burn, thought Dick Richards was going to reach through the radio and strangle me. We said, “No, we believe the cloud’s not going to be there, so we’re going to give the go.” Guess what? It didn’t go anywhere.\\n\\n There were some other very interesting things that happened on that landing, and Dave Walker made a wonderful landing, but he didn’t break out of the cloud. He didn’t see the visual landing aids until 3,000 feet, exactly what I’d been worried about at the Kennedy Space Center that didn’t happen, happened to us at the Edwards flight complex where it shouldn’t happen. You don’t think Mother Nature laughs at us?\\n\\n As I say, the physics of the situation are a mystery to me. Meteorological science tells you that those things shouldn’t happen, and yet, they did. I bear witness to it, and we made the best decision we could at the time that we had to make the decision, and it was a bad decision. Should have landed at KSC, should not have landed at Edwards. It was really funny—and we were all practiced to do the auto-land thing and didn’t do it.\\n\\n Then, we had a little incident with the tape recorder, which is really funny. It’s very important, as the Shuttle’s approaching the runway, you fly this Heading Alignment Cone, HAC, cylinder cone. You’re not aimed at the runway; you’re doing the crosswind leg and then you circle around and you go on the final leg. Because of the way the Orbiter flies, it’s very important to fly that precisely, because you could put too much g [gravity] on the vehicle. Or you could violate the venting. The air is rushing back into this big old payload bay as you’re coming down, and if you don’t allow the air to re-press it properly because you’re descending too fast, you could crush the Orbiter. Bad things could happen.\\n\\n There was a whole series of constraints on how you fly this Heading Alignment Cone and come down. They had, in the cockpit, a tape recorder velcroed up behind the commander to capture their conversation. I think that’s a pretty typical thing to do. Just as they got on to be ready to turn on to the HAC, the tape recorder came un-velcroed and fell on the floor and distracted the commander. All of a sudden, we’re watching the plots on mission control, and instead of the little tick marks where the Orbiter’s flying, going right over the circle which is what we’ve always seen before, they’re going out. I thought, “They’re going to crash.”\\n\\n There’s nothing we could say, and by the time we could say anything, David got back in control and he cut the corner on the HAC—which you’re not supposed to do because of the g and venting concern. And then they’re on final [approach] and don’t see the ground until 3,000 feet, so there was a lot more excitement in Mission Control in that landing than there should have been. There’s a story like that—maybe not that dramatic—but there’s a story for every flight. Operation was very exciting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’re getting close to the hour and a half mark, but I was thinking, if we can just start talking about some of the Shuttle-Mir flights, and that first experience working with the Russians and the first one, STS-60, taking a cosmonaut on the Shuttle. Did you work that flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I worked one of the early flights, and I don’t remember. I need to go back and check my records. We all went through the experience of working with the Russians for the first time in Shuttle-Mir. We were all children of the Cold War, and the Soviet Union was the enemy. In space we’d been competitors for years.\\n\\n We did have some of the veterans that had worked Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project], ASTP, back in the day. They told stories of going to Moscow in the bad old days, where they stayed in pretty crummy hotels and were followed everywhere by men in trench coats and fedoras if they went out to try to find a restaurant, all this kind of stuff. We were not in those days. It was much more open, and we learned pretty quickly that the Russians were pretty good guys. I think one of the most valuable things they did was they sent many of us at JSC to a Russian-American cross-cultural class.\\n\\n We had a guy that came and talked about the differences in American and Russian culture, and there were many valuable things we learned. The most valuable, I think, is that the Russians are very interested in the pecking order of things. Where do people fall in the social hierarchy? They’re interested in personally moving higher in the social hierarchy, and therefore they can be very contentious.\\n\\n Their culture and history say that they have to really be contentious to try to move up this ladder—regardless of the official organization chart. Not so important to them as it is to us. We tend to think so-and-so’s in this position, therefore they’re responsible and I need to give them good advice, and they’ll pick the direction, and then will execute that. Russians are more about this informal, who’s where in the informal pecking order, so they like to pick quarrels because that’s how they juggle around for this social pecking order. They like to be confrontational. And they like to drink a lot too, but that’s a different story.\\n\\n I remember this very distinctly—the first couple of meetings I sat in with some of these Russian guys, it was like, “You Americans don’t know anything, you’re foolish. We know how to run—” It was very confrontational. Then after it was over and we decided what we’re going to do, this all, “Hail fellow well met, we’re all colleagues, we’re all going to have a great experience together.” It’s just that the dichotomy struck me, and I was really glad I got to go through that class.\\n\\n I have to tell you, about the same time they gave us the Japanese-American cross-cultural class. The thing I remember most from that class, and there were a lot of things, is that the Japanese want to avoid confrontation at all costs. When they say, “hai,” it doesn’t necessarily mean “yes,” which is standard translation. It can mean, “I heard what you were saying.��� Doesn’t necessarily mean “yes,” but “we just want to avoid confrontation and we’ll do this non-confrontationally.”\\n\\n It became the standing joke around the Flight Director Office that when we had these multinational meetings later on for [International] Space Station [ISS], we put the Japanese guy next to the Russian guy and watched the fun. Because the Russian guy would want to be confrontational and the Japanese guy would be trying to avoid at all costs. We had minor entertainment that way. Those are all generalizations—everybody’s got their own peculiarities. We learned very quickly that they were very smart.\\n\\n I worked as lead flight director on STS-96. Not Shuttle-Mir, but ISS flight. Second ISS flight. We just put the [Unity] node and the FGB [Functional Cargo Block] together on STS-88, and STS-96 was put in the schedule to carry some logistics and outfitting equipment. It was going to be the first flight to the Space Station, but it worked very closely with the Khrunichev [State Research and Production Space Center, Moscow] flight directors for the FGB. They’re really good folks. I enjoyed meeting with them.\\n\\n I was the lead flight director, and we had this sim [simulation] case where we tried to dock, and the docking mechanism failed, and we bounced off. They were in for a drift, we were in for a drift, everybody started to tumble and move apart and we had to figure out what to do. Hadn’t thought about that as a possibility—the sim guys were great at finding things that you hadn’t thought about. As lead flight director, I went back and I wrote this, I think, 12 pages of every conceivable situation we could be in for this case. I wrote 12 pages. We had it translated and sent to the Russians, and the Russian flight director wound up putting his version of my 12 pages on a three-by-five [inch] card. That’s when I really believed that I learned that they were very smart guys. He got it right too, by the way. I started using his card instead of my 12 pages. They’re really good guys, and we learned a lot.\\n\\n Sergei [K.] Krikalev, who was the first Russian to fly, was just—I would call him a superior human being. He is just wonderful to work with, and I think on my flight we carried Yelena [V.] Kondakova, who’s the first Russian woman to fly on the Shuttle. She was outstanding as well. We had just very good relationships with those early cosmonauts, at least the ones that I worked with we did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you ever get to travel to Russia, or their Mission Control?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "N. Wayne Hale", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had people in Mission Operations that were in Moscow continuously for months and years and made dozens of trips, and I wound up making three. I was in Moscow three times out at the TsUP [Russian Federal Space Agency Mission] Control Center. Once was for pre-flight prep, and then twice as I supported—we would always send a Shuttle flight director to the TsUP to represent the Houston team. We had a Houston support group, which were flight controllers that lived over there basically. I went for two times to support Shuttle missions. It was really good, I’m really glad I got to meet them and work with them and meet in the cafeteria with them.\\n\\n The Americans, we had this big ex-pat [expatriate] group of NASA Americans staying at this apartment house that we rented called the Volga. We had a bunch of rooms in the Volga, and that was kind of like being back in the dorm, you know. We’d all get together and make dinner together or something. It was a good experience, very multicultural. Across the street from the Volga there was a bar, and you did not go over there because it was the mafia’s hangout. They said, “Don’t go directly across the street, don’t stand out in front of that bar. If you want to catch a taxi or something, go down the street.”\\n\\n It’s all those little things, back in the early ’90s, mid ’90s. I think it’s changed dramatically since then. That was all a good experience. Maybe we ought to come back and talk about that another time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We can stop there, sure. No problem." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00497", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SchweickartRL/schweickartrl.htm", + "original_file_name": "SchweickartRL_10-19-99.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/SchweickartRL/SchweickartRL_10-19-99.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 19 October 1999" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Russell L. Schweickart" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is October 19, 1999. This oral history is being conducted at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, with Russell L. Schweickart, who is known as Rusty to his friends and colleagues. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, with the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.\\n\\n Thank you again for taking time to visit us today for this project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We'd like for you to start by telling us how your interest in flight and in space flight began." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's hard to say how it began. I can recall several incidents from when I was very young, which kind of illustrate and refresh my memory that my interest started very young, but I can't honestly say any precise thing started it.\\n\\n I can remember when I was a kid, walking. I lived in the country, on a farm and my parents and I would walk on summer evenings around the local roads. I can remember one time I must have been five or something like that, I honestly don't remember, in that vicinity, and we were looking up at the moon, it was a full moon and fairly low in the sky, early evening, and I remember watching it go through the limbs of the trees.\\n\\n My parents asked me about it or I said something about the moon, and that was the first time I recall, I think, having said, \"I'd like to go there one day,\" or, \"People will go there one day,\" or something like that. I can still remember my parents looked at me more than a little askance and kind of chuckled and laughed, you know, humoring this little kid. That's my first clear memory of an intention or an interest in people going to the moon and the kind of not exactly ridicule, but patient humor from serious people that was given to me as a result of that interest." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And as you grew up, your life led you to the Air Force." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I was always interested in airplanes, and happened to live in New Jersey on the shore, probably twenty miles from Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. This was, of course, in the early days of World War II, and there were lots and lots of airplanes flying around, dog-fighting in the sky all the time. There were blimps around. In fact, Lakehurst was, not just in my life, but in my father's life, he actually snuck onto the property at Lakehurst and watched the Hindenburg come in the day that it burned up. So it was interesting stuff.\\n\\n In any case, the sky was always filled with airplanes. As a result, I used to identify all—\"That's a [F6F] Hellcat. That's a—\" I can't even remember. \"An [TBM] Avenger,\" blah, blah, blah, you know.\\n\\n And then there were a couple of other things. Of course, with World War II cranking up, there were the afternoon fifteen-minute serials on the radio, you know. This was before the days of TV. Usually around 4:00 or 4:15 or something like that, and every fifteen minutes you would crank through \"Hopalong Harrigan and Tank Tinker\" and \"Terry and the Pirates\" and \"Captain Midnight\" and \"Tennessee Jed,\" you know, on and on and on. So I would regularly listen to these.\\n\\n In reflection on that, my interest in flying airplanes, \"Hop Harrigan and \"Tank Tinker\" were an Air Force pilot and his mechanic, if I remember right. And, of course, \"Captain Midnight,\" you know. So there were those things and, of course, \"Buck Rogers\" and things of that kind I would see once in a while. All of those, I think, made something of an impression.\\n\\n In addition, I was always interested from the time I can remember in science, and astronomy, in particular, was very interesting to me. Which came first, I don't know.\\n\\n Then strangely influential in my life was an uncle who lived nearby, and I would basically see him every weekend, because he would come visit. We lived with my grandparents, and he was my aunt's husband. She was my grandparents' daughter. They would come by, and Uncle Gus would always—I mean, every week he would ask me the same question, you know, \"What do you want to be when you grow up?\" And any time there was an airplane in the sky, it was, \"What's that?\" So I would regularly point out every airplane in the sky to him and identify which one it was, and, of course, when he asked what did I want to be, one of the things I wanted to be was a fighter pilot. So all of those things were very strong influences." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At what point did you move your life closer to that? Through high school?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes, although high school is generally—you don't specialize in anything, but certainly my interest matured a bit as I went through high school. I can remember very vividly tracking in newspapers or the radio, magazines and things of that kind,\\n\\n Popular Science\\n\\n ,\\n\\n Popular Mechanics\\n\\n , and things, I would track, after World War II, the progression of maximum altitude reached by the V-2s fired up out of White Sands [Proving Ground, New Mexico], and when they had the first photographs, you know, the first ones that you could barely see some curvature on the Earth, you know, and I'd sort of hold the magazine up sideways to see if I could see it. [Laughter]\\n\\n But all of that then got me quite familiar with [Wernher] von Braun, with the V-2s, with the history of rocketry. And then probably one of the most seminal things in my life and, I suspect, a number of others, was\\n\\n Collier's\\n\\n magazine, which, of course, doesn't exist anymore, but Cornelius Ryan was the editor of\\n\\n Collier's\\n\\n , and for whatever reason had a strong interest in the idea of space flight and put out a special issue of\\n\\n Collier's\\n\\n magazine where he gathered together not just Wernher von Braun, which he did, but also Heinz Haber, who was a medical guy, Willy Ley, Chesley Bonestell, the tremendous artist and illustrator. All of them had special sections in this issue of\\n\\n Collier's\\n\\n magazine, and I can remember having read through that till it was totally dog-eared.\\n\\n Following that, there was a series of books which came out. I don't remember the publisher anymore. It may have been\\n\\n Collier's\\n\\n . They were sort of some of the first coffee table books in that sense. I don't remember the titles.\\n\\n Across the Space Frontier\\n\\n was one of them, but there were three books altogether. They went into fairly detailed technical and design questions and issues, as well as having dramatic Chesley Bonestell imaginative artwork. But those were all strong influences, and those all occurred throughout high school, and I think maybe the third of that series of books I just mentioned came out about the time that I was a freshman at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts], which was in 1952. So those were all influential things in shaping my early interest." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about Sputnik? How did that affect your life when you heard about the launch?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, again, because I had been tracking the V-2 and everything else, I was very familiar, let me say, as a kid. Obviously I wasn't technically involved in it. But as a lay person at the time, I was very interested in and tracking the development of the Vanguard and the U.S. attempt at putting up the first satellite.\\n\\n Obviously there was some disappointment with the Russians getting Sputnik up first, but it was clear that there was a race on and that we were having some troubles, and who was going to make it first. They made it first. Well, that, along with the first manned flight and all the rest of it, didn't mean a lot to me in terms of patriotism. What it really meant more than anything else was, hey, we're really going to go now. I mean, you know, here's competition. Here's some real stimulus to keep things moving. So I was as happy that anybody went up there. I would have liked it to have been ours, but big deal. I was a lot more interested in the exploration and development of space capability, regardless. There was no question the U.S. was going to be a major part of it. We ended up starting out a little behind the curve, but that stimulated us a good bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned, of course, going to MIT, where you pursued your interest there. Could you tell us about those days and what you were doing there that led you into your career with NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, again because of my interest in aeronautics, airplanes, and things of that kind, I mean, I really had two interests in a sense. I guess from the time I was seven, eight years old, something like that, I had a Chem Craft chemistry set. [Laughter] I guess every kid did. I had a little place in the second floor of one of the buildings on our farm that was my laboratory, and I'd mix things and smoke would come out, and occasionally I'd blow something up. So chemistry was also an interest, but it was an interest that was about as deep as a Chem Craft chem set takes you.\\n\\n When I went to MIT, in my freshman year I enrolled in chemical engineering. By the second term at MIT, I decided that chemistry was not really for me, and I went to what was my second technical interest, which was aeronautics. Of course, that was really a much more deep interest. Chemistry was, after that, never any real interest whatsoever. So it was really in my second term at MIT that I went into aeronautical engineering, and that led me on.\\n\\n Again because I wanted to be a pilot, I also joined the Air Force ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] at MIT, and went all the way through MIT in ROTC, and ended up being commander of the corps, I guess, or whatever, by the time I was a senior. Of course, from there, that led directly into my active Air Force, the beginning of my active Air Force duty as soon as I graduated from MIT in '56." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then you applied for the NASA astronaut corps. I understand that you were selected in the group of 1963." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. There's a lot of time between there. I went into the Air Force and worked my way through fighter pilot training and then active duty in the Philippines, flying [North American] F-100s [Super Sabres]. I spent four years, and then due to an administrative fluke, I ended up with a really crappy assignment when I came back from the Philippine Islands, which then gave me the best excuse in the world to get out of the Air Force. I wasn't interested in it as a career anyway. I wanted to get my advanced degrees. So having that bad assignment just made it perfect. I immediately started working my exit strategy from the Air Force the first time.\\n\\n Went back to MIT in 1960, in the fall of '60, to enter graduate studies. It had then shifted at MIT from aeronautical engineering to the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. So they were beginning to move astronautics into and meld it with aeronautics, which was great for me. I also, because I needed the money and wanted to keep up my flying, I joined the Air National Guard in Massachusetts, so I was a weekend warrior. I would fly in the evenings during the week, I would fly on the weekends. Somehow I had enough time for my family, but I had three jobs keeping food on the table and everything else.\\n\\n At that point I had three kids, but my wife was pregnant again, and the Berlin Wall went up, I guess it must have been somewhere around the summer of 1961. By the fall of 1961, [John F.] Kennedy, President Kennedy, had activated the reserves, the Air National Guard in particular, and our outfit, being from Massachusetts, and he was from Massachusetts, he had to call up his own state. So our Guard unit was activated, and in the fall of 1961, I went back into active duty in the Air Force and deployed over to Europe.\\n\\n Spent a year over there, saving the world, came back in '62 to pick up my MIT graduate work. During that time—and we'll talk about that—but during that time I had really made up my mind that that was, again, the era of [Project] Mercury and Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.] and John [H.] Glenn [Jr.] as the first flyer, first orbiter. By the time I came back to MIT that fall of 1962, I had made up my mind I wanted to be an astronaut.\\n\\n Then in 1963, early '63, in the spring, the applications were open for the third group of astronauts. That was what I was shooting for, and I then applied in the third selection." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was a different group of astronauts. Many of them before, or all of them before, had been test pilots, but yet they were asking—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was a big issue. We'll talk, I'm sure, about what made me decide I wanted to be an astronaut at that point. But let's go to that application. I mean, the big question for me when I came back off active duty and resumed my graduate studies was how was I going to qualify to be an astronaut. Because I had all of the academic credentials that I was going to need, and I was pretty aware of that. But the first two groups had a mandatory requirement of being test pilot, and the question was, how was I going to get to be a test pilot, because I assumed that that would continue.\\n\\n That was a serious challenge, because as a civilian it's not easy to become a test pilot. It's not something you just can decide to do and easily accomplish. I was debating, do I have to go back in the Air Force in order to somehow pull this off and get into test pilot school, or how am I going to work this? And that was a bit of a quandary, but a number of us at MIT at that time were interested in this, and in particular another guy in the lab with me, a guy named Phil Chapman, and also [Edwin E.] Buzz Aldrin [Jr.], who was in the instrumentation lab at the time and finishing up his graduate studies, was also interested. So the three of us were actually sort of tracking this and trying to find out what was going on in terms of prerequisites.\\n\\n Just before the applications were actually announced, or the opening for applications was announced, we found out through the grapevine that the requirement for test pilot was going to be dropped, and all of a sudden that opened up the possibility now, not after I somehow managed to become a test pilot. So that was the thing that really opened the possibility to becoming a reality." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the next step that you found, once you found that out? Were you able to then contact them or did they put an issuance out for people such with the credentials?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was really just an announcement that applications would be accepted. I can't remember whether I had to send away for certain forms or whether the information required was spelled out. I can't remember exactly the first step. But the prerequisites were listed, and I now met all of them, although I must admit—and this is not news to key people—but I sort of cheated slightly, in that one of the prerequisites in place of it, you had to be either a test pilot or have 1,000 hours of high-performance jet experience. Well, at the time that I actually filled out the application, I had about 995 hours or something like that, so I said 1,002 hours and sent it off and said goodbye to my wife and I went out to the airport and I flew seven more hours so that by the time they opened the letter, I was an honest person again. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Glad to hear you redeemed yourself. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right. So it was okay. It wasn't the postmark date; it was the day they opened it. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you were accepted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course, the selection process, you know, goes for months. I don't know, there were four or five different hurdles in it. Each time I would get the notice that I made that step in the selection, it was an amazing surprise. So that went through to the final step in the selection, which was really the interview processes here at JSC [Johnson Space Center] before, in fact, JSC existed. But here in Houston, let me put it that way, at what was then the Manned Space[craft] Center.\\n\\n So after that, I think there were 26 of us or something that made it to that point, out of 740 or something who applied, and after that, it dropped down to 13, and I was one of those. So it was a great moment when I received the call from [Donald K.] Deke Slayton, you know, and asking if I was still interested in being an astronaut. I guess that was something—I don't remember the date exactly, but it was either early September—I think it was probably early September of '63, and I was in the quandary at that point, if I didn't make this, did I go on to get my doctorate or did I head off to try and be a test pilot. I basically decided until I heard from NASA, I wasn't going to decide. NASA decided for me by selecting me, and the answer was obviously, \"Yes, Deke, I'm still interested.\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then you came to Houston." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. I was very interested in getting down here. You know, when something changes, get on with it. So I was really the first in the group to get down here. I started working in engineering. In fact, we were packing our house the day that JFK [President Kennedy] was assassinated. The moving van was there, and we didn't even have the television connected. The neighbors came running over and said that JFK had just been shot. All the way down, driving with the kids and some household goods down to Texas, and stopping all the way, every day it was, you know, more about the assassination and Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. I mean, all of that was just a blur of transition from Cambridge, Massachusetts, down to Houston, Texas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was an interesting route that you had to take through, and then you landed here and your new life began." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Totally new life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You adjusted to a completely different culture and climate and became part of the—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was probably a little more challenging for the rest of the family. Being in the Air Force, I had moved around a bit. Although my wife had, too, and the kids, of course, were coming along and they don't notice those things much anyway. [Laughter] But I was not unaccustomed to moving around at that point, so it was the next place to live. At that age, you go where the opportunity is, as opposed to this age, where I live where I want to live. [Laughter] Find out how to make a living." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, the program was new and the adventures were new. Tell us about some of those days of training and how you learned all there was to learn at the time. Were you helping them to learn more about the space program as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, given my MIT background and my flying background, in a lot of ways I was better prepared for the training than most of my classmates. A lot of them had as much or more flying experience as I did, but they didn't have the technical background. Some who had a lot of the technical background, like [R. Walter] Walt Cunningham, for example, was a little more on the science side than the engineering side. Of course, most of the astronaut training is really engineering. It's systems work and mechanics. It's a lot of stuff associated with things like aerodynamics and astronautics, both of which, of course, were my profession. So I was probably, from an academic point of view, better suited to the program than almost anybody else in the group. Perhaps [David R.] Dave Scott, but maybe not.\\n\\n In any event, the training was very interesting because it was not academic, it was real. I was going to be flying these things, so it's that much more interesting. On the other hand, an awful lot of it was very familiar to me, so it was not a strain in any way to go through the academic portion of the astronaut training. The other things, survival training and all that, I mean, that's all pretty much fun and games." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it took you to some different places." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You eat things like iguanas, but other than eating iguanas and things, you know, that's fun. That's physical challenge and it's fun to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you took some trips, I think, all over the world as part of your training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as we got more and more moving toward the Apollo Program, we took very seriously the geologic training. The big question, as you recall, in those days was, we're going to end up on the moon with all these craters, and what are they? Are they really impacts from meteorites or are they volcanoes, volcanic craters as a result of thermal activity internal to the moon, or a mix of them? Are we going to be able to tell the difference? So we spent a lot of time in field geology and visiting terrific places. I mean, the Pinacotis [phonetic] area in Mexico, up in Alaska, all over the Western part of the United States and Hawaii, volcano observatory in Hawaii, and traipsing all around the volcanoes there. Iceland.\\n\\n So we had an excellent graduate-level field geology training course, and it was terrific. I mean, I love that kind of thing anyway, so to me it was like water to a duck. I loved it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you given specific roles and responsibilities regarding helping with scientific experiments or planning for these excursions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Once the basic academic sort of training is done, or at least at that time was done, which took about a year, pretty much classwork and some field stuff, then one in the astronaut office in those days would pick up special assignments, technical assignments, as well as sort of doing maintenance level on training and specialized things.\\n\\n I at first picked up oversight of the Gemini scientific and medical experiments that were assigned to the Gemini Program, and that seemed a natural because of my background at MIT. It was a subject of interest to me anyway. The scientific experiments were, to me, an essential part of the program. I mean, we were not going into space only to just go into space, but to learn as much as we could not only about space, but about the Earth, about solar system. So, to me, the knowledge to be gained by going into space was the real goal. Getting into space was the necessary precursor in order to really accomplish that goal.\\n\\n So I was quite interested in the scientific experiments. In fact, I was, in an academic way, interested in the medical experiments as well. So I oversaw both of those and the development of them for the Gemini Program, and that put me in an interesting position, because, as you know, there was a fair amount of tension between the astronauts and the doctors, because the astronauts were not just astronauts who would perform experiments, but they were the guinea pigs and the subjects that the doctors had to experiment with, the only guinea pigs that the doctors had at the time, almost the only guinea pigs. [Laughter]\\n\\n Well, there were a lot of the astronauts who were not nearly as interested in the scientific results as I was, and they had been poked and probed before I had gotten there. As I caught up with them and being poked and probed, I began to be a little more sympathetic to some of the resistance to what was going on with the medical experiments, and at the same time I was also sympathetic to the science. So I found myself trying to bridge between my group of astronauts and the group of doctors and scientists.\\n\\n I did a better job bridging with the scientists than I did with the doctors, because the doctors were intrusive. From time to time they got pretty—they would basically be about as intrusive as somebody would let them be, and so I became sort of the front line between people especially like [Virgil I.] Gus Grissom and Al Shepard. In particular, Gus was really pretty short with the doctors. Wally [Walter M. Schirra, Jr.] as well, but Wally had a big enough mouth that he took care of himself. [Laughter] So I tried to bridge that gap and keep peace, at the same time get some things done as much as could be done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That had to be a challenging position for you to be almost in the middle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was. Gus, at first—Gus and I came to really love each other and we really liked each other a great deal by the time we got done, which was when he got killed. But at first, Gus saw me as a scientist and as a fink. I mean, I was almost a doctor myself, as far as Gus was concerned. He misunderstood. If I said anything slightly ambiguous, Gus would always bias on the negative side. So Gus almost went out of his way to misunderstand me at first. As a result, there was a lot of early tension there.\\n\\n Then later on, we were assigned to the same crew. I was assigned to his backup crew on the first Apollo mission, and we got to know each other a lot better. As I said, we came to really appreciate each other a great deal, even though we were two quite different personalities. But we, thank heaven, overcame that early problem.\\n\\n But it was a tight situation early on, because, as I say, the doctors would basically go as far as until they got this nose rapped. And I can't blame them. Their interest was in getting as much information as they could, but from time to time it spilled over into filling academic squares and being able to write a learned paper much more than it had to do with in fact learning essential medical information to further the development of space flight and humans in space.\\n\\n When it started getting over on that side, I got pretty hard myself on the doctors, so I tried to make sure that what was being done had a very clear purpose in terms of space medical research and not just furthering somebody's academic credentials." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did this role continue until you were named to a mission?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I think I actually—it was perhaps the end of the Gemini Program which did it. I don't remember the timing exactly. But I went from that role to overseeing the guidance and navigation systems for Apollo, in particular the onboard computers and the general G&N, guidance and navigation, development for Apollo.\\n\\n That took me right back to MIT, who were responsible for the instrumentation lab, what became the Draper Lab at MIT, were the prime contractor, [Minneapolis-] Honeywell [Regulator Company] and AC Spark Plug [Division of General Motors Corp.] at that time in supporting roles, but led by MIT. So that put me right back in very familiar territory and right back into the middle of my academic work as well, engineering work. That was very, very interesting. Of course, through that I came to know much more closely a lot of the other people that eventually I worked very closely with, like [Charles C.] Pete Conrad [Jr.] and [James A.] Jim McDivitt and others. So that was a natural assignment again, and very interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you there when you learned that you were going to be part of the Apollo 9 crew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so, yes. I don't remember. Yes, I had to still be in that role. At some point—and again the timing is not vivid in my mind, but somewhere in that period, Pete Conrad shifted over and took over that responsibility of the guidance and navigation system. I think that was probably when I was—that must have been when I was named to a crew, the first Apollo crew. That was with Grissom, [Edward H.] White [II], and [Roger B.] Chaffee, and McDivitt and Scott and I were assigned to back them up. It may have been at that time that Pete took over. I stayed very closely in touch with it, but I remember Pete did take that responsibility up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your role as the backup crew. How were you involved and what were some of your duties as being the first backup crew for the Apollo Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, being a backup crew is the same as being a prime crew until very close to the flight, until flight day. But, I mean, there's no difference between you for 95 percent of the training. It's only as you get right down before flight that it's pretty clear that the prime crew's going to fly, unless you can break somebody's leg late in the game. So you and the prime crew are doing the same thing.\\n\\n When it comes to any final decision, if there's some disagreement, you know, you always end up deferring to the prime crew. But by and large, it's a consensus process. So I was a lunar module pilot, even though we didn't have the lunar module scheduled with the first flight, but, nevertheless, we had the lunar module pilot and Roger Chaffee and I were the prime—I was the backup, he was the prime, lunar module pilots. And again, in Apollo, unlike today, everyone had to be able to do everything because you never knew what was going to happen and everybody had to be able to fly the spacecraft, etc.\\n\\n So while there was some differentiation particularly in the sort of day-to-day assignments, while you were preparing for the mission in terms of the training, the training was almost flat across the board, not quite, a little bias toward the commander doing the stick and rudder stuff for the entries and that sort of thing, but everybody did them. So it was not quite level, but it was almost level. I would focus more on the electrical systems and communication systems, and Jim would focus more on the flying systems, and Dave would focus a little more on the telescope and sextant and the navigation systems and that sort of thing. But, again, we all did everything.\\n\\n In terms of the day-to-day assignments, I hardly remember. I was probably in charge of certain checklists. Who knows." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did you feel at some point during this training, of course, with the fire that occurred, that the Apollo Program may be stopped, or did you have confidence that the program would be able to pick up and go again and you'd be able to fulfill your desire to be an astronaut?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I never had any doubt after the fire that we would pick up and go. I mean, it was a little dicey in terms of what was the congressional reaction going to be, what was the public reaction going to be. But it was really how long was the turbulence going to last more than it was, was it going to somehow terminate the program.\\n\\n I don't think anybody really thought that it would terminate the program, especially those of us in the program. I mean, with rare or no exception, all of us have had lost friends flying. I mean, I could probably count on two hands, but maybe not, the number of personal friends who had died in aircraft accidents, in flying accidents, and you don't stop flying. So for us that was quite natural. I mean, it's always regrettable and sometimes even inexcusable that people die. Nevertheless, they do. You're not playing Tiddlywinks and you know it.\\n\\n So for us it was regrettable, but unfortunate. Nevertheless, it was acceptable that occasionally people will die doing this, and they'll die in the future. Accidents happen and you keep going. So that wasn't so much of a question, and I didn't have any doubt that I would fly. It was just a matter of who long would it take to get things going. But that was a very traumatic time for the program and for a lot of individuals within the program, not to mention families.\\n\\n Of course, by the time that accident happened now, by that time we were already rescheduled. I mean, it's impossible for us to talk about all of the different scheduling assignments, vehicle assignments. I mean, we had every spacecraft through the first five or six spacecraft, both the command and service module and lunar module. I mean, we went through every variation and combination. I don't think any crew ever had so many different assignments as our crew. By the time the accident happened to Roger and Gus and Ed, our crew was already over on the second mission at the time.\\n\\n Once everything got straightened around again, we ended up being on the third mission, but that was after Frank Borman moved up on the second mission. You know, it goes on and on. I'm going to leave it to you to handle all that with your oral history of other people. [Laughter] But suffice to say that was a very turbulent time in which I went from backup crew on the first mission to prime crew on the third mission, which is where I ended up flying." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course we all know that you ended up as being the first ever LM pilot. Tell us how that must have felt to be able to fulfill this goal and then get to fly spacecraft that had never been created yet, and now you were going to be part of the whole evolution." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, frankly, with the exception of the first lunar landing, I could not and would not pick any other mission. I mean, the first flight of any vehicle is a test pilot's dream. To have the first flight of any airplane is a big thing for test pilots, for those who are watching this, who don't know. [Laughter] Which people might not.\\n\\n So to be the first lunar module pilot was, to me, terrific. While I would have loved to have flown on Gemini, if you gave me the choice of flying earlier on Gemini or flying the first lunar module, no question I'd have taken exactly the mission. I'd have bypassed Gemini, as I did, and gone right to the first LEM flight. That was great.\\n\\n So that was sort of my spacecraft, and while Jim was still the commander and flew the left-hand side, you know, that was my baby. It was a great experience. I spent, of course, as you can imagine, tremendous number of hours up at Bethpage, Long Island, at the Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corp.] plant, and got to know all the guys there, engineers and everybody, very well. It was a terrific team of people, and it was a very challenging vehicle for Grumman to design and develop.\\n\\n There were some early mistakes made which they came to recognize and Jim and I helped point out to them, organizations problems. I mean, Grumman started out with the lunar module, with the team that designed it being the team that would test it, and that's a bad formulation. I mean, the logic was that, well, they know most about it, and therefore they can test it. But when you create something, you know, you're biased toward the develop that you made, that you came up with, and it's a bad idea.\\n\\n So we helped urge Grumman to, in fact, separate and isolate those two teams of people, the design team from the testing and evaluation team. As a result, the first couple of vehicles down the line were pretty bad, and one of the big decisions that we were in the middle of in those days, not withstanding the tremendous challenge of getting to the moon and back before the end of the decade, which was a very palpable thing, we made the tough decision, along with [Joseph F.] Joe Shea and everybody else who was involved in it, but we made that tough decision of essentially making LM 2 a hangar queen or a museum piece and shifting to LM 3, which was in much better shape.\\n\\n I mean, Lunar Module 2 coming down the line was just bailing wire and Band-Aids. It was really a pincushion. We just realized that we'd just never get off the ground if we kept trying to put Band-Aids on that. \"Let's scrap it and get on with LM 3 and make that the first actual space vehicle,\" which we did.\\n\\n There were several technical decisions of that kind that are really tough calls. They cost money. They cost schedule. Both money and schedule were in short supply. I mean, as I said, that Kennedy goal articulated at Rice University back in [19]'62, I guess it was, to put a man on the moon and bring him back to Earth before the end of the decade, was very, very real. Boy, anything that cost a few weeks in the schedule or a few days was just tough. But we made a lot of touch decisions and ended up making the goal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Probably one of the tough decisions might have been where they had to switch the mission from Frank Borman's and move it up as Apollo 8, and then, of course, you became Apollo 9. Did that affect you and your crew in any way or were you still confident and able to do what you wanted to do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was a very good decision, you know. It was an excellent decision. We were really scheduled for the second mission, but again because of the LM 2 problems, we just kept running into problem after problem after problem in the testing and evaluating of the lunar module. Systems were just giving all kinds of problems, and integrating the systems was really havoc. So the LM kept moving to the right, and, you know, the calendar sits there and the deadline is there.\\n\\n Frank and I don't even know who all was involved in it, but certainly Frank was a heavy player in that game. He just saw a great opportunity for him to get to be the first guy around the back side of the moon, and Frank was willing to sacrifice flying the lunar module in order to be one of the first people to get around the moon, and he saw some value in terms of proving the navigation and communications capabilities by doing that, as well as the deep space capability and the reentry at high speed into the Earth with the command module.\\n\\n So Frank had enough material there to put together a good case, and in the end that was a very good decision. It simply relaxed the pressure a little bit on the Grumman team and on ourselves in trying to really push to get LM 3 ready and off the ground. So that put another mission in the middle and moved us to the third flight, and we forgot all about a second flight and Earth orbit, thank heaven. [Laughter] Who needed that?\\n\\n So I think it was great, and for us we could care less whether we moved from two to three. We kept the same mission. So it was good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And your crew was together for almost three years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we were together for a long time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember the first time that you and Jim McDivitt and Dave Scott had a chance to meet and talk about your mission?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. [Laughter] A non-memorable event." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess that's the good point." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Obviously the first time was when Al Shepard announced who the crews were, and there we were as the backup crew to the first mission. So that was when we became a crew, and obviously we talked about it as soon as the meeting was over. But aside from that, there was nothing in particular. We all knew each other." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And of course you got to know each other very well over the next three years. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[Laughter] We got to know each other very well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You worked very closely with Jim McDivitt, and of course Dave Scott was working on his effort as well. How often did the three of you come back together to work on simulations? Was that the majority of the training or did you have—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You mean after we were named as crew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All the time, every day. We had our office together. We moved into the same office. It was eight, ten, twelve hours a day. We would all do our own things, but I doubt, except for when somebody was on a trip on one coast or the other, something like that, if we were all in Houston, we talked every day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the decisions you made is the naming of your spacecraft. [Schweickart laughs.] Would you share with us the details on how that came about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, you've got oral history from other people as well, but just to refresh a few memories in case they watch this one and not those, the naming of spacecraft was part and parcel of the program, and public relations and everything else, public image from the time the program started. Of course, on Mercury, everything got off on a big patriotic kick with\\n\\n Friendship 7\\n\\n and\\n\\n Freedom 7\\n\\n and everything 7, you know. And I guess Gus' spacecraft was the Liberty Bell 7, if I remember.\\n\\n So when it came to the Gemini spacecraft, the same thing prevailed, and Gus, being the first up with Gemini III, named it the\\n\\n Molly Brown\\n\\n . And he named it the\\n\\n Molly Brown\\n\\n for somewhat obvious reasons, when he realized that the Liberty Bell sank, and, of course, the Unsinkable Molly Brown, etc., etc., etc. It was cute, and everybody appreciated it, but there were probably some raised eyebrows, naming it the\\n\\n Molly Brown\\n\\n . Well, Gus was a fairly stubborn character, and so he insisted on it being named the\\n\\n Molly Brown\\n\\n , and that worked until, I guess, Gus ended up with an illicit sandwich in space on Gemini III, and after that, the edict came down from NASA headquarters that there would be no more names for spacecraft, that things would be Gemini and GT [Gemini-Titan]—what was T? I can't even remember what T was. But at any rate, everything after that was names and numbers. So it came Gemini IV, Gemini V, VI, and VII, Gemini 67 for the combined mission, etc., etc. And everything was numbers.\\n\\n Well, here we are coming along with Apollo, and, of course, the first Apollo mission, forgetting the fire, etc., became Apollo 7 with Wally and Donn [F.] Eisele and Walt Cunningham, and then Apollo 8, of course, went out around the moon with Frank Borman, [James A.] Jim Lovell [Jr.], and [William A.] Bill Anders. And then came Apollo 9. Fine. So the logic was, well, we're Apollo 9. But now we've got two spacecraft, so when we're separated, what are we? And talking to each other, are we Apollo 9 Alpha and Apollo 9 Bravo, or whatever? And then when I go outside on EVA [extravehicular activity], I'm sort of a third spacecraft because now we're communicating over the radio with three different things. So what am I, you know? Or am I just Rusty or what am I?\\n\\n So at any rate, at one point McDivitt and I—I don't think Dave was there. I can't remember. At any rate, it was at the Fireside, which was a place in Downey, California, where we used to eat dinner and have drinks once in a while. We were sitting at the bar at the Fireside and we had a little discussion about this, and we decided we're going to start calling each other names. So we became—and we figured we can't make it anything humorous. It's got to be something very obvious, bland, that nobody can complain about, you know. [Laughter] But we needed to have call signs so that there wasn't going to be any ambiguity, you know. Did somebody mishear a call from the ground and get the wrong suffix and do something wrong? We wanted clear and distinct names.\\n\\n So we decided, and especially at that time because you'd look at the command module on the factory floor and it had a thin blue coating on it over the heat shield, and it looked like a gumdrop. Well, how can you complain about gumdrops? So it became\\n\\n Gumdrop\\n\\n . Of course, when you look at that thing over my shoulder here, I mean, what else does it look like but a spider? So,\\n\\n Gumdrop\\n\\n and\\n\\n Spider\\n\\n , you know. Now, can anybody complain about\\n\\n Gumdrop\\n\\n ? Well, we didn't ask anybody; we just started using it in the simulations, you know. As we got closer and closer to flight, Mission Control started using it. Then when I went outside, logical, right? Red Rover, because I had to cross over from one spacecraft to another. So, \"Red Rover, Red Rover, come over,\" right? So it became Red Rover,\\n\\n Gumdrop\\n\\n , and\\n\\n Spider\\n\\n . We didn't ask anybody. We didn't tell anybody. We just started doing it, and it stuck. And from then on in Apollo, the names came back in. So that's the story of naming spacecraft. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And a good one. You had trained and you had worked so closely together for so long, and the day the launch finally came. Then it was delayed because you had colds?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we really didn't, but I guess our throats were a little redder than normal, and there was some concern in the doctors that we might have developed colds. We didn't, so we flew a little later, but it put us on March 3rd instead of February 28th or whatever the original date was. And kept a lot of our friends and neighbors and families down at the Cape for an extended vacation to watch the launch. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It all went fine and you were up, and your mission that you'd been long waiting for had finally arrived." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Big day finally came. Your main emotion, at least for me, was, \"At last.\" You go through so many simulations and so much training, and you're sitting on top of that spacecraft so many times. It seems like it's just never going to happen, and especially in our case because we were a crew for so long, and, you know, with the fire and everything else, just on and on and on, it just seemed like we were never going to fly.\\n\\n Then here it was, finally the day there is and you're going to fly. But by that time you're very used to it. What's new, of course, is, in the end, weightlessness, but instead of just the noise, now you're getting the vibration and that kind of thing. But, you know, during the countdown, people don't understand it, but you doze off during the countdown. You're laying there, got up early anyway, somebody's talking to somebody else, and you're just laying there with the soft \"woosh\" of the air and the suit coming over you. [Snores] [Laughter] So you doze off, you know, and people think you're crazy. \"How can you sleep when you're about to be thrown into space?\" You sleep.\\n\\n But at any rate, it was basically an uneventful watch. In fact, it was uneventful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The best kind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Everything went perfectly normal, except for one thing. Except for one thing. That's right. Dave and I, I mean, we were all very aware of the possibility of having to get out of that spacecraft real fast on the pad before launch, in case something went wrong, any kind of a fire or an emergency. You know, you practice a lot, but your life could depend upon getting out that spacecraft hatch, which means you've got a lot of things to throw, switches and pump the handle and you've got a lot of things that you've got to do real fast if that happens.\\n\\n So after Guenter Wendt tightened us in the spacecraft and tightened the shoulder harnesses and really strapped us in so that we could not even move—and first of all, you can't have your freedom of motion. With Dave sitting here and Jim next to him, Dave and I had to make a choice. Was my left arm under his right arm, or was my left arm over his right arm? And from time to time we'd sort of switch because I had something to do or he had something to do. We couldn't get those three suits and those three bodies together in those seats side by side and still have full freedom of motion.\\n\\n So as soon as the hatch got closed and locked and Guenter stopped looking through the window, Dave and I loosened up our shoulder harnesses a little bit. I mean, not a lot, but we loosened them a little so that we could move around a little more easily and also give us a little more flexibility in case we had to get out of there.\\n\\n So during the launch, as I say, everything was perfectly normal, but at the end of the first stage, when the first stage cuts off, it cuts off very sharply. You go from almost 7 million pounds of thrust to zero in about a millisecond. Well, when the engines cut off like that and that compression on the launch vehicle suddenly stops, it expands. Of course, when it expands, the front end goes forward, and it threw Dave and I up toward—threw all three of us—up toward the instrument panel, but Dave and I had our shoulder harnesses loose, so we went like that right up, and our helmets stopped probably an inch from the instrument panel. I remember both of us sort of looked over at each other and went, \"Whew. We'd better tell the next guys not to do that.\" [Laughter] McDivitt kind of looked over at us like, \"What are you guys doing?\" So that was about the only notable thing on the launch. Everything else was perfectly normal wild launch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Those uneventful ones were the best." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Then we had a little confusion after immediately in orbit. Jim and Dave traded places because Dave had more docking experience and would be responsible for the docking, and so Dave slipped over into the left-hand couch. When we separated from the lunar module and turned around to dock with the top of the lunar module, things were not right. Valves had closed that were supposed to be open, and we noticed that because the spacecraft wasn't moving correctly. I said that we traded places. I can't remember. It may be that Jim stayed in the left seat. I can't remember which occurred.\\n\\n But in any case, we noticed, as we were trying to dock with the top of the lunar module, that the spacecraft wasn't behaving properly, and then we noticed there were some fuel valves that were closed, propellant valves that were closed. That had happened apparently due to the shock of separating from the thing. But as soon as we recognized that and got them back open again, everything went fine. With, I think, one other exception, these were the only incidents in our whole mission that were off nominal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On the fourth day, you performed with Dave Scott a two-man EVA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Oh, yes. Well, there were some other nonmechanical things that went wrong, like me. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you like to share with us what you're talking about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. The first two days were really checking out the command and service module and, in particular, the docked combination with the lunar module. This was the first time that there had ever been two spacecraft docked together, maneuvering in space. There were obviously structural questions or, let me say, structural design characteristics to be demonstrated and proven in terms of the flexibility or the rigidity of the tunnel and docking latches and all sorts of stress and strain kinds of questions and dynamics as you start maneuvering. The command and service module, you know, what are the dynamics on the lunar module. So there were a lot of things, engineering tests that we were doing, both just during coasting flight and also during short burns with the service module engine, the SPS [service propulsion system].\\n\\n A lot of that was going on in the first two days. I was basically strapped into the right-hand couch and reading checklists and taking pictures and that sort of thing. The lunar module was not going to be activated until the third day. I knew while Frank Borman had been very uncooperative and had never gone through any medical tests, and even denied at first that he'd gotten sick in space on Apollo 8, it was well known in the astronaut corps that Frank had barfed more than once, but he essentially refused to take any tests and blamed it on Seconal and all kinds of stuff, which is pure B.S.\\n\\n But as a result of that, we all became a little more heightened toward it. Although the Russians had had a fairly strong record that people would get sick in space, up until Apollo 8 we had actually not experienced it. Our spacecraft were smaller, we're much more restricted, and on Apollo 7 no one reported any problem. But on Apollo 8, Frank had gotten sick, but for all kinds of reasons which are Frank's, he wouldn't really come forward with it. He didn't do any tests afterward.\\n\\n So we didn't know a lot about it, but I was fairly cautious because I would get sick on the zero-G airplane, our affectionately dubbed Vomit Comet, which I'm sure you've heard about before. After successive parabolas, it's a very sickening experience and a challenging one for motion disturbance. So I knew from that and from a few episodes of seasickness that I was susceptible to motion sickness. So my whole modus operandi, my prophylactic activity there, was to keep my head as still as possible and not to move around a lot. I figured, great. And it's well known that that's a way to avoid motion sickness if you're sensitive to it. Not having much to do physically on the first two days of the flight, of the mission, I had that option, so, great.\\n\\n What we didn't know, partly because Frank wasn't willing to take any tests, was that what you do by doing that is simply delay adaptation. You don't adapt by doing nothing; you avoid sickness. And if you can come down and get out of the motion environment, that's fine, but if you're going to adapt to that environment, then that's not a very smart thing to do, because what you're doing is delaying your adaptation process.\\n\\n Well, of course, we didn't know that, so then on the third day of the mission, when it's time for me to go into action, that's really the first time when I'm moving around, and the first thing I've got to do is get into the space suit early in the morning. Getting into the space suit is a real contortionist challenge. So I got into the space suit, in which you have to double over. I mean, it's very interesting. I used to love to do it, and I could get into the suit as well as anybody or better than almost all people because I was also doing some of the early suit work.\\n\\n So I was pretty good at getting in and out of the suit by myself, but it's still tough, and you're ducking down, you're moving around with your head a lot. You're in a confined space. So when I came up and sort of popped my head through the suit and stood up and started zipping up the suit, I was not feeling too well. This was early in the morning before getting ready to go into the lunar module. I sort of slowed down to try and take it easy, but once that process of malaise starts going, you know, it kind of has a natural dynamic. So suddenly I had to barf, and I'm grabbing for a bag, barfed in the bag, and, I mean, that's not a good feeling. But, of course, you feel better after you barf, like anytime you get motion sickness, you feel better after it, but you don't like to do it. Of course, that was sort of a warning shot. I mean, you know, oooh, we got a problem here? And that's my silent question and it's Dave's and Jim's as well.\\n\\n So then I go over into the lunar module, and that's also a challenge, because now you're going from an environment that you're used to in the command module where that's up, now you go over into the lunar module. Well, in the lunar module, you're used to that being up. But now they're 180 degrees. So you're used to being up, and when you go over there, it's down. So you're having to change axes and do all kinds of stuff.\\n\\n So when I went over there to activate the lunar module, I was moving very slowly and deliberately and using my eyes a lot, and trying to keep my head from moving, because I sure as heck didn't want to get sick again. That worked out. After I got things turned on, then McDivitt came over and we started working together. We're slowly moving toward the afternoon activities, and at one point we're both busy. I mean, there's no slack time in space flight. I shouldn't that. That's a generality. Let me just say in those days it was no slack time. But at the same time you're sort of doing your piece of the checklist and the other guy's doing his piece.\\n\\n I got down to the point where there was something we had to do together, and Jim was a little behind where I was in the checklist at that point, so for the first time, sort of mid afternoon, I've basically got nothing to do. So, great. I'm just going to relax. Well, as soon as I relaxed, all of a sudden—I was not feeling great, but I wasn't feeling bad, but as soon as there was nothing to do and your mind is not occupied, this is a very interesting thing. You can talk to doctors. It's a thing called a reticular formation, blah, blah, blah. I won't get technical. But when your mind is suddenly—priorities are gone, then what happens is that malaise gets the top priority in your brain.\\n\\n Well, all of a sudden I had to barf again, so then twice, for the second time that day, I'm grabbing for a bag and I barf. Again, after it's over you feel better, but now I've barfed twice and, of course, we're all very aware of that. Even though I'm feeling better immediately after I barfed, I'm still not feeling great.\\n\\n So we get everything done. There was nothing wrong with getting—it didn't delay us at all, but we got everything done, but we got back in the spacecraft and now the question is, you know, the next day I've got to go EVA, or scheduled to go EVA. Well, barfing in space is no fun. Barfing anywhere is no fun, but barfing in space is different. It's not terribly different if you're sitting here like you and I, because you barf into a bag and you kind of [motions]. Pardon me for being graphic. But when you're in a space suit, you don't have that option. You've got the helmet on, you're locked in the space suit, your hands are out at the end of these gloves. You can't pull them in to do something here.\\n\\n So if you barf in weightlessness in a space suit, you die. I mean, it's that simple, because you can't get that sticky stuff away from your mouth. It doesn't go down into the suit; it just floats right there and you have no way of getting it away from your nose or your mouth so that you can breathe, and you are going to die. So being aware of that, although we'd never talk about it, but, I mean, it's an obvious thing, you know, and I'm not feeling that great, Jim decides—we're talking about it, but Jim decides, \"Well, we'll cancel the actual EVA tomorrow. We'll go right up to the point of depressurizing the hatch.\"\\n\\n I can still have the helmet on, do all the checkout on the portable life support system, the whole thing. \"But when it comes time to actually depressurize the lunar module, we'll simulate depressurizing, assume that you've been outside, you've come back in, and we've just repressurized. Then we'll pick up all of the checklists and everything from there. So we'll get all the tests and checkout and all the procedures and make sure every—we'll get as much done as we possibly can, but we're not actually going to do the EVA.\"\\n\\n We all agree. I mean, we decide this among us. Jim's memory of how it was decided may be better than mine, but between us we decide this. Well, then it's time to go to sleep and get ready for the next day, store everything. And again I'm still not feeling very well. Of course, now I've just been the cause of not doing the EVA, which means that the portable life support system really isn't checked out the way it was supposed to be checked out, so it's not really ready for the lunar surface missions, and are we going to run into some problems?\\n\\n This is already March of 1969. That end of the decade, I mean, is coming right up. Am I going to get so sick that we have to—am I going to remain sick, or are we going to have to actually abort the mission and the whole rest of the mission, in fact? Are we not going to be able to do the rendezvous? Is this basically a wasted mission because Schweickart's barfing? I mean, that's all going through my mind as I'm trying to go to sleep that night. That's about the lowest point in my life, till today. [Laughter]\\n\\n I mean, I've had a lot of low points, you know, as well as a lot of high points, but, I mean, that was probably the low point that you could experience. I mean, I had a real possibility in my mind at the time of being\\n\\n the\\n\\n cause of missing Kennedy's challenge of going to the moon and back by the end of the decade. So getting to sleep is never an easy task in space, but it was particularly difficult that night.\\n\\n We decided, because we were also going to bed late, just because of busyness, that we would sleep for an extra��since I was not going to go EVA, we were not going to go EVA the next day, we'd just lop off an hour out of it and say, okay, let's sleep for an extra hour, at least get some rest. So we slept. The ground didn't wake us up until an hour later than we were supposed to get up for the normal mission.\\n\\n Well, the next morning I felt a lot better, and we were going over in the lunar module and getting ready for doing what we decided to do, started getting everything ready and moving around and checking this out and that out and the other thing. And I'm feeling considerably better. So somewhere maybe an hour before we were scheduled for the EVA, at that point Jim looks at me and I'm looking at Jim, and we're obviously thinking the same thing. He says, \"You know, you're looking a lot better today. How are you feeling?\"\\n\\n I said, \"I'm feeling a lot better.\"\\n\\n He said, \"It looks like it.\" So we kind of looked at each other and said, \"Well, let's just keep going and we'll see what happens.\"\\n\\n So we go through probably another forty-five minutes, maybe half an hour before the scheduled EVA, fifteen, twenty minutes before it, and nothing's changing because we're doing everything as if I'm going out anyway. So somewhere down there, fifteen to thirty minutes or something like that in the records, we look at each other again and Jim says, \"How are you feeling?\"\\n\\n I said, \"I'm feeling real good.\"\\n\\n He says, \"You think you're okay?\"\\n\\n I said, \"I think it's fine.\"\\n\\n And he looked at me. We knew each other well enough, and he said, \"Okay, let's do it.\"\\n\\n \"Right.\"\\n\\n Jim calls the ground, says, \"We're going out on EVA.\" Surprised them. [Laughter]\\n\\n \"Right.\" Off we go. And so from low to high. As you can imagine, that EVA was more than just a normal EVA. I mean, that was just in twelve hours going from as low as I've ever been to about as high as I've ever been." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there any way that you can describe for us how you felt being actually truly out in space?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I mean, it sort of peripherally relates to what I've just been saying, but, I mean, the main thing during the EVA itself, first of all, we really had originally planned—I can't remember. It was about two hours, I think, for the EVA was originally planned, because I would get out—we got out at the same place, I think. I can't remember exactly. But at any rate, we ended up only being able to have about one daylight pass, forty-seven minutes outside, in order not to just have our late wake-up and everything else propagate into following days, you know, and really start screwing things up. So we just shortened the EVA to just a daylight pass. So it took it from almost an hour and a half or two hours down to forty-five, forty-seven minutes.\\n\\n But there was no question we could get everything done, because there wasn't all that much that had to be done. We knew that the tasks could be done. So we retrieved the thermal samples. Dave and I were taking pictures of each other and things of that kind. Then the main task was to go up the front of the lunar module, this handrail, which is right there, left hand to right handed. That handrail goes up the front of the lunar module and then it goes back over the top, then up to the command module.\\n\\n The main task in the EVA was to traverse up that handrail and over to the command module to the open hatch there where Dave Scott was taking movies of me doing that. The question was, was the combination of the suit and arm strength and the hand rail good enough to maintain your body position so that you wouldn't sort of flop around if you had to make that traverse externally and run the risk of damaging the spacecraft or puncturing the suit on that antenna that's up there, and things of that kind.\\n\\n So it was a mechanical task, and Dave was supposed to take movies of it so that we would document the stability of being able to do this. Well, I got up to about here on the hand rail. I mean, literally I just took my feet out of the golden slippers down here and started up the hand rail, and I got three feet up the hand rail and Dave said, \"Oop, the camera jammed.\"\\n\\n And so I stopped, and Jim said, \"What's going on?\"\\n\\n And Dave said, \"Well, the movie camera just jammed. Let me see if I can unjam it.\"\\n\\n Well, we all knew enough about that camera to know what Dave had to go through, so Jim said, \"Okay, Dave, you got five minutes. Rusty, don't go anywhere. Just stay right there.\" [Laughter] \"Yes, sir.\"\\n\\n So I stayed right there, except what I did was I just let go with my right hand, which was on top, and I just spun myself around with my left hand. I mean, what I knew immediately was I don't have anything to do for five minutes. Well, you know, I could have gone through, in my mind, the checklist or, you know, I knew that that was my chance to just say, \"Hey, this is my opportunity to really appreciate, to really be here in space, just where I am.\"\\n\\n So I just swung around while Dave was messing around with the camera, which he never did get fixed. I just spun around and I looked at the Earth, and I just said, \"My job right now is to just be a human being, just be a person.\" And I just stopped being an astronaut. There I was, a human being in space, saying, \"Absorb this. Just soak this up. Just let it all come in.\" No defenses, just ultimately vulnerability. And I just became a human being in space, looking at this beautiful planet. The sun was over my shoulder. Basically the full Earth, the lunar module's over here now, you know, so I'm just looking out at the Earth. That was really the high point.\\n\\n The transition from the night before to that probably had a pretty dramatic effect. It was subconscious. It certainly wasn't a conscious effect. But all of a sudden, you know, all of these questions, it's like, how did I get here? Look where I am. How did I get here? I wasn't looking for answers. I wasn't even looking for questions. I was just looking to absorb it. But, you know, my mind started—these questions just started coming in, you know. It wasn't that obvious question of how did I get here. Yes, Saturn V brought me here. Right? I mean, that's not the answer. It wasn't even NASA, you know.\\n\\n Again, I'm not answering this at the time, but even without trying to think of it, you know, it's immediately obvious, you know, I'm here—this is a history thing. This is because humankind has gotten to this point where we develop these systems which enable us to live in environments which otherwise are unavailable to us. This is not just the American taxpayer; this is the history of humanity. This is everybody on the planet, and I'm just a representative. I mean, I'm here because of all of history, because of all those people down there, because of science and technology and our animal tendencies to marry ourselves with machines, to extend our capability and survivability, all of that. I mean, it was this huge philosophical big hit.\\n\\n Of course, right behind it, what do I mean when I say \"Who am I? How did I get here? What does 'I' mean? I'm not here; we're here.\" I'm a farm kid from New Jersey. Any decision, millions of decisions which you make in your life, you know, put your hand here, take it up, scratch your nose, anything that you did for years ahead, that you did different, you wouldn't be there. I mean, there are just a million things that happen, any one of which you wouldn't be there. I'm here because I'm lucky. I mean, I'm just fortunate. Yeah, I work, all the things, but, you know, you don't get there because you want to be there only. You're there—it's just fortune. I was born at the right time, went to the right school, by chance. I mean, all those things.\\n\\n So that five minutes was a very special five minutes. I didn't talk about it until years after the flight. I mean, some of the guys here, we talk about this now, you'd think I invented it or something. [Laughter] But it's just one of those things that was very private. But that five minutes was a very, very special time because that took me from—I'd always been interested in philosophy. I always realized academically the implications of space exploration and going into space, but it didn't become a part of me.\\n\\n It didn't really get personalized until that five-minute experience. That enabled me to really see for the first time the implications of what going into space really means. History had a turning point. It wasn't me on Apollo 9. That's not what I'm saying. But this moment in history, the initial days of space exploration, there is before when we're confined to the planet, and all evolution, everything about us, is planet-bound, gravity-driven, gravity-constrained, and after the space program when we're off to other planets, we're off to other worlds, different atmospheres, different gravity, weightlessness, people, kids being born in weightlessness. Who knows what is coming? But that is a change in history, and we're fortunate enough to live at that moment.\\n\\n While I didn't articulate it at all at that time, it took years of sort of letting that ferment and bubble before I could articulate it, but that happened because of that five minutes. And maybe because I barfed the day before. Who knows. [Laughter] I guess it's the blessings of barf." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's all connected, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You can't separate these things. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Eventually you went back into the spacecraft, and, of course, the next day was the day that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Rendezvous, yes. Right. And that was a big moment in the flight and from the outside seemed to be hairy, I mean, really daring, but for us it was another day at the shop. I mean, we'd practiced that, we'd simulated that rendezvous and docking and separating and doing all those maneuvers and everything else. The fact that we were away from our heat shield, you know, 100 miles, I mean, it didn't mean much to us. It was there, we could talk about it, we mentioned it in press conferences and things like that, but, you know, in terms of something conscious in your mind, it was just part of—it was getting on the freeway and going five miles and taking the exit to Genoa Road or something, you know.\\n\\n I mean, it isn't that you pooh-pooh it, it's just that you bought into that years ago. You've trained, you've worked, you've developed all the procedures, you've tested the systems, you've helped build the systems, you've designed the procedures. You know, there it is and it worked just that way.\\n\\n In fact, the most impressive thing during the rendezvous was we're coming back in to rendezvous with Dave, you know, and in the simulator it's like a one-arm paper hanger. You're doing this and procedures and everything's going and you're working your little buns off, and in space, on the flight, we're sort of, \"Well, I don't have to do that for the next five minutes.\" You're sort of standing there, and Jim and I are looking at each other. It's like, \"Why do we have so much time?\" Well, the reason we have so much time is because in all the simulations, the guys out there on the console, on the control console, are throwing errors at you, they're throwing failures, this gyro fails or that fails or the radar is acting up, all kinds of stuff. Nothing's going wrong, you know, so you've got all this time. It was beautiful. It was great.\\n\\n We had a number of surprises. In the lunar module you have the two engines, the descent engine down at the bottom, and then the ascent engine that was buried right in the middle of it, at the bottom of the ascent stage. But all you had to do was reach around behind you, and you could lay your hand on the top of that engine bell. It had a cam over it, but there's that rocket engine is literally sitting right there. You just reach around and there it is. So Jim and I, when we lit off the—when we knew we were going to be lighting off the ascent engine to test that during the rendezvous, we figured we're not going to be able to hear each other. So if anything is going wrong, we worked out a whole bunch of hand signals that would allow us to communicate in case something went wrong during that ascent-engine burn.\\n\\n So we count down, three, two, one, ignition, light off the ascent engine, and there's no noise, no noise at all. Jim and I are, \"What's going on?\" You know. And, no, nothing's wrong. We had to look at the instrument to see that the acceleration was up, so we knew the engine was working, but it didn't make any noise at all. So that was a great pleasant surprise that there wasn't any acoustic coupling there. It shut off and just kept going. But, you know, pleasant surprises like that.\\n\\n The only thing that really was different was when we first undocked, and there the probe pushes the two vehicles apart. Dave had to throw a switch in the command module to extend and release the lunar module. As Dave did a hundred times in the simulator, he reached up and hit the switch and let it go, and the probe extended. Sure enough, we start moving away, and all of a sudden there's this \"Bonk!\" I didn't know what it was. I said, \"What's that?\" And Jim is looking out the top window, and he saw that we stopped. He said, \"We stopped.\" So we're looking at each other and said, \"It extended, but it didn't release us. It held us. The little latch has kept us connected.\" Jim and I are thinking, \"Well, maybe we should tell Dave to retract and then we'll talk to the ground and see what they recommend.\"\\n\\n About that time, Dave, in his own mind, says, \"Well, the latches didn't release. Maybe I'll hit the switch again.\" So he reaches up and hits the switch, and while Jim and I are trying to figure out what's going on, the switches release and we go drifting off the front of the command module. So Jim and I look at each other and figure, \"Well, thanks, Dave.\" [Laughter] We would have appreciated some engineering input on that one, but now we're off, so we'll find out when we get back whether we did any damage. [Laughter]\\n\\n Of course, it didn't do any damage. Everything was fine. It turned out that that was an error in the simulator. That's one of the few things we found where the simulator was different. You could just hit the switch and let it go and the whole thing would happen. It turned out, you had to hit the switch and hold it until it actually got past the latches and then release it. But those are the little things, you know, that you learn." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was one of the reasons it was important to do your mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At any rate, other than that, everything, the whole mission went perfectly nominal. We had very few problems. We learned a lot. But we didn't find any real problems to speak of, which is great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it proved a success and, of course, led the way to lunar landing. Your crew, of course, stayed together for a little while after you landed. You had some responsibilities as a crew, doing public appearances. Then you moved on to another task with NASA. Where did it go? Where did you move on to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, the logic would have been for me to rotate from Apollo 9 primary crew to backup on Apollo 12, three missions later. That would have been the normal rotation, but when I came back from flight, part of the question in my mind, even though after the third day, after that one day when I barfed twice, everything was fine after that, there was a question, well, would it be fine on the next mission? Again, aside from Frank Borman, who never would take any tests or anything, I was still at that point the only American astronaut who had ever barfed in space. So the question in my mind is not do other people suffer from this, too, but if I fly again, am I going to risk a lunar landing? Do I risk not only having somehow to abort a mission to the moon because I'm sick, but do I risk physically my crewmates, etc.?\\n\\n So I really didn't know the answer to that, and I, frankly, wasn't confident one way or the other. I figured part of my job at that point was to help NASA to learn as much as possible about motion sickness. So I did the opposite of Frank; I became motion sickness guinea pig. I took every test. I went over to Pensacola [Florida], which was where spinning rooms are and all kinds of stuff, and worked with Dr. Esgraybil [phonetic] and other people. I mean, I became the guinea pig, the poking, the pincushion that people stuffed their pins in and their probes in and whatnot. For probably, I don't know, I don't remember anymore, six months, something like that, I became, aside from public appearances and things of that kind, my main job was learning as much as we could learn about motion sickness.\\n\\n And I hate to tell you, and the doctors will probably disagree with me because they always think they learn something, but, frankly, we didn't learn that much and we don't know that much about it today, to be honest with you. Now we accept it, because so many more people have gotten sick. Almost 50 percent of the people who go into space get sick. Well, at that time I was one of about fifteen or sixteen, something like that, at that time, so we didn't know that. Now we don't think that much of it. I clearly would have adapted. Knowing what we know about it, I would have adapted and I wouldn't have risked. But by that time, you know, the Apollo 12 backup crew had been selected, so I missed out on that rotation.\\n\\n Then Al Shepard, for whatever reason, instead of putting me back on Apollo, put me on to Skylab. Well, I, frankly, would have preferred landing on the moon, but, you know, I wasn't one of Al's boys, and Al had his own agenda of who went where and whatnot. So I cycled into Skylab at the time. And I could hardly complain, because I'm the one who basically called the shot that I really didn't want to be assigned to a flight until we knew more about motion sickness.\\n\\n So I sort of took myself out of the rotation in order for us to learn as much as we could, but that was never appreciated. I mean, motion sickness is something that weenies suffer. Wimps suffer motion sickness, not real men. I mean, there was that macho aspect of it that was present in those days, much less the case now, but in those days, that was a component of it. This is \"Right Stuff\" days, you know.\\n\\n So since I'm the one that did that, you know, I just got reassigned when I decided I was ready to fly. I got reassigned to Skylab and went on to back up Pete Conrad on the first Skylab mission. We can talk more about that, but I'm going to let you lead this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we're getting close to having to close our session today, so we will take up with Skylab and we will do it when you've got more time to provide us details." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But looking back on your time with the Apollo Program, is there a time that you would specify as possibly your most challenging time or a time that you feel that you contributed to the space program that nobody else could have done?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, that's a tough question to ask anybody with an ego of any kind. I mean, I may not have a big one, but I've got one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, each mission had its own successes, and, of course—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For me personally, there's certainly no question what the highlight was in terms of my personal reward. That was the EVA on Apollo 9, again partly because of the sequence of circumstances, etc.\\n\\n In terms of my contribution to the program, I don't know. I like to think that I did a little bit of bridging between the science objectives and still at the same time respecting and supporting the operational objectives, and brought those two a little closer together. I mean, there was a real schism in those early days, and because of my background, my education, and the rest of it, I naturally sat across those two and I had great respect for both sides, and tried to bring people together. To some extent I was able to do that, but I don't think that there's no great credit, because, frankly, aside from people on the inside, I don't think there was much recognition that that existed.\\n\\n There's certainly no one decision I made or thing that I did. In something like Apollo, and people have heard it, the press has heard it time and time and time again, every crew says it when they come back from flight, you know, that this has really been a team effort, that it takes everybody to make this thing work. The astronauts may end up being the personification of it and they may get the glory. We don't necessarily even want it. You kind of have to learn to live with it, and some people do well with that and some don't. Some make a lifetime of it. [Laughter] And some try to ignore it.\\n\\n But it is a team effort, and, you know, I can hardly point to a decision that I made by myself or that anybody else made by himself—\"him\" in those days. You live so close together, everybody's living the experience and you're working on this huge thing together, so all of these things are a team decision, and even though you end up with strong positions on something, you're almost never alone. You end up getting people on your side. So there's great debate about all the decisions that had to be made in those days, and it was a tremendous engineering and financial and every kind of a challenge. And we did it. So it's a great thing to have lived through and contributed to, but I'd be hard pressed to say I did that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, all of your personal sacrifices and your courage may have become one day in the shop to you, but as we review history, we see that there was a lot of courageous moves and a lot of personal sacrifices to accomplish. We've enjoyed hearing those today, and we look forward to visiting with you again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So we can pick up with your—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There's lots more to come." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—next part of your career with NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sorry I'm so long-winded. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, we've enjoyed every moment of it and look forward to the next session. So, thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Russell L. Schweickart", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00512", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/RoseRG/roserg.htm", + "original_file_name": "RoseRG_11-8-99.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/RoseRG/RoseRG_11-8-99.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Rodney G. Rose", + "location_date": "Wimberley, Texas – 8 November 1999" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "Carol Butler" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Rodney G. Rose" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is November 8, 1999. This interview with Rod Rose is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interview is being conducted at his home in Wimberley, Texas. I’m Kevin Rusnak. I’m being assisted today by Carol Butler and Sandra Johnson.\\n\\n I’d like to thank you for agreeing to do this interview with us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And if we could start, just tell us a little bit about your background, and particularly your interest in aviation, going into college, or engineering." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, aviation-wise, I guess I have to start very early, back in the 1930s. I was born in Huntingdon, which was the county town of Huntingdonshire. It’s since been swallowed up by Cambridgeshire, but in those days, it was there. Ours was a poor family, and I got a scholarship to the local grammar school, Huntington Grammar School, which was also the original school that Oliver Cromwell went to. Of course, he went a few years before I did. Samuel Pepys also hung around Huntingdon quite a lot. So it’s an old school of history.\\n\\n Whilst there—in fact, before I went to the grammar school, I was very interested in airplanes. We used to have what we called a sherbet fountain from the little confectionery store. It was one with a licorice stick in it, a hollow tube, and sherbet, and you could suck it up, and as a bonus they gave a little tiny balsa airplane, where you just glided it. That was my first introduction to flight and aerodynamics. And then also, being an industrious type, I carved an airspeed Ambassador model, about that big, out of kindle wood, and painted it all up.\\n\\n When I went to the grammar school, it was the beginning of the war, beginning for us in England, which was 1939, and then I was involved in what at that time was called the Air Defence Cadet Corps, and used to do dumb things like stand in slip trenches guarding the local airfield and all that stuff, and then the Air Training Corps.\\n\\n Let’s see. We went from there. Well, I also got involved with flying model airplanes, building competition model airplanes and flying them, gliders and things. There were three of us school friends together who flew [model] airplanes and, funnily enough, all three went into the aircraft business. They both went to DeHavilland and I went to Avro [A.V. Roe and Company, Ltd.] at Manchester, and I went there because I wrote to Short Brothers first and they turned me down, so then I wrote to Avro and got a job there.\\n\\n I went as what they call an engineering apprentice, or gentleman apprentice, they called it, as opposed to a trade apprentice. A gentleman apprentice, you got paid a very small amount, less than the amount of my lodgings, I might add, and you went through every department in the whole company. I started off in the machine shop and went through there, marking out, tool room, jig and tools, subassemblies, assemblies, hydraulics, you name it, through the whole process of building an airplane, and then out to Woodford, which was the test airfield, and got involved in flight controls and engines and all that stuff, getting that flying. Then came back and did six months in the drawing office and then the research department, stress office, and then aerodynamics. Aerodynamics was my final sort of love, I guess.\\n\\n Whilst I was at Avro, we had a further education program and I started off at technical school, then jumped from there, got a scholarship to Manchester College [of Technology] and graduated from there with a BS equivalent in mechanical and aeronautical engineering, and that was a scholarship. After that, I finished my apprenticeship and got two scholarship offers. One was from Huntingdonshire County and the other was from Manchester, it was an Armament scholarship to go to Manchester College [of Technology] for further higher degree. Being sold on airplanes, I went to Cranfield College of Aeronautics at that time. It’s since been granted university status and it’s [now the] University of Cranfield outside Bedford.\\n\\n When I went, we were the fourth year, I think, to go through it. It was basically a three-year course crammed into two, so we did eighteen-hour days sort of thing, you know. Fed you well, but worked you hard. There we studied the whole nine yards of aviation, aeronautics, and so on. We did test flying. We also learned to fly both power flight, gliders, did wind tunnel work, especially in the second year.\\n\\n We had to do two theses. The first one I did, the written one, was on the low-speed characteristics of delta wings, which was used quite extensively. In fact, I’ve got a copy here somewhere. One of the things it had—one of my tutors was the originator of the carpet plot. I don’t know, probably in today’s age of computers, people don’t even know what a carpet plot is, but it was a way of plotting five variables on one sheet of paper in two dimensions, and the intercepts would all line up vertically, and therefore you could interpolate very nicely. And you could have carpets that curled under and did all sorts of weird things. So I used those extensively in the thesis, and that probably helped with my tutor. Then the experimental one was the low-speed characteristics of swept wings, and we did a significant amount of wind tunnel work on that.\\n\\n After I graduated from Cranfield, I went to join Vickers-Armstrong Supermarine. That’s Supermarine of the Spitfire fame, who at that time were [outside] Winchester. They used to be down at Southampton, but got bombed out during the war, and this was 1951 when I went there.\\n\\n At Supermarine, I was in charge of all the performance, the engine performance, the loads on external stores, stuff like that, and also, for my sins, I got involved in designing their wind tunnel for them, because they were going to build a wind tunnel, and did that.\\n\\n I worked on the Swift, of course, the Attacker, the Swift, the 525, which didn’t go too far, and the N-113, which eventually became the Scimitar, and that was the first twin-engine jet that the Royal Navy had used. In doing that, I was very heavily involved in several leading-edge things. One was supersonic blow over the flaps, to get more lift. The other was, we were working on angled decks for aircraft carriers, and Supermarine, when we did a catapult launch, we didn’t launch them horizontal, we cocked the airplane up about twelve degrees and launched it off that way.\\n\\n The reason we did that was because flying, getting catapulted off a deck, you want to minimize the amount of wind you need down on the deck, and ideally you should be able to launch an airplane on a dead calm day with the aircraft carrier stationary. That’s the ultimate objective, and so by rotating the aircraft twelve degrees and shooting it off that way, you saved about fifteen to twenty feet of height, because the pilot didn’t have to rotate the airplane after he got off the deck. He was already rotated, and therefore he could just go straight up. So that saved us about ten knots down the deck, which is quite appreciable.\\n\\n We did have a funny thing on that there, because [at] the RAE Bedford drome we were checking all this catapult stuff out with Mike Lithgow, who was the chief test pilot, and we were going through different loadings, and we were doing a low loading one and shot him off, and the airplane staggered around like a drunken sailor, you know. Made one quick circuit and came down. Went over to him and I said, “What’s wrong, Mike?” “Well,” he said, “I nearly redded out.” I said, “Uh-oh.”\\n\\n So I started hastily doing some calculations and realized that the airplane was tilted at twelve degrees, the seat was tilted another eleven degrees inside the cockpit, and so when you do your triangulation of forces, he was getting a lot of positive G to the head, which is, you can’t stand much of that. And so we hastily put some limits on that.\\n\\n The other interesting thing at Supermarine, the Swift was—at that time we had slots in the leading edge and fences and all that stuff, and we were going for the world speed record. To do that, we took the plane down to Libya, because for a given Mach number, the maximum velocity in miles an hour you get is when you get the highest temperature, so we had to get the right conditions. You had to do a flight so many kilometers this way and back again in one flight and they mean the two.\\n\\n On this particular morning, I’d spend about a week on the telephone with them because, working up, they’d give me the temperatures and I’d work out what the velocity would be, because you had to beat the existing velocity by, I think it was 10 percent, something like that. So this one morning, conditions were just right, Mike flew it, and we set the record, and I was busy filling out the forms. That was the day that, of course, the record was shattered out at Edwards [Air Force Base, California], when they went about mach one and a half or two or something. I mean, it was way faster than the Swift would do.\\n\\n Following the N-113, I looked after the deck trials on HMS\\n\\n Ark Royal\\n\\n with that, and we had an interesting thing on that, because the N-113 was almost a delta wing, but not quite, and I’d spent a lot of time with Mike Lithgow telling him, you know, that as you come in, if you’re too high, don’t just check on the stick, because normally you’d check on the stick to drop a little. I said, “Don’t do that, because with a delta wing, you’ll drop too far.”\\n\\n So Mike’s coming in, you know, and it got the light and everything and it’s a bit high, and he checks and drops like a stone. The hook—it’s got a huge hook on the back of the airplane—that caught on the round-down of the carrier. The carrier deck was covered with tarmac, but it’s steel plates underneath, and the round-down is about a foot radius, and then there’s about a two-foot steel I-beam that holds up the back end of the flight deck. Mike’s hook got on the round-down and plowed the tarmac up all the way to the front wire.\\n\\n So at the formal dinner that night, the captain said, “Mr. Rose, I would appreciate it if you’d tell Mr. Lithgow not to plow my bloody deck up next time.” [Laughter] So I said, “Yes sir, I’ll do that.” So that was that.\\n\\n Then we were working on the Supermarine 545, which never flew. It was an aerodynamicist’s dream and a structural engineer’s nightmare, because it was multi-cranked. We had steep sweep inboard, and then less sweep, less sweep, less sweep, and the wings were twisted as well, aerodynamic twist. The idea was that we could fly at about just under 1.2 mach number, with subsonic flow over the wing.\\n\\n The other thing, by the way, on the N-113, I forgot, that comes in, it was the first airplane that I’m aware of that had true area-rule waisting. Now, a lot of people, of course, at Langley, I wasn’t very popular, because they said, “Well, the engineer discovered that at Langley,” and I’d say, “Well, not quite, because I worked with Dr. [Dietrich] Kuchemann, who was one of the German scientist engineers, who was one of the wartime reparations to Britain, and he was at RAE and he’d worked out a theory for the nonviscous flow to correct. Then I took that, worked with him, and did the viscous flow application, and that’s how the waistline of the N-113 was shaped. And it supposedly saved you quite a bit of speed on that, or got you a lot of speed. So that was the other thing.\\n\\n Anyway, the 545 never saw the light of day, and finally, we had some old friends of mine from Avro were in Southampton, and one called me up and said, “Hey, we’re looking for people to come out to AVRO Canada. Are you interested?” So I said, “Well, yes, I might be,” you know, being young and all that stuff. I had a young family at the time. The net result was, we emigrated to Canada and settled over there and got involved with the Arrow. That’s how I was still doing airplanes.\\n\\n The Arrow was a great airplane, by the way, because not only was it delta wing, which, of course, was my thing, but it had a fly-by-wire control system, which I don’t think anybody else had flown up to then. We had a unique system on the intake and the engine through to the back end, because instead of having a variable inlet, a variable ramp, that a lot of people had, we had a fixed ramp, but then we had a boundary layer bleed on that, of course, but then we had a tap-off, a bleed, off the fifth stage of the compressor, and we would computer-match the flow and the bypass, so that the shockwave was always on the lip of the intake for maximum intake efficiency at all mach numbers. Then the flow was also matched at the back end and ejected, and that reduced the base drag at the back end, and it made a very, very efficient system.\\n\\n Of course, we were involved in some pretty advanced thermodynamics, in terms of refrigeration. I mean, we could refrigerate a pretty big building with the refrigeration system we had on it. We were using real-time telemetry. I’m bringing all this stuff up because it has a bearing when I get to NASA, because things weren’t quite the same there. We were also using a hybrid analog/digital simulator for the crew to train on. So there were some, at the time, state-of-the-art or cutting-edge stuff that was going on there.\\n\\n Of course, we got our experience of fly-by-wire, because Jan [Janus] Zurakowski, who was the pilot, chief test pilot there, super guy, I mean, in the air, he was cool as a block of ice. On the ground, boy, he’d get all agitated. I mean, discussions with him were really—he’d emote if it didn’t go right. But in the air, he was calm.\\n\\n One day he was taking off and the system failed. The flight control system failed. Jan just came on the voice loop and said, “Had a failure in system A, switching over to manual,” and just took over manually and carried on with the takeoff. So he was a cool customer.\\n\\n So that was AVRO, and that went on fine until February 20, 1959, the day of infamy for Canadians. I wasn’t a Canadian, but we thought we were going to be. And that’s when [Prime Minister John G.] Diefenbaker announced in the House, in the morning, that the contract had been canceled. Now, we didn’t know that. The management came on the PA system in the morning and said, “There’s an announcement been made about the future of the Arrow, and we’ll tell you all about it later today.”\\n\\n So in the afternoon they came on again and said, “Well, the Arrow contract’s been canceled, and we have no option but to terminate everybody.” So everybody was effectively fired, and that was pretty tough.\\n\\n Then they came round to me and said, well, among other supervisors, said, “Well, we want you to come back Monday through Wednesday, because we want you to supervise your people and make sure they don’t take anything that belongs to the company or anything about the Arrow.” And that was probably the worst three days I spent. Especially I had one young engineer who had only just arrived a few days before. He was still with his family and a young baby, being put up in a hotel in Toronto, and there he was, fired. So it was tough.\\n\\n All the Orenda people were put out of work as well, which I never could understand because the Orenda [Iroquois] was a super engine. Unlike a lot of paper engines, this one had actually flown, it had demonstrated its capability, and it was scrapped. It was a great shame. And I think the same with that about the Arrow, too.\\n\\n Anyway, on Saturday the 21st, I got a call from Frank Brame, who was the chief engineer’s assistant, I guess he was. Frank had been at Cranfield, too, later than I had, and he said, “Well, you’re not fired. We’ve got a small group that we want to study supersonic transatlantic airliners.” So there was, I know, John [D.] Hodge and Tec [Tecwyn] Roberts and myself were three of the folks who were kept on. And, of course, we didn’t know how long we’d be kept on or what.\\n\\n I guess it was sometime in March, Bob [Robert] Lindley called everybody together, and all the people who’d been fired and everything came and we had a big meeting in the cafeteria. He said, “Well, I’ve got something you might be interested in. There’s something called manned space flight in the States, and they’ve made some inquiries as to whether any of you would go down and join them.” Of course, nobody really knew much about space, especially manned space flight. We were airplane people. Then I discovered later that there weren’t many people who knew much about manned space flight anyway.\\n\\n So anyway, AVRO, we had about 500/550 people in the technical office at AVRO, and AVRO picked roughly about 200 people that they thought NASA might be interested in. NASA looked at that and winnowed it down, and I think they interviewed somewhere about 100, and of the 100, roughly, they interviewed, probably about four dozen got offers, of which 25 accepted.\\n\\n I was one of the 25, but I must admit, rather reluctantly, because at first I turned it down and then Jim Chamberlin, who was the chief technical person at AVRO, he was going down to NASA, and I’d been working directly for Jim. Although I was looking after performance, Jim had a habit of coming to me on a Monday morning and saying, “Well, I’m interested in so and so, and I’d like you to look at it and have a report on my desk by Friday.” And then Monday morning he’d come back and say, “Well, that was what I thought it would be,” or, “How about looking further into so and so.” I did that for probably the last six months of the two years I was at AVRO.\\n\\n So Jim took me aside and spent about two hours twisting my arm and talking to me like a Dutch uncle, and finally persuaded me that that was the place to go. So on the 21st of April, we crossed the border at Niagara Falls and drove down to Buckroe Beach, Virginia, to a miserable—better not say that—but a motel that was not of the finest.\\n\\n Owen [E.] Maynard had his family there as well, and we decided early on that that was really not the place for us or the family, so we all moved to the Chamberlin Hotel, no relation to Jim Chamberlin, but it was “the hotel” on the James River estuary and all that stuff. I think we nearly got thrown out of there because we had two boys, Steve and Chris, and Owen had three girls and one boy, and they were all hell on wheels, because they monopolized the elevators, and they’d go up and down in those things all day. [Laughter] Drove the hotel staff crazy. Anyway, that was our introduction to getting to the States.\\n\\n At the time, about half the group were Canadians, either born Canadians or converted Canadians, and the other half were English and one Welshman. Got to remember Tec, who was a Welshman. So we settled in. The average—see, the thing is that the average experience of that group was probably about twelve to thirteen years in the business. I had had fourteen years in the business, including the apprenticeship, and that was a pretty solid chunk of experience, especially with the things we’d been working on, like the real-time telemetry, the digital/analog simulations and so on. It was a whole lot of stuff that I discovered.\\n\\n When I got there, I got appointed as the [systems] engineer for Little Joe. So the first thing I discovered was that Langley, that’s the IRD, the Instrumentation Research Division, at Langley, was still using 16-millimeter and 8-millimeter cameras to photograph the instrument panel and of course, if you get a lot of vibration, that’s pretty tough to read instruments. We said, “Where’s the telemetry?” “Well, we don’t have that on this. This is a low-cost thing.” So we said, “Okay.” So that was one problem.\\n\\n But anyway, I got involved in Little Joe. We were launching [that] from Wallops Island in Virginia, and Jack [John C.] Palmer was the basic—well, Bob [Robert L.] Krieger headed up Wallops Island, but Jack Palmer basically headed up the whole thing on a day-to-day basis, and he was the range safety manager, if you will, at Wallops and so he and I used to do what we called eyeball range safety work. In other words, when the vehicle was launched, we’d stand outside and watch it go up, because [were doing] an abort to check the abort system, and Jack would say, “Do you think it’s about time?” I’d say, “No, give it a few more seconds.” And he’d say, “Okay, we’ll do it now,” and hit the abort button.\\n\\n Well, that was when we were actually flying it, but the first one [LJ-A (August 21, 1959)], we had the thing on the pad like you can see over there, and we were going through the count. In those days, we were pretty dumb, because we did about thirty-five hours straight, preparing the vehicle and going through the count, and that’s not the best thing to do, we discovered.\\n\\n About one o’clock in the morning, there was a slight change in the resistance of the explosive bolts on the marman band that held the capsule [on] the booster. So we get all the drawings out. In those days, they didn’t have schematics, they used wiring diagrams, and the darn things were about thirty feet long. And there we were on hands and knees in the blockhouse, following wires along this thing, and finally, in our considered opinion, everybody decided, well, it was a tenth of an ohm difference from what it had been when they measured it prior to installation, [but] that’ll be alright.\\n\\n So the decision was made to go ahead, and we started off and we got to about forty minutes or so before the launch time, and in those days, of course, this was the biggest thing Wallops had launched. Prior to that, they were fairly small things, Scout rockets and things like that, and they didn’t clear the pad until way, way late in the count.\\n\\n So we still had people in the vicinity of the pad, and I was in the tracking room station there, and heard a rumble, ran to the door, and the capsule had gone and had left the booster on the pad. And as my first sort of, as a pseudo flight director—my first launch—that was pretty embarrassing. You’re not supposed to do that.\\n\\n What happened, the—well, before I get to what actually happened, we had about eight engineers or ten engineers there, and I got eight or ten different versions of what happened. Fortunately, I’d been working with the T-33 people, and Gene Edmunds from the Photographic Division, and we’d worked up what I call an ascent rendezvous technique. With that, we’d rendezvous the T-33 with the count, such that at the moment of liftoff, the T-33 would come in on a dive to speed up and bank around away from the pad and spiral upwards, with Gene photographing with a movie camera from inside the back seat, and get an air-to-air shot of the thing coming up, which was just as well, because I got eight different versions, or ten, whatever the number of engineers were, I got that many wildly different reports of what happened. Then, fortunately, Gene got his film, and he did get good film, and we could see what happened.\\n\\n It turned out that there was a back-door circuit. The Little Joe, Langley had designed it with what they call a three-wire circuit with a common ground, and a common ground, we realized afterward, is not a good thing to have, because you think you’ve got two independent systems, but if you’re not careful, there’s a leak capability, and that’s what happened. So when they were charging the batteries, about forty minutes before launch, the battery level got to such that it overcame the resistance in the back-door circuit, fired the explosive bolts, fired the escape motor, off went the capsule.\\n\\n Well, it did the right thing, it went up like a beach abort, dumped the tower and the escape motor after it had burned out, popped out the drogue chute, and it just had one amp surefire squib to fire to let the main chute out, and it wouldn’t do it. Didn’t have enough gas, so it came down on the drogue chute. I think we spent probably about two weeks picking up pieces off the sea floor, along with fifty million other pieces, because Wallops had been doing an awful lot of stuff off the beach. So that was that. So that’s when we did some major revisions and we cleared the pad an hour before launch and we had schematics instead of wiring diagrams and a whole host of changes, so it was a good learning lesson.\\n\\n Wallops at that time was an island, by the way. It really was. Now they’ve got a causeway built across there. It’s a piece of cake to get over. You drive over now. But in those days, it was an island and you went over by boat, and I remember they had a contract with one of the fishing guys. They had a boat run us in.\\n\\n We came back from the island one time, and the thing started taking on water, and we got as far as the—just coming into the dock at Chincoteague, we’re all sitting on the engine housing, with our feet on the gunwale, because the water was all sloshing around inside. It finally, as we scrambled off, it sank at the dock. I said, “Oh, well, there goes that one.”\\n\\n [On one of the Little Joes (#3)] we had our first animated flight, and that was with Sam, which really wasn’t a male, it was a female, but it was a rhesus monkey that the School of Aviation Medicine [SAM] folks at San Antonio [Texas] had instrumented and trained. Sam had her own little capsule, and she was trained that as soon as it lifted or they turned things on, and soon to lift off, she had to punch a button when a red light showed, and then if she did, a green light would show and she’d get a banana pellet. And the idea was to keep her operating to see what happened.\\n\\n Well, you have to realize that Little Joe goes off at just over, about seven and a half G, which is a fair lick going up, and then when the escape motor goes off and pulls the capsule off, the animal gets a total negative to positive G, a total G of nearly twenty G. At that time Sam suffered what they call nystagmus, which is involuntary rolling of the eyeballs, in whichever direction, and in spite of the shots of electricity to her foot, she refused to work until the drogue chute came out and then she started hitting the button again.\\n\\n There’s quite a tale with that one because the flight was nearly canceled. We had a limited capability of oxygen for her, and we were near the end of the window, and I remember the captain of the destroyer flotilla downrange, we were fortunately listening in on his frequency to the messages back to the admiral at Norfolk, and he was saying, “Well, we’ve got [fifty]-foot seas and thirty-knot winds,” and we said, “I think that’s the other way around,” but anyway, it was pretty rough. It was pretty rough.\\n\\n One of the School of Aviation Medicine doctors, a veterinarian, as well as an M.D., he was on the destroyer, and this was the first time he had ever been to sea, and it really was rough. They had special stuff to inject the monkey with in case it was seasick. Well, when it landed, we nearly lost a sailor, because it was over eight-foot seas, and it was pretty hard getting the capsule grappled and back on board. But when they did, the monkey was fine. You know, just gave it a real banana and it was very, very happy. Unfortunately, the poor SAM doc was very sick, and apparently they had to give him some of the injection that was bound for the monkey because he was so sick. Well, they’d psyched him out beforehand, because the captain said, “Oh, you’ve never been on a destroyer? Oh, boy, you’re going to be sick.” So he was. Anyway, that was that one.\\n\\n We went through some more Little Joes… We seemed to launch them monthly, the fourth of the month. Like, Little Joe 1 was the fourth of [October]. Then we launched [on the] fourth of [November, December, and January 21, 1960]… [One of them] was the first time we decided, or the powers-that-be decided, we could open it up to the media. So we had all the usual big guns from the networks there and we briefed them. I gave them a briefing, and I said, “Well, this is not quite like what you’re used to at the Cape, guys. This thing goes off pretty fast, you know.”\\n\\n One of them didn’t follow that, because I was in the control center there with the radar and everything, and my guys told me afterwards, when it went off, this guy who, when I briefed them, he said, “Yes, no sweat. We’ll follow that,” well, he still had his camera zoomed in on the pad, and the vehicle was up here and he was saying, “Where did it go? Where did it go?” Six G makes a difference, because, you know, he’d been used to things that—I say, stagger off—but, you know, 1.1 or less G, they take off pretty sedately from the Cape. And so that was that one. Anyway, that was Little Joe [for me. There were three more flights after] I got moved over to the Mercury Program Office and got volunteered to take the first Mercury capsule being built by McDonnell. That was quite an experience for everybody, them as well as us, because this was the first capsule, manned capsule that they’d built, that probably anybody had built, and so there was a learning curve for everybody.\\n\\n They had three shifts working, and I was the lone capsule engineer trying to keep an eye on what three shifts were doing, so it meant some long days and long nights. That went on, then I got sick and had [another] kidney stone, and that got me back from that.\\n\\n But then I got put in as problem engineer on MR-2 [Mercury-Redstone 2], which was this capsule, and we had Ham on board, the chimpanzee. It was launched on the Redstone and did the flight all right, came down, but about an hour or so after it impacted with the water, while they still going in to recover [it], the capsule tilted over and started sinking. Fortunately, the Marine helicopter crew were able to get a shepherd’s hook on it and haul it up. It turned out that the heat shield had gone.\\n\\n Now, the thing is—let me show you this, what we did in Mercury, because this comes in on the [John H.] Glenn [Jr.] flight, too. See, this was Ham in the water, and as you can see, there’s just a torn bag and no heat shield and the thing’s lying on its side, and, unfortunately, water was coming in through a couple of valves on the top. That’s what we thought. Afterwards, we discovered it was a bit more serious than that, because when we got back and we looked at the—there’s a fiberglass heat shield that’s fitted on the bottom of the capsule and then the bag goes down from that. I don’t know whether you can see it on here, but there were some holes cut into the fiberglass and it went right through the bulkhead. So not only did we have some valves leaking, but we had water coming in through the bulkhead.\\n\\n So, being the problem engineer, I got the job of putting a team together. Langley had another capsule. We took that over to the water tank at Langley, the wave tank. It’s 200 feet long or so and cold as all get-out in the winter. We set up the wave state, because we knew what wave state we had to—it had been measured and all. We set that up, and, sure enough, within a few minutes of when it failed in the actual flight, it failed in the tank.\\n\\n What happened was, McDonnell had, on the side of the capsule, the bag would come from the capsule down to the heat shield and they had some stainless steel straps about an inch and a half wide and about, oh, probably, fourteen gauge, very thin stainless steel strap. What had happened, the jerking load of the heat shield, with the wave action on it, had snatched on those things and fatigued them, and they failed. And once they failed, of course, the bag tore and the heat shield disappeared, and then the CG [center of gravity] was wrong.\\n\\n So we got looking at that, and said, “Well, the straps obviously don’t work, so what’s the next best thing?” Well, a stainless steel aircraft control cable. Good stuff. We’ve used that for twenty, thirty years, you know, it’s good stuff. So we had the guys in Jack [A.] Kinzler’s shop set up a—they made a test setup for us, and what we did was continuously bend, at different frequencies, different diameters of stainless steel cable, over different radii, all in salt water, at the right temperature, and we’d run those twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We eventually came up with the minimum radius and the minimum diameter of cable that would do the job.\\n\\n Now, the problem was that we still had snatch loads in the cables. Now, a cable will only take so much snatch load. So, thinking about this one night, I said, “Well, you know, there’s the old triangle of forces. We’d better triangulate these.” So what I did was came up with putting—this is just a little seven-pound spring, and you attach it to the middle of each of the cables, and when you get a snatch load this way, it’s totally ameliorated by this little spring, because what you’re doing is putting a large load this way, but you’re taking it all out on a little spring this way, and by the triangle of forces, all you needed was a seven-pound spring.\\n\\n So that was the system that we came up with, with the bag outside, of course. It was a sort of a—I don’t know whether it was a nylon bag. It was rubberized, coating with rubber, and had holes down the bottom to get the right impact characteristics. And then we had drop capsules. We dropped those in Back Bay, off Langley, successfully. And then did two drops at sea, off Cape Hatteras. They both worked successfully, so at that point, Walt [Walter C.] Williams, who was head of operations at that time, said, “That’s it.”\\n\\n We only had—well, let’s see. I think it was a matter of just two months or so before [Alan B.] Shepard’s [Jr.] flight, and we had to get this working, otherwise Shepard couldn’t fly. We finished it about two weeks to ten days before he flew. Of course, they’d already fitted this into his capsule, but we had to prove that it worked. So that was that one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Well, if we could pause for a moment, to change the tape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Mercury landing, the other thing I didn’t mention, was the honeycomb that we put on the bulkhead, so that if the heat shield were to come up and hit it, the honeycomb would absorb the blow and therefore you wouldn’t get a hole in the bulkhead. Now, landing, Pete [Peter J.] Armitage and I, who was another ex-Cranfield, but somewhat later than me, landing, an ocean landing, people tend to think the ocean’s a benign thing to land on because it’s water.\\n\\n As a matter of fact, water is harder than land, when you get right down to it. I know people have a hard time believing that, but it turned out the worst thing you could have was a perfectly calm sea. You get the maximum G from that. What you really needed was a nice little chop, and then the capsule would come in—of course, we hung at an angle, so it hit on a corner—and the waves would act as a shock absorber. By breaking down the wave structure, you could absorb a lot of the energy coming in.\\n\\n Pete and I did a paper on that to the [AIAA – American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics] and all those people. I remember, I wasn’t involved in it, but I was told that at the time when the medical people were doing drop tests, they used a pig, and they had it in the Mercury capsule and the pigs kept dying. So they got this old farmer, I guess from North Carolina, and he took one look at it and said, “Well, of course the pigs are dying. You’ve got them on their back. Pigs die when they get on their back.” So they said, “Okay.” You still put the crew on their back.\\n\\n And the thing with that, of course, is that if you can put a G load on rapidly enough and get it off again rapidly enough, if you can beat the inertia of the intestines and all the innards in a human body, then a human can withstand a pretty high G. It’s only if it goes on too long. Now we’re talking milliseconds, you know, twenty, but if you can get it on and off in twenty, thirty milliseconds, it’s not so bad. But if you go it a bit longer than that, then everything starts moving, then you’ve got a problem. So that’s why we were working with that, also, an angle.\\n\\n So, taking Mercury through McDonnell and then the MR-2, I worked on some more Mercury, but then I got moved over to Gemini. With Gemini, this was really Jim Chamberlin’s brainchild. Mercury, bless its heart, you know, looking back, it’s horribly crude by today’s standards. In those days, people thought it was sort of leading-edge technology, but it was not an operations man’s capsule. For example, to get at the batteries, you had to take half the units out of the capsule, because they’re buried under the floor. So Jim said, “Well, what we really need is an operations man’s capsule.”\\n\\n Jim had a house just the other side of Mariner’s Museum in Hidenwood from me, and I remember Jim [James T.] Rose, among others, and myself, used to spend some Sunday mornings in Jim Chamberlin’s basement, scheming out stuff for Gemini, and that’s really where we came up with the clamshells opening up and all the systems and everything were on the doors and inside the clamshells.\\n\\n Then the other thing was that they decided water landing was really for pelicans or something, and what we really needed was a land landing. So Dr. [Robert R.] Gilruth called me in and said, “Rod, I’d like you to take a look at developing a Rogallo wing. We’re going to call it a paraglider system for Gemini.” So that’s how I got involved in that.\\n\\n I was doing that and all the escape stuff for Gemini, the ejection seats and so on. The ejection seats, that was the first time we put ejection seats on, because Mercury didn’t have them. They had the escape tower. Gemini did not have any escape tower, it had ejection seats, sat on top of a Titan, and the problem there was that, you had to get the crew through a fireball, so we developed, or had developed by Du Pont people, special fire suits that were fire—not fireproof, but they would allow them to go through the number of seconds we had to, and we checked it with dummies, flying over trenches full of lit gasoline and all that stuff, just to check it out. One of the benefits of that, of course, was ultimately, it got into use for fire departments’ suits that they use.\\n\\n One of the problems with the ejection seat is that if the vehicle is tilting on the pad and the wind’s blowing a certain way, that’s the worst combination, because if you’re tilting too much, one guy, or both of them, are probably going to hit the ground before the chute comes out, so that’s a pretty critical timing thing of keeping the escape fast enough with the chute opening and so forth, that it doesn’t open in the fireball, but it opens immediately afterwards, so you can get the velocity down before they land. So that’s what we were doing on that.\\n\\n The paraglider, we spent two years on that. The big problem with the paraglider, it [had] inflatable booms, for a start, and it was deployed, as you can see on the picture up there, like a parachute, then you’d inflate the booms and then you became a delta wing. Now, a delta wing on cables is a very flexible system, and so it was a whole new field of aerodynamics.\\n\\n Meanwhile, McDonnell [Aircraft Corp.] was dashing on building the Gemini capsule, and here we were trying to do a research program as to how to get a flying wing flying, among other things. Two major problems. Number one, the landing characteristics. Now, being an old delta wing guy, I was pretty familiar with it, and I told people, I said, “Look, the ground effect on a delta wing is a lot different to a regular airplane.” Normally, on a regular airplane—well, on any airplane—as you come in to land, you’ve got what we call a Delta H, a height increment, where you’ve got to start your easing back on the stick to flair. With a Delta wing, that Delta H is much smaller than on a regular airplane, because the onset of the ground effects on it is that much steeper.\\n\\n That was one of the problems that apparently happened. I’d left the paraglider program by that time, but when they did the full-scale drop out at Edwards, the pilot of the T-33 was supposed to say the word “flair,” and, unfortunately, took a rather long time to say it, and so by the time the guy started to flair, he’d almost got out of the Delta H, and he had a pretty high vertical velocity, and got hurt.\\n\\n Net result, anyway, was that the paraglider was scrapped as far as Gemini was concerned, and they went back to a chute. The other thing we did for the paraglider, by the way, was, it had a triangular landing system, which was the stable one, but instead of wheels or skids, we found that wire brushes, metal wire brushes, gave you the best stability characteristics and drag on your landing with it. So this was Rockwell that had that contract. So that was the paraglider, and did that one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any involvement with the parasail that was sort of an alternative to the paraglider?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I knew it was going on. Gosh, there was a little bit of competition, but they were checking that out at Fort Hood [Texas], as a matter of fact, and some of the guys from Landing and Recovery Division would say, “Well, that’s the way to go.” I said, “Well, that’s fine, but my marching orders are to make the paraglider work,” so that’s what we tried to do.\\n\\n The one interesting thing that came up with the paraglider, and I haven’t heard it mentioned at all since, but Rockwell came out with what they call microballoons, which are teeny little plastic balls, and very, very tiny, and if you put them in a boom and suck a vacuum on it, it’ll rigidize, and it’ll be stronger than steel. I mean, you could jump up—I’ve jumped up and down on one.\\n\\n I’ve often thought that, gee, you know, that would be a great thing, like, for the Space Station. One of the things you’re always worried about is a leak. You know, if you get a minute little thing hit the thing, gets through the shielding that they’ve got, and you get a tiny leak, if you had these microballoons in a little sachet and you let one go, it’d find the leak. Believe me, it’d find the leak because of the outflow. And once it hit the hole, it’d rigidize, because it’s a vacuum on the outside, pressure on the inside, it’d rigidize and seal it. I don’t think anybody’s taken it up, which is a shame. That would have been one of the positive things that could have come out of the paraglider research.\\n\\n Gemini, I was involved with other stuff on that, like the payloads and so on, and especially the radioactive payloads. DoD [Department of Defense] had a radiometer on board one, and I remember the Mexican Government was not going to let us operate the Guaymas station if the DOO8 experiment was on because it was a radioactive experiment. Well, you know, it was radioactive, but not in the normal sense of the word. It was to measure radioactivity, and it had a certain isotope in it, and that was all.\\n\\n So I started getting involved in that, and I forget exactly when it happened, but there was a big debate going on. This was as we were getting into Apollo days. When I first was there, I was under Max [Maxime A.] Faget in the Engineering Division, then I got moved over to the program office, Mercury and then Gemini.\\n\\n Then from Gemini I was moved over to the operations, and at first I worked for John Hodge. This was before we had the center built in Houston. Then was hauled over to work for Walt Williams, and Walt was “Mr. Operations” in those days. One of the first things I had to do for Walt, he had a report from the Bellcom people at headquarters, which said we needed thirteen ships on the tracking site for Mercury. He said, “Well, take a look at this, because I don’t think we need that many.” So, okay, I went away and looked at it, came back. I said, “Well, I figure we need about seven, Walt.” He said, “Good, we’ll go with that.” I think we finished up with five to seven, something like that.\\n\\n Then shortly after that, Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft took me on board as his technical assistant, and that started a long—I forget how long I worked for him, about [six or seven] years, I guess. When we moved down to the Center, Chris had the corner office and I had the one next door. As far as a varied career, that was a very fortuitous thing, because Chris had a habit of sticking his head in the door. Like one time, he stuck it in and said, “We’ve got a big argument going on between the medical doctors and the space physicists about radiation. I wonder if you’d take a look at it.” And so I said, “Okay.”\\n\\n So I thought, well, the best thing to do is to get everybody around the table and see if we can sort this out, so I started up what was called the Radiation Constraints Panel, and we had medical doctors there, the space physicists, the crew, flight ops people. What we did was, we’d go into the whole environment, and the big thing, of course, was the maximum allowable dose for the crew. Not that I’m a physicist or anything like that, but I got quite acquainted with radiation through third parties, but I’m more of—what do you call it? Not an integrator, but a person who allows things, you know, steers them in the right direction, gets them developed, as opposed to doing the actual work themselves. And that’s what happened with the Radiation Constraints Panel.\\n\\n We finished up working with the National Academy of Sciences’ Radiobiological Subcommittee, and they would never come up with a dose. They came up with what they called a reference risk, and then we’d play the risk-versus-gain game and say, well, we’re going to the moon, we’ll risk a lot more than Joe Blow working every day in a shop somewhere with low-level radiation. And that’s where the reference risk was set up as—excuse me, ladies—but for white males, because that was all the crew we had at that time, for white males between the age of twenty-five and fifty, and forty-nine, I think it was, at that time. We would allow double the incidence of leukemia and that was how we came up with our maximum career dose of 400 rem…to depth [5 cm].\\n\\n So what we did on that, we worked through this, and, by the way, Radiation Constraints Panels are still going on today, for each Shuttle flight, so when I think of what have I left as a legacy to the space program, I guess one is the Radiation Constraints Panel, and the other, we’ll get into later, is the Flight Operations Panel, because we did a similar thing there.\\n\\n On the radiation—going to the moon, the big concern, really, was if there was a solar particle event. Not a solar flare, because you can have a solar flare with not many particles or the particles can be going the other way, because you have to realize the sun’s rotating. It’s not rotating at its poles, but it is at the equator. And as a sun spot comes around from east to west, as we call it, if it’s on the west side, then it’s not a big problem, because the particles will go off in a [spiral] and disappear into space, but if you have one come up on the east limb, then that’s going to put particles in the Earth-Moon part of space, so that’s the one you’re worried about.\\n\\n We worked with NOAA [National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration], by the way, the space environment lab at Boulder. NOAA ran the SPAN, Solar Particle Alert Network, that set up telescopes and things worldwide, which, you know, NASA funded and everything. The guys came up with a program where you could plot the onset of particle event, the intensity of it, and they could forecast, it turned out, fortuitously, that the maximum event took longer to build up to a peak than the short ones, the low-level ones, so you could plot it for about eight or nine hours, and that would give you a good idea if it was going to peak and go down, or if it was going to really peak. If it was really going to peak, you had a total of twenty-four hours, so you had about twelve hours to decide what to do.\\n\\n And what we were going to do with Apollo, of course, because if the crew were on the moon in the suit, doing an EVA, there’s virtually no protection at all. If they got in the lunar module, there was next to nothing either. So the technique that we used was to have the crew, if an event like this were to come about, we’d have twelve hours or so for them to get back into the lunar module, get things set up, get a rendezvous set up, take off, rendezvous with the CSM, the command and service module, and then put the command and service module, with the hatch and the windows down, because the Apollo had a thick side and a thin side, and the thick side was away from the windows, because that’s how we came into Earth reentry. And with that, you then stay in lunar orbit.\\n\\n The lowest radiation dose is not to come back to Earth as quick as possible, but was actually to stay in lunar orbit. If you stayed in lunar orbit, the Moon acted as a partial shield and cut the total dose down to about a third of the free-space dose. Well, a certain celebrated author, named James Michener, was doing research for his book on space, and he came to the Center and talked to us, and I talked to him about the radiation, explained to him what our techniques were. Unfortunately, he took, I guess it’s writer’s liberty or something, and had the crew die from a radiation dose, which was unfortunate. Made it dramatic, but misled a lot of people on what the dangers were with Apollo. So that was one thing.\\n\\n The other thing early on, shortly after I started working with Chris, we wanted to organize the flight operations activities, and so I cooked up something. I called it—it was a mission operations plan, and it involved everybody. Everybody that had anything to do with the mission, with the vehicle, the mission, the network, anything, were all involved, and it was really a tool to help the mission planners, the old MPAD [Mission Planning and Analysis Division], in their work, because the Program Office would come up with a set of requirements, and then we had to come up with a mission to meet them.\\n\\n So I set it up that we had all these different people from the program office, the crew, Max Faget’s people, the contractors, Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland], you name it, KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida], everybody was involved. Typically, we’d have probably six or seven dozen people at the meeting, and others on voice loops, and what we’d do is iterate the requirements, and the MPAD people would come in with a rough cut at a profile, you know, of what their first cut was, and then we’d iterate it, and get everybody’s inputs and so on.\\n\\n I remember that at the first mission operations plan meeting we had, the medical people were very reluctant to come because they thought it was a waste of time. So we got them to come, and, lo and behold, they found there were all sorts of things going on that they ought to be interested in that affected what they were going to do. And from then on, they were pretty good attenders.\\n\\n The same in those early days with the crew. The crews attended because they said, well, this is the best place to find out what’s going on with their mission, because all the latest stuff on a mission, what we were going to do and so on, was all carried out in the mission operations plan. Later on, we changed it to flight operations plan because in the earlier days, we also covered all the network communications and everything, and then in later years we moved off that and just did basically the flight plan. We did those all through Apollo, every program. In fact, they still go on today with Shuttle.\\n\\n For the Apollo Program, we also started a lunar surface operations plan, and this, again, was because I felt that just the flight borne part of the program was one thing. That was pretty complicated. But the lunar surface operations were tremendously important and very complicated, and we needed to make sure that everybody was on board playing from the same sheet of paper, that we maximized the time the crew were on the moon, and went to the right place, did the right things, and so on, and all the procedures.\\n\\n Now, getting involved in that, we soon came to realize that, hey, there’s a heck of a lot the crew have got to learn about lunar surface operations, so when we were planning the G mission, which turned out to be Apollo 11, we said, “Look it. This is too big a chunk to bite off, from an operations point of view, in one go,” having a crew learn all about flying to the moon and also all the lunar surface stuff. So that’s really where Mission F, Apollo 10, was born.\\n\\n I wrote a long letter for Chris to sign, where we sent it up to headquarters and put all the whys and wherefores down, you know, why we wanted to do it, because basically it was so that the whole of the flight to the Moon and from the LM [lunar module] down to 50,000 feet was SOP, standard operating procedures. And then the only new thing, really new, the 11 people had, was from there down to the Moon and on the Moon.\\n\\n So finally, after an awful lot of debate, etc., etc., and Chris was really the one who was pushing this hard, because he signed off on it right away, he said, “Hey, that’s great. We need to do that.”\\n\\n So finally we had an Apollo 10. Well, it was fortunate we did. I have a great deal of admiration for Tom and the guys, Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford and the guys who flew 10, because it must have been awfully hard for them to be that close and not land. But Tom was very good about it. He was the only one of the 10 crew who never flew to the Moon, by the way. The other two subsequently did go to the Moon, but Tom didn’t, and I’ve always admired him for that.\\n\\n But what happened on 10, when the LEM got down to 50,000 feet and we did an orbit around the Moon, we found out that there were some perturbations in the trajectory that we didn’t know about, and it turned out that the mascons, the lunar mass concentrations, had been measured by unmanned satellites that were way up, miles and miles from the Moon, and here we were flying at 50,000 feet. There were some more lower-level mascons that didn’t show up on the unmanned tracking, but showed up on our tracking, the LM at 50,000, and we were able to analyze those, find out what they were and the strength and everything, and accommodate those in the software, the guidance and navigation for 11. Because 10 flew basically the 11 mission. It would have gone to the same landing spot, it had the same liftoff, landing, and everything else that 11 was going to have.\\n\\n So apart from learning everything we had to do about going to the Moon with the LM and everything, I think it was invaluable from the mass cons. Now, some people may say, well, would that have stopped its landing on 11? It may have stopped us, it may have caused us to abort 11, it may not, but when you think about the computer overload we had on 11, along with other stuff going on, and then if we’d also had this mascon effect that we didn’t know about, it certainly would have made the landing a lot more touch and go, it really would. Personally, I think it was invaluable, but that’s my personal opinion on that, because it was a thing that I was deeply involved in.\\n\\n Let’s see. Anything else on Apollo? Well, of course, we also were working with the Russians in that time. Of course, the Russians, we found, did a lot of cribbing, and so we found a lot of our stuff would be referenced in their reports. I remember the chief physician of the Russian program came over and we met in the MCC [Mission Control Center] and he had his interpreter, who was obviously a KGB guy, and Foggy Bottom—sorry, State Department had their interpreter.\\n\\n Well, fortunately, we had a white Russian engineer working on NASA JSC staff, and so I had him with me, and he was my interpreter, but we didn’t let on that he knew Russian. That was very interesting, because it turned out that the chief doctor of the Russian team made out he couldn’t speak English, and so when I got what his interpreter said to us after what he’d said, and then the State Department interpreter said, then my guy whispered in my ear what the real interpretation was, I said, boy, you know, three different stories here.\\n\\n So finally I got to where I’d test the Russian, you see, and I’d say something and watch his eyes, because if somebody understands what you’re telling him, you can see it in their eyes. It won’t show in the face, but you can see it their eyes, recognition of what it is. So that was a fun time.\\n\\n So radiation work went on, flight operations planning went on, I did a lot of the interfacing with Goddard on the network, TDRS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite] stuff. Let’s see. Of course, the other thing on Apollo was 13, and that was pretty bad, although the first really bad thing was 204, Apollo 1. That was a real tragedy and that was tough for everybody because we all knew them, been working with them for years.\\n\\n “Apollo 13,” unfortunately, the movie had to be dramatized, I guess, because it misled people a lot on what went on. The Apollo was on a free return, what we call a free return trajectory. Incidentally, that’s why Apollo 8, we were able to turn that around so quickly from when the decision was made in the early fall, to flying it over Christmas, the reason being that Morris Jenkins and the guys at MPAD and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts] and all those other people, Langley, had already come up with the basic trajectory design of a free return, and, of course, a lunar orbit rendezvous, because there were a lot of arguments about what you should do, whether to do a direct landing or what have you.\\n\\n So we were doing a free-return trajectory which meant if we’d done nothing else, the vehicle would have come back to the Earth. Now, would it have been an ideal capture? Not necessarily. But as a point of fact, the reason, the main reason that we had to do a tweaker burn coming back manually, using the lunar module, was because we had a lunar module on board and we had to make sure that went in at a pretty deep part of the ocean. And so that’s why we did a little tweak to get the lunar module over there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you had the radioactive generator up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It had an RTG [radioisotope thermoelectric generator] which had about 40,000 millicuries of isotope. In fact, I kidded Jim [James A.] Lovell about that afterward. I said, “You know, Jim, we had five KC-135s out there, and only one of them was looking for you guys. The other four all had radiation instrumentation, seeing if they could find some. They didn’t find any.” Because we put it in—oh, it was about twelve, fourteen thousand feet deep where we put it, and the RTG itself, one of the tests the Energy Department had to do was to do, it was in a graphite carbon-carbon type container, among other things. [I was told] they had to drop it from 5,000 feet onto concrete, with no chute, and make sure it didn’t break open, among other things. There was a whole raft of tests they did on it, so we were pretty confident that it would hold together, but you certainly didn’t want it hitting into land if you could help it, so that’s why we did that part.\\n\\n The other thing on Apollo 8, the Chinese exploded a device when Apollo 8 was being launched, but fortunately we went through the two layers rather quickly, you know, because we were on the way to the Moon, so the time spent there was very, very low and the radiation dose to the crew was minimal. I mean, it was a matter of—I’ve forgotten the exact numbers, but under 100 milligrams. I mean, you get more from a dental X-ray, especially if it hasn’t been calibrated lately. So it’s one of those things.\\n\\n Apollo 8 was probably—well, a lot of people have asked me, you know, which was the high point in the Apollo Program, thinking that it’s 11. Well, 11 was really something, but I think as the high point, Apollo 8 had to take the vote, because as an engineer, it was the first time we’d been out there, and we only had the one engine to come back with.\\n\\n Now, Rocketdyne and North American and Rockwell would say, “Well, there was redundancy to the gazoos on that engine.” I’d say, “Yes, but you only had one nozzle,” and if anything went wrong with the nozzle, as we found out on Shuttle not too long ago, you know, a nozzle problem can cause some gas pain, to put it mildly. So it was a gutsy thing.\\n\\n Anyway, of course, Chris and George [M.] Low and all those people set the thing up in the late summer, and I got the job of putting the profile together. Among other things, of course, at that time, I was on the vestry of St. Christopher Church in League City, and Frank [Borman] was a lay reader there, and so the beginning of October, I think it was, we had the vestry meeting, and Frank says to the minister—he was scheduled to be lay reader at Christmas Eve service, you see, and he said, “I’m going to be on travel,” because he wasn’t allowed to say where he was going.\\n\\n Now, I knew where he was going, so I took Frank outside, and I said, “Frank, I think we can work this. If you read the prayer and stuff from the Moon, I’ll get it taped in the MCC and whip the tape over to the church and we can play it in the service.”\\n\\n So he said, “Well, gee, okay, that sounds great.”\\n\\n So went back in and told the minister. Jim Buckner was the minister at that time. He said, “Frank can do that. He’s decided he can do it.” Of course, by the time Christmas got near, everybody knew that he and Jim Lovell and Bill [William A.] Anders were the crew going, and that’s when we let the minister in on the secret and we set up the PA system and all that stuff.\\n\\n Frank was so busy, he said, “Well, would you pick a prayer for me?” And that’s when I picked this prayer for work and peace by G.A. Weld. It was in the\\n\\n New England Book of Prayer\\n\\n for the Church of England, I think, which is the Episcopal Church. So Frank had that down in his logbook.\\n\\n In one of the early—I forget, I think it was about the fourth or fifth rev around the Moon, Frank comes on and says, “[Is Rod Rose there?] I’ve got a message for [him] and for the people of St. Christopher. In fact, it’s for people everywhere.” I’d called the thing “Experiment P-1,” for first prayer from space. So Frank read that and we recorded it, and then, of course, they came out with the reading of the first ten verses of Genesis, which was super. I had nothing to do with that, other than record it.\\n\\n So that worked in great, because I got off duty and took those over to the church, and I’d set up with the guys on duty in the MCC to give me a call as soon as the vehicle had come around from behind the Moon, because all our trans-Earth burns from the Moon were made behind the Moon, so you didn’t know whether it was a good burn or not until they came back. They’d finished the burn, came around from behind the Moon, and then that was the big “uncross your fingers.” The timing was exquisite, because that happened just before midnight local time in Texas, and they phoned me at the church and I was able to give a little message, piece of paper to the minister. At that time, we’d had the midnight communion and he was about to dismiss the congregation with a blessing and all, and he was able to tell him that [they were] on the way home. So that was probably the most emotional. [Rose expresses emotion.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I can understand that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After that, we had a request from a Catholic priest in New York who wanted to set it down as an anthem, which he did, and the choir sang that every Christmas Eve for several years.\\n\\n Subsequently, as a follow-up to that, and that’s really how I got the picture from Frank and Jim and the guys, the follow-up from that, Hank Flagg, who was chief counsel at JSC at that time, called me up one day. He said, “Rod, we’ve got a little problem. You and Frank and the guys and George Low and one or two others have been named in a lawsuit filed by Madeline Murray O’Hare, and she’s claiming that we’re expending government funds on a religious thing because it was called Experiment P-1, so it must have been official.” I said, “Oh, boy.”\\n\\n So, fortunately, it went to court in Houston—well, a pre-court hearing—and I don’t know who the judge was, but whoever he was, I take my hat off to him, because he dismissed it, said, “That’s irrelevant.” So that was that, so we never had to appear in court or anything. But, boy, the letters we had from all over the world were incredible, they really were. That was one of the highlights.\\n\\n Apollo 11—you know, people would say, “Well, what do you feel about Apollo 11?” I said, “Well, a great sense of relief when they landed, for starters.” I remember coming off the shift at the MCC and looking up at the moon and saying, “Well, it looks the same, but we’ve got three guys up there.” It’ll never be the same. So they left our mark up there.\\n\\n The later Apollos—see, one of the things the lunar surface experiments plan did was work out all the things for ALSEP, the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package, which 13 was going to be the first one to put one down. That’s how come we had the RTG on board. Well, subsequent flights, we landed. We got 14, 15, [16,] 17, got them up there, and that has always, I felt, been very shortsighted, but it was costing something like 6 million dollars a year to run a minuscule little control room. I mean, it wasn’t the main MCC. It was just a little room with a comm, just to keep an eye on the experiments and all, because the RTG would power up those experiments for, like, a hundred years.\\n\\n So there was all this data coming from the Moon, and after a few years, Congress decided that they didn’t want to spend [that] money on it, and they ordered us to shut it down. Well, unfortunately, the system was built so that you could shut it down, but you can’t power it up again, so we’ve got all those lunar surface experiment packages on the moon. As far as we know, they’re still gathering data, still measuring, anyway, and nothing’s come of it, because it ain’t going anywhere. So I thought, “Boy, that’s shortsighted.” So that was Apollo. And then we got onto Skylab, of course." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If we could take that short break to change out our tape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay, we’re finishing up Apollo. There was a lot [that went] on. One of the nice things working for Chris Kraft, you know, was that I guess he and I sort of were on the same wavelength. Not many people—I don’t know anybody who lasted [seven] years with Chris. Chris suffered fools gladly, let me put it that way. He didn’t like people who made bad mistakes, and I guess I didn’t make too many bad mistakes, so I managed to stay on. But he would really give me an incredible latitude to make all sorts of decisions. All the FOD stuff that went out, I’d go through it. I’d represent him at all our Level Two boards with the program manager, Level Three with Aaron Cohen, and so on. Altogether, it was pretty nice to be trusted that much, it really was, so I always think Chris was a great guy to work for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As someone who’s been on both sides of the fence, how do you think the relationship was between operations and engineering?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Initially, we were poles apart. When we started Mercury, the engineers said, “Look. We’ll build it and you fly it.” Typical airplane-type attitude, you know. That’s all very well, but when you get to a complicated system and an environment like flying in space, you find that you really need to integrate the operations requirements right at the get-go, because normally, when an engineer’s got a problem to solve, there usually are several ways of solving it, any one of which would be acceptable to the engineer, but to the ops guy, two of them would be anathema, and one of them would be, “Hey, that’s the way I want to do it.”\\n\\n So that was one of the things the FOP was set up to do, was to actually integrate the contractor and the engineering, Max Faget’s engineering people and so on, [Rockwell and] Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corp.] engineering and all. Get them all integrated with the operations people so they could understand what we wanted to do and, more importantly, why we wanted to do it, and then we could have a vehicle and a system and a flight plan that met all the requirements, the engineers knew which way they needed to go, and the ops guys could fly it afterwards.\\n\\n Nowadays it’s pretty well established, I think. The FOPs are still going on. They’ve changed somewhat now with Shuttle, because, of course, an awful lot of the flight plan has been standardized. One of the things we tried to do in the Shuttle was to actually standardize all the different pieces like a rendezvous. You’d have standard segments of the rendezvous, and then the flight planning would be more a question of assembling those pieces, rather than going from scratch.\\n\\n See, on Apollo, we basically started from scratch. It was a four- to five-year plan. A lot of people don’t realize that four or five years before 11 flew, we not only knew where we going to land, we knew the precise time we were going to land and the exact time we were going lift off, because we had to, in order to meet all the different requirements.\\n\\n There was about the best part of two dozen different things that would govern your launch window. Among others was not only where you were going on the Moon, when you were going, get the sunlight between three degrees and I think it was ten degrees, incidence, because it had to show up the boulders and things on the Moon. You had to get the deep-space tracking stations in the right place because of communications and so on. So it was a tricky thing. So, getting all that integrated was something.\\n\\n Now with Shuttle, we’ve managed to standardize things so much that a lot of the mission planning, not all of it, but a lot of the mission planning is done by technicians, basically. They’re people who’ve got a high school diploma. MPAD were the first ones to set this up. You train them in the application of these things, and they’re able to assemble these standard pieces and put together a Shuttle mission and all that, with the stuff that goes with it.\\n\\n It’s a lot different than when we started. When we started, like I say, it was four to five years of slog work, really doing it. Apollo especially raises a little bit of philosophy, because in the Apollo days, manned space flight was a pretty hard mistress, in that it required an extensive amount of one’s time and energy, to the detriment of your family. I think the unsung heroes of certainly the Apollo Program were the wives and children, because we didn’t spend enough time with them. [Rose becomes emotional.] That’s for sure. I know I didn’t with my two sons. Made up for it now, but, you know, when you’re working all the hours of day and night and travelling all over, you just don’t get to spend time with your family like you should.\\n\\n So it came at a price. In fact, the divorce rate—I don’t know what it was overall, but certainly at JSC, especially with the flight crew, there were a lot of divorces. And there were some with the engineers, although surprisingly, I don’t know whether it’s because we’re all a bit old-fashioned or what, but of the group that came from Canada, there were very, very few divorces, probably only about two out of the whole lot. Eventually there were thirty-one of us, because six came down after the first twenty-five. Maybe it was our upbringing or something that was different, I’m not sure, but we all worked pretty hard, I know that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think a lot of Americans don’t appreciate that sacrifice that all of you made." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes. I think it was the wives and children that made the sacrifice, because the engineers were so wrapped up in doing something that they wanted to do. I mean, it was a fantastic thing to be on as a career, and we tended to forget the other half of the family. I remember saying to someone once, they said, “Well, who do you think were the heroes of the Apollo Program?” I said, “The wives and children, the families, because they were the ones, you know, the wives had to take the kids to school, feed them, clothe them, make sure they did their homework, and all that stuff, get them to football games, soccer games, band practice, the myriad things they get into, and basically without the help of their partner.” And they also learned to look after household problems, too.\\n\\n So it was a tough time for them, and they really didn’t have the excitement or, I was going to say, glamour. Glamour is really with the flight crew, but with the engineers, the excitement and thrill of running a program, you know, doing a program. So they are the ones I take my hat off to. They were the supporters. Couldn’t have done it without them. You know, they keep saying, well, there were thousands of contractors and all that stuff. I say, yes, but there were also thousands of contractors in NASA, wives and families that contributed every bit as much as any engineer did. Couldn’t have done it without them. So that was Apollo.\\n\\n Anyway, then we went on to Skylab. In Apollo, by the way, I was in the MCC, but not on a console as such. I was on semi-console, because I had to make sure that all the activities, any events that went on during the day, were properly reported in the daily flight log, and also was on the editorial board for the post flight [report] and all that stuff. And real time, I kept an eye on the radiation group, because we had them off in the weather room. Alva [C.] Hardy and his people were there, and Tim [C.] White and those folks, and I’d just keep an eye in case—well, like, with Apollo 13, we had to have a conflab with that, and the MPAD guys, the MPAD people, to figure out what we needed to do and when we’d do it sort of thing, and why, and then convince George Low and all the other people why we had to do it. So that was what I did real time. As a matter of fact, after MR-2, I have never watched a real live launch. I’ve always been in the Control Center. I just see mine on television like anybody else, plus I’m looking at some charts and things.\\n\\n Skylab, I didn’t get involved in too much, although we did have quite a bit of radiation aspects to consider, one of which was, of course, the French, at that time, were doing their experiments in the Pacific, and whilst they were not exoatmospheric, the problem was that, in Skylab, the crew were doing a lot of ground observations, and had they been doing that as they flew over the site, when the event went off, then it’s highly likely they’d have been temporarily blinded. Now, it would only have been for a matter of three, six, seven seconds, but if you’re doing an EVA [extravehicular activity] or something like that, that could be pretty crucial. So we used to have what we called a heads-down command to the crew, and, in fact, we had to give it on one mission, because the French wouldn’t tell us when they were going to let it off, mainly I think because their explosion time was related very much to local weather, etc., etc., so they had a nominal time but couldn’t tell us exactly. So we had a heads-down time and we’d just have the crews keep their eyes inside the Skylab as it went over the site, and that was it.\\n\\n One always had to worry about exoatmospheric events. In fact, that’s probably the biggest threat, I think, to the Space Station, because if somebody lets off an event outside the atmosphere, it can be pretty bad. You know, we had one, when, in 19—oh, whatever it was. We sent one up with radioactive pieces of wire, if you remember, and that polluted the environment up there for years before it came down.\\n\\n So on Skylab, our main concern was that the crew limit the EVA—and this is true, by the way, for Space Station as well—limit the EVA when you’re going through the South Atlantic anomaly, because there’s about four or five passes a day where you would subject the crew to an increased radiation environment, depending on what the solar activity has been like, of course, because that squashes the South Atlantic anomaly closer to the Earth.\\n\\n So with both Skylab and the Space Station, years ago we recommended that they either not do EVA during the period of that time or get somewhere where they get a bit of shielding, if they’re doing EVA, because, you know, radiation’s accumulative, and even low-level radiation builds up. And as best as I can see from the latest reports, it doesn’t dissipate like they thought it did, so that happens.\\n\\n Then, of course, you also have to worry about rogue events, terrorist-type things, and they don’t have to explode it anywhere near the vehicle, by the way, because the beta tubes go around the Earth and follow the electromagnetic lines of force. And so if you happen to be flying through a tube at the time the electrons are coming through, you get a zap like you’re in line of sight, which is not too smart. So, you know, I think radiation is something that—well, the Center is still concerned about it.\\n\\n The other thing is, as was illustrated recently, was collision avoidance. That will get me through Skylab. ASTP [Apollo-Soyuz Test Project], had to learn Russian, sort of. Funny language, that Russian. Didn’t get too involved in that, although we did do the radiation aspects, and then we got on to Shuttle.\\n\\n Now, Jim Chamberlin, by this time, was looking after the early development of Shuttle, and again, his office was just down the corridor from Chris’ area and mine, and very often he’d call me in. He’d say, “Well, what do you think of this, Rod?” and he’d have a layout of something on there about the Shuttle and so on. That’s how I got involved in that.\\n\\n Then, of course, we started Shuttle FOPs and radiation [constraints] for Shuttle, and then we had a gentleman from Goddard who was going to do all the data systems and integration communications for Shuttle, review it all, and he moved down to JSC, was there six months, and retired. So guess who got the job? So I ran what we called CADSI panels, communications and data systems integration, and that’s where we followed the data from the sensor or the instrument, whichever generated the signal, through the payload, the interfaces, the Shuttle, the communications system, the satellites to the ground, or if it was on the pad, through all the connections on the pad.\\n\\n We did schematics of each stage of the Shuttle flight. Those were quite horrendous. Of course, I was supported with contract folks, you know, [Bob Legler and Ray Schultz] who supported me and did the secretary work and everything [under Lynn Croom]. They did the technical write-up of the minutes and so on. I didn’t have to bother with that. But we would typically have probably fifty or sixty people in the actual meeting, and then anywhere up to about fifteen loops all over the world, to the various DoD sites and KSC, Goddard, and headquarters, and overseas, and to the Australians and so on, so it was a pretty involved thing. So I did that until we wrapped it all up.\\n\\n Then on Shuttle, apart from being in the evaluation group and all that stuff, working out of the Chamberlin Hotel, by the way, back there again, I got volunteered to be the range safety manager, and at that time apparently the Eastern test range [ETR] and the Western test range [WTR] didn’t talk to each other very much, for some reason, and the relationship between NASA and the Eastern test range apparently was not of the best, so yours truly got volunteered to see what could be done.\\n\\n So we got down there, and the first thing was, I got the two commander’s [range safety people] together and said, “Look, guys, I’m only going to go through this once, not twice. We’re going to fly from the Eastern test range, the Western test range, we’re going to have one range safety system. We’re not going to design it twice, we’re not going to have one system for the east and one for the west, so we need to all sit down together and work it out,” and that’s what we did.\\n\\n We’d alternate meetings at ETR and JSC Houston, and over on the Western test range. And apparently, at least the working-level guys in the safety offices there thought it was great. I said, “Boy, this is really good. We’re working together here on this stuff.” I had some terrific people, like Morris Jenkins, who was one of the group from AVRO, was instrumental in that, and Bob [Robert E.] McAdams, I know, headed up the group that did all the external tank stuff.\\n\\n That’s where we come to this little picture, which was one of the few we’ve got of an external tank coming in. You can see it’s already broken up into pieces. The width of the footprint was fairly narrow, about sixty nautical miles, but the length of the footprint was over 1,200 nautical miles. Now, that doesn’t mean that the debris would cover from alpha to omega. What it said was, statistically, the debris could be in an envelope anywhere in that footprint.\\n\\n And that’s where we got involved with the Australians, because, of course, we’d had Skylab come in with a degrading reentry, and there’s four tons of lead somewhere in the Outback in Australia. Somebody’s going to find it one day and think they’ve found a lead mine.\\n\\n See, we had a lead-lined vault, film vault, on Skylab, to keep all the film and emulsions in that were sensitive to radioactivity, because that was one of the things you had to protect in order to [not] degrade the data, and that thing sure as heck didn’t melt as it came in. I mean, it was a solid chunk. Some of it would melt, obviously, but not all of it.\\n\\n Anyway, the Australians were very antsy about the Shuttle, so headquarters decided that I’d be volunteered to go to Australia. I think they thought I spoke the language. When I got there, they called me a “pommey.” I said, “No, I’m a Texan that talks funny.” So that went better. I had to brief the Minister for Science and Technology and his people about the external tank.\\n\\n Now, to understand the external tank, reason for the concern, on orbiter, on Shuttle at first, the external tank, Marshall had designed it, and they were going to have a retro pack and a platform and all this stuff, weighed tons. Well, weighed a lot of pounds and cost a lot of money. Well, the MPAD guys came up with a super idea, I think, and that was, they said, “Hey, why don’t we cut the main engines off slightly suborbital, like 130, 170 feet a second shy of orbital velocity, separate from the tank, and the tank will go in at the antipodal point in the middle of the Indian Ocean, on its own.” You know, as long as you tumble it so it doesn’t fly. And meanwhile, the Orbiter can then coast around to the [apogee] point and do a little burn and either circularize or go higher up or whatever it wants to do. So that was fine.\\n\\n So in the FOP we were setting up for the first two flights, I said, “Well, we’d better put this ground track through the Bass Straits,” because we weren’t flying due east the first flights, we were flying, I forget, it was about thirty-odd degrees, thirty-four degrees, I think. I’d have to look it up. But anyway, we moved it so the ground track went through the Bass Straits, because I figured, well, if the computers didn’t cut off the main engines and the crew had to manually cut them off, they had to do it within half to one second, or you got a significant downrange of the tank. So I thought, well, we’ll put it through the Bass Straits, you see.\\n\\n So I get over to Australia. First thing they say to me is, “You realize 70 percent of Australian oil comes from offshore drilling in the Bass Straits.” I said, “Oops. We’ve only got two missions.” [Laughter]\\n\\n And then the third mission, we went more due east, and at that time the ground track came over the northern outskirts of Melbourne. That’s when the guys first brought it to me in the FOP, and I said, “Well, gee, that doesn’t sound too swift. Melbourne’s a pretty big city and a lot of folks there. Let’s move it north a bit.” So we went a little more due east and that moved the ground track up a little bit.\\n\\n While I was over in Australia, by the way, they had a little Control Center, and I set up with them that we would give them a heads-up on when the Shuttle was going to launch, when the tank was going to impact, or if was going to overfly and so on. It wasn’t until two flights later that the State Department found out about it, raised hell, because they said, “Who made this agreement with the Australian Government? You’re not allowed to that.” I said, “Well, we are, and it’s working, and they’ll be very mad if you cut it off,” so we kept on doing it.\\n\\n Anyway, I was then talking to the Secretary of the Science and Technology area. Now, Australian Civil Service, like British Civil Service, the secretary really runs the whole department. The minister is a politician, and the secretary is really the guy who makes all the decisions, etc., etc. If you ever watch “Yes, Minister,” or “Yes, Prime Minister” on the BBC series, they have it on PBS, you understand how that works.\\n\\n Anyway, I was talking then fairly regularly with the secretary, a very pleasant guy. So on this third Shuttle flight, I said, “Well, I’ve moved the ground track a bit north of Melbourne, because I didn’t want to overfly Melbourne. It’s about sixty miles north of Melbourne. It flies over some valley.” He said, “Valley? North of Melbourne? Wait a minute. You wouldn’t like to put it a little further down, would you? That’s the best wine grape-growing area in the country.” So we moved it a tad down, but still off of Melbourne. Unfortunately, he’s since died of cancer, along with several others, but that was part of the thing. They were very sensitive to stuff coming in.\\n\\n One thing we did do, though, that opened my eyes in Australia. They provided us with a tape of the population distribution in Australia, with their latest census, because on the due east flight now, the tank, if it overflew, crossed the west coast of Australia, north of Perth, way north of Perth, and over the east coast. And it was quite a surprise to all of us, I think, when we discovered that the total population we overflew was less than 200. In fact, the biggest place was about three dozen people, I think. I mean, it flabbergasted me, because until I talked to a Qantas pilot when I was over there, and he said, “Well, you have to look at Australia as a bloody big saucer, and people don’t live in the middle, just around the edge.” And that’s about what—except for Alice Springs, which is a—and\\n\\n Woo\\n\\n mera or Woo\\n\\n mera\\n\\n , whichever you like to pronounce it. Other than those two places, that’s about it. So anyway, that was the Australian bit. They seemed to feel that we knew what we were doing, and we got on quite well with them.\\n\\n So we’ve covered the radiation thing. The tank, by the way, we would deliberately tumble it so it would break up. Otherwise, you worried about it trimming and flying before it reentered.\\n\\n Let’s see. I have to look at some memory ticklers here. Oh, I know. On Shuttle, the other thing with range safety, I also got involved with DoD and the people up at Cheyenne Mountain, at the Space Defense Command. One of the things was, we had to set up a program such that in real time they would notify us if a piece of debris was getting anywhere close to the Orbiter, and then we’d have to do a maneuver.\\n\\n In fact, that happened with the Space Station just a few weeks ago, and it’s the same setup, same sort of program as we had set up way back in Shuttle days. They came a bit closer than we’d have allowed them in Shuttle, by the way, but I think they’ve gotten braver since we flew Shuttle or something. Because one of the dangers in space flight at that altitude is the debris problem. A lot of people think NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] tracks everything that’s in orbit. Well, they really don’t. They can only track down to a certain size. I won’t say what size, that’s still classified, but I mean, they can only track to a certain size.\\n\\n Not that I was firsthand involved in this, but I was aware of an Orbiter coming back one time with a crater in the windshield, which is bulletproof glass. I mean, you could fire a gun at that thing, close to, and the bullet wouldn’t go through it. This one had a crater that was quite deep and quite big and it turned out, on analysis, that the only thing they could find that would have caused it was a fleck of paint. So they did some tests in the hypervelocity tunnel and found out, sure enough, that a fleck of paint could do that. And so that’s one of the reasons, as well as micrometeorites, that they’ve got the buffers around the station.\\n\\n Because a lot of people say, “Well, how on earth do you get all that debris in space?” Well, it’s quite simple, really. In the early days, especially the Russians, but we were as guilty as well, we’d put up third stages and wouldn’t bother about what happened to the propellants that were left, so they’d be in a tank and eventually, boom, they’d go, and you get pieces go all over the place. What happens is, it’s like a dog with fleas. You know, each flea has fleas and lesser fleas have lesser fleas. Well, these little pieces eventually would—some of them would impact and break up into more pieces.\\n\\n [Don Kessler] the expert, or was, at JSC, got a plot of all the debris and he actually got an experiment run where they had a [special] radar looking upwards that just measured everything that went over in a twenty-four hour period.\\n\\n And it turns out that NORAD only got about a quarter to a third of what went over. All the rest of the stuff was real small, but equally embarrassing if you got hit with it. And it doesn’t come out very quickly from space, that’s the problem. There’s a belt of it around and it’s there and it’s not growing as fast as was originally projected, because now there’s an international agreement that all the ultimate stages will be vented so they don’t explode.\\n\\n But the fact is, if two spent stages happen to hit, you know, and everybody says, “Well, boy.” Because you’ve got stuff going at polar orbit, you’ve got stuff going due east, you’ve got stuff going fifty-seven and whatever in between, and sooner or later, some of them are going to hit. When they do, you get a big cloud of debris. So that, to me, is one of the concerns I would have for the Space Station, is radiation and debris, are two of the things. Of course, that’s why we’ve got the crew escape vehicle, if the Russians get it built in time, you know, to get the crew back off the vehicle. That’s why I wish they’d used the microballoon sachets. Because if the Russians had had one of those when they had the leak on Mir, it could well have stopped the leak, because, you know, it’d get almost anywhere if there are small enough little packets. Anyway, those, to me, are two of the things, I think, you have to worry about on the Space Station.\\n\\n As far as after Shuttle, or after NASA, I retired in ‘84, and joined Bob Miner, he was the head of the Rockwell effort, and we did three proposals. I was involved in doing three proposals with him. The first one was the STSOC contract, which was running the Shuttle and everything for him. Then there was the Space Station Phase B studies and the DoD payloads integration contract. I was the director of that one.\\n\\n When I retired from Rockwell, I said, “Hey, I’ve done three proposals, they’ve all been successful, I’m quitting while we’re ahead.” Added to which, we had moved up here.\\n\\n And then for a little while after that, I was a consultant and did some consult work for Rockwell, or for a company that supported Rockwell. Then there was a small group of us did some for the Hermes, the European spacecraft, but quite frankly, I think—we had a group of French come over and I think they were just trying to get a lot of information for nothing. We never did get a contract. We spent a whole day with them, going over all sorts of stuff, giving them a few pointers on networks and ground systems and so on, radiation and so on.\\n\\n After that, I retire retired and said, “That’s it,” after forty-four years in the business. Some people ask me, “Well, where do you see space going, and why are we doing space?” Well, apart from the obvious of communications and so forth, I look at a much longer term thing. Being an old mission planner, I say, well, our sun’s got a limited lifetime, not that it’s going to affect me. I don’t think it’ll make me live that long, golly, I hope not. But anyway, it’s a limited lifetime, and in order to fly at the speed of light or faster, we’ve got to do a heck of a lot of research and work, and the sooner we start, the better.\\n\\n Also, I’m glad to see that finally people are waking up to the danger of meteorites, or whatever, asteroids, because that’s been a concern for some of us for a long time. We said, you know, you aren’t going to be able to develop something in twenty-four hours or a month or something. It’s going to take years. And the sooner you start the better, and then you’ve got your ducks in a row and if something happens, you can do something about it. Because I think going to the Moon showed us that eventually something’s going to hit the Earth. It does anyway. There are about 1,500 objects come in and hit the Earth every day, but they’re all small, thank goodness, usually, although the Russian occasion and Meteor Crater and the Gulf [of Mexico] evidence that other things have happened, and sooner or later, it’s going to happen again. We’ll get something. I mean, I know they’ve made movies and all, but finally the administration and people in control here and elsewhere have finally said, “Hey, we really need to start thinking about it.”\\n\\n Well, likewise, I think people need to start thinking about what’s going to happen as the sun starts burning down, because it will. We know already from Hubble [Space Telescope] that stars degenerate. I mean, when you look at the millions of pounds of matter that the sun gets rid of every day, you say, “It ain’t going to last forever, guys, and we need to do something about it.” Because if humankind is to exist and continue to exist, then we’ve got to not only find out where there’s something else that would be favorable for us to live, but we’ve got to have the means of getting there and get a significant number of people there to recolonize humankind. That’s a long—that’s thousands of years, probably, but as the Chinese say, “A march of a thousand miles starts with the first step.” We need to make the first step, because it’s a long road, a long road. And that, to me, is the ultimate of space, when we get that far.\\n\\n The other thing people keep asking me is, “Why manned space flight?” I say, “Well, a good example of that is Hubble.” We launched Hubble and there was a major problem with the optics, among other things. And because we had the manned capability, we were able to go up there and fix it. If it had been an unmanned thing and we didn’t have a manned capability, we’d have lost all that. Hubble would have gone. And as it is now, we can go up and we can renew gyros, platforms, software, and keep the thing going for a long, long time.\\n\\n So, you know, when people say, one or the other, I say, in exploring space, each complements the other. You need unmanned and you need human. I won’t say “manned” anymore because now we’ve got a nice lot of female astronauts that raise their own problems as far as radiation is concerned, by the way, but we can protect that. But, you know, the two branches of space flight really have to work in coordination and conjunction with each other, because each is essential to the other.\\n\\n Now I know that’s heresy to a lot of the unmanned people who say, “Boy, all this money’s gone down the drain on manned space flight.” Well, yes, but just think, you know, MIT in the year 5000 and something might need some capability to send some MIT people off somewhere. And if you don’t work on it, you won’t get there. So that’s it.\\n\\n It’s been a fascinating experience as a career, though, one I’d never dreamed I��d have, and looking back on it, it’s quite something to feel that you’ve been involved in the first twenty-five years of manned space flight. When you look back at the first twenty-five years of aviation and realize how much that moved, and then you look at the first twenty-five years of manned space flight and see how it’s moved, you know, you say, “Boy, we’re on an exponential curve.” It’s incredible.\\n\\n When I started, for example, the only computers we had, when we wanted to get accurate stuff, we’d prefer, we’d use a three-foot slide rule. You know, I mean, that gets your eyes going. And then we used to have to solve quartics, you know, quartic equations, and the only thing we had was a Friedan mechanical calculator. And if you’ve ever tried to do square roots, because you turned the handle and the numbers chunked over, you know, I mean, it’s painful. It used to take us about four to five days to do one solution for a wing lift on a swept-back wing. Now, of course, a computer spits it out in seconds or milliseconds.\\n\\n That’s why I always had a bit of fun with all the engineers that were involved in the flight ops. They’d come to me with some data, and I’d say, “Well, I want to see it graphically.” They’d say, “Why do you want to see it graphically?” I’d say, “Because I like to see where things have come from, where they’re going to.”\\n\\n So they’d come to me with data that would be graphic and I’d say, “Well, why is it doing that?” And they’d say, “Well, that’s how it came out of the computer.” I’d say, “I don’t want to hear that. You go away, and come back and tell me what fundamental thing caused it to do that, and then explain it to me.”\\n\\n Invariably they’d come back and say, “Well, there was an incorrect data entry” or, “The computer program had a glitch in it,” or whatever, you know, and I said, “Folks, think fundamentals, because if you can’t explain it from fundamentals, you’re going to be in trouble.” And that’s my little take on the education system, because I think we’re getting far too many specialists and not enough people who are trained in the fundamentals, who can look at the big picture.\\n\\n I was fortunate enough to have a bit of both, although I didn’t use directly a lot of the specialist information I gleaned in the course of my studies, but at least it prepared me to be able to look at the big picture and understand the fundamentals behind everything. And we need a good slice of people like that. We still need the specialists, don’t get me wrong. You’ve got to have them, but you also need people who can look at the big picture." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s pause for a minute so we can change the tape. Looking back on your career as a whole, what do you think the biggest challenge for you was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In aircraft or space, or the whole thing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Both, if you’d like." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The biggest challenge, probably, looking back on it, was getting Apollo 8 to the Moon and back, closely followed by Apollo 11 landing, although at one time, on Little Joe, you know, there was a move afoot to put Al Shepard in Little Joe, because we knew the Russians were going to go, so some people were pushing to just put Shepard in a couch with a bottle of oxygen and a mask and send him off on Little Joe, because it did basically the same flight as his Mercury flight did. But that got squashed by headquarters. They said, “This is a scientific program, not a publicity stunt.” So we didn’t do it, and the Russians beat us into space.\\n\\n There are several highlights going through. I’m sometimes surprised at how much of space work and aeronautics work are interrelated. See, the Shuttle really is an airplane. It’s a lousy glider. It’s got a lift-drag ratio of about .7, 1.4, I don’t know, it’s a terrible thing. Anyway, it flies like a brick. But you can maneuver it and you can get cross-range out of it, because it starts off at a lot higher altitude.\\n\\n I think the thing that probably, I know, got to a lot of my friends was when the Orbiter came in and it crossed over the hill country in Austin and Houston and I had the data track on from NASA and there it was still well supersonic, going over the west coast of Florida. People say, “How can that happen?” I say, “Because it slows up real fast coming in.” That was quite a sight. That was good.\\n\\n Anyway, the highlights, I think, were probably the space flights, no doubt about that. It was certainly the epitome of a space career, the height of it. In fact, that’s one of the problems with the Shuttle. Shuttle flights are not quite the same as going to the Moon. You know, it’s hard to get wrapped up in the same—not enthusiasm, that’s the wrong word, but the same sense of really exploring that we did on Apollo.\\n\\n And that really raises one of the problems with the Shuttle, because people have to realize that it was a vehicle put together that relies intrinsically on an awful lot of dedicated people doing trajectory work, getting the vehicle ready, turning it around, you know, everything. There are fifty million places where something could be done wrong, or, you know, a wrench could be left in the wrong place, or a nut could be dropped and left and it’s a disaster, it can be, a potential.\\n\\n People always ask, “Well, was the first Shuttle flight the worst one?” I say, “No. To me, the worst one’s going to be somewhere along the line where people tend to get, almost from human behavior, you tend to get a little complacent.” Been there, done that, you know, and it becomes routine. When Shuttle becomes absolutely routine, that’s when I get concerned, because it basically was designed relying on a lot of people being really dedicated and knowing exactly what was needed all the way through, at every turn. And somebody says, “Well, are we liable to lose another Shuttle?” I say, “Probably. You know, I’ve been in the aircraft business and, believe me, you lose a lot more vehicles and people flying new airplanes than we have so far, flying spacecraft.”\\n\\n I used to kid the astronauts about that. I’d say, “Hey, you guys got on to a much better streak than test flying.” Typically, you’d have ten test pilots start a program, and if you finish with half of them, you’re doing pretty good. Whereas, you know, in actual space-related stuff, Challenger’s—other than [Virgil I.] Gus [Grissom] and the guys on the pad—but in flight, Challenger’s the only one we’ve had. So we’ve been lucky, and I hope the luck continues, because we’ve only got four of them left, and there’s no way we’re going to build another one like them.\\n\\n So there were definitely some high points, and I think I was remarkably fortunate to be involved in it. As I say, I’m still a Texan that talks funny, but that’s all right. “T3F,” I call myself. I can say a few words in Texan to the amusement of my true Texas friends. They think I’m murdering the Texas language. I say, “Dead already.” [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While we’re talking about Shuttle, the Shuttle we ended up with is a lot different than the Shuttle that they had anticipated in the late sixties and early seventies. When did you first learn of our efforts to have a Space Shuttle, and what did you think of it then?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that was when Jim Chamberlin was doing sketches and things in his office, and called me in to look at the different layouts and things. He got a separate group, went off to another building doing that. I didn’t get so involved then, but I knew early on the internal tank versus external tank, etc., arguments that were going on. So once it got involved with more or less the configuration it is today, I was more deeply involved in helping to solve all the problems with it that could invariably come up when you design something.\\n\\n One of the things I remember, for example, that people are not too familiar with except those involved in the thing, but when the Shuttle’s on the pad, it’s held down on the solid rocket boosters and the Orbiter is sitting quite a few feet off. Well, we start the Orbiter engines first. One, two, three, or three, one, two, whatever their sequence.\\n\\n But the point is, you’ve got a heck of a bending moment, and you have to realize that the whole Shuttle is a flexible structure. When it goes up, it’s quivering like an arrow, you know, and from calculation, we found out that when you fire the main engines, the pilot’s eye moves [about] twenty-one inches that way and back again, and the secret at launch is to time the—it’s rather exquisite to milliseconds—the ignition of the solid rocket boosters, such that you catch it when the bending moment’s at a lower level, otherwise you’d have busted the thing on the pad.\\n\\n So the fact that the engines start first, get up to max thrust, is all designed and it’s a pretty unique and fairly exquisite time line, because the SRBs [solid rocket boosters] have got to fire at a certain time in the bending moment curve in the Shuttle’s position so that it doesn’t overstress [it] and clears the tower and all that good stuff. And so there’s a lot of things that go on with that, that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Moving backwards a little bit, you were talking about Apollo 13 earlier. What kind of studies did you make into using the LM as a lifeboat prior to the accident? Were you involved with that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we did some very cursory ones. Quite frankly, the probability we felt at that time was so low, we didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it, so a lifeboat concept was schemed, but we didn’t work any of the real details out. We did enough to know that it could be done, but we didn’t do what I consider as the last few months of an FOP, when the flight director takes all the people involved and goes into the fine nuts and bolts and tuning.\\n\\n That’s why we had not run a dry run, for example, of how you circulated the air from the LM system to the CSM [command and service module], and that’s where the guys did a lot of incredible work, you know, overnight, real time, getting that done. As I say, the maneuver, the Delta V that was done, really was basically just a plain old trajectory solution to get the lunar module in the right place, although we had the capability, obviously, to do a tweak like that to get optimum capture in the Earth’s atmosphere, because if you come too steep, you burn up. Too shallow, and you bounce out. So you’ve got to get it right, and it’s 36,000,090 feet a second. You’re moving along at a fair lick.\\n\\n But the manual control was definitely tricky. The crew had practiced manual control, but not, I don’t think, in that configuration. I think that was probably a first time, I don’t know. But I know from the mission-planning point of view, we’d sort of done the preliminary work that we knew that from a performance point of view the LM could do it. But it was always nip and tuck on consumables, we knew that right from the word go, but then we didn’t want to put extra consumables on the LM because that iterated all the way down [to] the LM performance landing, ascent, and so on, so you just had to do a risk versus gain and say, “Well, [the probability of] this happening so low, we won’t spend a lot of weight and time on it.”\\n\\n Now, the normal non-nominal trajectory behavior and procedures actually comprise probably about 90 percent of our work and training. A lot of people think the crew just spend all their time training a nominal mission. I say, “Hey, that was the easy one.” The ones that really get you is when, you know, everybody’s thrown all sorts of problems in the sims [simulations], the crew as well, and when we run integrated sims and start throwing problems, that’s where the training comes, and so I would say over 90 percent of the training was all off-nominal stuff, because that’s the way you train.\\n\\n We probably became the best “what-if’ers” going, which drives your wives crazy. I know it does mine, because, you know, if anything and everything comes up I want to sit down and say, “Well, let’s go through the pros and cons and what-if here and what-if there.” They say, “Oh, gee, just make a decision.” I say, “No. Been too many years doing it the other way.” So going to have to put up with it.\\n\\n So, 13 was a lot of new stuff, and I take my hat off to the folks involved, because they did a great job, but it wasn’t totally—it wasn’t something we thought of at the time the accident happened. It was there but we’d never really wrung it out, so there was an awful lot of new stuff had to be done. But fortunately, it worked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, it did, and it worked out well enough to get them back safely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was good. That really was. Well, that’s one of the beauties of the free-return trajectory. That was one of the first things that MPAD came up with and we emphasized it in the FOP. We said, “Look, the only sane way to go to the Moon is on a free-return trajectory. If something happens, you can coast back.” And so that was our first sort of ace, if you will, that we held in reserve.\\n\\n One time, you know, with communication, we were talking about putting a satellite off to the side, not behind the Moon, because we couldn’t have that, but off to the side in the dead zone, because there’s a dead zone between the Earth and the Moon, you know, where you can put a satellite and it’ll stay there “forever.” And we thought about putting a communications relay satellite there. One, one side; one, the other, so that we could communicate while around the back side of the Moon.\\n\\n But then we got into the expense and everything involved, and the fact that we’re only thirty minutes behind the Moon and we said, “Hey, we’re just going to have to bite the bullet and breathe hard when they’re behind the Moon.” But, of course, the trans-Earth burn was always behind the Moon, so I would say on all the Apollo missions, apart from the touchdown, which is always a sensitive point, the trans-Earth burn was always one where you breathe a sigh of relief when you got comm again. The same as reentry, you know. When you hear the crew answer back on the comm loop, that’s, whew, you know, made that one.\\n\\n So trans-Earth burn, you’ve got that, and after reentry. Because we did have one time, people were pushing to try and get schemes to get communications through reentry, like trailing a long wire behind them, and all that stuff. That’s not too swift operationally." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They tried that in Gemini, didn’t they, in one of the experiments, maybe on Gemini III?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What, for reentry?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, but not very successfully. Wires burn off, they discovered, rather rapidly. Added to which, it’s liable to mess up your aerodynamics as you come in. And Shuttle, there’s too much stuff at the back to think about that, because basically, Shuttle, you’ve got to translate from a spacecraft to an airplane, and a supersonic airplane at that, and then you’ve got to go through the whole range of speeds. So aerodynamically it’s quite a challenge.\\n\\n But we finally, with the blackout, we came to the conclusion that you just bite the bullet. Of course, it would have been nice to have communication. I know on Glenn’s flight, when finally we heard his voice after he came back, that was a real sigh of relief. I guess that was probably one of the big sigh-of-relief points in [the] programs. We knew that the heat shield had stayed on. That was quite something. So there were some key points going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course, with Glenn’s flight, there was the problem where they thought the landing bag had deployed. What was the impact of that, from your point of view?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we had a bad sensor, that was the problem. Fortunately, people decided that rather than gamble as to that it was just a bad sensor, they’d do another gamble which was a risk versus gain. They said, “Well, let’s leave the retro pack hooked up and hopefully it’ll burn off without messing up the capsule.” And that gave John quite a reentry. Of course, we see chunks of the thing going by, so we probably put his heart rate up a bit, but at least it worked. But the heat shield was firmly attached anyway.\\n\\n Again, it was a question—in operations, we always try to have a fail-op, fail-op, fail-safe—”FOFOFS,” we call it in NASA acronyms—FOFOFS—which is fail-op, fail-op, fail-safe, and basically that’s what we tried to do in most of the programs, is to do that. And that’s one of the probably—I don’t know, but I would suspect that was one of the underlying reasons that Chris and them decided to keep the retro pack on, because, hey, the odds of it messing up the heat shield were less than the heat shield—because if a heat shield came down, it was curtains. You were done. Whereas you may or may not be done if the retro pack messed up something. So it was the lesser of two evils, and it worked, fortunately." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On Gemini, you were talking earlier about some of the problems with the ejection seats. Who decided to have ejection seats instead of a launch escape system, and why?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think Jim and McDonnell were involved in that quite a bit. Jim, because he never did like the escape tower system. He thought it was a lot of mass you took up that you didn’t need to. Of course, Max was responsible for the escape tower and all, and so that’s why we went to ejection seats. It was a cleaner thing.\\n\\n It allowed you to lift off with less payload penalty. But as we got into it, we found that it did have its own problems, but I think we basically resolved them all, because, like I say, we solved, we think, the problem with the fireball and the heat, the suits, and so on, protection of the crew. What we finished up with were a set of launch constraints, in terms of wind velocity and direction, and if the wind was blowing such that astronauts [heads] were going towards the ground, then you’d have a much lower permissible launch wind than you would if it was blowing the other way, just because of the seats. And of course, we had the usual bunkhouse and everything for them to go to when they landed.\\n\\n Yes, we had quite a program with the ejection seats. Of course, Jimmy Baker of Martin-Baker used to regale us with all sorts of tales, but I’ve known him back in England. His big boast was that he had one pilot who ejected off a carrier takeoff and had the presence of mind to stay in the aircraft while the carrier went over and then ejected out. That was his line. I’m not sure myself. That sounded a little flaky. But they certainly have saved a lot of people, certainly have. But the ejection seats had their problems.\\n\\n The chutes had to be made with special fabric as well, and that’s where we got into rip stop, by the way. There’s a lot of things that were intrinsic to the space program and the industry came up with them and then it turned out that they were applicable. For example, on Mercury, just going back there for a minute, on-orbit photography. The [McDonnell] people, for a long time, thought, well, you can’t expose color film in orbit because you’re in space. I said, “You’re in a capsule, for heaven’s sake. What difference does that make?” You know, film’s film. It’ll work.\\n\\n The only thing was that we didn’t have a big enough capacity in the cameras. So at that time I worked with Kodak, and that was a fun time, as a matter of fact, because I worked with Kodak and that’s where they came up with this ultrathin base, which is now standard, by the way, to all films, just about. But in those days, it was new, experimental, and that was nice, because they used to send me rolls of 35mm film and say, “Well, try this and see how you like it,” and I’d say, “Great.” You know, go out and take pictures. So we had all sorts of film speeds, emulsions, and I’d send them back to Kodak to be developed. That was good fun. That’s really where the super-thin emulsion came from, because it enabled us to have twice the length of run time on a given camera size than we would have had, which we needed in orbit. So that was one thing we had.\\n\\n The rip stop on the chutes. The suits with the heat protection was another thing. All of these things were, you know, necessity is the mother of invention, and we needed something, and industry came across with something. So it helped, apart from Teflon frying pans and all that stuff.\\n\\n The funny thing was, as an aside, on Mercury, everybody was worried about the ablation of the heat shield and all that stuff. One flight, we had a piece of good old masking tape left stuck on the side of the capsule, and that came back with flying colors. I mean, it was just a little bit golden around the edges, but it survived reentry like gangbusters.\\n\\n Just to give you an idea of some of the other applications of the space thing, we used RTV, which was that red gunk on Mercury, you know. God, we almost stuck the capsule together with RTV. And of course, it had a very high ablation capability. So some years after that, I was over in England at the Shuttleworth collection in Old Warden, and that’s where—do you remember “The Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines”? Well, most of those airplanes are at Old Warden and they fly them. I’m always interested in old airplanes anyway, but they had a Gloster Gladiator, which was the sleeve-valve engine biplane of the beginning of—well, it was faith, hope, and charity of Malta, you know. Their defense was three Gladiators. They called them Faith, Hope, and Charity. They had one there, and the Townend ring that collected the exhaust, had a little stubby exhaust, the Townend ring that got the exhaust was burning out, and they’d swapped the non-flight-worthy one they had with the Duxford people, the museum at Duxford, because they weren’t going to fly theirs and they wanted to fly the Gladiator at [Old Warden].\\n\\n So when I looked at it, I said, “Well, you know, there’s something we did in the space program you might try. If you spray RTV on the inside of the Townend ring, it’ll take probably many hours of flying to ablate it and then you can just clean it off and spray it again and then you can keep using the same Townend ring.” Whether they ever did or not, I don’t know, but it certainly was another application." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One more question from me. Did you have any involvement in going into Apollo in the earth orbit rendezvous, the lunar-orbit rendezvous, direct descent debate, and did you have thoughts on that at the time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not too much. I left that to Morris. Morris Jenkins was the big man on that, and, of course, Buzz Aldrin, who “became the rendezvous expert.” We had some super guys in MPAD who worked on that. Morris was just one of them doing the lunar rendezvous stuff.\\n\\n The thing I used to take the guys to task with, when they set up the Gemini Program, they had a bunch of acronyms, you know, for the different burns and things you did. And when we got to Apollo, I’ll be darned if they changed them all. Chris used to complain and he’d say, “Damn it! I’ve just learned all these other acronyms. Now you’ve changed them all.”\\n\\n So, yes, I was involved, not in developing it, but using it, in the FOPs. We’d go into some depth about the various rendezvous and how to do it and so on, and that’s where we came up with the technique for the Orbiter to approach something, you know, to rendezvous with it, beneath it, and then just come up. Otherwise, when you went to put on the brakes, so to speak, you’d blow your object away from you. And that’s really where the crew learned that flying by the seat of the pants didn’t work anymore, because a certain gentleman hosed out an awful lot of his RCS [reaction control system] propellant because he took over manually on the controls. So you don’t do that anymore. You’ve got to fly it by the computer. I think nowadays, of course, most of the crews, they’ve been weaned on flying with computers, so it doesn’t bother them, but the first astronauts, you know, they were more of the old stick-and-wire type, I call them, and they had a hard time believing that it could do it.\\n\\n The one thing we haven’t done yet, that I know of, by the way, is that one thing we developed for Shuttle is the automatic landing system, and as far as I know, they’ve never actually used it yet. But we did a lot of work on it, setting it up and landing it. It’s really not a lot different to a 747 landing. I always laugh when I’m flying now. You get a smooth landing, everybody applauds, and I say, “Yes, that computer did a good job.” The pilot only does it once every six months to keep his hand in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course, the Soviet Shuttle, Buran, landed automatically, because it went up unmanned, the one time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it did… Sometimes having a person on board is beneficial, and sometimes it gives you problems, but generally, a well-trained person is a heck of a flexible capability to have, it really is, because computers, they can only do what they’re programmed to do, at this stage of the game. I keep telling people, “Artificial intelligence is when you can give me a system that I feed it in the basic equations and it does all the derivations from that. So I feed it Newton, Galileo, and what have you, and then if it can think through all of that, then you’ve got artificial intelligence.” At the moment, we’ve just got what I call “enabled intelligence,” where we put some human logic in and let the computer do all sorts of weird things with it. So anyway, it’s fun.\\n\\n I’m glad to see, for example, the Canadians got involved in Shuttle. One of the old AVRO group turned up as one of the chief guys in the Canadian arm [remote manipulator system] program. That was Bruce A. Aikenhead. So that’s how I got to meet Bruce again when he came down on the arm. And [R.] Bryan Erb, of course, is now the Canadian representative at JSC, mainly because he never took U.S. citizenship." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, he was telling us that story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I have sympathy with him because at the time we came down, we were already committed to thinking about, we’re going to be a Canadian citizen, so not being able to go back to Canada as a citizen didn’t worry us too much, because we said, “Hey, we’ve cut the umbilical cord already.” But the Canadians at that time, if they took out U.S. citizenship, they lost their Canadian citizenship, and they had to reapply as an immigrant. So I can understand how they were reluctant.\\n\\n In fact, the first group of us that took out U.S. citizenship, I think it was about seven or nine of us. Jim Chamberlin was one. I know John Hodge. Let’s see. Tom [Thomas V.] Chambers, [Pete Armitage, Morris Jenkins]. There were a bunch of us, anyway. And that was interesting, because afterwards, of course, NASA wanted pictures of us in the chambers with the judge, and I remember the judge saying at the time—I’ve forgotten his name—he was one of the well-known ones in Houston, after we finished, he said, “Well, congratulations, you’re all Texans. Oh, by the way, you’re U.S. citizens.” [Laughter] I said, “Great. Now I’ll learn to talk like one.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which shows where their priorities are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s right. Brown, that was it. Judge Brown. Bless his heart. So that was the group of us. And then, of course, subsequent to that, we discovered that, in fact, we didn’t give up British citizenship as such. We have a form of dual citizenship, which Canadian citizens can now have. There’s a bilateral agreement between U.S. and U.K. that as long as you don’t vote in a British election, the British consider that, “Okay, so you took out citizenship of whatever country, but you’re always welcome back,” sort of thing. And the Canadians finally did that so maybe some of their people wouldn’t feel quite so cut off if they came down to get U.S. citizenship, but we did it.\\n\\n Originally, it was just an expedient thing because when we came down, we couldn’t do any classified work unless we’d signed a declaration of intent in a court of law and all that stuff, which we did. And then we said, “Hey, you know, when in Rome, if we’re going to live down there, we want to vote. We pay taxes. If we want to vote, by golly, we’re going to become citizens,” so we did. And that was ‘65, 1965, so we’ve been citizens since ‘65 and Texans since ‘81. I’ve lived longer here than anywhere else. Still talk funny." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’d like to ask my colleagues if either of them have any questions for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have a couple of questions. And speaking along the lines of citizenship and such, your group that came down from AVRO filled some pretty key roles at NASA. Do you have any thoughts of when you were coming down, or how you were received? Did you just fit right in? Did people accept you well, and do you have any thoughts on the role you did play?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, some of us were a little apprehensive coming down, because, yes, we were going into pretty senior management roles and we had a pretty good idea of how that would be if the shoe was on the other foot, and there was people coming up from the States to Canada, or England, for that matter. There was always a lot of kidding, I mean, by some of them, but we understand that.\\n\\n But the fact is that here was a group of engineers and support staff at Langley in the Space Task Group, I think there were 130-odd of them, when this mob of strangers came down, you know, and not only that, moved straight into management positions. I had, I don’t know, four or five guys working for me, and just about everybody else had people working for them, Americans, and I was really astonished at how well we were received.\\n\\n Now, one thing that we didn’t do, which I know the Germans did at Marshall, we did not form an old AVRO group, you know, and stay close together. We integrated from the word go, and some of our best friends were Americans, you know, rather than Canadian or English. So I was pleasantly surprised, and I really take my hat off to the folks. They really accepted us, although obviously every now and again there would be a statement, like one time one of my colleagues was a person from Georgia, and I remember him, we had to converse on the phone when I was at St. Louis. He’d say [imitating accent], “Rod, I wish you’d just talk English.” And I’d say, “My dear Jerry, I speak nothing but.” [Laughter] And then every now and again one or two would make a few slight digs at the old dominion and the old country and so on, but it was all in good fun, really.\\n\\n That’s why we came down, because Gilruth was short of really experienced people to put in at that level. He’d robbed Langley of just about—in fact, the Langley director told him, he said, “Bob, I know what you’re trying to do and I’ll support you as much as I can, but you can’t rob any more of my people. You’ve got to take some dead wood.” And Bob said, “I don’t want dead wood. This is a young tree.” [Laughter]\\n\\n So that’s when he—you know, when Arrow was canceled, Bob knew to some extent what we’d been doing, because he’d been involved with PARD, the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division at Langley. And we’d fired stuff off from Wallops and been involved with the tunnels at Langley and Ames and so on, so they had an idea of some of the talent. And all of a sudden there was this talent available up there, and so that’s how we came in.\\n\\n We came in pretty quick, because when we went to the consulate in Toronto, they said, “Boy, somebody’s pulling strings for you guys,” because we went within a week or two of accepting the offer, and they said it usually takes six months just to get an interview. Two months after the Arrow shutdown, we were crossing the border, coming to the States. I understand later that it went up pretty high, probably to the White House, I think, to get approval.\\n\\n For some years, at least the early years, I didn’t think much of Diefenbaker. I thought old Dief had done us a pretty dirty trick, but as time went on, and I got more and more into the space program, I finally realized old Dief did me a good turn, because he put me in on one of the most wonderful careers. He didn’t know it. [Laughter] He probably wouldn’t have done it if he’d had known it, but he accidentally put some of us on a really fascinating career. So now I don’t think so harshly of Dief as I used to. I say, “Well, he stumbled into that one, but it was luck, dumb luck.”\\n\\n So I think our acceptance was quite remarkable, it really was, and I can’t praise Bob Gilruth high enough, though, because he was really the one who set the tone. To give you an example of the sort of thing Bob would do, when I went to St. Louis, I was the resident capsule engineer, and under Civil Service regulations, you were on travel for six months before you got a paid [trip] to come home, and Bob said, “I don’t like that. I’m going to have a staff meeting every other Saturday morning and I want you there.”\\n\\n So I’d fly from St. Louis Friday night and get home a bit—well, I’d get to Newport News Airport, such as it was, about 1:30 in the morning, Saturday morning, and have about four hours’ sleep, go to the staff meeting. Bob would run it from about nine till noon, and then he’d say, “Well, you don’t need to go back till Sunday afternoon.” So I got to see the family every other week. Otherwise, it would have been a pretty tough row to hoe, but that was the sort of man he was. He had a lot of concern for his people, and he was a great engineer, too. Of course, he got me on paraglider, but that would have been good if it could have worked, but we were trying to match a research program with a production, and that’s always tough, so that was that.\\n\\n Anyway, I think the way people accepted us was tremendous, it really was, and I can’t say good enough things about it. It was good. Because it would have been so easy for there to be a “we/they” sort of thing, but I guess we were spread through the organization so much that there weren’t too many of us working side by side.\\n\\n An interesting thing is that when it came to, like by the time Apollo 11, a lot of Canadians would like to say, “Well, the Canadians helped put Apollo 11 on the Moon.” I said, well, you know, of the thirty-one of us who came, there were eleven left on the program by the time of Apollo 11, eleven or twelve, and two-thirds of those were all U.S. citizens, because we’d taken out citizenship. So that sort of squelched “the Canadians landed the men on the Moon,” much to the disgust of some Canadians, but, you know, I said, “Well, you’ve got to tell it like it is,” so that was that. But it was a good experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like it. I do have a couple other questions, but if we could go ahead and change the tape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned earlier that you would have never imagined where your career would take you, and that, actually, you at first weren’t even going to accept the NASA offer, but you did. What did you think when you first heard President [John F.] Kennedy’s challenge then to make it to the Moon in ten years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought it was a heck of a challenge. [Laughter] A lot of people thought it was nuts, but we said, hey—well, we’d been working on it, you know, doing some preliminary work, so we knew that it was feasible, but we knew there was an awful lot that had to be done, and so we just looked at it as “Hey, it’s a challenge. We’ll go do it.”\\n\\n You know, the nice thing about working for NASA as opposed to working in the aircraft industry, all too often in the aircraft industry, you’d spend years and an awful lot of your time designing, developing an airplane, only to have the darn thing canceled, or, you know, six of them built and that was it. Every program that I was involved with in NASA went from alpha to omega. That, really, from a professional point of view, is one of the most satisfying things you can have, is to really see the thing through, all the way through to the end. It makes a big difference, I think, because the cancellation of the Arrow was about the last straw.\\n\\n I did have another job offer. That’s why Jim Chamberlin had to twist my arm, because after we’d heard all the speeches and everything, the Aeronautical Research Council, I think they called themselves, at Ottawa, who did wind tunnel work and stuff like that, had called me up and offered me a position there. Well, Ottawa, if you haven’t been up there, it’s a pretty cold place in the winter. I thought about it, and, in fact, they called me with the final offer the day after I’d got the offer from NASA and was set to cross the border. I said, “Hey guys, you’re just a couple of days too late. I’ve just agreed with NASA. I’m going.”\\n\\n So they said, “Well, why don’t you go down and try it for a year, and if you don’t like it, come back. There’s a job here waiting for you.”\\n\\n And I said, “That’s nice.” So that’s what we did, but after a year, I was so enmeshed in the work that I didn’t even think about it. We got looked at as those bunch of folks that talk funny. I mean, even the Canadians would say “aboot,” stuff like that. So we generally had fun that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like it all worked out pretty well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think it did. I know Bob Gilruth was pleased, I think, I hope, with what he got, and we certainly were pleased to be down here. It was a great thing to be involved in it. It was an opportunity that you couldn’t dream of, and certainly not one you could say, “Well, I’m going to work towards that,” or something like that. It hadn’t happened.\\n\\n When Kennedy made his announcement, it really wasn’t so much a surprise as it was a confirmation, because initial studies had already been done, and it was a question of getting the administration wheels in motion and then getting Congress behind it and getting the money and everything like that. That was one of the really helpful things with Apollo and that was…I won’t say there wasn’t any limit on money, but from an engineer’s point of view, you could approach every problem two ways and you could follow both solutions through to the end, do testing on them and everything, and then pick the best one.\\n\\n When we got to Shuttle, things were a lot tighter, and we had to—we, not me, but collectively—we, as an organization, we had to make decisions very early on about the path we were going to take, and then you had to suffer with whatever decision you made, because there wasn’t enough money to do two separate approaches, so you had to hope you guessed the right one early on.\\n\\n The other thing that happened, which has plagued, I think, the program all the way through, is spares. One of the problems, any logistics guy will tell you, “You guys were crazy, because you only operated on about a quarter of the logistics you should have.” You know, a good military logistics guy would say, “I don’t know how you could work that.” And the net result was that something would go wrong on a system or a subsystem on Shuttle and you’d have to rob Peter to pay Paul because you didn’t have a spare, so the next vehicle on line you had to break into a system, take that component out, put it in here, check it out here, then when the new component came, you had to put it in this one and recheck all that, and that’s pretty expensive and time-consuming. That’s one of the problems of not having enough spares. But it was a choice that was made deliberately.\\n\\n I know Bob [Robert F.] Thompson would have loved to have had more spares, but the budget just wasn’t there, so, you know, you had to pick the lesser of two evils and you gambled that you wouldn’t need X number or two X spares instead of half X, or something. And very often it worked, sometimes it didn’t and then, you know, it’d give you hiccups. And then the media would get on to you for delaying flights and things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talking about spares and situations like that, you talked some about Apollo 8 and that it was a very big highlight of the whole program, but when they initially made the decision to go and there weren’t any spares, like the single engine and so forth, was there a lot of discussion surrounding the wiseness of that choice?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some people did. From the ops point of view, we didn’t, because the program office—I know I had lots of discussions with Owen Maynard about this, because he was heading up the effort in the program office, and Owen wanted to do a deep space flight, out to the lunar vicinity and come back and we said, “Owen, if you’re going to go that far, why the heck don’t you go around the Moon?” Because you’re in deep trouble either way, if something bad goes wrong.\\n\\n And that’s when we started putting down all the pros and cons and everything and said, “Hey, if you’re going to go that far out—” No, not for Apollo 8, I’m sorry. For Apollo 10. Owen wanted to do a 10 that went out a long way and came back, and we said, “Hey, if you’re going to go that far, go the whole hog with a LM and put it in orbit around the Moon, and then we can practice lunar rendezvous and all that good stuff.”\\n\\n Sorry, that wasn’t 8. Eight wasn’t a big debate. Well, there was a debate about sending 8, of course, but we didn’t have a lunar module and we didn’t want to do another Apollo 7. I mean, we’d been there, done that, so what was there to do? Well, I don’t know who first came up with it. I suspect it was George Low.\\n\\n I’ve worked with George, by the way, ever since I started at NASA, because when I first came to NASA and got the Little Joe [systems] engineer, George was the manned space flight contact at headquarters for the head of the program out there. I got to know George real well, because he and I would spend a good two or three hours every evening, going over every detail of what had gone on during the day, on the capsule, the booster, and everything else.\\n\\n George was a meticulous engineer. He was a damn good engineer. I got to know George pretty well, and he was a good troop, he was really was. I enjoyed working with him. I have a sneaking feeling that he was one of the people who came up with the Apollo 8 thing, but like I said, the free-return trajectory already existed. Morris and the guys had already been there and worked that, because if we hadn’t done that, Apollo 8 couldn’t have flown, because we certainly couldn’t have got it ready in that short time. I mean, there were probably at least two years of work had gone on beforehand, getting all the T’s crossed and the I’s dotted in the translunar trajectory and everything else.\\n\\n I was not involved in terms of doing what I call the detail slide rule work. I was the enhancer, if you like. I’d just get all the right people together and make sure that they were going in the right direction or move them this way, move them that way. Say, “Well, we’re not doing this, we’re doing that,” sort of thing. So I was the implementer, if you will, of the thing, an integrator. But somebody’s got to do that. A lot of people said, “Boy, terrible job.” I said, “Well, it’s a fun job.” You get to corral all these people and get them working together and doing the right thing. It’s pretty satisfying. Hard work, really, because at one time on FOPs we were running—oh, [well], we had three or four mission FOPs a week that we were running, as well as CADSIs and radiation constraints panels.\\n\\n I was the perennial meeting attender, because Aaron Cohen ran Level Three boards I had to sit on as a board member. Bob Thompson ran Level Two boards I had to sit on as a member, so I did an awful lot of sitting and what have you. I was, I’m afraid, rather renowned for not being what I call a head-nodder. You know, when you have a big board meeting, a certain percentage will agree with almost anything, and I was one of those who would always say, “The king’s got no clothes. What do you want to do that for?”\\n\\n Eventually, I don’t know whether people objected to it too much, but that’s why Bob Minor hired me to be his guy at Rockwell. He said, “I want someone who’s independent, who will tell me which way is which, whether I like it or not.” And I said, “That’s what you’re going to get.” So that’s what he got for four years.\\n\\n But on Apollo 8, I know Chris and George and them were involved in that and we just got the thing, you know, Chris said, “Hey, we’re going to go to the Moon instead of another around-the-Earth thing, and get going.” And so that’s when we started the FOPs on it and got going on it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Apollo 8, obviously very successful. Apollo 11, very successful, and they started the whole program of the actual lunar surface activities, but then by Apollo 17, it all came to an end. What were your thoughts at the end of the program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought it was a terrible waste. We had at least one more booster that we could have done a flight with. When you stand back and look at it and think of the terrible waste that goes on with other stuff that Congress, bless them, in their infinite wisdom, get involved in, and then you think, boy, you know, what could we have done? But I guess politically, you know, the public had got to where it was ho-hum. I mean, the networks hardly even carried the launch anymore. It’s amazing how rapidly the public can lose interest in things. I mean, the first Shuttle launch is, boy, you know, it was, wow, real-time coverage and everything. Pretty soon you got to the state where you’ve got a two-second blip on the six o’clock news if you’re lucky. They say, “Well, so and so was launched today and it’s going in orbit all right.” You know, that sort of thing.\\n\\n So I’m afraid the attention span of the average Joe Blow, Jane Blow, in the American public, is remarkably short, unfortunately, [and] Congress, unfortunately—I always look at politicians, they either have a two-, four-, or six-year attention span, and if it ain’t on their watch, they’re not too interested. Now, the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Packages, you see, would have gone on for a long time, and when I think of all the waste that goes on and the fact that we lost all that data and a chance to get more lunar material, I think it was tragic. We did all that work. We got all that skilled team together. I mean, that team, I don’t think we’ve ever had it before or since. It was a remarkable team of contractors, NASA personnel, military, and it was just one heck of a team. I think psychologically it was really a booster for this country. I know it was a Cold War thing, eventually, as it turned out, but I mean, psychologically I think it gave the country a real shot in the arm.\\n\\n Now, of course, all we hear is, “Well, if you [could] send a man to the Moon, why can’t you do so and so?” I say, “Money, people, skills. Give us those three and we’ll do anything.” Give them time. Sorry, you have to have time as the fourth element.\\n\\n So, it was sad. Really, it was sad because we had everything in place. We’d done the planning, we knew we could do it, there was another all set to go. It just seemed a horrible waste. But, you know, having lived through many aircraft cancellations in my career, I said, “Well, ho-hum, another one.” At least we landed on the Moon and did our stuff. So, really, you have to say the program overall was a tremendous success." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tremendous success. And like you said, it took tremendous people in many situations to make it happen. You’ve mentioned some of them today, Gilruth and Chris Kraft. Are there others that you can think of and their impact on the space program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, [including Bob Carlton, who was my right hand in the later years]. You could go through the telephone book of people at JSC, [GSFC, KSC,] and Rockwell and Grumman and MIT and Headquarters, even, bless them. I mean, we had to have the headquarters people. Marshall, I know, used to kid that Uncle Willie, [Wernher] von Braun, you know, because at one time we were sort of deadly enemies, but that was all by the board. And there was a lot, a lot of people who really sacrificed an awful lot of their lives and effort and contributed enormously. I mean, that was the beauty of Apollo. It wasn’t one person or one team; it was really an integrated army of an awful lot of dedicated people, and not just the engineers. I mean the support people, we couldn’t have worked without them. And like I said earlier, the wives and families. So it was really a terrific, concerted effort.\\n\\n I even hated to name any names at all, because I’m terrible on names to begin with, but there are so many people who were involved. Max, for example, was intimately involved. There are so many people involved. Out of our group of twenty-five, I’ve only named about three or four of them, and everybody played their part. You know, there were loads of them. A lot of people tended to just give the astronauts the main praise and then NASA, and I said, “Well, you know, there’s an awful lot of contractor people who put in just as many hours as we did, worked just as hard and everything else. It was just a terrific team effort.” And that’s what it takes.\\n\\n If we’re going to go back to the Moon or go to Mars, it’s going to take a similar dedication of the administration, the people of the country, and putting teams together like that, because it’s a big challenge, and we’re trying to do Space Station on less than a full team. It’s like playing football with only seven guys on the field. You’re liable to get clobbered. I mean, that’s not to denigrate the people that are in it, they’re doing the best they can with what they’ve been given, but I wish they’d have been given a bit more. You know, it’s a shame.\\n\\n But I always liked the—we used to have a motto they put on the old, I think it was the Space Roundup when it first started. It was a Browning quote, it said, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” I said, “That’s it.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s great. Very good motto." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, that’s space." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rodney G. Rose", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00180", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/EngleJH/englejh.htm", + "original_file_name": "EngleJH_5-5-04.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/EngleJH/EngleJH_5-5-04.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Joe H. Engle", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 5 May 2004" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Joe H. Engle" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 5th, 2004. This oral history interview with General Joe Henry Engle is being conducted for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas. The interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Sandra Johnson. This session is a continuation of the oral history session begun on April 22nd, where we talked to General Engle about his days with the United States Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base [California]. We’re going to start again today with him sharing some more memories of those days as a test pilot.\\n\\n We thank you again for taking time this morning to come in and visit with us. You mentioned some of the aircraft that you flew in our previous session, and I wanted to visit that topic one more time before we moved on. Are there others that you would like to talk about, especially the lifting bodies?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was really lucky to get to fly the lifting bodies. Not very much, only one or two flights, but the lifting bodies, particularly the early versions of the lifting bodies, were very unique flying airplanes. They were difficult to fly. They required tremendous pilot attention to the task, because they had very poor roll-yaw coupling in the flight controls. There was no augmented flight control system and no stabilization in any of the axes, so it was all manual.\\n\\n In fact, the one that I flew was the M2-F1, which was kind of the prototype, really, for all the lifting bodies. It was even made out of plywood by a fellow named [William “Gus”] Briegleb, who built gliders in the area out there. Paul [F.] Bikle, who was the head of what is now [NASA] Dryden [Flight] Research Center [Edwards, California], was an avid glider pilot/sailplane pilot, and knew him very well and knew that he could construct a very low-cost vehicle of the right shape to check out the aerodynamic characteristics for that shape.\\n\\n So the first of the lifting bodies was a plywood version and looked just like a bathtub. Probably flew about the same as a bathtub, too. It was not an easy, relaxing, fun vehicle to fly, but it was challenging and it was very, very interesting. It had a very, very low lift-to-drag ratio, which meant that you had to glide in very, very steep, in order to keep energy built up to flare and touch down and land then.\\n\\n The flights in the lifting bodies were preceded by a course in glider flying, mainly so that we could get some time on a towrope behind a tow vehicle, and that was very useful. I had not done any soaring to speak of before then, but really thoroughly enjoyed that as well.\\n\\n The first lifting-body flights were ground tows, towed behind a vehicle, behind a Pontiac GTO convertible. It had a 427 engine in it, I believe, a souped-up 427 engine and flat racing tires on the back end so that it had good traction out on the dry lakebed, and a five-speed manual transmission. I remember it was every hotrodder’s dream, and Mr. Bikle very, very adamantly forbade any of the test pilots from driving it out on the lakebed, because he knew that we would just have too much fun with it out there. So we were restricted from driving the vehicle, but we were towed by that vehicle on our first lifting-body flights. Get us off the ground, familiar with the handling qualities of the lifting body, and then cut loose and glide back in.\\n\\n Normally, the lifting bodies were towed behind a [Douglas] C-47 [Skytrain]. They were towed right up over the lakebed, circled up over the lakebed, then you’d cut loose and glide down and land.\\n\\n Let’s see. The lifting bodies were thought to probably be predecessors to controlled entry vehicles and horizontal landing vehicles, space vehicles. It turned out that because of the high demand on the piloting task for control of the vehicle and for landing, they were not really the right choice. There needed to be some wing on a vehicle to give it a little better glide ratio, give it a little better controllability and stability than the lifting bodies exhibited. Today, lifting body would probably be a conceivable thing to do because flight control systems and avionics have advanced so far that you can build in automatic or artificial stability and artificial control, as a matter of fact. So now it might be a more reasonable thing to pursue.\\n\\n The purpose of the lifting body was to attain a very, very blunt shape that didn’t have any sharp leading edges like a wing does, because those small-radius leading edges are very, very susceptible to high heating during the entry. The shock wave can stand in very close to them and transfer that heat of reentry to the structure of the vehicle much more efficiently than if you have a blunt body, kind of like a blunt prow on a boat as it goes through the water, the bow wave stands out in front of it, much the same as happens in a vehicle when it’s reentering the atmosphere. So although the goal and the concept was good at that time, I think they were just a little ahead of their time.\\n\\n The final modification to the lifting bodies was the X-24C. The X-24 was the third in a series of basic lifting-body shapes that were designed and attempted. Then the X-24 was modified and kind of a wing was put on it, which made it a much more controllable airplane, much more easy to land. The pilot task was reduced tremendously. And the X-24C probably had a lift-to-drag ratio or glide ratio very similar to the Space Shuttle.\\n\\n The lifting bodies eventually, after the M2-F1, which was the plywood one that I talked about, all the rest were aluminum construction, and all the rest had one form or another of a small rocket engine in them, either for landing in the pattern to flatten out the approach and flatten out the landing, give the pilot more time to land.\\n\\n Or, in the case of the X-24, the engine was ignited, carried up—it was carried up much like the [North American] X-15, under the wing of the [Boeing] B-52. After launch, the engine would be lit and accelerated out, and the X-24C got to, I believe, almost Mach 2, and I don’t recall the altitude, but it expanded the envelope enough to see that landing a vehicle of that type was very, very reasonable to proceed with.\\n\\n That kind of summarizes what I can think of right now on lifting bodies. I didn’t fly the lifting body very much at all. Mr. Bikle, once I started flying the X-15, my other flying duties down at Fighter Test Operations at the Air Force side of the ramp just about took up all my time, so I really didn’t have any time to devote to the lifting bodies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Out of the three X-15 planes, you flew numbers one and number three. Did you ever have an opportunity to fly the modified X-15, number two?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I didn’t. The -2, the modified airplane was, as you know, a rebuild of the airplane that [John B.] Jack McKay had had the landing accident with at Mud Lake, actually rolled over on its back and did extensive damage to the airplane. But the airplane is pretty tough. So the decision was made not only because the structure of the airplane, the fuselage was reparable, but also because there was a desire to provide a platform to take the scramjet engine, which was an engine design concept at that time to try and have an engine that would operate in the atmosphere at speeds up to Mach 8. The desire was to have some platform to get this engine out to Mach 8, try the ignition, see if it could propagate the flame in the engine, and propagate ignition.\\n\\n So the decision was made to rebuild X-15-2, put tanks on it to give it more propellant to accelerate out faster, and mount this small prototype scramjet engine on the lower ventral fin of the X-15.\\n\\n [Robert A.] Bob Rushworth had begun the initial checkout on the X-15-2 and he received his orders to go to his next assignment, which was not imminent, but it was a few months, six to eight months down the pike. I was the backup Air Force X-15 pilot, and so I was designated to take over and do the envelope expansion on the number two airplane, on -2. But before starting the checkout program, the next NASA selection had come along and it was pretty obvious that I needed to make a longer-range career choice, whether to apply to come down here to NASA or to finish out the envelope expansion on the X-15 and then go to the next Air Force assignment, which there was no way of telling what that would be.\\n\\n I chose to take the assignment to NASA here, and when I did that, then [William J.] Pete Knight was brought on board as actually Bob’s replacement—actually my replacement on the program—and Pete was the one who then eventually flew the X-15 too and expanded the envelope on out, after Bob Rushworth left." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Before you moved on to your assignment to NASA, you had more duties at Edwards, including one being a chase pilot. Could you share with us the duties of a chase pilot and how important it is to the success of the whole program to have that person in that place?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Chase pilots and chase planes were used extensively at Edwards, and they are very, very valuable. They’re a safety item that provides visual observation and provides a lot of good operational information. If you’re having an emergency onboard, the chase pilot always had a checklist for the type of aircraft you were flying, and he could go through and read off checklist items, emergency items, to make sure you didn’t miss anything in taking care of an emergency that you were having.\\n\\n It was very valuable in confirming that configuration on an airplane, particularly for any test data point, if you had flaps set in a certain position or a gear up or down, or if you had external stores on the airplane, confirmation that these were in place and that they were stable, the gear was down if you were going to land, or stores had separated, in many cases, at different speeds and flight conditions. And if you had some sort of indication that you had either a fire or a hydraulic leaks, the chase pilot could confirm or at least tell you that there was no visual indication of smoke coming out of the airplane or of a hydraulic leak, hydraulics coming out.\\n\\n In the case of the X-15, probably one of the more valuable contributions of the chase pilot was after joining up in the pattern and following you down in the pattern, he could confirm that either the lower ventral fin had separated so that you could land the airplane okay, then as you flared and started to float into the touchdown and put the gear down, he could confirm that the gear was down.\\n\\n On the X-15, it was very critical that the gear come down, of course like in any airplane, but particularly the nose gear, because the main gear, the skids, were located at the very aft end of the X-15, so as soon as they touched, there was no fulcrum for the horizontal stabilizer to allow the pilot to ease the nose down slowly. The nose was going to slam down very hard. It was designed to do that for stability on the lakebed. The nose wheel had no steering, so the skids in the back created drag and that created the stabilization for the slideout.\\n\\n But the nose came down so hard, that without the shock absorbing of the nose strut to absorb that impact, it would have crushed the pilot, vertebrae certainly, and done damage to the airplane. And the gear was not put down until after the flare and the float into touchdown because of the additional drag. So if the nose gear didn’t come down, the chase pilot would call that out, and the X-15 pilot really had no recourse but to then punch out, bail out, right there, just before the airplane touched down, to avoid injury.\\n\\n You couldn’t tell how high off the ground you were and you didn’t have power in the X-15—it was an unpowered landing—so being able to go in while your air speed was bleeding off very rapidly and get down close to the ground, be ready to touch down at the right speed, was very important in the X-15. And the chase pilot would fly in very close formation with you all the way down to touchdown and call out the height of the skids above the ground so you knew how high you were. It was a skill that good test pilots really developed in calling a very steady chant and a very even chant on height above the ground, every three feet, two feet, one foot, six inches, six inches, and if you ballooned a little, they’d call one foot, back to one and a half, so that you knew exactly what was happening and how far off the ground you were, and that was very useful. In fact, we did that on the initial flights on the Space Shuttle, using chase pilots to call the height of the gear above the ground, because at that point in time we didn’t really have confidence in the calibration of the radar altimeter in the Space Shuttle, and we didn’t have radar altimeters in the X-15.\\n\\n Other instances, we spoke earlier of chasing [Jacqueline] Jackie Cochran when she set her speed record, the chase pilot could be a tremendous help in offloading the prime pilot, in this case, Jackie. She was flying closed course, which meant essentially a continuous circle. She had to go outside of the imaginary pylons, which were determined by radar points on the ground, and had to hold a certain altitude. She had to end up, after completing the 15 kilometer closed course, she had to end up at an altitude equal to or higher than what she entered or it would be an invalid run. So it was a matter of her accelerating into the tangent of the circle she was going to fly, rolling in, holding a certain G-load, which meant a bank angle and back-stick pressure, not too much so that she cut inside the course, and not too little so that she drifted outside and had a longer course to traverse and therefore take her more time. In addition to that, she had to hold the altitude or at least end up with a positive altitude.\\n\\n When she was developing her proficiency in this maneuver, the chase pilot, while she was concentrating on whichever variable she wanted to concentrate on, whether she wanted to concentrate on Gs or bank angle or altitude or what, there were a lot of variables shifting around, and the chase pilot was really valuable in helping the pilot develop those skills by calling out her altitude precisely if she started to drop a little, calling out the G-load if she started to deviate from the Gs at all.\\n\\n It was interesting from the chase pilot’s standpoint as well. In fact, it was probably more work from the chase pilot’s standpoint than it was from the pilot flying the speed course." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have an opportunity to work as a chase pilot with her?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. Jackie and [Charles E.] Chuck Yeager were very, very close friends. They had flown together a lot. Jackie had taken Chuck on several overseas—in fact, one round-the-world trip in her [Lockheed] Lodestar—because they both loved to fly. And I think because everybody knew Chuck Yeager, too, that she didn’t mind having some doors opened whenever she needed to have doors opened, although she could open all of them she needed to herself.\\n\\n But she also had a very strong desire to set the world’s speed record for women. She did it in a [Northrop] T-38 [Talon] initially, and then it was broken again by Jacqueline [Marie-Thérèse Suzanne Auriol], a French aviatrix. And Jackie was determined to take it back in an [Lockheed] F-104 [Starfighter]. She was not current in the F-104, but was able to get permission to check out and fly one of Lockheed’s bailed F-104s. It didn’t belong to the Air Force, but it was a standard F-104. She had asked Chuck to help her get ready for it, practice and get ready for this run, and Chuck was working with her very, very intensely, and had a commitment—I think some weather delayed the attempt, the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] attempt. It slipped into a time period when Chuck had a commitment on the East Coast, and I can’t recall whether it was a Pentagon commitment or some kind of a commitment that—he was very good about keeping commitments. It was going to be practice weekend, so he asked if I would like to—he didn’t ask me if I’d like to; he told me I was going to fly chase for Jackie that weekend. And I was really thrilled to death. He briefed me on the things to watch, things to do, things to tell her.\\n\\n So Jackie and I flew together I think about eight flights over that weekend, with her practicing the techniques to use to polish and refine the course, the ground track, and the altitude that she would fly a couple weeks later on her attempt, and she successfully smashed the world’s record for women with that 104 flight.\\n\\n I was very thankful to Chuck in many ways, because I had known and admired her very much anyway, and it gave me an opportunity to get to know her, and she invited us down with Chuck to her ranch on several weekends, several times, several occasions, and it was really a good friendship. She was a great aviatrix." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Another time as a chase pilot, [Milton O.] Milt Thompson gives you credit for saving Bob Rushworth’s life from a potentially serious accident by a timely call just before touchdown. Do you recall the situation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, boy, I sure do. It was during one of the envelope expansion flights on the -2, on the number two X-15, the one that had been rebuilt. The landing gear was deployed by a purely mechanical cable and hook mechanism, very simple thing, where you just pulled on a handle and the cable went over some pulleys and released a hook and the nose gear would drop down.\\n\\n In the rebuilding of the -2 airplane, there were some parts of the airplane that were extended and expanded to accommodate for more fuel on board. The X-15 would expand, stretch, or swell up and stretch just like any metal does when you heat it up, so at high speeds it would heat up, it would expand in length. In fact, at Mach 6, it would expand over two inches almost, two and a half inches. And this cable, of course, was inside where it wasn’t exposed to that heating, so it didn’t expand as much.\\n\\n In the rerouting of this cable, they forgot to take into account that the airplane was going to expand and the cable was not, so at about Mach 4.5, 4.2, I believe it was, the airplane expanded enough to release the cable and the nose gear had come down. There was a modification made to it, so Bob went up to get the next datapoint. And on this one, the little door which extends first before the gear came down, it was released, although the gear didn’t come down. It had opened up and the hot gas had gone inside, so we knew there was some damage in the nose wheel well.\\n\\n I was Bob’s chase for landing that day, so he came across the field, I joined up with him, with the F-104, and flew down with him and told him that the little nose-gear door was open and that we ought to be ready for some kind of anomaly on the nose gear extension.\\n\\n So as he floated in to touch down, he pulled the landing gear handle and the main gear came down and the nose gear did not. It just hung there because there’d been enough heating damage inside and he was at a high enough angle of attack that it didn’t fall down into the air stream; it just sat there and it kind of bobbed back and forth a little bit.\\n\\n I was calling to him to “hold it off. Don’t let the airplane touch down. Hold it off. Just keep holding it off. Hold it off.” In fact, I think I said, “Hold it off. Hold it off. Get ready to bail.” And I had just said, “Get ready to bail,” and I saw the nose gear finally start to come down, and I said, “Don’t. Don’t bail. Hold it off. Hold it off.”\\n\\n He held it off as long as he possibly could, and it turned out that the nose gear finally latched and dropped down just before or about the same time the main gear touched and the nose slammed down. So he avoided some injury that day, but it was only a matter of precluding him touching down at the normal time, I think. If he’d touched down at the normal time, the nose would have come down before the gear was extended and then he would have had that problem of a very hard slapdown and either a very serious injury or get killed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On a completely different set of circumstances, Milt Thompson also tells of a special delivery that you made to a group of pilots stationed up in the High Sierras [Sierra Nevada Mountains] one time. Would you like to share that story with us?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, you bet. Chuck Yeager and [Clarence] Bud Anderson, every year they would go on either a ten-day or two-week backpacking trip up in the High Sierras to fish; fish for golden trout. That was a delicacy and they were only found in the headwaters of the Kern River up there. So Chuck would pack up there with nothing but a backpack, and as I recall, it was a forty-four-pound backpack or fifty-four-pound backpack. I went with him a couple times, so I should remember. But you carried only your tent and enough dried food to last you for two days, because that’s how long it took to hike to up to where the lakes were where the fish were, and then you ate fish for the rest of the time.\\n\\n So at that time we would fly up in whatever airplane was on the ramp that we could get, just to check and make sure that everything was okay, and they had emergency signal mirrors that they could signal us and let us know exactly where they were on the ground. We’d fly down low and wave and everybody would know that they were okay.\\n\\n Chuck had said that it gets pretty old eating fish for two weeks. Not that he was complaining, because he really liked to fish, but pretty much well along into their trek, their routing around up in the Sierras, I was going to go up and check on them one day, so I went over to the commissary and picked up some really nice thick steaks, and I was going to put them in a helmet bag and put the helmet bag in the speed brake of the 104, which opened up kind of like a clamshell in the back end, and close it, and then drop them to him, open the speed brakes and drop them to him. And I thought it would be kind of fun to give him something just as a joke, so I got some frozen fish sticks and put them in another helmet bag on the other side. The speed brakes opened up on either side of the 104. So on one side there were the steaks and on the other the frozen fish sticks.\\n\\n I flew up and saw the flashing mirror and saw them, and went down low and wagged the wings, and they were waving. And I came back around real slow with the flaps down, and that normally means you’re going to make a drop of some kind to them. When I got just about there to them or where I thought it was about right, I popped the speed brakes open and the bag of steaks came out just like they should, and fell and they hit very close to them on this high mesa where they were at. The other bag kind of hung up on the actuator, the hydraulic actuator that opened the speed brake, hung up for a while, flapped around until it tore the handle loose, and then it finally came out, but it fell down in a very steep canyon, down into the Kern River.\\n\\n So Bud and Chuck ran over and picked the helmet bag up and saw these steaks and they were just beside themselves, Chuck said, that they knew the other bag had fallen down there and they were discussing whether or not it was worth going after those steaks or not, because it was a very steep climb down into the deep, deep Kern Valley, but they decided, yeah, for steaks it was. They spent the best part of a day going down, looking for that bag, because it was olive-drab-colored and didn’t really stand out. But they found it, and then when they found out that they were frozen fish sticks, that was a good gotcha. That was one that Chuck hasn’t equaled yet, but he’s still trying.\n\nAnd I couldn’t have planned it any better, because they had the steaks. That was the hook. They had the steaks and they thought there were steaks in the other bag." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that’s a nice relaxing time for them. Were there other trips that you guys took together to help relax and just get away from your tasks?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. A lot of times we would find—there would be times when there was no particular flight testing that had to be done on a particular day and it was a nice day to fly, the airplanes were available, and they really encouraged us to fly as much as we could at Edwards, just to develop proficiency.\\n\\n Chuck would call and say, “You want to go up north, make a run up north?” Well, that always meant a low-level run, because he had gone through gunnery school in World War II at Tonopah [Nevada], which is near Mud Lake, which is one of the prime dry lakebeds that we used for the X-15 emergency landings. He really got to know the area well, because they would fly low level and strafe at anything that they could with the [Bell] P-39s [Airacobras], when they were going through gunnery school.\\n\\n So he loved it up there. He knew a lot of people, a lot of ranchers, and he knew a lot of fascinating things about areas, old mines, old cable cars that would go up over, haul ore up and over the mountains and down into Owens Valley, and he never ran out of new things to show me at low level. We’d fly up there, take a couple of 104s or a couple of whatever was on the ramp, and fly up and he’d point out these things to me. It was very fascinating, and the interesting thing was that we still fly together at Edwards. We get to fly the [Boeing] F-15s [Eagles] to open the [Edwards Air Force Base] Air Show every year, and one of Chuck’s favorite past times is to get a couple of airplanes and fly up there north, over Panament Springs and Tonopah and look at all the old places that we used to fly in World War II." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned to us that you spent some time with the Confederate Air Force, but those were not high-speed airplanes. Tell us about the difference in flying the vintage planes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Those were World War II airplanes and I, of course, grew up wanting to be a World War II fighter pilot, so for me, to get the opportunity to fly those airplanes was just a real thrill, a real nostalgic thrill, if there is such a thing. And actually, Chuck had been flying with them. He was the one who took me down and essentially introduced me to the Confederate Air Force and got me started flying down there, flying the airplanes down there. No, they’re not fast, but they’re our heritage. They were what won World War II and kept us from speaking German or Japanese today, I guess. [Laughter]\\n\\n So I’ve always had a fascination with the aircraft that were used in World War II, both sides, as a matter of fact, and to fly those airplanes, it’s a real thrill. It’s a thrill for me, and I’m awed every time I think that people fought an entire world war in such basic equipment as those airplanes. It gives me a lot better appreciation of what they were up against when they flew their missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have one in particular that you liked to fly more than others on those vintage planes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I think my favorite World War II fighter was the [Curtiss] P-40 [Warhawk], because that was what I initially wanted to be, was a P-40 Flying Tiger pilot, and that was the first airplane that I really got to know anything about. It was not the best flying airplane. It was not the highest performance by any means, nor was it the easiest to fly, although it was a very easy, straightforward airplane to fly.\\n\\n The P-51, I think, was probably the most enjoyable World War II fighter that I have had the opportunity to fly. I did get to fly a lot of the airplanes; the P-40, the [Republic] P-47 [Thunderbolt], the [North American] P-51 [Mustang], the [Bell] P-63 [Kingcobra], P-39, and the [Lockheed] P-38 [Lightning], and all of them are very, very fun. They’ve all got their own unique personality, and I wouldn’t trade any of them. I wouldn’t trade the flights in them for anything else. But my favorite airplane was the P-40, and probably the nicest flying was the\\n\\n P-51." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there some during your time at Edwards that you had to check out in and be responsible for taking up that you just didn’t like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I never met an airplane I didn’t like. Some of them are less relaxing and less enjoyable and less fun to fly, and some of them are a lot more work to fly than others, but they’ve all got their own characteristics, they’ve all got their own personality, and I really, really enjoy any new airplane, any airplane." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just a few months after you took your final flight in the X-15, you became part of NASA in the astronaut corps. Tell us about how that transition occurred and how you made that move, and why you decided to take that path instead of staying with an Air Force assignment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as I mentioned, I knew that my flying at Edwards wouldn’t be open-ended. I couldn’t stay there as long as I wanted. I knew that I would probably be reassigned within a year, because I’d been there for quite some time and that’s just the Air Force policy of rotating you around to other assignments so that you have a good diversified career. So I knew that I was going to be reassigned.\\n\\n I did apply and was accepted on that particular class of astronauts, and it was not without some reservations. I had some mixed feelings because I was leaving a very, very good flying job, the best flying job in the world at Edwards, for something that was unknown and something that was known it would not be as good airplane flying. But at that time the emphasis on selection of astronauts was on test pilots because of the type of the programs and missions that were being flown and the nature of the missions.\\n\\n To me, it was somewhat an extension of the test pilot discipline, of the test pilot career. There was talk of controllable reentry vehicles, flying a vehicle back into the atmosphere, because we were working on the lifting bodies at Edwards at the time. So I kind of had that in my over-the-horizon view, I think, that I did want to go to the Moon, and that was the main purpose for the selection of our class. I did want to go to the Moon. I thought that would be a tremendous envelope expansion and wanted to do that, and then had hopes of being able to be part of whatever the vehicle was that came along that would be the reentry vehicle, which eventually was the Space Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You already had space experience, basically, because you had received your astronaut wings when you reached that threshold in the X-15. You were the only astronaut of your kind to come across to NASA. How were you and your class received by the astronauts that were already in place? What were some of your first assignments and tasks that you began working with them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I sure didn’t notice anything but a very warm welcome by all the people who were already selected. I think the feeling was that any new guy that came in—and our class was certainly the new guys—when the new guys came in, they went to the end of the line as far as getting a flight anyway, so there wasn’t real concern on that. And I don’t think at that time there was quite the feeling of flying and then turning around and flying again right away that there is now with the Space Shuttle, just because of the nature of the flights. You know, we fly much more often now and you’re expected to fly a number of times now. So I don’t think that feeling was there.\\n\\n I know that we had a very large class, a class of nineteen, and after our class, the selection of astronauts continued to grow faster than the number of seats that we could see opening up downstream, and even [Donald K.] Deke Slayton at the time would tell new classes, he said, “I don’t really need you, I didn’t really want you, but you’re here, so here’s what I’m expecting of you,” and that was pretty much your welcome speech. Of course, eventually just about everyone did fly.\\n\\n But I didn’t notice any resentment at all on the part of other astronauts in the office. In fact, much to the contrary; very warm reception, very much one of willingness to help get started, get your feet on the ground, and get running." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Chuck Yeager was such a mentor to you in the Air Force. I’m curious, was there another figure of that type when you came into the astronaut program, someone that you worked closely with?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think Deke Slayton was. Deke commanded the respect of everybody, the old guys, the new guys, and everybody, because he was very, very straightforward, very honest, very straightforward. I can’t really remember for sure, but I know when we were selected, if you made it, if you were selected, Deke called you, and if you weren’t selected, it seems to me like somebody else called and I can’t remember who it was, to tell you that, you know, “Very impressive résumé,” and all this, “but we’d like for you to try again next class.”\\n\\n But if Deke called you, you knew you were in, and it was not a real emotional high-grade sales pitch; it was, “This is Deke Slayton. Want to come down and work for me?” And that was about it. You said yes or no. [Laughs]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How soon after you got the phone call did you report to Houston?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t really remember that. Probably a couple of months. I would think about two months, but I really don’t recall. It wasn’t an awfully long time, but long enough to get the transition made okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And quite a difference in location from being out in the desert to the [Texas] Gulf Coast." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it sure was. There were a lot of differences in reporting down here, positive and some not so positive things. I think the weather was not so positive. I was down here over the summer. While our home was being built, I was down by myself, and I just stayed out at the BOQ [bachelor officer's quarters] out at Ellington [Air Force Base, Houston, Texas], the old BOQs, and they didn’t have air conditioning out there. Got down here in the middle of March, so I was here in April, May, June, July, the hot, muggy part of the summer, and didn’t know a whole lot different at that time, so although it was uncomfortable, I wasn’t miserable. But it was sure a shock. The weather was a lot different than the dry heat of the high desert.\\n\\n NASA was a much bigger organization than what I had ever been exposed to before. It was kind of a cultural shock for me. In the first place, it was a nonmilitary environment and I’d never worked in a nonmilitary, other than down at NASA Dryden, which, since it’s located on an Air Force base, the culture is a little bit more military there.\\n\\n But I remember my first feeling was that they’re just paying way too much attention. The media and, in fact, the people in the residential areas, meaning well, but my impression was they just paid way too much attention to the new guys when they got here, before they’d done anything. The guys that had flown, that was okay, but when you just check in and you’re getting ready to start training, and all that media attention, and all of the things that were done for you, I was very uncomfortable with that, I remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did your experience as a test pilot and X-15 pilot help you with the training as an astronaut?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It probably gave me a little confidence and self-assurance that I was going to be working in an environment that I had at least been exposed to; high altitude, high task demand, tasks that demanded a lot of attention and concentration. The environment of living in a spacesuit, a full-pressure suit, were all things that I really had no qualms, didn’t have to think about, really, which was good. I think I was the only one in my class that did not have an advanced degree, didn’t have a master’s degree or higher, I had only a bachelor’s degree, and so probably it was a good thing. I would have been very, very concerned, I think, if I didn’t feel that I at least had something to counter the academic levels of my counterparts.\\n\\n I was very surprised, in fact, when I was selected, because of that, after looking at the list of guys who hadn’t been selected, very surprised that—the trend had already been started toward focusing more on education, and there were more and more test pilots who did have advanced degrees. So I was a little pleasantly surprised when selected, because I didn’t have an advanced degree. I perhaps had the opportunity for more flight test experience, but my academic background was not as strong as others’." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It wasn’t too long after you joined NASA that the [Apollo/Saturn, AS-] 204 fire occurred. Could you share with us your thoughts of that event, how it affected you, and how it impacted the astronaut corps? Then if you’ll tell us how you were involved in the role of the investigation, if at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wasn’t involved in the investigation at all, because at that time, our class of nineteen was still in our training cycle, and our time was totally focused on the training program, the training curriculum.\\n\\n It certainly was a shock. We certainly followed the tragedy and the investigation, and the causes for it. In fact, I think, as I recall, my first meaningful assignment after our astronaut training session year was to be assigned to the crew of—it was called 2TV-1, a thermal vacuum test. It was an eight-day test to put the newly designed vehicle in the big thermal vacuum chamber here at NASA and put a crew in so that all of the life-support systems were exercised and tasked and all the electronics were tasked, and many of the things had to be done manually from inside the vehicle anyway.\\n\\n So [Joseph P.] Joe Kerwin and Vance [D.] Brand and I were selected as the crew of 2TV-1, to go into the chamber for eight days or ten days? I think it was eight days. The chamber was pumped down to a vacuum and heat lamps were turned on, and we lived inside the Apollo Command Module for eight days. So that was really, as I say, that was my first meaningful what I considered contribution to the program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was that like? Because that was quite an event at that point in the history of NASA, to spend that much time in that module as a testing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We didn’t think of it as being quite such a monumental thing. We were kind of bored in there, actually. [Laughter] I think I pulled on my hunting and camping skills to living in a confined area. Being confined in a tent while it’s raining for several days, with a couple of guys, that was good training for 2TV-1. [Laughs]\\n\\n We did learn. We did learn a lot about living in a confined area like that. We were really busy operating all of the systems, going through the checklist every day to operate the systems that needed to be exercised and checked out, so it wasn’t a real bad experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just a memorable one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A very memorable one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The progress did occur, though, through the Apollo Program, and Apollo 7 was launched and 8, 9. Describe what you were doing during the times of these missions and what you were doing as part of your training program and preparing for your turn." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think even after our training period as a new class of astronauts, we were exposed to geology, because at that point in time everyone was a potential lunar surface crewman. The geology training I really thoroughly enjoyed. It was one of the most valuable pieces of new knowledge, and a discipline that I had not been exposed to before, and I really thoroughly enjoyed it. Plus, it meant traveling literally all over the world to different geologic sites, because at that time they weren’t certain at all what kinds of geology would be found on the Moon, whether it would be sedimentary or volcanic or just what. So we were exposed an entire spectrum of geology and geology features, and by doing so, we did, in fact, go to Hawaii and Alaska, Mexico. We did go to Germany, but that was for specific training with regards to the Apollo 14 crew site. But the geology was one of the things that I really enjoyed the most.\\n\\n In addition to the thermal vacuum testing on 2TV-1, I was given a task to monitor and evaluate different concepts for a lunar surface transporter, it was called at that time, crew vehicle. The rover we call it now, but at that time the concepts for how to get around on the lunar surface, beyond walking distance, really hadn’t focused in at all on what type of vehicle it ought to be. And one of the more interesting ones was a rocket flyer that you strapped on your back, and I think you may have probably seen at football games or demonstrations, the rocket man. He’s flying this rocket-powered vehicle. That was one of the concepts that was being considered at the time, and I think one of my more interesting flights was up at the Bell [Aerosystems Company]—no, it was at [NASA] Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia], I guess it was. Bell built the rocket pack.\\n\\n But I convinced them that if I was going to give it a fair evaluation, I really needed to fly it. So they did let me strap it on, although I was tethered on a big rig and only got to fly up and around a very limited area, but I did get to fly that. That was a lot of fun.\\n\\n I spent a lot of time at [NASA] Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama] in the development of what is the lunar rover now. That was interesting, fun and interesting, too. I like mechanical things, and that was very interesting to consider the requirements that were going to be needed on the Moon and the limitations, and factor those into the design of the rover vehicle. Not only the mobility of the vehicle itself and the type of suspension, the type of wheels that would be used, the type of tires that would be used, but the type of controllers that would be used, because in an inflated suit on the lunar surface, you had very restricted mobility and so all of the controlling functions had to be done with very limited movement, and with as few levers and things as possible so you didn’t bump into them when getting in and out of the vehicle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So did you have an opportunity to take it out to the back forty and use it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joe H. Engle", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes. [Laughs] Oh yes. Yes, we did. We really worked it out and learned a lot while we were developing it, too." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00254", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HinsonSH/hinsonsh.htm", + "original_file_name": "HinsonSH_5-2-00.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/HinsonSH/HinsonSH_5-2-00.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "location_date": "Louisburg, North Carolina – 2 May 2000" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright", + "Kevin M. Rusnak" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Shirley H. Hinson" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 2, 2000. This oral history is being conducted with Shirley Hunt Hinson in Louisburg, North Carolina, as part of the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Kevin Rusnak.\\n\\n We want to thank you again for allowing us in your home and having this opportunity to visit with you. You spent numerous years as part of America’s space program, and your contributions were so many. Tell us how you first became involved in working with NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I graduated from college, it was in 1958. I went to college, started in September of 1955. I graduated in May of ‘58, which was two years and nine months, with a degree in math and a minor in science. I lacked one hour in having a double major. The main reason I majored in math was because it was easy. I mean, why do you major in things? The other reason is I decided that if I married someone locally and I got stuck in a little dinky town, I could always teach math. But if not, maybe I could get out of Franklin County [North Carolina] and go somewhere and work for real.\\n\\n So the week before I graduated, my professor asked me would I like to have a teaching fellowship. I probably didn’t even know what a teaching fellowship was, but I said, “What is it?” and he told me that I could teach one class each quarter, and they would pay me to get my master’s. So I said, “Let me go home and ask Daddy.”\\n\\n So after I graduated, I asked Daddy, “If I need any money, can you help me through school one more year?”\\n\\n He says, “If that’s what you want.”\\n\\n So I went back to school one more year, and I ended up getting my master’s in 1959. There were three people that had graduated from that math department that had gone to work at a place called Langley Research Center [Hampton, Virginia]. I heard they were making a lot more money than schoolteachers. At that time school teachers in North Carolina were making $2,999.99, one penny less than $3,000, and the government was offering $5,430. So I had nothing to keep me from going up there. So I wrote to ask them for an application blank. They wrote me back and said, “You can pick them up at the post office,” to show you how much I knew. [Laughter] But anyway. I fill out an application, and they wrote me back and told me I was hired and that I could come to work on June 30th. So that’s how I started work at NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did your family take the fact that as a basically young single female that you were just going to pick up and move away from home with a brand-new job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My daddy was so proud of me, he couldn’t see straight. I was the first girl—I had three sisters, no brothers, and I was the first one that had graduated from college, and he was very proud. The first thing, they asked if I minded moving to Greenbelt, Maryland, and I said, “No.” They said, “Well, we will assign you then to the Space Task Group,\" because we were supposed to move to Greenbelt, Maryland. They were building a new facility up there which became Goddard, I think, but that’s where Space Task Group [STG] was going, before [Speaker of the House] Sam [Samuel T.] Rayburn and [Senator] Lyndon [B.] Johnson came along. And I’m thankful because I like Texas a whole lot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about those first days going with your brand-new job, brand-new facilities. For you, what was it like those first few days that you were there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know. [Laughter] I was new. I had no car. I did find a new roommate through the placement area at Langley, and I was living with a girl who was working at the Unitary [Plan] wind tunnel, I think, was the name of the place. And I found a ride to work with people that were working on my side of the field. Space Task Group was on one side of the field, and Langley Research Center was on the other side of the field. I just found rides to work and just fell right into a great job, really a great job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your first role? What were you first assigned to do as part of that Space Task Group?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first thing I did was I walked into a room with about four other girls, or women, there. I think two of them had majored in math in college, and two of them were math aides. And then we had a little computer. This \"little computer\" was the size of a refrigerator. It was a Bendix G15, single instruction. Anything you wanted to do, you had to bring it into the register, do it, then store it. If you ever wanted to use it again, you had to remember where you stored it. So that was my first experience with a computer, and we were given a Freidan calculator. I had had a Monroe. I had never had a Freidan before, so I didn’t know to run that, and they were different.\\n\\n From there, they started bringing us these trajectories about this thick to plot, and just started working then. I think the first program I ever did was to transfer rotational velocity to inertial velocity and vice versa." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any idea what you were working on in the beginning, or all this make sense based what you might have learned in some of your classes in college?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, in some of my classes in school, I knew what I was doing, but I was not familiar with orbital mechanics and all that. I had to learn that on the job. I learned a lot on the job. I did have one professor in college who always was saying, “When you go to work, you will need this.” So there was a lot that I knew, but the largeness of it—see, I’d never been next to an airplane before I went to Langley. I had never seen an airplane on the ground before I went to Langley. So it was a change for a little girl from North Carolina. But I had a good time. [Laughter]\\n\\n I worked hard and learned a lot and dealt with some great people. We worked hard hours. Sometimes we didn’t even know—eleven o’clock at night we’d go home, and we had a computer over in another building. I think it was a 704 that they would run trajectories on and they used us to debug their programs. They would bring them back, and we would plot. When I say plot, I mean by hand on a piece of graph paper. There was no computer that plotted for us, so we would plot everything that they would bring back. If it didn’t look right, we’d look at the data and find out what was wrong with it and then they’d go change the parameter, rerun it, and we’d do something over again. So for all of the trajectories for Mercury, we basically debugged the programs by plotting and seeing what things looked like.\\n\\n Then as we got closer to the missions, we would do all of the trajectory analysis reports and just the entire mission trajectory and the mission analysis reports we would do. The flight controllers would know everything that was supposed to be done. We plotted the big—I guess they were four-foot by four-foot projection plot boards that were at the Cape. We did all of that by hand on paper. They rolled them up, carried them down there, and put up on the projection plot boards." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it was you with a few other women, or did you have men that worked in this area as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, they were all women in that one area. We were not just women in that particular area; we were in the room with all the men. I mean, there was one long big room, and everybody was together. But they basically separated the women from the men as far as the work they did, although I did sort of creep out of my little math aide-type hole into the real world eventually. But it took me a while." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Some of the management, or some of the other team members, that would bring you work to do, did they explain what they needed or did they basically leave this information for you to figure out on your own? How did they provide enough details for you to give them back what they needed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think they just probably told me once, and from there on I know what should be done and could pick it up pretty good. I worked very closely with Clay [Claiborne R.] Hicks and Charlie [C.] Allen. They were, as far as I’m concerned, the trajectory specialists at that time. We would plot things about every five seconds. One day I was looking at a trajectory, and I noticed that it really looked funny. It was printing out every tenth of a second, so I plotted that, and I think I was the first person to ever plot max Q [maximum aerodynamic pressure]. It built a little castle. That’s what we called it from there on out. They went like, “What’s wrong with this trajectory?” And then they realized what it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was the trust built up between your work and their instructions? Did it take them a while to feel very confident in what you were giving them back?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think so. I think they trusted me pretty soon after I went to work. I never got the feeling that they did not think that I was on an equal with them. Even though I didn’t take the data over to the other building and input it in the computer, I never did get the feeling that they didn’t trust me or like my work or anything like that. In fact, I think I’m the first women to go travel for Space Task Group. I’m not positive, but I think I was. But I did go to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] for just about all of the missions during Redstone and Mercury and the first three for Gemini." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you share with us some of those trips and tell us what that was like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, that was great. A few funny things about it. The first when I went down there, John [P.] Mayer called me into his office, and he says, “Shirley, we’re going to take you to the Cape to do the post-flight reports. But you have to behave, because if you don’t behave, they won’t ever let another woman go.” [Laughter] And I really wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about, but I found out before it was over, but he didn’t have to worry about me because I had [James] Kirby [Hinson]. [Laughter] Anyway, that was a little funny. We laughed about that over the years.\\n\\n We would have these what they called go/no-go parties. If the mission didn’t go and it was scrubbed, they’d come around and knock on our doors at midnight, and everybody was expected to get up and go sit out by the pool. Most of the time they’d sit out by the pool and talk about the mission and everything, and then we’d go back to bed about one or two o’clock. But, anyway, they woke everybody up for go/no-go parties. And they weren’t really parties that much, but everybody had to get up and get dressed.\\n\\n We did all the post-flight reports at the Cape. In fact, we got to see a U-2 land while we were there. We were at Patrick [Air Force Base, Florida] doing the reports initially, and that was very, very good because you learned a lot. The data was being transmitted back and forth. Somebody would get on an airplane and go to Goddard to get it and bring it down there. If there was anything wrong, we’d call back and say what was wrong with the data. It was a great time, it really was. We had a good time. And I learned a lot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was almost as if it was on-the-job training, but so much of what you were having to do was being discovered as you were doing it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did that pose a challenge for you, or was that something that you felt excited about doing from day to day?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You didn’t really realize that was what was going on. I didn’t at the time. I knew I was just learning, and everything was just falling into place, and we were doing things right, and every time we got ready for the next mission, we had learned on what we did before. But I don’t really remember anybody saying, “Okay. Here’s what we did, and it was good, and we’re going to do this next.” I don’t remember that. It was just everybody did what they were supposed to do and kept doing it better, without any realizing you were doing that, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the atmosphere like working with the Space Task Group during Mercury and so soon after you started then became the goal that we should land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth? Was there excitement in the air?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it was excitement the whole time. To me, everything I everything I ever did out there was exciting. It was interesting, exciting work. After Gemini, or really after Mercury, when we moved to Florida, I moved in April of ‘62, we formed a group that was going to do the real-time program requirements and do the flight support requirements, do the programs and everything for flight control. We formed a group then, and I was working a little small 1620 computer then, IBM 1620 computer, and that’s when I was telling you that I had trained other people to program.\\n\\n But I moved on from that and started doing the launch and launch abort program requirements, and that was a extremely exciting time, because all of the launch requirements and all of the launch abort requirements, I worked very closely with flight control. These are the people I’m sure you have heard about in the Trench, the Retrofire Officers and the Flight Dynamics Officers more so than anybody else, and Guidance Officers. I did all of their requirements and wrote the requirements up in terminology so that IBM could code the requirements. Then I did all of the unit testing, subsystems testing, and everything with IBM.\\n\\n We would schedule computer time just like we were going to run the missions and go, and of course we would get a lot of midnight, 4 a.m. computer time, but we had to do that so flight control could have the daytime. But we did all the testing. You will never go through every branch of the program, but the launch programs probably had the most branches of any that you could go through. We would test those programs and test them, and I dare say that the launch and launch abort programs was probably as error-free program as has ever been written. [Laughter] I had a lot to do with it, I’m sure.\\n\\n I think the first mission that was controlled out of Houston was Gemini IV. There was a cute little story about Gemini IV. Kirby was going hunting, and he had made arrangements for me to go hunting with him also. I think it was the first weekend of December 1964 that we were going to have a simulation for Gemini IV out of the control center in Houston. I was going, and my division chief says, “No, you can’t go. You’ve got to babysit flight control.”\\n\\n So I sat on the—I guess you've seen in the control center where there's a little ledge right behind the trench row. I sat there all day long helping Cliff [Clifford E.] Charlesworth. They resented us a little bit by being there, but we knew the programs better than they did. They knew what the requirements were, but we knew the programs better than they did. So he wanted me there in case he had any troubles, and it was a good day. I enjoyed that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were the challenges in creating those programs? What kind of requirements did you have to meet to do this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This was the first time that we ever had displays on television screens. There's one thing I need to mention, too. Back then we could pick up the phone and call our programmer and say, “Flight control says they didn’t like velocity located at this place on the display. Move it.” Before that, we had done everything by hand and on paper. Now we had a computer program that was driving each spot on the TV screen, and if you didn’t like where velocity was displayed, you could move it. We were very fortunate in that we were able just to pick up the phone and called the programmer and say, “Move it. The requirements will follow.\"\\n\\n Of course, we were doing requirements then without word processors, you know. You would cut and paste, and you’d cut out this part and move it down on the paper and insert the correct part. But the programmers trusted us to cover them with the requirements later, and they’d go ahead that night and make the changes and recompile the programs. The next day the flight controllers would be seeing it moved to where they wanted it moved, or a new computation and things like that. It was nice to be able to communicate with your programmers. Now, you know, if you want to change something, you've got to go through all kinds of requirements, panels, and budget cycles and everything else before you can get anything changed.\\n\\n But it was nice to be able to say, “Our flight controller doesn’t want it this way. Change it for him,\" and we could just get it changed for him overnight. Some of us were a little more effective at getting things changed than others, more persuasive. That’s another part where trust came in. They knew if I asked them to do it that I would include it in the requirements and they didn’t have to worry about my changing my mind, “Oops! I didn’t really mean to do that.” So that was good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What area were you included under at this time when you moved to Houston? Did your division continue to change as the organization changed, or were you pretty much left with the same folks that you started with when you started originally at STG?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was with the same people. We were in Mission Planning and Analysis Division. It really wasn’t MPAD at that time. It was Mission Planning and Analysis. At that time I was working in a branch called Real-Time Program Development Branch, RTDPB. That was Lyn [Lynwood C.] Dunseith. A little after we moved to Houston, we were transferred, detailed to the Ground System Project Office, which was a big mistake. They figured that out after about six months and put us back in MPAD, which was nice.\\n\\n We stayed in MPAD until the division chief—and this sounds awful—the Flight Support Division died, and they asked my branch chief would he be division chief. He said, “Only if I can take my branch with me.” So that was the first time that the control center requirements group had been moved out of MPAD. So we went into Flight Support Division, and that’s where we were the rest of the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it felt like a good match, a natural match for you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was really good because it put software requirements and the hardware requirements in the same division. Then MPAD, they did the design and the trajectories and the system parameters and limits and everything. We used their work, but it was good that the software and hardware requirements were in the same division. The systems engineering for the hardware was in that division. That was a very good organizational move." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did your role change at that time? You were doing the same day-to-day activities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did the same day-to-day activities as far as the program requirements go, and check-out and getting everything ready to turn it over to flight control to fly the missions. We were just moving up to Apollo at that time. Then I got the added duties—we were having a little bit of problems—they’re having real bad problems now, I hear, but we were having little problems with system parameters and constants and things like that where one programmer divided a day by twenty-four hours, and it messed us up. A day doesn’t have twenty-four hours.\\n\\n So we decided something had to done about that. I took over the system parameters and constants, and I don't know how many, I'd say 2,500 at least, and then many, many, many tables that had to be inserted for each mission that were mission-dependent and verified every mission. I took that over and we didn’t any inches and centimeters problems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I’m glad to hear that was a good move so that didn’t happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That did not happen. We had two problems, though, in the programs based on things like that. One of them was [M. Scott] Carpenter’s mission, where he overshot the landing zone. I think that was the one where we divided by twenty-four. Anyway, we had two mistakes. But we took all constants out of the software code and put them in tables so that anybody who wanted a constant, even pi, they had to go to the tables. Any programmer that wanted it had to go to the tables and use it, so that everybody was using the same accuracy. One person wasn’t using four-digit accuracy and somebody else seven-digit accuracy. Everybody was using the same accuracy.\\n\\n The Viking [Mars lander] people came down. They heard we were good, and they looked at our system to see how we did it, and they copied our system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good. Let’s walk back a few steps. When you were working with Mercury, you were building a trust and, of course, building a new reputation as being very efficient. You assisted and co-authored three papers that we know of, that you helped do for technical papers. Tell us how you became involved in doing that. Do you remember those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I remember them. One of them was like Tracking—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "“Tracking and Sighting Data for Stations”?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. They were just—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it a compliment, or was it an expectation that you would have been involved with technical papers at that time? Was it something that you were looking forward to do as part of your career, or was it kind of a surprise that you were going to be working on technical papers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As hard as I worked on those documents, I wanted my name on them, but it wasn’t easy. The worst thing about documents like that, no matter who worked on them, they would put “compiled by” and there would be just one person’s name on it, or the section chief would sign them. But I worked hard enough on those documents, and I had enough of my work in them that I was very, very happy to sign them. I probably got to be third author on everything, but that’s okay. I got on them, anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that a time-consuming task that you did those papers, or was it information that was already available that you just helped put into a paper?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, they were all original work. Once we did the first document, the next mission was patterned after the last document and just the data changed. But all of that was original. We didn’t have anybody's work to copy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, everybody was new." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did not have anybody’s work to copy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have an opportunity at a later time to do other publications?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After every mission, I did the insertion papers. They were like memos of what the orbital insertion conditions were and what data we used to decide whether we were into orbit or not, like how many points we averaged to tell whether we were definitely into orbit or not, and all of the data from—I think we had four launch insertion sources, if I remember correctly. One was GE-Burroughs, one was Impact Predictors 7090, which they called the Azuza, and San Salvador, and Bermuda. We got data from those four sources and we compared that data for insertion. The reason we did is was so that we would know whether the data we were getting from those tracking sites were good enough to base an abort on. If not, we might not know whether we were really in orbit when we were. So we did post-flight analysis on data sources, a lot of analysis on data sources, and with different types of computations as to whether we averaged data or whether we applied short arc solutions and things like that to the data itself, just to make sure whether the transmission of the data was good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there times that you could see that your work here, especially these post-flight documents, proved to save time or maybe cost or just affected the next missions down the line? Could you see the compilation of your work continually to positively affect the next missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it did, and it made us better. Every mission made us better the next mission. If we had not done that, we would not have known whether what we were doing was right or wrong. So every time we did these post-flights reports, we did the next mission better because of having done that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You worked on landing site prediction, is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was the launch abort type." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Something regarding radar look angle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That term? That was what I was talking about, the San Salvador and the Bermuda. That was the radar looking at the spacecraft. So those post-flight reports is taking that data and analyzing it after the missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was in Mercury. Did you continue this effort as Mercury moved into Gemini and then on to Apollo?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We didn’t have to after Gemini." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did it evolve? Did you find this work then be applied to the other programs as well, or this was finished and so you started on a whole different process of doing things for Apollo, as far as your new duties, as Apollo progressed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did the same thing. I did the launch requirements and the launch abort requirements, but the Gemini was so different from the Saturn that it was just a totally different program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did that affect your work? The time is changing, the spacecraft was changing. But are you finding that your tools were changing to help you do this as well, with the computer starting to evolve along with the spacecraft, to help provide you support you need?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If we hadn’t had Apollo, we’d still be back ten years. You wouldn’t have a desktop probably now. Apollo drove the computers in the United States, as far as I’m concerned. If we had not had the Project Apollo, we would not have had computers for at least ten years. We would have had them eventually.\\n\\n From way down looking up, there were two people that I can say that helped us get the computers that we went to the Moon with, and that was Dick Hanrahan [phonetic] and Lyn Dunseith. Dick Hanrahan worked for IBM, and he was Bednarcyk’s boss. But they were little brains just working all the time, and they knew we had to have something better than we had had. Of course, IBM was always at that time these big number generators. But I think knowing what our requirements would be to go to the Moon helped develop the computers. We could not done as many computations as we did. We couldn’t have gone if the computers had not been getting better and better. We could not have had the requirements to get more detailed as they were and as many as they were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you walk us through the evolution of the computers that you’ve worked with? You said you started out with paper and pencil, and, I guess, an eraser on occasion." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had Freidan calculators, and then I had a Bendix G15, which was a single instruction. From there we went to the IBM 1620, which was a low-decimal machine, and we had a Flexiwriter paper tape input, and if you missed one key, you had to start over again because it had little holes in the paper. I have taken a pen and corrected the paper tape to get it to read so we wouldn’t have to do the whole program over again. They were basically the only computers that I programmed for, because once we got to Gemini—well, that’s not true either. I programmed for the 7094 a little bit when we got into Houston. But basically we hired IBM as our software programmers for Gemini and Apollo, and all we did was we looked at the code. This wasn’t like you don’t see the code. We did flow charts and we did code and NASA got to see the code, where I’m sure now no one ever sees the code. We did have people who could correct the code in hexadecimal. There were a couple of people that were that good. So it was basically just the capacity, and, now your desktop calculator computer has much more power really than the computers we used to go to Moon with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there a time where the technology was coming up quickly and your requirements were still needed as quickly as they had been, where you were having to learn the new technology and still do your job and meet all these deadlines at the same time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Always. But it was no problem. It just evolved. If there was a problem, we weren’t smart enough to know it was a problem, or dumb enough, as the case may be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just adapted to the moment, huh?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I can imagine that it—because sometimes if you’re on one system but yet the new system has to be implemented, but yet you still have to get your work done, it must have been a little challenging at times to have that happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were very fortunate that throughout Apollo we were able to keep the same contractor without going out on bid. The government does itself an injustice by trying to change. We were very fortunate that we were able to keep IBM and IBM computers, as far as all of the software requirements go, and the programmers and everything, because a lot of the programs that were used, if you just move it from one computer to the other and that you had the same operating system and same programmers, and we wrote our own operating systems at that time, and we had a whole section that had operating system requirements. So we were fortunate in that we did not have to go out on open bid to replace our coders. That made a lot of difference." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The people that you dealt with IBM, you felt that they were very supportive of the NASA goals and the country’s goals as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I sure did. The hardware people started out as Philco Ford. I don't know who they are, I guess they’re Lockheed now. We kept the same contractors. They changed names, but we kept the same contractors for the hardware and the software from Gemini through early Shuttle, and that really made a difference. I think if we had to go out on open bid and got a different contractor every two years, we’d have never made it. No way. I think they’ve just put out a consolidation contract. We tried that in the early eighties, an awful, awful lot of work, and it basically went down the drain, because as soon as they came on board and they were supposed to be a fixed-price, \"Here's your job. Do it,\" NASA wouldn’t let them do it. So it was not good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was the rapport with the IBM folks on a one-to-one basis with you? Were you their supervisor? Were you the one that checked off to make sure they had gotten their job done correctly, or were you mostly kind of their peer, where you worked very closely with them to tell them what you needed and they gave it back to you? Explain that whole relationship to us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In Gemini and Apollo, I was basically equal to the programmers. I gave them the requirements. I would sign off on all of the systems tests and subsystems tests as far as launch and launch abort goes. But later in my career, I was a section chief, so I was their boss basically. But I did have to sign off on all of the subsystems tests for the launch and launch abort systems for Gemini and Apollo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were all the programmers IBM employees, or were there NASA and IBM?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were all IBM employees." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were they housed at NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were housed across the street at the IBM Building. I don’t know what building it is now, but it was across in Nassau Bay. We had couriers that carried decks of cards back and forth because we compiled all the programs with decks of cards." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m glad you mentioned that, because so many people now who work with computers don’t realize that. So maybe you can give a little background on those cards worked and how many hands that those cards went back and forth to, to give us some background on that whole system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as I said, we had couriers hired, and they would bring these big boxes of cards over, and they have been dropped. Of course, they had a sequence number on them, and some people would have to put them back in sequence. Everything would be recompiled if you made a change. It wasn’t like if you made a change now like you do in a PC. You had to punch a card, recompile the program, and rerun it. So it was time-consuming, very time-consuming compared to the way you input data today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There were only so many computers with only so much computer time. How did everybody who needed time on those computers get time to do their job to get the results that were needed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had a meeting once or twice a week, and you had a form to say, “I need X number of hours to run a certain program,\" and you were scheduled, and twenty-four hours a day we ran the computers. Well, most of the time we ran them twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes we started not running them but two shifts later in the program. But we ran them twenty-four hours a day, and you could schedule on every computer but one. That was an earth resources computer, and that did not have programs. But you could load any program on any machine. That may not be exactly true, but for the most part, any machine could run any program. It was manually scheduled, everybody with their little block of time. Then it was put up on the bulletin board over in the control center, and you’d go find out when your time was, and you’d better show up, because if you were a no-show more than once or twice, you didn’t get any computer time anymore." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you ever get bumped?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we would get bumped. Flight control could bump us any time they wanted to, if they decided they wanted to have sims [simulations] or if anybody wanted to go in and practice, they could bump us a little bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where were all the computers housed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were in Building 30. All the flight controllers were in Building 30. All the flight support people were in Building 30, and all the mission planning and analysis people were in Building 30. Beautiful situation. That’s the way it should be, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Clearly it worked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it did. It would be awful, I think, to have part of the people in—well, now they have people in Building 4 across the duck ponds and everything, but it was much better when everybody was in the same building. I just walked around the corner and talked to the FIDOs [flight dynamics officers] and said, \"Is this what you really want?”\\n\\n “Well, that’s what I said I want.”\\n\\n And I said, “Well, once we put it in a program, it looks like this.”\\n\\n And they said, “Oops! That’s not what I expected it to look like.”\\n\\n I really felt sorry for those guys. They had to come up with what they wanted to control the mission with six months to a year before they used it. And then once they saw it, they thought, ”Well, that’s not quite what I thought it was supposed to be.” I thought it was nice when we could go back and change it for them, because you can’t always decide six months in advance what you want to use to control a mission. First of all, they may not even know what the mission rules were when they gave you the requirements. I think that was one of the best things about Gemini and Apollo, is that we could change it for them when they saw it and they didn’t like it.\\n\\n Down the road—do you want to talk about down the road?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that's a little bit too far down the road. I don't want to do that now.\\n\\n I guess one of the other things I did that I really enjoyed is Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz called me and asked me would I help him out. I told him I would do anything other than go to Building 12. And he says, “Well, it’s close.” He says, “It’s coming to flight control.” I asked him what did he want me to do. He said he wanted me to teach the teleprinters for Skylab how to be teleprinters. They were all about to quit because they couldn’t learn the job. That was, I think, on a Friday. I had never signed on to that program in the control center. That was not where I was working at that time. I was still working on Apollo.\\n\\n I got somebody that weekend to show me where the requirements were for that particular program. I read it over the weekend, got me some computer time on Monday and worked with it. There was one guy in flight control who knew it very well, and he worked with me a little bit. So by Tuesday I says, “Okay, I think I can do it.”\\n\\n So I taught the secretaries in flight control how to be teleprinter operators for Skylab. For nine months, I worked for Gene Kranz and Ed [Edward I.] Fendell. That was an experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought that was very good experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What a different pace, I guess, from what you had done before. A different avenue, anyway, of moving." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I probably had a chance to be a flight controller if I had really wanted to be, but you didn’t own yourself if you were in flight control. You were a slave to missions, and when you were needed, you couldn’t make any plans. I admire those people who did that. They basically gave up their lives, and for nine months that's what I did, just about. So I was ready to go back to the real-time program area after that.\\n\\n But when I got back, they had changed bosses, and I didn’t like him, about one of two or three people that I ever had to work with before that I didn’t like. I didn’t like his methods. I did like him, but I did not like him as a section chief. I'll put it that way. So I went to the division chief and asked him, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”\\n\\n He said, “I need somebody to help me with the budgets so bad.” We had about 120-million-a-year budget, and it wasn’t being controlled.\\n\\n So I said, “Well, let me have a try at it.” So then I went into working on the budget area for the control center, and that was an extremely rewarding job. It wasn’t your ordinary budget job. The engineering orders for all of the hardware and the control center, nobody knew where they were, what the schedules were, whether they were being worked on or not, whether anybody was charging charges correctly for the work that was getting done. It was just haphazard.\\n\\n I did a program for keeping up with all of that. We had a monthly meeting, and every month we knew exactly how much work was completed, how many charges had been made against an engineering order, and how much money we had budgeted for it, what they thought the projection was to finish it, and the date it was going to be finished. After about, I guess, three months, we had a total absolute handle on how much everything in the control center was going to cost, when it was going to be done, and whether it was going to be done on time and everything. That was a good job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Quite an accomplishment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was really was. One of the worst things that this program showed is—I don't know how to say this. It was about the time when you couldn’t do what you want to anymore at NASA, when you could not effect the program the way you wanted to because they said money was tight and all of this. Money wasn’t tight. The way money was handled was tight. I think they got so many people up at headquarters and didn’t have anything for them to do.\\n\\n I’ll tell you a cute little story. When I was little, my daddy would go off and play poker. When he would come back, he would bring me little purses, this little patent leather purses, full of nickels and dimes. I always thought that was the greatest thing in the world. After Apollo, Headquarters reminded me of a whole bunch of little people with these little bitty patent leather purses, and they all had their little nickels and dimes. In order for them to have anything to do, they had to have a budget and thought they had to control that budget.\\n\\n Well, the control center at one time had something like maybe twenty-five different fund codes that we had to pay for. We had a little purse. The money to do this job had to come out of the little purse. These little purses didn’t have enough money in them to really do the jobs, so you were having to either put some of this work over in another purse, move this over to this place, move it over here. We had to keep up with so many fund codes and reprogram things into different projects because we didn’t have the money and we did have it there, that if they had put all that money back together, we could have done the job cheaper, much cheaper. We spent more time trying to keep up what we charged something to than we did doing the work. I don’t whether they’re still doing that or not, but that was one of the worst things NASA had every done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Quite a difference from what you had seen before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Apollo had one fund code, basically. Once we got into the Shuttle, like I say, there were so many people that felt like the only way they had any authority is for them to have a budget, and somebody at Headquarters gave everybody a little bit of money so they would have a function. It just about destroyed being able to be efficient. I don’t know whether that’s still going on or not, but that was one of the worst things that's ever happened to the funding sources at NASA, is they broke them up in such little bitty pieces. You had to charge to them and keep up with the actuals. That was very difficult.\\n\\n I think finally people just decided it wasn’t worth it, and they just did them however they wanted to. But one thing they did for us is they knew that we knew what we were doing so much that they did not cut our budget frequently. They would cut other people’s budgets because they couldn’t really verify and justify what they had. But we didn’t have that problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s when you were doing the cost or before that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m talking about when I was doing the costs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where did you go on from there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From there I applied for and got a section chief position for the control center software, so I was section chief for about three years. My division chief at that time said, “I need help over in simulation. I think I’ll send you over to simulation and let you be a section chief over there.”\\n\\n I said, “I don’t even know how to spell simulation,” because I had never worked there or anything.\\n\\n He said, “It doesn’t matter. We need you over there.”\\n\\n So I went over to Building 35, knowing this, and to a section that felt like they didn’t belong on site, I think. They didn’t even get [the Johnson Space Center] Space [News] Roundups in that building. Nobody had ever said we’re not getting them and nobody ever knew or anything. But I went over there and stayed over there and stirred up the pot and learned how to spell simulation before it was over. Had some great guys working over there, really did. They’re spread out through JSC now, and I’m sure are doing great jobs. But that was quite an experience to go there when I didn’t know anything. I told them. I said, “I don’t know a thing. You’ll have to teach me,\" and they did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m sure it didn’t take you long to learn." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I never did learn it all. You don’t learn it all in simulation if you live there forever, but I did learn a lot and I think I helped a lot.\\n\\n From there I went to two source boards: the Control Center Source Board and the Simulation Source Board. I stayed there for almost a year for those two source boards." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, that was a different type of a job. Would you like to explain to us what your duties were as a source board member?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did most of the evaluating the cost proposals. That was fun and hard. That was probably one of the hardest jobs I had, in that all the people who bid would bid differently. You could tell them to come with a bid costing a certain way in the proposal, and they’d come in with their own costing. Everybody has a different definition of what a manager is, or what an assistant manager is, and they would cost them at different levels and everything. So to get all of that for all of the proposals on the same plane was a very difficult job, but fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you made some order out of chaos at times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you had to end up with them all on the same plane, so you had to change them to where they would all be the same so you could compare apples and apples." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And from there, did you move on to yet another position?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was another section chief. I moved back into section chief back into the control center section chief area, and stayed there until that branch was abolished. Then I went into the ground software development environment, which was a fairly new environment. It was developing the tools for all of the Space Station software development, which had planned to do software development with tools instead of people and requirements. Basically it was building the software support environment. There we had just that little area. There were two of us doing that, and we had about a little over a million dollars a year to spend in that area. So that was interesting and challenging, because that was in the new era of computing and Internet and really getting automated to develop software rather than doing it manually, the way we had done it before. That was where I was when I retired." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you can literally say that as far as computers were concerned, you had done it all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had done it all, from a little Freidan calculator to something much smaller than the Freidan calculator doing more than the computers were when we were going to the Moon. But it was interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there a time during that period of evaluation that you found to be the most challenging and rewarding at the same time, of having to turn theory and hopes into something that was reality and a success?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess there were three areas maybe that I thought were really challenging and good. One of them was really the launch program requirements, working so closely with the FIDOs, the Retros, and the Guidance Officers. That was a great time. It really was. Everybody was doing something brand-new, and you’d do it, and you’d look at it and say, “Ooh, that’s good” or “Ooh, I want to change it.”\\n\\n Then the part that I played with the constants and systems parameters in the Apollo time frame. I did that, too, in Gemini, but Gemini didn’t have as many as Apollo. Then the engineering orders and the handle that we got on the costs of the control center was very good. I enjoyed that a lot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Three very different aspects of it all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But also related, because you can’t do software without the hardware, and you can’t do the costing without knowing what you need for the hardware and software. You just can’t take a budget person and cost the control center. You’ve got to know what these components in the control center do. That was a very fulfilling job. It was so time-consuming. That was one of the places where the government did go out and re-bid. We had outside databases that we interfaced with, and it was doing the job, and I could come home at 4:30 every day, and then the government went out on bid and they got this other program that could do the job, but it took me five times longer to do everything that I was doing before. And that’s when my husband didn’t see me in the daylight for about five years. It took me twelve to fourteen hours a day to do what I had been doing eight hours a day.\\n\\n The government would say, “This program does do the job.” Yes, it does do the job, but I had to code around the basic program. I had to cut and paste all the time. I couldn’t print out anything on wide paper. It would only print this way, and then it would reprint. Then you'd have to cut it and tape it together in the middle. I could spend hours doing that. Then it went out on bid again. They got us a better program, and I saw daylight again. In fact, that was probably the best database management program that has ever been. I guess it’s still around. It should be if it’s not. NOMAD [phonetic]. Are you familiar with it? Oh, compared to what I had before that, it was just such a beautiful tool." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you involved at any point in those decisions for those new programs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, Building 12 did that. That was their job to do that and to supply the programs to the center. So I didn’t get to do anything but gripe about the one that they picked was bad. The rest of them were good. They only picked one that was bad." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So many talents came together to make NASA’s history, and with those talents were people of different personalities. In your job, you certainly came across so many of them. I thought about that when you mentioned working very closely with the Trench folks. Here you were coming in and saying, “Are you sure that you really want to do that?” How did they take you doing that? And can you tell us some episodes that maybe that they felt a little challenged at someone saying, “Think about this twice.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were good. They really were. We worked together so well. We’d fight. We’d fuss. “I told you what I wanted.” and I said, “No, you may have, but you don’t really want that. You haven’t seen it like I have.” But they were good. They were just great. I worked for some great people. I had some very smart people. My division chief, of course, was Chuck Mathews, then Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] was my next division chief. Then John [P.] Mayer and, of course, Bill [Howard W.] Tindall was working with John Mayer at the time. Then Lyn Dunseith. But all of the flight controllers like Tec [Tecwyn] Roberts, Carl Huss, and I'm sure you've heard of these people, and Chris Kraft was in the trench way back when we were at the Cape.\\n\\n Speaking of challenges and things, after MA-3, they blew up MA-3, I was standing out. We weren’t in the control center over by the Redstones then. We were in the, I guess it was military control center. They had a little porch out, and I was standing on that, and it was drizzling rain when it blew up. It was thirty-eight seconds or forty-eight seconds, whatever it was, but we knew what time it blew up. We spent the next two and a half days looking for the thousandth of a second that it blew up. We ran trajectory after trajectory, trying to figure out exactly the thousandth of a second that it blew up. After that, I realized you don’t just plot every five seconds. You plot every five seconds and then look in between. Did anything change? If it did, was it changing smoothly? Because it really made a difference to find out exactly when the error occurred. I thought that was interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, you were mentioning all these people that you learned so much from, those great leaders that you had. You were a section chief several times. What did you want to pass on to the people that were in your division? How did you want them to perceive you as a manager, and what did you want them to learn from you? How did you train them to do their job?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Before you do that, there’s two other people I didn’t mention that were in my chain of command that I thought were great. One of them was Jerry [C.] Bostick, and the other one was Jim [James E.] Mager. Have you heard of Jim Mager?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He took over after Jim [James C.] Stokes [Jr.], and Jim Stokes was there, too.\\n\\n When I got to be section chief, they sent you to Columbia Lakes—I think it was Columbia Lakes—for a week of management training. I don’t know whether they still do that kind of thing or not, but it was interesting. The people under you had to fill out these forms so that the instructors could read what your people were thinking about you. So when I got down there—the guy was Dutch Hall, I don’t know whether you've ever heard of Dutch Hall, and Walt Mattenmeyer [phonetic] or not, but they stayed at JSC doing a lot of management training. He looked at me and he says, “I don’t think anybody has ever gotten any better comments than you have. I don’t what you do to these people. You must have brainwashed them or something.”\\n\\n But I tried to provide them with the tools. I told them I was not going to do their jobs for them. In a lot of cases, I did not know their job, and I really did not want to know their job, except to whether they were doing it properly or not. I did not want to know the details. I don’t think you can manage very well if you try to manage at a level that you could do everybody’s job for you. If you have eight people under you and you can do all of their jobs, then you don’t need me. So I did not try to manage them so tightly that I could know everything they did. I expected them to keep me informed so I didn’t look like an idiot when I went to my bosses. I think they did that, and for the most part, I think I had very good rapport with the people I worked for, even though I was a woman. I had two women working for me, and the rest of them were men. I don’t think I had any problems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were first named as a section chief, were you one of the first women to be named in that position in Houston?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In that division, yes, but not on the site. There had been a lot of others on the site. When I first went to Houston, there were eight or ten people that they featured in the paper down there, of \"These women make over $10,000 a year.\" [Laughter] I had a lot of firsts, and I enjoyed it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s hear some of those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was first to go on travel." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you behaved." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I behaved. I got two trips to New York City for the IBM 1620 computer having some internal problems where it was not compiling our program so that we got the answers that we thought we should get. When I started flying for NASA like that, I wore high heels and hats and gloves, believe it or not. I went to Headquarters one time on travel. I think most of the things that I did first was to get to travel and go down for the post-flight reports for the Cape, got to see most of the launches. In 1983, I got a Manned Flight Awareness Award and got to go see a Shuttle flight. After you leave, there will be billions of things I can think of to tell you, and you won’t be here. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’ll have to list them for us later.\\n\\n The launches were pretty spectacular all the way through NASA’s history, and you certainly saw many from each program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I saw everything except the Saturn IB." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was it like to see what you had done on paper turn into reality for everyone to watch? Because you had a part of what was going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Awesome. It really was. It was just indescribable." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The people that were around you, they were all part of different teams that had come together, pretty much individuals like you that were putting their talents together to make that happen. Then yet when the launch was over, everybody went back to prepare for the next time. Was there ever a start and finish, or was it just one continual trip from the day that you started on your road?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was never a stop and finish. Everything was always overlapping. In fact, sometimes we were working two or three missions at the same time. You’d just to start over, take your mind off one and start on another. But for things like Mercury, they were basically all the same. You were going around the Earth with basically the inclination, and you could work on two or three things at one time and not have to reset. But once you got into the Shuttle, you had to reset based on what payloads were going and things like that. Everything was always overlapping. You never finished a job and started another one. You were always working on one and starting another one at the same time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s quite a talent in itself, keeping it all straight, but yet, as you said, overlapping. You were promoted to a full engineer during the Gemini Program, which at the time that NASA began, there weren’t many, if hardly a few, women engineers. Can you tell us how that promotion occurred, and what was the result of that? How did that affect the rest of your career, being moved into more of a technical position? Because you were a math aide." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I was never a math aide." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were hired into NASA as an engineer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was hired in, I think they called us—there weren’t ASTs [aerospace technicians] at the time I hired in. Numerical analysis engineer, I think, is what I was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I was never a math aide." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, that clears that up then. Then you went from the numerical engineer. Did it change from a different status of an engineer at some point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, at one point they changed our classifications to aerospace technologists. Then they gave our classification, and they did that so that we wouldn’t be equal to civil service titles, so they could give—I think this is the reason they did it—so they could give NASA a higher grade rating than they did civil service people in other agencies. I think that’s why it happened. You may want to cut that. [Laughter] They did give NASA different classifications than they did other government agencies. But I had my master’s in math when I went to work, and I did work very closely with the trajectory-type work rather than just a math aide-type work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, I’m glad we have that straightened out because I think some of our earlier research wasn’t clear on what we were able to find. So that does that.\\n\\n Missions. Any particular that you found to be more challenging than others as they were building from one program to another? You said that Mercury kind of went round and round, but then, of course, in Gemini you had two men, and you were having to make modifications here and there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess Gemini VI was our real Gemini challenge, getting ready for another launch so soon afterwards and basically doing two missions and all of the constants and parameters and everything for two at the same time. That was probably the hardest one we did. Worked hard on that. That was a challenge in every respect for everybody, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As you moved into Apollo, so much was going so quickly in order to meet the mandate from President [John F.] Kennedy. Apollo 8 all of a sudden now was going to put men closer to the Moon than we had ever been before. Were you involved in that as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We just worked longer hours, harder and longer hours. If the same number of people did the same job, but we had to work more hours." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your thoughts when you heard that all of a sudden we were moving that few steps closer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Fine with me. I was gung-ho. We were young and could care less. And I had already found my Kirby. I may not have had him then, but I’d already found him. I don’t know how much he told you, but a cute thing about how I met him. When we first went to work, there were so many brand-new twenty-two-year-olds right out of college, we had these beautiful orientation courses. We had to go once a week on Wednesday mornings to these orientation courses, which I don’t think they do now because they don’t probably hire enough at one time to do that, but that was an excellent training, a way of training us. You were talking about how did we get involved and everything. And I saw him and I thought, “Um.” That’s not I really said. In fact, you will enjoy this. This doesn’t have to be official in the end, but the first time I saw him, Mary Shep [Burton] and Cathy [Catherine T.] Osgood were sitting at this table, and we were at the cafeteria at lunch time. He walked in the door, and I said, “I’m going to marry that man right there if he’s not already married.” I put down my fork, and I stared at him until he saw me staring at him.\\n\\n But the way I found out who he was was in these orientation classes, I stayed back one day until—we had to sign in, and they gave us these little pieces of paper to sign in on, and I stayed back until he moved down on the end of a row. So I sat at the aisle end of that row, and I watched everybody, where they put their piece of paper on the bottom or the top as they passed them over to the aisle, and that’s how I found out what his name was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It worked, didn’t it? [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It worked. It worked. It did work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you had goals. I mean, so—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, oh, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it worked out.\\n\\n Speaking of goals, one of the major goals at that time was to put a man on the Moon and to return him safely to Earth. Tell us about your part in that. Where were you when that all happened?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was doing launch and launch abort program requirements and the system parameters and the constants for the whole mission, for every phase of the program, for the launch, the launch aborts, the orbits, the rendezvous and everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just doing your regular job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just doing my regular job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you on site when they landed? In mission control, the room?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I was always in the control center for the launches, because that was my program. I wanted to see how it worked and everything. Then, of course, I always had to do the reports, the launch reports right afterwards. So I would stay there and gather the data and do my little post-flight analysis for the data. But I was not ever in the control center during a mission, per se. Sometimes they called me and asked me about specific things about the programs, but I was never a pure flight controller." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you mentioned before, that was something that you really didn’t want to move into, or did you have desires to move into as a flight controller?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I sort of wanted to, but I didn’t want to be that tied down, I guess. Not tied down. The best way is, Gene Kranz would have owned me. [Laughter] I mean, he would have owned me. Greatest man to work for. He inspired me. He asked me to do a job for him, I had never done that job before in my life, and I learned it in two and half days and started doing it for him. He could make anybody produce 140 percent. Everybody wanted to work him. You wanted to do the best job in the world for him. I had several bosses like that, but Gene was really—I don’t know what he had. I can’t put my finger on it, but whatever you did for Gene Kranz, you wanted to do the best in the world." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So many people who know nothing about the space industry know him, of course, from the movie Apollo 13 and how he was so instrumental in saving Apollo 13. Did you have a role in that mission as well that was different? Did you have anything extra to do as part of that?\\n\\n Shirley" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just sit and wait like everybody else to make sure that they go in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We gave them the best programs in the world and let them take control of operations. We did a good job, I think, on providing flight control good hardware and software. They did a great job on using that hardware and software to operate the missions, but I was always in the support role." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the Skylab came, and you mentioned that you put a nine-month stint, probably something very different than you had ever done before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I was teaching nine girls to be—nine women, some girls really, some of them were very young—to be flight controllers. They were really flight controllers. They had mission assignments and they worked shift work eight hours a day, seven days a week. I think we had no back-ups. I think only one time did I have to go on console myself because somebody couldn’t come. Because they couldn’t come, somebody had to sit in for them, but most of the time they wanted the overtime, so I figured I could get people to work. This girl called me five minutes to midnight. She said, “I just had a wreck and I’m not going to be there.” So I jumped in the car and went out there and took her shift. But I think that was the only time I had to do that.\\n\\n The thing that was rewarding about that job is they had been trying to train these girls, the guy that taught me had been trying to train them, and he couldn’t get the computer time to train them. I was able to get the computer time. The bad thing about the teleprinter job—I hope they’ve learned their lesson—is that you had to have three computers up at one time in order for that job to happen, to get the message to the astronauts. If one computer went down, they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to store the messages, type them so that when the computer came up, they would just go without doing them in real time again. So I wrote the procedures for them to do that. They didn’t have anything. They were just trying to do it haphazardly and everything. So I put a little organization into that, and they did a great job. They really did. And some of those messages—I don’t whether—did y'all ever find their messages?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nuh-uh.\\n\\n Shirley" + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You didn’t get any of the teleprinter messages? I don’t know where they stored those, but some of those messages were great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have to look for them. Is there an example that we should look for?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some of the Christmas messages. They were cute. Some of them were cute and some of them weren’t. Very innovative." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That will give us a challenge. We’ll have to look for those and see what we can find.\\n\\n Shirley" + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "See if you can find any of the teleprinter messages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. We'll do that. The last program with Apollo was the joint effort that was done with the Russians. Were you involved at all with ASTP [Apollo-Soyuz Test Project]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Same capacity?\\n\\n Shirley" + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the same capacity as the other missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have to do anything different because you were working with the Russian spacecraft?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was doing launch and launch abort. I wasn't doing rendezvous and docking and that. So the only thing I had to do for that was to make sure I got that set of system parameters in the program correctly. I just say I did the constants and system parameters, but that was a very important job because that had to be accurate, and you had to take somebody who cared and played tennis almost, proofreading. There was a lot of proofreading in that job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And lots of pages of information, isn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Lots of pages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you passed that on, after you knew it was accurate and it was ready for someone else to review, what could you possibly tell them in a synopsis, or was their responsibility to take all that information and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I gave them the exact cell in the program, the exact name of the system parameter, the exact value, and a verbal explanation of what the numbers were. Then when they gave it back to me to make sure it was correct, they gave it back to me with the same name on that parameter. Every system parameter had a name, and every letter in the name meant something. Like M, mission program number, it was six letters, and every one of those letters meant something. It had to go into exactly the same place in the program so that when somebody came and got that system parameter, they called it the same thing every time they went after it. I sat there and proofread those things. That was the only way to make sure they were correct. Some of them were fifteen digits long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hours of your time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hours, hours, hours." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you bring your work home and review, or did you stay on site and go through—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Kirby and I both did a lot of work at home. Something like that you could bring it home and proofread it at home.\\n\\n Speaking of working at home, we had some DoD [Department of Defense] joint missions at one time. The guy who was in charge of DoD died, and nobody, nobody did his work. When we came, this was when I was doing the engineering orders and the costs control of the control center, nobody knew what his budget was last time versus what it should be this time, to deal with DoD. I probably worked about three nights until 4 a.m. in the morning getting ready for that program operating plan, based on what he had last time versus what he needed this time. That was a very difficult task, to do things like that without the person there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Quite a challenge, no matter what you picked up. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Program operating plans were certainly a challenge for the control center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We're going to take a break for just a second. [Tape recorder turned off.]\\n\\n Having such a career with NASA, as you mentioned, you have had so many challenges and you had so many tasks, and life was almost never-ending from day to day as you accomplished one thing to another. Do you have any regrets of not becoming that teacher and filling out that application and moving on to Langley?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not at all. I think that’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me is to have been hired by Langley Research Center for two weeks. I never worked at Langley, but my first paycheck came from Langley, or it came from Greenbelt, Maryland, I think. I'm not real sure. But anyway, then the next one was Space Task Group. I have never had any regrets for going to work for NASA, and I really enjoyed moving to Houston. I just had a great career. I think that I could never have done better than working for NASA.\\n\\n I said when I went to work that I was never going to work anywhere more than two years, because I wanted to travel and I wanted to get different experiences and to learn different things, but there's no way when you are hired to work for Project Mercury that you could ever change jobs. Of course, the job itself changed every two years, so I did change jobs every two years. I just didn’t change agencies. But I could never have worked anywhere I enjoyed more than NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you walked into a time period that has never been matched, and as you met people, of course, from we understand and from what you’ve said today, walked into an extended family. The family itself had some challenges, with the Apollo fire as well as with the Challenger accident. How did those affect you personally? Did you feel like NASA might have stopped its goals at that time, or did you feel like it was something that everybody could pick up the pieces and go again?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It hurt deeply when we had these, but there was never any doubt that we weren’t going to continue. I saw no reason whatsoever to stop just because we had accidents. It was a deep personal tragedy, but the mission had to go on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, your certainly did, from a youngster in North Carolina. You mentioned that math was just fine. Even through grade school, as a child did you enjoy doing math?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As far as I know, I’ve always enjoyed it. I can’t remember when I didn’t enjoy it. One funny thing about it is I think the first time that we went to one of my high school reunions, there was one of my classmates there, and he said, “She was the best thing in math I’ve ever seen,” or something similar to that. “Is she still good in math?” I don’t know that I’m still good at math, but it was always easy for me. It really was.\\n\\n The only other thing I can think of that I might would have enjoyed majoring in would have been chemistry. If I had done that, though, I would have had a totally different life. I would have gone to work for DuPont. I would have never met my husband that I have today. It would have been just a totally different life, and I wouldn’t have been involved with the space program. So I’m glad I majored in math." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We are, too, because your contributions have been many and I think they’ll live on in history." + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I hope somebody else recognized them. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think every time those accuracies were proofed, they recognized. Kevin, do you have anything that you’d like to add?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I did have a couple of questions. You mentioned once or twice your work with the gentlemen who were in the Trench. I wonder if you have any particular stories you’d like to share about any of these guys. There were some colorful characters that came out of there, very different personalities, men like Glynn [S.] Lunney or John [S.] Llewellyn [Jr.], or the ones that you had already mentioned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "John was the biggest character, John Llewellyn. He was adorable. I don’t know whether you’ve had anybody to talk about him or not, but he was a good old guy. One of the cutest things about John is he’d come to work and couldn’t find a place to park, so one day he parked right on the grass, right at the back door of Building 30, and they hauled his car off, I think, or they called and asked for him or something. Parking at Building 30 was not the easiest thing in the world. John sort of tried to prove to them, you need to build more parking spaces around here, and he did.\\n\\n But those guys were just so smart. It’s hard to tell you how hard people worked and how they cared as to what they did. I assume that all phases of life have that kind of people, but I haven’t met them anywhere except at NASA. That changed before I left, which is sad to say, but it did. I’m sure that y'all have seen that, too. I think it changed when they started bringing people in that did not grow up in the job, when they started bringing people who-–maybe they had a great success in a mission in one particular area and they made a name for themselves and then when the job opened over here, they said, “Oh, let’s give him this job.”\\n\\n I could see a difference in it when they started not bringing the managers up in the ranks in the organization, when they started trying to get people from outside. That would have been good had they moved these people around and they had experiences in several different areas. A friend of mine who got trained for a job, I told her, “Don’t stay in this job more than five years. Don’t stay in any job more than five years. Train somebody to do your job so you can get out of it and move up.” But I think when they started not promoting people from within is when I saw a big change in NASA. In JSC, I should say, not NASA. When I say NASA, I really mean JSC. I don’t know NASA as a whole." + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had spoken at length before about doing the launch and launch abort activities. Just to clarify, did you not then have that much involvement with the phases of Apollo going to the Moon and that type of thing? In other words, like an Earth orbital mission not being any different for you than one that was actually going on a lunar trajectory eventually?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were very different because I did the system parameters for all phases of the missions. I did those for every phase, so I had to know a lot about the other requirements in order to do the system parameters for those phases. I just didn’t have write the requirements and check out the software and do the subsystems tests and everything. But I did know a lot about the program overall. I had to in order to do the system parameters, to know that the systems parameters were needed for those phases." + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In that vein, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about Apollo 8, because that decision was obviously quite a milestone, to send the second Apollo mission around the Moon, but it was kind of kept under wraps for a little while. Did you remember having any work on that type of lunar mission before it was actually revealed that NASA was going to send this mission to the moon?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we were working on getting all the programs ready so that they could talk to each other and my part was only the numbers for those phases. All these programs had to hand over to the next phase. Like the launch program had to hand over to the orbit program. That was a pretty big phase-over, sort of like changing shifts. You had to make sure you gave the next program all the data it needed to continue, so we were working on those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you know then what that was going to be for specifically, that that mission was going to be doing that? You were in on the secret, in other words?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. You had to be. If you were doing mission planning, you have to be in on the missions. You have to be in on what the mission is going to be if you are doing mission planning. So, we knew a lot of all of that, like when the re-boost was for the Skylab and things like that. We were in on it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A little bit earlier, you talked about the Gemini 7/6 mission. That was a mission that occurred because when VI first tried to launch, there was essentially an abort on the pad. Do you remember that event specifically?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I could not take you through it in detail. I could probably sit down and think about it for a day and figure out what—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I just didn’t know if you had any specifics." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I didn’t. Not being in the control center, that’s not the thing you remember. How hard you had to work to get the programs turned around in order to launch and totally change the configuration of the computers is the type of things I remember rather than the actual mission phases." + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that makes sense, given your particular experience.\\n\\n Well, that’s all I had for this one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Then we thank you and appreciate all that you've had to offer. What a wonderful insight into couple of evolutions all by themselves in the middle of everything else that was going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Shirley H. Hinson", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Like I say, I’m sure I would have a million things to say after you leave, that I just can’t think of today, but—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s okay. We always welcome the information." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00131", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2020-015.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Harkrader, Richard (1969-1971): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2020-015", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2020-015", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Richard Harkrader served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia from July 1969 to February 1971 as a tourism development and urban planning specialist. His training program allowed him to become fluent in French. Harkrader's work took him to every part of Tunisia as he helped the Ministry of Tourism to better position its foreign tourism industry. After returning to the U.S., Harkrader worked briefly as a Peace Corps recruiter before starting construction and solar energy businesses and marrying fellow RPCV Lonna Dole. Harkrader returned to Tunisia in 1995 to reconnect with friends and observe the current state of the tourism industry. Richard and Lonna later set up a long-term development and education project in rural Nicaragua. Interviewed and recorded by Robert T. K. Scully, October 21, 2019. 2 digital audio files (web streaming files combined into 1 file).", + "dates_of_materials": "21 October 2019", + "extent": "2 digital files (audio; stereo; 39 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "095. Tunisia.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Tunisia. Harkrader, Richard (1969-1971): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Tunisia", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2020-015", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2020-015-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/pe8x8t73a1yd6r7lv0u84mbq62kewemn.pdf?odc=20231115173706-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/f54cf307-948b-4a50-bba9-06006d78c7be/c0739afc-2cee-4351-a2ef-fcc5167e3487/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzI0NTZfNjg3MzhjNmVhNGRkNGE0MTMwOTQ0NjIzM2FmZGE5OTg4MjZhZTAxMGIwNDkwNjYxZGNhNzhjYzI2MGNjNWY2Y18vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS9mNTRjZjMwNy05NDhiLTRhNTAtYmJhOS0wNjAwNmQ3OGM3YmUvYzA3MzlhZmMtMmNlZS00MzUxLWEyZWYtZmNjNTE2N2UzNDg3L21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Durham, North Carolina", + "length": "16 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed December 11, 2019, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Richard Harkrader Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Robert T. K. Scully" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Richard Harkrader" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:02", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I'll introduce quickly, this is Robert Scully from Raleigh, North Carolina, returned Peace Corps volunteer from Kenya. The date is October 21, 2019, and I'm interviewing Richard Harkrader in at his home in Durham, North Carolina. Richard was a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia beginning in July 1969 and ending in 1970." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "1971. And his project was in the architectural field, tourism and urban planning. And Richard, I'm going to let you give us your Peace Corps story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:48", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you, Bob. My name is Richard Harkrader. Soon after, very soon after graduating architecture at Cornell, I joined the Peace Corps and did for a tour in Tunisia, North Africa. We were a group of 15 architects and we had an extraordinary training program in Estes Park, Colorado, where we all showed up at a small dude ranch and did intensive French and cultured cross-cultural things for, I think, six or eight weeks. The program is run by an extraordinary Peace Corps legend, Lee Jennings, and we were very fortunate to have had a long relationship with Lee, he’s a wonderful person. And we did training. And then we flew to New York. And as we were passing through New York, I had happened to be that weekend of Woodstock and there were quite a few people that wanted to take a break and go to Woodstock. And luckily that didn't happen because we have been stuck there for a week and we flew on we were flying on to Tunisia through Rome. We got to Rome late and we couldn't land in Tunis. The plane, I guess the connecting flight had already left. And so we got to spend the night in Rome. And I my mother's Italian and I had been to Rome several times and I was able to we checked into a hotel, but none of us stayed in the hotel.\n\nWe walked around the city all night long and I was there. The guide for all these architects who had, you know, studied the amazing urban planning and buildings in Rome. And we had a wonderful time. We arrived in Tunis the next day totally exhausted because we hadn't slept all night and continued our our training. And we went to at that point, we weren't doing individual training in country with families. We toured around Tunisia with current volunteers and looked at the different job opportunities. And we then pretty much self selected what we wanted to do. Half the group went to the call, the bazaar, the University and Tunis National University in the architecture school and taught for the two year period. And they lived in and around Tunis, which is in the far north of the country. I selected a post and I'm very far away from the capital, and it was a program and there were three participants. One was Peace Corps, the other was USAID, and the third was the Ministry of Tourism and Planning and Aid provided equipment and a vehicle and office equipment especially. And we, the volunteers in that program, established new planning and tourism offices. And I think for parts of the country, it was a phenomenal opportunity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:04:04", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the city or town where you were?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:04:06", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was in a town. I was in an oasis town on the Mediterranean. Name is Gabès, G-A-B-E-S, with an accent. And other people were in other locations and we all shared the same job and we frequently talked with each other. It was a remarkable opportunity. We had initially we were housed in the Public Works Office and then later moved out and had an independent office. And we had several Tunisian people working with us. And our job was to train them to take over the responsibility of urban planning and tourism in the states that we were working in. I stayed there in that job until February of two, almost a little over a year and a half, and in that time we worked with remarkable technicians and they really took to the to the job of planning. I'd always been interested in planning, even though I studied architecture. I spent a lot of time in the planning school and taking courses there. And the other fascinating part, in addition to planning extensions of towns, water and sewer, transportation and the electrical grid, I just kind of nitty gritty of planning, was working with the tourism office and our office in particular was asked at one time to help establish tourism circuits in the south of the country, in the Sahel, in the desert in the south of the country visiting oasis sites. And these are remarkable places that you can imagine. It was sand dunes, palm trees, date palms and water coming out of the ground, but nothing around it for miles and miles.\n\nSo we were there at the time was tourism was just starting in Tunisia and the island of Djerba was part of our planning area. And that island exists right at the border between Libya and Tunisia, right in where the coastline turns, becomes east west and becomes Libya. And there where they were building a big airport to group tourism, which was starting and the hotels were being built. And our job was to find interesting things that people could do away from the beaches on the Mediterranean. And we established these tours out to these ancient towns and and activities for people to do camping in the desert on camels and visiting date palm oases. And remarkably, those those tours are still going on and they've really embellished it. There's now a camel festival in January of the year and it's become quite popular. As a volunteer, I had to work in French and I had studied French in high school, never, not in college, and but I spent a lot of time learning, communicating in French and learning French and also reading and writing French because we had to write reports. And that, unfortunately kept me from learning very much Arabic. Other volunteers in the country were in public health and teaching and so on, and they their training was all in Arabic. I learned street Arabic and I would spend times in the souks, especially with the drug dealers and just on weekends or whatever, just hang out.\n\nAnd that's how I learned what Arabic I did know it was back then because of my Italian background, I could easily pass for a Tunisian. I had curly dark hair and a tan very easily. And so I would one problem I had if I started speaking Arabic, people would not believe me when I said, that's all I know. Again, I had to switch to French and it was because of terrorism in the country. It was there was often also discrimination against Tunisians at the beach resorts. And so at times I would go to the beach resorts with other volunteers and they yeah, the doorman would come back and yank me out of line or take me out of the group and said, I'm sorry, you can't come in here. And my friends would have to vouch for me. I even once coming back into the country at the airport, I had the police come over and drag me out of the foreigners line and said, no, you have to be over here in the in the Nationals line. And they didn't believe my passport, but I got around that. But anyway, the job was remarkable. We did a lot of great work on town extension's water and sewer, and the tourism work was was just really icing on the cake. And the fact that it's still a lasting project and that the Tunisians took over is really remarkable.\n\nI haven't been back since 1965, 1995, but I did go back twice after leaving and visited some of the offices and met with some of the Tunisians I had worked with. We were all young then, and the last time I went back, they all had families and I brought my daughters with me and we got together. It was really a wonderful time and I would like to go back soon. One thing I tried in in training the Tunisian staff we had in the office because planning work is so tied with the real estate and real estate investment, I really made a big effort to talk to them about the ethics of the work they were doing and the potential for corruption. And when I went back, one of the remarkable things is they told me, you know, many years later, 15, 20 years later, that they are still remember those discussions and took them to heart. And they saw it happening. They saw how easily you could become corrupted in that field. So that was that was very gratifying. One of the remarkable experiences I had is there is a town near gabbers, and it just happens to be the town where the young man five years ago burned himself and started the Arab Spring. And the mayor of that town had called us to help plan a lot what he said was a logical road system because the and water and sewer, mainly water, they didn't have sewer water extension of the town.\n\nAnd so I went out there and that was a hodgepodge of property ownership that had been divided and subdivided. I mean, as you could see anywhere over time, including here in North Carolina, and what to do to it to get a street system through that would be fair to everyone involved. And so I came up with a way to handle this. But the interesting thing was the mayor happened to be the former U.N. ambassador from Tunisia. He was. And he, of course, spoke great English and. I was a grandfatherly figure, and when I got there, he was wearing a traditional robe and he said he invited me to walk around the town with me and he said, I know this is not usual for you, but, you know, we walked around the town holding hands and he explained to me that traditions of the town and, you know, the different problems they were facing because some some parcels had palm trees and others didn't. But nobody could get to their houses with any with with a vehicle because the streets were narrow and and people were complaining all the time. And there was neighbor neighboring feuds. And so we were able to pretty much solve that problem and be equitable to to the people involved. But that experience was one of the highlights of my my time there to interact with the person that really had played on the world stage. And we talked about politics." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:13:40", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now this was near the town of Gabès?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very near the town of Gabès." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the name of that town?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:13:44", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I am trying to remember the name of that town. I do have a carpet from that town. I cannot remember it right now. But it is the town where this is where the Arab Spring, the spark that started the Arab Spring, when this young man who had who had had a college education came back to his town, couldn't get a job and was selling fruit on the streets. And the police were hassling him and wanting wanting a bribe and kickback to protect him. And that was what happened. And actually, when I was there, there was an uprising, not not violent, but protests and against the current government, which had been in power for 30, 40 years, and the corruption that had spawned, especially in economics, in the economic area and the whole country shot down. People just withheld their money. They didn't go to the bank. They closed their stores and shut down the economy and forced the government from power." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:13:49", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When was this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was 19, must have been early 1970 against the Bourguiba regime. And then Ali, who came into power, he was related to the Bourguibas and he was then the same thing happened maybe 10 years ago when he was pushed from power and the Brotherhood came in. And but you can tell from the history of Tunisia that it's, you know, civil war, as in Algeria or Tunisia or in Libya next door was not really anything that would have been adopted by the Tunisians.\n\nThey were they were able to handle political change and discord by pretty pretty much peaceful means. I mean, not that there weren't, quote unquote, riots. And and the police came out and a few people died, but there was never a civil war in Tunisia. It's really remarkable place. And the elders are respected and the merchants, it's a it's a country of small merchants are hold a lot of power and use it. So my that's pretty much my story. Peace Corps. I came back and met my wife, who's also was a Peace Corps volunteer, and we hit it off immediately as many people that have that experience in common. And we've been married now for 47 years. She was a she was a volunteer in Ethiopia and Ghana. We went back actually when I came back from Peace Corps, I did it. I was asked by Peace Corps to do some recruiting. And I went to the American Planning Association meeting in New Orleans soon after I got back and actually recruited a couple that went down and took over the office that I had just left. And I recruited on several campuses, planning, planning schools. And a lot of and that resulted in quite a few people joining the Peace Corps and going to Tunisia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Go ahead." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:17:15", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, years, years after Peace Corps, we had a two year old, my wife and I had a two year old daughter and we signed up with Peace Corps to do a training program in Togo. We were building contractors and home builders at that time in Durham, North Carolina. And we signed up to go to Togo and teach volunteers, many of whom were not experienced in construction, how to build schools. And so Lorna was fluent in French. She taught French. I ran the program and taught the volunteers construction techniques. And we built a school and in the center of the country, way north of the capital, Lomé. And those volunteers built rural schools and dug wells. And that was a great experience for an experience teaching. And that was 1970. Oh, boy, 79?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:18:14", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that a Peace Corps project?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:18:16", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was Peace Corps. Yeah, I was. I was running the training program. Another famous long-term Peace Corps person, Carl Beck, was head of Peace Corps Togo at that time and got to know him and his family. We then much later in 1990, starting in 1990, 1993, started a Peace Corps like program in Nicaragua. And we and our family learned Spanish, went to Nicaragua, established a nonprofit in this rural county. And we have worked quite often with Peace Corps volunteers there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:18:58", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the name of the nonprofit?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:19:00", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The name of the nonprofit is Sister Communities of San Ramon Nicaragua. And we're we just celebrated our 25th anniversary. And the current head of our program in Nicaragua is a former Peace Corps volunteer. She married what's married in Nicaragua. Yeah, Angie Price, who is Peace Corps Nicaragua. Let's see, she's been out five years or so, probably. And she served for three years, probably 2005-08 or maybe 08-11, somewhere in that time. And she's been a wonderful asset to our organization. And she taught at the university level education. And we've done quite a few projects, rural education programs. We've built schools. When I say we build schools, we organize communities to build their own school, and we provide the materials. And an expert experience mason contractor and the community donates the land. They provide all the labor in the sand and water and security. And we have built a dozen two room school houses around this large county that's very much like Appalachia with very poor roads. And even though geographically it's not gigantic, it still takes over two hours to drive across it because of the roads conditions. So we've been going down there for the last 25 years and running a Peace Corps program type program in and with some with many of the lessons we learned in Peace Corps of helping people to help themselves be successful. And the other goal of our program, of our project in Nicaragua is to take North Americans to the Third World and give them a short Peace Corps experience of a week long. And we developed an ecotourism lodge up in the mountains, a coffee farm, ecotourism lodge that we thought at the time was just going to be available for people, groups we brought down and we were organizing groups of 10 to 15 people, several each year.\n\nThat's one way our nonprofit made income. And then this project got in some of the guidebooks, one of them in particular Moon Handbook, which is started by Peace Corps volunteer, former Peace Corps volunteers. And then more people started coming and we started running international awards at this eco-tourism lodge. And one year we even won the Virgin Atlantic Best Eco-Lodge in the World award. So here we were in Durham, North Carolina, running a fire, a coffee farm, an eco-tourism lodge, hotel and restaurant. It was over an hour from the supply places and had meals and had twenty five employees. And we had and two of the managers of that farm were former Peace Corps volunteers. And so we continue with that project. It's kind of gone on hiatus right now because of the political situation in Nicaragua, which is very unfortunate. But we're going to try to weather it and but our relation with Peace Corps and the third goal of Peace Corps, of bringing it home and introducing an American population to the third world and and why people how people live and why they might want to come to the United States. And the whole immigration issue is one of our big goals. And I think we've been quite successful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:23:06", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think mentioned something about coffee production as well as part of the San Ramon. How does that work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:23:12", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This project is the name of the farm is Finca Esperanza Verde, which means Green Hope Farm. Finca Esperanza Verde, and it was an abandoned coffee farm when we bought it, the intention of buying this was to bring groups down, but also to work with a local farming cooperative to build a model farm and training facility. The farmers, we were there and we had an agreement with them to do this and we left. And a couple of months later, they contacted us and said they found this piece of land and we could buy it for very little. So we sent them the money, we bought the land, and then we started this project. Well, it turned out that these are corn and bean farmers and who live in and around San Ramon, which is at 2500 feet elevation in the farm, is at 4000 feet. It's it's not cloud forest, but it's it's definitely tropical rainforest and much, much cooler. Yes. And great for coffee. And so after a while, it became clear that this was not an appropriate training facility for them. But we were taken with the beauty of this place. It's on a mountain.\n\nWe ended up owning the whole watershed of 250 acres that we bought little by little over time. And it has a 100 mile view with no lights at night. And we were off grid and had solar and small hydro running the place. So one thing led to another. And as I say, we eventually tried to run this place from Durham and which was only possible by the Internet having the Internet available. And then we entered and it turned into a hotel and restaurant facility. So we had to train Nicaraguans to who in the countryside were used to working from 6:00 in the morning to 1:00 in the afternoon, six days a week. And that was it. Well, you can't run a tourism facility on those kind of hours. So we had to train people and ended up with a two team approach where people work three and a half days, 12 hours a day. And then another team came in and did the same. And that was very popular, especially with women who could leave their kids for three and a half days with their sister or something and have all that time off." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:25:50", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And has solar energy been readily adapted by adopted down there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:25:58", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Nicaragua has a lot of wind available wind power, and they've done a good job on that. And they have hydro Costa Rica right next door. Who they're in or tied with is mainly hydro driven. So in terms of renewables there, they have at times 60, 70 percent of their energy is from renewables that they have not done much solar. They have phenomenal solar resources. And I have a good friend I work with in León, Nicaragua have pretty much financed his company and he does solar projects around the country. But on the on a smaller scale, not a utility scale. And we've we tried it one time, but we're not successful. But it's got an enormous solar resource. And we have done small projects with a with a group here in Chapel Hill called United Solar Initiative, many of whom are former Peace Corps volunteers. And we've done solar on some of the rural schools which were off grid. So it has enormous potential and it is doing a good job with wind power, they have an incredible wind resource down on the lakes between the Pacific Ocean and the lakes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:27:22", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you see yourself continuing these projects?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:27:25", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, we're well, you know, certainly we my wife and I, you know, been the founders of this nonprofit and the we the two of us in the name of the nonprofit develop this farm and supplied a lot of the capital and were later paid back by the tourism. So the but the development, the farm itself, all the buildings in the solar system and so on has worked that line. And I did with with local people. And the nonprofit concentrated on the school's projects, the handicapped kids projects providing markets to artists here by buying their stuff and selling it in the U.S. a lot. And at one time when we first got there, I designed the baseball stadium for the town, which is now become one of the nicest baseball stadiums in the in the whole region. And a lot of play offs and stuff happens there, which brings money into the town and people and visitors. So that was very gratifying. You know, so we our whole family is is fluent. Being in San Ramon and going to San Ramon has been a real blessing to our family. Our kids are totally bilingual, even trilingual. And they would they hop on a plane any time and go down there and have lots of friends," + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:28:58", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Has the nonprofit to find an American or U.S. market for coffee?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:29:05", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we never raised that much coffee at the coffee farm. We have worked over the years, pretty much since the beginning with counterculture coffee here in Durham, North Carolina, on both the importing. And we were and still are. Well, since we stole the farm project five years ago, up until that time, we were one of the few businesses I know of that actually grew the coffee, imported it roasted and sold at retail. We still sell in cooperation with counterculture coffee. We still sell coffee at retail once a month to our customers to raise money to pretty much cover our administrative expenses so that donations and money we earn in tourism goes into projects. So that I learned a lot about the coffee business. It's a remarkable business. It's actually the second most traded project product in the world next to petroleum." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:30:07", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now in Tunisia, your local host country participants basically took over all the various tourism and so on that you were you were working on. Have the Hondurans also, not Hondurans I mean Nicaraguans, also pretty much replicated your work and taken over the management zone?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:30:30", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the we trained the tourism that we did in Nicaragua, which had two parts to it. One was when we took groups down for a one week Peace Corps experience, we went took people to the farm for three or four nights. That was a real ecoterrorism experience with birding, hiking, going to rivers and waterfalls and things like that. Monkeys is a remarkable place and picking coffee and learning about coffee and the other three or four nights was staying with families in town and so on, especially trained families to host. Two people in their homes got their train them to improve their bathrooms, you know, have a decent room, decent beds, we loan money for people to buy beds. We train these these families. And a lot of them are women led households and provided them with significant income. You know, during the times usually January, February, March, when our groups would come to the coffee farm aspect was really, as I say, ecotourism. And the main goal of eco tourism is that local people profit from and learn from and run. They run their organization and learn how to deal with the international tourists. And so we train. We had to train everybody, guides, cooks, servers, everybody. And we got lots of help from different people. We people that would come down on our trips would have lots of different skills. They would teach people, especially in food and preparation and and running a hotel, you know, with the linens, you name it. It's in. And we had. The guides were trained by the people at the Museum of Natural History here in North Carolina, and they would go down all the time and they would also take their own birding groups down there and they would train the guides in birding and hiking and how to build trails, how to maintain trails. And those people are still all working there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So it is ongoing as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:33:07", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is that component of tourism something that would perpetuate itself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:33:12", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well it was doing phenomenally well. We sold it five years ago. We, meaning the nonprofits to think of five years ago, privatized it because it was become such a business that John and I were trying to run from here and they were doing very well. They invested a lot of money in the in the Finca. And they were going to be full all this past summer until the political upheaval, upheaval happened in the summer of 2018. And they are really in dire straits now. Tourism went to zero." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:33:53", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So did Kenya after the bombings." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:33:54", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, tourism went to zero. And all the merchants guesthouse families in the town of San Ramon. And the artists are all suffering from a lack of people coming. We're going to try we're recruiting two groups of adults for this spring 2020, but we don't think it's possible to take high school groups, which is really one of the main groups we want to get down there, as is as high school groups and groups that have gone down. Many groups, I don't know how many, 25, 30 groups of high school students, often with a teacher. I mean, the reports we get back from those groups are just astounding. And many of those kids go on to Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:34:49", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Have there been some security issues recently that have put a damper on it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:34:51", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well there was in the spring of 2018 and early summer. But since that time, there really hasn't been any issues for foreigners. I mean, there have been roadblocks and, you know, passport checks and things. But it's just, you know, the bad publicity that gets out. And, of course, the State Department has warnings out. So we hope we can get 20 to 30 people to go this year and to resume as soon as we can. The high school groups," + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:35:28", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is this the group going down in February?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:35:30", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There are two groups to February, you know. Yeah, and we're recruiting for them right now. Yeah. Yeah, we hope that I don't get politically incorrect. There's no Peace Corps Peace Corps pulled out immediately, pretty much immediately, because there were there were paramilitaries and extrajudicial killings and riots and blockades going on around the country and Peace Corps pretty much within a week. Pull everybody back to the capital and take them out of the. Yeah, very sad. Very sad." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And they're not back in yet?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, there and there's I don't see there's just not even a line of sight for Peace Corps going back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:36:20", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So Kenya has, the Peace Corps is going back this next year. Which is good to hear." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:36:25", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, unfortunately, the government in Nicaragua is totally corrupt. And it's a real shame. They were one of the governments that had made most progress on that U.N. Millennium Goals reducing poverty. And but then they obviously made the decision that they were going to hold elections, but they were never going to lose another election." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:36:50", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Has corruption been a major challenge for your program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:36:50", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really. Except we did have problems with people challenging the land titles we had from the former owners of some of the properties who during that after the revolution had properties confiscated. But we had we were on solid ground, but we did have to go all the way to the Supreme Court and spend a significant amount of money defending our titles. That was very stressful for all of us. But the Senate, the political corruption means that. We don't see that they're going to allow any significant candidate to run and there's 30 to 40,000, 50,000 Nicaraguans in exile in Costa Rica, political exile. So it's a very sad situation for a country of nine million." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:37:49", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You do expect a fairly large group to go back in the next tourism, ecotourism trips?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:37:55", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Trips well to two groups of 10 to 15 people. But that's, we were doing 60 to 120 people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:38:03", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh really. So there was quite a cut back on that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:38:05", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, which affects our incomes. And it's very hard to get a lot of our donations were coming from people that made those trips so are not or don't have an income we used to have. So we're trying to survive this period and see what happens." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:38:24", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A great program employing people. Yeah, connecting American tourism with yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:38:36", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So that's thank you for the opportunity, Bob, to speak about this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:38:41", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, thank you, Richard. And as I've indicated, this will be this interview will be forwarded on to the Kennedy Library at Harvard, and it will be eventually part of the archive, the Peace Corps Oral History Archive for future generations of researchers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, thank you again. It's been great to meet with you and your lovely wife, Lonna, and very well I wish you well with your with your ongoing Nicaragua program and maybe a couple of return trips to Tunisia as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard Harkrader", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Robert T. K. Scully", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Take it easy." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00207", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-MR-2005-056-001.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Breyfogle, Russell P., Jr. (1964-1966): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-MR-2005-056-001", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-MR-2005-056-001", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Russell Breyfogle served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya from 1964 to 1966 on a secondary education project. He joined in 1963 as an experienced teacher and an Army veteran, and completed training at Columbia University Teachers College. As part of the first Peace Corps group in Kenya, he taught at an established Anglican secondary school in Maseno, north of Kisumu. Interviewed and recorded by Robert Klein, June 22, 2005. 2 tapes (web streaming files combined into 1 file).", + "dates_of_materials": "22 June 2005", + "extent": "2 audio cassettes (mono; 111 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "046. Kenya.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Kenya. Breyfogle, Russell P., Jr. (1964-1966): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Kenya", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "MR-2005-056", + "transcript": "RPCV-MR-2005-056-001-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/m74m06ys6p257v5r72gryv213773or55.pdf?odc=20231115173936-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/6d470309-0eb4-489c-af94-ef1fabb6b159/10724662-5157-4bad-9a2b-67bc4c33ec55/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzM2N2JfYTE4Y2JjYjBkNjk5NmYyOTQzYzY5YzIwMjQ1OGEyNWNkOTE4ODRhYjM0NTkyNTk4OTJjOGM0MGMyMGZhYWZmY18vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS82ZDQ3MDMwOS0wZWI0LTQ4OWMtYWY5NC1lZjFmYWJiNmIxNTkvMTA3MjQ2NjItNTE1Ny00YmFkLTlhMmItNjdiYzRjMzNlYzU1L21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Columbia, Missouri", + "length": "67 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed September 2, 2005, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Russell P. Breyfogle, Jr. Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Robert Klein" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr." + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today's June 22, 2005. This is Bob Klein. And I'm interviewing Russ Breyfogle, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya in secondary education. 1964 to '66?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. 1964." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So let's go back to a year before you joined the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:32", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I happened to be a teacher. I taught three years before I went in the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:00:38", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:00:38", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I was teaching an experimental program for high school dropouts in Flint, Michigan, called the Personalized Curriculum Program. And I was realizing that teaching students, at least those students I had, I was not very well prepared to teach them. Massive problems. And so I realized I was dealing with an unusual population at least in traditional school sense. It was a great experience, and I enjoyed it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:01:11", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What degree did you have?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:01:15", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was completing, I had a bachelor's degree in history and government from Beloit College." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:01:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What year did you graduate?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:01:23", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "1957. And I was completing a master's degree, going to summer schools at Western Michigan in teaching of social studies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:01:32", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. And that, you were in the middle of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:01:35", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:01:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During your third year of teaching?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:01:36", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. And then I completed the degree before I went into the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:01:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Um. Where did you grow up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:01:44", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In Three Rivers, Michigan, which is about 25 miles south of Kalamazoo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:01:48", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You went to high school there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:01:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:01:50", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In high school, did you do any kind of volunteering work or travel?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:01:57", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, my parents did the best they could on very limited budgets to try to get us to travel some. Like I remember my dad taking us to Niagara Falls when I was five or six. And then he knew that with a war breaking out, he made a quick trip to Alabama to see his sister and brother-in-law in 1942, just before gas rationing. But we saw the Smoky Mountains." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:02:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Siblings?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:02:25", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm the youngest of four. I have two sisters and a brother so, and that's our order. Girl, girl, boy, boy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:02:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. And you went straight from high school to college?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:02:42", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:02:50", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And at the point you're entering college, what was sort of your career goal?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:02:51", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I, my dad had been active in politics. At that point, never was successful in elective office, but was a delegate to the Republican convention in 1952 and was a Taft delegate, conservative Republican family. And so I thought I would, since I had majored in government and history, I thought I would have a career in politics." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:03:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During the four years in college, [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:03:26", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho, in Montana. I was stationed in Idaho, but I fought forest fires in Montana. And I did that summers of '53, '54. So between my high school and Beloit, I was in Idaho and then also the next year. So I did, did travel. Yes. And one of the ironies is when I was in Idaho the second year, it was rainy. It was a rainy season and there weren't very many fires and not many prospects. The year before was very dry and so I made a lot of money, I mean, at a $1.50 an hour. But, you know, when you work 14 hours a day or so, you end up making a decent, a decent income." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:04:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:04:12", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But anyway, so this one fella was going to take a quick trip down the coast, Pacific Coast, down through Oregon and California. There are two of them, so I ended up traveling with them. The fellow who was the primary organizer had an uncle who lived in Beverly Hills, was the head set director for 20th Century Fox. And so we met Marilyn Monroe and Gene Simmons. And for a 19 year old, you know, this is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:04:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh, so after college, your first degree at Beloit, you started teaching?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:04:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I worked. Let me back up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:04:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:04:54", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, I lived in a funeral home in Beloit. Actually, when I was in college my freshman year, all four of us were in college. And so my parents, although my dad certainly would be a middle income person making eight or $9,000 bucks a year in those days, he didn't have that kind of money. My sisters were on scholarship and my brother at Western Michigan, I don't think his school cost maybe three or $400 a year in those days. And Beloit was relatively expensive at $1,300 a year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:05:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:05:31", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I ended up living in a funeral home. So I got my room. I got 25 bucks a week. So that, but I ended up, when I graduated from college, I ended up with $90 in my pocket, so I was debt free. But anyway, I went to work in Detroit for the Aetna Casualty and Surety Company because I was going to be a big business type." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:05:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then go into politics." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:05:54", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. But anyway, when I, prior to my going to Detroit working for the Aetna, I had given myself a 30 day vacation. And so I had hitchhiked up to Maine and the New England states and ended up in Washington, D.C., and stayed at the YMCA, which was a few blocks from the White House. And ironically, a fraternity brother who was from Stanford but he was a political science professor at San Jose State. And I realized that he'd ran for Congress in 1956 as a Democrat. And so I wrote him a card at Christmastime and said, although I'm a Republican, I'll come out to California and help your campaign if you're going to run again. And he wrote back and said, I'm not running for Congress this year, but going to South America. Are you interested? So I quit my job with the Aetna and I traveled to Mexico, Central and South America.\n\nThere are three of us, and we got stuck on a sandbar in the Magdalena River in Colombia. And he and the other person were on a timetable. I mean, like he had to be back in fall time to teach. All I had to do was get back and get drafted. And so we split. But then I traveled on my own for the rest of that trip. I spent a total of $600 for four and a half months. I literally ran out of money in Buenos Aires. And a German ship captain, the 24th ship captain I'd asked, said yeah, I could work on the ship. Didn't make any money, but I went from Buenos Aires to New York. So I had done some travel and service." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:07:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about had you picked up any language?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:07:35", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Spanish, I knew some." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:07:38", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You wouldn't consider yourself fluent?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:07:39", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I mean, when I was there, of course, I got, I could survive with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:07:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Okay, so you finally, you get back to New York and then back to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:07:50", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Three Rivers, Michigan. Went back to my draft board and said I'm here, and seven weeks later I'm in the Army." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:07:59", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So that put you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:08:00", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That would take us up to December 1958." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:08:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:08:06", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Served 21 months. Got an early out and go to western Michigan to start my teaching certificate and master's degree." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:08:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At what point did you become aware of the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:08:20", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, surprisingly enough, in the campaign of 1960, I was aware of that being talked about. And then I kind of put it in the back of my mind until summer school in western Michigan in 1963, and the Peace Corps recruiter was there. And so I said, well, this sounds like a possibility for me, being single. So I got the information and filled out whatever I had to do at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:08:48", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was a fairly lengthy application, I don't know if you remember it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:08:51", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:08:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things they ask is the preference for area. Do you recall?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:08:59", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I left that blank. I said anywhere." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:09:01", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:09:02", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because I thought maybe at least with my even my limited Spanish, I might go to Central or South America." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:09:07", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did you think some familiarity with?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:09:11", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I said, I'm not trying to deceive anybody, I'm not fluent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:09:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, right. Were they still taking the entrance exams? [inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:09:29", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, I don't remember, except for when I went into training, when I went to Columbia University, we had a battery of tests." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:09:36", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, this would have been, well, they may have stopped by then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:09:41", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Or they may have and I'm just forgetting that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:09:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So when did you apply?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:09:51", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I applied in that summer of '63." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:09:56", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:09:56", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And made at least an initial application that said I wouldn't be available until after August of '64. I did want to graduate with my master's degree." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:10:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you completed your master's." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:10:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:10:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you do student teaching?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:10:15", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had done student teaching back when I got out of the Army in the academic year '60-'61. I did my student teaching at Western Michigan University, I mean, at Three Rivers High School." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:10:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Once you applied, did you think that was it or were you still looking for career alternatives or jobs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:10:40", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, when I was in Peace Corps, I was very open to whether I got assigned land settlement, teaching, whatever." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:10:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But would you have fallbacks [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:10:56", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was planning on then to stay on teaching where I was. And I got accepted in April or May of that year. Got a telegram from Sargent Shriver." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:11:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:11:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so then I made that announcement that I was not going to be back for next year because I was going in the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:11:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:11:17", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Said you'd been accepted for Kenya. Training at Columbia University Teachers College, Columbia. Such and such dates, like September 15th to December 20th or whatever." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:11:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your reaction?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:11:32", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was, I was, I was really excited. I thought, this is a tremendous, a tremendous opportunity. But also I was really honored in getting this far in the acceptance process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:11:45", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what was your family's reaction?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:11:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I, of course, called my parents, told them what I was doing. Since I'd been to South America and survived, my parents were not terribly distraught. And my dad had been in World War I in France, and so he could see the value of travel." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:12:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:12:11", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, they were, they were very encouraging, very supportive." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:12:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any fears or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:12:15", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, they too thought this was just a tremendous experience. Certainly an enriching one to make a better teacher." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:12:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not that you were crazy or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:12:25", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:12:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what did you know of Kenya?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:12:33", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, of course, I had, having taken history and government through college in the fifties, I was aware of the Mau Mau movement. And obviously, very biased, very pro-British at that point in time. I shouldn't say pro-British, but certainly not pro-Africa." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:12:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you wrapped it up in Michigan and headed off?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:13:03", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. At Teachers College." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:13:07", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember initially reporting at Teachers College? Now you're meeting with the people who, like you, were going into Peace Corps. [inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:13:25", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I don't have a real clear recollection. And I'm trying to think of whether we got in at night and went straight to the hotel that we stayed at and then the next day met at Teachers College. I think that's what happened. Because I remember meeting. No, that was later, that was when we were getting ready to go to country that I met a couple of my friends who I'd trained with, we then were on the same plane. One came from Anchorage, Alaska, and then stopped in Detroit. But no, I flew into Newark because I had a high school friend who met me there. And so I really, my first night. I got there a couple of days before I was supposed to so I could visit with my high school friend who was lived in the greater New York area. He worked on Wall Street." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:14:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So your training group was about 120 people?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:14:25", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "120 of us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:14:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you were actually in training for Swahili?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:14:34", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's true. All of us, of course, were being trained in Swahili. That was the common ground. And all being trained for education." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:14:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Secondary education?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:14:44", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, secondary education." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:14:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For Tanganyika and Kenya?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:14:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's correct. It was Tanganyika when we started, but it was Tanzania by the time we left the training because the merger with Zanzibar in '64." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:14:57", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Did you, did you differentiate initially? [inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:15:05", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, we were. When we were lumped together for language, we were lumped alphabetically. And so whatever this group will have this teacher and people are going to all three countries, that did not make a big difference." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:15:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Describe the training [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:15:27", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, we'd have lectures on East African history. Cultural things. And language we had one hour, three days a week. So it was not. I mean, people knew that we were going to be teaching in English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:15:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:15:47", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so it's not like knowing Swahili meant whether we survived or not. And had a lot of presentations on racism. And of course, this is '64 when the civil rights stuff was just beginning to evolve. But, you know, whether you see two people, two males walking down the street holding hands. How do you feel about that? This is their culture and it's just a sign of affection. And it has nothing to do with sexual identity or sexual identity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:16:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, that would be inaccurate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:16:26", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:16:27", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:16:28", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then have British teachers come in and talk about, talking about the boot, or the boot in the bottom of the car versus the trunk." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:16:37", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You actually had?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:16:38", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So we had Brits come in and teach." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:16:40", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:16:41", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was fun, it was just to get this cultural difference." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:16:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But it was kind of generic?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:16:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Where we were going made no difference. We were given the same education." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:17:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did that vary [inaudible]? Did you ever sense that [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:17:20", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There certainly was that sense that they're going to prepare us for possibilities of being questioned why is your government doing these kinds of things? And of course, when I was in Kenya, I was confronted with, why are you going into Vietnam?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:17:36", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During training, did anyone from Washington come?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:17:45", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, actually, talking about Vietnam, we had Roger Hilsman, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for Southeast Asian Affairs and was a West Point graduate. He was defending our policy in southeast Asia. And so, yes, we had people. And also we had people who wrote about the civil rights. Our chief psychologist in the deselection process, was it Dr. Gilbert, who was the chief psychologist at Nuremberg? We were just scared to death of him. I only heard him once and didn't really meet him personally. He presented when we had our first deselection. And like ten people got deselected, I mean, which was not a high number. I think out of 120 of us, 109 survived that process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:18:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall the deselection process? I mean, did they do a battery of tests?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:18:54", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:18:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Psychological tests?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:18:58", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Psychological and probably intelligence tests. Because at least I know when I was interviewed by my psychologist, he said I was kind of in the mid. I wasn't, I wasn't at the top or at the bottom. I don't know what that meant." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:19:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You remember, do you recall the interview?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:19:15", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Oh, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:19:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:19:18", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, at least the interview that I got was centered around, well, do you think you can survive two years without conveniences? Loneliness. You think you can cope? And I certainly felt, you know, I was a 29 year old male and so I was used to being single. And I thought, well, I can give it a try and certainly see, but I would think that I had that. And it is a big difference between being home and being alone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:19:59", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were most of the group [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:20:05", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think, I think all of us had a level of stress." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:20:10", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then when the big [inaudible], what was the reaction?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:20:26", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Shock. Disappointment. Not because they got deselected, but in the process, because one of the persons was very popular with the. We thought of all of us. And that's another thing I think plenty of us were tremendous people. I mean, I've never been involved, because then it became a family. Even though 120 of us got to know each other, at least to some degree. And it was just a talented group of people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:21:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:21:13", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that's true." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:21:14", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:21:18", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I didn't feel I was in any clique. I was never an outcast, but I never was inner-inner in any subgroup." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:21:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Most of the group were just recent graduates?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:21:26", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Most were 21, 22, 23." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:21:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So in effect, you were older." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:21:41", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know there was another person who was 26, another male who was 26, I was 29, but he also was a former veteran. So there were two of us who had been veterans, and there were three women who were older than I was. But I was the oldest male. Yes. Clara was 67." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:22:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. [inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:22:03", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "00:22:07", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, uh, the language component was minimal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "00:22:11", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "00:22:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible] What was your own feeling about deselection [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "00:22:23", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I certainly felt buoyed by making the first cut because I knew there would be a final cut. But, but, no, then my self confidence rose. I said, okay, I think this is the hardest part." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "00:22:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of the group [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "00:22:46", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I would think, out of 120, maybe 20." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "00:23:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That low?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "00:23:00", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "00:23:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During training [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "00:23:03", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I should have said that initially, that the major focus really was on education. You know, how to present, how to teach." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "00:23:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you were a teacher already." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "00:23:17", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, that's right. And, and we had R. Freeman Butts, he wrote, which I thought was a tremendous book on the history of American education give a presentation, and other well-known educators would be a guest lecture. They weren't there all the time, but they did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "00:23:45", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "00:23:45", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had, we had eight. I think we had two people come back who were teachers for East Africa, which was the program that preceded the Peace Corps. [inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "00:23:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "American?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "00:23:59", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "American. We did have a couple of British people as well as I talked about doing the language thing and the cultural thing. So, so we got a good exposure, I thought. And then we had a block of student teaching. I was assigned to Commerce High School, which is now I think a hall. Not Carnegie Hall, but where Leonard Bernstein was conductor." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "00:24:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "00:24:36", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But anyway. The old Commerce High School, it's now torn down. Anyway, it was, looked like it had possibilities, but having taught I was kind of bored. And so I fortunately was able to opt out and I worked for Leonard Covello who had been principal of Benjamin Franklin High School in Harlem, Puerto Rican, the commonwealth of Puerto Rico. So Nancy Shandling and I opted out because we've been teaching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "00:25:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And they simply said, you don't have to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "00:25:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. They gave us permission. I think we had to find something before we could opt out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "00:25:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. And what did you do instead?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "00:25:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we helped organize a one day workshop for students at Benjamin Franklin High School, for people in the neighborhood, for career development. So a lot of my colleagues volunteered a half a day or a day to talk about what it was like to be whatever. And some were not really doing anything they were familiar with. Somebody didn't show up who was a beautician. But that was, that was also part of the growth, the development, was to do the unusual and be flexible." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "00:25:56", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there, were there any [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "00:26:07", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My Swahili teacher was from Kenya." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "00:26:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any significant others?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "00:26:16", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Other than an occasional person coming in and talking about cultural things. There was no permanent staff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "00:26:27", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And were there discussions or lectures about [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "00:26:39", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Maybe not quite in that category, but certainly their awareness was heightened on these things. But it wasn't a direct topic on it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "00:26:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there lectures about [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "00:26:59", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not directly, because most of this was in '50, '52 to '54, '55. Since Kenyatta, of course, had been now at that time was the prime minister, was prime minister the first year. And when we got in country, he'd become president. So the government format was parliamentary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "00:27:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So how long did the training last?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "00:27:31", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As I remember, September 20th to December 20th, and then we had time off to go back home for Christmas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "00:27:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Do you remember the final deselection?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "00:27:41", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was less stressful it seemed like, and only two people or one person maybe at that point were deselected. So it wasn't like the mid." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "00:27:56", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Had you been given an assignment? Did you know?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "00:28:03", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We didn't know where, that didn't happen until we got in country. We just knew that we're going to Kenya and we're going to teach in a secondary school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "00:28:11", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what subject were you going to be teaching?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "00:28:15", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was obviously thinking I was going to be involved in some kind of social studies as I had a master's in teaching social studies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "00:28:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But that didn't match up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "00:28:33", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "00:28:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had home leave?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "00:28:35", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "00:28:40", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Five days, six days?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "00:28:40", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably a whole week, as I remember maybe it was the 20th. Then because we landed in Nairobi on the 31st. And so, and we had a 12 hour layover in Madrid. SO we flew from New York to Madrid, to Athens. And then we had an hour refueling and that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "00:29:03", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was a charter flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "00:29:03", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "00:29:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the seats were full with volunteers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "00:29:08", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the 120 of us plus the land development people going to Kenya." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "00:29:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible] When you went home, any second thoughts?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "00:29:24", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, not for me. I mean, I was wound up. I was ready to go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "00:29:28", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did your family give you a big send off?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "00:29:33", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, my family certainly gave me a tremendous send off." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "00:29:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you in the local paper?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "00:29:42", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was. Three Rivers is the city of 7,000, but I had my picture in the paper, selected for Kenya." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "00:29:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "00:29:52", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it was a big deal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "00:29:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So now you arrived in the airport." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "00:30:00", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course, my dad and my mother drove me to Detroit and people got off the plane, and that's when I saw [inaudible]. And she was from Anchorage and so she was on the flight with me going from Detroit to New York. And then, of course, we all assembled in the airport in New York City to catch our one flight. And as I say, we had 12 hours in Madrid. Of course we're tired, but I tried to make every bit of that 12 hours. Go to the Prado." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "00:30:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were on travel." + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "00:30:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was a traveler. And then we refueled in Athens. So I have been to Greece for an hour. But then, then as we were flying, the sun was coming up and I could look down and I could see where the White Nile and the Blue Nile came together. And we're flying over to Khartoum. And then I don't know how many hours later the landing in Nairobi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "00:31:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there a reception when you landed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "00:31:18", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "00:31:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Governors?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "00:31:19", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. And of course, the planned settlement people spoke very good Swahili so they could sing the national anthem much better than we could. [tape break]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "00:31:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible] Do you recall at any point was there a swearing in ceremony? [inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "00:31:51", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember that. It's not to say it didn't happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "00:31:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell me about your initial reaction to being in Kenya." + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "00:32:04", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were assigned to a hotel. I got sick for some reason, either because I hadn't been sleeping. I read a book a friend of mine, Neil Lampert, who was one of my professors at Western Michigan, gave me a book. Departing. And I read that book in its entirety on this flight. So I was really wound up. So probably from the lack of sleep, my body finally caved in and had got a tremendous cold. Finally, Dr. Campbell came up and gave me a shot or something because I was kind of throwing up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "00:32:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So the first couple of days [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "00:32:54", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was at that time that the group met Tom Mboya and really, really high powered people, who I missed. I missed that part of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "00:33:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you got to Nairobi as a group [inaudible] other two continue on?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "00:33:12", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes, yes. The Kenyan group stayed in Nairobi and the Uganda group, I don't know how they got to Uganda. They, we split." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "00:33:25", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So all of a sudden, now the groups is down to about 40, 50 people?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "00:33:29", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably 35. 40 originally. Probably someone of those people [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "00:33:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your initial reaction then after that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "00:33:47", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But Nairobi certainly was not bush. Major city. So, so that, I mean, the shock wasn't like if you landed in [inaudible]. It was a major city and hearing the different languages, but most people spoke, everyone we encountered spoke English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "00:34:14", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So it was kind of an easy transition?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "00:34:20", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was. Yeah. And then people were. Met you. Met the Peace Corps Director Tom Kunde. And then the assignments were given. And so then we have an allotment of money to go buy bedding, pots, and whatever, whatever we need." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "00:34:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you try your Swahili at all the first few?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "00:34:50", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Some. But I have to admit, I was not terribly fluent. Didn't push it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "00:34:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talk about your time. At any point do you recall [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "00:35:11", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm sure that that happened and I didn't have any preference. I just said, send me, again like my application, send me wherever you want. I'm open to that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "00:35:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So within the group, I mean, there wasn't any sort of [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "00:35:28", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At least I didn't have that sense. I mean, I didn't. I really liked everybody and I thought I could work with anybody. And I was assigned with Steve Poland to work in a Harambee school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "00:35:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "00:35:41", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, what was it? Freedom. And it was one of the new schools just being opened. And so I thought this is going to be a neat experience, Steve and I got along well. And then when we got on the train to go to Kisumu, because the Harambee school was south of Kisumu. But when I got off the train, I had, overnight, been reassigned by the Ministry of Education and ended up going to Maseno, which was about 25 miles north of Kisumu. So Steve and I got separated at that point in time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "00:36:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "00:36:24", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, that happened just as we were there and assignments were read out. And Breyfogle, you've been reassigned to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "00:36:36", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was before?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "00:36:36", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we were in Kisumu at the train depot at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "00:36:40", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And somebody came?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "00:36:40", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And said, you're going to Maseno." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "00:36:48", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 237, + "timestamp": "00:36:48", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From the Ministry of Education." + }, + { + "turn_id": 238, + "timestamp": "00:36:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 239, + "timestamp": "00:36:52", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was, I had to readjust. And plus the fact Steve and I bought stuff together. And so we had to kind of look at what, what we could separate. So he took the pots and pans because I figured I could take the, I had my blanket and sheets and those things because that stuff you, of course, had your own. That was easy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 240, + "timestamp": "00:37:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So how did you get to Maseno?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 241, + "timestamp": "00:37:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Somebody from Maseno, one of the teachers, one of the English teachers, who had a car, was asked to come down and pick me up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 242, + "timestamp": "00:37:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 243, + "timestamp": "00:37:34", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 244, + "timestamp": "00:37:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So now you're going off [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 245, + "timestamp": "00:37:55", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I do. And that was. The Brit, who was the geography teacher, who I ended up living with during this time, was very welcoming. They made me feel very accepted. Just looking at the scenery, it was beautiful. Your first real glimpse of the African countryside, or at least for me. I thought it was beautiful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 246, + "timestamp": "00:38:28", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There was a good road there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 247, + "timestamp": "00:38:28", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 248, + "timestamp": "00:38:40", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 249, + "timestamp": "00:38:40", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, at that point in time, it was, as I remember, it was tarmac. But part of it was relatively smooth ride." + }, + { + "turn_id": 250, + "timestamp": "00:38:50", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the Brit try to fill you in on the school and what to expect?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 251, + "timestamp": "00:38:57", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just in general terms. This is a school founded in 1907, well-established. The students are good students. You know, they're the cream of the crop of the country." + }, + { + "turn_id": 252, + "timestamp": "00:39:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 253, + "timestamp": "00:39:08", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 254, + "timestamp": "00:39:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have any idea why [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 255, + "timestamp": "00:39:17", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I could, I could say probably because I had experience and also a masters degree." + }, + { + "turn_id": 256, + "timestamp": "00:39:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But no one ever [inaudible]? So you arrived at the school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 257, + "timestamp": "00:39:36", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 258, + "timestamp": "00:39:36", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your living arrangements?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 259, + "timestamp": "00:39:36", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I was assigned to live with the geography teacher at least for the interim. Uh, the house that I lived in that first two weeks, because later I was going to be assigned to another house. Certainly more than adequate, but a much older house than some of the newer houses. In fact, they were constructing three new houses on the other side, of the western side of the compound. But that was a little house with two bedrooms. So I had my own bedroom. Living room, dining room, little kitchen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 260, + "timestamp": "00:40:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Running water?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 261, + "timestamp": "00:40:18", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Running water." + }, + { + "turn_id": 262, + "timestamp": "00:40:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Electricity?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 263, + "timestamp": "00:40:20", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Electricity at night. It was a generator." + }, + { + "turn_id": 264, + "timestamp": "00:40:22", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A steward or servant?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 265, + "timestamp": "00:40:28", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This person happened to have a, uh, houseboy is the term, which is very colonial." + }, + { + "turn_id": 266, + "timestamp": "00:40:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you beginning to feel [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 267, + "timestamp": "00:40:46", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that was a struggle because I was really looking at the mud hut impoverishment of being a person living on my own, not being dependent on other people. But I have to admit that then over a period of time, it took me about a month to get used to the idea of having, quote, a houseboy. We realized really how important this was for that person. I mean, it's an interesting part of the Kenyan economy. So this person then offered me $12 month to do your laundry, mow your yard, clean your house. And that was his livelihood." + }, + { + "turn_id": 268, + "timestamp": "00:41:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 269, + "timestamp": "00:41:59", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, but there was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 270, + "timestamp": "00:42:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 271, + "timestamp": "00:42:03", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. I mean, the expectation I thought was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 272, + "timestamp": "00:42:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your own." + }, + { + "turn_id": 273, + "timestamp": "00:42:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Your own, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 274, + "timestamp": "00:42:10", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mean, your own expectation [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 275, + "timestamp": "00:42:14", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we would take care of ourselves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 276, + "timestamp": "00:42:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 277, + "timestamp": "00:42:28", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was not bad at all. And certainly when we got the lay of the land and realized what was really expected, for the economic reasons and because of time. We were just horrendously busy once the students came that we didn't have time to mow the yard. I had, I had snakes in my yard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 278, + "timestamp": "00:42:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Describe the school. This was not a well-off school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 279, + "timestamp": "00:42:53", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, this was an old school. 1907." + }, + { + "turn_id": 280, + "timestamp": "00:43:06", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 281, + "timestamp": "00:43:06", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The housing, particularly for the European staff, was really very, very comfortable. For the African staff too. They had the older homes. But still the fact was the home that I lived in initially became an African staff person's home. But the new homes obviously were in colonial style and went to the Brits. And half the staff were British and half the staff were Africans. I was the only American." + }, + { + "turn_id": 282, + "timestamp": "00:43:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 283, + "timestamp": "00:43:47", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think there are 60 or 70 even." + }, + { + "turn_id": 284, + "timestamp": "00:43:54", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 285, + "timestamp": "00:43:56", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had, we had forms 1 through 6, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 286, + "timestamp": "00:44:11", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 287, + "timestamp": "00:44:11", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The headmaster, of course, was there for many years. His father happened to have been the bishop of Uganda. So he was maybe born in England, but had lived much of his life in East Africa. And his wife, Cicely, was the daughter of a bishop in India. I mean, so in other words, she was a colonial child as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 288, + "timestamp": "00:44:40", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I don't know [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 289, + "timestamp": "00:44:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. But none of my British colleagues opted for that. They maintained the British passport." + }, + { + "turn_id": 290, + "timestamp": "00:45:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But how many of the British [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 291, + "timestamp": "00:45:16", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think all were British." + }, + { + "turn_id": 292, + "timestamp": "00:45:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, so they come out just to teach." + }, + { + "turn_id": 293, + "timestamp": "00:45:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 294, + "timestamp": "00:45:27", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 295, + "timestamp": "00:45:27", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had one missionary probably. A young wife, two children. And the others were more my age, I mean, my age being 29, I was. And so the physics teacher, the chemistry teacher, and the geography teacher were about my age." + }, + { + "turn_id": 296, + "timestamp": "00:46:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was this a church run school?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 297, + "timestamp": "00:46:02", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was an Anglican school, British church, Church of England. In fact, in Maseno there's a cathedral. The chapel that we had on campus, I realize now, since I'm now an Episcopalian, sometimes we pray for the Diocese of the Maseno." + }, + { + "turn_id": 298, + "timestamp": "00:46:22", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And but you still got the support in that system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 299, + "timestamp": "00:46:27", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was, it was a government, by that time it truly was, the government took control of it. But it certainly, we taught religion. There was a Cambridge exam, the students took an exam like in November of their fourth year and their sixth year. And those exams were bundled up and sent to Cambridge." + }, + { + "turn_id": 300, + "timestamp": "00:46:59", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 301, + "timestamp": "00:47:00", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Kenyan staff were teacher trained. In other words, they had gone through a certain level of education." + }, + { + "turn_id": 302, + "timestamp": "00:47:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not university?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 303, + "timestamp": "00:47:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not university. We did have later on have a graduate. And these, the African teachers basically taught forms 1 and 2, the lower forms, math, whatever the subject matter. And the Brits taught the higher levels. But later on when there wasn't a graduate, he was teaching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 304, + "timestamp": "00:47:40", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was the school [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 305, + "timestamp": "00:47:40", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was initially and then when the physics teacher married an American in my second year, she then joined the staff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 306, + "timestamp": "00:47:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about the student body?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 307, + "timestamp": "00:47:56", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The student body was all male." + }, + { + "turn_id": 308, + "timestamp": "00:48:01", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was a boarding school?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 309, + "timestamp": "00:48:01", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was. There were 10 dormitories." + }, + { + "turn_id": 310, + "timestamp": "00:48:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, well, let's talk about [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 311, + "timestamp": "00:48:22", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The headmaster, Bertram Bower, a delightful person. He later retired to [inaudible] came to an. After I went and got back and got married, I spent an evening with Bertram [inaudible]. But anyway, Bertram assigned me forms 1 math, religion. And form 3 history. So I was out of my head in the math and religion because I certainly was not steeped in the religion. And the math, I could do the basic math, but I was just barely a day ahead of the students. But then, because of the detached retina from one of the English teachers, this was the Hungarian born American who had an Australian wife. And then when he had the detached retina and had to go back to New York and get that taken care of, his wife taught his classes. But then she left to go to New York. And then that the big shift, that I got all forms 3 and 4 history and English, forms 5 [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 312, + "timestamp": "00:49:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But eventually [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 313, + "timestamp": "00:49:53", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I had a syllabus but that meant that I really had to do a lot of boning up to even be ahead of the students." + }, + { + "turn_id": 314, + "timestamp": "00:50:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Same things with the math?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 315, + "timestamp": "00:50:05", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Same thing with the math that I had." + }, + { + "turn_id": 316, + "timestamp": "00:50:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you feel [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 317, + "timestamp": "00:50:10", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, I had had high school algebra and geometry, advanced algebra and solid geometry, and that was the extent of my math." + }, + { + "turn_id": 318, + "timestamp": "00:50:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Given the fact that this is such a [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 319, + "timestamp": "00:50:32", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had those feelings. But overall, I thought. I mean, even though I thought I was out of depth in the math and religious studies, that shifted probably within six weeks. Yeah, the shift was not even a full semester. But it was during this time the results came out from the Cambridge exams from the year before. And it was the worst in the school system. And the students got very upset and went on strike." + }, + { + "turn_id": 320, + "timestamp": "00:51:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When was this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 321, + "timestamp": "00:51:13", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was in my first semester. And the students were on strike and not willing to participate in doing their garden work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 322, + "timestamp": "00:51:22", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 323, + "timestamp": "00:51:26", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We haven't even gotten that far yet. We had a meeting with the principal. The headmaster got permission from the Ministry of Education to send the students home. So the students were sent home for about a week. But this school strike became a national issue since Maseno was a very prominent school. Vice President Oginga Odinga and financial minister Tom Mboya had gone to school there. So Parliament was talking about this strike in Maseno and blaming it on the Peace Corps for not being prepared to teach. And of course, I really was not prepared to teach some of the subjects I had been teaching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 324, + "timestamp": "00:52:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were these, they must have been politically motivated attacks?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 325, + "timestamp": "00:52:11", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 326, + "timestamp": "00:52:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So there was some political division [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 327, + "timestamp": "00:52:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course there was. If you read Time magazine, if you had read Time magazine, Oginga Odinga, of course, was kind of considered pro-communist. He was a Luo, a member of the Luo tribe. Two thirds of our students were Luos. And so there might have been that. Certainly the students were truly upset with the results." + }, + { + "turn_id": 328, + "timestamp": "00:52:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mean, [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 329, + "timestamp": "00:52:48", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, I'm assuming there were some student leaders. I wasn't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 330, + "timestamp": "00:52:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you a very short time [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 331, + "timestamp": "00:53:00", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it gave me time to prepare. It helped me get caught up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 332, + "timestamp": "00:53:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During this period, is that when your schedule changed?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 333, + "timestamp": "00:53:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My schedule had changed before that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 334, + "timestamp": "00:53:14", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, so now you're history." + }, + { + "turn_id": 335, + "timestamp": "00:53:14", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, which I felt far more comfortable with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 336, + "timestamp": "00:53:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 337, + "timestamp": "00:53:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I was. Or at least, we're going to sit the exam the years after." + }, + { + "turn_id": 338, + "timestamp": "00:53:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible] you'll be out of here before [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 339, + "timestamp": "00:53:38", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's true." + }, + { + "turn_id": 340, + "timestamp": "00:53:38", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you feel [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 341, + "timestamp": "00:53:41", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, certainly. In other words, the students made it very clear to me that I was there to teach them English or history. And the history, of course, is crazy. It was British Empire and Commonwealth history." + }, + { + "turn_id": 342, + "timestamp": "00:53:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 343, + "timestamp": "00:53:57", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they were very, very clear about it. You're here to teach us. We need to take this exam. And our lives, our future hinges on how we do on this exam." + }, + { + "turn_id": 344, + "timestamp": "00:54:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mean, did they say that to you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 345, + "timestamp": "00:54:10", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. No, that was very clear. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 346, + "timestamp": "00:54:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How does, uh, Kenyan English is obviously a little bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 347, + "timestamp": "00:54:20", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Kind of the King's English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 348, + "timestamp": "00:54:22", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that an adjustment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 349, + "timestamp": "00:54:32", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The joke was, as I got settled in, was the status symbol was to get an American accent rather than a British accent. So the Brits would tease me. And African students weren't the ones that really said this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 350, + "timestamp": "00:54:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, did any of your students [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 351, + "timestamp": "00:54:56", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they. No. But no, they, they wanted to be up to speed. And when we're teaching some of the literature, of course, a lot of it was British literature like Dickens, Orwell. But anyway, if there happened to have been an American author, of course they could see the slight difference in the language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 352, + "timestamp": "00:55:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So the strike is over [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 353, + "timestamp": "00:55:32", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The strike took place probably two thirds of the way through my first semester. And so I finished that first semester and then I had a month off. And, well, in Kenya, the schools had three months off. You'd go to school like from January, mid-January to April. And have mid-April to mid-May off. In school from mid-May to mid-August. Off mid-August to mid-September. Teaching from mid- September to, say, right up to Christmas or 20th. And then have that off until mid-January." + }, + { + "turn_id": 354, + "timestamp": "00:56:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, so [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 355, + "timestamp": "00:56:18", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 356, + "timestamp": "00:56:25", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your sense of the interaction with the professional [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 357, + "timestamp": "00:56:37", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There certainly was a camaraderie. But it wasn't the same camaraderie that I had with Americans. It still was, I don't like the word colonial, but there certainly was that angle that the British were superior and better educated. I mean, the truth is there was racism." + }, + { + "turn_id": 358, + "timestamp": "00:57:11", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So where did you fit in [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 359, + "timestamp": "00:57:16", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, absolutely. I mean, I didn't differentiate. But the African staff also were married and had families, which made it different socially from me than with my British friends who were single who could." + }, + { + "turn_id": 360, + "timestamp": "00:57:37", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 361, + "timestamp": "00:57:51", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, most of the socialization was like in the teachers' lounge at coffee break. Like 10:00 to 10:30 in the morning or whatever the times were. And that's where the socialization was, because then once people went back to their homes, they had other obligations too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 362, + "timestamp": "00:58:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you recall if any of the [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 363, + "timestamp": "00:58:27", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, no, no. We would have dinner exchanges and I would be invited to their homes. I had a problem because the fact that I, with three other British, although I later ended up having a home of my own, I ate with three other British. And so for me then to invite an African family was kind of problematic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 364, + "timestamp": "00:58:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you didn't do it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 365, + "timestamp": "00:58:54", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't do it. I mean, I did do it with a couple of people, but not, not with all the staff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 366, + "timestamp": "00:59:01", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So were there instances where the three Brits, you [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 367, + "timestamp": "00:59:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that did happen. It's like, I didn't feel terribly uncomfortable, but I felt some discomfort, although only a little bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 368, + "timestamp": "00:59:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 369, + "timestamp": "00:59:29", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One made it clear to me that was not the style." + }, + { + "turn_id": 370, + "timestamp": "00:59:37", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But this again was your [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 371, + "timestamp": "00:59:42", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, actually, actually, by that time I had been assigned a home. And there were three new homes that had been completed and the geography teacher had a home by himself, and then the chemistry and physics teacher shared a home. And then the biology teacher, his wife, with two children, had the other home. And so we ate in the home where the physics and the chemistry teacher roomed together. But we split the wages of the cook four ways." + }, + { + "turn_id": 372, + "timestamp": "01:00:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 373, + "timestamp": "01:00:27", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Kisumu, a major seaport in west Kenya was about 17 miles away, and that was very accessible and a lot of times somebody would be going to Kisumu so I could go in and shop. See my friend Sue Boardman, who taught biology at one of the schools." + }, + { + "turn_id": 374, + "timestamp": "01:00:48", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you would always drive down? [inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 375, + "timestamp": "01:00:57", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Rarely. I could go out and hitchhike, that was easy too. I could just go out and stick my thumb out and catch a ride with somebody else who was coming down from Butere or." + }, + { + "turn_id": 376, + "timestamp": "01:01:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 377, + "timestamp": "01:01:27", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have to admit, I was really busy and so I didn't dwell on the unusual stuff so much. I really was trying to prepare and also grade papers because I really thought that students had to learn how to read and write English well. So I took that responsibility seriously. And I thought that I maybe wasn't the best teacher, but I was adequate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 378, + "timestamp": "01:01:59", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your other responsibilities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 379, + "timestamp": "01:01:59", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was the basketball coach, I introduced basketball, in fact even helped carve out, chopped. I didn't do the chopping, but carved out a place where we made a basketball court. And our first game was against a school that had been playing basketball for quite a while and we lost 64-8. We scored one basket each quarter. And I was the scout master. And we had a newspaper that was published, certainly once a semester, and I was responsible for that. And I had the yearbook, which was published at the end of each year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 380, + "timestamp": "01:02:38", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were these assigned or were they volunteer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 381, + "timestamp": "01:02:46", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, they were assigned by the headmaster. And then one month out of the year, one month out of the semester, we would have chapel duty. I wasn't terribly steeped in the Bible so sometimes I would read [inaudible]. And that was, that was not [inaudible] headmaster who was a missionary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 382, + "timestamp": "01:03:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were supposed to get up in front of?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 383, + "timestamp": "01:03:13", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Three hundred students. It would be a ten or 15 minute inspirational, that's probably what we'd call it today. [tape break]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 384, + "timestamp": "01:03:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We were talking about [inaudible]. During your first year, how often did you go away from the school?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 385, + "timestamp": "01:03:50", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, I didn't go away a lot. I enjoyed the school. I enjoyed the students. I enjoyed the Brits, I enjoyed the African staff. So I didn't feel a great need." + }, + { + "turn_id": 386, + "timestamp": "01:04:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You didn't feel [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 387, + "timestamp": "01:04:22", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I felt neutral. I mean, I felt comfortable with the African staff. And I had a lot of respect for both. The teachers were very competent and very bright." + }, + { + "turn_id": 388, + "timestamp": "01:04:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 389, + "timestamp": "01:04:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, they were teachers from East Africa with the exception of the headmaster, of course, who came out of the Anglican Church. And then the biology teacher also was Anglican missionary. And then there was another missionary who was on leave. So there were three missionaries still left over from the old colonial days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 390, + "timestamp": "01:05:06", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 391, + "timestamp": "01:05:18", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the only, the only one was when [inaudible]. Students were very considerate, thoughtful, thankful, appreciative, respectful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 392, + "timestamp": "01:05:28", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the size of the class?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 393, + "timestamp": "01:05:35", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thirty students in a class, at least in forms 3 and 4. And they did their homework. If they had questions, they would say, I don't understand, can you explain? Just tremendous respect. Teachers were really in an elevated position at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 394, + "timestamp": "01:06:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 395, + "timestamp": "01:06:14", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was certainly adequately staffed. Probably an old country schoolhouse with the description of the old wooden desks, a row of 30, whatever. Six rows with five desks each. And there was a blackboard, chalk. And no electricity. I mean, there was electricity, but at night. But buildings kind of latched, you know, where you had daylight, but then you'd close it down at night to not let the mosquitos in and keep the lights on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 396, + "timestamp": "01:07:06", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And so the students had textbooks. Do they work out of exercise books?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 397, + "timestamp": "01:07:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. What we would, when we would take an exam. Blue books I think is what we called them. And that's, that's basically what they had." + }, + { + "turn_id": 398, + "timestamp": "01:07:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So during the first year [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 399, + "timestamp": "01:07:38", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The doctor? Maybe. I mean, I didn't have a lot of visitors. I don't know why that was. You know, whether because I was surviving and things seemingly were going okay or what. I don't know. I certainly knew that I was supported and if I needed someone, I could. We did have a phone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 400, + "timestamp": "01:08:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 401, + "timestamp": "01:08:08", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I knew that folks were accessible." + }, + { + "turn_id": 402, + "timestamp": "01:08:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And so you didn't [inaudible]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 403, + "timestamp": "01:08:23", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did not. In fact, I remember, I remember the physics and chemistry teacher had a motorcycle. BMW, I think. And they taught me how to ride it. Wednesdays we didn't teach in the afternoon. And he said, why don't you go over to whatever, 20 or 30 miles away there was a Peace Corps volunteer. He said, take the bike. I took the darn thing over and skidded. Took a lot of skin off and it was a stupid thing for me to do, not being very competent. So anyway, I got the bike up to Majengo and then somebody, the government, a Land Rover, came by and took me back to the school. It took three baths to wash the stone grit out. And then I took a bottle of rubbing alcohol.\n\nAnd the nurse when she discovered what had happened, she realized I'd done the right thing, but was amazed that I could tolerate that much pain because I was, I had a lot of spots where I poured the alcohol." + }, + { + "turn_id": 404, + "timestamp": "01:09:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The nurse at school?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 405, + "timestamp": "01:09:36", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, the nurse at school, the biology teacher's wife was a nurse. And then she got some salve for me and some gauze. And then finally, about a week later, a Peace Corps doctor came out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 406, + "timestamp": "01:09:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wasn't there a policy [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 407, + "timestamp": "01:09:55", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There probably was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 408, + "timestamp": "01:10:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[inaudible] As you're coming to the end of the first year, what was your sense of [inaudible]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 409, + "timestamp": "01:10:20", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I did feel good about, or at least I thought I was doing a good job of teaching. That I felt comfortable with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 410, + "timestamp": "01:10:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you didn't get feedback from anyone else? [inaudible]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 411, + "timestamp": "01:10:40", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, nobody on staff came to observe my teaching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 412, + "timestamp": "01:10:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you get any feedback in any way?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 413, + "timestamp": "01:10:47", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In kind of a roundabout way. I mean, they didn't come right out say you're doing a great job. But they appreciated the fact that they were learning English or learning British Empire history, which I thought was an interesting twist." + }, + { + "turn_id": 414, + "timestamp": "01:11:11", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 415, + "timestamp": "01:11:11", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Read about the American Revolution as to how it's written by the Brits and, you know, the other, the basketball, yearbook, the newspaper, you know, the outside activities were going well and the students were seemingly enjoying those activities, which I was involved in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 416, + "timestamp": "01:11:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have much informal contact with the students?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 417, + "timestamp": "01:11:37", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I had a dormitory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 418, + "timestamp": "01:11:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, you did? Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 419, + "timestamp": "01:11:40", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so certainly two or three times a week I would wander over in the evening just to see how they were doing and if there's anything that they needed before. And then of course, I had ten banana trees in the yard. So when bananas get ripe, you've got arms of bananas and I'd give them to all ten dorms. I just, I wouldn't give them to my dorm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 420, + "timestamp": "01:12:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 421, + "timestamp": "01:12:05", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Africans appreciated the extra food." + }, + { + "turn_id": 422, + "timestamp": "01:12:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the students question you about America? And do you have any sense of what their perception was of you as a Peace Corps volunteer? Did they distinguish you from the Brits?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 423, + "timestamp": "01:12:24", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, certainly when we got into Vietnam that became an issue for the Kenyan students." + }, + { + "turn_id": 424, + "timestamp": "01:12:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is during your second year, isn't it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 425, + "timestamp": "01:12:32", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "During my second year, yes. 1966." + }, + { + "turn_id": 426, + "timestamp": "01:12:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How'd it become an issue?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 427, + "timestamp": "01:12:37", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the students just couldn't figure out what in the world was America doing in this? I mean, they saw it as a form of colonialism, I mean, which from their perspective is absolutely right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 428, + "timestamp": "01:12:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 429, + "timestamp": "01:12:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they thought it was dead wrong. And then, of course, the Congo thing was going on too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 430, + "timestamp": "01:12:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 431, + "timestamp": "01:12:57", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they just thought the American government was intervening inappropriately." + }, + { + "turn_id": 432, + "timestamp": "01:13:03", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where did, I mean, did you sit down in the dorm and say, let's talk about Vietnam? Or did it come up in class?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 433, + "timestamp": "01:13:11", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A lot of times it would come up when I'd have time. We'd discussed the material that we covered for that day and have an extra 10 minutes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 434, + "timestamp": "01:13:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In class?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 435, + "timestamp": "01:13:20", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In class, yeah. And so I'd say, is there anything you want to talk about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 436, + "timestamp": "01:13:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 437, + "timestamp": "01:13:25", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they'd say, yeah, what in the world are you folks doing in the Congo or? I don't remember what it was that happened at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 438, + "timestamp": "01:13:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I assume their language is a little bit more formal than, what are you folks doing in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 439, + "timestamp": "01:13:40", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 440, + "timestamp": "01:13:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 441, + "timestamp": "01:13:43", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And there certainly was a level of politeness." + }, + { + "turn_id": 442, + "timestamp": "01:13:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So that, you never had a strong expression of anti- Americanism?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 443, + "timestamp": "01:13:52", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 444, + "timestamp": "01:13:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Or anything directed personally against you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 445, + "timestamp": "01:13:57", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 446, + "timestamp": "01:13:57", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In those settings, did you feel called on to try to defend America, or how did you, whatever your own feelings about the Vietnam War?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 447, + "timestamp": "01:14:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was, I was raised in a very conservative political family, and my basic source of information was Time magazine. And Time magazine supported the war so I supported the war in Vietnam. And so I defended American policy in Vietnam. Talked about the domino theory and the spread of communism." + }, + { + "turn_id": 448, + "timestamp": "01:14:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. And your students bought it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 449, + "timestamp": "01:14:35", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No! They understood my point of view." + }, + { + "turn_id": 450, + "timestamp": "01:14:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 451, + "timestamp": "01:14:42", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they respected my being able to defend it, but they still didn't agree with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 452, + "timestamp": "01:14:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Well, let's jump. There must have been somewhere a long break between first and second year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 453, + "timestamp": "01:14:58", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there are these months between." + }, + { + "turn_id": 454, + "timestamp": "01:15:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's right. Yeah. What did you do with the free time? Initially, I suppose you used it to prepare for teaching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 455, + "timestamp": "01:15:08", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I also traveled, but I would find the Peace Corps said you have 30 days of vacation here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 456, + "timestamp": "01:15:14", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 457, + "timestamp": "01:15:15", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But find a project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 458, + "timestamp": "01:15:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah, yeah. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 459, + "timestamp": "01:15:19", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I had a project with the land settlement people. That's where I met Mike Davis and Jim Cloutier, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 460, + "timestamp": "01:15:28", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 461, + "timestamp": "01:15:29", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they were living in this house where Robert Ruark either lived or, because there were bullet holes in the wall from where this particular murder took place, where the Brits killed the cook or." + }, + { + "turn_id": 462, + "timestamp": "01:15:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 463, + "timestamp": "01:15:47", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In Uhuru." + }, + { + "turn_id": 464, + "timestamp": "01:15:48", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 465, + "timestamp": "01:15:50", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I'm, I'm getting exposed to language and different experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 466, + "timestamp": "01:15:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 467, + "timestamp": "01:15:59", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I felt very enriched by having that mixture of both working in projects when I was traveling." + }, + { + "turn_id": 468, + "timestamp": "01:16:07", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the project?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 469, + "timestamp": "01:16:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm even blocking on what I was doing, except for I was traveling with these guys who spoke fluent Swahili and they were doing something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 470, + "timestamp": "01:16:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now they tended to be based on a land settlement area?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 471, + "timestamp": "01:16:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, they were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 472, + "timestamp": "01:16:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And their role was kind of complicated. It could have been, was it with elementary school kids or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 473, + "timestamp": "01:16:31", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought they were working with adults." + }, + { + "turn_id": 474, + "timestamp": "01:16:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, I mean, they were. But did you come in and sort of?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 475, + "timestamp": "01:16:36", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I was working with them. I was just kind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 476, + "timestamp": "01:16:38", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just following them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 477, + "timestamp": "01:16:43", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Tagging along." + }, + { + "turn_id": 478, + "timestamp": "01:16:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 479, + "timestamp": "01:16:44", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, that particular project was, we laughed about it being a project." + }, + { + "turn_id": 480, + "timestamp": "01:16:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. That's, I mean, two interesting guys to spend time with. Again, I think I said going into the second year, you begin, you know that you're only going to be there another couple of semesters. Did you think in terms of what am I going to accomplish before I leave? Or you just knew that your teaching was it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 481, + "timestamp": "01:17:13", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have to admit, I stayed focused on the teaching part of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 482, + "timestamp": "01:17:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 483, + "timestamp": "01:17:17", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And my goal was for the students. My accomplishment was through the students accomplishing success." + }, + { + "turn_id": 484, + "timestamp": "01:17:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 485, + "timestamp": "01:17:25", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "By taking the Cambridge exam and doing well so they could go on to further education or some kind of career development." + }, + { + "turn_id": 486, + "timestamp": "01:17:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You'd been pretty adventurous in your life up to joining the Peace Corps. While you're in Kenya, I mean, you're under very comfortable circumstance. Were you at all tempted to try to reach out and learn more about the real Kenya? I mean, traditional culture of the Luo or village life or get a student to invite you to his village?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 487, + "timestamp": "01:18:00", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn't get invited by any students, but I did get invited by a family that lived off the compound. And I don't know if that person's connection with the school other than he'd graduated from the school. But he worked like for the Agriculture Department." + }, + { + "turn_id": 488, + "timestamp": "01:18:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 489, + "timestamp": "01:18:17", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I had a couple of times where he would invite me out to dinner and he had twin daughters who were of marriage age." + }, + { + "turn_id": 490, + "timestamp": "01:18:23", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 491, + "timestamp": "01:18:27", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If he probably only had one daughter, I might have had a different outlook. But now I'm in a dilemma here. I don't want to offend anybody. I mean, I'm maybe jesting or misreading but. I enjoyed that contact, but I didn't pursue it beyond just the, the dinners and the camaraderie. I did try to, it only lasted for about a month because it really became time, terribly time consuming. I went out to an elementary school and tried one hour a week and it took me like an hour to get there. And I tried to teach English, but that then that was like on my Wednesday afternoon that I had off. So I only did that probably for six or seven times, maybe four." + }, + { + "turn_id": 492, + "timestamp": "01:19:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did, how did that get set up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 493, + "timestamp": "01:19:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was aware of the school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 494, + "timestamp": "01:19:24", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 495, + "timestamp": "01:19:25", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because one of the wives of one of the Africans taught in that school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 496, + "timestamp": "01:19:33", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 497, + "timestamp": "01:19:33", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so she said, gee, if you come out to the school and do this, this would be tremendous." + }, + { + "turn_id": 498, + "timestamp": "01:19:37", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 499, + "timestamp": "01:19:38", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it was through her that I knew of the school. When I said an hours, it was probably only a half an hour walk, but an hour, you know, half an hour each way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 500, + "timestamp": "01:19:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you'd walk out to the school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 501, + "timestamp": "01:19:51", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. And it was, it was nice, but it was, became very time consuming from what I really was trying to stay focused on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 502, + "timestamp": "01:19:59", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 503, + "timestamp": "01:20:01", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I didn't, I didn't make a lot of inroads in the area with the African population." + }, + { + "turn_id": 504, + "timestamp": "01:20:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And that was a Luo, a traditional group?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 505, + "timestamp": "01:20:15", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, but there was the Abaluyia, which was a Bantu versus a Nilotic language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 506, + "timestamp": "01:20:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 507, + "timestamp": "01:20:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My, my gardener happened to be a Luo, uh, Abaluyia. And I remember he lost the child through the childbirth process. And so I knew that they would have celebrations because every so often I could hear in the nighttime this wailing. And so I made sure that he had sufficient money to, for the burial and for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 508, + "timestamp": "01:20:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. You didn't you didn't try to improve your Swahili, did you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 509, + "timestamp": "01:20:53", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 510, + "timestamp": "01:20:54", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. That's not an accusation. It's just that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 511, + "timestamp": "01:20:57", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm very, very honest about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 512, + "timestamp": "01:20:59", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 513, + "timestamp": "01:21:00", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Interesting, though. I made sure that I spoke with my gardener." + }, + { + "turn_id": 514, + "timestamp": "01:21:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 515, + "timestamp": "01:21:08", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And he did something one day. It usually rained, if it rained, it rained at 4:00 or 4:30 in the afternoon. The rains were very predictable. One day the clouds came up about 11:30 in the morning and he came trotting up with my raincoat. And these British people said, how did you train him to do that? And I said, I didn't. It's just the fact that he appreciates me and I appreciate him and he's taking care of me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 516, + "timestamp": "01:21:38", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the second year, had the faculty changed much? Had people come, people go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 517, + "timestamp": "01:21:44", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As I mentioned, the physics teacher married an American TEA teacher. And so then she taught some of the English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 518, + "timestamp": "01:21:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 519, + "timestamp": "01:21:54", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so that was, so then the chemistry teacher. He had worked with a physics teacher, but he moved out or went back to England, because obviously the wife took his place in that household. That's still where we ate dinner. I mean, I still ate dinner with them, but there was no, there wasn't a major shift." + }, + { + "turn_id": 520, + "timestamp": "01:22:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And your health generally was okay after the initial bout you had when you arrived, generally good?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 521, + "timestamp": "01:22:23", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I maintained very good health." + }, + { + "turn_id": 522, + "timestamp": "01:22:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 523, + "timestamp": "01:22:27", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Except for I had my bottom, I had my wisdom teeth pulled." + }, + { + "turn_id": 524, + "timestamp": "01:22:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 525, + "timestamp": "01:22:31", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right just before I was ready to get out because I wanted to have it done at government expense because I had a 90 degree root on both sides." + }, + { + "turn_id": 526, + "timestamp": "01:22:37", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And that was done in Nairobi?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 527, + "timestamp": "01:22:39", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. No, no, no. Kisumu." + }, + { + "turn_id": 528, + "timestamp": "01:22:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In Kisumu? Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 529, + "timestamp": "01:22:43", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But when the dentist got to the bottoms. He popped the tops, he just popped out and I was able to play tennis. But when the bottoms were done, he said, you're going to be sick for four days. And I thought that guy had his foot on my jaw while he was pulling those teeth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 530, + "timestamp": "01:22:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 531, + "timestamp": "01:23:00", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And he was wanting to drive me back up to the compound. I said, no, I could hitchhike, which I did. And I also had been invited over to dinner to a teacher's college, and I said, I'm really sorry, but I just had my wisdom teeth pulled. And I said, I don't think I'm going to be feeling well in a couple of hours. And so I ate soup and easy things to eat. And they took me home, a delightful couple from Winnipeg, and sure enough, I was sick for four days. This was on Wednesday afternoon, and the afternoon we had off I had my teeth pulled." + }, + { + "turn_id": 532, + "timestamp": "01:23:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 533, + "timestamp": "01:23:34", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I crawled over to the classroom and wrote the assignments on the board, said sick, and then went back over Friday and Saturday. By Sunday afternoon, I was back to normal. But, boy, those four days were terrible. Otherwise, no, I was not sick." + }, + { + "turn_id": 534, + "timestamp": "01:23:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 535, + "timestamp": "01:23:52", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I had consistently lost 25 pounds over a period of time. So I weighed 125 pounds. And I understand losing 25 pounds for a male is not abnormal in the tropical climate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 536, + "timestamp": "01:24:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Right. It's, uh. At the end, between the first and second year, was there a conference of the group? Were you called together? A mid-term conference it would have been called, I think." + }, + { + "turn_id": 537, + "timestamp": "01:24:26", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, we might have. By that time maybe you're gone?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 538, + "timestamp": "01:24:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think so. I was out of Kenya." + }, + { + "turn_id": 539, + "timestamp": "01:24:33", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And we might have had not anything quite that formal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 540, + "timestamp": "01:24:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 541, + "timestamp": "01:24:40", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had a formal get together down at Mombasa or Malindi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 542, + "timestamp": "01:24:45", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 543, + "timestamp": "01:24:46", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When we were ready to be discharged, probably." + }, + { + "turn_id": 544, + "timestamp": "01:24:50", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 545, + "timestamp": "01:24:50", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Four weeks before we got discharged." + }, + { + "turn_id": 546, + "timestamp": "01:24:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Right. And that was the termination conference?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 547, + "timestamp": "01:24:58", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you, that's the term I'm trying to fish for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 548, + "timestamp": "01:24:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And so the whole group gathered in Malindi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 549, + "timestamp": "01:25:03", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 550, + "timestamp": "01:25:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which is easy to take. It's a beachy resort." + }, + { + "turn_id": 551, + "timestamp": "01:25:09", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yeah, it was plush." + }, + { + "turn_id": 552, + "timestamp": "01:25:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I gather during the two years you did not have much contact with other volunteers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 553, + "timestamp": "01:25:20", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sporadically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 554, + "timestamp": "01:25:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I mean, your real focus tended to, stayed within the school community." + }, + { + "turn_id": 555, + "timestamp": "01:25:24", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 556, + "timestamp": "01:25:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So now you come back and two years are over and you suddenly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 557, + "timestamp": "01:25:30", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, with the exception when we'd have those month periods. Like one time I went to Nairobi and spent. The Presbyterian Church had sent a shipload of books to Kenya. So one of the projects was to support, to separate these books out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 558, + "timestamp": "01:25:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 559, + "timestamp": "01:25:55", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then try to catalog them in some way, shape or form. And then schools would be getting these books. And so that was one of the projects that I did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 560, + "timestamp": "01:26:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where did you stay when you were in Nairobi?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 561, + "timestamp": "01:26:07", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There was, there was a hotel that was not terribly expensive. It was within a block or two of the Peace Corps office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 562, + "timestamp": "01:26:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 563, + "timestamp": "01:26:14", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so that was within my budget." + }, + { + "turn_id": 564, + "timestamp": "01:26:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, you were being paid a living allowance by the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 565, + "timestamp": "01:26:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 566, + "timestamp": "01:26:23", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that, did that tend to be adequate?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 567, + "timestamp": "01:26:25", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I, I. It would not have been enough to support a vehicle, but it was enough for me to pay for a fourth of a cook's wage, to pay for a gardener. And to save enough money to buy a Pentax camera and wide angle lens and photo lens and tripod." + }, + { + "turn_id": 568, + "timestamp": "01:26:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were specifically forbidden from owning a vehicle?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 569, + "timestamp": "01:26:51", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 570, + "timestamp": "01:26:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 571, + "timestamp": "01:26:53", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, so the $100 a month I got, and the $10 for my rent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 572, + "timestamp": "01:26:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 573, + "timestamp": "01:27:00", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The $110 I got, I probably was able to save 30 to 40 percent of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 574, + "timestamp": "01:27:06", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And was that deposited to your account in Maseno?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 575, + "timestamp": "01:27:10", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that's how it works. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 576, + "timestamp": "01:27:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Let's jump back to the termination conference. And your, the group gathers now, I guess for the first time in the two years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 577, + "timestamp": "01:27:22", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It might have really been in that break between." + }, + { + "turn_id": 578, + "timestamp": "01:27:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, yeah, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 579, + "timestamp": "01:27:26", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Semesters, because I don't think, we didn't teach for that three or four days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 580, + "timestamp": "01:27:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Right. Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 581, + "timestamp": "01:27:33", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was, it was in preparation for us to be prepared for culture shock going back to the United States." + }, + { + "turn_id": 582, + "timestamp": "01:27:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was that played out? I mean." + }, + { + "turn_id": 583, + "timestamp": "01:27:45", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm glad, I mean, it was, it was nice to see the people again, you know, the camaraderie and the friendships that we had in Teachers College, Columbia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 584, + "timestamp": "01:27:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 585, + "timestamp": "01:27:54", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then plus the friendships that we had that were people that were in proximity. Like Sue Boardman for me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 586, + "timestamp": "01:28:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 587, + "timestamp": "01:28:02", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sue I saw fairly frequently." + }, + { + "turn_id": 588, + "timestamp": "01:28:04", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 589, + "timestamp": "01:28:07", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was delightful in that, as you mentioned, that Malindi was plush and probably not terribly expensive in those days, but seeing the ocean and the flowers were just magnificent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 590, + "timestamp": "01:28:25", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The settlement group wasn't there at the same time, was it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 591, + "timestamp": "01:28:27", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. They were obviously having their conference at a different time, maybe at the same place, but different times. Just the teachers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 592, + "timestamp": "01:28:36", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And at that point you at all tempted to extend for a third year?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 593, + "timestamp": "01:28:44", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At that time also they, not necessarily in Kenya, but in Micronesia, they said you can spend a year in Micronesia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 594, + "timestamp": "01:28:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 595, + "timestamp": "01:28:54", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I was tempted to do that. But I was 31." + }, + { + "turn_id": 596, + "timestamp": "01:28:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 597, + "timestamp": "01:28:59", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I was saying, you know, I could, I could be an adolescent all my life, live in this abnormal environment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 598, + "timestamp": "01:29:07", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had a sense that this was not the way the world really was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 599, + "timestamp": "01:29:12", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I was grateful for that conference in preparation of serious culture shock when you get back to the United States because from '64 to '66 with the Vietnam, the social uprisings." + }, + { + "turn_id": 600, + "timestamp": "01:29:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 601, + "timestamp": "01:29:32", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A lot of change." + }, + { + "turn_id": 602, + "timestamp": "01:29:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was it run in small groups?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 603, + "timestamp": "01:29:36", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. They're kind of like a big talk and then you split off." + }, + { + "turn_id": 604, + "timestamp": "01:29:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there facilitators for each group?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 605, + "timestamp": "01:29:43", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 606, + "timestamp": "01:29:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And was it, did they tend to be lively exchanges or were people simply impatient and say, you know, I don't need to hear that, let me?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 607, + "timestamp": "01:29:55", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I, at least I thought people were very receptive to what was being said in preparation for what life was going to be like." + }, + { + "turn_id": 608, + "timestamp": "01:30:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Had many of the group terminated early? I mean, I don't know, you were 35 to begin." + }, + { + "turn_id": 609, + "timestamp": "01:30:11", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm only aware of two people quitting in midstream." + }, + { + "turn_id": 610, + "timestamp": "01:30:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So it was still 30 some people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 611, + "timestamp": "01:30:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 612, + "timestamp": "01:30:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember if there was discussion with the young men about the possibility of facing the draft when they came home? Because things had changed and the war had become a little more intense by then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 613, + "timestamp": "01:30:34", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It certainly was mentioned. I mean, the war was heating up, had heated up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 614, + "timestamp": "01:30:40", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 615, + "timestamp": "01:30:41", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that, you know, you. Whatever draft deferment you had before, you might not have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 616, + "timestamp": "01:30:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah.\n\nFor the experience and now being with the group, will you still in your sensitivities essentially a Republican? Had you shifted or drifted at all?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 617, + "timestamp": "01:31:03", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I certainly. Let me just talk about an experience that I had." + }, + { + "turn_id": 618, + "timestamp": "01:31:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 619, + "timestamp": "01:31:10", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I basically am a very prompt, punctual person, and only once in my two years was I late for class. And I don't know, that's five or 10 minutes late." + }, + { + "turn_id": 620, + "timestamp": "01:31:23", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 621, + "timestamp": "01:31:24", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because, you know, after 10 minutes, the students technically could go home. Go back to their room. And I came into class one morning late, six, seven, eight minutes or whatever it was, and the students said somebody was looking for you. And I was stunned. I mean, because nobody had ever checked on me. So I said, you know, was it Mr. Bowers, who is the headmaster? No, it wasn't. Mr. Smith, the chemistry teacher? No. Mr. Jenkins, the physics teacher? So I went down the European teachers. I was making an assumption it was a Caucasian male, and they said no all the way down. So I said, gee. And I was thinking, was it somebody from Peace Corps office? And that was very unusual. I mean, nobody ever came at 7:00 in the morning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 622, + "timestamp": "01:32:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 623, + "timestamp": "01:32:18", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because usually if they had, they would have spent the night with me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 624, + "timestamp": "01:32:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 625, + "timestamp": "01:32:22", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Anyway, so I said, well, describe him. And they said, well, white skin, straight hair. And in unison, the 30 students said, all you white people look alike. And that, that was like a PhD for me, all of a sudden. Then the students said, what are you laughing at? And I said, well, if you came to the United States and you hear white people talk about Black people. And then they got offended." + }, + { + "turn_id": 626, + "timestamp": "01:32:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 627, + "timestamp": "01:32:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Said we don't look alike. We look, we're different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 628, + "timestamp": "01:32:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 629, + "timestamp": "01:32:54", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So anyway, I certainly as far as race, culture, I certainly had grown tremendously." + }, + { + "turn_id": 630, + "timestamp": "01:33:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm." + }, + { + "turn_id": 631, + "timestamp": "01:33:07", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Politically, I still identified with the Republican party." + }, + { + "turn_id": 632, + "timestamp": "01:33:10", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 633, + "timestamp": "01:33:12", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My, I had left Flint and my congressman going back to Flint was Don Riegle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 634, + "timestamp": "01:33:18", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 635, + "timestamp": "01:33:19", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And Don was a Republican at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 636, + "timestamp": "01:33:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 637, + "timestamp": "01:33:22", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In his fourth term in the House, he switched to be a Democrat because of Vietnam, and then served a fifth term as a Democrat. Fifth term in Congress, but as a Democrat. And then, of course, he ran for the U.S. Senate and won to replace Phil Hart. And of course, Senator Hart died even before the term was over. And finally Riegle became my senator for 18 years. He became a senator for 18 years. And I knew Mark Hatfield a little bit. So there are some decent Republicans still on the scope." + }, + { + "turn_id": 638, + "timestamp": "01:33:57", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But sitting in the termination conference or being near the end of your service, were you would at all reflective about how you had changed or what you'd gone through or what it all meant to you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 639, + "timestamp": "01:34:10", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It probably hadn't crystallized." + }, + { + "turn_id": 640, + "timestamp": "01:34:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 641, + "timestamp": "01:34:13", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But certainly the seeds had been planted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 642, + "timestamp": "01:34:17", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At that point then, what was your plan? I mean, obviously you were leaving Kenya in a fairly short time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 643, + "timestamp": "01:34:24", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And, you know, it was funny. I was still flying by the seat of my pants and I knew that I'd have this air ticket to Detroit, and so did I want to get home for Christmas time. And I'd get discharged like on the 10th of December and do those whirlwind tours through the European capitals and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 644, + "timestamp": "01:34:42", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 645, + "timestamp": "01:34:43", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Get to, get to Detroit and then to Three Rivers. And finally, in the process I looked at the map and I sort of said, I could go to Europe, I could go to Asia. It's far different. So I finally sat down and cashed in my air ticket to Detroit and made it from Nairobi to San Francisco with 26 stops on it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 646, + "timestamp": "01:35:09", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 647, + "timestamp": "01:35:10", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I still wasn't sure what I was going to do, whether I was going to do a whirlwind thing and try to be a name dropper. [tape break] Boarding the plane in Nairobi, Walter Brigadier knew this very attractive British lady who was the sister of his headmaster, and she was going to do a three week tour or so in Ethiopia. And Walter was going on up to Cairo. So I traveled with this lady for three, three weeks until Christmas had long passed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 648, + "timestamp": "01:35:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 649, + "timestamp": "01:35:43", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And she then went on to, she was married." + }, + { + "turn_id": 650, + "timestamp": "01:35:47", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 651, + "timestamp": "01:35:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You might not believe it, but I hardly didn't even hold hands with her in the three weeks. It's just, we were traveling companions and she'd studied Ethiopia, and so I learned a lot about it. And that's where I met, stayed at John Coyne's house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 652, + "timestamp": "01:36:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 653, + "timestamp": "01:36:04", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so after that three weeks, I knew what I was going to do. I was really going to make good use of those 26 stops. And time was not of the essence." + }, + { + "turn_id": 654, + "timestamp": "01:36:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So you're still avoiding readjustment or coming back. Well, you finally got back to San Francisco." + }, + { + "turn_id": 655, + "timestamp": "01:36:25", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 656, + "timestamp": "01:36:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you'd been on the road for quite a while." + }, + { + "turn_id": 657, + "timestamp": "01:36:28", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Seven and a half months." + }, + { + "turn_id": 658, + "timestamp": "01:36:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 659, + "timestamp": "01:36:30", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Or seven months, because I still then, it took me about a week to get to Three Rivers, Michigan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 660, + "timestamp": "01:36:36", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. So the return culture shock must have been sort of diffuse, I mean, because you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 661, + "timestamp": "01:36:44", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, in Hawaii, of course, all of a sudden I stayed at the Y, YMCA, and all these vets were on R&R from Vietnam." + }, + { + "turn_id": 662, + "timestamp": "01:36:54", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 663, + "timestamp": "01:36:55", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the music, the loud music. I mean, it was just a cacophony. But two people from Three Rivers, Michigan, lived in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 664, + "timestamp": "01:37:06", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hawaii?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 665, + "timestamp": "01:37:07", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Honolulu. And so I had dinner with them. I had dinner with one couple, and then they took me over the other couple because I didn't know them. And so I had a more gradual coming in, but I was in shocked in Honolulu." + }, + { + "turn_id": 666, + "timestamp": "01:37:21", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay. Because of the military, because of the music, because of the mix?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 667, + "timestamp": "01:37:29", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All of the above." + }, + { + "turn_id": 668, + "timestamp": "01:37:30", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. You finally get your, work your way back to Three Rivers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 669, + "timestamp": "01:37:35", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 670, + "timestamp": "01:37:36", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you still face the question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 671, + "timestamp": "01:37:38", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I." + }, + { + "turn_id": 672, + "timestamp": "01:37:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While you were in Kenya, had you done anything to find out about programs or do any job search?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 673, + "timestamp": "01:37:45", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 674, + "timestamp": "01:37:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you ever consider trying to go to work for the Peace Corps? Was there any, ever any contact about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 675, + "timestamp": "01:37:52", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, it's funny and that, because of my language not being really a good Peace Corps volunteer and not learning the language." + }, + { + "turn_id": 676, + "timestamp": "01:38:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 677, + "timestamp": "01:38:01", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really had not really thought that I would make a good staff member. You know, I kind of deselected myself from going further." + }, + { + "turn_id": 678, + "timestamp": "01:38:10", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah. Okay, now you're back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 679, + "timestamp": "01:38:14", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I really had, other than maybe thinking of going back and teaching in Flint, Michigan, I had not given serious thought about horrendous changes. But I did, when I got back to Three Rivers, I thought, well, I want to try the political stuff. And so I did hitchhike to Washington. And spent ten days in Washington seeing Don Riegle and Bill Steiger, who was a Republican from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who I knew." + }, + { + "turn_id": 680, + "timestamp": "01:38:46", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 681, + "timestamp": "01:38:46", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because he was had young Republicans in Oshkosh, but nobody had an opening for me. Nobody was willing to extend one. So I went back to Three Rivers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 682, + "timestamp": "01:38:57", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had readjustment allowance, I think, which was a, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 683, + "timestamp": "01:39:01", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I'd spent that on my trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 684, + "timestamp": "01:39:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 685, + "timestamp": "01:39:06", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so I got to Flint, saw my old boss, and this is the Friday before Labor Day. He said, Russ, do you have a job? And I said, I've been offered a job up in Midland to teach junior high school social studies. Had a cousin who lived in Midland, and I was borrowing his car to come to Flint. I mean, he had two cars, so I had his Volkswagen. And Les Erenbright said, well, how about teaching junior high school in PCP, the program that I worked in, personalized curriculum program? Potential drop outs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 686, + "timestamp": "01:39:41", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 687, + "timestamp": "01:39:42", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I said okay. So I called Midland and said I'm not coming. So I went to lunch and I came back and Mr. Erenbright said, geez, I just changed you and you're going to be a counselor at a different junior high school just across the street here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 688, + "timestamp": "01:39:57", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 689, + "timestamp": "01:39:57", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I said, how did you do that? I don't have a degree in counseling guidance. He said, you have a master's degree." + }, + { + "turn_id": 690, + "timestamp": "01:40:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 691, + "timestamp": "01:40:02", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And in junior high school, that's all you need. You don't have that counseling guidance degree." + }, + { + "turn_id": 692, + "timestamp": "01:40:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 693, + "timestamp": "01:40:08", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I went back to return the car back to my cousin. I think that's right. Unless he let me have the car. But I went to Three Rivers and got my stuff enough that I could live on. Went to Flint, got an apartment, and walked into this junior high school. The day after Labor Day was a teacher conference." + }, + { + "turn_id": 694, + "timestamp": "01:40:34", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 695, + "timestamp": "01:40:34", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the principal, who I had known, Howard Auer played football with Jerry Ford at Michigan, later played for the Chicago Bears. And Howard had been my vice principal at Flint Central before I went to the Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 696, + "timestamp": "01:40:45", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 697, + "timestamp": "01:40:46", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Got promoted as principal. And Howard said, Russ, what are you doing? I said, I'm going to be one of your counselors. What? And another fellow, Horance Brown, also was there. And he got introduced and said, what are you doing here? Well, I'm assigned also like Russ to be a counselor. And we ended up monitoring the cafeteria. That was our primary thrust. 1,350 students. There are five of us assigned to this duty." + }, + { + "turn_id": 698, + "timestamp": "01:41:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 699, + "timestamp": "01:41:16", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The principal was very grateful to have these two warm bodies to help." + }, + { + "turn_id": 700, + "timestamp": "01:41:20", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 701, + "timestamp": "01:41:21", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right in front of the cafeteria." + }, + { + "turn_id": 702, + "timestamp": "01:41:22", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. In the initial reassignment to become a counselor, was there any sense that, do you get a sense that people thought, well, he's been in the Peace Corps, he can do anything?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 703, + "timestamp": "01:41:34", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought there was that element." + }, + { + "turn_id": 704, + "timestamp": "01:41:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 705, + "timestamp": "01:41:37", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He's flexible. He could adapt and adjust." + }, + { + "turn_id": 706, + "timestamp": "01:41:39", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you end up as a lunchroom monitor." + }, + { + "turn_id": 707, + "timestamp": "01:41:43", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And which was really a neat experience because we tried to learn 1,350 kids' names. That was our means of control because if you know somebody's name you have tremendous control." + }, + { + "turn_id": 708, + "timestamp": "01:41:55", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 709, + "timestamp": "01:41:56", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was amazing. One, one person was eating, so there were four of us. In three different lunch periods, one staff member was eating. Clarence Brown, my office mate, and I ate after all this was over because we didn't have assigned duties per se. But anyway, learning those students' names. And one person was outside to monitor the smoking and no fighting policy. So three of us inside." + }, + { + "turn_id": 710, + "timestamp": "01:42:25", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 711, + "timestamp": "01:42:26", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Two were in the cafeteria and I was in the lunch line to make sure no brawls and cutting and that kind of stuff. And it was amazing. Later on, the students were really talking about serious problems through all this ruckus. And the privacy was tremendous." + }, + { + "turn_id": 712, + "timestamp": "01:42:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 713, + "timestamp": "01:42:45", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I'd say a ninth grader, female. Jeez, I'm pregnant. I think I'm pregnant. And I'd say, go see the nurse." + }, + { + "turn_id": 714, + "timestamp": "01:42:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 715, + "timestamp": "01:42:56", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay, whatever. The stuff, the problems kids were having." + }, + { + "turn_id": 716, + "timestamp": "01:43:00", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were a counselor?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 717, + "timestamp": "01:43:01", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really was, yes. And I ended up having part of a caseload around, surrounded around these kids who were in PCP, the personalized curriculum program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 718, + "timestamp": "01:43:13", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 719, + "timestamp": "01:43:15", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was amazing. The counselors were changing the kids' schedule, and the psychologist was testing kids, and one social worker was doing therapy. So I said to Ed Hughes, I said, what makes you special? And here you have counselors and psychologists and you're the one doing therapy. He said, I like therapy. I like doing therapy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 720, + "timestamp": "01:43:38", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 721, + "timestamp": "01:43:39", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I said, well, what kind of degree you have? He said, I'm still a student at the University of Michigan. And so, evolution, I'm evolving." + }, + { + "turn_id": 722, + "timestamp": "01:43:48", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 723, + "timestamp": "01:43:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I get introduced to Don Jake, which was social worker in Flint Central. He later supervised me. He introduced me to Frank Maple, who was a professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 724, + "timestamp": "01:44:01", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 725, + "timestamp": "01:44:03", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I ended up two years later going to the University of Michigan School of Social Work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 726, + "timestamp": "01:44:08", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And during this transition period, a year, two years. What was your perspective on the Peace Corps phase of your life? I mean, you're getting to be an old man now in your mid thirties." + }, + { + "turn_id": 727, + "timestamp": "01:44:22", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I also meet my wife in this process. She too was a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania. And we were speaking together as a panel at the International Institute." + }, + { + "turn_id": 728, + "timestamp": "01:44:31", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 729, + "timestamp": "01:44:33", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So then in June of 1968, so it was a quick romance." + }, + { + "turn_id": 730, + "timestamp": "01:44:37", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 731, + "timestamp": "01:44:38", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We got married. But in this time, Martin Luther King gets killed. And on the day of our wedding, Bobby Kennedy's funeral. So." + }, + { + "turn_id": 732, + "timestamp": "01:44:45", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And the war in Vietnam is still on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 733, + "timestamp": "01:44:49", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the war in Vietnam was just getting worse." + }, + { + "turn_id": 734, + "timestamp": "01:44:53", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But how does this all relate to your sense of I've been a Peace Corps volunteer? I mean, it may be hard to connect." + }, + { + "turn_id": 735, + "timestamp": "01:45:01", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the racial unrest. This is an inner city junior high school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 736, + "timestamp": "01:45:05", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 737, + "timestamp": "01:45:05", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And 60 percent Black, 40 percent white. And certainly, again, I felt comfortable. African or European. And so I again was able to make that bridge. And so I got to know, you know, African American families as well as European families. And discovering the issue, the racial issue was not race so much as it was economic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 738, + "timestamp": "01:45:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 739, + "timestamp": "01:45:35", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The whites that were uptight were the poor whites. And so we then tried to work on those issues to try to make the school truly integrate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 740, + "timestamp": "01:45:48", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Through the, um. I jumped in two directions. Uh. The third goal of the Peace Corps, of course, is that on your return that you become, you inform people about the Peace Corps point of view and possibly about the country you've been in. This is kind of a payoff. Have you done, can you, did you do any of that or have you done any of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 741, + "timestamp": "01:46:22", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I certainly would have opportunities to talk to groups about my Peace Corps experience and to talk about Kenya specifically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 742, + "timestamp": "01:46:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 743, + "timestamp": "01:46:30", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then, then later on talking about how this has affected me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 744, + "timestamp": "01:46:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 745, + "timestamp": "01:46:35", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And so it was in the mixing, in other words, the integration process, at this junior high school particularly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 746, + "timestamp": "01:46:43", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 747, + "timestamp": "01:46:44", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That it really. I'd come up to a Black student and say, let me rub a little bit of Africa off on you. And they would titter and they'd say." + }, + { + "turn_id": 748, + "timestamp": "01:46:52", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 749, + "timestamp": "01:46:52", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But, but they knew I'd been to Africa." + }, + { + "turn_id": 750, + "timestamp": "01:46:54", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh okay. And that was a, that was a plus." + }, + { + "turn_id": 751, + "timestamp": "01:46:56", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was a big plus. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 752, + "timestamp": "01:46:58", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Okay. And did you ever get to formally teach about, I mean, either informal talks about Kenya?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 753, + "timestamp": "01:47:11", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In this junior high school, the social studies teachers would come to me and say, I'm preparing a week on Africa and could you come up and show slides or give a presentation? So that would happen within that building." + }, + { + "turn_id": 754, + "timestamp": "01:47:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right. Okay. Now let's jump ahead, you know, after 30 some, 40 years or whatever. What's your perspective on what, you know, the effect Peace Corps had on you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 755, + "timestamp": "01:47:43", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, first, as I mentioned, I got married. My wife had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania in an orphanage. And before we married, she said, you know, that experience is really affected me. And I'm thinking that maybe I'd really like to adopt and could be an African. And so in the course of our marriage, we did adopt a Korean daughter, had a biological son, and then we did adopt an African American. Actually, she's biracial." + }, + { + "turn_id": 756, + "timestamp": "01:48:14", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 757, + "timestamp": "01:48:15", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mixed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 758, + "timestamp": "01:48:16", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 759, + "timestamp": "01:48:17", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And Sue and I have been very grateful having these three children. And they get along fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 760, + "timestamp": "01:48:26", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Seemed perfectly natural to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 761, + "timestamp": "01:48:28", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 762, + "timestamp": "01:48:29", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 763, + "timestamp": "01:48:31", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And certainly my politics have changed. I had to switch parties when I was, I ran for the legislature last year and did not win. But I met a fellow, and my fliers said I had been a Republican. And he said, what made you change? And I said, Nixon. He said, that's a good answer. I'll vote for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 764, + "timestamp": "01:48:51", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But he may have been the only one who voted for you. Um. That's kind of the end of the interview. I don't know if there's anything else you'd like to mention about Peace Corps, about your involvement." + }, + { + "turn_id": 765, + "timestamp": "01:49:06", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I mentioned the word evolution, and I'm still evolving." + }, + { + "turn_id": 766, + "timestamp": "01:49:12", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 767, + "timestamp": "01:49:12", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm still changing. I'm still a student. And I'm going to be 70 in six weeks or so and I'm still young. And I attribute a lot of that to my Peace Corps experience. And I'm forever grateful. I'm grateful to you for coming out and staying, you old fart." + }, + { + "turn_id": 768, + "timestamp": "01:49:35", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You know, have you, have you had a chance to go back to Kenya?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 769, + "timestamp": "01:49:37", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, soon I would like to go back to East Africa, but we just, the kids and college." + }, + { + "turn_id": 770, + "timestamp": "01:49:44", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. So you haven't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 771, + "timestamp": "01:49:45", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But, you know, there's not to say that the time will not come." + }, + { + "turn_id": 772, + "timestamp": "01:49:49", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And have you maintained any kind of contact with people from the, that you knew, the Kenyan students, staff, or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 773, + "timestamp": "01:49:58", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have to a degree but it's not been." + }, + { + "turn_id": 774, + "timestamp": "01:50:02", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 775, + "timestamp": "01:50:04", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A lot of people and then firm contact. We had a reunion, a 20th reunion, and I missed it. In San Francisco in 1984." + }, + { + "turn_id": 776, + "timestamp": "01:50:11", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of your teaching group?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 777, + "timestamp": "01:50:13", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And we didn't have a 40th." + }, + { + "turn_id": 778, + "timestamp": "01:50:15", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 779, + "timestamp": "01:50:16", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it takes a lot of energy to organize one of those things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 780, + "timestamp": "01:50:19", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 781, + "timestamp": "01:50:20", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I'm thinking maybe I'll try to do something. I'll try to do something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 782, + "timestamp": "01:50:25", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you know, and in some ways, Peace Corps ex- volunteers, they're very individual people and they don't respond readily to groups." + }, + { + "turn_id": 783, + "timestamp": "01:50:36", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And not everybody has put their name in the directory." + }, + { + "turn_id": 784, + "timestamp": "01:50:38", + "speaker": "Robert Klein", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, certainly not. Certainly not. Well, good. That's, uh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 785, + "timestamp": "01:50:44", + "speaker": "Russell P. Breyfogle Jr.", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you very much." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00103", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/CollinsM/collinsm.htm", + "original_file_name": "CollinsM_10-8-97.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/CollinsM/CollinsM_10-8-97.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Michael Collins", + "location_date": "Oakville, Ontario, Canada – 8 October 1997" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Michelle Kelly" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Michael Collins" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This interview of Michael Collins was conducted in Houston, Texas, on October 8, 1997, by Michelle Kelly and assisted by Paul Rollins.\\n\\n Mr. Collins, the first question I'd like to ask you is how you became involved in NASA and how you became interested in it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, like most of the early astronauts, I was a test pilot, and it was sort of a stair-step process. I went to the military academy, I went to West Point primarily because it was a free and good education. I emphasize \"free.\" My parents were not wealthy. When I graduated from the military academy, there was no Air Force Academy, but we had a choice of going into the Army or the Air Force. The Air Force seemed like a more interesting choice. Then the question was to fly or not to fly. I decided to fly. To fly little planes or big ones? I became a fighter pilot. To keep flying the same or new ones? I became a test pilot. And so, you see I've stair-stepped up through five or six increments then, and it was a simple, logical thing to go on to the next increment, which was higher and faster, and become an astronaut rather than a test pilot. So that's how it happened. It was not that when I was a little kid I had aspirations of flying to the moon or anything like that. Actually, I did have aspirations of flying to Mars, but not the moon. But the path that led me to NASA Houston was a stair-step, you know, one little increment at a time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can I ask you a little bit about your interest in Mars when you were a young boy? What was your interest and where did it come from?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know. I think primarily it came from the old Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and when you were a kid in those days, when you went to the movies on Saturday afternoon, there was always a little short subject right before the movie, and usually they gave you a news clip, five minutes of the latest weekly news, and then sometimes there was a little science fiction blurb of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Those are the names. I don't know that they went specifically to Mars. They went everywhere. They went to the Caverns of Mongo. I remember that. So, I'm not sure. Of all the possibilities, as I got older and learned a little bit more about our solar system, then Mars seemed clearly to be the most interesting place to go. So I would say some thin study of planetary science with a heavy overlay of Flash Gordon and whoever the other guy was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can I ask you a little bit about your astronaut selection process and how you became involved in that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, again, I was out at Edwards. I was assigned to the fighter test section at Edwards, and we were very much aware of the NASA program as it began, and we were very much aware of the fact that they were looking for test pilots, and so we were up to speed on all the paperwork. I mean, we knew when the next cycle was and so on and so forth. When the second group of nine was picked, I had just—I've forgotten whether I had not quite graduated from the test pilot—I think I had just graduated and gone down to fighter ops, and so I applied for that, and I didn't make that. I didn't have sufficient experience, they said. So then when the third selection in 1963 occurred, I applied again, and this time I was accepted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can I ask you a little bit about that process and what you did to be able to be selected?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it's kind of too late to do much of anything. By the time you've put your name on the application, your flying background, your educational background, they're pretty much set in concrete. You can do a little bit. I lived close to a hillside, which was like a treadmill, in that as it went up it got steeper and steeper, so I kind of prepared for the treadmill. I thought that was a big deal, you know, to be in good physical shape, so, by running up this hillside, which was like a treadmill in that the further along you went, the steeper it got.\\n\\n And I did try to do some studying. I did try to do a little bit of studying on astronomy and space science. I think the most common thing people did at that time was read Aviation Week and those publications very carefully, because you wanted NASA to understand that you were very interested in what they were doing and you were interested to the extent that you had done whatever research was readily available." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned some of the physical aspects. For instance, you were training on the treadmill. I understand that there were some other physical tests that they performed and some of the astronaut candidates at the time were not very happy with those. Can you explain a little bit about those and what some of their purposes were?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that applied primarily to the Mercury people. I think the emphasis shifted a little bit from the physical to the mental, if that's a fair way of saying it. I mean, I think the unknowns of space were such that when the first Mercury candidates were selected, people were legitimately or otherwise concerned about their ability to withstand vibration, high temperature, isolation, darkness, heat, and so they tended to emphasize those. By the time it got to the second and the third group, where I was involved with it, as I said previously, with both those groups I don't remember anything that was too horrible physically. What specifically did you have in mind, and maybe it will spark my memory?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For instance, I read in one of your books you were talking about some of the Rorschach inkblot tests." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, well, the psychological aspects of it. Well, I think that—I don't know what I think. That's a complicated subject. I think psychiatry is certainly a legitimate branch of medicine, and I would not want to fly in space with a psychotic or a highly neurotic person. On the other hand, I would not give too much credence to odd results, and I thought that some of them were kind of amusing, like the blank piece of paper, which I think I said I saw nineteen polar bears fornicating in a snowbank. And the question then is, why nineteen? Just an odd number. That kind of appealed to me somehow. Those are the kinds of things you're driving at, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'd like to move on, then, to your astronaut training, once you were selected. What types of things did you do for your training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You mean once I got here to Houston?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know already that what they did was they regarded the spacecraft or the body of space knowledge like a big apple pie, and they sliced it up, and they gave each one of us in the astronaut office a slice, and they said, \"This is your slice.\" Mine happened to be the extra-vehicular operations and spacesuits and that kind of stuff. So in addition to having to learn a little bit about a lot of things, you had to learn a lot about those specific things, if that's what you're kind of driving at.\\n\\n Obviously, to fly in space you have to have a certain knowledge of all the various aspects. You have to know that you're talking to the ground via Australia and Spain and Goldstone. You don't have to know how those antennas work or what frequency they're on or how many volts or watts or amperes or whatnots, but in general you have to have a very wide background knowledge, I think, to do your job well. Then in addition to that, we represented the astronaut office in our own area of expertise, and that was more difficult, I think—at least for me I felt it was more difficult—because you were going to meetings and saying to the engineers, \"Yes, this is what we're going to do as a group of astronauts. This is what is going to be reasonable to ask us to do.\"\\n\\n I was trying to guess years in the future what thirty people, myself plus the other twenty-nine in the office—I was making commitments for that group of thirty people for actions we would or would not take a couple of years in the future, and that's kind of a scary responsibility.\\n\\n Did I answer that to your satisfaction or do you want to ask that question again, or do you want to go on to something different?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I want to know a little bit about what you did as far as your work in the pressure suit area, as well as the extravehicular activities." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the newer pressure suits—not in all cases, but in some cases, they were tailored to my specifications. In other words, they were fitted. They were custom-fitted to my dimensions and I was a test subject for—I remember one competition between the David Clark Company, who had made the Gemini suit, and the ILC, International Latex, who ultimately made the Apollo suit, and then there was a third contender; it escapes me right now who that was [Hamilton Standard]. But anyway, I was the test subject for these three competing designs, and my input was certainly not the overriding one, but was an important voice among that of the engineers in terms of fit and comfort and mobility and the other qualities that go into picking a pressure suit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you put these suits on and just make recommendations from how it felt in doing various tests, or did you work closely with the engineers in its development from the early stages?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes and yes. In the particular competition that I had in mind was to pick the Apollo suit, and it was more of a formal process where, you know, I wore each suit for so many different hours under identical conditions and went through identical comparative tests, but then once that suit was picked, and before that suit was picked back in the Gemini program, yes, I did work with the suit development people, and they tried out new ideas on me, and I gave them my feedback and recommendations to try to get a pressure suit that was as functional and comfortable as possible.\\n\\n Pressure suits are weird things. I mean, they have to do so much. They have to protect you from the temperature extremes, and they have to protect you from micrometeorites. So they have to be heavy, insulated, bulky, and then, even worse than that, they have to maintain, as their name implies, a pressure with a vacuum outside, and you've got to be pumped up like the tube in your car, and that makes them very rigid, and then all kinds of ingenious engineering devices come into play to take something which fundamentally wants to be immobile, wants not to change shape, like the tire on your car, and force it to have joints at the elbows and the wrists and the arms and the knees and the heads and the whatevers, so that you can move around and do whatever you have to do inside it while it still is maintaining this rigid pressure. So to engineer a suit properly is an extremely complicated task. You don't think so when you see some guy in a suit compared to the complexities of a rocket, but in miniature, the engineering that goes into a suit is quite complex." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Next, can I ask a little bit about the work you did on EVAs, or extra-vehicular activities, as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did generic work on EVAs, like what it was reasonable to expect people to do and not do, but most of the EVA training was very specifically done by the people on a particular flight. Going back, the first EVAs, of course, were on the Gemini program: Gemini 4, Ed White [Edward H. White II], and then Gemini 9, Gene [Eugene A.] Cernan. I was the third one, Gemini 10.\\n\\n Each of those was quite different, and different from the ones that followed, and the training that was done for those was done primarily by the guys involved specifically addressing the particular equipment they had and the particular objectives of their EVA and what they wanted to do. Ed White was just to get out and see what it was like. He had a small handheld maneuvering device and then come back in. With Cernan, I'm sure you know this from the records, but his thing was to put on a backpack and go trundling off, and that didn't work out too well.\\n\\n With me, there actually were three EVAs, all quite short...The first one was just to stand up in the open hatch and take some measurements of stars, and then the second one was to use this handheld maneuvering device similar to the Ed White device and use it to propel myself over to an Agena, retrieve an experiment package from the Agena, and then the third was just a hatch opening to dump all the extraneous equipment that we no longer needed. So I did have the three EVAs, and I think they're all pretty well documented, so rather than my trying to just go through all that again, if you have very specific questions about them, I'd be happy to try to answer them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I actually do have one about the first EVA that you conducted. I believe you mentioned you stood outside of the hatch and took some measurements of some stars and other bodies, but you mentioned in one of your books that you got something in your eyes and your eyes started watering. Did they ever find out what that was?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, they never did, and I tell you, the guy who would be the best source for you on that would be John [W.] Young, because John's still here, he's still immersed in the technical details. But the method that we used on Gemini to purge the system, to absorb the exhaled carbon dioxide from your body, were canisters of lithium hydroxide. The stale air went through the lithium hydroxide and it came out purified. Lithium hydroxide is kind of, I think, a granular sort of material, and our best guess was that somehow lithium hydroxide had escaped from some canister and had gotten into the nooks and crannies of the system in the pipes and that there was some triggering mechanism having to do with depressurizing the spacecraft that caused that lithium hydroxide to start billowing up. It went through, and it can be an irritant, and that's what it was.\\n\\n But to the best of my knowledge, they never established that beyond the shadow of a doubt. All I know is that I couldn't see and John couldn't either, and it was frightening for a moment, because the hatch on Gemini was not a very straightforward thing. In other words, you just didn't go \"clunk, latch.\" I mean it was—you had to look up, and there were little levers and whichnots that had to be fiddled with, and then you had to make sure that all your hoses and stuff were not going to get in the way, and then you had to come down in a certain way and you had to get your body underneath, your knees underneath the instrument panel and kind of ratchet your body down, and it was a tight fit. So it was the kind of stuff that, with practice, you found it became easy to do, but it was visually dependent and to try to do all that by feel rather than—it wasn't something you ever had trained to do or thought you would have to be doing anything by feel [alone].\\n\\n So I could see well enough to do that after a couple of minutes, this thing cleared up, but, you know, the idea of being out there blind was, even though I was only half out, the problem was this goddamned hatch was opened and, as I say, it needed some visual help to get it closed again. So that's about all I can say about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like it would be frightening." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To the best of your knowledge, did anybody else have the same [unclear]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. To the best of my knowledge, that was an isolated incident. No one every had eye problems, and they probably would have written it off as the two of us were imagining it or maybe it was just sweat in our eyes, except it happened to both of us simultaneously and slightly different. I don't remember the—again, you should talk to John, but the air I was breathing had gone through a process a little different from the air he was breathing. I was getting mine through an umbilical cord, he was not, and yet at the same time, this thing overtook both of us. So it was kind of weird, and, as I say, the best guess as far as I can recall, and it was never improved on, was that it was some kind of lithium hydroxide that had escaped. Maybe it had escaped from that particular canister that was installed at the time. Maybe it had escaped months earlier at the factory and, as I say, somehow was in the little crannies and crevices of the system and then somehow had been activated by the depressurization. I don't know. But ask John. He might know more about it than I do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "My next question concerns your second EVA that you mentioned. You went out to the Agena to retrieve an experiment package. Can I ask you primarily some of the challenges and problems that you encountered while doing that imaging?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the fundamental problem was, I guess, stupidity. We had not, in our designs, really thought through what happens to objects that bang together in weightlessness. Unfortunately, on this tape recorder I can't—I have to go through some body manipulations to explain what I mean, but maybe you can reconstruct. This chair is a one-dimensional replica of space. If I push against this table, you can see what happens: right away my body swivels. If I push this way, it swivels the other way. That's no problem because I'm anchored to the floor, and I can just swivel back and forth, it's very simple. But now, in space, where there's no anchoring, you not only rotate this way and call that yaw, you rotate in pitch, and you rotate in roll. So if I touch that table, I go off in some totally three-dimensional random direction. So as soon as I start doing that, I've got to stop, and so I grab, and then I go swinging back the other way with greater force, and I need greater force to stop that. Very soon you're just out of control.\\n\\n I say \"stupidity\" because we had really not thought that through as well as we should. By the time we got to Gemini Twelve with Buzz [Edwin E.] Aldrin [Jr.], there were handholds and work stations. On the Shuttle, you see it in space. I mean, they don't go out without being anchored in two or three different ways. But we were stupid; we hadn't thought of that. So, the point is, I was going over to this Agena, propelling myself with this dorky little gun, which in itself was a very difficult thing because, again, going back to the pitch, roll, yaw, if you did not have a gun aligned absolutely through your center of your body, if you were off a little bit, then when you squirted the gun, instead of going that way, you would not only go that way, but you would start twisting and turning. You see what I'm saying?\\n\\n So anyhow, I was using this little gun to get over to something, to grab something that had not been designed to be grabbed, and I'm in this bulky suit that I described before, it doesn't want to bend too well, I'm immobilized. I'm having a tough time as I'm going along, pitch, rolling, and yawing, trying to keep this dorky little gun through the center of mass of my body, and then I arrive at this goddamned Agena, which is not meant to be grabbed, and I've got to grab it. So, the first time I grabbed it, I went to the end of it, and it had a docking collar. Docking collars are built to be nice and smooth so that the probe that goes into them will be forced into them. They have smooth lips and edges on them, and that's what I was grabbing.\\n\\n Well, I grabbed the docking collar. It wasn't meant to be grabbed, bulky glove, and my momentum is still carrying me along, so I just slipped, and as I went by, then I went cartwheeling ass over teakettle, up and around and about, until I came to the end of my tether, and then it swung me in a great big arc. So, again, unfortunately, on the tape recorder I can't wave my arms and show you where all these objects were, but Gemini was down below to my left, the Agena was up above to my right, and I'm off somewhere sashaying around between the two, and then finally I got the gun out and got it under control and came back.\\n\\n I went back to the cockpit, and then John Young got a little bit closer to the Agena the second time, and when I went over to it the second time I was able to get my hand down inside a recess between the main body of the Agena and the docking collar where there were some wires, and grab some wires, and then I was able to get the experiment package off and so on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds very difficult." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was different. I mean, it was not clean analytical engineering. I mean, it was more acrobatics and a guy on a trapeze and stuff that you don't think about in the space program. But, as I say, the fundamental thing was stupidity. It was that if we'd really given it more thought, we would have said, \"Well, when you get over there what are you going to grab? And then what are you going to grab it with, which hand? How are you going to stabilize it? Where are you going to put your hand and your feet, and what's going to hold you in place? How are you going to go about doing this?\" And then maybe the answer to that would have been, \"Well, you can't. It's just not possible to do it,\" which would not have been a good answer from my point of view, because I wanted to go EVA. I wanted to do that thing. Or maybe the answer would have been, \"Hey, you get Lockheed to install a couple of handholds on the front end of that Agena,\" and then it would have been a relatively simple thing. But we didn't think of it, or if we thought of it, maybe we thought that would cause the whole [EVA] idea to be canceled. Maybe that's what was the deep psychological root cause of our stupidity. I don't know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand now they do a lot of EVA training in an underwater tank." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. No, they started that during Gemini, but later on. For Gemini 10, there was no underwater training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was just going to ask you, then, what type of training did you have?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we had the thing that I called the \"slippery table.\" It was a highly polished metal surface about the size of a boxing ring, it was in one of these buildings around here, and then on it was something that looked roughly like a floor waxer, and then you stood on the floor waxer. The gimmick was that air was blown in so that the friction between the floor waxer and the surface was as close to zero as possible so that when you stood with your gun, your little maneuvering unit, and squirted air out, you could move across the boxing ring.\\n\\n So what you could do with that thing was you could move forward and aft, left and right. That's two motions, or four motions, if you want to call it that. Call it move forward, one, back is two, left is three, right is four. So you've got those four things you can do. And then as you went, you could swivel, you could rotate, you could yaw. So you could yaw left, that would be five, and yaw right, that would be six. So you had those six things that you could do, but you could not pitch up or down, so you're missing seven and eight, and you couldn't roll left or right, so you're missing nine and ten. Oh, you couldn't go up or down, so you're missing eleven and twelve.\\n\\n So, of the twelve things that you can do in space, and those are the only twelve things you can really do, you've got six—they call them \"degrees of freedom,\" if you want to get technical. So you've got the three translational degrees you can move forward, backward, left, right, up and down, and then you've got the three rotational. You can pitch, roll, and yaw, two ways. Of those twelve options on the table, you could just practice six of them. So it wasn't a great simulation, but that was the source of our training, that was the best we could do.\\n\\n Then we also did zero-G airplane, but it is not too helpful for tasks like that, because, as you know, it can only generate periods of something like twenty-eight seconds at a time, and you can't really learn too much twenty-eight—as a matter of fact, the zero-G airplane was probably trying to tell us something that we weren't smart enough to understand, and that was inside the zero-G airplane for those twenty-eight seconds of weightlessness, we were frantically trying to get all these tasks done, and in the process we were banging around and moving rapidly left, right, up, down, we were rotating, and it was kind of pandemonium, and we thought that these little jigging motions were in part caused by inaccuracies in the trajectory of the airplane, that the airplane was maybe throwing us off a little bit left, right, up, down. So that instead of being everything nice and smooth and calm inside for that twenty-eight seconds, your training sessions tended to be twenty-eight seconds of kind of spastic slashing around.\\n\\n Well, it turns out that maybe that guy was flying that airplane perfectly and that this spasticity, if you want to call it that, was caused by what I was describing earlier, which was this reaction to every little motion. To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So what we were seeing, we should have paid maybe a little more attention and said, \"You know, we're going to be banging around up there to the extent that we need some help in terms of tethers, lanyards, handholds, footholds, stickum on the knees of our suit, I don't know what.\" But those were the things that we didn't really think of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's interesting. And I'd like to go back to how you were selected for a crew. I understand that you were selected as part of the back-up crew for Gemini 7." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell me a little bit about the selection process?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I really cannot. I mean, Deke [Donald K.] Slayton and his assistant, probably, George Abbey, could tell you a lot more about that than I can. But, you know, you were just picked. I suspected that the fact that I knew Frank Borman, he and I were classmates at the test pilot school, Ed White and I were classmates at West Point, so for Gemini 7, you had Borman the commander of the prime crew, and then I was paired with Ed White on the back-up, you know, that might have had something to do with it. But on the other hand, it could have had absolutely nothing to do with it. I really don't know. I mean, all I know is I was tapped. No one ever told me, \"You were picked because of A, B, or C.\" I really don't know.\\n\\n I think there was probably—I hate to say this, but there might have been a clique within a clique in the sense that I think that people who were test pilots tended to maybe band together a little bit more because at that point we were starting to get in non-test pilot astronauts, and I think there might have been a little snobbishness, you might say, or a clique within a clique, where the test pilots tended to favor other test pilots. There could have been a clique within a clique within a clique where the Air Force people tended to favor Air Force and the Navy tended to favor Navy, but I don't know those things. Those are just wild speculations, and all I know is I never was given any inkling as to why I was ever picked for anything. I was just picked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can I ask you, then, a little bit about your training for Gemini 7 and what types of things you did to prepare for that mission?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Gemini 7. Well, I did all the wonderful things you read about in all the training manuals and all the stuff you've gotten in answers from other people. Maybe you ought to ask that differently. What are you driving at specifically?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don't have any specifics. I do know that it was the longest mission at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, you mean because of the—well, Gemini 7 was fourteen days, and I think there were eleven different experiments or maybe eleven different medical experiments alone. There were a lot of different experiments in that. The doctors were very worried about the metabolism, what would happen to the body under—and they wanted to measure every ounce of food you ate before the flight, during the flight, and so on. The protocols for the medical experiments were quite complicated, and we felt sort of like guinea pigs rather than pilots. But we did the things that crews always do. I mean, we went to the factory, and we spent a lot of time up at McDonald-Douglas in St. Louis, and we spent an awful lot of time in the simulator, as much time as we could. We did the normal training stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand that there is some sort of unwritten system where, if you were assigned to a back-up crew for a particular mission, you skipped a few [unclear]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I call it \"the knit one, pearl two.\" So, in other words, if you were back-up for Gemini 7, that was your knit one, you would pearl 8 and 9, and then you would become prime on 10. There were exceptions to that, but I think in general that's the way it worked on both Gemini and Apollo, so that that is true, that from the day that I got assigned to Gemini 7, I was really kind of looking forward to Gemini 10 and trying to figure out what kind of a flight it would be and whether it would be a space walk, and the duration of the flight and what kind of rendezvous. Rendezvous was the biggest thing on Gemini, and so forth and so on. Yes, that was true." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Interesting. Can I ask you if your training for Gemini 7 prepared you a lot for the mission on Gemini 10? Were there similarities in your training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course, a Gemini spacecraft is a Gemini spacecraft is a Gemini spacecraft. There were variations. There were tailored pieces of equipment for each flight, but by learning the fundamental aspects of the Titan-II booster and the Gemini spacecraft, by learning those on Gemini 7, all that knowledge transferred over to Gemini 10. On the other hand, there were very specific parts of Gemini 10 that were quite different from Gemini 7, having to do with rendezvous, which was the most complicated part of the flight, and the space walk, the EVA, which was the second.\\n\\n Can we take a quick break? [Tape recorder turned off.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think—this is just off the record—I'll just try and talk about your rendezvous and docking and also on your missions, on the training on Apollo, both on the [unclear] performance crew and then also to Apollo 11, just your recommendations, what you consider your accomplishments and maybe the challenges have been throughout your career." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, God, I don't have any idea about those things, but ask away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As specific as you can get, and you probably, rather than—anyway, ask." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Thank you very much. My next question for you is, I know that on Gemini 10 you, along with John Young, performed one of the first few rendezvous and docking missions. Can you tell me a little bit about the complexities of it and what types of training and classes you took to prepare you for that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were a couple of rendezvous on Gemini 10, and one of them was a relatively straightforward rendezvous, in that the Agena—let me back up. We rendezvoused with two different Agenas: our own Agena, call it Agena 10, and then a dead, inert Agena that had been used by the Gemini 8 flight, that had been up in the sky for a couple of months just sitting there. These Agenas were different in two respects. Agena 10 we could ask questions and it would answer. It had a transponder. So we could ask it, \"How far away are you?\" and it would tell us. The Gemini 8 Agena had dead batteries. Its transponder could not reply. So when we asked it questions, it would not answer. This meant that we could not find out how far away from the Agena we were. We had to just deduce our range by the apparent size of the Agena or the actual size. As it got bigger and bigger in our window, then we knew we were getting closer, but that we had to measure or compute our distance by optical rather than radar means, and this was the first time this had been done, I think, and it made that second rendezvous more difficult, and it involved a lot of measurements on my part with a sextant.\\n\\n So I would look through this instrument, and then I would, by seeing how big it appeared, I would then look on a chart and say how far away we were, and then by measuring how far away we were over a period of time, I could then calculate our closing rate, which we then compared with a closing rate chart to say, \"Whoa, we're closing too fast,\" or, \"Oh, we're not closing fast enough.\" So the fact that this Gemini 8 Agena would not talk to us via transponder made our life more complicated during the rendezvous." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can I ask you, I think you were given a call name, so to speak, by Mr. Young, and I think it was in connection with your rendezvous and docking. May I ask you about what that was, and a little bit about it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. Tell me. What are you driving at?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I read in one of your books that you were called \"Magellan\" because of your [unclear]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, Magellan. I forgot about that. Yes. Oh, yes. Well, see, there's so many aspects to this. The calculations which placed the Agena in one part of the sky and us, the Gemini, in another part of the sky, and the calculations that brought us closer and closer together, this navigating, if you will, had heretofore been done by the big computers on the ground, and the gimmick on Gemini 10 was that we were going to prove that we could be autonomous, that we could, on board, make all the calculations that the ground normally made to bring our little part of the sky closer and closer to the Agenas.\\n\\n Some of the people who were working in the Guidance and Control Division at the time thought that that was a wonderful thing to demonstrate, and they thought that the flight of Gemini 10 should be devoted exclusively to demonstrating various new navigational techniques, and they wanted to cancel space walks and anything extraneous to their navigational interest. We, the crew, on the other hand thought that a lot of this was baloney, that the things that they wanted us to investigate would never be used on Apollo, would never be applicable, and were technological dead ends that were perhaps useful for some engineer to give a paper at a symposium, but that really wasn't contributing much at all. So we kind of had a little tension between us.\\n\\n These navigational engineers would say things like, \"My God, do you realize you're like Magellan, out of sight of land for the first time in history! You're going to be up there all by yourself doing your navigating! You'll be all by yourself!\" I didn't get it. I mean, I didn't buy it.\\n\\n But anyway, somewhere along the line, John Young, who has a very wry sense of humor, started referring to me as Magellan because of that. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think that's an interesting story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Moving on from Gemini, I'd like to work into Apollo and just ask you a little bit about your transition from Gemini to Apollo—I know that Apollo had started before Gemini was completed—and how you found yourself within the transition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I found some things the Gemini people were doing just because they were important to their own ego or amusement or professional development, and I just gave you an example of some of the navigational stuff that the Guidance and Control [Division], Gemini people, were pursuing that wasn't really relevant to going to the moon and coming back, but by and large, I think the—there was a tension between Gemini and Apollo. I think the Apollo people I would fault a little more than the Gemini people in the sense that a lot of the Apollo engineers tended to think that they had more of the answers than they really did, and they kind of looked upon Gemini as little guys playing around with their toys over in the corner but that, \"Hey, we on Apollo know how it really should be done or is going to be done,\" that they kind of looked down their noses at some of the Geminis.\\n\\n But I thought the Gemini program, as it was advertised to be, truly was very useful in bridging the gap between Mercury and Apollo, that it was a bridge and that we learned things about rendezvous and other aspects, long-duration space walking, that were very helpful to Apollo. The two programs did have to be developed in parallel. You couldn't wait until Gemini was finished before you began work on Apollo, so Apollo did have to go off on its own way in some regards. It couldn't wait for Gemini answers. But the Gemini program was a little jewel, I thought, and the people who worked on Gemini, particularly the workers and the managers in St. Louis working for McDonnell, I thought, were superb, and when you transitioned from St. Louis to Los Angeles and you went from McDonnell to North American, I think the workers and the managers out there suffered somewhat by comparison. I think there was an arrogance initially in Los Angeles.\n\nI think there was not the dedication to the extremely strong work ethic. I think there was a—I hate to be prejudicial against California, but I think there was kind of a \"West Coast-ism\" out there. They outgrew it, they got a lot better, but initially I think particularly the West Coast parts of Apollo could have paid closer attention to Gemini and profited therefrom." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In what sorts of things do you think they could have profited from Gemini?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, building a good spacecraft instead of worrying about whether you're going to get your camper up into the High Sierras for the weekend." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And was that the type of attitude that was pervasive among the [unclear]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wouldn't say pervasive, but it was certainly there. It was certainly there. There was a \"we know better\" kind of an arrogant attitude on the part of some of the managers, and it was a laid back, \"Well, we'll get it done one way or the other sometime somehow\" attitude on the part of some of the workers…not compared, say, to…the United Auto Workers or a production line of automobiles or manufacturing radios or anything like that. I'm comparing it very specifically to those McDonnell people who were extraordinarily dedicated and very highly skilled." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can I ask you, then, going back to the Gemini program and reflecting upon it, what types of things do you think that the program itself learned? You mentioned, for instance, rendezvous." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well…Gemini [wa]s what the propaganda said. It was rendezvous, long duration, and EVA, and those really were the things. I think, of the three, the rendezvous was the most important because the Apollo scheme, of course, was contingent upon getting the LEM back up from the surface of the moon and rendezvousing with the command module. So that was very much in the back of our mind. You've got these two vehicles—I'm talking now in the mid-sixties when no one had been anywhere near the moon, we had this image of, \"Hey, a couple of years from now a quarter of a million miles away, see, you're going to have these two vehicles sixty miles from each other on the back side of the moon where you can't talk to them, trying to get together.\" And that was a scary idea, and it required an awful lot of thought and testing and practice, and that was done primarily through Gemini." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Moving along and going back to what you mentioned about the Apollo Program in its early stages, what types of things and problems occurred? We know about what happened with the Apollo 204 fire, but were there other events as well? Can you talk a little bit about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Have you got something in mind? Are you leading me in some specific direction? Because I'm not sure that I know a good answer to that. I mean, there are so many things. It's been so long and there were so many things, it was such a large and complicated program, but the wonder to me was—well, one wonder to me was that no Saturn V rocket ever blew up. I mean, that just surprised the pee-Willie—I don't know what to say about it, I can't put a nice word on it, but it really surprised me. I thought certainly with the Saturn 1, the 1B, and the Saturn V, surely one of those suckers was going to blow up, as it did in the Russian program, their moon rocket. They had horrible problems with the Russian moon rocket, and I'm not that surprised. When you have gigantic machines churning away at extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures, it's a real tribute to the engineering of [Wernher] von Braun's people, primarily." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think you were assigned in the beginning of the Apollo program to Frank Borman's crew." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I believe that was going to be the second Apollo mission. Is that right? It seemed a little confusing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm not sure. The sequence of events kind of got shifted around. When I was first assigned to the Borman crew, I don't think we were going to be the second manned Apollo. We were going to be an extremely high-altitude flight, huge elliptical orbit way out thousands of miles from the Earth, but in orbit around the Earth, and I think we were maybe the third or the fourth manned flight. Then things got rejuggled and shifted, and [James A.] McDivitt's crew with the LEM got transposed with Borman's crew without the LEM. So Borman's crew ended up being the second, but I think at the time we were maybe the fourth. I'm not sure if that's what you were asking. Anyway, that's all in the records, that's all in the documents. What did you want me to say about them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to then ask you what types of training did you perform to get ready for the Apollo mission, since it was so different from Gemini." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, again, more of the same, just everything that everyone is telling you. I spent a lot of time at the factory. We started to become specialized.\\n\\n I'm getting a little out of sequence. At some stage in the Apollo Program, astronauts started becoming more specialized, and they became command module specialists or lunar module specialists or what have you, but on Apollo 8 we didn't have a lunar module, so we spent a lot of time out in Downey with North American-Rockwell, we spent a lot of time in the simulators, which were a problem in the early Apollo missions, because the simulators were not working very well. In some ways it's easier to build a spacecraft than it is to build a simulator to imitate a spacecraft, and the development of the simulator has lagged behind that of the space hardware, and that was a problem for us training. We spent long hours, flew around like crazy from one place to another, had our wives angry at us because we weren't home, you know, that kind of stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think at that time you were diagnosed with a problem with your back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I had a disc come loose between two cervical vertebrae, and I had to have an operation where they take a little chunk of bone out of your hip and fuse two discs together. That kicked me off the crew and grounded me for a couple of months, and then when I returned to the selection pool, I guess you would call it, I happened to come along about the time for Apollo 11. So, let's see. The knit-one-pearl-two theory would have said—I wasn't back-up. I would have been—I don't know. Anyway, I ended up on 11." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Almost a fortunate turn of events." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "…That's an interesting question, the historical importance of Apollo 8 versus Apollo 11. To summarize that, I think Apollo 8 was about leaving and Apollo 11 was about arriving, leaving Earth and arriving at the moon. As you look back 100 years from now, which is more important, the idea that people left their home planet or the idea that people arrived at their nearby satellite? I'm not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more significance than Apollo 11, even though today we regard Apollo 11 as being the showpiece and the zenith of the Apollo Program, rightfully so, because that was President [John F.] Kennedy's mandate, to, as he said, land a man on the moon, not two or not a woman, but just a man on the moon. So that was the focus, and when that was done by Apollo 11, then that naturally put Apollo 11 up on a pedestal, but, as I say, 100 years from now, historians may say Apollo 8 is more significant; it's more significant to leave than it is to arrive. That's all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think that's a very interesting way of describing it. I'd like to go back a little bit to Apollo 8. I believe you served as Capcom on that flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess it would be the first Capcom to have told the crew that they were ready to go for TLI [Translunar Injection]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I can remember at the time thinking, \"Jeez, there's got to be a better way of saying this,\" but we had our technical jargon, and so I said, \"Apollo 8, you're go for TLI.\" If, again, 100 years from now you say you've got a situation where a guy with a radio transmitter in his hand is going to tell the first three human beings they can leave the gravitational field of Earth, what is he going to say? He's going to say something like—he's going to invoke Christopher Columbus or a primordial reptile coming up out of the swamps onto dry land for the first time, or he's going to go back through the sweep of history and say something very, very meaningful, and instead he says, \"What? Say what? You're go for TLI? Jesus! I mean, there has to be a better way, don't you think, of saying that?\" [Laughter] Yet that was our technical jargon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was the feeling in Mission Control at the time when they were able to do that, when you relayed that information to them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, space flight is such that you're hardly ever—not until the thing splashes on the water and the parachute collapse around it, not until them are you allowed the luxury of relaxing. So the fact that it had done this wonderful thing, that it had gotten going to escape velocity, that it was leaving the Earth, you couldn't sit back and pat yourself on the head and say, \"Isn't that wonderful. We've done that thing.\" I mean, this is just another little link in the chain. So your whole attitude is looking forward, \"Jesus, what next?\" I won't say that it added to the feeling of tension or apprehension, but it certainly did not diminish it, the fact that it was on its way. \"Oh, my God, it's on its way. We can't just bring it back. It's got to go do its thing.\" So I think how to put that in perspective, it was just a feeling of a greater awareness of the larger responsibility that this flight, the chunk that they had bitten off, that we were actually leaving and going. You know, it was venturing off into a new area. It was scary in that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds quite significant as well. You were a very big part of history in that respect." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'd like to move on a little bit to Apollo 11. I have so many questions I'd like to ask you, although I'm sure you've been asked everything that can possibly be asked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so, but you could still fool me. I'm here to be tricked. Go ahead and try." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, you're not here to be tricked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I apologize in advance if I'm too repetitive, but I'd like also to use this as an opportunity for you to talk about some things that maybe you feel haven't been talked about before and that maybe are relevant to [unclear]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. Go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But my first question is, what was training like, knowing that you perhaps were going to be the first crew to land on the moon?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I tend to compare Apollo 11 with Gemini 10 because those are the two flights that I made, and I put Gemini 10 in the context of being certainly an important event, but sort of like an important sporting event, maybe, say like a championship middle-weight fight or something like that. It was important, but there it was.\\n\\n Apollo 11, on the other hand, was taken out of the sporting event category and put in the category of not even a national event, whereas Gemini may have been more national, Apollo could have international implications, and it was obviously—it sounds trite and hackneyed, but it was a historical milestone. It was of importance to the people of the world, I think, whereas I don't think Gemini necessarily was, not to all people in the world. I mean, certain people either didn't know about it or didn't care about going to the moon, but it was of some importance to people in virtually every little corner of the globe, and I felt that very keenly, and I felt that in a negative sense as well as a positive. The negative was, hey, don't screw it up. I mean, I felt a tremendous feeling of, you know, I could make some stupid little mistake and just make the whole program look ridiculous in the eyes of the whole globe. So I felt a heightened feeling of responsibility and worry because of the responsibility. I guess that's how I felt about the training of Apollo 11." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like you also had a heck of a lot of simulator time. Did you find that you spent most days in preparation in the simulator or were you doing other activities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, all the above. You do the usual thing. You go to the Cape for various reasons. You go to the factory for various reasons. You go get your pressure suit done. There are simulators here in Houston and at the Cape. At the Cape, you do a lot of testing inside the actual spacecraft. Here in Houston, you go to a lot of meetings on your flight and how you're going to accomplish this and how the flight plan is going to be written up and so on. But then, as you point out, the simulator is probably the backbone of your training, and there are simulators in Houston, simulators in the Cape, and we spent as much time as we possibly could in both places in the simulators, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you feel that you were, in a sense, working very closely with your crew and working as a team and tracking a little bit more than you had in the past?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes and no. Actually, on Apollo 11, no, there was not the unified training that there had been on previous flights involving only one spacecraft, because Neil [A. Armstrong] and Buzz were in the LM for extended periods of time while I was in the command module by myself for extended periods of time. So our training was bifurcated, if you will, and I spent hours and hours by myself doing my aspect of training. They spent hours and hours by themselves. It was true, we came together as a threesome, and there were certain aspects of our training, the launch and the recovery and so on, that we did as a group of three, but I had the feeling I spent more time away from them than with them during the latter phases especially of Apollo training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And can I ask you how you felt about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I feel fine about it. I don't have any little hidden agenda or hidden feelings about Apollo 11. It's one of the questions I get asked a million times, \"God, you got so close to the moon and you didn't land. Doesn't that really bug you?\" It really does not. I honestly felt really privileged to be on Apollo 11, to have one of those three seats. I mean, there were guys in the astronaut office who would have cut my throat ear to ear to have one of those three seats. I was very pleased to have one of those three. Did I have the best of the three? No. But was I pleased with the one I had? Yes! And I have no feelings of frustration or rancor or whatever. I'm very, very happy about the whole thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In fact, I did read in one of your books, you said that you felt such a connection with the command module itself that you almost had a feeling to write on it. Can you talk about how you felt in interacting with this is your home around [unclear]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, my happy little home, Command Module 107. I know I said bad things earlier about the workers and the people out in Downey, California, who assembled it. Now I should say some good things about them, because as time went on, those command modules got better and better and better, and by the time they shipped 107, I mean, it was a wonderful machine in really superb condition, and I thank them for it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find that you actually had an attachment to it in a certain respect?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I think you do get attached to—pilots get attached to airplanes, I know that. I have at home an oil painting of an F-86, Serial Number 525231, and that's my number. I mean, I flew that airplane for a couple of years. I flew it from California through Greenland and Iceland, to Europe, I was in a gunnery meet, won a gunnery trophy flying it. I use that as my bank PIN number. Don't tell anybody that. [Laughter] So I think it is very true that pilots do get attached to pieces of machinery, and in that sense, I did get attached to Command Module 107. Maybe I'll use that for my PIN number." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can I ask you a little bit about events surrounding Apollo 11? I guess after your launch, I think you referred something to the effect of the Russians putting something around the moon, and I think it was eventually called Lunar 15, if I'm not mistaken. They mention in some of the books that I've read something to the effect that Mission Control was really worried about how it might interfere with your mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. I think that was baloney. I mean, the chances of one object hitting another launched from two different parts of the Earth going in two different, separate trajectories around the moon, different angles, time phasing, one thing and another, the chances of those two machines colliding are much less than the chances of one of the two of them getting hit by an asteroid, for example, and I don't remember anybody getting all in a swivet because we were going to get hit by an asteroid or meteorite or whatever. So I think it was a public relations or a political necessity, perhaps, to voice some concern about collisions. I think they sent—didn't they send Borman to Russia or something to work out details? You know, that was all pretty much, from a technical point of view, eyewash." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'd like to ask you a little bit about once you returned from Apollo 11, because I'd like to talk to you more about Apollo 11 itself. It seems so well documented that [unclear]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes. Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But I'd like to ask you about what happened during your—I guess it would be your landing, recovery, once you got into your BIG garments, the Biological Isolation Garments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And into the mobile quarantine facility. What was it like to go through that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, for one thing, I always felt like that BIG business and the recovery business was a huge gap in the planning for Apollo. Now, I don't know how you would do it any differently. I certainly couldn't improve on it, but, on the one hand, you've got rooms full of scientists saying, \"We're not going to have one germ brought back from the moon. We don't think there are any germs up there, but should there be, we ain't gonna expose the population of the Earth to these germs.\" So they have all these procedures.\\n\\n But then look at it this way. Suppose there were germs on the moon. There are germs on the moon, and they come back with Aldrin and Armstrong on their clothing, in their lungs, whatever, all these germs get breathed out. The command module is full of lunar germs. The command module lands in the Pacific Ocean, and what do they do? They open the hatch—you've got to open the hatch—and all the damned germs come out, right? They contaminate the whole Pacific Ocean! Then you're got these three guys in there. There's stuff on these suits, these BIGs. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. It was a huge flaw in the planning.\\n\\n But anyway, getting back to the BIGs, they had no ventilation system. They are extremely hot. That was a hot day out there, and we were warm anyway. So I can remember thinking—we got out of the command module in the BIG, no problem. We got into the raft, had a little trouble getting the door closed on the command module, and I went back and closed the door. Then the helicopter picked us up, and then we had to go back to the carrier, and all this time we're getting hotter and hotter. I don't know about the other two guys, but I'm getting hotter and hotter, and I can remember thinking, \"I'm giving these guys thirty seconds, I'm getting out of this goddamned suit. I don't care how many bugs there are coming with me,\" you know. And that was about it. I was getting to the end of my tolerance, thermal tolerance. My visor was all sweated up. I couldn't see where I was going. We got out of the helicopter, could se[nse] hordes of people. I'm waving and stumbling along. I don't know where I'm going, can't see, hot, tired. I wasn't ticked off; I was very pleased.\\n\\n But anyway, then they got us inside the house trailer, the MQF…and they closed the door, and then we got all our germs out inside it, then it was okay from then on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I heard you mention something about keeping the mice healthy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the whole thing with the LRL, Lunar Receiving Laboratory, they had a colony of I don't know how many white mice, and they exposed them to the moon rocks and to us. Had there been some strange malady, maybe these mice's grandparents had some genetic defect or something, I don't know, but had the mice all sickened, jeez, I hate to thing about it. We'd be in that building today. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can I ask what it was like in the MQF, Mobile Quarantine Facility, once you were transferred?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was fine. I mean, it was a happy little home. These people are there. There were three of us plus two. We had the doctor and the engineer, John [Hirasaki]...Anyway, Bill Carpentier was the physician and John [Hirasaki]…Anyway, we were there, five people happy as clams to be in a confined space. It's not that confined. It's like living in a trailer for—we were in it for, I don't know, a day? That's about all. So it was no problem. We had gin on board, had steaks. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There you go. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What the hell? I could have stayed in there a lot longer. That was fine. And a hot shower. That was the main thing, really, because I love hot showers, and, of course, there's not one on the command module. I was grubby and glad to be back. Hot shower, gin, and steak. Wow!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's all a man can ask for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Now, if someone had said to me, \"You can have either a hot shower or a gin martini or a steak,\" it would have been easy to say, \"I don't want the steak.\" But the choice between the gin martini and the hot shower, I don't know what I would have done. It would have been close, very close." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Then I think you proceeded on to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory here in Houston?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "LRL, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can I ask how long did you stay there and what types of things -" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I believe the rule was—we had to be in isolation, I believe, twenty-one days from the time we left the moon. So if you subtract the transit time back and the MQF time—I just don't remember anymore, but it seems like my numbers must be wrong, because I have the feeling we spent eight or nine days in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. It must have been longer than that, or maybe I don't remember the quarantine period, but I want to say there was a twenty- or twenty-one day quarantine, but it doesn't seem—I don't know. I've forgotten." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "From what I've read, they said twenty-one days from the time of the lunar landing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That sounds like what I just said, but somehow—because then from that you subtract four days and another five. So that would have been sixteen days in the LRL. It doesn't seem like it was that long. Maybe it was. But again, it was fine. No problem. We had comfortable rooms, good food. We had to write post-flight reports anyway, so it wasn't as if some horrible injustice had been done to us or anything like that. It was fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It seems that after that, I'm sure you were swamped with press conferences and photo opportunities and a trip around the world to meet various dignitaries." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All those things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was that like, and how did that impact your work as well as your outlook on what you had done?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know. That's an interesting question, but I don't know the answer. Well, let me see. In the first place, everything worked on Apollo 11 so extraordinarily well that we didn't really have any embarrassments or anything to conceal from public scrutiny or anything to worry about, so it was very easy in terms of press conferences or talking to people. How did it go? Well, fine. Everything was great. So that part of it, it was very easy that way.\\n\\n On the other hand, it does get tiresome. I get very tired, not so much anymore because—well, for a whole variety of reasons, but in those days I got tired of being asked the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And that's hard to explain, because you can see it in people's faces. They meet this guy who just came back from the moon, just came back last week or last year or last decade, and it doesn't matter too much. They've never met anybody that's gone to the moon before, and they say, \"What was it like?\" you know, all excited, and the guy says, \"Oh, God. It was great, terrific.\" You can tell that the guy is bored out of his skull, and that person must think—you can see it in their eyes, \"What kind of a person is this person? He's just come back from the moon. He's not even excited about it?\" It isn't the fact that he's not excited about it, it's the fact that he's been asked that same question ten million times and he can't stand it anymore. It's hard to explain to people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. But the trip around the world was very, very interesting. I think all of us felt—I certainly did—very honored and fortunate that they put a whole big airplane at our disposal, the back-up Air Force One, a big Boeing 707 that had a whole crew. There were three of us and our three wives, some people from NASA Headquarters, Julian Scheer, the public affairs guy, and some others. It was a small and friendly and compatible group. We got to go places and do things that normal people are not privileged to do, and it was a privilege.\\n\\n It was very tiring. I don't know, there's something about being on edge and having to go through receiving lines and remember people's names, and meeting kings and queens, and making speeches, and flying all night and then doing it again the next day, there's something very tiring about that. I mean, I was physically ground down by the end of—I think it was twenty-eight cities in thirty-three days, or thirty-three cities in twenty-eight days, or something like that, but by the end of it I was very tired. But on the other hand, I couldn't criticize five minutes of it. It was a wonderful opportunity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It seems that after that people wanted to name so many things after you, and you had your signatures just written out by a machine, I think, through a NASA office, even. One question comes to mind, going back to Apollo 11. Right at the time of the launch, they came up with the idea of having a plaque put on the LM with everybody's name on it. I heard that you didn't know about that, that your name had been signed to it. Is that true?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, the machine you're talking about, called the Autopen, and the astronaut office certainly had them, and if you check the signatures on that plaque, \"We came in peace for all mankind,\" you'll find that the three of ours—I don't know about Richard Nixon's, but the three of ours are autopenned. What we knew about it and didn't know about it, my recollection's not too crisp about it. I recall that we knew something, there was going to be some kind of plaque, and they were kicking around what it should say. Now, I remember that after the landing, I can remember talking to Julian Scheer about it. Julian's a wonderful guy. Are you going to talk to him? Is he on your list of people to talk to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'd like to add him to it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You should. You should. He's a wonderful guy. He has a wonderful sense of humor, and he was in the middle of this from a PR point of view. I can remember Julian was one of the guys who worked out the wording, \"Here men from Planet Earth landed and when we came, blah, blah, blah, July of 1969 A.D., we came in peace for all mankind.\" I think Julian wrote that, or one of his people did, and then he had to clear it with the White House. He was over there talking to somebody on the Nixon staff, and they said, \"Well, I don't see anything in there about God. You know the President's big on God.\" [Laughter] So you ought to ask Julian about that.\\n\\n But before the flight, see, we were so beset with technical details, that if someone had said, \"Hey, we're going to put a plaque on the LM,\" we'd have said, \"Fine.\"\\n\\n \"It's going to have your name on it.\"\\n\\n \"Fine.\"\\n\\n \"It's going to say this.\"\\n\\n \"Fine. I don't give a damn. Give me something important.\"\\n\\n So even though it may seem important from a historical or public affairs point of view, it did not loom large. [Its wording couldn't kill us.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of my questions for you is going to be to ask you if you have any ideas of other people that we can interview and people that you think are important to the history of the—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'd sure put Julian on the list. Off the top of my head, he's the only one I can think of. You would know better than I, I think. I don't have any—no." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think he might be a good addition [unclear]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He's a good fellow. You ought to talk to him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "My next two questions concern mostly what you think about your career, both at NASA and otherwise. I'll just ask you, first of all, what you think your accomplishments were and especially what your greatest accomplishments were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have no idea. Accomplishments. Well, Moltke the Elder…One of the Moltkes, who said, \"Luck, in the long run, favors only the able.\" And that's kind of what I believe. I believe a lot in luck. I think there's a tremendous amount of just being the right age. Look, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were all born in 1930, okay? That's a question of being in the right time. Now, being in the right place has to do with their backgrounds and how they became pilots or whatever, but there's an awful lot of luck, and I feel that I've been very, very lucky in my life to be in the right place at the right time.\\n\\n On the other hand, I'd have to say, as Moltke did, in the long run, if you seem to be very lucky, maybe you're doing something right also. So I think to be successful is a combination of luck and skill, and that's what I feel in my life. I mean, I don't feel I'm any bloody genius or have any extraordinary ability, but I'm a stable person and I don't have a lot of weaknesses. In other words, if I go to school, I do about as well in math as I do in English. I'm diversified, if you want to put it that way, and I think that's been a help in the jobs that I have had. I'm not explaining this very well.\\n\\n But what are my accomplishments? I don't know. I've been in the right place at the right time, and I've been able to do a good job when those opportunities were presented to me. Now, someone else can maybe do a hell of a lot better job. I'm not claiming that they couldn't. But what I'm saying about myself is, I'm stable and I'm diversified and I'm not narrowly focused. I'm not extraordinarily good in one area and extraordinarily bad in the other. I'm kind of even, even steven." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think that's very modest." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'd like to ask you, then, what you think the biggest challenges you encountered in your career were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know the answer to that either. The biggest challenge. I don't know. Again, going back to this being even or—that's not the word I'm searching for, but coming from a broad base, I felt that I was not as technically sharp as perhaps some of the other astronauts were, and I think one of the challenges for me was to make sure that I learned and retained and remembered and learned and relearned and pounded in my dull skull all the technical odds and ends and bits and pieces that I needed. So I thought one challenge was mastering this gigantic pile of machinery that is the Gemini spacecraft, the Apollo command module, or whatever. That was a big challenge to me, and I felt I probably was not natively as well equipped as some of the other people were for doing that. So that was one challenge.\\n\\n Then later on, in other jobs, the challenge, of course, is less technical detail than it is being an astronaut. It's more people; I mean getting along with people. So I think my biggest challenge, as for almost everyone, is trying to evaluate people and hire good people, fire bad people, get along with people, managing people, all those things. And I tend to do okay on that. I've made some big blunders people-wise, but I tend to do okay on that. As I say, I'm a balanced person. I'm not extraordinarily strong and extraordinarily weak in one area or the other, but I'm balanced, and that's about all I know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I appreciate that. I'm going to have one final question for you, and I will try to make this short. I'm just wondering what your thoughts on the future of the space program are and where you think NASA should remain." + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael Collins", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'm not—boy, and I just made a big speech about how balanced I am, and now I'm going to contradict it and say I'm unbalanced, because I'm Mars, Mars, Mars, and Mars. I've always been Mars. Before I went to the moon, I was Mars. After I came back from the moon, I hoped that we would be Mars. [Vice President] Spiro Agnew, God bless him, tried to push a Mars program. Tom Paine liked Mars. [President] George Bush wanted to go back to the moon and on to Mars. I think the really interesting thing in the future is Mars.\\n\\n If you need an International Space Station as a stepping stone to Mars, okay. Frankly, the International Space Station kind of bores me, like it does the American public. I'm not sure that you really need it, but it looks like we're going to have it, so I'm certainly not going to resurrect that argument. Going back to the moon? I'm not in favor of that because I think it's a gigantic sinkhole of money, time, and talent, and that going back to the moon will create as many problems as it solves and will delay and delay and delay Mars. I'm pro-Mars. That's all I can say." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michelle Kelly", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you, and I want to thank [unclear] I just want to tell you I appreciate the fact that you've written such well—" + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00848", + "metadata": { + "category": "NASA Headquarters History Office Oral History Projects 1999 - 2021", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/Administrators/FrutkinAW/frutkinaw.htm", + "original_file_name": "FrutkinAW_1-11-02.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/Administrators/FrutkinAW/FrutkinAW_1-11-02.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Headquarters Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Arnold W. Frutkin", + "location_date": "Washington, DC – 11 January 2002" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Arnold Frutkin" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is January 11, 2002. This oral history is being conducted with Arnold Frutkin in Washington, D.C., for the NASA Headquarters History Office. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright, assisted by Carol Butler.\\n\\n Arnold Frutkin served eighteen years as director of NASA’s Office of International Programs, starting his duties in 1959. [For most of that time, his title was Assistant Administrator for International Affairs.] He became Associate Administrator for External Relations in 1978 and retired from federal service in 1979. During his tenure, [guidelines for international space programs were formulated, initial projects were launched and] numerous major international space endeavors contributing to the nation’s foreign policy objectives and advancement of human knowledge were [implemented].\\n\\n We thank you for visiting with us today, Mr. Frutkin, and we are very interested in learning about your role as NASA’s senior negotiator [in the international sector]. But let us begin by talking briefly about what led you to this job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. I [had] actually had several different careers that [were] wildly unrelated, but immediately before I came to NASA, I was at the National Academy of Sciences, working in the program for the International Geophysical Year, the IGY. I had come there in about 1956 to initiate an IGY bulletin reporting monthly on the results of the IGY.\\n\\n But as the program, the IGY, went on—the year was actually eighteen months, 1956 and ‘57—I became deputy executive director of the U.S. National IGY Committee under Hugh Odishaw, who was [the] extremely able executive director of the committee. The connection between that job and the NASA move was that the first artificial satellite program was a part of the IGY.\\n\\n In the preparation by the international scientific community for the IGY, which involved observations, [coordinated observations] all around the world in a dozen different geophysical disciplines, … the [participating] scientists said that the means for putting the first artificial satellites in orbit were now available because of the advances in rocketry, and this [fact] would lend [itself] to scientific purposes, [so] they recommended that nations consider putting artificial satellites in orbit.\\n\\n Well, the only two nations who could do that [at the time] were the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and I’m sure the scientists in both countries said each … should proceed or else the other … would be the only one to do it. So both countries announced …, maybe as early as ‘54, … that they would contribute artificial satellites for scientific purposes to the IGY—[to] make geophysical observations, [e.g. in] solar physics, cosmic rays, all sorts of things.\\n\\n [Our office became] very much involved in the [internal and external] organizational relationships of the IGY on [the] whole problem of exchanging [the] data that would be expected from the satellites ([as well as] from sounding rockets, which [were being used] at the same time). … [I] represented the Academy in … meetings that the [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower administration [conducted] within government on how to handle [data, public affairs and international] problems in the Vanguard Program, which was the [name of the U.S.] satellite program for the IGY.\\n\\n [In that context, I] met the people who were just setting up NASA. Hugh [L.] Dryden, who was to be the deputy administrator of NASA, and [T.] Keith Glennan, who became the administrator [were of course the principals].\\n\\n In fact, when we get to the U.N. [United Nations], you might pick that up because that was my first connection. There was an issue at the time as to what [role] the U.N. should have [in future space matters]. It happened that I was asked to prepare a paper on that [subject],, and I remember I prepared a paper about thirty-five pages long on the unsuitability, as I saw it, of the U.N. to be a medium through which the U.S. [(or other countries)] would operate … space program[s]. I felt that we’d lose freedom of action, having to deal with a [large] number of countries [which] knew nothing about space science or technology, [i.e. subject a new and imperfectly understood field of national activity] to the majority vote of [an] essentially … ignorant [and highly political] congregation.\\n\\n …That’s how I got involved. Then, in time, [NASA] offered me the job of director [for] international [affairs]. That’s how I went over there. They did [earlier] have somebody for a few months in that job who apparently was unsatisfactory to Glennan, [so he] told me …, and … I was invited over there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you took the job in 1959, what were your duties and responsibilities? What were the expectations that you were supposed to fulfill in that new role?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had a long talk with Glennan about that. You see, the basis for expectations was the provision in the [National Aeronautics and Space Act] that said NASA shall, in conducting its programs, cooperate with other nations and groups of nations. That was the mandate, and Keith Glennan used to walk around with a copy of the act in his pocket, in his breast pocket, and he would take it out, and there was that mandate to have international cooperation. So he provided for an [appropriate] office….\\n\\n … I came in there absolutely cold, knowing nothing about what we ought to be doing. In the first week I went over there, Dryden and Homer [E.] Newell, who was [the lead science man] for the new NASA, and I, the three of us, went abroad for about three weeks…. We visited England, France, Germany, [and] Italy, at least. We may have gone some other places, I don’t remember, but those were the main places. The idea was to tell people, the likely scientific groups, that we were going to be open to cooperation, and something about on what basis we would receive proposals. That was actually a second step for getting the program off the ground.\\n\\n The first step occurred before I went to NASA when I was at the Academy, at a meeting of [COSPAR, the Committee on Space Research of the IGY]. The U.S. representative from the IGY to that committee was Richard Porter, Dick Porter, from GE [General Electric Company]. He was asked by Dryden back at NASA and the Academy, the Space Science Board at the Academy, to announce that NASA would entertain proposals from other countries to launch [entire] satellites and [individual] experiments [to be conducted in satellites or] in sounding rockets and cooperate in [other related] ways that would seem sensible.\\n\\n So there had been that announcement through the scientific community, and then our trip. … Dryden was a key person in both of these things, [and] I think that’s why it was done that way. Dryden was the one who was sensitive to [the overall context, the scientific community, and to] what was already going on in the IGY because he was [a distinguished aeronautical scientist and he was] home secretary to the National Academy of Sciences…. He had his legs planted firmly in this practice of relationships, this pattern of relationships in the scientific community. So [NASA] went to the right place and opened [itself] to these proposals.\\n\\n Okay, that’s how [the international programs] got off the dime. … Next, … I came back from those three weeks and had to sit down and figure out how we were going to handle these proposals when they came in and what guidelines should be [set up] to receive them, judge them, and move on them.\\n\\n Well, there was a big break for me at that time. The Congress had just concluded [a review] of the international program of the Atomic Energy Committee, five years of experience. I just got hold of those hearings and studied them, and what I did was look for every “mistake” that the Atomic Energy agency made in its international programs. They did a fine job, and [I mean] no criticism of them whatever…. It’s just that anybody who was first with a large program like that would naturally make some mistakes, and I just set down … guideline[s] to prevent [as many of] those mistakes [as possible] and also reflect my own [predilections].\\n\\n For example, a … bias I had was that there was too much American money being given away to foreign countries without regard to any hard-headed test of mutual interest and practicality. So we came up with [a fundamental guideline that precluded any] exchange of cash; each side in a cooperative project would do what it could do at its own expense; the project would be considered only on the basis of mutual interest. So if somebody came to us and said, “We’d like to put up a satellite,” … the question [would be], are we interested in [the science proposed]. I mean, you may be interested in the science, but are we interested in it? It has to be [of] mutual [interest].\\n\\n The judge of the validity of mutuality of interest would not be me. I had no such competence. It would be our scientific program people in NASA. This made for a very good relationship between my staff office and the operating offices, because I never for a moment thought of challenging their right to judge contributions [or the validity of] their participation in international programs. … It was always a joint [procedure]. I was concerned with policy and guidelines, and they were concerned with substance and program. It worked very, very well, always. We never had a problem—unless I [can] think of one later.\\n\\n So let’s see. We have no cash exchange. We have mutual interest. We have substantive scientific value. [Another guideline grew out of] the character of NASA as a civilian agency. We were very much concerned to protect that character and avoid the appearance or substance of a military program. The Department of Defense was responsible for military applications in space.\\n\\n [This was because] one of our jobs was to project a strong image of peaceful purposes for the United States in space. We didn’t want to compromise [that], so [the projects] had to be civilian in character, and this meant dealing [only] with civilian agencies abroad. We weren’t going to deal with the Italian Air Force or [military] rocket development in France. We were going to deal with [civil] agencies that were concerned with science. In [some] countries, there was no such agency at that time, and so they set them up. We, in effect, inspired the creation of civilian agencies that would be dealing with their national interests in the space research.\\n\\n … Another guideline was that any people sent over for training in connection with cooperative projects would be funded by their own country, not by us. They would be sponsored by an institution of the sort I’ve just described, [a] civilian institution, to ensure that [work was rooted] in some ongoing interest in their country and [so] that they would have something to go back to, so that they wouldn’t [just] stay [on here]. That was a big problem in the atomic energy program. People came here to be trained at our expense, so they were happy to come, and they got training without regard to whether they had a job to go back to—[which they often did not, resulting in their staying in the U.S. and contributing to a “brain drain.”]\\n\\n So you can see [that] there was a … string of guidelines that we laid down to avoid problems that the Atomic Energy Commission had or to achieve objectives that NASA was supposed to have in space as a civilian agency and so on.\\n\\n Now, if I can back up a little here on the importance of projecting peaceful purposes. Some [sources, particularly] a colonel, … whose name I forget, and I apologize to him for [that], because he did a very good job, [show that] Eisenhower [had a very strong and I think positive] effect on the [character of the] space program…. Eisenhower came out of World War II with a strong conviction that intelligence was the great future need for military purposes, that we needed systems to acquire intelligence. When he became president, the Rand Corporation was turned loose in trying to come up with ways of acquiring intelligence through advanced technology. That … led to the U-2 program, … an aircraft program in that early period for acquiring intelligence through [surveillance]. It wasn’t long before … Rand …, on a classified basis, came up with [the] notion that satellites [could] be a major source of intelligence.\\n\\n Well, you can see that raised all kinds of prospective problems. One was overflight of other countries. Aircraft overflight of other countries was illegal without their permission. The U-2 was being done secretly. [But of course] the Russians knew about it. It was just the Americans who didn’t know about it…. But the Russians … their radar … could see there were planes up there. … They [just] couldn’t reach them [for some time]. They had no planes to fly that high, and they had no antiaircraft … [effective] at that height.\\n\\n So we got away with the U-2 program for quite a while before [the Soviets finally] knocked one down with Gary Powers [in] it. … NASA was the cover story for those flights. …The U.S. said was that these were just NASA weather planes. [Still], they had no right to overfly the Soviet Union. [We] said [Powers’ plane had] wandered off course…. NASA was [the cover], but nobody at NASA, except a couple of people, knew that … until … the [whole] story [eventually came out].\\n\\n [According to the research on the Eisenhower-stimulated satellite reconnaissance programs, the U.S. would have] to accustom the world to overflight by satellites. NASA’s peaceful civilian program could do that. I mean, if the first satellites that the world knew about were going to be peaceful scientific satellites, hopefully there would be a minimum of objection to overflight, and if the Russians were doing [the same thing], then there would be [little] basis for objection. Then when at some future date it became known that intelligence agencies were using satellites, too, [the established practice would leave little ground for protest].\\n\\n There was a lot of academic [debate] about where the boundary was between air space and outer space, and [there was much talk] in the U.N. Legal Subcommittee [about it]. Actually, the world had really accepted a sort of rough boundary line between air space and outer space before the U.N. put its imprimatur on it. The U.N.’s action reflected a consensus that I believe had developed, [that outer space began where satellites could orbit—and that was higher than aircraft could fly—so a practical argument was established fro excluding satellites from national airspace sovereignty].\\n\\n In any case, the U.S. strategy, I think, was extremely good. I give great credit to the Eisenhower administration…. I think they handled that extremely well. Their basic purpose was [well-conceived and] well protected—I don’t think it emerged [to public view] for a long time—… and [may have] accounted [in good part] for how well in the early years NASA was protected from the Air Force.\\n\\n The Air Force was a [strong] rival of NASA in the early years. There were individual generals … who [wanted in the worst way] to get their hands on [major space programs]. [Still] later, you know, … McNamara proposed that all near-Earth space activities with men would be military and NASA would handle only the distant [programs] like the Moon and [beyond]. But he never got anywhere. The reason is … [that] there were [wise heads] hardly visible in the administrations [of that time that understood the international political support of maintaining an image of peaceful purposes and activities in space]….\\n\\n I think that was extremely well done. It was to the interest of the world because the reconnaissance satellites have had a lot to do with peacekeeping in the world. So it was a good thing, and I think Eisenhower doesn’t get enough credit for his constructive role in space.\\n\\n I think I must have answered that question." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You did. And always, if you have more to offer, we’ll take that as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, this … is interesting to me, and I don’t know how clear it is to others…. Maybe everybody [already] knows more about it than I do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, please continue to share all those thoughts when you think of them.\\n\\n I wanted to ask you when you were listing the guidelines that were set up that were proposed, did you have full authority to suggest those? Did you have to work with a committee? What was that process of getting those guidelines accepted?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Good question. As long as Dryden lived, which was, I think, until 1965—I think he died in 1965, of cancer—I worked very closely with him. Of course, I saw the administrator [often], but Dryden was the man I worked with. I sat down and worked out my version of guidelines and took them to Dryden, and it turned out Dryden was a very simpatico guy. … We happened to have the same intellectual approach to these things. He had [similar] prejudices [to mine]. He had, of course, infinitely more experience with the scientific community. But he was perhaps the most intelligent, objective person in all my experience at NASA…. I just worked with him, and he approved these things. Once he approved something, he backed it 100 percent, so there was no trouble.\\n\\n As we dealt with different offices in NASA, you’d [sometimes] run into … some initial opposition, people wouldn’t see it your way, wouldn’t like it, but I was backed so thoroughly that pretty soon the word got around that there was no point in arguing these matters…." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That had to at least give you some confidence in knowing that once you could start a project, you had a little more freedom to get it completed without a lot of bureaucracy at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the implementation of the project was always with the program office, not [the International Office].… We would sit side by side with the program people, and I generally had the lead in negotiating an agreement, a cooperative agreement, but the [framework of the] cooperative agreements [was] fairly simple. That was something I did. [The content, the substance, was up to the program people.]\\n\\n …There was no precedent that I knew of [for such agreements]. It just seemed to me [that] what we needed was a [simple] memorandum of understanding. We’d state what the project purpose was. That was done … with our program office; … they knew what they wanted to do and could do…. Then we stated what the other side was going to do. They were going to provide a scientific instrument at their own expense. They were, [for example], going to bring it to standards of aerodynamic, magnetic, [and] electronic compatibility, say, with the rest of the system, whatever it was going to be.\\n\\n If they were going to do experiments for sounding rockets, they were told what the compatibility requirements were, weight and size and [so on]. If they were going to do a satellite, it was compatibility with the launcher, [the tracking and telemetry system, etc.]. If they were going to put an experiment in one of our satellites, it had to be compatible with the other experiments in the satellite. So it was prescribed what they would do and prescribed what we would do.\\n\\n …Another [major] guideline that I omitted was that these responsibilities would be implemented through a joint working group. That was something that NASA’s own practice just led straight to. I mean, they were extremely good through their history in the old NACA of setting up working groups. So there would be a joint working group, and it ensured that all these compatibility requirements were met. There would be somebody from my office who would meet with the joint working group just to ensure that the guidelines were being observed and that nobody on our side was saying, “Oh, we’ll pick up the tab on that,” or something like that, which would violate a guideline, you see. Because Americans are too generous. “We’ve got the money. We’ll pay for it.” No, no.\\n\\n Anyhow, that’s the way that was done, and I just worked with Dryden, and he approved these things. I worked very closely with Homer Newell also, who later became head of space science at NASA. Earlier he reported to Abe Silverstein, who died just a few weeks ago, another extraordinarily able guy.\\n\\n Does that answer that question?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many staff members did you have? This seems to be quite an amount of work to do. Did you have a number of people that worked with you to get this accomplished?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had a secretary in the beginning, which was [in] September 1959, I think [it was that] I went there. There was one fellow named Ed Kerrigan, who was transferred to me. He had been working with the office responsible for [establishing] tracking stations. They had needed to work with the State Department to get permission to build tracking stations around the world, and he was the guy they had doing that. So he was transferred to me, because there had been no proper place for him.\\n\\n Then through the years, we had to continue adding people as more of these programs developed, and I think we ended up with some thirty people. We tried to keep it down. I had some prejudices against government payrolls and bureaucracy and so on. So we tried to keep it down. But we eventually ended up with—I don’t know how many foreign satellites NASA ultimately launched, but it had to be over forty, maybe fifty. I don’t know. [And with other types of cooperative programs, we needed more people.]\\n\\n There were [in fact] many other programs that developed, which … were non-satellite [or didn’t involve activities in space itself by other partners]—like SITE [the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment], [an] Indian program, or Landsat observations and so on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you tell us about the process, once the nation contacted NASA and said, “We’d like to have a cooperative agreement,” how that took place? Because not only did you have to cooperate with that nation, you also had to do cooperation within our government agencies as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So could you explain what that process was and what your role was and how all those steps were taken?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it differed in different cases. Should I give you some examples, different examples?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That would be great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A good early case would be the Canadian proposal. The Canadians came to us and proposed that they build a series of ionospheric research satellites, topside sounders, they were called. These satellites would ping the layers of atmosphere from above, [using] different radio frequencies to determine the character of [the] different bands in the ionosphere. Previously, geophysical research of the ionosphere was done from the ground up by sending signals up and you got some notion of … the ionospheric layers … that reflect radio signals.\\n\\n Well, the Canadians came and said they wanted to do this. [Our people] said, “We already have a program on the books to sound the ionosphere from above.” So I said, “Well, let’s get together and see what it is [the Canadians are] talking about, and you [our program people] see how it relates to your program.”\\n\\n Well, it turned out, not in my judgment, but in the judgment of the space science people at NASA, that the Canadian proposal was a more advanced and better proposal than ours. We were designing satellites to sound the ionosphere at certain fixed radio frequencies, [but] the Canadians were going to design … a swept frequency approach, [i.e., to] just sweep through a whole range of frequencies … and sound the ionosphere [at all of them]. Our people said that would be great, that’s a better idea. [In addition], we made clear to our people that this meant the Canadians would be paying for that satellite program. They’d be building those satellites [at] no expense to us. We would launch them at our expense. [And, with our tracking stations, we would receive the data. Of course, that would be shared with the Canadians.]\\n\\n One interesting little footnote is that satellites generally cost a lot more than launchers, so [the Canadians would] meet the preponderance of the cost of the program. There was no requirement that the expense be equal. So our [people] readily agreed. … It was a wonderful thing for their budget and, [at the same time], improved the program. … We drew up a memo along the lines I’ve just described. The purpose was topside sounding, … the Canadians would do this, and we would do that, [and] a joint working group [would be] set up [to implement the program].\\n\\n The Canadians [provided], I don’t remember exactly, but I think there were four satellites in that program over a period of years [all] worked extremely well. [It was a superb] program, and everybody was very happy about it.\\n\\n [Now], to illustrate how we would handle the sort of problem that [might] come up in the middle of a program: Somewhere down the line, maybe [by] the second or third satellite. … The joint working group discovered [that] the Canadian satellite [in that case] was gaining weight. Our people, that is, the program people, were very experienced in this kind of thing and kept warning the Canadians, “You’d better go into a serious weight-reduction program or you’re going to be in trouble. You won’t be able to get [the satellite up on the] launcher we are to provide].” There was a top limit. [It had been agreed the satellite would be of such-and-such a weight and that we would provide, a Thor-Delta rocket to launch it.]\\n\\n Finally the Canadians came to us and said, “We’re just too far overweight. There’s nothing we can do about it, and we’re going to need [a larger] Atlas launcher.” Well, an Atlas launcher was … a lot more expensive than a Thor-Delta.\\n\\n That’s where I came in and said, “No. … The agreement was for [a] Thor-Delta [launcher]. You’ve got to solve the problem, not us. You’re not meeting your requirements for weight restriction, [but] you’re [asking] us to spend more money to take care of that [problem for you] by going to the Atlas launcher. That’s not right. You’ve got spend the money on the weight-reduction program,” which is what they didn’t want to do. It was a very expensive thing to do, to redesign the satellite sufficiently to reduce the weight.\\n\\n There were individuals on the Canadian side who were very upset, and I’m sure very angry at me, because we could [have provided] an Atlas launcher, but the principle of it was [that] … international agreements have got to mean something. They can’t be soft-headed, mushy things [lacking principles and standards]. [We couldn’t] start down that road.” So we stuck to our guns.\\n\\n Now, we had people in NASA who said, “Gosh, we could give them an Atlas.” I said [we have] policy and [we have] standards. No….” And Dryden backed me on that. So [the Canadians] had to spend the money [to downsize their satellite]. They spent a lot of money, and one of their people was in real trouble within their system. But it worked….\\n\\n Now, I’ll give you another example that I don’t think has ever seen the light of day, but it seems to me it’s about time that the story could be told. Very early in the program, probably 1960 …, we were doing a lot of [cooperative] sounding rocket programs … because it was an easy way for countries that had never done any space research to get into it. Instead of building a complex demanding satellite, they’d make some small instrument, put it in the nose cone of a sounding rocket that went up ninety or a hundred miles. The instrument could radio back its measurements or be brought back by other means…. We would provide the rockets, they’d provide the experiment; it was a way of helping people get into space and permit certain basic geophysical experiments to be done in many places around the world, [near the equator, the Arctic Circle, etc.]…. We were doing that with the Italians, and we did it with the Swedes and the Norwegians and so on, and they all later graduated to satellite work.\\n\\n An Egyptian representative came to us at that time and proposed a sounding-rocket program. He visited … the international office, and we had someone from the Space Sciences [Office] sit with us to hear what he was proposing. He was proposing an experiment called a sodium vapor experiment. A sounding rocket would [be sent up to] release metallic sodium in powder form … into the atmosphere [where] it would vaporize. This would be done … around sunset or sunrise and … would create huge … clouds, enormous … clouds up there, as the sun, the setting or rising sun, [turned them pink] against the dark sky…. There would be … triangulated optical installations on the ground that would photograph those clouds, [so] you could [measure] wind sheers … at [about] a hundred miles up, … something like that.\\n\\n Well, we were doing that kind of thing [so] that sounded fine, but as [the gentleman] talked on, he explained that they would do these launchings simultaneously in two places. At that time Egypt was part of the United Arab Republic, which consisted of Egypt and … Syria…. They would launch from both places, [producing these great pink clouds in both]. He wanted to meet a deadline for the program which was [to be] the anniversary date of the establishment of the United Arab Republic.\\n\\n Well, you see, that caused us to prick up our ears. Launching by an anniversary date, [a] political anniversary date, has nothing to do with science. That’s a political objective. [In addition, we couldn’t avoid noting] the geography involved. You had Egypt and Syria. What’s in between them? Israel. What would [the Israelis] see? They would see these huge clouds, sodium vapor clouds. You can see them for a hundred miles or more. They would see them on both sides. It [was hard to miss the possibility of a motivation] for political intimidation of the Israelis.\\n\\n [None of us had any] particular concern for Israel…. But that had nothing to do with it. It was just too political. I could [imagine] us being accused by various people [of getting way off our scientific track]. … I could [hear] newspapers saying, “…What’s NASA doing lending itself to a program with obvious political overtones?”\\n\\n So I had a real problem. What do you do? I didn’t want to engage in a political discussion with this [man]. I thought the thing to do was [to] pursue the technical merits of the program as far as [we] could, because [legitimate science preparations and scheduling might exclude the political overtones in the normal course of things].\\n\\n So our program guy said, “Fine. We’d like to send some people out to your sites to work with you [in a] joint working group, [give your people some training, help review preparations for] the optical cameras in the [proper] places and [do] all this kind of thing through the normal range of responsibility of the working group.”\\n\\n He said, “Oh no, that’s not necessary. Everything will be taken care of.”\\n\\n We said, “Oh no, we do [all these things] through joint working groups to assure [it’s quality and readiness]. You [do lack] experience with this [sort of] thing. …We do, and we want to ensure that the program is successful. We do not want to be involved in programs that have not been optimized for success. We’re not looking for failure; we’re looking for success.”\\n\\n Well, he didn’t want to let us go anywhere near anything in Egypt. [This] just fortified … suspicions of the program. The newspapers were carrying stories at this same time, of [ex-WWII] German rocket scientists working in Egypt on the development of rocket capabilities….\\n\\n [We repeated firmly that we would work only according to our guidelines and that all preparations and [unclear] would be through our established joint working group mechanism with complete access to an open project.] …\\n\\n He didn’t want to do that. He said, “But you’ve done this for the Italians.”\\n\\n We said, “Yes, but through working groups [with complete access]. We’ve had no problem with access to Italian launch sites and so on, none whatever. They’ve been working very closely. We haven’t had any trouble with any other country. This is an open program, not a … closed program.”\\n\\n He finally said, “Well, give us the rockets and we’ll conduct the program ourselves.”\\n\\n We said, “We don’t give rockets for programs that are not jointly worked out in the mutual interest.”\\n\\n So he said, “Well, we’ll buy the rockets in this country.” So he went to a rocket manufacturer to buy rockets, and then he came to us and said, “Would you authorize transportation of the rockets to Egypt on the Military Transportation Service?” which I suppose we could have done. We could have requested it.\\n\\n We said, “We just don’t want anything to do with it. That would be a United States service for a program in which we have no interest. It’s a program within our jurisdiction, but we have no interest in it [on these terms]. [We can’t] ask the U.S. to spend money sending a plane to Egypt to carry this stuff. Besides, the rockets you’ve ordered, two-stage rockets, a lower stage and an upper stage, have never been fired in conjunction before. That’s a serious problem in rocketry. [There are real problems] of aerodynamic, … magnetic, … electronic and [other] compatibilities between upper and lower stages, and it has to be carefully worked out and [extensively] tested. It’s never been done. It’s unlikely to work.”\\n\\n They went to the State Department, and the State Department authorized the Military Transportation Service to transport [the] rockets over there, and they were [in fact] transported. We never heard another word about the program. No sodium vapor clouds, nothing. The manufacturer came in, and we asked him, “What’s happened? You went over there. What sort of sites did they have?”\\n\\n “We didn’t go. We weren’t allowed to go. The rockets were shipped without us.”\\n\\n So the people who knew how to handle those rockets weren’t there, and we can only guess that the rockets didn’t work. We can only guess that. I don’t know what happened. Anyhow, we never heard of it again. But I think it’s a good example, it’s one of the very few examples. We rarely ran into any political problem. I can’t think of another at the moment.\\n\\n But we didn’t have to meet the political problems because they did not meet the guidelines for a jointly implemented program with open access, open civilian character, and so on. We didn’t know but what they were military at the other end. We just didn’t know…." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In that case you mentioned that the State Department became involved because of those circumstances. In normal procedures, were you involved with the State Department in your role?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did that process work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we would keep them informed of these things. In this case, [I believe State questioned us and that we explained why no project materialized and why we wouldn’t authorize transport of the rockets.] … I’ll mention a man by the name of Robert Packard, Bob Packard, who was in the appropriate office of … State. [He] dealt with us over the years very well; [he] was just a superb collaborator. He … understood what we were trying to do and was [a] wonderful, … very fine [colleague].\\n\\n But we had to deal with other offices in State which were not always understanding. If you want [to] detour to SITE or take SITE later, I can—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We can do it now, if it’s on your mind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because it’s sort of relevant. You see, each time you dealt with a new country, you had to do with a new desk at State. It’s no reflection on State, but anytime you deal with a new office anywhere, there’s always the chance that there’s going to be a difficult initial period. People don’t know each other, don’t trust each other, are somewhat suspicious of each other, and there’s that human tendency to say no rather than yes. So you often ran into problems, and the SITE case is an illustration.\\n\\n Leonard Jaffe was in charge of the applications programs [at NASA] and worked very effectively with us. He was very alert to the opportunities for international participation and understood the guidelines. He was very good about it. He came to me at one point and said, “We are working on the first satellite which will be able to broadcast TV programs directly into receivers on the ground, and it seems to me that you’d be interested in it for international applications.”\\n\\n Well, that was SITE, the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment. I think that’s what the letters meant. I’m very bad about things like that. So, okay. I talked with them about what the satellite could do. It [would be able to] broadcast into … “home receivers” but with a sort of front-end adapter and a simple dish, a small dish similar to what we have now on DirecTV [Inc.], but not as [capable as today’s version].\\n\\n So I sat down and began trying to think of where in the world [SITE would most constructively be used], where [it would best] fit. You wanted big countries, and [there] seemed [to be] two big countries that would be worth considering … Brazil and India. Well, we looked into Brazil and discovered that there [already] was a lot of television in being along the coast of Brazil and that the population back of the coast was almost nonexistent. So it was unsuited.\\n\\n India was the reverse, just perfect, had virtually no television in existence and [had a] huge population spread throughout the subcontinent. So India looked like a good place to go. I should make clear that the whole point of SITE was that it could broadcast directly into home receivers, [obviating the need for an extensive] ground network of … stations to receive television from a satellite and rebroadcast it through a diffusion [system]. You could skip that whole step, go right to home receivers. So [the] infrastructure was unnecessary.\\n\\n Well, we were already dealing with a space committee in India under a man named Vikram Sarabhai [on] sounding rocket programs. I called Vikram Sarabhai and said, “Would you be interested in … Indian participation in this?” Well, I knew the man very well. He was a very superior person, came of one of the two wealthiest families in India and had been educated as a physicist at [University of] Cambridge [England]. [He was], I think, a very fine person, [now dead]. He was very much interested. …He was the sort of person … dedicated to doing [things like this] for his country.\\n\\n Before I called him, I went through our State contact to the India desk. [There I] met somebody I’d never known. [I] explained … what we wanted to propose to the Indians. … And he said, “No, you can’t do that.”\\n\\n I said, “Why?”\\n\\n “Well, we have for some years been trying to establish a Voice of America program in India with Voice of America broadcasting [stations] in India, and the Indians won’t let us do that.”\\n\\n So I said, “Oh, well, that’s completely distinguishable from this, because we don’t want to build anything on Indian soil, in the first place. Secondly, the Voice of America wants to broadcast American programs, [which they probably view as] propaganda, good or bad, in India. We don’t want to broadcast any American programs. According to our concept of this thing, all we would do, … after we have used the satellite for American purposes for a year, [is] nudge it along the equator till it looks at India. Then India can use a ground station which it will build with its own money, broadcast its own programs, which must be educational programs, up to the satellite, and the satellite will diffuse [them] down to the receivers.”\\n\\n “The Indians won’t let you do that.”\\n\\n I said, “I think they will let us do it.”\\n\\n “No, you can’t go to them.”\\n\\n I said, “Why don’t we let them say no?”\\n\\n This guy just didn’t want to do it. He was the prisoner of his vest, which was buttoned all the way up. I felt that was just an ignorant, obstructionist viewpoint.\\n\\n … I called Vikram Sarabhai and said, “Vikram, this is something we think you’d be interested in. Would you be interested in it?”\\n\\n “Of course. Yes.”\\n\\n So I said, “Write me a letter proposing Indian participation in the SITE program which is being prepared.”\\n\\n He said, “Sure.” So he wrote me a letter and said, “In accordance with your suggestion, we would like—.”\\n\\n I called him up and said, “No, Vikram. Write another letter that doesn’t refer to my phone call.”\\n\\n So he wrote another letter. Now India had proposed [participation]. There could be no further objection from the State Department. We went right ahead with it. It was enormously successful.\\n\\n [Actually this] was a remarkable instance of how much in the U.S. interests such a program [can be], because India had one year, under our agreement, one year that they could use that satellite. They built their ground station. They broadcast their own programs, which they designed and which we watched very carefully when they were being developed, because we wanted to be sure that they weren’t going to do anything that would upset America for any reason. No political criticisms, no political news programs. There were wonderful [educational] programs which I could tell you about sometime, not [to] take the tape [now] for that, but [there] were some wonderful things.\\n\\n When they finished the year, they said, “Could you please extend the availability of the satellite [to] us for another year?”\\n\\n Well, [we] knew they were going to ask that. … And we were all prepared. We … said, “No. The agreement said one year. That was a year out of the life expectancy of a U.S. satellite. We’re going to move that satellite back and use it for more U.S. programs. That’s it.”\\n\\n They were very upset. They tried political pressure and so on. We refused. We said, “It was an agreement for one year and just don’t lean on us to do this.” Okay, we took the satellite back. [What was the consequence? India] contracted with Ford Aerospace for a commercial satellite to continue their programs, and they contracted for a number of Ford Aerospace satellites over the years to do that…. I think they’re still doing that, but I’m not sure. … The point is: this program not only was an educational lift to India and demonstrated what such a satellite could do, but it brought money back into the United States, commercial contracts for satellites for a number of years.\\n\\n I think it was an extraordinary program, and that’s how [such] a program was handled. Each program was … different, but here was one where we invited participation because we thought people would be interested and it would work well, and we knew that they would have to continue commercially once they got started….\\n\\n There are some other very good examples like that, but you go ahead with any questions you have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have any more of the opposite, where you had suggestions from countries to enter into agreements that you just knew were not the right thing for the United States to do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. As I said, that Egyptian thing was almost unique. I mean, there may have been something. I can’t think of anything. If when I review the transcript I think of something, I’ll add it or tell you about it or whatever you want to do with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’d like to talk to you about the tracking stations and your role in securing those areas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, there were some interesting stories about that, too. Actually, … I had nothing whatever to do with procuring the [sites for the] first tracking stations abroad, because that was done when I was [still] over at the IGY [and] before NASA was created. [Those stations were set up during] the IGY program [by the Navy’s contractors. After the U.S.] announced, in ‘54, I believe, that we would launch a satellite, … the administration gave that responsibility to the Naval Research Laboratory or … the Office of Naval Research, [whichever]….\\n\\n …It was [named] the Vanguard Program…. To launch [the] small Vanguard satellites, … they had to set up tracking stations for it, and they did that through a contractor, I believe it was [the] Bendix [Corporation], … [working with] the State Department.\\n\\n They got permission to build stations at various places, [generally accommodating] countries. … The first stations were down [island chains] in the Caribbean, [either] British or U.S. …, and then [in] South Africa, … Australia and the Pacific islands. I don’t remember exactly where those initial stations were. [They were] all established by the time I got to NASA.\\n\\n One of the first things I had to do at NASA was [to complete obtaining sites for a] new tracking network for the first U.S. manned flight program, Mercury. [The earlier tracking network was designed for unmanned satellites. The new manned satellites required] additional stations and much more capable [ones] with very large … dishes, radio dishes. [Sites were planned for] Zanzibar [Africa], Spain, [Mexico], at least one additional dish in Australia [Woomera], and I forget [where] others may have been….\\n\\n In fact, I sat down at my desk maybe the first day and … looked at the project manual for Mercury, and as I looked to see how the flight was going to be managed, the thought that came into my head was, “My god, they really mean to do this.” [Laughs] I mean, that was the fall of 1959 or maybe it was ‘60. …It was very early [on], and [I at least] hadn’t … been [quite] able to absorb the notion of man in space.\\n\\n Mexico was … very interesting. …Australia, South Africa, Zanzibar looked like no problem. Zanzibar was then a British [responsibility]. They were no problem. But [the] State Department told us that Mexico would never allow a U.S. facility on Mexican soil, that nothing like that had been accommodated in Mexico since General [John J.] Pershing [was ordered to invade] Mexico in—1919 [1916]? … [The Mexicans had] never forgiven us and [State said they] wouldn’t allow [a tracking station on Mexican soil].\\n\\n Well, we felt [our interest was entirely new and different] and I felt confident we could sell it if we could get to the Mexicans. [But State was reluctant even to try.]\\n\\n Well, I went to Glennan, [the first NASA Administrator], and told him we were having serious trouble. … He made the breakthrough suggestion. He said, “President Eisenhower’s brother, Milton [S.] Eisenhower, is president of Johns Hopkins University [Baltimore, Maryland]. Why don’t you go up and see him. He has good contacts in Mexico.”\\n\\n So I called, made an appointment, went up to see Milton Eisenhower, who was a marvelous man, wonderful man, and told him our problem.\\n\\n He said, “Well, let me see what I can do.” He said, “The president of the University of Mexico [Universidad Nacional Autonoma do Mexico] is a close friend of mine, and the brother of the president of the University of Mexico is the president of Mexico.”\\n\\n In no time we had an invitation from the Mexicans to come and talk with them and explain what we wanted. [They agreed to] do everything they could to accommodate us. …What I think the State Department failed to appreciate at that point was that space had a mystique that appealed to people all over the world; it [seemed] like a wonderful, exciting, benign thing. The peaceful purposes meant it was no problem. Well, we had a superb collaboration with Mexico. They did everything they could to help us.\\n\\n Now, this leads to a related thing. Our embassy began to send us little news clippings from Mexican newspapers, leftist newspapers. There was a strong communist [movement] in Mexico, and they were saying that the station that was being built was a Trojan horse, that there were guns hidden under the floor of the station—all kinds of absolutely absurd stuff. We talked with the Mexicans about it, and they said they could handle [it. And they did.]\\n\\n But at the same time, something broke in Zanzibar. … The Air Force began building a tracking station in Zanzibar, too. There was a [small but influential] communist element [also] in Zanzibar, … then within the Arab community…. The two large population [groups] in Zanzibar [were] the blacks … called Afro-Shirazi because they [claimed] ancestry from ancient Persia— … and the [Arabs] … (Zanzibar [had been] a center of the slave trade).\\n\\n There were noises in Zanzibar of hostility toward these U.S. stations, and I told the State Department that I thought it was very dangerous to set up an Air Force station in the same small island with NASA because [the AF station’s presence was] sure to [invite dangerous antagonism, which] would rub off on us….\\n\\n It got … bad [enough that] I wrote memos, written memos, to State saying [we were] going to have serious trouble and risk losing both stations if [they didn’t] get the Air Force station off that island. Well, [it seems that] a contractor employee for the [Air Force] station talked loosely on the beach … one day … to a young lady who turned out to be some sort of undercover operator…. There was a big fuss in Zanzibar, and the Air Force had to [abandon] its station. [The hostile elements then] threatened our station.\\n\\n They announced that as of a Sunday coming up there was going to be a huge demonstration. 200,000 people [would go] out to the NASA station to force it off the island. Well, the whole island population was 240,000, so I knew they wouldn’t have 200,000, but I was afraid they might have a lot.\\n\\n I went to Glennan and said, “I’m very worried about this. If there’s a demonstration there and they’re able to force us off the island, … it will lend [new] support to the [opposition group] in Mexico and we may be forced out of [there, too]; and the whole network may be in trouble.”\\n\\n He said, “Well, what are you going to do?”\\n\\n I said, “Well, the only thing I can think of doing is going out there and talk to people and see if we can get them to be reasonable.”\\n\\n So on a Thursday, that Thursday, I left for Zanzibar, [taking] with me a guy from the Mercury program out of Houston who knew the program. I … knew what my political objective was, but he knew the program. His name was Warren [J.] North, an extremely good guy, very good guy. He had tried to qualify as an astronaut [but] didn’t make it….\\n\\n So we, the two of us, went out there together, not knowing really exactly how we were going to operate, but we were going to meet a USIA [United States Information Agency] guy there. The consulate was not on Zanzibar, [but he was to come up from Dar-es-Salam in] Tanganyika….\\n\\n …It took [a] long time to fly out to Zanzibar in those days. (We flew on an early version of the Comet for part of that trip [before Comets began to fall] apart in the skies….)\\n\\n Anyhow, we got to Zanzibar, [the] young guy from USIA had done a super job. [The very poor general population was organized in small] men’s clubs. They would meet, … smoke, … and [listen] to a little radio, [and discuss the] news…. [Our USIA man] just had us go around from one to another [of these clubs] to talk about what Mercury was and show them how open it was and all the good things the tracking station would do for them. It would bring in construction money, … we would buy all our supplies locally, and we would hire maintenance people locally, and anybody who qualified [for] work in the station in … electronics, we would hire [him also]. We didn’t have to have only Americans and so on and so on. I think we did very well. Warren North was a very appealing young guy, and I think together we did okay talking to these people.\\n\\n [But] we had to … speak to the [leaders, too]. On the Saturday, [the] day before [the protest march] was to happen, we went down to speak to a man named Ali Musin, … head of the Arab party. [He, as expected, was] extremely hostile. …We [had to go down to] the local kasbah and I worried for our safety.\\n\\n [Though] he was very hostile, but he gave me the most intelligent response I ever had to [any argument that]: “Look. Our station’s completely open. You can go in there at any time to satisfy yourself as to what’s going on.” He said, “I might as well ask a donkey to go through my desk,” … a very clever answer and probably correct….\\n\\n Then we went to see the [leader] of the Black party, the Afro-Shirazi party. He was an ex-longshoreman [named Karume] with scars [on] his face, … ritual scars plus whatever other scars he happened to add to them. He spoke no English, but he had somebody interpreting. We didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, [and I felt quite] desperate. [I knew that] the next day … maybe 20,000 people would go out to the station [to] demonstrate. For the safety of our people, we’d have to pull them out.\\n\\n [So] I said, “Look. … Your people, I understand, are the truck drivers. [Tomorrow], you’re going to provide the trucks and drive all these demonstrators ten miles out into the country to the station. You’re going to do all that and make the demonstration possible…. Who do you think is going to get [the] credit for driving us off the island? The Arab party is going to get the credit. You’re not going to get the credit.”\\n\\n You could just see lights dawning in this [guy’s mind]. He talked to [his interpreter] at some length, and then … he said, “You two tomorrow be at such-and-such a (big, open) park. Be there to show your film and talk to the people, and we will have our people there.”\\n\\n Well, we had won—at least for the time being—because, instead of his people driving the Arabs out there [to the station], they were going to be listening to us in the evening. That’s what happened. He had [about] 4,000 people squatting in the dust on [a] huge [sort of] playground…. Our USIA guy … set up a big screen right in the middle. If you project on a screen like that, you can see the picture from both sides.\\n\\n So we showed Mercury films and showed the little monkey, Ham, flying in space. Oh, they ought that was marvelous. We talked to them, and we answered all their questions. [The result was that] we stayed on the island for three years, which was all we needed. But [later], when [the station site agreement] came up [for] renewal, there was a revolution [in progress] there. Ali Musin was killed, the Black Karume took over, and they asked us to leave the island. But by that time [the program people had developed other tracking arrangements so that the loss was not serious].\\n\\n [Karume] asked us if we would leave a generator … for him. We recognized the situation. He [personally] wasn’t against us; it was the forces there. So we left a generator. [Sometime] thereafter, a [young American] consular official, … later … Secretary of Defense, [Frank Carlucci, was visiting the island. There was a riot during his visit], and he was knifed. But he controlled himself [did not panic, helped calm] the crowd … down. He did an incredible job. He told us later that when some of the local politicians [verbally] attacked NASA, [Karume stood up and] said, “Don’t attack NASA. They never did anything to us. They were very good here, and there’s no reason to attack them, and they’ve left us that generator.”\\n\\n [Karume himself was] assassinated some years later. He [had become] vice president of Tanzania, [when] Zanzibar was joined to Tanganyika, … under [Julius Kambarage] Nyerere….\\n\\n [You can see that establishing the manned flight network had its moments.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. Before we start anymore, we’re going to take a break for just a minute, be able to change out tape so we don’t miss anything you have to say." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. [Tape change]\\n\\n In my experience, when we went to State to say we [wanted] to set up a tracking station in such-and-such a place, … they [often] said [that we’d] have to [provide the host country some major benefit, e.g.] a deep water port [in one case]. They’re going to ask for (e.g.) a deep water port. They’ve been after us for [that] for a long time.”\\n\\n [Apart from the fact that such considerations might total] hundreds of millions of dollars, [my feeling was that we should give nothing—] … not even … pay rent for the land. …Our story [was] that if we [came] in, we [would] spend money locally to construct the station, [to meet local] needs … for maintenance—like oil to run generators and so on and so on. We [would] need to hire a lot of local maintenance people. We [would be] willing to train local people on the operation of the station and employ them if they [qualified]. So we [were] going to [bring significant] advantage [with us], plus the intangibles, [such as] identification with the space station [program].\\n\\n …We developed a way of approaching these things. We [didn’t] tell [a] country that we [needed] a station there. What we [said was], “We plan to put a station in your part of the world, somewhere in … your neighborhood of countries, wherever we get [suitable] cooperation.” Each country [knew] that if it [didn’t] agree, another country [might do so] and [so] get all those advantages, local money spent and so on. We never had any trouble…. I think that State just didn’t have the right approach to these things—[at least at that time]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have specific ideas or create definite guidelines of what you needed from those countries when you established those stations? Did they have to provide or did the United States pay for everything that was there? Was it more a cooperative agreement?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. No. It was not cooperative. They were just accommodating our requirement. But we felt that in implementing our requirement, we were bringing lots of advantages to them [that] they would be glad to have it—[as indeed] they always were…." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What responsibility did NASA have once the station was established?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we just operated our station. …Actually, the people who did the operation were quite wonderful people, generally speaking. I mean, [one or another might] get us in [minor] trouble locally. But generally speaking, they were very good. The station personnel would do lots of local things, like improve something at the local hospital or upgrade the local communications to meet our standards so that we could use them. So they did a lot of things sort of on their own that they could do because they were capable of doing it and because they had [a] generous attitude." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "If issues came about where the local operations folks did cause problems locally, did you have to get back involved again or did another part of NASA take care of those issues? Do you have an example of one of those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I don’t have a good memory for such cases. I know there were some. My belief is that the tracking office people were extremely good and responsible at that, and they would handle it, do whatever was necessary to handle it very well. That’s my best sort of memory of how it went. I don’t recall my having to get into something like that.\\n\\n We had some [irritations—not in the tracking network but] with one or two of our interpreters [dealing with the Soviets. Some] became too friendly or … brought in books from the outside that the Soviets didn’t want in their country. We felt it was not our role to bring in forbidden books. If one of our interpreters … brought in [such] a book in a pocketbook, that [might risk] our whole operation, so we would stop that kind of thing.\\n\\n One of our people saw an anti-American poster on a visit to a monastery in the Soviet Union, [of course] back during [the height of] the cold war. It was a nasty anti-American poster. He just [lost his temper] then and there. (I was not present.) He … chewed [out] the local people who, as I [was told], included some of the monks at the monastery….\\n\\n [After], I was told about it, [I rebuked him strongly] in the presence of his boss, … Bob [Robert R.] Gilruth…. I told him he was not being paid to go over there at NASA’s expense to express his political views. He was there to do a particular job and do it as well as he could and it was not up to us as individuals to create risks to [entire projects] for no purpose except [to vent] personal feelings. But he didn’t have anything to say. …It was stupid. You have to remember what you’re there for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The formal agreements that you set with these countries, were the provisions very detailed or were they somewhat open?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All our agreements were very simple…. They would make such-and-such land available. We would entirely at our own expense build [a] station. There would be no charges. We would undertake to train local people, if that was agreed. We would buy certain types of provisions locally. It was really very simple once you decide you’re not going to get into [the] business of what kind of blackmail, [like a deep-water port] you [were] going to pay for the accommodation…. I was very much against any of that kind of thing, and we were able to work out ways to get away from it.\\n\\n [The notion of] letting countries know that if they don’t want to be cooperative, you’ll go somewhere else is a big help. I might tell you about the first communications satellite [arrangements] because that illustrated [my point. It] was back, I think in 1960. Abe Silverstein was head of [the unmanned flight] program at that time. He came [to me] and said, “We’re going to be putting up the first [synchronous] communications satellite, and we want to demonstrate it intercontinentally. We’d like a station in Europe, somewhere in Europe, and we have $5 million in the budget to build the station.”\\n\\n I said, “Abe, put your money away. We’ll get you a station free.” We wrote letters to the British Post Office [BPO]. There had been talk around about communications satellites coming, so we knew [who might be interested. Besides] the British Post Office, [we wrote also to the] responsible … French agency, [called CNET]…. We [described the coming] program [and said] we’re going to want to demonstrate it internationally. We could do this with a country that was willing to provide at its own expense [a ground] station at the other end in Europe somewhere. We’re planning to be in London and Paris in … two weeks’ time, … and we’d like to visit you.\\n\\n So London knew we were going to [be talking in] Paris, and Paris knew we were going to [be talking in] London. I drafted an agreement … according to [the] program requirements …—[Len Jaffe was in charge of the project]—cleared it with Glennan, went [with Jaffe] to Europe, and within one week we had two agreements signed [with both BPO and CNET].\\n\\n [Per these agreements], the British built their own … hundred-foot dish at Goonhilly Downs [England], … high up on the cliffs in Cornwall. (Years later I sailed by there with some friends in a sailboat coming from France and saw the dish up there. It was marvelous.)\\n\\n The French wanted to beat the British and didn’t think they could do it building [a] dish themselves, so they bought [an antenna] from this country. They paid $14 million for [horn antenna (in lieu of a dish)] like the one that AT&T [American Telephone and Telegraph Company] had in Andover, Maine…. So we saved Abe Silverstein’s $5 million and brought $14 million into the country.\\n\\n Other countries heard about [this and wanted to participate]. The Germans, the Bundespost [Germany’s postal service] built a dish. There were, all in all, I think thirteen countries that got in on that program eventually…. Len Jaffe established a joint working group among all those countries to coordinate these experiments. That group became the nucleus of Intelsat. That’s where it all came from. I mean, Intelsat would have happened anyhow, but that’s the way it [did happen]. It was very good.\\n\\n Oh, … an interesting [sidelight]. …There were a number of [interests] at that time vying for the inside track for communications satellites. NASA wanted to do the experiments. AT&T was [giving the global impression that it was] going to be doing all this. Foreigners were confused as to who was going to do the program—should they deal with AT&T or should they deal with NASA and that kind of thing.\\n\\n I suggested we invite an AT&T representative to come with us when we went to London and Paris so that when we were [conducting] the negotiations, he would be sitting there quietly and it would be very clear who was doing what and that there was no issue about it. Because we had AT&T, we felt we should also invite ITT [International Telephone and Telegraph Company]. So we had both of them there, vice-presidents from both companies, and there was no issue about ambiguous auspices or authority." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Other areas and organizations that you worked with, you mentioned some, but we haven’t talked yet about the United Nations. So how did their views or purposes work or not work with the ones that NASA had?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. In the very first days when NASA had the mandate to cooperate with other nations and groups of nations, I don’t know the legislative history of those words. This is one reason I want to talk with Eileen Galloway. But it’s clear to me that when somebody [added] “groups of nations” [to “nations”], they meant some of the … institutional international organizations like the U.N. [and perhaps] NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization]. Different people had different concepts [as] to how we should operate.\\n\\n Senator [Henry Martin] Jackson, at that time, “Scoop” Jackson, was an outspoken advocate of dealing through NATO…. That appeared to a lot of people, including me, as inconsistent with the notion of peaceful purposes. NATO was a military organization then. It was the height of the cold war. I mean, you [would be] inviting [the Soviets to set up] a Komintern space program—[not the best start for programs ostensibly aimed at peaceful purposes].\\n\\n Now, … the U.N., … was different. [It certainly projected] peaceful purposes, and on the surface it [appeared] to be a totally sensible possibility. The Secretary of State at the time was [John F.] Dulles, and he was pushing for involving the U.N. in some way, and apparently before I came to NASA when I was still at the IGY, the State Department gave the brand-new NASA some kind of a proposition that they deal in some way through the United Nations.\\n\\n Dryden at NASA … wanted that analyzed pretty carefully. He was, I think, not too excited about it. Apparently the [man] they had, … my predecessor, was not quite up to doing that. So Dryden asked Hugh Odishaw, who was [executive director] of the U.S. IGY Committee, … if he could get it looked at. [Odishaw] asked me to do it.\\n\\n [I tried to think through the proposition and then wrote a] thirty-[some] page memo…. I don’t remember it [in detail]. I don’t have [a] copy of it…. I told you what the burden of it was, that it just seemed totally unwise, at that early stage in NASA’s mission to achieve primacy for the U.S. in space, to burden NASA with an obligation to work through or with the United Nations, … dealing with dozens and dozens of other countries through a bureaucracy, … [only one or two of them] having the least clue about, [let alone experience of], space technology or having thought through … the political ramifications [at a time where the UN was split right through by the Cold War]. So it seemed to me terribly unwise thing [to try to work through the UN at the time]. I’m sure I would have listed the pros as well as the cons, but I think it was pretty clear where the burden was.\\n\\n Anyhow, NASA was not [so] burdened with that thing. [The UN] did go ahead and develop [its] Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space [COPUOS], which from [the US] point of view, would be a benign organization [in that] it had no role, [no] operational role in space.\\n\\n Now, much later, there were some people in the U.N. who were looking for a role for the U.N. in space. Particularly there was a [man] in UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization], who came up with a proposal for a tracking network, a U.N. tracking network for satellites. He came and talked to me about it…. Well, I thought it was a crackpot idea, [and] I said [that was no need for it. Both the US and USSR had] all the tracking stations we [needed]. It represents an enormous investment. “Do you know how much a tracking station costs?”\\n\\n “No.”\\n\\n “Do you know how much a tracking station network costs?”\\n\\n “No.”\\n\\n “Well, it’s a lot. …Our tracking [operations are as open as possible], but the Soviets’ are not. You wouldn’t get [operating or scientific data] for the Russians, and where would [you] put [the network]—alongside the existing tracking stations?”\\n\\n He said, “No, around the equator.”\\n\\n “Well, [an equatorial network wouldn’t begin to meet the many requirements for satellites in a variety of orbits].” Well, [the idea] never went anywhere, but … it shows you what the U.N. [problems] was.\\n\\n [What the UN] got to be [in space] was—in the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee [of COPUOS]—a show-and-tell organization, which is pretty good. I would give credit to Dulles or the State Department people for getting that set up because in the end that worked out very much to our advantage. What I mean by show-and-tell is that … [a] pattern developed [according to which country] was a member of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee … would tell what it was doing in space. …There were only two countries that had completely independent programs, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. All the other countries that had anything to say were saying essentially [what they were] doing with the U.S. [(NASA)] in cooperative programs.\\n\\n … Nobody was talking about cooperation with the Soviet Union because they weren’t cooperating with anyone. [Of course, in time] it began to be so embarrassing that [the Soviets] developed … “cooperation” within Eastern Europe, their own satellite countries, but that was so [politically] transparent.\\n\\n [It all] worked very much to our advantage and kept putting pressure on the Soviets to cooperate more. That was one of the devices, or at least proved to be a device for pressuring the Soviets to [become] more forthcoming. That, and some other factors, eventually forced them to cooperate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your specific involvement with COPUOS or the United Nations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, except in the first year or so when Dryden was effectively the U.S. representative and I was with him as an assistant, after that I was effectively the U.S. representative in the parent committee and in the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee until I stopped doing it entirely. But I did it for a number of years. Paul Dembling and then [S. Neil] Hosenball [of NASA], were the … representatives … in the Legal Subcommittee [of COPUOS]. I mentioned that [one of the US ambassadors] from the U.S. mission would usually open the parent committee meeting and then give way to me.\\n\\n [The] staff of the U.S. mission was extremely active in this, particularly … Peter Thatcher, a very, very good man…. He was … support [and guidance] for our participation, very, very good. That worked very well. But in my view, [the main benefit was the show-and-tell function]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the United States delegation on these committees ever come to you looking for information or guidance that only your team could provide? Were they looking for anything specific on maybe how to deal with specific countries or if they had some specific ideas they were looking for some assistance from you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[Eventually we were the US Delegation.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Maybe some of the principles that they were working on or some the treaties that they were working on at the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I mean, I don’t think [the mission] did a thing on the treaties without dealing with Dembling and Hosenball…. If something they wanted to do in a treaty would cause a problem [to the US space program, in NASA’s view], we’d be very quick to speak up, and [it] would not [be pressed] it, if it was a real problem. I don’t think that much presented a problem, but it might have been, I just don’t remember. Hosenball might give you a much better answer than I could on that.\\n\\n But, no, we were in touch with Peter Thatcher regularly because there’d be some ongoing business within the [UN] committees and [the mission would] want to know [what we were] proposing to do or say [about it], and that worked very well, very congenial. In fact, a fellow who was my deputy at NASA for some years left and became a member of the permanent staff of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space—Marvin Robinson … became a member up there. But we didn’t deal much with him. We dealt with our own mission, because he [became] an international civil servant and [we] didn’t want any conflict of interest there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I made a note earlier that you said when we got to this area we were going to talk a little more about your definition of space and boundaries and where that came with how the United States looked at where the boundaries were for space and how all that came about." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, there was … a lot of [talk] around the world about a “boundary” between air space and outer space; … it was important because of [the] overflight question. The U.S. policy was to achieve free overflight [in space].\\n\\n [For example], Theodore von Karman, [an] aeronautical scientist, … was one of the active people in trying to come to a definition. But my feeling is that people were focusing on trying to [define] a boundary [to] accommodate the fact of [satellites orbiting] in outer space. They came up with [a] rationale. I am not competent to say how valid it is, but it’s been accepted in the world. It almost comes to [saying] that the height at which a satellite can orbit is by definition in outer space. It is, I don’t know, roughly a hundred miles. When [the satellite’s orbit decays] below that [level], they go in [fairly quickly]. So I’m not being too enlightening on that, but I’m saying that the legal work accommodated the reality." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your job also took you I believe for a small span of time working with Dr. Homer [E.] Newell on NASA planning problems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I cannot remember anything about that. I know I did it. Let’s say I spent some time working with Homer Newell. I’m not even clear on what I was working on in memory. …There was a staff that had worked with Bob [Robert C.] Seamans, and it involved Wyatt, DeMarquis [D.] Wyatt, D. D. Wyatt, and another man [or two]…. They were doing … management analysis on programs for Seamans, as I thought. Now, Seamans left, and Newell got more into that area. He asked me, he or whoever was the administrator at the time, I honestly don’t remember—did you have dates on it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don’t believe I do, but maybe if we visit again I can send you some information and we can try that find that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He asked me to come over and help on what it [was] they were doing, but I don’t remember exactly what they were doing. I do know that it didn’t work out. It did not work out, and I honestly don’t know the reasons.\\n\\n …Wyatt had been doing this job himself. Whatever the job was, he had been doing it himself, and he did not take kindly to my coming in from outside with no real background in it. I had no background in financial management at all or program management, none…. I don’t know exactly how we resolved it, but I’d have to say that it was a mistake to put me there, that I did not have the background for it, and probably everybody was happy [with] my going back to the international [arena]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Speaking of which, one of your accomplishments was the negotiations with the Soviets regarding Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project, ASTP]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’d like to start with that, and you can tell us how far back that those negotiations started and what your role was to help." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Do you want to talk generally about cooperation with the Soviets, or do you want to talk about the Apollo-Soyuz thing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s start with the general negotiation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The general?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Back during the IGY, before NASA was established, the international IGY apparatus that dealt with rockets and satellites was called … COSPAR, [the] Committee on Space Research. [Recognizing that both the US and the Soviet union had committed to launching satellites]…. [COSPAR] wanted to arrange for the usual exchange of [scientific] information between the two. [As] in all the other areas of geophysics, the data was to be exchanged. It was [understood] that the frequencies on which the data would be telemetered down to Earth would be given to each side. Our frequencies were given, [but] there was always a great problem with the Soviets. … There were arguments about it [but there was] no real cooperation [so far as satellites were concerned].\\n\\n When NASA was established, Dryden had obviously been given direction, … pretty [clearly] from the White House, to see what he could do about getting the Soviets to cooperate. We would talk with them on the side at [the] U.N. meetings when they were set up and before that at any other meetings like the International Astronautics Federation and the AAS, the American Astronautical Society…. At those [functions], the Russians would attend, we would attend, and we would meet privately on the side.\\n\\n In the first years, [in] the very first period, the Russians would say, “Well, we can’t cooperate until there’s complete and total disarmament.” So it meant no cooperation. A little later, they began to say, … “We’re open to cooperation, but it has to proceed step by step.” That was a specific line they used over and over, “step by step.” We would say, Dr. Dryden would say, “Okay, what’s the first step? We’re ready to take the first step,” [but] they would never define or agree to [define] a first step.\\n\\n …At a certain point early on, like … ‘61, in the [President John F.] Kennedy administration, [the Soviet side did agree] to try to develop some cooperation—[by which was meant exchanges of scientific results]. Meteorology [is a good example]. Weather photographs from space, from satellites, [were to be exchanged]. The key for … [understanding this] is that this early cooperation was [at] arm’s length. [In] and each area, [there] was an exchange of [results] with no integrated involvement of either side in the other’s work. [Again, take] the meteorological case. We would have to set up dedicated communication lines [between] Washington [D.C.] [and] Moscow to exchange this weather data. We [assumed—and proposed—that we would] share the cost of the line. [The Soviets] said, “No, we’ll pay for it to our border and you pay [for it from there to your] border.” We said, “We’d [there] be paying for [most of the cost] of the line … and you’d be paying for [very little of it].” I [felt we should not budge from an equal division of the costs]. They made a great fuss about that. In fact, [they] insisted that Dryden refer [our] answer back to Washington—we were in Geneva [Switzerland], … at the time—[to see if] Washington [would back him. I didn’t think Dryden should indulge them, compromising his authority but he did. Of course, we were backed, the Soviets gave in and we shared the cost equally. But you can se the attitude of the Soviet side.]\\n\\n Now, we got to a [point later] where even [this level] began to fall away. … [The Soviet side] stopped answering letters. They ignored things…. It irritated me greatly because I felt … it was undignified, … a lack of self-respect, for us to pursue them under those circumstances, [as we were asked to do]. I began to compile a dossier, [listing every] date when we attempted to communicate with them [and their failures to respond]. We’d communicate again, [citing] the first effort and the fact that it [had] not been answered. I had a couple of pages of this absolute proof that when they talked about cooperation in the U.N. or anywhere else, they were [grossly misrepresenting the facts].\\n\\n At a meeting in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, [at] one of the astronautical societies, I [was scheduled] to deliver a paper. I read … off [the record of correspondence] with the Soviets, who were supposed to be dealing with us. It included exchanges of data of manned flight [that were supposed to be occurring]. …Gazenko, [their representative, a] very nice guy [personally], was in the front row. [I didn’t soft-pedal their dismal record at all. Gazenko] came up afterwards practically squeaking with indignation. “How could you do this to us?”\\n\\n I said, “Is it true or isn’t it true?”\\n\\n “Yes, it’s true, but there are reasons for it.”\\n\\n I said, “Yes, I’m sure there are reasons for it. I know you wouldn’t do this on your own, but this is the fact, and you can’t tell everybody that you’re cooperating when you’re [actually not doing so.”\\n\\n It all changed within weeks. Holding their feet to the fire really worked.\\n\\n [The big] change from an arm’s-length program to a program that really engaged the [two] sides [in common, interdependent activities] came with Apollo-Soyuz. That got started in the [President Richard M.] Nixon administration…. One day [Thomas O.] Paine, … then the administrator, called me in and said, “We want to come up with [some significant cooperative effort] with the Soviets.” He had in mind … something that [would involve one side] launching a manned capsule of [the other]. There were some other people [present], program people. We all agreed that [would not be] a viable proposal to the Soviets, because if they [launched] our capsule, [we risked a widespread impression that] we had to go to them because we didn’t have the launch power [(though of course, we did). Even more important, we could not expect access to] … enough information to satisfy [our] safety requirements and [meet] the standards that our program people [would] want. [The Soviet side would feel the same reluctance to be seen as dependent on us for a launching].\\n\\n [I felt any project, to be viable, had to have] the appearance of equality. [The Soviets wouldn’t] buy it unless they look equal in space to us. They’re not any longer [but] they’d like to look equal. That’s what [could] induce them into this…. Everybody agreed it would be have to be something like that. I believe it was [I who suggested] a docking in space. That led to the Apollo-Soyuz thing.\\n\\n Now, Why did Paine call us in to say we [had] to come up with something? I am [morally certain] that he had just come back from the White House and that the Nixon administration, [Secretary of State Henry A.] Kissinger, had pushed him to … come up with something [highly visible in cooperation with the Soviets]. I think that’s how it started, because Kissinger turned out, after this, in my own experience, to be [the] strong force within the White House pushing Apollo-Soyuz.\\n\\n Paine [asked us to] come up with a [docking] proposal, and he wrote a letter [along the lines we discussed]. I probably drafted it. [I] don’t honestly remember, but almost certainly I would have drafted it—and I don’t remember to whom it was addressed, but I’m guessing [it was] [Mstislav Vsevolodovich] Keldysh, … head of the Soviet Academy. …That’s the way it would have worked. [Eventually], a meeting [was arranged].\\n\\n By the time we met, Paine had left and George [M.] Low was the acting administrator. … [Bob] Gilruth was made head of the delegation [to Moscow]. I was … in charge of … policy and the negotiation. … Gilruth had a young guy on his staff with us. (I’m sure there were more than just the three of us, but I don’t remember who else.) The young guy was Glynn [S.] Lunney, who turned out to be an absolutely super, super person for this job, … technically and managerially and personally. The Soviets loved him. He could get them to do things that they didn’t know they wanted to do. He was just very, very good.\\n\\n So we had that first meeting and agreed on the broad outlines of an Apollo-Soyuz thing which would have to be [worked out] in detail [by joint working groups]. I remember we came back and had a press conference. Low asked me to handle the press conference; he did not appear. … The story made the front page of the New York Times in the right-hand column, and you [can] always refer to that. Any researcher who wants to see the next day’s [report] on that first Apollo-Soyuz [press conference]—it’s a lengthy story—[can find it all there].\\n\\n Lunney and [a Soviet engineer named Bushuyev] who Lunney always called “the “Professor” [Konstantin Davydovich Bushuyev],” … were heads of the joint working group apparatus. There were a number of joint working [(sub-)]groups on different aspects of the program and [apparently] all did a very good job.\\n\\n Early on, after one of the early meetings fleshing out the details of the program in the negotiations, Lunney called me and said [he was] very worried … because the Soviets [were unwilling] to set up a direct telephone [link] between their manned space program [in Star City] and ours in Houston.” Lunney said, “We must have that. It must be possible for the guys … at the working level on this [project] to call each other any time they run into a question or a problem [so they can] get it straightened out [promptly] or we’ll never get there.” He said, “It just won’t work [otherwise].”\\n\\n I knew he was right. First of all, I trusted him, and [second], it just made sense that for such a demanding [project] where you had to have interfaces [of all sorts] and coordinated launchings and parameters for the rendezvous and [so on, that], you had to be able to resolve issues [directly and promptly], and the Russians weren’t agreeing to it.\\n\\n So I said, “I agree with you. I’ll talk to George Low.” I went to George Low and told him the story and said, “I’m sure Lunney’s right and it’s got to be set up.”\\n\\n He said, “What [do you suggest]?”\\n\\n I said, “I think you and Lunney and I ought to go to Moscow and sit down with these people and tell them this [channel] has to be set up or else we’ll have to go back to the White House and tell them that we think the project has to be dropped.” That’s what we did. We went back [to Moscow], and that’s what was said, and the Soviets caved in. [The link] was set up. [You] see, they were worried about calls coming in at any time when they might not be around to monitor them, [when] they wouldn’t know what was being said by their people…. I’m sure that was their concern.\\n\\n [A telephone protocol] was set up on some rational basis so calls [could] come in, I think, [everyday but I believe between fixed hours] in the morning [and] afternoon…. I don’t remember exactly, but there was something that [fully] accommodated Lunney’s concerns [yet] had the appearance of some rationale or organization for the Soviet side, but they caved. The project went ahead, and it went ahead very, very well.\\n\\n Now, there’s one further episode that relates to Apollo-Soyuz that will illustrate some things about it. Somewhere during the program, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote a letter to one of the newspapers. He was not then in office. This was in the Nixon administration and before [President James Earl] Carter came in. He wrote a letter saying that Apollo-Soyuz was a technological giveaway, and it was a shame that we were conducting such a … program.\\n\\n I sat down and wrote him a letter which [stated] what the situation [was with respect to his charge]. First of all, our [space] program was [already] a substantially open program. The Soviets’ was a substantially closed program. So in any relationship between the two of them, it [was more] likely we’d learn … more [about their program] than they’d learn [about ours], and that, of course, was the [actual] case. We went to Star City [Zvezdny Gorodok, U.S.S.R.]. We saw their rendezvous and docking apparatus and how primitive it was. We saw lots of [such] things. In the course of [the] program, we [also] went to one of the [Soviet] launch sites. We were the first Westerners, other than [President of France Charles] de Gaulle, who was like that goat looking into my desk. But we went to the launch site. [In general, the project] was clearly more [revealing] for us than for the Soviets.\\n\\n Second, the only significant technological interchange in the program was the docking device. When the [joint] working group sat down and looked at what was required for the compatible docking [exercise, they looked at] our system, our docking device, and they [looked at the Soviets’. Our people argued that] theirs was better. It was safer. [You] see, ours was a portable thing that [had to be] stored away somewhere, and [taken out for use and put back afterwards. It had to be manhandled into position for use]. In theory you could rip a flight suit or [damage] something. But [their docking device] was designed later and better in the sense that it was hinged [and folded into place or removed] very nicely. Nobody had to drag [it] down like a barbed ironing board and poke it around. … So it was agreed that we would use their docking device. To permit that, we had to build one like it, so [the Soviets] gave us [their] blueprints. They gave us the blueprints for the docking device, [it was] the most substantial technological interchange in the program, and it went from them to us.\\n\\n Now, in addition to that, they accommodated us in [a third] way. …In the first concept, there was to be an additional piece of hardware … to be put between the two capsules when they rendezvoused and docked. It was a decompression chamber, … necessary because in our Apollo capsule, the atmospheric pressure inside was five pounds per square inch [while] in theirs it was fifteen pounds per square inch. We had a pure oxygen atmosphere at five pounds. They had nitrogen and oxygen at fifteen pounds. You couldn’t go from one to the other without [risking] getting [the] bends…. So you’d [have to] have a decompression device—a big complication to the program. [It] would … cost [a] lot of money, not only to design and build, but to provide for carrying it up and installing it and all that stuff.\\n\\n So the Russians [volunteered to use their capsule itself] as the decompression chamber. [They would] decompress before [anyone moved] from one capsule to the other inside. [They would] just sit there [for a couple of hours while decompressing] down to five pounds. Well, that was a very nice accommodation, … again on the Soviet side. It was at some risk to them because now they would have to bleed off the nitrogen and [get] down to five pounds of pure oxygen, which [would increase] the fire hazard.\\n\\n So they [asked] to us, [if we could give them] samples of the beta cloth from [our] flight suits. [They would] make up [their] our own flight suits. Well, we wanted to give them the beta cloth so they could do that, but [our] export authorities, in their wisdom …, said we couldn’t do it. The Soviets [therefore] had to develop their own fire-retardant cloth, and they sent us a piece of it. The guys at Houston—[this is not any opinion—the guys at Houston told me it was better than ours. They improved on ours, and we had a sample of it.\\n\\n [Another] thing [the] Soviets asked us for [was] a low light intensity video camera so they could broadcast video scenes from their capsule. … We had the kind of [video] camera that you can buy today anywhere, but in those days you couldn’t, and it could take pictures in very low light [inside the capsule] and [relay] TV [to] Earth. [Again], we were not permitted to send [the Soviet side] a camera that they could use, so they had the develop their own camera. I’m told it was not as good as ours, but it worked, so they solved the problem, and they probably learned something while doing it.\\n\\n [All this] was the substance of my letter to Brzezinski. I feel it demolished his [uninformed], presumptuous and [very] biased letter. He thanked me for my letter and [continued making the same allegations. If he had simply and honestly said he was opposed to cooperating with the Soviet Union because of its human rights violations, that would have been perfectly reasonable. But it appears he made unfounded charges without revealing his real considerations.]\\n\\n [Of course, we were directed to do this program. And it was very well done.] Whether it was worth doing is another big question, and I’m not sure of the answer to that. We did it because we were told to do it [by the White House]….\\n\\n Now, I hope it’s come through that I’m not soft-headed about dealing with other people—[like] if you knew your neighbor better you’d like him. I never believed that. If you knew your neighbor better, you might conclude that he [was] a worse son of a bitch than you [suspected]. I mean, those [notions] are just soft-headed.\\n\\n But nevertheless, I think there were some [very] good things about Apollo-Soyuz. For one thing, about one hundred technicians on each side were involved, and those technicians traveled from Star City outside Moscow to Houston and from Houston to Star City, and they met [and worked with] each other [over an extended period]. They were invited home to family dinners. Their people stayed in our motels. I saw [them] come down to breakfast at my motel and how they got along with our waitresses—[who] thought they were great fun. They were interesting. Houston is such a dull place, and here you have these interesting Soviets. The Soviets fell in love with maple syrup and took all they could home. [They] bought stuff in the supermarkets. They saw what this country was really like, not what they were told it was like, a hundred of them. They were [one] hundred elite people. …Not just ordinary people. [They’d] go home, and spread [it all] out through their families and their [extended families]…. So I think that must have had a big ripple effect in the Soviet Union. I really do.\\n\\n It also humanized the individual Soviet person for our people. After all, they were human beings, and they were pretty good. They had [just] been misled by their government…. So that is the story on Apollo-Soyuz.\\n\\n Now, oh, there’s one footnote. It [seemed] so logical to continue … because [the project] was so successful. It seemed to me the thing to do next would be to move [on] into a space station. But that was a huge undertaking at the height of the cold war with the Soviet Union, and it had to be done in such a way that we weren’t transferring technology and [so that neither side had anything to fear from it].\\n\\n …The very first step toward a space station would be the concept, [so we would] have an agreement which [provided] for trying to agree on a concept. We would talk with each other about a concept for a space station. If we could agree on a concept, only then would we move to a second phase, which would be the design phase. Only if you could agree on a design would you begin to move toward [developing] a bench model of some sort [and so on through all the established developmental phases toward a completed product].\\n\\n Well, … working closely with [our people] at Houston, we developed a draft agreement and negotiated with the Soviets to the point where they [actually] signed it. There was a signed agreement from them for a joint space station program, but with this careful, limited step-by-step [procedure according to which] you would never proceed from one [phase] to the … next … unless there was complete comfort and satisfaction in the prior [phase].\\n\\n …[By this] time, there [had been an] election [and] Carter [was] coming in. … I told [James C.] Fletcher, who was then the administrator, that I felt we … would have to consult with the new administration [before signing the agreement] because there [was] no point in … confronting them with [a fait accompli] that they might not want. I don’t know whether I knew Brzezinski was going to be [national security advisor] or not then. I just don’t remember.\\n\\n Anyhow, [Fletcher] was interested in signing it, but we held off. When the new administration came in, I called the White House, and they said, “Don’t sign it…. Scrap it.” I felt pretty embarrassed, because we [had] led the Soviets into it and then we couldn’t follow through, but there [could be] no argument about it. The administration had the right to call it. They didn’t want to do it, and certainly Brzezinski, who [had by] then materialized as the president’s national security advisor [would oppose it]. But they gave it no hearing, just no hearing.\\n\\n Now, maybe it was not a good idea. Maybe it was premature. But if the Soviets were willing to get into it, I think it was not premature. That was the story, [and] there was no more about [cooperation in a space station for years]—until the modern, the more recent stuff, and I know nothing about that. …I [do] know … that in my time there would have been no program under which millions of dollars would have been given to the Soviets to carry out their side of joint operations in space. I don’t know, what was it, $400 million?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Forty million. Are you talking about Shuttle-Mir? Are you talking about current ISS [International Space Station]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, all the joint operations in their capsule. We put men up there. It was a lot of money, anyhow. But [there] wouldn’t have been a dime in my time. … Now, I admit that we were working during the cold war and [that it’s] different [now], but it would not have happened. I don’t believe in that kind of dollar cooperation. I mean dollar-paid cooperation. You don’t pay people to cooperate with you. If it had been insisted on, I would have resigned…. I would not have been identified with that kind of thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, there’s so much more that you did that we would like to talk to you about, but our time for the day is here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Goodness sake." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We don’t want to keep you from your other appointments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I’m going to call my luncheon date right now, if I can." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You certainly can, and we’ll just close for today. Then maybe we can have a chance to visit again in the future, but thank you for today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re very welcome. One reason I have been so willing to speak at length and cooperate is I have just been asked by Kathy [Kathryn C.] Thornton. Do you know [her]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "She lives in Charlottesville [Virginia]. She teaches at the University of Virginia. She’s just asked me to give a course. It’s going to be on the international space program. It’s just a few lectures [in] an institute for senior citizens that [is] identified with the University of Virginia. So I’m going to do that next year. [I’ve done an outline of] just a couple of pages … and thought this would be [a] useful rehearsal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good. You’ll have a transcript of this, so you’ll be able to use it for everything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Arnold Frutkin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you a lot for today, and we hope to see you again in the future." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00247", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-MR-2011-002-004.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Nieblas, Peter (1962-1964): Oral history interview", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-MR-2011-002-004", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-MR-2011-002-004", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "Peter Nieblas served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia from 1962 to 1964 on an agriculture project. He was studying civil engineering as a senior in college when he saw a flyer about the Peace Corps and decided to apply. He requested placement in Latin America because of his Latin background and his ability to speak some Spanish. Nieblas found the training somewhat harsh and not too useful, except for portion at the Agricultural School in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. In Bolivia, he was part of an animal husbandry and dairy project intended to increase local milk production. He was based at the milk processing plant in Cochabamba, which was originally built by the United Nations, but would also travel around to assist local dairy farmers. After the Peace Corps, Peter went back to school and finished a master's degree in civil engineering. Interviewed and recorded by Sharleen Hirschi Simpson, June 24, 2009. 1 tape (web streaming files combined into 1 file).", + "dates_of_materials": "24 June 2009", + "extent": "1 audio cassette (mono; 34 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "009. Bolivia.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Bolivia. Nieblas, Peter (1962-1964): Oral history interview", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Bolivia", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "MR-2011-002", + "transcript": "RPCV-MR-2011-002-004-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "October 28, 2023 9:18:57 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/11mme14xs2jq0101pytpwcs7ri65ils0.pdf?odc=20231115173839-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/53d10ebe-16d6-40b6-ba0b-c7ad4cf72513/4b08f867-c1cd-4c36-801e-d11e1218fb52/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzIwMzdfM2RhZjZhZGM5OWI0ZjBlY2I3ODAxNDQ4OTc1NWY1MGI3ZmVmYzgyNDQ1ODk1OWQ0NjRlMTYzMDBkNTU0OTI3Y18vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS81M2QxMGViZS0xNmQ2LTQwYjYtYmEwYi1jN2FkNGNmNzI1MTMvNGIwOGY4NjctYzFjZC00YzM2LTgwMWUtZDExZTEyMThmYjUyL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Branson, Missouri", + "length": "18 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed November 30, 2010, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Peter Nieblas Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Peter Nieblas" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:04", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And today is June 24th, 2009, and this is Sharleen Hirschi Simpson, and I'm interviewing Peter Nieblas. And Pete, why don't you start by just telling us kind of what you're doing now, retired." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:23", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Retired in 2000. I retired in 2004. And I have an avocado grove I take care of. I raise flowers and take care of a grandson." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:35", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And where is it that you're living now?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:37", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We lived in Valley Center, California. It's north of San Diego, about an hour and a half. God's country for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:00:43", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, actually, it's pretty nice out there. I know. And now what? I want you to think about the year before you joined the Peace Corps, how did you happen to hear about it and how did you happen to decide to go with it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:01:06", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was really a fluke. I was in college and it was in my sophomore year and I was tired of school and saw this flier, Peace Corps. I looked at and I said, I’ll send an application. So I sent an application in and heard nothing. Another application came in, filled that form out. It went on like that. And here comes an offer to go to Bolivia, you know, and of course, I had another offer to go to the Bering Sea with the Alaska Department Fish and Game. And I tried to postpone going to Bolivia and they say, it's either now or not. So I went to Bolivia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:01:45", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you did you have a hard time making that decision?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:01:48", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was the hardest part was I had to make it and I made it because it was definitely a place I never imagined they'd ever go, you know. I had been to Alaska. So I jumped in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:02:04", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what did your family think, they decided to go in the Peace Corps and your friend?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:02:11", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, my family. Yeah, my mother would always say if you want to do it. And so there was no problem. There wasn’t even hesitation on their part. And to my friends, they said, what are you doing? And I don't I don't know, but I’m going to try it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like a plan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, well planned out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:02:32", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what were you studying in college?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:02:35", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, civil engineering. It was then and I did eventually graduate as a civil engineer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:02:42", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you put in your application, did you ask for any specific country or place?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:02:51", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I asked for South America because I have a Spanish background and that would be the only reason. No, I think I did, but no specific country, just the area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:03:03", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, so what tell me a little bit about the project, what you were invited to do? Well, just like just about the project, because I want to talk about training as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:03:16", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were the project we ended up going to was in Cochabamba, the valley of Cochabama. And I had to do with animal husbandry and dairy in the United States, no, the UN had to build a processing plant to plant the field. And it was produced it was designed to produce about 20 thousand liters of milk a day. And they were only getting like three or four. And they wanted some way of bringing it up. And so somebody got the idea of let's have somebody in this case volunteers, you know, try to encourage dairying. And so this we went down there to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:03:50", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So tell me a little bit about the training. When you when you first went into the Peace Corps, what were you expecting or different than you were expecting or what was your impression?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:04:05", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had no expectations, you know, and I'd never been any kind of training, a formal group, you know, so I went along with the flow. You know, we had some language training that was logical. There would be language training. And there was some, you know, training. We lived with the Indians. I guess that was the experience, a little bit more of a different culture. The training, a lot of the training wasn't really relevant. We had advisers or people who had lived in Bolivia and there are U.S. Ag people come back and they gave us talks about what to expect. And I don't think they ever went out of the country because it was different, you know, but it didn't make any difference with important when you really got down there, what they could have done in the States, you know, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The environment was just different. You had to just say go with flow and that's what you did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:04:58", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So overall, what did you think of the training in Arizona?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:05:04", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was the Indians. That was probably be the harshest food they had." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:05:08", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell me a little bit about what you actually did in the training?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:05:13", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they try to teach us how to construct, you know, in this case was chicken pens, you know, chicken barns or something like that. We built little buildings and, you know, just built a large free range chicken pens, you know, and and then, you know, they did teach us. Then we went in town, we had classes in the shop, metalwork and have some idea of tools. But that was basically it. Got my teeth fixed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:05:48", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about the next phase?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:05:50", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was Mayaguez, Puerto Rico." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:05:55", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, well, Arecibo first, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:05:57", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well that’s still Puerto Rico, Arecibo. Oh I think this was Camp Crozier?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:06:03", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Crozier." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:06:07", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They try to teach us how to learn to swim. I never learned I still don't know how to swim. But, you know, I think the the instruction there I was I don't think it would be interesting if you learned it or got were proficient and whatever they're trying to teach it is if you're willing to try it, because there were people who you know, they're like the team we had to repair of dams. You know, some of the girls have been doing just that. One girl from South Carolina, I forget her name. She freaked out. Yeah. No way could you get her to the edge. You know, I think all that counted against her, anybody who really wasn't willing to give it a try, they didn't care if you did well or want to do it, you know, unless that was just to see, you know, what you're willing to try at. But that was, again, big thing outdoors." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:07:02", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How about the heights?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:07:04", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All the height was the same thing, just to see, you know. They broke it out to your ability. My ability was such that I had to go with the girls. But again, with the same thing. I remember when they were sorting us out. Nieblas, go with the girls. Anyway, it was again it seemed to go on. The time you spend overnight will make the hikes, you know, because in actuality, actuality, when we got to Bolivia we never did any of that stuff. I didn't sleep out in the countryside. It was never even proposed to sleep out in the countryside." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:07:47", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about Mayaguez?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:07:51", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mayaguez. That was the university that was more practical because of the Ag school. And they gave us classes and, you know, in different tropical fruits, animal husbandry, really pigs, some cows there also, and just some of the, you know, foods and stuff, you know, of Latin America. That was the most practical. Other than the language part. Good exposure to Latin countries." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:08:20", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So after you got done with Puerto Rico, then what happened?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:08:25", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Then you come home. Regroup and then we had to go to Vermont. That was the Cuban Missile Crisis." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:08:34", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When we got to Miami, that was the Cuban Missile Crisis?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:08:36", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, then we had to go to Vermont. I actually liked that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:08:42", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Going to Vermont?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:08:43", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it was it was in the fall. And I never had never been on the West Coast. On the East Coast. And so all that was fascinating, all the people you know. The country was pretty even, just like you see, you know, in those calendars, you know, the barns and the ducks in the field and of flowers and stuff. And then, you know, I, liked Vermont, could have stayed there too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:09:08", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A lot of people apparently really liked Vermont. Completely different after the desert." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:09:18", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yeah. It was it was good. I went raccoon hunting with the janitor." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:09:23", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, did you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:09:24", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, we were eating raccoon. Yeah, it was fun for me. It was because I never did that. And he had a dog, an old pickup, and the dog would be in the back of the truck and we’d drive along. I'm antsy. I'm ready to, you know, as soon the dog barks. The guy would say, no, just wait. You’ll know, the dog then would make kind of a howl, jump out of the truck and take off, you know, and then again, I'm saying, well, let’s go chase him. No, you wait. And you hear the dog barking, barking, and then the pitch of the bark changed. Ah, he’s got one and finally the janitor would come out with his pistol and a flashlight and there we’d go and he’d have a raccoon up in the tree and go pop. One raccoon, put in the truck and go do it again. There was no real sporting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:10:13", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you do with the raccoon?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:10:15", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, he was up every spring and in the year to come there was they had a festival with the raccoon. Some kind of delicacy or something. And this festival, they had raccoon meals and he was collecting in his lot of raccoons." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:10:34", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But I know they do that sometimes in the south." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:10:37", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But possibly I think south. But a big rat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:10:42", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the big hairy rat. Yeah. So did you go into Boston?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:10:48", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah Boston. One place where I thought they didn't speak English. I remember asking a policeman some directions, you know, and he was really polite to me and I said, yeah, what did he say? Can’t understand him. It was really, really thick his way of talking." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:11:12", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you were you are one of us had problems when we first went to training, understanding people from the east, the people from the south, or was that not a problem?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:11:24", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't think. I don't remember it as being a problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:11:33", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, so then, uh, after that, then I guess we were on our way to Bolivia. So tell me about your experiences when you got to Bolivia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:11:48", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When we landed in La Paz, the airport, some fourteen thousand feet. My head was bursting, the air so rarified up there. I just just couldn't do anything, you know? And I spent the first day or maybe two in bed, you know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:12:04", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's like the sea level." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:12:08", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I never had a head hurt like that. And so eventually you got a little better. And they took us, the Bolivians there. It was the kids group or whatever. But they took us for tours. Saw Lake Titicaca and some of the tourist sites that you see around there, the reed boats, and then a few days. And I don't know how many days it was. We got in their jeeps and had a caravan to Cochabamba. And we were driving along the Altiplano, you know, just going." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:12:38", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you get to drive one of the jeeps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:12:41", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't remember. I can remember being the Jeep and on each side of the Jeep there was nothing. And these people, you know, these rock walls, and that was their farm and god it sucks, you know, out of people. I mean, I really feel sorry for that. That's what, it's hard to imagine to do anything to help the people who didn't have anything to start with. Nothing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:13:04", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what when you got to Cochabamba, what did you think?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:13:07", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Cochabamba is a lot like California, where we were not as high. I mean, it's higher than could be California, but they had the dry rolling hills. That kind of brushy hills and know big trees, eucalyptus. The climate is nice, you know. You know, winter got cool, don’t think it snowed very much. But it was closer to where I was accustomed to the climate. Not too hot. Dry heat, too, wasn’t any humidity, not like Cochabamba." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:13:39", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So tell me about where in Cochabamba that you live by yourself or do you live with a family?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:13:47", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I lived with a family. Larry Wohlwend and myself lived with a family of German descent, Grosbergers. Husband, wife and two children, maybe three, three children, had two children and, you know, kids that were, you know, maybe five and four, and a small baby. He spoke English. He'd been in the States studying agriculture. And so he brought his he picked up in the state and he had a dairy and he raised chickens and he kind of had his hands and everything. You know, these people that any time you made a good politician, he was just into everything. Knew everybody, spoke the Indian languages and stuff, you know? You know, he was an interesting fellow, Grosberger." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:14:34", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, uh, what, how old were you when you went?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:14:39", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Went at 22. I was 22 years old." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:14:41", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "22. So what exactly do they ask you to do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:14:49", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well. Back in the States, I had some knowledge of cows, we had milk cows, and so maybe we put in the cow works and stuff like that. And so we worked with the plant, the goal was to increase dairy production. Each one of us had an area which was our area to cover. And so we visited the farms and the people that had cows and the way we knew what they were with the plant appeal had a route where they picked up the milk cans. And so they gave us a list of their dairy and people, you know, and we would then we would visit those that were within our section, introduce ourselves. We're here to help the owner. And of course, when they say help, this is what they all say, we're getting money? No, we're not bringing any money, just trying to help you, you know, with your cows and they’re little farmers, you know, four or five cows. You know, you call them cows that were they were males with tits, that’s what they were. Really bad stock, really bad stuff.\n\nAnd then so we tried to help mainly at that time was the hygiene. The plant was trying to get the milk twice a day, which is the normal practice. But the evening milking would sour, and it was from poor hygiene. The plant furnished them, in the morning when they picked them out, they would drop off a block of ice so they could keep the canister at night in cold water. But the sanitation was bad, they lost their last milk. And so the farmers went to only milking once a day because they milk in the morning, they picked up in the morning. It was gone, it didn't go sour. You know, we were trying to encourage them to go ahead and milk twice a day. And some people went with it and some people never believed it. We explained to them that there were little bugs, you know, made the milk go bad. You know, they’d look at can, looks clean to me. That's what they actually said and they're really courteous, they didn’t say you're an idiot or something. And they just kinda." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:16:50", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And make a difference that you were so young?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:16:55", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't think it bothered him. I don't think I never picked up on that at all. And they may have picked up on the fact that what we were trying to tell them was really not so. They didn't see it, it really couldn’t be. There wasn’t obvious dirt in the container. They rinsed it out and stuff like that, but it wasn’t clean enough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:17:18", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So is that pretty much what you did while you were in Cochabamba?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:17:26", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The program was supposed to be one year and it was supposed that we were trying to transition, transition into something else. We never transitioned. The director, can’t remember the fellow’s name." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Barrone?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, that's right, Barrone. We were getting close to transitioning, he came up with the bright idea, let’s do another year. And I was kind of tired of it because the hours were bad. I mean, you know, get up at 3:00 in the morning and get to these dairies, you know, and you had to be there if you didn't get out there before they started milking, they would be done before you got there and they'd be done because only three or four pounds. And it took you most of the morning to get to some of these places. So you had to be there early and so had get up in the morning at 3:00, get in my Jep and take off. Those of us who had this milk project, had jeeps, the rest of the people had the bus. Then I get back and I’d go to the plant and deliver my samples, do the testing on them, get all the data, fill in my paperwork, and then I go back and get home maybe about 10 o’clock and go to bed. Sleep until lunchtime. And then life started again and again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:18:39", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So that was what you were doing for the work. What did you do in your off time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:18:45", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Learn to drink beer. Um, I liked going around town. You know, I used to spend a lot of time wandering the town and going into the marketplace and just wandering around, talking to people, just looking around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:19:00", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You must have fit in pretty well. I mean, I bet they thought you were some kind of Latino." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:19:06", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, they did. They spoke Spanish enough. I didn't have a real pronounced accent. You know, I could get along well. The people were very interesting, you know. And the fact that I was an American Latino, was different that a Latino from Argentina simply because it was some kind of animosity between some of the neighboring countries. You know, I liked it there. I mean, the two years was enough, but I liked it, had no problem with the time I was there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:19:37", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So is there. Can you think of any significant things that happen to you or that you, while you were there, that really stand out? Well, you know, maybe significant is not the. Well, tell me about something that really is something that happened, really sticks out of your mind while you were there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:20:12", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The people were nice. They got along with everybody. I knew a lot of people like to converse with me and, you know, but, you know, when it comes out is when we first got to Bolivia, we were at the Lake Titicaca. And I always remember there was a beggar, you know, you see that guy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:20:36", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, was he, uh, crippled?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:20:59", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Anyway, it was sad to see him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:21:02", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that the first time you’d seen something like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:21:07", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it was the first time I ever saw someone like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:21:15", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So moving on. Did you do any socializing when you were in Cochabamba?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:21:22", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just parties. The girls liked Americans. So the social life. Apparently, any guys that had anything going were gone. And the ones that were there were trying to go. Again, there were a lot of nice people. And that part is interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:22:03", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, uh. So over time, say at the end of the first year or say, for example, where were you when you heard about the Kennedy assassination?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:22:16", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can remember like it was yesterday, like it was today. I got off the bus. I lived actually in Cochabamba, a little suburb of Piacoyo, it was on the bus route. I'd gotten off the bus and was walking down toe street to the house and this girl comes up, pops her head out the window, and says, they shot your president." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. That was hard." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That was hard. I remember that. And then apparently, listening to news, but that's when you remember seeing or hearing it. I still think it stands out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:23:09", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think that was very traumatic for all the Peace Corps volunteers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:23:13", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh everybody. Yeah they all remember that, wherever they were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:23:24", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So at the end of your first year, sounds like you didn’t have a hard time adjusting to the culture?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:23:33", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I liked it there. The food was different, had to learn what to eat and where to eat, stuff like that. Always ran out of money." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:23:42", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was all that beer drinking." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:23:48", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I got to eating and I would get done with my work around 10, 11 o’clock, you know, and I’d go to town. Couldn’t go to sleep, I’d go to town and have lunch, you know. Bolivians have something called salteñas. I liked those. And the best salteñas, even to Bolivians, were made by a Chinese guy. Go over there, he makes the best." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:24:15", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that about 10 o'clock in the morning?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:24:18", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From 11:00 until maybe 1:00." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:24:25", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great. So in the long term, from where when you got done with your time in Bolivia, how did you feel about what you had done? Did you feel like you had done what you thought you what they thought you needed to do, or how did you feel about that experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:24:47", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I felt I did what they were expecting me to do, you know, in social context. I tried to help the people who were successful, but they were really slow to change. But I was satisfied with me. You know, I was ready to go. I wouldn't have signed up for another tour. It was time for me to go. After seeing how Bolivians live with it and realize, you know, I've got to get going with that I need to do, go back to school and finish. So I did eventually finish, but I was 27 when I graduated from college. But no, I was content and I thought I did what they wanted, what they're expecting. I think Peace Corps at that time was expecting a volunteer to go down there and try, not get in trouble, you know, and be friendly to people. And I did all that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:25:37", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, tell me if at the end of your tour, you mentioned this earlier, did you think that the preparation and the training helped at all?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:25:52", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mostly the language portion helped and then the actual agriculture. Maybe living with the Indian American Indian reservation, the Maricopa, seeing how another way people live. People who came from the State Department to give you advice and stuff, they were worthless." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:26:22", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, well, that I subsequently spent time in other doing other things down there, and it was true, but some people had no clue about anything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:26:35", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They weren’t there. I mean, if they were, they spent the time in their room." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:26:40", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you did probably provide some technical assistance and probably help people understand the U.S. and Americans better, and you got to know the Bolivians and lived with them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:26:52", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And we were from America trying to help you with your cows. And we did. The plant went from production of about three thousand liters per day up to eight or 10 liters." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh that’s good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had an impact, you know, and then the scientists there brought in the artificial insemination to try to improve the herds. It helped." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:27:18", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So after you got out the Peace Corps, have you had any continued involvement with Bolivia or Bolivians?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The family you lived with there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:27:31", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I abandoned everyone and went on my greedy way. I went back to college. I would read the paper about Bolivia and show my relatives my slides. But I didn't have contact. I didn’t keep any contact." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:27:52", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, tell me, do you think that being in the Peace Corps changed the direction that you went after you got out? Would you have done the same thing had you not gone?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:28:05", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I would have. If you go to Peace Corps, I think you stay in that direction. I think you should go and be in a program where you help people. My profession was, I built stuff. I didn't help the down-trodden." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:28:19", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, that’s something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:28:20", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, indirectly, but it's not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:28:23", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were a civil engineer, and so that's the kind of thing you did in California?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:28:34", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My specialty was water and sewer, so we designed and built water treatment plants, sewage treatment, the pump stations. Did that for 37 years. Civil engineering helps society, but that was in the back of my mind, I had a good job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:28:55", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where I were, you know, they were always trying to see if we were altruistic. I think we were altruistic. We were also looking for some adventure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:29:03", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think it to be something new. I was tired of school. I really didn't know which way to go to school. I mean, I didn't have good English ability. But I was good at math and understood the engineering concepts, so I went that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which are foreign concepts to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But they're not to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:29:29", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Everybody needs their little direction to go. OK, so basically you said you came back and went to school, but took a while to finish with that just because." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Changed majors." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were you doing before?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:29:45", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Civil engineering. But it was structural, and I had changed over to water and sanitation, which required me to take some more hydraulic classes and take microbiology. And sewage treatment is a biological process. Had to learn that process, so it took me longer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:30:03", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, well, most engineering or anyway, takes five years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:30:18", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And now I did get a master’s, just not at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:30:28", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So do you have any other comments or things that you'd like to add?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:30:37", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My daughters used to ask if they should join the Peace Corps and I said, do it! Do it when you're young. Now, they can't do it. They're married or they got the career, they have too much time spent on their education, they can't let that lapse." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:30:54", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I know I hear students talking that they would really like to be corps, but nobody’s willing to give up that two years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:31:03", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It can be an impact depending on where you are in your education. I think it's harder, it's harder to go right after college, especially if you if you have the technical education, you have to keep that up or you lose it. The liberal arts would actually be pretty good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:31:26", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, the problem with nurses is that, if they get out, they really need to practice, because I know that for me, I felt about 10 years after I was in the Peace Corps, I had. [tape break]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:31:46", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were bacteria and cleanliness and it wasn't cleanliness because it shined, you know, it had to be cleaned and not sterile, but at least clean. These people didn't think that was problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:31:55", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That would have been a real problem with trying to improve the sanitation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:32:09", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a big problem. They just did not get it and they would do what you suggested, supply them with the soap and stuff like that, but soon as they ran out of the soap or were in a hurry and they couldn’t do it this morning because they got late, you know, it was not something they conscientiously believed in. Something they did with it might have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:32:29", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I ran into that trying to teach him how to scrub, sterile technique, you know, because I finally had to teach it like a ceremony. Because you do this, you do this, because they didn't understand scientific principle, so you couldn't tell them that and figure that they would know how to use that, you just had to tell them a specific way to do it. And it always had to be in this way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:32:58", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, the hope of those people are the kids. The adults." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:33:02", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have much contact with kids? A lot of a lot of people were teaching English and doing other 4S clubs and stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:33:11", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I helped, I taught English. The replacement teachers would go on vacation, I think I took Lofton’s place for a while. But I didn't do it as a routine though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:33:29", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, well, if you have no other things?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Peter Nieblas", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:33:32", + "speaker": "Sharleen Hirschi Simpson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "OK, let me just stop this." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00066", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/BrinkleyR/brinkleyr.htm", + "original_file_name": "BrinkleyRH_2-24-16.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/ISS/BrinklelyRH/BrinkleyRH_2-24-16.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "International Space Station Program Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "location_date": "Mountain City, Tennessee – 24 February 2016" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Randy H. Brinkley" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is February 24th, 2016. This interview is being conducted with Randy Brinkley as part of the International Space Station Program Oral History Project. Mr. Brinkley is speaking with us via telephone from Mountain City, Tennessee. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright. Thanks again for taking time today.\\n\\n When we spoke yesterday we talked about when you decided to take the leadership role on the International Space Station [ISS] Program in January 1994. When you began, the Program was behind schedule, it was over budget, there were serious technical problems identified. As you told me, you just didn’t know what you didn’t know. But the challenges were many, both internally attempting to integrate new programs with existing cultures at NASA, and externally learning to work with a new international partner, one that was very experienced in long duration flight, but also one that historically had been an adversary to the nation. It certainly wasn’t an easy job. I think we all want to know, why did you choose to take it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I thought it was, one--a tremendous challenge and professional opportunity, and, two--it was something that I believed would make a difference to our nation. That was really important. It had a major impact on the future of human spaceflight and for our nation. I felt I was obligated to take the job, quite frankly.\\n\\n Maybe I didn’t know what I didn’t know and how challenging it was. But, I knew that if I walked away from it, I would regret it for the rest of my life. When I was asked, I didn’t question. I was honored, then set about to figure out how to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you share with us some of the qualities or the experiences that you felt that you had that gave you the confidence that you could figure out how to set about to work it out? You spent many years in the Marine Corps. I know you worked a few years in industry before you went to work at NASA to do the Hubble [Space Telescope] servicing mission. But why did you feel that you could make this work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess because I felt like all my life I had a professional life in the Marine Corps and along the way, I had been successful in whatever endeavor I had been involved in. But I also credited the success to the people around me. It was the way I was raised, and certainly in the Marine Corps, whether I was the platoon commander, I knew that I had learned the same thing from my platoon sergeant in the Marine Corps, and the same was true in Marine Aviation after I graduated from flight school.\\n\\n I just kept doing the things that had made me successful—and that was to do the best I could and surround myself with dedicated and talented people and listen to them and create an environment that would enhance their ability to succeed.\\n\\n We had just come off repairing the Hubble Telescope, which if you go back and look at Newsweek and some of the press coverage about the mission, it was really critical to the reputation and future of NASA. At least [NASA Administrator Daniel S.] Dan Goldin certainly thought so. I probably didn’t appreciate the importance at the time, but somehow we were successful in that. I felt like if we had been successful basically following the same kinds of leadership principles and managerial experiences in organizations and what I’d learned, and it had worked for Hubble, I felt like there was no reason that it wouldn’t work for the International Space Station.\\n\\n I just knew that I was going to work as hard as I could to do everything in my power for us to be successful. When I say us, I mean capital US, never about me, it was about us. I never ever once at NASA got to the point that I drank my own bathwater and actually thought I knew that I was one of the graybeards who really knew everything that was tutorial to other people. I never never got that comfortable with myself, nor my experience.\\n\\n To me it was a natural thing just to listen to people. Listen not only to one person, but multiple people. At the end of the day I wasn’t afraid to make hard decisions. I did so with a lot of input." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You certainly had a lot of opportunity to make a lot of hard decisions because of the different challenges that you had to overcome. I know there are many, and I’m sure there are more than will ever be documented, because some of them were big, but others were larger, so that took an overwhelming amount of time that you spent on those. But are there some as you look back on those years that stick out more in your brain, those that were like an awfully hard mountain to climb but you managed to do it? Could you share some of those with us that stand out in your mind that were very significant to the success of the Station?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably one of the most critical times for the International Space Station was the launch of the first element, the Functional Cargo Block [FGB]. I think it was in November of ’98 or ’99. The FGB had environmental control and life support system, and it was a Russian vehicle, although we [the United States] paid for the development through Boeing and Khrunichev. If that launch had failed or if that element had failed, it was a single path failure. We didn’t have any additional backup modules to launch. It was all or nothing.\\n\\n One of the things I remember that was of such great concern was that five months earlier, there had been a failure on the launch vehicle, the Proton. That’s the vehicle that we were going to fly on. That was the launch vehicle from Khrunichev that the FGB was going to be launched on. We spent five agonizing months going through root cause corrective action, doing everything in our power to make sure that we understood what caused the previous launch failure of the Proton and that it didn’t happen again, because if it did, the Space Station Program would have never survived. There were no backups. It really would have been a catastrophic failure for the Program and for NASA.\\n\\n That’s probably the one that comes to mind as probably the most significant because there weren’t any alternatives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No do-over on that one, was there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While we’re on that topic, would you like to talk about that day when the launch happened, where you were, what your role was at that moment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were all in Baikonur for the launch. Mr. Goldin was there, Mr. [George W.S.] Abbey was there, the head of the Russian Space Agency, dignitaries, representatives from the White House staff, and news coverage. It was a very very cold November day. It was for all the marbles, and we had a perfect launch, and we waited until we had separation from the Proton launch vehicle and the Functional Cargo Block. It was a great relief and a great sense of pride for all of us. I remember it was being televised on NASA Select back in the States. My family watched it, and lots of other people, because it was so important. That was a special day. I thought at the time there were so many people that never believed we would ever develop the hardware, much less successfully launch the Space Station, and there it was, the first element was in orbit. Shortly followed by the second launch with [Robert D.] Bob Cabana and his [STS-88] crew on the Shuttle Endeavour in December [1998] to deliver Node 1." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At the same time were there a lot of concerns? Did you believe that Unity was going to do well once it was there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really did; I used to laugh. We had 21 different independent review groups overseeing the International Space Station, and it seemed like we spent half our time dealing with the various review groups, answering questions about this and about that. I guess the good news is they probably asked every imaginable technical, every question that you could imagine. Maybe instead of being a real impediment and a pain in the rear end, maybe it was really beneficial because it certainly caused us to have the Space Station looked at from every possible angle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely. Were all of those [review groups] cross-cultural? Or were some independent from each nation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Most of them were U.S. But there was one that was joint Russian and U.S. That was headed up by General [Thomas P.] Tom Stafford, the Stafford review group. Tom had been doing that function for Phase 1 [of ISS]. Actually Tom also had headed up an independent review group for the Hubble. I was grateful for his role on the Hubble mission and certainly they played a very important role on the International Space Station. He had Russian members and U.S. members.\\n\\n Tom was very special because he was the commander of the Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project, August 1975], so he had a relationship with the Russians. Viktor Legostaev, who was my counterpart, knew Tom from those days when they did Apollo-Soyuz. Viktor really had great respect for Tom and for NASA and is a wonderful wonderful man. Those relationships really helped, and Tom certainly helped with his team of Russians and Americans in their independent review. Their endorsement was really helpful of the decisions and the directions that we made; they were supportive of that. That gave a lot of credibility to the Program and the decisions that had been made.\\n\\n We were very open about everything, and I think that made a difference. We weren’t trying to hide anything. I looked at those review groups as an asset, not a liability, because they weren’t going to go away. So how do you use them to leverage value added? We did that to the best of our ability.\\n\\n But Tom, he’d been in this business all his life. He really understood, he knew the Russians. He and his team were a great asset to us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now that you had those two historic modules up where they needed to be, you certainly had more things to do, because you had more challenges with the next modules. I believe within the next six or eight months you had issues with the Priroda and the Spektr target dates not being met." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "One of the big issues that we had was if we launched the FGB and the Node 1, and the Russians continued to slip on the Service Module, there could be such a gap that the first two elements could run out of on-orbit life or gas and fuel, prop, etc. before the Service Module was ready.\\n\\n That was a huge issue as to when the Service Module was really going to launch because of the delays and lack of funding by the Russian government. That really caused a lot of angst. I ended up having to testify [to Congress] over that on several occasions. It was a real hard point in Congress with the critics, and rightfully so, because we were burning $2.3 billion a year, and a year delay in the Service Module basically cost the taxpayers $2.3 billion. There were work-arounds and other things we were doing, but a year slip on the Russian side had dramatic impact in terms of cost to the Program on the U.S. side, and it affected all the other partners as well, because everybody was waiting around to fly the hardware that was being built.\\n\\n We had similar problems with the Destiny lab, but not as long, and it wasn’t as critical, because the Service Module provided the follow-on environmental control and life support system for the whole Space Station. The only way we could be human-tended was with the Service Module." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You couldn’t catch a break with what was going on in Russia, I would imagine, with all the turmoil and the ruble falling and political unrest and changes in the country. Did you have a contingency at all to help?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we did. We were funding FGB2 that we could launch to attach to FGB1 to extend it on orbit until the Service Module got there. There were all kinds of things that we were looking at. But these weren’t the days of Apollo where you could throw all the money from [Fort] Knox against it. A lot of the contingency plans weren’t funded. Or maybe certain aspects were funded. We did fund some of the work on the FGB; it was the test vehicle for the first FGB that we looked at how to make it move from a test to an actual FGB2." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At times were there concerns that the Russians were using leverage possibly to garner more funds for what they needed? Did you encounter any of those types of situations? Or did you feel that things were being done to the best of all ability?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, that was happening all the time, but to be candid, the Russian government was not funding the Russian Space Agency to the level that it needed to be in order for them to be able to execute the Program on the schedule that we had.\\n\\n They continued to struggle with minimal funding. But, they’re very clever people, and they were always trying to figure out a way to get more money from the U.S. side. We recognized that and if you go back and look, the Russians flew billionaires to the Space Station, they did it really with our passive blessings, but in order for them to get the $10 million for somebody to fly to the Space Station, because they needed the money. Although there was great angst about who would approve it. But initially that concurrence was approved by NASA, but it was with the understanding that it would be astronauts from the European Space Agency, Japanese Space Agency, etc. that that’s where the money would come from. But the Russians were more entrepreneurial than that. They went after and sold those launches to billionaires and we were stuck with our concurrence. That’s one example. We paid for a lot of things that you could argue they should have contributed to, but also if they hadn’t, we would have been further delayed. I think they did the best they could with what they had.\\n\\n I clearly felt after the successful launch of the FGB—Zarya or Sunrise—the first launch of the Space Station, that really crystallized both sides to realize we can actually do this, we did find a way, we will find a way. Everybody took ownership of that. That was a turning point for the Program. We never really got the severe criticism after that that we had before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You proved the impossible could be done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and we had like 40 more impossible missions ahead. Just take it one at a time; stay focused.\\n\\n I wanted to talk a little bit about how Node 1 came to be named Unity and the FGB was Zarya and how all the elements got to be named. What brought it up was with the FGB. There had been a lot of angst back and forth from the Freedom days with the Clinton Administration and [former Clinton senior advisor George] Stephanopoulos and other people about what to call the Space Station. It was a political issue, and nobody in the White House—we couldn’t get a name that was acceptable.\\n\\n It was a real morale issue at the Program level that we didn’t have a name. What are you going to call the Space Station? There was political angst because of the name that had been given under the Reagan administration, Freedom. They didn’t want to do that.\\n\\n We decided that since we couldn’t name the Space Station we would name all the elements. We decided on our own that Node 1 was Unity, because it represented the bridge between the Russian segment and the U.S. and the other segments. That’s how Unity came about, and we took that name, and didn’t ask, didn’t run it by George Abbey. That’s how Unity became Unity.\\n\\n We were at the last general design review for the launch of the Functional Cargo Block, and Mr. [Anatoly] Kiselyov, who headed up Khrunichev that was making the block, I said to him, “We have named our first node Unity. Mr. Kiselyov, have you thought about a name of the Functional Cargo Block, which is going to be the first launch of the Space Station?”\\n\\n He said, “Mr. Brinkley, that’s a good point. I’ll think about it.” About an hour later he said—this certainly wasn’t democracy—“Mr. Brinkley, it will be named Zarya, which in Russian means Sunrise. The rise of a new era of cooperation between the United States and Russia working together.”\\n\\n That’s how the FGB became Zarya, and Node 1 became Unity, and then the lab became Destiny, and not to be outdone, the Italians had Michelangelo for their module, and everybody got a name. We felt, “I don’t have the name of our dog, but I have the names of the front leg and the back leg and the tail and all the dog’s parts.” That’s a little humor, but a true story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Since we’re talking about the Russians and their tremendous name within an hour decision, talk a little bit more about your time in Russia. You said that you went there, I forgot, yesterday, 30 times I think you told me?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Twenty-six." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Twenty-six. You had also mentioned that you had spent a great deal of your life thinking that if going to Russia it would not be for a good reason but yet you were. How did the first visit compare to the last? How had the country and the whole environment changed because of the Americans being there and how had that impacted the Russian Space Agency?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first time I was there, we went to the Russian Space Agency for a series of meetings. That night the head of the Russian Space Agency hosted a dinner for us. [William M.] Bill Shepherd and I were walking around the halls of the Russian Space Agency by ourselves looking for the toilet, unescorted, just wandering around. It struck us both that a year earlier, no American had ever been in the Russian Space Agency building; few even knew where it existed. There that night, the two of us were wandering around in the Russian Space Agency building.\\n\\n Actually that day was the birthday of the Marine Corps. That night Mr. Goldin told Mr. [Yuri] Koptev, who headed up the Russian Space Agency, “Mr. Koptev, today is the birthday of the United States Marine Corps. Colonel Brinkley, the Program Manager of the International Space Station, was a colonel in the Marine Corps.” Then Mr. Koptev smiled and said, “Well, we don’t have any military in the Russian Space Agency, we don’t have any marines in the Russian Space Agency.”\\n\\n Then later on at drinks in a private conversation I said to him, “You may not have any ex-military but you certainly do have several KGB agents.” He cracked up. Because one of the guys we knew was; it was an open secret. He had served at the Russian embassy in DC for a number of years. It was funny. Okay, you don’t have military, but you have your KGB." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess this was the opposite of what you told me earlier, you did not know what you did not know. This is one of those things that you did know what you did know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yes, we realized. Every general design review in the States, there would be several of the Russian team members that were delayed, would have trouble with their visas because of their “background”—all of that was done through the FBI. We knew who was; after you work with people for five years, you get to know one another." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How much had things changed from that first time that you were there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first time I was there, there was not one McDonald’s [restaurant]. My counterparts on their business cards had inked out CCCP, Central Committee of the Communist Party. They had all been members of the Communist Party. None of them would acknowledge it. The people that we were dealing with, they were the leadership of the Russian Space Agency and they were all members of the Communist Party. That transition was somewhat interesting to say the least.\\n\\n What I did find about the Russians, which is logical now, but at the time I thought the Russians would find this freedom empowering and a great experience. Instead it scared them to death because from a culture perspective, Russians--their minds don’t work the same way ours do. They’re used to being told what to do, from the czars all the way through communism.\\n\\n For them, deciding what to do in Houston on an important issue, was career-ending. We would never get decisions on the spot. We would get, “We’ll think about it tonight and get back to you tomorrow,” knowing that the phone system would be red-hot with discussions all night long, back and forth, back to Russia as to whether to do something or not to do something. Even if those people that were there did have authority, they were reluctant to exercise it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talk about when the Russians first started coming over here for meetings." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely. The first cosmonauts came over to stay; there’s a funny story with Bill Readdy and Bill Shepherd taking them out to go grocery shopping. They were convinced that they were being taken to stores that were specially set up, because they couldn’t comprehend having more than one type of cereal on the shelf in the supermarket. They were blown away and they were convinced that it was all set up. Now it’s that way everywhere [in Russia].\\n\\n When all the Russians would come, I knew every suit that every one of my counterparts owned, because they only owned one or two. They certainly didn’t have a lot of money. They would stay at a hotel that offered free breakfast and a happy hour and hors d’oeuvres. They would save all their money. We would work Monday through Friday, we would have a general design review or summary meeting where we had to sign protocols on Friday, then we would have a celebration Friday night, dinner together. Then they would leave on Sunday instead of Saturday. We always left on Saturday to come home from Russia, but they always left on Sunday.\\n\\n On Saturday you could guarantee yourself you’d see them at Home Depot. They would be loading up everything they could. They saved all their money, and they’d be loading up everything they could get their hands on to take back to Russia. If you wanted to see your Russian friends, if you happened to be in Home Depot you would see them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any last-minute details you had to do, you had to go to Home Depot and shop with them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s what they would do. They would be there buying stuff. The other thing is they refused to drink American vodka because they said, “We only export the stuff to you that’s not drinkable.” They always brought their own vodka. They would not drink our vodka." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess they had empty suitcases then to put things in from Home Depot, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s what they would do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. Were these tools or things that they would go back and use for their homes or for a business?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, mainly for their homes. All the things that we have, little items, this and that. None of that was available when we first got there. I went back a couple years ago. I was just amazed, because they had everything there that you could find in Paris or on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. When we first got there, there was nothing on the shelves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m glad you were able to see that transition and be able to be a part of that for where it came from." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was an amazing experience. I have great respect for the Russians. They are incredibly educated. Our counterparts, we had Russians who had left aerospace industry with PhDs that were our drivers for the Program Office of NASA. PhDs in electrical engineering, and they spoke fluent English. There was no shortage of educated Russians that we interfaced with. A lot of them left the industry because they could make more money in the flea market than they could working in aerospace." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Speaking of Russian engineers, some things they certainly had in common with American engineers, but one of I believe the components that was of a difference is how safety was done. How did you resolve some of the discussions about how things were going to be built or how things were going to be operated to bring safety standards to a common place between the two different space agencies?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The biggest difference how it relates to safety was how the Russians tested versus how we tested things. They tested things to failure. Catastrophic failure. We had given up on testing things to catastrophic failure decades ago. Couldn’t afford it. We didn’t build 10 test modules. They did because it was a jobs program, and it kept people employed. So they would build nine test articles and they’d destroy those nine. That’s how they knew the failure tolerances, because they tested them to failure. We never did that.\\n\\n The Russians really had a hard time getting used to analytical analysis in terms of limits on hardware, because they were used to testing. That was a real issue that we had between the two sides. They learned a lot from us. We were able to get comfortable with their safety side because they could show us catastrophic test results.\\n\\n Initially they didn’t want to share that. It was proprietary, so they wouldn’t tell us initially, “just trust us.” We had to show them analytical [results], and you could argue that that at least was a sensitive area, whether it would be intellectual property or whatever, to get them comfortable. Then they would show us their test results. Both sides had to give a little. That related I think to the safety.\\n\\n I will say this. I never felt once that there was a lack of regard or concern about safety of the cosmonauts. I felt they were just as dedicated to mission success as we were and the loss of humans would have had just as much political angst and concern in Russia as it would in the U.S. I never felt when it had to do with the crew that either side took that lightly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you feel that there was possibly some leverage based on the two incidents on Shuttle-Mir—the fire and the collision—that gave an opportunity to discuss safety maybe more forcefully than not? Did those issues occurring on Shuttle-Mir have an impact on some of the discussions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Stafford Review team played a critical role in looking at those incidents. That really made a big difference to us in Phase 2 and the ISS. But those two incidents on the Mir, and that joint independent review team, they drove a lot of those changes that we benefited from on the ISS in terms of exposure and insight as to what happened and change of procedures.\\n\\n When you asked me that question, I didn’t have an example on ISS, but clearly their [Stafford Review team] role, I would use those as prime examples." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let me ask you about safety for the astronauts and the crew overall. The ISS was being viewed as a future orbiting laboratory. Were you also working at the time with the science and life science communities as well as others to create the overall Station to be a sustainable environment? How much were you involved in those pieces for those elements as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were in charge of them. They were critical. [Michael T.] Mike Suffredini was the Payloads Program Manager for me. He had the primary interface with the science community in terms of the racks and everything that was being built. That was a big deal.\\n\\n The science community was not bashful about their views and their priorities. Unfortunately, we had overruns where a significant amount of the funds to deal with those came out of the science line; we eventually were able to put it back. We had to borrow from the science because if we didn’t build the Station, we weren’t going to do any science, but there was a lot of angst about that and about not being able to do the science that the Space Station was intended to do.\\n\\n I think three of those independent review teams were from the science community. They would let Mike Suffredini and I know in no uncertain terms their opinions about things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Another piece that was happening during that time, and it actually goes back to safety, was finding an assured crew return vehicle for the Station. At one time there was a possibility the X-38 was going to serve in that role but it didn’t.\\n\\n Can you give us some background about what happened and how you were involved with that decision of the X-38 and the Soyuz becoming the vehicle for the crew to use?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There were two things. One was the Soyuz was the baseline, had been the baseline, and had a flight history. Clearly we wanted to have a U.S. return vehicle or lifeboat, but we did not have a flight-proven vehicle. When push came to shove in terms of the funding, the X-38 became expendable.\\n\\n But now keep in mind that was before the decision to stand down the Shuttle. One of the angsts that I have today is the decision to stand down the Shuttle has turned out to be a huge gap between that standing it down and having an operational capability to replace it. We still don’t have one to this day. That was never envisioned.\\n\\n It wasn’t envisioned ever. I’m not going to point fingers. But the lack of that on the U.S. side has significantly adversely impacted the science on the Space Station because we don’t have a capability to bring science back to Earth. We’re just now getting that capability with SpaceX and the Dragon vehicle. That’s adversely affected the science, bringing protein crystal growth or whatever back to Earth.\\n\\n When those decisions were made, it was before a decision had been made to stand down the Shuttle. The Shuttle was our lifeboat. The Shuttle was our transportation system, and the Soyuz was the lifeboat.\\n\\n John [F.] Muratore and his X-38 team, really sharp engineers, worked hard, were very creative, but at the end of the day the decision was made at Headquarters there was not sufficient funding to continue it. It certainly was one of George Abbey’s favorite projects, I can tell you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was a sad day I think, at JSC; the pride of JSC, being able to build it here—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I still have a model on my desk here at my home that Muratore gave me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Speaking about the crew, before you left, crews were training, and Shepherd was going to lead that command. Did you have any involvement with that encouragement to put him in charge of the first crew going up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I had lobbied hard to George Abbey and Dan Goldin that Shep deserved that because he had worked so hard as my Deputy. Of anybody that should be the first commander, it should be Bill Shepherd." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You still feel like you made a good decision, don’t you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I certainly do. I will say that during one conference call on NASA Select, Dan Goldin wanted to fire Shep, because while on orbit Shep had arbitrarily told Mr. Goldin that he had decided what to name the Space Station. Goldin called Abbey. He said, “I’m going to fire him.” Abbey said, “You at least got to wait till he comes back to Earth.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You did mention Keith Reiley before we started talking for today’s session. Would you like to share a little bit more about the contributions that he made?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For every trip I made to Russia, Keith made two. The Russians loved him. He’s a great engineer, and he had an incredible way of working with people. His counterpart at the time was [William H.] Bill Gerstenmaier in the Shuttle Program. Keith and Bill could get past any egos or any agendas and they’d figure out a way to get things done. Keith had an incredible rapport with his Russian counterparts. Alexander [G.] Derechin from [RSC] Energia, plus others. They were able to come up with great technical decisions and Keith just played an incredible role as launch package manager. If you were to ask Jay Greene, Jay thinks Keith walks on the Moon, as do I.\\n\\n One thing that I remember in particular in our design of the Space Station, we realized we had a gap in power and that the Space Station would go dead. Keith came up with a design to put a solar array on a module and we’re able to go from design to actually getting it built in nine months. We were dead in the water because we would have lost power if Keith hadn’t figured out a way to come up with that design change and been able to get it done without affecting the schedule.\\n\\n I would have to say also the guys at Rockwell who actually built the module, they were incredible as well. Everybody stood tall to get it done. From initial conception to design to actually having the hardware built, tested, ready to go, it’s an amazing story. Keith came up with it, but everybody involved, just was a Herculean effort. At this point in time few people remember, but it would have never flown had it not been done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The Station has been flying, has had a human presence, for over 15 years. It is those days before it ever launched that if you tried to explain to the people now working on it some of the things that you went through, they probably would think that some of that stuff just can’t be true." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re right. There was no hardware interface between the Russian hardware and the U.S. hardware before it flew. The FGB never was mated to Node 1. On those interfaces, it was never ever tested on Earth. The interface was tested the first time on orbit, in the extreme atmosphere of space. That’s a big deal. From FGB to Node 1, the first time was when [Robert D.] Bob Cabana and his crew got up there.\\n\\n We hadn’t checked to see if it would work at ambient temperature, much less space. But it worked—the power system, the software, the node interface, you had completely different systems on either side of the node. Those guys that work software figured it out, and there has never been a major software glitch on the Space Station. To me that’s incredible. Software worked from day one.\\n\\n There’s a whole other story on the software that’s just as remarkable as the hardware. The guys who ran that lab out at the Sonny Carter Facility [Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, Houston, Texas] and the Russians, they really worked well together. They did an incredible job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did it stay pretty much on schedule and budget or did it have ups and downs as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It had less ups and downs than the hardware did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had also mentioned earlier [Bohdan] Bo Bejmuk." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Bo Bejmuk. Now that he’s a retired Boeing executive, he serves on the Stafford independent review team. Bo really played a critical role in Phase 1." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You said he did a lot with the hardware. Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. He was a Rockwell heritage guy that had been with the Shuttle. When we had to figure out the interface between the Shuttle and the Mir in terms of docking and to build that hardware for the interface, Bo was in charge of all that. We used the same on the Space Station, everything on the Russian segment was a Mir-2, was a derivative of Mir-1. They were able to come up with a design on the Shuttle for docking those vehicles, then we used the same interfaces on the nodes, anything that touched the Russian segment. Bo really played an important role." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Randy, you shared a lot about what worked well and how things were able to work out. Were there just some challenges that you met that just didn’t get done? Or where you had to compromise to a point that you weren’t happy but had to move the Station forward?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, there were decisions and priorities that I would have done otherwise, but again at the end of the day you can either resign or accept. There were decisions that were made above my pay grade. Mainly I’m talking about funding. You can only do so much, and you have to do the best with the funding that you have. Everybody wants more funding, but at the end of the day when that’s what you’re given, you have to either make that work or go do something else." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In 1999 you made a decision to go do something else. Why did you decide to leave NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because I had always wanted to go back into industry. I felt like I had done everything that I could —I felt the Station was in a position where I could walk away and feel proud about it. We had two elements on orbit working successfully. We had all the Phase 2 elements well along, ready to be launched. I could have stayed and I guess ridden that out. I talked to Mr. Abbey.\\n\\n I wanted to go run a company, and I wanted to do something outside the government sector. I’d spent 25 years in the Marine Corps, I spent 10 years in NASA. I wanted the experience to have an opportunity to do something on the industry side." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What lessons did you learn from working your years at NASA that you brought with you into your new your career?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think NASA was a follow-on building block to the Marine Corps. At NASA I felt I had achieved a degree of credibility in industry. When I was offered the job as senior vice president at Hughes Space and Comm [Communication Company] for all the satellite programs, I didn’t know anything about satellites, but I figured it couldn’t be any more complicated than Space Station or the Hubble." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that a true statement once you got there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I found the Marine Corps is the most empowering organization I’ve ever been a part of and NASA is the second most empowering organization. Unfortunately, my experiences in industry, they’re certainly not of the same league in terms of empowerment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s a good thing you had lots of experience and challenging opportunities then. It sounds like that’s what prepared you for that. Did you leave any recommendations or suggestions when you left, when you knew you were exiting out? Were there some thoughts you shared?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we had an extensive lessons learned database. When I was in Hubble they were trying to recapture the Apollo lessons learned. The first thing I did is try to go back and look at lessons learned as to how I might apply them to being the mission director of the Hubble repair mission. What I found was, there really wasn’t such a thing.\\n\\n So we within the ISS Program established our own lessons learned. There was an extensive database created. Maybe they’ve thrown it away, but it certainly was extensive while I was there, to capture lessons learned as we went along." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As you look back on the years that you were there, what do you consider your greatest or the most significant contribution that you made to the Program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess I would say it was facilitating the relationship between the Russians and the rest of the space agencies. I certainly don’t take all the credit for that, but I realized that we had to treat the Russians as partners, and I recognized that if we didn’t we’d never be successful.\\n\\n I had to set the tone, and I knew how important personal relationships were. I learned that from them. It wasn’t necessarily obvious, but after dealing with them I had great respect for them and I realized we were never going to be successful if we didn’t establish personal relationships. And we had to find common ground—couldn’t do it the NASA way—we had to find common ground.\\n\\n If we had not been able to overcome those cultural differences, we would have never solved the technical and operational issues. Given where we started and the background of both sides, I think one of the greatest contributions that the Space Station has made is in international relationship. If you look at where we started and what it took for us to be successful as where it is today, that is an incredible success story." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It is, it is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "If there’s ever to be—this is my own opinion, but if there’s ever to be a follow-on mission to Mars or getting out of low-Earth orbit, it will not be a national program. It’s unaffordable. It will have to be an international program. The lessons learned on the Space Station would serve those involved in good stead to review them in terms of working together, whether it’s with the Russians or the Chinese or the Indians or whomever. I don’t see that kind of historic explorational effort ever happening unless it’s done with the commitment of multiple nations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s good that you helped set that foundation in place so many years ago so that at least hopefully it’ll go forward and not go backward. Before we close out today, is there anything else that you would like to add? Or did something else maybe come to your mind that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to share that we can include in the session?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Randy H. Brinkley", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I can’t think of anything in particular. I remain very very proud of the Space Station and the people that are running it today. The Program Manager is a dear friend of mine who deserves to be the Program Manager. They’re as dedicated as they’ve ever been. The ISS -- it really is one of the 10 engineering miracles of the world. It’s really significant in terms of when you look at it in perspective.\\n\\n To be part of it was a great honor, and with the people that I had a chance to work with. I’ve been blessed by all that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you. Thanks for the contributions that you’ve made." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "oral-history-at-the-national-archives-00020", + "metadata": { + "interviewee_name": "Jason R. Baron", + "description": "Jason R. Baron, whose National Archives career spanned from 2000 to 2013, begins his interview with his participation as a DOJ lawyer (pre-NARA) in the landmark PROFS case that established that email can be a federal record and should be preserved in electronic format. He discusses how this case and successor cases ultimately led to NARA’s publishing of email regulations and the OMB/NARA Managing Government Records Directive. He then talks about becoming NARA’s first director of litigation, searching for responsive emails, the promise of artificial intelligence and machine learning for e-Discovery, playing a role in the development of the Capstone approach to managing email, and issues surrounding access. Lastly, Jason describes memorable cases and events during his 13 years at NARA.", + "file_url": "https://www.archives.gov/files/about/history/jason-r-baron-oral-history-interview.pdf", + "collection_url": "https://www.archives.gov/about/history/oral-history-at-the-national-archives", + "original_file_name": "jason-r-baron-oral-history-interview.pdf", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04 22:30:14", + "publisher": "U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION", + "date": "September 25, 2023" + }, + "broad_source": "nara", + "collection": "oral_history_at_the_national_archives", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview", + "elicitors": [ + "Stephanie Reynolds" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Jason R. Baron" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. I've got the recording started. Thank you for participating in the National Archives Oral History Project. We're documenting the history of the agency by preserving firsthand accounts of events. My name is Stephanie Reynolds, and I'm based out of our National Archives facility in Denver, Colorado. I'm assisting the agency historian, Jessie Kratz, on this important project. Today is Monday, September 25th, 2023, and I'm speaking with Jason R. Baron. Okay, Jason, just to get it started, could you just tell me a little bit about your background, like your education, where you're from, that sort of thing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course. Thank you so much, Stephanie, for the opportunity to participate in this really important project. I am an enthusiastic supporter of oral history. My own background is that I was born and raised in Massachusetts. I'm the son of an MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] professor, I went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and then I went on to Boston University School of Law. I graduated there in 1980. I started working in the federal government at the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980, and then transferred to the Justice Department in 1988, to work in the Civil Division’s Federal Programs Branch. While there, I defended lawsuits involving the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and federal recordkeeping policies, among many other types of lawsuits. I was there for 12 years. In 2000, I took a visiting scholar position at the University of British Columbia. And then I was very lucky that there was an opening at the National Archives for a position as the first director of litigation at the National Archives, posted in 2000. And I was very privileged and honored to be accepted there. So then I spent 13 years at NARA [National Archives and Records Administration], which we'll get into. So really, I know that you first want to speak to the Justice Department portions of my career, and I'm happy to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to ask you about, to rewind back to your time at DOJ [Department of Justice]. I know that you've covered a lot of high-profile cases, and I didn't know if you wanted to go into any detail about any of those cases, for example, like the PROFS case and how that morphed into the Public Citizen v. Carlin case? Do you want to talk about any of those things?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'd be happy to. The PROFS case—Armstrong v. Reagan, Armstrong v. Bush, Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President. It had different titles. It was really the most important case of my career. And it is one of the most important cases that the National Archives ever faced. It is a landmark case that established, in particular, that electronic mail can be a federal record and a Presidential record and should be preserved in electronic form as well as paper form, when appropriate. So the case was filed on the last day of the Reagan administration, in the afternoon on January 19th, 1989, by Scott Armstrong—who wrote the book called The Brethren with Bob Woodward—and a number of other plaintiffs, including Gary M. Stern, who became general counsel at NARA many years later in 1998. But in 1989, the plaintiffs had heard from John Fawcett, who was then the head of Presidential Libraries at NARA, that backup tapes containing Iran-Contra [Affair] PROFS notes from Ollie North and John Poindexter were going to be destroyed at the end of the Reagan administration. They were going to be recycled. And because they believed that there was unique history on those backup tapes in the PROFS notes that may or may not have ever been printed out either because of the special counsel investigation of Lawrence Walsh into Iran-Contra, or otherwise by staffers at the National Security Council, they went into court, sought a temporary restraining order, and got one from the late Judge Barrington Parker. I should add that John Bolton, as assistant attorney general of the Civil Division, argued the case. And that afternoon, he said that backup tapes are sort of like furniture. They're like chairs and desks. They can be thrown out at the end of an administration. The court did not accept that. The court said that there might be a case here for the plaintiffs and issued a temporary restraining order for 392 backup tapes being preserved. That case went on to seven years of litigation with four appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. It had many ramifications to it. The case expanded in 1992 at the end of the George H. W. Bush administration when . . . the late Judge Charles Richey issued a second . . . TRO [temporary restraining order] and preliminary injunction, stopping further destruction of any backup tapes from the Bush 41 [President George H. W. Bush] administration before Bill Clinton came into office on January 20th, 1993. And Judge Richey finally got to the merits of the case on January 6th, 1993, when he held that email in paper form was different from email in electronic form. It did not have sender and recipient information. And so in his mind, the computer knew something that the printed versions of email didn't. The [computer] had all the recipients of email. So, this was—he didn't say the word metadata—but it's the first judicial decision that recognizes that metadata is important and makes electronic versions different from paper versions of records. And that decision was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, and it remains an important landmark decision. Along the way, there was an appeal on issues of whether courts should even be involved in Presidential decision-making. And an early decision, the first appellate decision in the case, is still very relevant to today. It said that plaintiffs don't have standing to micromanage the President's recordkeeping. And so, any portion of the case that involved Presidential records was off-limits. But at the time, the backup tapes were the National Security Council's backups and the NSC’s status as to whether it was Presidential, that it was covered by the Presidential Records Act, or was a federal agency, was left for a remand, as was recordkeeping guidance . . . left to the district court to further rule on. Plus, the case got expanded to all the other components of the Executive Office of the President [EOP] through amended complaints. And so OMB [Office of Management and Budget] and USTR [Office of the United States Trade Representative] and the Office of National Drug [Control] Policy and others were caught up in the case. It wasn't just about the original backups. It was the email from all of the White House in the Bush administration and the Clinton administration. And so what are the outcomes of the case? Well, I'm going on at length because this is really important to how the government works today and what happened with the National Archives. One of the outcomes of the case was that emails have been archived by the White House since 1994. Up till then, email was not considered a record, but the case said it was. And it was only considered a record if somebody printed out the emails. But because of the case, John Podesta went to Bill Clinton. They succeeded in getting money appropriations out of Congress for what was known as the ARMS system at the White House. That was the original system that archived email. And at the end of the Clinton administration, there were 20 million Presidential emails, 32 million from the EOP as a whole, and that number has only increased over time. So since 1994, White House records have been archived because of the Armstrong case holdings and the voluntary position of the White House that everything should be archived electronically. So now if you fast forward to 2023, NARA is holding on the order of 700 million emails between the Reagan administration and the Trump administration, which comes to about 3 billion pages. And as an aside here, I'm on record in many of my talks that we need better ways to access that information, including through artificial intelligence, because only .5 percent of the 700 million emails have been opened and are accessible to the American people. Think about that. Ninety- nine-and-a-half percent of White House emails as of 2023 remain unopened. And there are reasons for that, but we can talk about that some other time. So this, the Armstrong case, also led to NARA issuing email regulations in 1995, and they still are in existence. They've been amended. . .. The last thing I'm going to say about this, there's one more thing that happened, which is that the case ended up deciding that the National Security Council was a Presidential component and produced Presidential records as opposed to federal records. And that was another decision that was held in the case. So the case is important in many ways. It did have a successor case that you mentioned, Public Citizen v. Carlin, and it involved the General Records Schedule [GRS] 20, which has now been superseded. At the time, that schedule was an attempt by NARA to satisfy the Armstrong holding, but also not impose electronic recordkeeping throughout the government, which at the time in the 1990s, agencies considered to be extremely burdensome and costly. NARA got hundreds and hundreds of comments on a notice of proposed rulemaking, which was issued as a one-time thing, with respect to the General Records Schedule 20. The bottom line was that the GRS 20 said that emails could be printed out, but they had to have the metadata that the Armstrong case and Judge Richey decided. So [emails] had to either have sender and recipient information printed out, or agencies could archive email in some form. Plaintiffs objected—a different set of plaintiffs, with Public Citizen being the lead—objected that that really wasn't in conformance with the Armstrong case, that everything should be electronically saved. And this was kind of a makeweight solution, a halfway solution with still allowing the government to print emails with metadata. And plaintiffs wanted [to litigate] this [in] court. They lost in the court of appeals. And so the government at that time did not have to electronically archive email or come up with email schedules for every agency. If you fast forward to 2016 because of a memorandum issued in 2012, which we can talk about, titled the Managing Government Records Directive, NARA and OMB required all agencies to electronically manage their email. And so the print-to-paper era of Armstrong and the Public Citizen v. Carlin case came to an end in 2016, and now every government agency has to manage its electronic records and particularly manage its email electronically. So the Armstrong cases had profound implications for the rest of the government. I will pause and not go into the Capstone archiving policy that I'm happy to do. But in any event, the echoes of that case, the way that that case set policy continues as a really, really important precedent to this day. I was honored to be lead lawyer in the case from 1992 until it ended in the late 1990s. And also, I was the lead lawyer on the Public Citizen v. Carlin case." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, it sure reverberated through the entire, you know, through the years since the 80s, 90s, to today and continuing on how records are being managed for sure. What" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": ". . . and how lawsuits can or cannot sue the President, whether complaints can be filed that survive a standing analysis that courts don't throw them out because of something that is happening in the Oval Office. In the White House, for example, there was a lawsuit by CREW filed—Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—filed against the Trump administration, all about the use of ephemeral apps like Signal and Confide that were used by individuals at the White House. And the suit was all about whether those should be considered records and preserved. And the courts threw the lawsuit out, not because they didn't think they were records. The DC Circuit said, \"Of course, they're probably covered under the Presidential Records Act. But the President decides what is a record and cannot be micromanaged.\" [Paraphrasing.] And so the court dismissed the lawsuit. So, the early Armstrong case has implications for what is going on currently in many lawsuits." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You said that you were the lead on the Armstrong case. Can you talk about what your role was in that case?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was the guy standing in court when many of the events happened. I was not the lead at the beginning in 1989. Other lawyers were, who worked for John Bolton and then others in the Bush administration. Again, it was filed on the last day of the Reagan administration and carried over to the Bush and the Clinton administration. But I came in June 1992, and as lead lawyer, I was the person defending the merits of the lawsuit. The positions of the United States, DOJ and NARA had already been set out in briefs prior to my entering my appearance. But there were many rounds of further briefing in 1992, and I was arguing the case in late 1992. I was standing there when a preliminary injunction was issued by the court. I was there during the Presidential transition as lead lawyer. That was an unhappy experience of transitioning from George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton. The court held Archivist Don Wilson in contempt for failing to abide by certain preservation standards with the handling of backup tapes. And the transition was chaotic. At the end of the Bush administration, there were a lot of things that went wrong. The court got upset that its own guidance hadn't been immediately satisfied. That is when the court ruled that email was a record. It wanted to have the EOP change all of its systems and do archiving and do restoration of tapes, whatever. On all sorts of grounds, the court thought that the White House and the Executive Office of the President were moving too slowly, and so it accepted plaintiffs' arguments on lots of grounds, including alleged mishandling of backup tapes. And the Archivist was held in contempt. It's the only time, to my knowledge, the Archivist of the United States has ever been held in contempt by a court. That ruling was stayed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and ultimately the DC Circuit overruled the contempt finding. But it was a fraught time. And as the head lawyer of the case, I took a lot of flak from the court as to what the government was doing. I think Judge Richey and I had a good working relationship, but I could only defend the government's actions to a certain extent. And it was a highly visible experience and written up in The New York Times and The Washington Post repeatedly as to what was going on. And I stayed on the case, and what I was happiest about is that I did have a role in settling aspects of the case with respect to electronic recordkeeping. There were various stipulations of settlements that let the case go forward and let the White House develop its own archiving system. And plaintiffs did not object—they had a role in both the email regulations in giving comments and also in understanding what was going on at the White House. I really was privileged to play a role in quieting down the case, in some respects. And then the case went on with respect to the National Security Council’s status. In any event, it is a great privilege to be able to stand up in court as a Justice Department lawyer and say that you're representing the United States. You're representing the White House and NARA. And because of my role in the case and my great interest in recordkeeping, as a result of the case, you know, I continued on the Public Citizen v. Carlin case. But I was absolutely enthralled with everything about the National Archives. And I loved it as an institution. I got to know many people who I thought were consummate public servants. And so, when an opening came up for a position as director of litigation, I applied. Miriam Nisbet, who had been special counsel to the Acting Archivist Trudy Peterson, left for an appointment at the American Library Association. So when the Office of General Counsel and Gary Stern—who was the general counsel in 2000, replacing Elizabeth Pugh, who had been general counsel for a couple of years—when that position was opened, I thought it was the perfect position for me having spent all this time on the Armstrong case. And I thought I could play a useful role going forward at the National Archives. I was delighted to be there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. So, you've brought up a few things here that I want to touch on. First, I want to go back to the email regulations in 1995 that came out of that Armstrong case. Did you have any input on that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes, actually I did. I worked very closely with Jim Hastings and others to essentially draft those regulations. After those regulations were put into effect, I was honored to be given an award from the Archivist [John Carlin] for my role. It is and it was a very special thing. I think Justice Department attorneys do get involved in agency policies from time to time. But I really felt that I wanted to be “all in” on how to solve the email recordkeeping issues that arose in the case. And so I actively assisted NARA personnel in that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, did working on that and working with NARA on these lawsuits, did that really give you the interest in email and electronic records and the legality surrounding all of that? Or were you already interested in those things?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Stephanie, I actually did my honors thesis in 1977 on recordkeeping and also on how the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and its criminal databases were accessed by Interpol. So I've always been interested. I took a FOIA seminar in law school. All I can say is that Malcolm Gladwell believes that if you do anything for 10,000 hours, you become a subject matter expert. And I spent almost that many hours on the Armstrong and the GRS 20 cases over a period of my eight years remaining at the Justice Department. I did other litigation, but—. So it was natural for me to go on. And when I came to the National Archives, the Armstrong case followed. The backup tapes followed with me! There were still issues regarding preservation of the backup tapes, and continuing issues about disposition of those tapes over time. In any event, when I came to the National Archives, I was in my dream job. And I'm happy to talk to you about all of the things that happened on my watch in the 13 years I was there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, certainly. So it sounds like because of some of the Armstrong cases and working with NARA, that that built some interest in you wanting to move over to the National Archives. Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had great interest in pursuing these policies and assisting NARA further." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So did the Archives make this position for you, do you think? Or they posted it and you just saw that it was open?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They did not make the position for me. But no, as I said, Miriam Nisbet left and there was a reformulation of the position. She had been special counsel, but Gary Stern and others, Chris Runkel and others, believed that there should be a broader mandate for a director of litigation that covered both federal court litigation, as well as administrative proceedings like EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] administrative hearings under Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] or MSPB [Merit Systems Protection Board] hearings. And so there was a broader portfolio for the director of litigation. I should add that there have been three successor directors of litigation since I left in 2013, but I was privileged to be the first in this position, as there were many candidates that applied for the job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find it challenging to be the first one?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, first, what I wish to say here is that Gary Stern, who has been general counsel since 1998, and continues through the date we're having this discussion, has been the finest civil servant I've ever met. He has set the tone for the General Counsel's Office for 25 years as someone who is nonpartisan, fair, gives appropriate advice both to appointees from Democrat and Republican administrations, and is always on top of everything. He comes out of Vassar and Yale Law School. He is one of the smartest lawyers I've ever met. And he's one of the kindest. And what he allowed all of his staff to do is to blossom in the job, whatever responsibilities they have. They can go with whatever interests them as much as they want. And in my case, early on, I told Gary that I thought of the job as more than just a litigation job. It was also an educational job of what the Federal Records Act means to government agencies, and that I would be happy to act in a public-facing way to go out and give talks and briefings and be involved in the world. He not only allowed me to do that throughout the government, but he also allowed me to pursue outside interests in terms of the greater legal community. And I'll tell you how. It was the case of U.S. v. Philip Morris, which involved a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] racketeering case against seven tobacco companies that was filed in the Clinton administration, which was all consuming to many federal agencies for many years. There were 100 billion dollars at stake originally that the Clinton administration said was the remedy that should be disgorged back to the American people from these companies, because they had been in a conspiracy since the 1950s to withhold information about cigarettes and about cancer from the American public. And that case went on for a very long time. But in 2001 and 2002, right after I started, the Justice Department received a request for documents directed to many, many agencies, including the National Archives. The National Archives was asked for all documents related to tobacco going back to the Eisenhower administration. And because NARA owns Presidential Libraries and runs them . . . there were tremendous numbers of paper records. There were also, in the Clinton email collection that was accumulated because of the Armstrong case, 20 million White House emails and 12 million other EOP emails all to search for responsive records. And I should add that the request from Philip Morris and the companies to the government for documents was 1,726 paragraphs long, where . . . the last paragraph said, \"All the prior paragraphs apply to the National Archives.\" So I was tasked by the Justice Department tobacco litigation team to go search 20 million emails. And the way to do that in 2002 was simply to type in keywords and use a vendor who had put up the emails on a platform—I believe it was Booz Allen—and do a search. So there were search terms that were used, and I was asked to create the search terms. I actually got about 25 individuals, lawyers in the office as well as archivists, to go look at 200,000 emails that were found to be responsive to a set of search terms. At the end of that process, after six months, I believe, we found about 100,000 responsive records. There were a lot of false positives that were there—you type in the word \"smoking\" as a keyword and you get a lot of policies on smoking in bathrooms, but it has nothing to do with tobacco policy. Or you type in Marlboro, you get lots of emails that have to do with Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Any term you type in will get false positives, get a lot of noise. You have to separate that out. Plus, you have to look for various categories that would be privileged and have a discussion about that with the other side. In any event, that all went forward. I don't think we have the time to talk about all the particulars of the litigation, but what I emerged with afterwards is that I saw the future in some respect. And I saw that if there were 20 million emails of Clinton, that at the rate of growth of email there would be tremendous numbers in the future. I've been proven right. There are 700 million now. And when you get up to those kinds of numbers, keyword searching doesn't work. And so I went on a quest to find better ways to search than lawyers did in 2002. That led to a whole other set of actions and developments that I was part of that really don't relate to the history of the National Archives as such. It relates to my personal history in going to computer scientists at the University of Maryland and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology using lawyers in my office to work with me on a research project called the Text REtrieval Conference, TREC Legal Track, which by itself set the basis for finding that machine learning and AI [Artificial Intelligence] methods worked better than keywords, were much more efficient, and were just as good. And so all of that work started out of the U.S. versus Philip Morris case, and I continued it in various forums and wrote about and spoke about it and then did research on it, and it ended up influencing the case law that came afterwards where judges accepted that machine learning methods could do a very good job in answering document requests. And that continues to this day. There's a growing number of hundreds and hundreds of cases that accept that AI methods for search, known as technology-assisted review or predictive coding, work well if the parties are able to talk to each other about what is going on with the software. . .. I feel very good about the role that I played in evangelizing AI methods early on, and it was all originally due to these requests to NARA for a search. No one had ever searched 20 million emails in 2002. So, the fact that that obligation was imposed on NARA in the litigation led to thinking about better ways to search. And not to toot my own horn, but there was a documentary about my career and about another lawyer's career in 2014 called The Decade of Discovery, that outlined the case and the efforts that I had made, and I'm very proud of being part of that documentary. The documentary had many other individuals—judges and lawyers—in it, and it was basically tracking the way that the law developed in terms of this area. So if you fast forward to today, I have sometimes now been a critic of NARA. One of my failures in my time at NARA was not being able to push sufficiently for tools, software, that would do the machine-learning-type methods that I think would help with huge volumes of electronic records that are coming in, that were known to be in the White House. And now for the rest of the government, there are directives that say that the entire government will be transitioning to electronic records and accessioning permanent records to the National Archives after June 2024. That's the latest deadline as of now. But I've been pushing for NARA to use machine learning more and more, especially due to the experiences of searching for records of Supreme Court nominees for John Roberts in 2005 and Elena Kagan in 2010. They both worked in the White House in prior administrations as younger lawyers. NARA had to search for those records. and then later, after I left my position, for Brett Kavanaugh’s records. I think [these experiences] have all convinced NARA officials that when you're asked for records of Supreme Court nominees and they end up being, you know, on the order of 900,000 emails, you need a better way than keyword searching to search. And that was a matter of some [considerable] back and forth [with Congress], the last time with Justice Kavanaugh being nominated. So, because of those [appointments], and the special role NARA plays in historical records and needing to search during the nomination process for individuals who worked in the prior administration, plus litigation, plus FOIA requests, there are many reasons that one needs machine-learning methods that are well-known in e-Discovery in the private sector to be employed. And I believe steps are being made now [by NARA] in 2023 to have more robust search methods. But I've been out there in the ten years since I've been at NARA to argue that NARA should be a leader on this. And in various forums, I've made that point. I think, yeah, things are changing. And there's also machine learning that is being done at NARA in other contexts involving searches of web online records. Pam Wright, in the Office of Innovation, has done excellent things in terms of advancing the ball for the use of machine learning and AI in other ways. But in the litigation world with email, email is not a web record. It's not put up online presumptively as soon as it's created. So even now, I've told you that only .5 percent is up there. So there are different worlds of records that NARA has, and there are tremendous efforts to deal with digitization and putting up all portions of the collection. But with respect to email records from the White House and the coming wave of email from all government agencies, NARA is going to really need to, in the future, consider artificial intelligence to help." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Again, lots of topics here. So, you mentioned Gary Stern. He really allowed you to blossom in the job and kind of, you know, look into things that were important to you or that you were interested in, and so that led you to learning more about keyword searching and FOIA and machine learning and all these other things that you were looking into in terms of being a successful director of litigation, specifically at NARA. Do you think that you need to be given that latitude to really learn and look into being in the forefront of records in terms of, you know, searching records, providing access, FOIA, e-Discovery, things like that? Do you think that's largely what helped make you successful as the director of litigation at NARA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that every director of litigation—there have been four of us—has brought their special strengths and expertise to the job. I did believe, and I still believe, that it's extremely helpful to have been a trial lawyer at the Justice Department—as was Alina Semo, who succeeded me [at NARA] after we worked together in the Federal Programs Branch at the Justice Department. The fact is that when you are a former Justice Department lawyer who comes to the National Archives, you have a certain respect for your colleagues that they know that you know how litigation works. And so while others can do a fine job without having been at the DOJ, I always felt that in my own case, it tremendously helped, because I knew how litigation worked. I was a lead attorney [at DOJ]. And I was happy to be second chair on any number of lawsuits as director of litigation at NARA and play a different role. But being able to talk as a peer to one's former colleagues and new colleagues, you know, in the Justice Department Civil Division, was a big plus. So that's really one set of expertise. Others bring their own expertise. They can be experts in privacy. They can be experts in other ways with classified records. And so it's a great thing to have, you know, expertise in any number of areas. Obviously, if you're director of litigation, your focus in the General Counsel's office is primarily on assisting on litigation and helping the general counsel frame the arguments for NARA, hearing what NARA's position has to say, and being a strong advocate for NARA in all of its ways. But inevitably, you get involved in non-litigation areas, as in writing memoranda, including in interacting with, for example, the Office of Legal Counsel if there's a difference of opinion between NARA and another agency. I wrote a couple of memoranda that were part of [inter- agency] disputes, and we were successful. But in other ways, I did believe that, because of my role in Armstrong and having helped fashion the email regulations, that I had something to say about electronic records and email as a matter of policy. And that wasn't always well-received by staff who thought that I should stay in my own swimming lane. But I think I had tremendous support from Paul Wester, who was the first chief records officer of the United States, and support from his successor, Laurence Brewer. And the two of them are absolutely wonderful. They have been wonderful civil servants. Mr. Wester, Paul, is now at the National Agricultural Library as director. During his years and in Laurence's years, I think they understood that Gary and I, and others in the General Counsel's Office, had a role to play in assisting in the fashioning of policies. And one instance that I will say . . . I was heavily involved was in the Managing Government Records Directive. Actually, Gary Stern took the lead in working with OMB in creating a memorandum that Barack Obama issued in 2011 to the entire government, saying that the era of recordkeeping needs to step up to embrace technology and so we should really pay attention to it, and that recordkeeping is the backbone of transparency and open government. That's a phrase that Gary actually put forward and then others took the mantle up. And so Gary fashioned something that ended up being this memorandum that was adopted by the President, issued, and then that [was] followed in 2012 with something called the Managing Government Records Directive. And that was a mandate from OMB and NARA to tell the government that there were certain deadlines that had to be met. The original deadline was 2019 for transitioning to electronic recordkeeping, and all accessions at the National Archives after 2019 would be in electronic form. I remember there was a series of retreats and facilitated meetings where we were brainstorming about what the Managing Government Records Directive would look like, and I played a role. One day I channeled JFK [President John F. Kennedy] [with respect to going to the Moon], in suggesting that by the “end of the decade” we would be asking for electronic records solely to be accessioned, so we would become an electronic records repository. There would always be legacy paper, but whatever. And that was adopted. The 2019 date was originally adopted. It went to 2022, and now it's June 2024—in a series of updates and revisions to that policy. But the central mandate was set in 2011-2012 by the efforts of Gary, and I contributed to the fashioning of the directive. Now how the government would then go about archiving email and what policies were in effect, I'm very happy to have played a role in the development of what is known as the Capstone archiving approach to email. Because as you recall, Armstrong was all about email being a record. And NARA then said you could still print to paper with metadata, but that didn't work. No one in government was really paying attention to the regulations. There was massive noncompliance, in my view. And so I believed that senior officials' email should be archived, presumptively, that we should just deem all senior officials in government that are designated by their agencies as such to create permanent records. It was a disruptive idea because up till then, email was scheduled. Every email was to go to its own record schedule, depending on its subject matter. But this was a different way, a role-based way of archiving email. It was controversial in the beginning. There were individuals on Paul Wester's staff that believed that senior officials' emails contained a lot of junk, noise, temporary records, that would be swept up if all of their emails were deemed to be permanent. And they were right. . .. But the problem is, as I tried to say in many places, the National Archives could either accept zero percent of email from the government, or it could take in a huge amount, which historically would contain records that it wouldn't normally take a lot of temporary stuff, but then it would have the good stuff, the permanent stuff. So, what did you want? Zero percent or too many records? I think the National Archives was right in adopting a Capstone policy that said to the agencies voluntarily, if they wanted to adopt this as a way to meet the Managing Government Records Directive, that all email from senior officials would be deemed to be permanent and everybody else's email would be preserved for seven years. Two-hundred-and-fifty components or more of the government have adopted Capstone. Today there are hundreds of millions of emails being preserved in cabinet agencies. And that, of course, leads to what I was talking about before, a search issue of how you search them for responsive records. But the fact that they are kept means that for history's sake, the emails of senior officials in the administrations from 2016 on, will be preserved for the American people. I think that's a tremendous plus to history and, look, there'll be issues about search and filtering for sensitivities and exemptions but at least we have those emails. And so in that, I played a role. The word Capstone was not mine. It was invented by a gentleman named Ken Hawkins, who was on the staff at NARA. But as to the idea, I remember pulling out a dollar bill and on the back there's a pyramid with a capstone on it. And the idea, I think, resonated with me early on that that should be a government policy. And then Ken came along and named it Capstone. So I was very pleased to be part of that effort." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I mean, like you said, it was kind of a landmark thing where this was unheard of before. I remember being at a conference one time, just attending and sitting with others nearby and talking about it and expressing it as more of like this role-based approach that the senior officials would be permanent. And it just blew their mind. They didn't really understand it yet, but it was still new. The idea was still new. But like you said, there's so many agencies now that have adopted that approach, and I think it has made it a lot easier to get those emails captured, although there are issues. [CROSS-TALKING] Go ahead." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The reason that it has been widely adopted is that there are no alternatives that work. Because if you rely on people to drag and drop into folders, they won't do it. Nobody wants to spend extra time on every email. There are just too many emails, and now there are text messages and other forms of ephemeral apps that may or may not be incorporated into Capstone. There's a recent policy that Laurence [Brewer] put out that urges agencies to think about expanding the Capstone repository to other forms of electronic messaging, consistent with various legislation that exists on the subject. And so it's a workable thing, because it's automated, but it's not the end. It would be nice if through means of AI, there could be some greater differentiation and granularity to email to separate out good stuff and, you know, wheat and chaff, noise and signal. But for now, it is a very good first approximation of what an archiving scheme should be, in my view. But it has been controversial, and there are flaws." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I think, you know, agencies are working toward making it a more efficient and smooth process. I know that when we inspect agencies, some of them talk about the challenges of having to track, for example, like an acting senior official. When did they get in the role? When did they leave that role and, you know, no longer are senior officials and that sort of thing? But they're all working on processes to improve that. But I think the basis of it is pretty sound in terms of keeping all of the senior officials’ emails. And there are agencies accepting Capstone or using that approach for electronic records now, too. So, in terms of the M-12-18, what goes into crafting a government mandate like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, in the first instance, I mentioned brainstorming on the part of NARA individuals. But that brainstorming effort was aided greatly because the memorandum from President Obama originally set up a process where agencies would comment by certain dates, and OMB followed that, so that NARA received hundreds and hundreds of comments. I forget the exact number, but the way that NARA staff dealt with it is to read every one and, in a spreadsheet- fashion, decide what action should be taken, whether it should be accepted, rejected, accepted in part. So there were hundreds . . . of comments that agencies had as to what would be appropriate in a Managing Government Records Directive. In the end, we did accept many of those comments. But it was mostly fashioned in a way by NARA staff, because they are the experts and we were the ones that set the 2016 date and the 2019 date that was in that mandate that really are the hooks in later memos. We've seen an evolution in terms of the Federal Records Center Program and NARA insisting that agencies transition to managing all of their records and not storing paper records in the future in Federal Records Centers. So while that may be a legacy aspect of the National Archives history, which is very important, you know, it won't continue. Agencies are supposed to be managing electronic records . . . privatizing paper storage and using their own resources. So that's a point that is worth talking to individuals about, that has been . . . a very important, core part of the National Archives in the 20th century with respect to the Federal Records Centers. These memos developed over time, but I think the 2012 memo set the basis. It's foundational for the other joint memos that have come out, and we'll see how the overall transition goes. COVID slowed down transition efforts. That's why the date was extended from 2022 to 2024. There are complexities in electronic recordkeeping that everyone knows, but we will get there. And so the oral histories of the future will, I think, incorporate the notion that the entire government is sending permanent records in electronic form to NARA. And frankly, 50 years from now, if not sooner, 99.9999 percent of what records there are at the National Archives will be in electronic and digital form. That is not to say that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—the Charters of Freedom—and the records of the 19th and 20th century are not important, and of course legacy paper has continued to come into NARA in the 21st century. All of those records remain important. And as permanent records, they need to be curated. And the National Archives contains thousands of treasures and documents, whether it's maps or photographs or in all kinds of media. But the future is electronic, and one of the giant challenges is how to provide access to government records. And NARA is in the access- building business according to its strategic plan. And so “making access happen” has been in the current strategic plan and the last one, and that is a tremendous challenge in the future. We've seen the dawn of the electronic age on my watch and, you know, it will continue with a faster pace in the coming years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think the M-12-18 was really huge to the records management community in pushing the federal government to do business electronically faster than the pace that they were doing it before. But in terms of now you've got all of these, for example, emails coming in, like you said, the volume just keeps growing. What are some of the issues around being able to even ingest that as an agency for NARA? You know, we're telling agencies to send us everything electronically, but the issue then is being able to accept everything that we're telling them to send us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that's an issue. And I'd like to talk about what I consider an even greater issue. The issue of formatting records in accessioning to NARA has become a much more sophisticated exercise over time. Back in the 1990s, there were still regulations that talked about ASCII [American Standard Code for Information Interchange] and EBCDIC [Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] as the transfer mechanisms for electronic records. And I'm sure in other histories, you can discuss with individuals who know more than I do about the Center for Electronic Records that started in the 1970s, with Charles Dollar as the first head and Ken Thibodeau following. There were certain formatting requirements that that office required, and then it reviewed records to see whether they met the standards so that they could be accessioned permanently. Today, there are a whole set of transfer requirements in all sorts of media, and every couple of years, there's some updates of those. There's also been digitization standards for both permanent and temporary records that have been recently issued. And it is a big deal because, obviously, NARA does not want to be like the Smithsonian and keep every type of proprietary software that's out there for every format that could be. And with backwards compatibility, it's a huge issue when you're thinking about permanent records. We're thinking about the life of the Republic, and that can be hundreds or thousands of years into the future. And so NARA needs to get it right as to what it's accepting, when it's accepting millions or billions of records in electronic form. There are absolutely very important issues about transfer formats. Beyond that, however, dealing with the volume of records—what I have been interested in ever since the tobacco case and my interest in searching for responsive records there—is very important. The obstacle to opening up records is the fact that they are chock full of PII or personally identifiable information. And when you have Social Security numbers or you have other types of personal information, both in numerical form and textual form, traditionally archivists have looked at every page and redacted or put in sheets or, you know, . . . withdrawal slips, to say that there is personal information on certain pages or certain documents. That can't be done in the electronic world. You can't look at every object. And so, again, there is a need for AI and machine learning to help human review in looking at whether collections have personal information in them. So most recently, I've been involved in research that looks at, particularly, Exemption 5 of the FOIA, to see whether through various methods, including generative AI, but mostly classical machine learning methods, software can differentiate what are facts and what are opinions in documents so as to tell the human reviewers what to redact in terms of the FOIA exemption world. There are lots of sensitivities in NARA records, both in email and other electronic records, and you will not be able to open access to the American people of billions of electronic objects until we do a better job of filtering for these sensitivities. Otherwise, it defaults to human review, which is just impossible to do in real time. You need the help. Not that you're giving over to the software to do everything and just release based on what the software says, but the software can help in rank ordering what is important, seeing what parts of collections have sensitivities and the parts that don't. And then combined with human review, it could expedite the process. There's a tremendous challenge that NARA faces. Otherwise, as I've written about, that 99.99 percent that I'm talking about that's digital will become a dark archive. For example, my father fought in World War II in the 3rd Army under Patton, and he was in a certain regiment battalion. I can go to AII. I can ask for boxes. I can find that regiment with finding aids and with the help of subject matter experts. And I can be given a set of boxes at a time . . . and I can look for records. . .. But when hundreds of millions of records are at NARA in electronic form, you can't sit at a terminal, and you can't sit at your home through a portal and look through these collections. They're all dark. They're all closed to the public because of this PII and personal information problem. So we need to help solve that to make accessible the history of the American people in the 21st century. Otherwise, the Archives will not be a place where you go to find records or even that you sit at home and search for records. Yes, there'll be a tremendous number of records that are online, but that's the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg will be mostly dark archives. That's . . . what I have been so concerned with and giving public presentations on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think that machine learning is there yet to help with some of these issues?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So machine learning . . . absolutely. It's a solved problem with respect to searching for responsive records. The e-Discovery, private-sector, legal community knows how to do that based on methods that were evangelized in the 2000s, between 2010 and 2020, and I had a role in that. But filtering for sensitivities is a really difficult problem. And until that is solved better than it is now, we are [still] in the soup of human review. And also for, like, declassification of records, that's a whole other issue that I haven't touched. So there's lots of ways that we can advance the ball, and hopefully NARA will be given the resources to help and other agencies will be given those resources, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We're going to follow up with a few more questions here, and we'll go on from there. Right now, I wanted to ask about just the overall history of the Office of the General Counsel. I'm not really familiar with the start of that office. I was wondering if you can tell me a little bit more about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. So, of course, the National Archives became independent in 1984. And at the time of its independence, Steve Garfinkel was general counsel at the General Services Administration, and he carried over into NARA. It was the “National Archives and Records Service” [NARS] at GSA between 1950 and '84, but with its independence going forward [the agency became NARA]. The first general counsel that I had occasion to interact with was Gary Brooks, who's passed away. He was an excellent lawyer, and he was an institutional memory. And I remember meeting him in 1988 as a new DOJ attorney talking about a lawsuit involving an envoy to Richard Nixon [Kenneth Rush] and documents that had been stored at the State Department. I remember coming into warren-like rooms, I think it's 305, but it was on the third floor of Archives I in kind of a closed space with low ceilings and two rooms. It had a couch in the outer room. Oh, it had a secondary little area. He had a tiny office that you walk into, and that was the extent of the General Counsel's Office at NARA. It was him and one other individual in a very small space. And it was very intimate. And I talked to him, and I thought he was great. I thought he was just the perfect person to talk to about records in general. And I think that may have triggered my interest in all things at the National Archives. But [later], he was caught up in the Armstrong litigation. And for his own sake, there were issues as to whether he had acquiesced with what the Justice Department lawyers, including myself, wanted, which was something called the Bush-Wilson Agreement where Don Wilson, who was the Archivist at the time, signed an agreement with George H. W. Bush to basically address the problem of what to do with backup tapes at the White House during the pendency of the Armstrong case. And that agreement was eventually found to be inconsistent with the Presidential Records Act. And Gary [Brooks] got caught up in that maelstrom. Acting Archivist Trudy Peterson decided that he wasn't the right person going forward to be general counsel. But I always have believed that Gary acted honorably, and he was somebody I always looked up to—Gary Brooks. After him, Chris Runkel, in the General Counsel's Office, served admirably on a couple of occasions as acting general counsel in the interim between others. Elizabeth Pugh, who was in the Civil Division at Justice with me, and was essentially my supervising attorney on the Armstrong case, came to be the replacement to Gary Brooks and Chris Runkel as acting in 1996 as general counsel at NARA. She was only here for two years at NARA, and then she went on to be a general counsel at the Library of Congress. During her time, the office expanded. When Archives II was built out, there were . . . a suite of offices that were actually in the back of the building and then, due to her, eventually the GC office moved towards the front of the building to be directly closer to the Archivist's office. And after her, Gary Stern, who I've already mentioned, came in 1998, and I was lucky enough to be hired by him in 2000. So he, as of this recording, is still general counsel, one of the longest serving general counsels in government. In my time, there were on the order of 12 lawyers and other staff members total. There was a FOIA specialist and a couple others that made up the office. It's generally been around that size. You'd have to ask others what the exact number of FTEs is today, but historically, the General Counsel's Office has been a very small shop, doing all sorts of things including in terms of supporting litigation, supporting the management of NARA in Title VII cases or MSPB cases that are brought against officials by individuals settling those cases. I was supervisor to the head FOIA person who handled the active records of NARA that are within the scope of FOIA requests. There's another office at NARA that handles FOIA requests coming in for archival records. But for NARA records, the general counsel assumes that. General Counsel assumed the RESOLVE program of mediation of disputes. And, you know, lawyers . . . wear many hats. And one of the best hires I ever made was Stephanie Abramson, who's currently still there as procurement and EEOC counsel. I supported the movement of lawyers going from journeyman status to a GS-14 level as a cap to being a GS-15 non-supervisory position. I thought that the talent in the General Counsel’s Office was always great, and I enjoyed working with colleagues. And as I've said before, Gary Stern has set a very high bar for what constitutes collegiality and outstanding work by all, and he is just respected by everyone who's ever worked with him. So that's my little mini capsule of NGC [Office of General Counsel]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I can't imagine walking into, like, this little tiny room. It sounds like a dungeon, [LAUGHS] and you've got two or three people there. [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was on the third floor. Every room there, you know—that were little rooms around the corridors. So yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So, it's grown a little bit since you first started there. [LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I also wanted to ask you about, you know, during your time that you were at the Archives, Sandy Berger . . . this whole incident about unauthorized removal of classified records, just everything surrounding that. Are you able to tell me anything about that case?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Sandy Berger was the National Security Council legal director during the [later part of the] Clinton administration. Head lawyer. And he was very much involved in events involving Osama bin Laden and what happened in the Clinton administration with various matters . . . like the bombing of the World Trade Center and incidents that were precedent to 9/11. For reasons that only Mr. Berger knew, he was very interested in reviewing documents that he had been associated with in the Clinton administration, after the Clinton administration. And so in 2003, and I believe in parallel with ongoing proceedings that happened [due to] . . . the 9/11 Commission, he wanted to independently review documents. And he did that at Archives I in offices that were not a SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] but were traditionally the offices where senior representatives went to look at documents. There was a long tradition at the National Archives to give deference to former officials who still retained their top-secret status or security clearances to review documents. And nothing like what happened with Sandy Berger ever had happened before. There was a culture of deference, just like until Les Waffen stole NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] tapes and photographs out of AII and was convicted for that. There were never any guards checking briefcases or anything else walking out of AII. That came into being because of a bad actor who violated every principle that, you know, archivists are trained under to preserve records, and so whatever his motives were . . .. But similarly, there was a culture and tradition of respect. And the staff were, unfortunately, subject to being present in a series of meetings where they only slowly came to realize that over the several times that Sandy Berger was in these offices that he was engaged in taking certain documents. And, of course, it turned out that he took them out in his pants or his socks or whatever. Staff noticed that. They marked certain documents. They ultimately found him out that he had been taking documents and storing [some of] them in a dumpster. The Inspector General, Paul Brachfeld at the time, was upset that the General Counsel, Gary Stern, and others in the Office of Presidential Libraries that had been interacting with Sandy Berger, hadn't alerted him in a timely way for him to somehow either entrap or, you know, be more active between these various meetings where there was some suspicion that something's going on till the time that individual staff members reported what was going on. And he launched an investigation, which led to an in-house investigation that really, in my view, should never have taken place in the way that it did. Ultimately, Mr. Brachfeld, as inspector general, referred his findings of investigation of NARA staff to the Justice Department for possible criminal referral, but nothing ever happened; in my view, they did nothing wrong. But along the way—I mean, Sandy Berger did something wrong, and he was prosecuted, and he pled out to a misdemeanor, and then he passed away. And we can discuss his case. But that's separate. The history here, though, is that there was a long investigation of NARA employees. Allen Weinstein was involved in getting advice from Paul Brachfeld as to whether to engage in any kind of disciplinary action. And I was acting general counsel during this time because Gary Stern was involved in conversations that took place in October 2003, which was the time period of the original incident. The investigation went on for years. The House of Representatives had an Oversight [Committee], behind-closed-doors [staff] meeting. I testified, or at least I spoke on the record, at this meeting representing the Archives. I also was very much involved in ensuring that the Inspector General's Office did not release the names or circumstances of employees who, in their view, had done something wrong, but weren't publicly named. It was very important to me to protect the interests of NARA staff. And that's what a good general counsel or acting general counsel would do. That means coming to grips with, and disagreeing with, decisions that the inspector general might make. In the incident that really brought things to a head for me was that, along the way, the inspector general's lawyer and the Inspector General Paul Brachfeld wanted to release a report of their investigation in a way that, although they redacted names, it would have been clear who was involved in terms of their view that they had done something wrong, that they had aided Sandy Berger in this effort and that they shouldn't have. And so it would be obvious to any reader who these people were. And I objected to the level of redactions, anticipating FOIA requests and other requests. I believed the IG report was not sufficiently redacted for purposes of keeping personal privacy. And I went to bat for these employees. One or more of them had a private lawyer, but I, as the in-house lawyer, . . . I went to bat with them right up to the Archivist Allen Weinstein. And I came close to being a former whistleblower, because at a meeting with Allen Weinstein, the question of whether Paul Brachfeld would get his way and the report would go out the way that he wanted it to go out, or in a more redacted way that I was suggesting, this was for the Archivist to decide. He's the only person at the agency who the inspector general . . . [must by law] report to in any fashion. That's by the Inspector General Act of '78. So, it was the Archivist's decision. Allen Weinstein sided with me. I did not have to be a whistleblower. That didn't make the inspector general happy. But, you know, one has to deal with that. And if you're acting general counsel, you have to deal with it. So, this was a very tense time. To this day, I believe no one at NARA acted improperly, and I would defend them on that again with whatever facts that came out. But in any event, there was a great deal of tension, and that tension continued between the inspector general and the General Counsel's Office during Mr. Brachfeld's tenure. He ultimately was suspended on other grounds and left the agency under circumstances that I'll let others speak to. But during the time here, it was a very fraught relationship with him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I guess so. I bet the staff really appreciated you standing up for them. We all know when your name gets out there, you know, it can be kind of hard, even if you haven't done anything wrong, to turn your career around after that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the Presidential Records Act. I know it's been in the news a lot recently, but you also served under, I think it was three different Presidential administrations. So I was just wondering if you could talk about that a little bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I've been in government since Jimmy Carter. But at the Justice Department, I've mentioned previously that there was a rough transition in terms of the litigation involved in the Armstrong case between George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton with the handling of backup tapes and otherwise. And the problem is, whenever there's a Presidential transition, there are lawsuits that involve Presidential records. There are lawsuits, there are subpoenas, there are access requests from Congress. And they're caught up in this transfer where records need to be appropriately preserved and indexed and transferred in appropriate ways for either paper or electronic form. It's very difficult. And there are legacy issues that carry over to the next administration. So, 1992-93 was one. 2000-2001 between Clinton and George W. Bush was another. And at that time, there had been a glitch in the email system—that I talked about [earlier] that had been implemented in 1994— with missing records of various types. All emails with the letter D were missing, last names with D. And there were certain emails that were mixed up. Because of that and because of other transition issues, there had to be a restoration of backup tapes that carried over into the George W. Bush administration under special circumstances. And there were pending preservation obligations and litigation. So that was one thing. Let me go to, however, the end of the George W. Bush administration, the transition to President Obama. During the last couple of years of the George W. Bush administration, there had been a lawsuit that had been filed to challenge the fact that allegedly 22 million emails were missing from the White House archive, the email archive that was in existence. And the [public interest group] Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington brought this lawsuit—CREW v. EOP. And there were meetings that were ongoing. Gary Stern and I had gone to the White House, the West Wing, and talked to White House Counsel Fred Fielding. And it played out that when there was this transition, particularly with this litigation, the Obama administration didn't want to—really, it wasn't their issue. It was the Bush administration that had the allegations of 22 million [missing] emails. So there was an ongoing series of settlement discussions going on. I had a role in playing with the settlement of the case, because at one of these conversations, one of these settlement meetings with White House lawyers and Gary Stern as representing NARA and plaintiffs’ counsel and some outside counsel that they had hired—one of whom was in Saudi Arabia or was in the Middle East on the line—there were a lot of people gathered at a meeting at the White House and on the phone. And I was part of that meeting. And at some point during the meeting—I was at a hotel at a conference, I was taking it from my hotel room—at some point in the meeting, I realized that people were laughing because someone had fallen asleep in the meeting and started to snore. And it was completely disruptive. The meeting couldn't go on because of this loud snoring, and they couldn't hang up because there are all these lawyers from different parts, you know, in government and in the Middle East on the line. They didn't want to sever the connection. Well, I realized it was myself. I was the one who had fallen asleep and was snoring. And I must say that what happened after that is that it broke the ice. [After] that meeting, what followed was a settlement of that lawsuit. And [all] because the parties were talking to each other, they were amused. I think if I had been in the room with Gary, he would have kicked me if I ever fell asleep. But in any event, . . . they don't teach you that in law school about how to settle lawsuits. It was my unique way of contributing to this transition! Presidential transitions are hard, and of course, we are aware in more recent times of the indictment of former President Trump for taking records out of the White House and having boxes at Mar-a-Lago. And I've been very critical in the media about that. Of course, the Presidential Records Act was enacted in order to have the American people own records, not the President own records. So up through Nixon, all Presidents from George Washington to Richard Nixon had owned their records. After Nixon left office, there was a special statute to take back his records for the American people. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter owned their own records. But the Presidential Records Act of 1978 said that from Ronald Reagan on, the American people owned the records. They're to go to the National Archives as soon as there's a transfer. So on January 20th, each time there's an inauguration, the last one being in 2021 between Trump and Biden, legal custody of all Presidential records go to the National Archives. And any departure from that is inconsistent with the Presidential Records Act. And it becomes especially very problematic if classified records are brought to some other place. And so now there's been an indictment of President Trump, a former President, and I must say that it's inconceivable to me during my time in government that a President would take 15 or whatever the number of boxes are, of unclassified and classified Presidential records and claim that they were his. But there always have been issues with each Presidential transition, not perhaps as highlighted in the news as this last one, but during my time it always was fraught, and litigation made it more difficult. These are huge operations. In the Clinton era, they used to have C-5 A planes coming in during the last year, taking pallets of documents in huge crates and boxes. That was in an era when there were tremendous numbers of paper records. . .. I know that the Obama Center, which is operating under a different model than prior Presidential Libraries, has been leading an effort with NARA to digitize all of its records, so it wouldn't have any paper records in Chicago when the building opens—it[‘s records] would all be in electronic form. Whether these records are accessible goes to the issues that I've been talking about. But in terms of the form of it, there's less and less paper records now, and more electronic records. And that's why actually the current scandal, the current controversy with respect to removal of records at Mar-a-Lago, is kind of a retro scandal. It involves paper documents, not the tremendous amount of electronic documents that are part of these transfers. I also will say that NARA's role becomes much more prominent at the end of a Presidential administration. NARA officials get involved because there's the potential for a library, and there have been Presidential Libraries in the traditional sense through George W. Bush. They were getting larger and larger, and Congress put restrictions in effect that basically they had to be better endowed because of their special public-private nature—that through private sources there had to be an increase in the percentage of the endowment to allow it to go forward and then NARA to take it over and assume expenses after being built. And because of that, there's been a different model with President Obama, and we don't know what his successors will do. But anyway, NARA is very prominent when it occurs to the President and his staff that they're going to be dealing with NARA. Presidents have representatives after office that are talking with NARA officials all the time about matters involving their records, because they can assert executive privilege or otherwise. I was privileged, because of the litigation I was involved with, to have occasion to meet Vice President Cheney at a Christmas party where other NARA officials were there. It was at his [VP] residence, and we all met him and we met other senior officials. And I also was present once [at a meeting with President George W. Bush], along with Gary Stern and Adrienne Thomas, who was the Acting Archivist at the time, Nancy Smith, and Sharon Fawcett, who was head of the Presidential Libraries. We went over and met President George W. Bush in the Roosevelt Room right next to the Oval Office during the last couple of weeks of his Presidency. He had just concluded his last press conference. He couldn't have been more charming. He knew things about us. He was sort of briefed beforehand. He hung out for a while. He took pictures with us. I thought he just was sort of the kind of person who you'd want to hang out with and have a barbecue with and, you know, go to a football game with. In any event, . . . Gary and others at the Archives, the Archivist of the United States, of course, more routinely met with Presidents and their staff, and particularly in the last days of the administration, the last weeks or months. There is a tremendous effort behind the scenes generally, and I've been part of it . . . [getting] to work with White House officials for an orderly or smooth transition. It never completely happens, but there's a tremendous effort to make it as smooth a transition as possible, and that can take many months or years. When a President is in the second term of a two-term Presidency, they know they're leaving. When there's a one- term President like George H. W. Bush, he loses an election, he's not as prepared for that transition, that part of the chaos there. When a President is in denial that they have lost an election, it becomes even more chaotic." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. And what about NARA's role in enforcing that Presidential Records Act?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So, NARA does not have a police force. That's what I've said to everyone in the government when NARA does try to inspect or audit recordkeeping practices. There isn't any monitor of a police force from NARA in special uniforms, like the Public Health Service, going over and looking over the shoulder of a records manager. Similarly at the White House. Yes, there are a couple of people on detail who, according to public reports, were very frustrated when records were torn up or shredded or flushed down the toilet. Those individuals can't possibly be responsible for alone enforcing the carrying out of the Presidential Records Act in the last days. The PRA does not have a provision for enforcement. But the good people at NARA . . . are acutely aware of their responsibilities and very conscientious in preserving records for the American people notice things. When they find that there are gaps in some portion of records that they believe should have been transferred, they ask questions. And in case of the latest incident with former President Trump, Gary Stern and others were asking questions for a year until they got the return of 15 boxes. So there is a felt responsibility on the part of consummate civil servants to do the right thing, to ensure that Presidential records are properly transferred to NARA. Let me segue, though, to an important other part of the general counsel's duties, which is replevin. Apart from making sure that Presidential records go to NARA, there's also a responsibility that is felt throughout NARA—but actually executed by attorneys in the General Counsel's Office working with others, including in the IG's office—to have to take steps to get records that have walked out of government improperly returned. If documents have been taken out of the White House at the end of, or an abrupt end of an administration like what happened in FDR and JFK, any records that are then sold on the open market, whether it's eBay or an auction or whatever, there's a responsibility . . . and a duty to try to retrieve those for those Presidential Libraries or back into federal agencies. There was a Cuban missile [crisis] map that JFK annotated and, through the efforts of Gary Stern and others working with the Justice Department, that was a litigated case. NARA got the return of that map from when it was being sold on the equivalent of eBay or somewhere. I was involved in something called the Grace Tully Collection, where there were 5,000 or so documents taken by Grace Tully, who was, with Missy LeHand, . . . [one] of FDR's top assistants. FDR, of course, died suddenly in 1945, in his fourth term—and Grace Tully walked out with 5,000 documents. She [later] claimed that they were hers. She passed away in the 1980s. They eventually came to Conrad Black, who was a noted publisher, and then [after his passing] his estate was selling them. It came to the National Archives' attention that many of these should have been part of what would be records and objects at the FDR Presidential Library, that they shouldn't have been taken. So there was a lawsuit that was drawn up but not filed, because we attempted to settle with the parties, with essentially Christie's holding the materials on behalf of Conrad Black's estate. And there was an inventory that was created by an archivist, Bob Clark, at the FDR Library, and me, where the two of us were sitting at Christie's going through a collection of documents to see which ones really should be considered U.S. Government records. Some of them might be gifts to Grace Tully, but documents that were drafts of FDR's speeches in his nominations at conventions and other important documents, correspondence that Grace Tully should not have had, we made a claim for. And there was a special legislation allowing for some compensation being given to the [Black] estate that [former Rep.] Elizabeth Holtzman, now in private practice, was assisting with. There was a great deal made of the return of the collection in 2010; the Archivist and others were present, including members of Congress, at a ceremony when we had gotten the return. And I felt very good about the role that I played. During my time at Christie's, during the week that I was inventorying these records, . . . things like Picassos and Monets and other artwork that Christie's was selling would be walked by in the back room where I was. This was an experience that I never thought I would have as a lawyer at the National Archives doing inventorying of records! And so you never know. I have had many other unexpected experiences. . .. I've experienced a joint sovereign Navajo and English ceremony in Lenexa in a limestone cave, celebrating an agreement between Secretary Gale Norton of Interior and John Carlin, the Archivist. This was in 2004, —. . . to [have] . . . 200,000 boxes of Bureau of Indian Affairs records in one place, to consolidate them from around the country into this newly formed American Indian Records Repository that is maintained in archival conditions in this limestone cave. And it was quite something to be part of, you know, Navajo dancing and speeches and whatever in this cave. This was another event that I never thought I'd be part of, but I was a drafter of the memorandum of understanding with [Department of the] Interior senior officials. And so I did get involved there. Just all sorts of incidents, all sorts of experiences, that I never thought I would have as a director of litigation that I had along the way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there other [CROSS-TALKING]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let's stop the tape, because I need water. Or you can just have the tape go. But let me just for a moment..." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sorry about that, Stephanie." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Going on. All right. What else can we cover?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I didn't know if you wanted to talk about the Pearl Harbor incident?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Pearl Harbor incident was that [Director] Cynthia Koch of the FDR Library basically wanted me to take back a huge painting of FDR's sailboat, the Amberjack meeting the USS Indianapolis. That painting was gifted to FDR, but he never took possession of it. He was on the Indianapolis, but he never actually physically took it. Later the painting ended up in the captain's quarters in Pearl Harbor. I went there on a mission from Cynthia to go about getting it back. And I'd already told her that we don't own it. NARA doesn't own it. But I succeeded, probably because of my daughter being [there with me], eight years old and cute. I don't know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "[LAUGHS]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "As part of the meeting, I got an agreement to have the painting displayed at the Library for one year on a loan. During that time, Ms. Koch decided on her own to write to the Secretary of the Navy and claim ownership on behalf of the National Archives. That was not something that I had advised her to do, and for whatever reason, she did that. She thought it was important to do that. I got a call from the head of the 7th Fleet, the lawyer for the 7th Fleet, telling me that I was a bad lawyer and having negotiated in bad faith this transfer of loan. That was not the best day. Not a good day. We ended up actually having the painting for two years on loan. There was a ceremony . . . a reception and an event celebrating the painting being at the Library. But it was returned. I'm not sure whether I'm banned from Pearl Harbor now, but that was another experience along the way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, yeah, you've got so many. In terms of awards, I know that you've won three Archivist awards, which has to be something of a record, I think. And I know you've won numerous other awards. Do you want to talk about any of them in particular and maybe what these mean to you in your career?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, let me say—and you didn't quite ask me this, but . . . I know you were going to ask me about my impressions of the Archivists that I've worked under." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I don't want to avoid the question. Let me just lead up to it by saying that I've had the privilege of working under [Archivists] John Carlin, under Allen Weinstein and David Ferriero. And John Carlin didn't like lawyers very much for whatever reason, I thought. But he was very effective in getting the Electronic Records Archives funded. Originally that project failed, and we don't have time for that in this interview, but you should talk to others about it. He was very good at getting money [for NARA from Congress]. He was a former Governor of Kansas, and he knew how to work legislative levers. Allen Weinstein, from his background as an academic, knew a lot about history. He was someone who I had difficulty hearing, because he was such a soft talker that you couldn't even hear him when you were three feet away. Allen Weinstein suffered from Parkinson's [Disease], and ultimately, he's now passed away. I won't say anything more about him. He had a difficult tenure with some degree of controversy. I will let others speak to that. David Ferriero is a very impressive person. He always struck me as the brightest person in the room. He cared a lot about how the Archives could sustain itself and was a tremendous presence during his years as Archivist, was in the forefront of all of these memoranda—the 2012 memorandum with OMB—and constantly . . . understood the cutting edge of where the Archives should be on electronic records issues. I'm personally grateful to David Ferriero for participating in a really lovely ceremony in the Chandelier Room 105, whatever it's called now . . . but it is on the corridor with the Archivist's office. . .. In 2011, I was very privileged to receive something called the Emmett Leahy Award. It's an international award recognizing one's impact in the records and information profession. I was the first federal lawyer to win the award, and only the second lawyer in 40 years. And I ended up chairing the Emmett Leahy Committee [during five of the next] 10 years [while I served on the Committee]. David Ferriero was very, very gracious in his speech. There were other speeches that day that said that it was the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. And everyone was waiting for me to retire in that room, but I stuck it out for a couple more years. So, it was a very special event. He also was very gracious when my mother passed away in sending a note. I wish him well in whatever next steps he does." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know we've got just a few minutes here. Do you have a minute just to talk about your part in the FOIA Advisory Committee? I know this was after you retired from NARA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": ". . . The FOIA Advisory Committee works with the Office of Government Information Services [OGIS]. Miriam Nisbet was the first head of OGIS, and Alina Semo is the current head. And they both have been very passionate about working with this FACA committee, a Federal Advisory Committee Act committee, to get input from both government representatives and outside representatives. Now, I have served for two terms, and I'm on the current term of it to advise the Archivist and to make recommendations about improving the administration of FOIA. I have been pretty much an evangelist on the same issues that we've been talking about during this interview, that there is a need for artificial intelligence and machine learning to play a role in filtering sensitivities, FOIA exemptions, and for recordkeeping purposes generally. And I served on a subcommittee a couple of terms ago that tried to integrate recordkeeping— Federal Records Act issues—and FOIA issues, because they're often siloed in agencies where the FOIA officer and the records officer are basically doing whatever they're doing, but they're not talking together. There's a whole field of information governance that would encourage that, along with lawyers and cybersecurity people and whomever, CISOs [Chief Information Security Officers] and CIOs [Chief Information Officers] . . .. So I think the advisory committee aspirationally has the role of trying to make progress in government, making it more efficient under the FOIA, to have improvements. There have been 52 recommendations to date. One of the aspects of the current term of the committee, the 2022-2024 term, is to evaluate past recommendations and how they've been implemented by the government. So, expect a report in 2024 about that. Alina Semo and Kirsten Mitchell and others on the staff of OGIS do a tremendous job in trying to make sure that the committee functions well, along with all of their other important duties in OGIS." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Hey, I know you left the Archives in 2013. What does it feel like to still see the Archives when you're in the DC area or . . .? What does it feel like to finally have moved on from the National Archives?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I left the Archives after 13 years on October 1st, 2013, during a government shutdown, and I was responsible for Jay Bosanko and three others coming in that day and actually getting paid to process my exit! And let me say this—I say this in many kinds of public forums when I'm asked: my time at the Archives was a dream job for all the reasons that I've talked about in this interview. You get involved in so many different aspects of American history and litigation against the government, and you're playing a substantial role. It's an organization that doesn't have many layers. And so you could go talk to the Archivist—just as the general counsel, and director of litigation—walk into the Archivist's office or the Deputy Archivist and . . . discuss serious matters that involve Presidential records. You get to go to the White House. You get to go for [high-level] meetings, go all around the government. I've gone to all sorts of black box agencies, you know, from CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], NSA [National Security Agency], and you can go down the list. My time in all of these experiences that I've had was a tremendous education, and I loved every minute of it—maybe not every minute of the Sandy Berger time, but almost every minute of it. I worked for 33 years in government, and my last government position was at NARA before going to private practice and then now in academia. And I said in my retirement party when I left NARA that I still feel the same way as I did coming to Washington as a 19-year-old doing summer jobs and then after law school, that I believe public service is the highest calling one can do. And I know that every night when I left Archives I—I had offices in both Archives II and in Archives I—but when I was at Archives I and leaving in the evening after a long day, you know, you cross Pennsylvania Avenue, go to the Metro, you look down east and down the avenue and you see the Capitol lit up. It's a tremendous feeling that you are part of the Nation's history. Main Archives is such a wonderful building with a history, and you're part of the workings of government in an important way and that you have a mission to do the right thing for the American people to preserve their history. And I was caught up in that. And it never ceased to affect me walking out of that building. And I feel that way to this day that the finest civil servants that I know have been at the National Archives, and I admire them and their mission. I admire what everyone does. They wake up every morning to preserve records and to provide access to American people and the world. And so, you know, I salute them, and I will always, always look fondly back at my time in government and especially at the National Archives." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's really great. Yeah, I think NARA has a really important mission, and you played a huge part in that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I played a small part. We all are part of a relay race in life where you get the token for a while, you're given the token by someone, and then you hand it off to the next person. And if you've done your part in the relay race, running as fast as you can, doing as much as you can to help, you know, knowing that your time is limited, you value that time and then you hand it off to others to continue." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Well, hey, I think I've kept you over our time here, so I just want to say thank you for participating in this. I'll go ahead and get you that transcript as soon as I can, and then I'll reiterate in my email some of the points that we talked about previously. But yeah, thank you so much for all this information. It's been really great and interesting. I hope you had a good time too. And I hope [CROSS-TALKING]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did! This is a lot of fun with all these memories and thank you for giving me the opportunity. And, of course, I wish you all the best and want you to keep interviewing people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, yes. I will. All right. Well, thank you so much. And yeah, I'll be talking to you soon then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thanks, Stephanie." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Stephanie Reynolds", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All right. Have a good rest of your day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jason R. Baron", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All right. Bye." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00656", + "metadata": { + "category": "Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office Oral History Project 2012 - 2013", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/C3PO/GerstenmaierWH/gerstenmaierwh.htm", + "original_file_name": "GerstenmaierWH_1-10-08.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/NAF/GerstenmaierWH/GerstenmaierWH_1-10-08.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA at 50 Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 10 January 2008" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "William H. Gerstenmaier" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is January 10th, 2008. We are at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas to speak with Bill Gerstenmaier for the NASA at 50 Oral History Project. Mr. Gerstenmaier serves as NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Operations. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright assisted by Sandra Johnson. In preparation for the space agency's 50th anniversary, the NASA Headquarters [Washington, D.C.] History Office commissioned this oral history project to gather thoughts, experience and reflections from NASA's top managers. Information recorded today will be transcribed and placed in the history archives at NASA Headquarters where it can be accessed for future projects. Thanks again for providing us time, especially since you're on travel to Houston and not in your normal office at Headquarters. If we could begin today by you briefly describing your background and how you came to your current position?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess I'll start at the very beginning, because it all somehow relates. I graduated from Purdue University [West Lafayette, Indiana] in 1977. I first went to work at the [NASA] Lewis Research Center, now the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. I worked in the Wind Tunnel and Flight Division up there. I did supersonic wind tunnel work in the wind tunnels, and as part of that job I had the privilege of working on a couple projects for the early [Space] Shuttle Program. They were the Air Data Probe Calibration Wind Tunnel Test, which is the Shuttle has two air data probes that come out at Mach 3.5 and they're used to determine the air speed and angle of attack of the Shuttle as it comes down to land.\\n\\n We provided the calibration for those. We took the data in Cleveland, along with data was taken at [NASA] Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] and at [NASA] Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California], and then that data went into a database that then became essentially the parameters that fly on the Shuttle today that determine altitude, air speed, and angle of attack from those probes. So that was my first experience in the Shuttle world. I didn't do much but take data for the Rockwell [International Corporation] engineers at the time.\\n\\n I also worked on a project where we had about 760 pressure measurements all over the Shuttle. It was a Shuttle with an external tank and solid rocket boosters. We looked at all the different configurations and we ran from essentially about Mach 1 all the way up to Mach 3.5 in that configuration again in a tunnel, gaining pressure, temperature data for, again, Shuttle analysis.\\n\\n Then I supported Shuttle Base Heating Test, where we put thermocouples on the back end of the Shuttle model in the wind tunnel and we actually fired two model rockets on the side that represented the solid rocket motors, and we looked at how those plumes would heat the bottom of the external tank. That data was again used by Rockwell to determine the thickness of the foam and the insulation that needed to be on the bottom of the tank. So that was my first exposure to the Shuttle Program, was essentially right out of school in 1977.\\n\\n Also at the same I did other aerodynamic research, nozzle stuff, subsonically, and then some supersonic inlet stuff and some other stuff. But I had the experience then of getting the chance to see a little bit of the Shuttle Program at that point.\\n\\n Then in 1980 I had the opportunity or was asked did I want to come to the Johnson Space Center, and again my propulsion background was what attracted the folks down here, and they asked me if I wanted to come down and be a flight controller in the Flight Control Division down here. Steve [Stephen G.] Bales was the Branch Chief at the time. I flew down and looked around the area and decided that if I really wanted to get into the space business this was the place to be. So I decided I'd come down here for two years and see if I would like it or not.\\n\\n It turned out that I really loved it down here. I became a flight controller. I served on the first Shuttle mission, the Columbia flight. I was in the back room doing thermal analysis. On that flight some of the tile were damaged on the OMS pods and I was in the Orbital Maneuvering System/Reaction Control System [OMS/RCS] Section. We analyzed whether we thought it would be safe to return with that tile damage. Then what's curious about that is here in my recent career we had the blankets peel up here on the last Shuttle flight, and the analysis was almost identical to the analysis that I did back in 1981 at STS 1. So my career has started at the beginning and then still I get to go see that.\\n\\n So then from being a flight controller, I flew about the first 17 flights as an orbit flight controller in the OMS/RCS Section. I also did ascent entries towards the end of that. I then moved off and did payload activities in the Payload Branch. These were the payloads that fly on the Shuttle. I also worked on the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle for a little while, ran that project office and systems division. Then I guess in 1992 I decided that I wanted to go back to school again.\\n\\n When I was in Cleveland it was very important to have a PhD or have an advanced degree. So they brought professors in from the University of Toledo [Toledo, Ohio] to work on your master's. I got my master's degree from the University of Toledo with the teachers coming down part-time. I actually completed it down here in Houston from the University of Houston. But I had that, and then I decided in '92 I wanted to go back and get retooled again technically. So I went back to Purdue University to pursue a PhD. I didn't get a PhD but I completed all the coursework and got through the qualifiers.\\n\\n I was there for about two years, '92 through '94. Then I came back to the Johnson Space Center, worked in Flight Design and Dynamics Division again on the Shuttle side looking at the software that controls the Shuttle, the orbital mechanics, the ascent software. I did that for about a year, managed a branch over there. Then I went to Russia in 1995 and '96 when Shannon [W.] Lucid flew on the [Shuttle-] Mir [Space Station] Program. I got to go to Russia and support her and be her ground person while she was flying in space.\\n\\n For me coming from the [Mission] Control Center here in Houston and then getting the privilege to go be in Russia and work in their Control Center and be pretty much accepted as a flight controller in Russia—at that point the team in Russia was very small. There was myself and maybe five or six contractor folks that were there supporting that mission. The Russians had not seen anybody really come for an extended period of time. I stayed for about a six to seven-month period of time over there. So they really adopted me as a flight controller. They sensed the love of space flight, the love of engineering that I have is the same that they have. We bonded really well, and I had a great experience, and I can't say enough about Shannon Lucid. She was a phenomenal astronaut to have on orbit. She was just super. She was a joy to work with every day. It was my privilege and pleasure to help her with her science program. Hopefully she had a good time because of what we did. But again that was very neat that I got to go do that in Russia.\\n\\n Then I came back, worked in the Shuttle Program after that, in the Orbiter Project. Got to go out to Palmdale [California], got to see some Orbiter modifications out there. Then I don't remember exactly when, but about 1999 I came to the [International Space] Station Program as Tommy's [Tommy W. Holloway] deputy in the Station Program and worked there until I became Station Program Manager. I was Station Program Manager until I got my present job in Space Operations up at Headquarters.\\n\\n So again if you look at my career I didn't really plan any of these moves. But from where I started to where I am now I have the privilege and luxury of having a tremendous background. I have a lot of firsthand international experience by working with the Russians firsthand. So then when I became Station Program Manager I was treated with a lot of respect. I was already a known quantity so the negotiations, although very difficult, like after the Columbia tragedy [STS-107], etc., the Russians had a tremendous respect for me because I had spent that time, and they knew who I was.\\n\\n So I couldn't have planned it that way, but the way it worked out was just super. So again if I look back at my career I'm truly blessed. I've worked with phenomenal people throughout my career. It's all been in Shuttle Station human space flight activities, but it's just been amazing. It all fits together, and now my job where I lead both Shuttle and Station from Headquarters is fitting. So I know what [N.] Wayne [Hale, Jr.] does in the Shuttle Program. I know what Mike [Michael T. Seffredini] does in the Station Program. I know their problems. So then my primary job in Headquarters is to keep all the Congressional folks and other folks out of their hair and let them go do what they really need to go do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let's talk a little more about what you are doing up there. You do have some challenges and some of course routine day-to-day aspects. If you could fill us in a little bit more about what all that your job does entail?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think that the current job, what probably some of the biggest challenges are as we're retiring the Shuttle is how do we fly out the Shuttle safely, in other words make sure that each Shuttle flight is just as safe as the last Shuttle flight and we keep our focus on what we're doing. It's very difficult if you look at other programs as they phased out to keep them strong until the end. So that's one of my challenges, is to do that. My other challenge is to take each Shuttle flight and make sure we get maximum advantage out of it so we can get the Space Station completed or at least get the major elements launched, as well as put up a large number of spares to be prepared until the next vehicle comes online that can start providing routine cargo transportation to Space Station.\\n\\n So the big challenge strategically is how do I lay out a plan that supports this but then I need to lay that out with the constraints that I'm given from the environment in Washington. I get some guidance from the Office of Management and Budget. I get some guidance from the Executive Office of the President. I sometimes get conflicting guidance from the Congressional side. So then how do I make sense of the two conflicting things but yet craft it into a plan that meets their constraints but yet is still technically reasonable and we can then go move forward.\\n\\n Then the challenge is to then convince the folks down here in Houston that do the real work why this plan really makes sense and why even though in the real world I wouldn't necessarily pick this plan but with the constraints we've got, with the budget limitations we've got, where we sit, this is the best we can do with the parameters we're given. So then to explain that to them and get them to not only understand it but then to embrace it and be ready to move forward and make continued sacrifices to do that, those are my challenges.\\n\\n It's very hard in the Washington environment. I'm trained as an engineer. I'm trained as a manager. It's hard to convey sometimes to folks not in our business how difficult our business is, what the challenges are. They don't understand the motivation of my workforce. They don't understand the love that the folks really have of this business. For me to try to convey that to someone that doesn't understand either the technical piece or the managerial piece is sometimes very very difficult. I spend a lot of time with them trying to explain and get them to understand how we think and what we think and why we're doing what we're doing, because they sometimes see it as being very confusing. As engineers we sometimes get so much into minutiae that we're talking all the fine details and they don't really care about the details, they want to understand the big picture and how it fits together.\\n\\n So I have to avoid the engineer tendency and try to craft it in a language and in a motivation that they can understand, and that's been a big challenge for me. The challenge is to find out what motivates them and then to cast what we want to go do in terms that they can respond to, and then I know when I talk to my engineers I cannot use that same language or that same motivation, because they will not understand that. So then I have to recraft that same direction back into a language that the engineers can understand and the managers can understand down here. So that's my job, is to have the split personality of dealing with the extreme technical to the extreme lawyer political side and figure out how to make sure that as the interface between those two groups is clear. The communication from the politician lawyer to the engineer technician on the floor must be clear and understandable to each.." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As the one responsible for directing the space exploration operations of the agency, you have a vital role in helping to make the Vision for Space Exploration a success. So tell us how the impact of the announcement from President [George W.] Bush had an impact on the future of the agency and the things that you were doing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Again I think the clear thing is that we really have a Vision now that takes us beyond low-Earth orbit. I think if you ask most folks in the human space flight world, they really want to get beyond low-Earth orbit. We're meant to explore. We're meant to go out. We're meant to go do things. So having a plan where we go to the Moon and then we have extended stay times on the Moon is great. Then that yields right next to Mars, which is even more demanding.\\n\\n I think for a long time we talked about going to Mars first. I don't think we're technically ready to go to Mars. To go to Mars would require a spacecraft about the size of the Space Station. The Space Station when it's completed will weigh about 900,000 pounds. So we would have to construct in orbit a spacecraft about the size of Space Station and then have the three-, six-month journey to Mars and then for about a week's stay, and then return back. So we're not really quite ready from a technology standpoint to make that big leap to Mars. But we can use the Space Station to learn about long-duration space flight.\\n\\n We can learn how to operate and live and work in space. We can do that with Space Station. Then we can take that knowledge, apply that to the Moon, permanently stay on the Moon for a period of time, learn what it takes to operate on the Moon, and then get ready to go to Mars. The way I look at it is in Space Station if you mess something up you're hours away from returning back to the surface of the Earth. So it's a bad day but it's not all that bad a day. You can still get back in hours.\\n\\n When you're at the Moon you're now days away. So you have a little more of a constraint but it's still manageable in the big scheme of things. If you don't have the right spares or the simple things such as food or water are not what they need to be or there's contamination in the water supply, you've still got several days, and you can get back. But then when you go to Mars, it's now months. So the criticality is now kicked up where it's not a forgiving environment. So you better learn from Space Station, learn from the Moon to enable you to go be successful on Mars. So there's a natural nice progression that sits and goes forward as we go do that.\\n\\n The problem for us in Shuttle and Station a little bit is that in a sense we're transients. Shuttle's going to retire, but we're retiring Shuttle because we need another vehicle that can take us beyond low Earth orbit. So we would ideally like to be able to fly both the Shuttle and the new vehicle, but we're not given funds to go do that. So we have to end one to pick up the next to go where we want to go. That's what I try to convey to folks. I think it makes sense if you look at it and then you look at that natural progression of stepping stones from Station to Moon to Mars. Again the plan is there. We're ready to go execute that.\\n\\n Now as we sit here today and we look at the election coming up, what we need to do now is figure out how we can keep this Vision that we've got through the election. Now we know it's going to change. We know when the new administration comes in, just like when we got the new Congress, they're going to want to put their fingerprints and change what's going on, and that's fine. So our job at Headquarters is to figure out—this is probably not politically correct—but to figure out what we can let them change that doesn't destroy the entire Vision, but yet lets them have ownership in this Vision and make it their plan.\\n\\n So we're consciously now trying to figure out which things can be changed or, conversely, which things shouldn't we change that would so disrupt the Vision that we lose this momentum that we've got as we go beyond low-Earth orbit. So that's our challenge now, is to look to the new administration and try to determine what things strategically they're nice to have but they're not critical to the overall Vision. So for example, how we use the international community on the surface of the Moon, how we develop new hardware, how we put things together, some of those things it's not as critical to us as other areas. So again, we're starting to lay all that out. So again, I look at my job in Shuttle and Station as how do we take Shuttle hardware and use it to advance the Constellation [Program] .\\n\\n For example in Florida Firing Room 1, which used to be a Shuttle firing room, has now been given to Constellation, and they're going to go ahead and use that firing room. The A1 Test Stand at [NASA] Stennis Space Flight Center [Mississippi], that's been turned over, and they're testing J2X engines down at Stennis now in that test stand. We're going to fly a demonstration flight for Constellation in April of 2009. It's going to launch off one of our mobile launch platforms with our four-segment SRB [solid rocket booster] underneath. Our flight control team that does Shuttle and Station will be the flight control team that will oversee that launch and see that suborbital flight that's going to occur for Constellation. So that natural transition is there.\\n\\n The way I see my Directorate interface with the Exploration Directorate is the Exploration Directorate is building the hardware, they're designing the new hardware, but then when it comes time to operate it it comes back to the Mission Operations Directorate, and we will go operate that hardware. So in the big scheme of things I think it all fits in that world, and it works fairly well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It's exciting times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's a great time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you feel NASA's role is for society or its impact on society? How would you explain that, that NASA has this purpose that we can have for the future?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think NASA gives us a chance to think about things in ways that we don't normally think about things. As a kid growing up, probably my most compelling memory was I think from the Apollo era when the picture of the Earth or the Earthrise from the Moon. That gave us as a species a whole new perspective on what the Earth was. Here's this little blue ball. As a kid I used to look at that and say all of us are in that picture. Then today if I look at say I think it's Cassini [spacecraft] that's there with the Saturn rings and that little tiny dot that is the Earth, that's us. So NASA has allowed us to rise above our day-to-day problems and our day-to-day crisis and look at our world and our lives in a whole new perspective that we would never be able to imagine any other way. We realize how small we are in the big scheme of things, how precious the Earth is in a sense.\\n\\n When you look at the pictures from Space Station, if you look at it you'll see Space Station, especially at the fly-arounds, and you'll see that thin little blue line, and that's our atmosphere, and that's all. So I was at a conference once and they were complaining that the space budget was so much more than the aeronautics budget. So I had a picture, my first picture on my slide was Space Station. So I showed them that little blue line, and I said well see all that little blue stuff, that's aeronautics, that's why your budget is so small, you see all that vast darkness out there, that's space, that's why my space budget is so big. So again in a simple way, our job allows us to see a different perspective.\\n\\n What's hard is it's hard for us to explain our jobs to folks. When I was Station Program Manager I used to challenge my people all the time to try to explain to their neighbors why they worked all these ridiculous hours and why we did all this hard work. They really can't explain it. But they're part of a bigger thing that is bigger than them, and there's a spirit of it's so complex and it requires everyone to work together as a team or it can't be successful. In a sense that really is an unbelievably great way to motivate a team and to move forward. If I look back through my career, the hardware's neat and cool, and as an engineer I like that, but I think I carry more memories of people that I've worked with, and in very difficult times.\\n\\n After the [Space Shuttle] Challenger [STS 51-L] disaster and the Columbia disaster, those were really hard times, because you lost your friends who were astronauts that you really knew as friends, not as astronauts, and then it also took an impact on your work. You in a sense had failed in your job. So then the double problem or double calamity was just hard to take. So we have a great business. There's tremendous highs when things are happening and years of work come together as we start seeing Space Station assembled and we see the international partner modules get launched probably next month. That's exciting, to see that thing that you've worked on for 10 years, 15 years come to fruition is a huge plus.\\n\\n But then the other side is sometimes we have tremendous downs, when we have a Columbia or a Challenger tragedy. So that's part of our business. It has both extremes. But I think the people in this business are the thing that I carry as the most memorable thing, to have the privilege and pleasure of working with all these folks throughout these years has just been great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Those years equal to about 30. You've spent 30 years so far with NASA. Tell us how NASA's changed through this time period." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, boy, it's definitely changed. It's hard to reflect on the change, because I've seen it come so incrementally to myself, right. I've seen this change in the way we do business. I've had a tremendous privilege of working with some great folks. I worked directly with Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz, I've worked with Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft, Bob [Robert F.] Thompson in the Shuttle Program, Leonard [S.] Nicholson in the Engineering Directorate and the Shuttle Program on the payload side. The list goes on and on, Arnie [Arnold D.] Aldrich, George [W. S.] Abbey, all the folks.\\n\\n So throughout my career I've had a chance to work with all these folks and to see how today's management style is a little bit different than then. So NASA has changed. In the earlier days it was a pretty hard environment, you were challenged very up front. You either knew your stuff or you weren't even permitted to give presentations and you were done, whereas in today's world we're probably more forgiving. We're not as hard as we were back then. But\\n\\n The other thing that's changed a lot is the technology. In the Control Center today the new computer systems and the new software they have for the Space Station Flight Control Team is dramatically different than what I had as a flight controller. If you looked at what I had as a flight controller, it was really rudimentary, very simple compared to the complex software and complex operation that the new flight controllers have.\\n\\n That's another thing I really enjoy is occasionally I'll sneak over and sit next to the flight controllers in the Space Station Program and just watch what they're doing and just talk to them about their job and they don't quite know who I am, but it works out just great, to see that the same joy, the same excitement, the same really love of their job is there that I've shared throughout my life. So it's neat that that same spirit, that same deep internal motivation that was there in my beginning days at NASA even in the aeronautics side is still within NASA today. So that aspect of NASA has remained consistent.\\n\\n Now the technology and some of the meeting styles and some of the management controls, those things have changed over time. But that underlying drive, that underlying spirit has been there since throughout my career." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, what are some of the lessons that you've learned through this career that you've taken to your current position?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Boy, I think I've learned a couple things. One definitely is that everyone's position really has merit. So early on I was doing a project and one of the guys in the Avionics Division was thought of as not very productive within the division and he was assigned not very good jobs to go do. I didn't know that. Then I came in from the operations side and he explained to me how some things ought to be wired and put together in the avionics system. I would take what he told me and then I would feed it back to his own division and they thought I was some kind of genius because I could do all this electronic stuff. Well, it wasn't really me, it was actually this person within their own division that they had written off as not being valuable.\\n\\n So what I learned out of that was that some folks don't present very well, and they get branded as not being a strong contributor, and they may not in all areas, but they still have something that they can really contribute. So I learned to listen extra hard. So then when my initial reaction is maybe not to listen to a comment from somebody or to dismiss something, I want to make sure the little red flag goes off in my head and says okay listen extra hard, because this person really is trying to tell you something and you need to value what they're trying to tell you. It may not be exactly what you want to hear, or it may not be exactly on target, but it has meaning and it can help you do a better job. So I've learned to really value and pull data and information from a whole variety of different sources. So I think that's one thing that I've learned.\\n\\n I've also learned that you have to balance your life a little bit. You can do so much work stuff that you don't have another life. So occasionally you need to find things where you get grounded and you get back to being a real person. Whenever I start thinking that I am somewhat smart or gifted, then I go talk to my family and they definitely put me back in the right perspective. I think that's really good, because we're not all that great, but you get this inflated attitude where people are nice to you, and they're treating you well because of your position, and that doesn't really matter. Go back to your family and let them chew at you for a little while, and then you get regrounded back to where you need to be.\\n\\n So I think there's a balance between the home life and the work life that has to occur. Especially in today's world I think it's tough for some of the new folks coming in to find that right balance because the work can be very addictive, because you're getting very strong positive feedback from what you're doing. You can read about what you do in the paper. That tends to make you get a big head and you start thinking that you're better and you're more gifted than somebody else, and in reality you're not, and you need some chance when you can get back in more of an equal surroundings and be with other folks and see what's really going on. So I think I've learned that also.\\n\\n I've also learned that people will really rise to the challenge if you can put the challenge in front of them in the right way. Again there's really nothing I don't think that this team can't do if you put the challenge in front of them in the right way and you give them a little bit of resources to go do it and you help enable them, and you're consistent in walking the talk, that when you ask somebody to do something you need to be willing to do it yourself or to show it. Folks look a lot at your actions. You can have all these great platitudes and all these great words about how you ought to do something, but the simple things that you do every day that they're watching and they see happening are stronger motivators than all the right words that you talk about.\\n\\n I didn't realize until one day here in Building 1 at JSC somebody had spilled some coffee. So then I got a paper towel and got down on my knees and wiped it up and threw it in the trashcan. I didn't think anything about it. Then we're having safety day, and somebody brought up the fact that they saw me get down and wipe up this spill on the floor, and they said, “Holy cow, he is really concerned about safety and is really doing the right thing.” I didn't think anything about it. But that carried a stronger motivation for my folks than anything I could have ever said in terms of motivational lectures or speeches or emails or writings. So again we're always being looked at as managers and leaders. It needs to be natural, but you need to really walk the talk and not just pontificate on how things ought to be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Part of the Vision for Exploration has a balance or a cooperation between human and robotic space flight. Tell us about the important relevance between them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it's unfortunate, because a lot of times in the media we get pitted robotic against human space flight. That's really not the case. The motivation that they have in the robotic side, and I say they, and that's probably not right, but the robotic folks, they have the same motivation that we do. If you look at the Rover activity or the Mars team at JPL [NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California] or you look at those folks, they had that same drive and motivation that we do on the human side. So I think we get characterized as either it needs to be robotic or it needs to be human. I don't think that's right. I think it's really the combination of both makes a much stronger team.\\n\\n We're starting to see some of that in the new Exploration Vision. There's going to be some Lunar Landers potentially here. There's going to be some mapping experiments done on the Moon. Those will provide information that are needed for the human, and then the human can come and expand on those findings. We're learning that a little bit on Space Station as we have new Special-Purpose Dexterous Manipulators, the two-armed robot from Canada that'll be launched in March, and that will allow us to do tasks that we could only do EVA [extravehicular activity], now we'll be able to do robotically. I think at first the crews and the flight controllers will not want to accept that new robotic device, they'll want to continue to do it the way we've done it before, but then I think they'll learn how advantageous that can be to them, and how it can actually augment and help them do their job.\\n\\n You see the same thing in some of the undersea repair activities. They have little remotely operated vehicles, and at first the divers didn't really want those things around. Then when they figured out they could actually help them by providing tools and being a camera platform and a light platform and it actually made their job easier, then they started accepting those robotic vehicles next to them. I think we'll see the same thing in space. I think you'll start seeing a natural blending between robotic and human. I think it's unfortunate that we get pitted against each other, because it's not right. There's a place for both, and there's a place where they can both cooperate together, and I think the real strength is when we work together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned earlier about aeronautics. How do you feel aeronautics will be utilized or the research for aeronautics will be utilized in the next years with NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think aeronautics again has a pretty strong future. I think we didn't use the Shuttle quite as much as we should have throughout its history. We declared it an operational vehicle, and we didn't continue to use it for research. Recently on the Shuttle we've had some problems where we had some gap-fillers, the little pieces of material that sit between the tiles that keep them from chattering together, those have popped out, and when they come out then the flow over the bottom of the Shuttle, it trips or gets interrupted by that little device that's sticking out, that little piece of felt or plastic that's sticking out. Then the flow behind that becomes turbulent, and when the flow becomes turbulent the heat transfer increases, and it can actually melt or damage the tile.\\n\\n But we don't really know exactly at hypersonic speeds like Mach 25 when that transition occurs or how it occurs, because there's not very much air when we're flying Mach 25. We should have probably throughout the Shuttle career done some more tests of aerodynamic capability. We looked at things such as how the Shuttle flies. We did Detailed Test Objectives where we looked at the stability in terms of roll maneuvers and pitch maneuvers and how the Shuttle flies, but we didn't look at the fundamental aeronautics things that we could have done on the Shuttle. I think we should have figured out some way to stick some of those in. We're going to try on these last couple Shuttle flights to actually do some of this. We're going to try to put a little known trip indicator in and then some instrumentation behind. The problem is the instrumentation isn't quite as good as the aeronautics guys want. But I think it'll still give us some good information.\\n\\n We're going to also try to take the new tile material that's going to fly on the Ares vehicle, the PICA [Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator] tile, we're going to replace a Shuttle tile with a tile of the new Ares design to see how it performs. So I think we're going to use the Shuttle over these remaining number of flights to try to do a couple of these things, but I think it's a shame that throughout the Shuttle history we didn't have a chance to do more of that, because I think again there's a natural tie between the Aeronautics Directorate and what we do.\\n\\n We need their aerodynamic code, their software to analyze things on the Shuttle or space flight. They need us to essentially provide some experimental data back for them to improve the codes and understandings. Things have changed a lot from when the Shuttle was first designed. We had the recent failure where we had a piece of foam hit the bottom of the Shuttle and it dinged out or removed a piece of the tile. We were able to use aerodynamic code to really analyze that cavity and how hot it would get. When we did the first Shuttle designs, we couldn't do it with near the fidelity that we're able to now. So again technology has gotten better. We need to apply that technology to the Shuttle again and then take some of that data from the Shuttle experience and feed that back into the technology, and then both of those move in parallel, they leapfrog each other, and we continue to improve both in the basic technology as well as in the applied technology." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We're nearing the end of time for us to be here today, but we wanted to ask you before we closed out, that we mentioned you spent 30 years with NASA, why would you encourage someone to join NASA as a career for the future?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In my case, again as I described my career path, look at all the amazing and wonderful things I've had a chance to go do. As a new student out of college here I was at Lewis Research Center with the researchers that wrote my aerodynamics books. To sit with them in the same office and then have them teach me how the code works and how the analysis works, it was phenomenal. At that time we hadn't hired many folks within NASA for a while, so I was one of the first new employees in several years. So they adopted me as their son or kid. So then they gave me all kinds of experiences in the wind tunnel. I got to do tremendous things in terms of testing and analysis and building hardware and running computer codes and what a tremendous breadth of experience I got in that field.\\n\\n Then I got to come to Houston and be in a flight control team to do the procedures for the Shuttle. The Shuttle's done amazing things. I participated in satellite retrieval, satellite repair, I've done refueling demonstrations, I worked hand-in-hand with the crews in the simulators, I've taught astronauts how to fly ascents and entries. This is stuff that people dream about. I got to do all that.\\n\\n I got to go back to school, which was tremendously important, because again I had this engineering problem that I have to stay technically sharp. So then I was able to go do that. So NASA again allowed me to go do that. They told me it wasn't such a good thing to do, but they still let me go do it, because not many folks had done that. But it was still for me, that was a great thing to go do. Then to get a chance to go to Russia, experience that aspect, it's just been amazing. I've been able to really take everything I've done, I've just been lucky and been able to go do all this stuff. So as a new person coming in, to know that that opportunity is there within this agency is just great.\\n\\n Then if you look at our future and you look at where we're going to go, if you want to be part of getting out of the planet, I would say in my career we used to go to space, but we never really stayed in space and we never really worked in space. I would say now that we've had a permanent crew presence on board Space Station for almost seven years or for over seven years, it'll be eight years this fall, we have now made that bridge where we can now work in space. We've assembled this phenomenal Space Station. It's amazing to see all this hardware from around the world come together.\\n\\n So to have a chance to work in the next phase that will be to go beyond low Earth orbit, and that will be to start moving out to the Moon and then out to Mars. What a great, great, great opportunity that is for somebody new to come in to get a chance to experience that. Then even on the science side or in the robotic side, it's the same thing, to be able to be working on a probe that's going to Pluto or is going to fly to an asteroid, those things are once-in-a-lifetime kind of things that you can work on stuff that other folks dream about. I think that's what the beauty of working for NASA is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything you'd like to add as you reflect on the next 50 years for NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think again the Shuttle transition to exploration provides us with a tremendous opportunity. A lot of people see it as we call it transition, or the ending, maybe the Shuttle Program. I don't see it so much as that. I think it's a chance for us to reinvent and revitalize NASA a little bit. We are a government agency and we are a bureaucracy, and especially in my Washington world I see us as an aging bureaucracy. Therefore we've gotten maybe more sluggish and not quite as nimble as we were back in the Apollo days. But I think this new move from Shuttle and then eventually as Station retires in 2020 or some later date, I think you get a chance to reinvent NASA a little bit, to reinvigorate us a little bit, to do some things like we used to in the older days.\\n\\n So I think this is a very unique opportunity within NASA at this time of change. So change is scary and change is tough, but it's going to allow us to not only transition but also in a sense allow us to reinvent ourselves and essentially reengage us or get us motivated again to do those things that are hard, as we were challenged in the beginning. We don't do this work because it's easy, we do it because it's hard. I think we get a chance to retool and revitalize.\\n\\n So I think the Vision and this transition here at 50 years has given us a chance to essentially reinvigorate ourselves and move forward and be essentially maybe a new birth, not a midlife crisis for the agency, but a chance to really re-invent ourselves and get ready for the next 50 years. The next 50 years provide the agency with challenges even greater than the first 50 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, thank you. I think we'll end for now and let you get on with the rest of your busy day. Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William H. Gerstenmaier", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thanks." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00023", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/AllenJP/allenjp.htm", + "original_file_name": "AllenJP_11-18-04.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/AllenJP/AllenJP_11-18-04.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Joseph P. Allen", + "location_date": "Washington, DC – 18 November 2004" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Joseph P. Allen" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is November 18th, 2004. This oral history with Joseph P. Allen is being conducted for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Washington, D.C. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is the interviewer.\\n\\n Thanks again for joining me for a fourth session. I think we should start today by talking about your second mission, STS 51-A." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joseph P. Allen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And your timing is good. It’s November 2004, and two weekends ago the crew of the mighty spaceship Discovery had a reunion here in Washington, D.C., and believe me when I say we relived that mission, as best we together could remember it. You should have recorded those conversations, but they were late at night and fairly rowdy, probably.\\n\\n We were scheduled to launch on the seventh of November early in the morning, and we loaded into the spacecraft [several hours later]. We unloaded from the spacecraft, in spite of the fact that it was a beautiful, crystal-clear day in Florida and in spite of the fact that the equipment seemed to be working properly. The upper atmosphere was not cooperating, though we, of course, couldn’t see that, and the weather controllers were getting reports of very high wind sheer at upper levels. They consequently said we could not launch that day.\\n\\n We were disappointed. History now shows we were also possibly very lucky, because both of the tragic accidents, that of the Challenger and that of Columbia, involved launching through very high wind sheer conditions, and there’s some thinking now that high wind sheers and Space Shuttles do not safely go together.\\n\\n In any case, we were offloaded from the spaceship. I remember it for many reasons, one being I had a genuine feeling of anxiety that morning, and, perhaps because of naïveté, when I’d launched two years earlier aboard Columbia, I had not had that feeling of anxiety. We stood down for twenty-four hours. Loaded aboard the next morning, and that feeling of anxiety was no longer in my subconscious. So, again, I have no reason why that was the case, but I felt a lot more confident the second day, and indeed, we launched on that second day and arrived safely in orbit.\\n\\n I’m going to back up with regard to the objectives of the mission 51-A. In January of that year, 1984, my former shipmate and good friend Vance [D.] Brand flew an earlier mission. The objectives of that mission were to deploy two communication satellites, PALAPA and WESTAR by name, both of them fitted with a new, improved kick stage, the rocket that sits behind the satellite that is used to take it to the proper geosynchronous orbit. They also deployed a satellite that, if memory serves me, was to inflate, for reasons that kind of escape me, and was to have been left in the low Earth orbit inflated so it was to physically have a large size. The fourth objective of the mission was to deploy still another satellite. The name of this satellite was Bruce McCandless [II], testing the Manned Maneuvering Unit.\\n\\n The first satellite was deployed. The spaceship backed away and then watched as that satellite ignited its kick stage, and the impression to those in the spaceship was the rocket did indeed ignite. Then somehow they lost the sight of the rocket engine fire, but they weren’t sure it was anything out of normal. The ground controllers, however, detected that the rocket had ignited, the satellite had moved in position, but then the rocket had extinguished itself. Thus it was in only a slightly higher low Earth orbit. It was a long way from geosynchronous orbit; a terrible disappointment.\\n\\n The second satellite was to be deployed the next day. The twenty-four hours between those two deployments were filled with debate as to what was this problem. Was it a satellite problem or was it a new, improved kick-stage problem? If it was the kick stage, perhaps it would be wiser to bring that satellite and kick stage home undeployed, and fix the problem. The other argument was, “Nah, it was just an anomaly. Go ahead and deploy it. Put it up to high geosynchronous orbit, and everything will be fine.”\\n\\n The decision was ultimately made, probably with a vote that resembles our recent presidential elections, a hair’s breadth of difference between those for and those against. Sure enough, the second satellite behaved in exactly the same way. It did not get to geosynchronous orbit. I probably was watching this mission more intently because, again, my good friend Vance Brand was the commander, so I knew that Vance was distressed in the extreme, as his fellow shipmates now aboard this flight.\\n\\n The third mission objective was then addressed, and that was to deploy the inflatable satellite. I don’t exactly remember how that unfolded, but in essence, the satellite was put outside into an orbit a short distance away from the Orbiter. The inflation process began. To everyone’s amazement, it inflated to the proper dimension but then continued to grow and popped. It was like a party balloon that had overinflated and then collapsed back on itself. So they were now zero for three in satellite deploys. I’ve never asked him, but I wondered what Bruce McCandless was thinking at that point, because he was going to be the fourth satellite.\\n\\n Fortunately for Bruce and for the entire NASA team, that deployment worked like a charm, and the MMU [Manned Maneuvering Unit] behaved beautifully, and some of the best known photographs of humans in space, Bruce McCandless specifically, as a satellite free in Earth orbit, maneuvering himself around with the maneuvering unit. Again, that photograph is one of the most famous and has appeared everywhere, including, I think, on a United States postage stamp.\\n\\n The mission of Vance Brand concluded and, I think, landed at Cape Kennedy, the first mission to land back at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]. I could be wrong about that, but I think it had that unique aspect to it as well. Perfect landing.\\n\\n I was to fly aboard a mission in November of that same year, and the payload for STS 51-A was relatively firm on the manifest. However, the irony of a very successful MMU flight coupled with two stranded communication satellites, both in perfectly good working order, crept into the minds of a number of engineers at the Johnson Space Center, and very quickly evolved a plan to use the MMU and spacewalking crewmen to move out to the satellites one at a time, grapple them or grapple each, tug it back to the Space Shuttle, affix it in a clamping device of some kind, and bring [them] home.\\n\\n This plan was encouraged from the outside by business entities now owning the satellites, and those entities were insurance companies, one of the companies being Lloyd’s of London and another company being [International Technology Underwriters (INTEC)]. It was managed by a man named Jim [James W.] Barrett. The Lloyd’s of London ownership was managed by a man named Stephen Merrett. Each of these individuals independently argued with NASA it would be a good idea to fetch the satellites, and following the precedent of the Law of the Sea, the salvors would then have possession of the salvaged treasure and could be returned to the rightful owners.\\n\\n Well, NASA liked the idea. Keep in mind, NASA was still in its halcyon days, still riding on the coattails of the successful Apollo missions, successful Skylab, successful Apollo-Soyuz [Test Project], successful first tests of the Orbiter, and a series of thirteen successful Orbital flights. This was the fourteenth flight. NASA continued to be bullish on itself. We, the crew, were thrilled with these discussions, because it would mean we would fly a very interesting flight profile and be given the opportunity to carry out the first salvage of valuable assets from the new ocean. Important assets had been dealt with in orbit in earlier flights, namely, the Solar Max [Maximum] satellite, which needed some repair, but that asset was addressed and repaired and left in orbit.\\n\\n To capture the satellite was not an easy assignment, however. No one, in the building of the satellites, had ever envisioned that they would be visited later, much less handled by suited astronauts, because the satellites would be in their rightful place, namely, twenty-two thousand miles above the surface of the Earth in geosynchronous orbit. Space Shuttles could not go there. The only feature of the satellite that appeared to us might serve as a handle were microwave guides and antennae affixed to the top of the satellites, or possibly the opening at the bottom of the satellite through which rocket exhaust gases escaped to reposition the communication satellite in its geosynchronous orbit from time to time. So, in short, there was a small rocket bell extending from the back of each of the satellites.\\n\\n With this in mind, the NASA engineers came up with a very clever plan. We decided the antennae would be too fragile to grapple, and so they decided we would stab the satellite from the back, using a device that I later called a tribute to Rube Goldberg and Sigmund Freud, the device we called the stinger. It, in essence, Jennifer, resembled a folded umbrella which one could put up inside the rocket and then open such that the tines of the umbrella would now stick against the side, and essentially the stinger would now be locked in the rocket engine of the satellite. This didn’t seem at first blush to be a good idea, but it was determined that the rocket engine had gone out, and it was not of itself ignitable again.\\n\\n Because of troubles that the Solar Max mission had experienced with automatic tripping devices on grapple tools operated by the suited astronauts, we decided the stinger would not have any automatic devices. Everything would be manual, including the deployment of the umbrella feature would be done just with a button on the device, and the tightening down of a clamp that pulled a plate against the now open umbrella tines would be done just by a crank. Both the button and the crank could be reached by the suited astronaut—that would be myself or Dale [A.] Gardner—because the device was to be affixed across our chest. When completely suited in the space suit and in the MMU with the stinger device affixed to our chest, we looked for all the world like a space-age medieval knight entering a jousting contest. It was very bizarre-looking, quite ungainly on the ground, but in the zero gravity of space, should be quite workable.\\n\\n The procedure was to be MMU crewmen would grapple the satellite and then patiently wait while the Orbiter was maneuvered close enough to the satellite-astronaut combination, such that the robot arm, the RMS [Remote Manipulator System], could grapple a grapple fixture mounted also on the side of the MMU. In personal terms, I would go out, capture the first errant satellite using the MMU feature known as the attitude hold; stop satellite and myself from rotating. Rick [Frederick H. Hauck] would maneuver Discovery close enough to me such that Anna [L. Fisher] with RMS could affix the grapple feature attached to the MMU. It seemed easy enough.\\n\\n She would then maneuver me and satellite in such a position that Dale could affix a clamp to the delicate part of the satellite, the wave guides on the top of it, which the grapple fixture could then hold while the two of us, Dale and myself, affixed a much larger clamping ring to the bottom of the satellite, the end from which the small rocket engine protruded. Seemed like a good plan.\\n\\n We trained on maneuvering the MMU at simulators in Denver [Colorado] and at visual simulators there in Houston [Texas], and Dale and I both got very adept at flying the MMU. I was to make the first recovery attempt. If that worked, and based on experiences gained, Dale would make the second recovery attempt.\\n\\n Our mission was also to deliver two other communication satellites to orbit, so again we had a fairly simple mission to fly; two satellites up and deployed, a few in-flight experiments to do, and then two errant satellites to recover, load aboard the Space Shuttle, and come home. I mention I got several somewhat rude notes from my fellow astronauts underscoring the fact that in delivering the two satellites to orbit and picking two up, that neither Dale nor I was to get these satellites confused. In other words, don’t bring home satellites that we’d just taken there. It’s very unkind from our fellow astronauts to point this out, but it was kind of funny.\\n\\n The training for this mission unfolded in a blur, because there was a lot to get done, and in those years NASA moved with a certain amount of speed, in sobering contrast to the speed with which NASA now moves. Nonetheless, all the training was completed on time.\\n\\n Jennifer, there are many, to my mind, amusing stories about this, some of them quite serious—not amusing, but serious—because this would be a tough mission. We also learned in a rather roundabout way that more than a few lives would be dramatically affected by our success or nonsuccess, lives of people whom we did not know on the ground, but were individuals who would lose considerable amount of their personal wealth if the satellites were not recovered. I won’t go into the details as to how this works, but with Lloyd’s of London, often the losers in a big insurance loss are individual people that have bet on the fact it’s not going to be lost. With American insurance companies, this is not the case; it’s corporate monies that are lost, not monies of individuals. But in the case of Lloyd’s, because of the way Lloyd’s evolved as kind of one of the first insurers on a world marketplace, that’s what’s happened.\\n\\n We saw a BBC [British Broadcasting Company] television broadcast, quite by accident, of the various serious people in England that would be bankrupt and destitute if this mission fail[ed], so we really felt considerable pressure to do the very best job we could to attempt to make certain it succeeded.\\n\\n Another recollection I have of the flight is becoming for the first time in my life aware of the insurance industry, and I found it bizarre that the insurance industry was now touching on space adventures, in a way. I remember hearing an insurance person from England describe the mission we were about to set off on as very unusual to his way of thinking, because, he pointed out, he had spent a lifetime insuring things against fire or the chance they would explode, and he said, “With you chaps in the space business, you purposely set fire to a massive amount of explosives, and I find myself now betting on whether you can control the explosion or not.” And I thought that was a rather graphic way to describe a rocket launch. The more one thinks about it, though, it’s a very accurate way, and sadly, a year later, we saw an example of what happened when we chaps could not control the explosion, and we lost Challenger as a consequence, as a tragic consequence.\\n\\n Since I’m talking about it, let me describe the recovery effort. We deployed the first two satellites without any problem in the first few days. We did some in-flight experiments, and then the day to do the spacewalks came upon us. I was very keen to have that day arrive, because, you will remember, I had been an unsuccessful spacewalker two years earlier. In a way, my dreams had been answered, because without the satellite recovery, the STS 51-A would not have had a spacewalk, I’m sure. But here I was, through weird circumstance, being given a chance to do a spacewalk.\\n\\n Per the procedures, Dale and I began to don the space suits, very ably helped by David [M.] Walker, who was the IVA crewman, the Intravehicular [Activity] crewman, with the assignment of being the caretaker of the EVA [Extravehicular Activity] crewmen. He would help us get suited, and he would then watch us closely through the aft windows of the Orbiter and help with the choreographing of the spacewalk as it unfolded. He would be the communicator to us, and he took that job very seriously, and he was superb at that job. Eight hours after the EVA started, we reentered, doffed the space suits with David’s help, and then realized by looking at him that he had one of the worst headaches one could imagine. He put his heart and soul into it and was suffering as a consequence.\\n\\n We were elated because we had succeeded in getting the satellite, but we were concerned about David, and as a consequence, urged him to consume more of the headache medicine that he perhaps he should. He asked me, “Joe, you’re a doctor. How many should I take?”\\n\\n I said, “Take all but two, and call me in the morning,” and I think he did take more than two. He did not take all but two.\\n\\n We were suited without consequence. There is a point when the IVA crewman pops the helmet on the head of each of the spacewalking crewmen, and he had already buttoned Dale up, and then he was coming to me. Just as he got ready to do it, I said, “David, stop. I am so hungry. I really need a cookie or something to eat.”\\n\\n He said, “Oh, Joe, how could you? We’re slightly—.”\\n\\n I said, “David, I need a butter cookie.” So he goes off into the food pantry, grabs things, throws it hither and yon and comes back with a butter cookie. I open my mouth. Keep in mind I can’t use my hands now. He puts the butter cookie into [my mouth], the whole thing, and then he hits my jaw shut [demonstrates].\\n\\n He says, “Eat it, but don’t choke, you little rodent.” We can come back to that later.\\n\\n I ate the butter cookie; felt better. David put the helmet onto me, popped it. We’re now sealed, and there unfolded a pressurizing and then a depressurizing of the airlock, and the EVA started.\\n\\n It was extraordinary, Jennifer, as you would imagine. EVAs have to be the most fun ever invented. In this case, with Dale’s able help, I was plugged into the MMU, affixed to the gunnel of the Discovery. Once plugged in, I then removed my tether, pulled the pins that held the MMU, and it floated free in the payload bay. Ever so carefully, I then began to use the control mechanisms of the MMU, rotational motion on one hand and lateral motion—fore, aft, up, down, left right—on the other hand. I’d been very well trained to do this through the simulators and also in talking with Bruce McCandless and Bob [Robert L.] Stewart, the two earlier pilots of this. Everything they had taught me, and the simulation had taught me seemed to be happening as I activated these controls. The MMU moved exactly as I expected it to, and within a few moments I had confidence that I could maneuver wherever I wanted to go at whatever speed and achieve the first objective, which was to affix the satellite.\\n\\n Now, I’m going to put a bookmark here, and I’m going to tell a story that’s a true story that happened two days before the launch. As you know, crew members get very tightly booked as the launch gets closer and closer, and one finds oneself as a small cog in a big machine. You really do not, as an individual, have a life of your own. Training starts early in the morning and goes till late at night, and you work diligently through the schedule to make certain every square is filled and you’re properly trained before a flight.\\n\\n That said, to our surprise, when we arrived at the Cape maybe four or five days before the launch, we remarked on the fact that we had a meeting about two or three days before the launch with an Associate Administrator of NASA, an individual newly named to the job of the head Public Affairs Office at NASA by the White House. We didn’t know why we were to have this meeting. It was to be for an hour. But we didn’t question it.\\n\\n The meeting took place in crew quarters at the Cape. We went into the meeting room in flight suits, we five crew members, and then in came the Associate Administrator. Very nice gentleman; introduced himself, and I think one of his aides or deputies was with him. Introduced himself all around. We sat down and Rick said, “Now, Mr.—;” it’s unimportant—“what’s the agenda for this meeting?”\\n\\n Whereupon the albeit naïve individual—we didn’t know it at the time—but said, “Well, no specific agenda. I just wanted to introduce myself and just say that if there’s anything I can do for you, I’m here to help and wish you good luck.” We as individual crew members were all surprised, because this really was occupying a good chunk of our morning, and time was very important to us right then. Not that it was discourteous of the individual, but it was unclear why this meeting was to take place.\\n\\n However, an unfortunate incident had happened a day earlier, in that a story appeared in the Florida newspaper the Today, that an unnamed NASA spokesperson had quoted the crew as saying, “The likelihood of capturing both satellites was very high.” We’d read the article and amongst ourselves, were curious, because none of us had said it, and how the crew could be quoted. Perhaps it was a support crew member, but we didn’t think so, and were fretful that those words had gone in, because we thought the task was going to be quite difficult. We didn’t plan to do anything about it, because newspaper stories are newspaper stories, and it was now water under the bridge.\\n\\n Something about the start of this meeting, though, got under Rick’s skin as the commander, and he said, “Mr. so-and-so, there is something that you can do.” He then cited this newspaper article of two days ago, and he said, “I do not know who said that. I assure you that none of us said that, nor do we believe it. And I will personally tell you that my assessment is, if we successfully capture one satellite, it will be remarkable, and if we get both satellites, it will be a fucking miracle.” And he went on to say, “You can quote me on that.”\\n\\n Well, the man was shocked, properly so. We were as well. [Laughter] And then Rick said, “If you have no other business, I think this meeting is over.” We’re ten minutes into a one-hour meeting.\\n\\n He excuses himself, somewhat distressed, with probably good reason, and leaves, and we go back, too, and we sort of said, “Boy, Rick, that was being very commanderlike. But good for you.”\\n\\n We’re now back in orbit, Jennifer. I successfully grappled the first satellite, not without a bit of a wrinkle towards the end, because probably by accident, I found myself lined up approaching the satellite from the back exactly against the Sun, such that I was looking into the very, very bright Sun, and the satellite had no part of it easy to look at, because it was just a black silhouette in front of a terribly bright Sun. And I thought, “Oh, this is going to—.” I couldn’t see the center of it, and said, “This is going to be very difficult,” and said as much in the communication with David Walker, the IVA.\\n\\n I might say in those years we did not have a working TDRS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite], and so one still was flying with a loss of signal, acquisition of signal. You’re out of listening with the ground for most of the orbit, a very convenient feature, because you can talk as normal people talk, not with the worry that someone was eavesdropping on what you said. I discussed this in English terms, whereupon Rick said, “Joe, not a problem. I’ll move the Orbiter over and shadow the satellite.” He did that. He moved the Orbiter slightly; a shadow was cast on the satellite such that I was no longer seeing the Sun. It was beautiful, clever as could be. I could then see the bull’s-eye, the center, the rocket engine, very easily, threaded it like I’d done it all my life, deployed the tines of the stinger, tightened down the clamp, and voilà, there it was. Anna grappled me with no problem at all; turned around, and Dale set about affixing the clamp to go to the top.\\n\\n Time passed. Trouble had appeared. The tool designed to fit on the top of the satellite did not fit. The problem, we later learned, was the satellite was not built to the drawings of the satellite we had used on the ground. About the time we realized this was the case, Discovery came acquisition of signal, and we reported to the ground that the holding tool did not fit, and they said, “Roger that. We’ll get the back room working on it. What is your plan?”\\n\\n And we said, “We’re going to go to Plan B.”\\n\\n “Roger that. See you next AOS [Acquisition of Signal],” and the ground was now out of earshot again.\\n\\n David Walker, bless his heart, was the keeper of all the Plan Bs that we as a crew, prior to the launch, had devised, and we’d written them down. What would we do in the event that “blank” failed? What would we do in the event that “blank” failed? We had a Plan B for what we would do in the event that this clamp failed, and it was, sad to say, written on David’s piece of paper just as “Improvise.” We really did not know what we were going to do.\\n\\n But we talked about it, and on the fly, Jennifer, we decided that Dale could affix a foot restraint on a gunnel; this is a standard EVA tool that are there. I would come out of the MMU and into that foot restraint. Anna would maneuver the top of the satellite around to where I could grab it with my hands, and then I would be holding the satellite at one end, not the grapple fixture, and Dale by himself would put on the very large clamp on the bottom. That was the only thing we could think of to do, knowing full well it would be very difficult, because the very large clamp was a two-person operation. We had successfully maneuvered it with two people in the water tank several times earlier, but with the two of us, it was not easy.\\n\\n The mission unfolded. I found myself holding the satellite; ground weight 2,000 pounds, on-orbit weight zero, so it was not nearly as hard as it looked. I held the satellite for about two hours. It took Dale about that long to single-handedly affix his big clamp. The fact he was able to do it still astonishes me, but he was. He’s just persistent, the most persistent individual I’ve ever worked with, and one of the smartest, and he did the impossible. Ultimately the clamp was affixed.\\n\\n I later was given far too much credit for supporting a 2,000-pound satellite for one orbit of the Earth, and a political cartoon appeared in Canadian newspapers the next day showing a chunky little space-suited crewman standing on the gunnel of an Orbiter holding this satellite, and the caption was, “Nobody kicks sand in this man’s face anymore,” referring back to an old Charles Atlas ad of many, many decades earlier. Dale was not recognized in the paper for the heroic work he had done, but his fellow crew members knew of it and still know of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you mind me asking, what was going through your mind as you were holding that satellite?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joseph P. Allen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hoping against hope that Dale would be able to affix the clamp, and attempting to maneuver it, the satellite, to better square with where the clamp was; where I thought it was, based on the feel that was coming through the satellite. Very difficult to describe, Jennifer, because a suited crewman has very little tactile sense. You can’t see very well. The satellite was twice as big as I, and Dale was at the other end. But every so often I could feel where he was pushing and attempting to get the clamp to go on, and react against it such that it didn’t move.\\n\\n I also was aware of the fact that the Sun was moving across my body, because a space-suited crewman is naturally cooled or kept the proper temperature all over his or her body, except for the hands. The hands are not encased in the liquid-cooled garment, and your hands can sense which side is the dark side and which side is the Sun side, because when the Sun is on, for example, the back of your glove, you can feel the back of your hand get very, very warm. I couldn’t really move my hands, so my hands were getting quite warm in places and very cold in other places. Not comfortable, but I didn’t think it was life threatening. It definitely was not life threatening.\\n\\n All this said, Dale ultimately was successful and clamped the clamp down, and then the two of us could maneuver it over the pallet to which the clamp would affix, and the affixing of the clamp to the pallet was considerably easier than putting the clamp onto the satellite. Once there, we knew we had it, and we clamped it down, as much as dusted our hands off [demonstrates], heaved enormous sighs of relief, and then went about storing all the equipment that we had pulled out of storage to use in this weird emergency, including putting the MMU back, putting all the foot restraints back, reorganizing the various tethers, and then we reentered the airlock, repressurized the airlock to the point where David Walker could come in and get us out of our suits.\\n\\n I think the record will show we came out of our suits about eight and a half hours after we had gone into them. It was an unusually long spacewalk, but we had one satellite locked aboard. We were both exhausted, but we were also concerned about Dave, who clearly was suffering mightily because of a headache, but we got serious pain medicine into him, and then we had the major dinner of the flight, which I think is a rehydrated steak or something quite extraordinary, and felt elated in the extreme.\\n\\n The next day was a planning day. The NASA policy was, and I think still is, spacewalking crewmen and women do not do back-to-back spacewalks. There is a day’s recovery time between them, and was also the case in this flight. It was a very full day, though, because we then attempted to devise plans, how do we do the next spacewalk. Do we do it per the plan, or based on what we now knew, do we use Plan B on the assumption that the same tool would fail to fit this, albeit different, satellite?\\n\\n We discussed this a lot with mission control. Mission control is always extremely helpful in these things. To our surprise, mission control finally said they did not have a recommendation, that we knew more about it based on what we had seen and experienced, and that whichever procedure we elected to use was okay with them. Again, we were surprised at this. Serious responsibility again was with us. We decided that we would go immediately with Plan B, because if we started with that, there were clearly some steps we could skip over, not worry about at all, and on this day, Dale would recover the satellite, Anna would grab him, and then hand the satellite to me. I would already be on the gunnel. It would be a very dramatic shortcut to the path we’d had to follow by necessity two days earlier.\\n\\n And that’s what we did. Dale captured the second satellite every bit as easily as I had. I claim it’s because I taught him how to do it; it’s a totally false claim. The same procedure then unfolded. This time, Jennifer, perhaps not surprisingly, we accomplished it in about six hours. The second satellite was locked down. We were LOS, loss of signal, and Rick, Anna, and Dave all were very pleased for us and said, “Congratulations,” and Rick, as the commander, said, “Joe and Dale, when we come AOS, I want you to report that both satellites are locked safely aboard.”\\n\\n We looked at each other and kind of shook our heads outside, and almost together, we said, “Rick, that’s the commander’s job. When we come AOS, you report that we have two satellites safely aboard, and you can also use the words ‘fucking miracle.’” [Laughs]\\n\\n We came AOS, and Rick, in his Chuck [Charles E.] Yeager-type relaxed drawl, said, “Houston, Roger. Discovery here. We have two satellites safely aboard.” You could hear the mission control people cheering through the microphone of the CapCom [Capsule Communicator]. It was really quite fun.\\n\\n That report being made, we were still ahead of our timeline, and I was still affixed to a foot restraint on the arm. Dale was on the tether. He went into the airlock and untaped from the edge of the airlock a sign that we had prepared in advance of the flight that said “For Sale,” because the satellites would be returned and would then be in the ownership and the possession of insurance companies, which had every intention of selling them as brand-new satellites.\\n\\n Dale came out, reached up, grabbed a stanchion affixed to the foot restraint on the arm, and Anna lifted Dale and myself up in the air somewhere—“in the air,” there’s a human term—up away from the gunnel, Dale holding on just with one hand, both his feet affixed in nothing at all and the “For Sale” sign in his other hand.\\n\\n I took a photograph of him holding the “For Sale” sign with the Nikon camera I was carrying with me outside in a white jacket. It’s a terrific photo, and one of the only photos I’ve ever taken that shows me as well, because I’m reflected in Dale’s helmet, holding my camera, and the photo shows part of the Earth, the blackness of space, Dale Gardner, the “For Sale” sign, and my likeness reflected in his helmet; a favorite photo of mine to this day.\\n\\n When we returned, the “For Sale” photographs—and Rick and Anna and David had taken many from the flight deck as well—were an important part of the press package that went out, and they showed up in a number of magazines. I might say that the Lloyd’s of London and the [International Technology Underwriters] were very, very pleased with these photographs. NASA was not as pleased, and we were given somewhat curt—reprimands is the wrong word—curt discussions from our [NASA] Headquarters bosses over what did we have in mind in doing that. I don’t think any harm came from it, but at the time I thought, “Maybe I should get into a different line of work. My career days may be limited here.”\\n\\n One or two days later, we landed, and we landed at the Cape. So I landed once in California and once in Florida, both times on the sixteenth of [November]. Strange. I flew twice, and I landed twice on the sixteenth of [November], once on the East Coast and once on the West Coast.\\n\\n We were greeted, as always, by the suited technicians that come out to save an Orbiter, and by now I had experienced one safe landing and the opening of the Space Shuttle to the wonderful smell of planet Earth, and the suited technicians coming in. In California when I’d landed, they pretty much were all, “Congratulations, welcome to planet Earth, and what a great job you all did.”\\n\\n In Florida it was different for the following reason. During the course of the mission, after we’d successfully recovered both satellites and had just a few hours on our hands, extra hours, Dale Gardner and I had made a videotape of his pulling me, extricating me from inside a very tiny middeck locker. We reviewed the videotape on orbit in the black-and-white monitors we had there; found it was very amusing, because we had used an optical trick of sorts, and it looked as though I really had come out of a very tiny middeck locker.\\n\\n Just for the fun of it, we beamed it down to the night controllers on the ground. These are the people that sit through the night shift, and because the mission was going very smoothly by then, we knew they had very little to do, so we thought that they would be amused by this. We were also certain that it can’t be intercepted publicly, and it would just be shown around the mission control, and that would be the end of it.\\n\\n What I didn’t know is they had been so amused by it that they had shared it with other NASA Centers, including Florida, and people who had seen it in Florida were the very technicians that had prepared the spacecraft for launch. They were very well aware of the configuration of the middeck, and they knew full well that the dimension of a drawer would not accommodate an astronaut, however diminutive he or she may be, and they were quite mystified by that.\\n\\n The same technicians that had packed the spacecraft for launch were also those that came out to greet us, and they came in and looked around; looked around at the configuration of the middeck lockers and said, pretty much, “How the hell did Joe Allen come out of—?” And then they said, “Oh, we now understand it.”\\n\\n Did I tell you this story before, Jennifer? Had you heard it before?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You’ve told me parts, but not on tape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joseph P. Allen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The trick, which we can now reveal for your history, is that the middeck lockers are just an array of lockers across the middeck, and they’re maybe four lockers across and perhaps four lockers down, and so all told, you have sixteen lockers there. In our particular flight, because of the loading of hardware used to recapture the satellite, we had a weight problem and a center-of-gravity problem, and the Orbiter’s nose was ever slightly too heavy. As a consequence, several of these lockers themselves had been stripped out, and so when you looked at this four-by-four matrix of lockers, there were several gaps that looked not unlike a human mouth with several teeth missing.\\n\\n I had, in fact, scrunched into a gap of two missing lockers, so I’d occupied basically a two-locker volume, and then we photographed my being pulled out of the drawer right along the face of the middeck locker, such that the drawer that Dale pulled out and said, “Joe, come out, come out,” obscured the fact that I was in the gap offset from the locker that Dale was pulling out, and a television camera, because it does not have good three-dimensional accuracy, fooled the human eye looking at the picture, because I came out from the gap, not from the drawer.\\n\\n But it was very cleverly done, I must say, and that particular video sequence is still shown in children’s programs on Saturday morning cartoon videos, because it’s kind of amusing just to watch the thing.\\n\\n Well, the technicians then saw the gap and immediately knew what had happened, but I thought that was very unromantic “welcome back to planet Earth”-type remarks that they had made to us.\\n\\n The debriefs at the Cape and the medical checks and so on were not unlike those that I’d experienced two years earlier in California. An aspect I’ll recall—I’m a little uncertain that—it has no historical significance, but in the sense that people read these looking for human things, this is a human thing. Claudette [A.] Gage was the astronauts’ nurse for many, many years, and she was as expert a medical individual as one would ever find and was a good friend to virtually every space flyer that flew, I think to every to space flyer who flew. She typically would draw the blood, would come to the Cape or to California and draw the blood of crew members coming off for the research purposes that are still important. She was there this time, but it had been determined by the then chief NASA doctor, who did not practice very much during the course of the year, that he would renew his proficiency by drawing blood on a couple of the crew members, I being one of them.\\n\\n It had been a very difficult mission, and without question, I was more dehydrated because of the two spacewalks than had been the case, my case, two years earlier, and I felt that. I felt somewhat light-headed; not uncommon with returning space flyers, but I still felt somewhat different and not my usual able self. The chief NASA doctor began to attempt to draw blood and failed two times, whereupon Claudette spoke up and said, “Doctor so-and-so, let me just try that. Let me try.” The doctor readily agreed; went off to other things.\\n\\n I said, “Claudette, you’ve just saved my life.”\\n\\n And she said, “Joe, I know that. I know that. Now you just relax.” And she skillfully drew the blood that was needed, and we were done. But she saved me, I’m sure, from passing out or being even worse. I’ve always been appreciative of her, and for that moment I’m really thankful. I think she figuratively did save my life.\\n\\n There in the crew quarters we also were reunited with family members that were there, and Bonnie, my wife Bonnie, had understandably been very concerned during the mission, and she was also, though, quite happy, because she realized I had now done the spacewalk, and clearly we were quite happy. But at that point she said to me that I should now start to think about leaving the space-flying business, and I told her I would definitely think about it.\\n\\n Jennifer, again, there are so many stories associated with this. A lot of them are like other space missions. I think the only thing truly unique about the STS 51-[A] mission was the recovery." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand you did receive an award, though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Joseph P. Allen", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did, and I can speak to that. Let me talk about that. In the months that followed, just the few months that followed, this mission was really one of the last to get a certain amount of publicity. It still engendered some interest among the public. We were surprised and actually very flattered when Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft, as experienced a space pioneer as existed, told us in a meeting we had with him afterwards—and I think he no longer was at NASA; I think he had retired, but you can research this—he asked for a dinner with us, because he basically said he just wanted to congratulate us.\\n\\n He said to his mind, this was one of the most remarkable of the space missions, and that all things considered, the fact that we’d had a short time to train, the fact that we’d been able to do procedure workarounds on the spot, really pleased him, and he said that it, in his mind, would remain as one of the great missions of the early space age. He also chided us for publicly saying it had not been that difficult. “Because,” he said, “it was difficult. I know it and you know it, and your making it look too easy is not helpful to the space program in the long run.” He said, “By your sounding as though it were easy, is not useful to NASA in the long run.” So he was giving us a very warm pat on the back and a bit of a scolding at the same time.\\n\\n I neglected to mention, Jennifer, when we arrived at the Cape, we were met in crew quarters by two individuals from the United States Customs Department. We were surprised by this, and they said they had forms for us to fill out, because we were bringing into the United States approximately $250 million worth of technical hardware, and there was a certain duty now due on this, because anything that’s imported into the United States over a certain value must be taxed, and the tax would be 10 percent of $250 million. How did we plan to pay for that?\\n\\n Fortunately, they also had an agreement between Customs and the NASA Office of General Counsel that waived this import duty, that the chief NASA lawyer—I think his name was [S.] Neil Hosenball—had foreseen this as a complication and had organized the waiver prior to the success of the mission. But we were to sign the Customs form, and for that they gave each of us a United States Customs hat, and we crew members had those hats when we had our reunion two weeks ago.\\n\\n In the weeks that followed, we joked with the insurance people as to whether they were going to pay us a salvage fee, just a modest 1 percent of the value or something like that. And somewhat to our surprise, Stephen Merrett with Lloyd’s said they weren’t, but they were going to arrange a reception in London [England] for us, and that he had organized with NASA officials to permit us to attend this reception, and that they, Lloyd’s of London, were going to cover the expenses for it. We were thrilled and surprised, and I think in February of ’85 we, nine NASA individuals, that would be five crew members plus four spouses—David Walker was not married at the time—boarded a flight in Houston, Texas; flew to [Washington] Dulles [International] Airport [Dulles, Virginia]; were taken off, taken to the luxury suite of a British Airways used by those bound to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the SST [Supersonic Transport]. We were wined and dined and then loaded aboard the SST and then flown aboard the Concorde to London. What a wonderful experience.\\n\\n There unfolded five days of quite extraordinary entertainment and receptions, including a visit to [Prime Minister] Mrs. [Margaret H.] Thatcher in 10 Downing Street; a visit with Prince Charles in the palace, with Lady Di there upstairs with a probably two-year-old William running around. We’re still regretful we didn’t meet Princess Di. A visit to Oxford [University, Oxford, England], participate in High Table at Oxford at the college attended by Stephen Merrett when he was a student at Oxford. A grand reception in the City Hall of London, attended by the mayor of London with important persons of all kinds giving speeches. And numbers of other terrific experiences during the course of those five or so days.\\n\\n One of the ceremonies was actually held on the floor of Lloyd’s of London, where we were recognized and shown a bell there at Lloyd’s of London called the Lutine bell, which, since the very early days of insurance on oceangoing vessels, was rung on each occasion an important treasure was salvaged from the depths of the ocean, and we were told that that bell had been rung on the floor of Lloyd’s of London when Rick reported that two satellites were safely aboard the spaceship Discovery. We also were told that we would be given special awards—it’s called the Lloyd’s Medal—but that medal would be presented at a later date.\\n\\n Stephen Merrett and his wife came from London two weeks ago and joined us in our reunion, and so we had great fun recalling what we had done when we were there with him.\\n\\n Jennifer, a conversation that has definitely historical meaning to it was with Mrs. Thatcher. She met with us five crew members. She was at the time the Prime Minister and very much in charge. We also were invited by her to go over to the floor of the Parliament during the questions-and-answers session, and she said, “Well, come over, dears. You’ll find it very interesting. It’s a veritable bear garden over there,” meaning the shouting. And bless her heart, to have to go over and withstand the questioning, as Prime Ministers must do. It’s a very interesting custom there in the English government and one that would serve us well in this government, but it’s not in the cards.\\n\\n She was extremely keen to visit with Anna Fisher, and she’d been well briefed by staff, because she knew that Anna Fisher as an undergraduate had studied chemistry. Anna, of course, is a physician, but undergraduate, she’d been a chemist. She said, “Anna, my dear, I too am a chemist,” which, of course, we didn’t know. She said that she found it very useful and very useful in her responsible position right now. Chemistry, the study of chemistry taught one to think about problems and solve problems; that’s what she was doing.\\n\\n She went on to say, “And you know I’m so keen on meeting you, and I adore your Ronnie.” She was talking about President [Ronald W.] Reagan. “I adore your Ronnie. He’s one of my favorite people, and we have just a terrific time together.” She went on to say, “You know, we two countries have only had one spat in our entire history, and you chaps were entirely correct.” [Laughter] It took us a bit to realize she was talking about the American Revolution. She wanted us to know there were no ill feelings left and that King George [III] probably was completely cuckoo, but she didn’t put in those words. It was pretty funny.\\n\\n Moving on, Jennifer, we later were asked to come to the White House to be presented the Silver Medal from Lloyd’s, and in the presentation would be President Reagan, and it was the only time, actually, that I as an astronaut ever was invited to the White House. Astronauts before have gone on a regular—and afterwards, but I was just in that particular segue where they really weren’t doing that.\\n\\n We were taken to the Oval Office by President Reagan and Vice President George [H. W.] Bush, and shown around, and Mr. Jim [James M.] Beggs, the NASA Administrator, had a presentation that he wanted to give to the President, and he did. He presented President Reagan with a set of spurs that had been carried to space. They were the president’s own spurs, and he wanted them carried to space. They had been carried to space, and he, Jim, said, “Mr. President, these were carried to space aboard the very famous Space Shuttle flight number seven with Sally [K.] Ride.”\\n\\n Well, the President was very gracious, and the five of us kind of looked at each other. I particularly exchanged glances with Rick and smiled, because it was clear to us that the Administrator had forgotten that Rick was also aboard that same flight. He was the pilot. [Laughs] But never mind; Administrators can’t remember everything.\\n\\n We were then taken to the Roosevelt Room for the presentation, and in the Roosevelt Room were Stephen Merrett; his colleague and, I think, boss, probably, in a sense, a man named Peter Miller, who was the head of all of Lloyd’s of London; and the British Ambassador, front and center there in the White House.\\n\\n Mr. Miller began by thanking everyone for coming. He’s a very impressive public speaker. He spoke without a note, and in this booming voice, he said, “Mr. President, Mr. Ambassador, crew members, I’m so pleased to be here. We are presenting this medal today to four men and a woman, and you may think this is the first time a woman has received a medal from Lloyd’s of London. This is not correct. Dr. Fisher, you will be the second woman to receive this award. Let me recount for you a newspaper story appearing in the London Times, April 18th, 1846.”\\n\\n He then verbatim banged down through a story, and some of it was old English. It was amazing. It was not the way a story would read right now. It started, “On or about the first of April in the Year of Our Majesty,” and so on. “The good ship so-and-so set out from Plymouth Harbor, bound for the Indian Ocean and points—.” And then he goes on, “It was—,” etc., etc., and at the end, “The captain and his wife were able to save the ship, in spite of terrible hardship, and bring it very slowly back to port in England. For this heroic effort, the two of them were given the medal from Lloyd’s of London. And you will know, Mr. President, that Mrs. so-and-so was not an English woman; she was an American from Chicago.” Gave her name. She was married to Captain so-and-so, the captain of the ship.\\n\\n Well, of course, no one in the room knew this, and we were quite surprised. I think, all told, there are just a handful of Americans that do have the medal, including two women. So we found that story very surprising and fun.\\n\\n The ceremony was now over. Vice President George Bush said to us, “Crew members, come let me show you where the other half lives.” Then he took us over to his office in the West Wing of the White House, a beautiful office. A fire was burning in the fireplace; it was sometime in the winter. We sat down and visited for quite a long time, and I felt as though I got to know Vice President George Bush very well. This became very useful later on when we lost the Challenger, and we can pick back up on George Bush Senior, and the Challenger when we talk about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This might actually be a good place for us to stop." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00201", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/GregoryFD/gregoryfd.htm", + "original_file_name": "GregoryFD_4-29-04.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/GregoryFD/GregoryFD_4-29-04.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "location_date": "Washington, D.C. – 29 April 2004" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Frederick D. Gregory" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is April 29th, 2004. This oral history is being conducted with Fred Gregory for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright. Mr. Gregory currently serves as NASA’s Deputy Administrator, and we are talking today in his office at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., about his first days with the agency and those days that led up to selection as an astronaut.\\n\\n Thank you again. We appreciate you taking time from your schedule to visit with us. We’d like to start by you sharing with us how your interest in aviation began." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was because my dad, who was an educator, but he was also an engineer, very early in my life exposed me to areas that I’m sure that he would have liked to have participated in as a kid. So I think that when he took me to see things and visit and touch, I think he was actually taking himself.\\n\\n One of the places we always went was to an Air Force base nearby Washington, D.C. It was Andrews Air Force Base [Maryland], and as a kid, I can always remember him taking me there. If I sit and think, I can’t remember exactly why, but we were always near it. As an example, in the late forties or early fifties, they had sports car racing at Andrews. They would use the taxiway and the runways for these car races. He would always position himself and me across from a hangar, and there would always be airplanes. There would always be airplanes on the ramp or in the hangar that I could see. And though the object was to watch the sports car racing, you couldn’t avoid seeing the airplanes in the background.\\n\\n He was not a flyer. There were a lot of his friends, however, that I later learned were Tuskegee Airmen, but who visited our house quite often and talked about flying, but I never really associated their knowledge of flying with anything that had to do with the military. I remember, as a kid, when I was very young, taken to a very small airport and put in an airplane and I was of the belief that they were going to take me flying, but I recall that my mother banged on the window and told the pilot not to take off, and so my first flight was actually a taxi around the runway. But I guess I never really identified who these people were relative to their importance, but I do know that as a kid, as a very small child, I was always exposed to airplanes.\\n\\n I think I was intrigued with the military in the fifties, and I know much, much earlier than that there was a very active Junior ROTC [Reserve Officer’s Training Corps] program in the high schools in Washington, D.C. The program was mandatory for tenth graders and voluntary for eleventh and twelfth graders, but it was such an important program, as far as we were concerned, and it was so visible, that in our senior year perhaps two-thirds of all the boys in the high school would be in the program. So it was a very, very large program.\\n\\n So I think I gained an appreciation for the military during that period of time in high school through that exposure. Then I connected the airplane and the military, and decided that military aviation was what I was going to do, and I probably had made that decision by the time I was fourteen years old or so.\\n\\n I began dating a young lady who attended a rival high school in Washington, D.C., and the first date that we went on was to an air show at Andrews. So I had a brand-new driver’s license, a brand-new girlfriend, and we drove to Andrews to watch an air show. I don’t think she really understood or appreciated at that time the love and passion that I had for both the military and the airplanes, but on June the 3rd we will celebrate our fortieth anniversary. [Laughs] So she was either very patient or in fact had those same kinds of motivations.\\n\\n But I think it was the early exposure that I had from my dad to an area, an environment that he would very much have loved to have been in, but did not have the opportunity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You received an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy [Colorado Springs, Colorado]. Can you tell us how that selection happened?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At one of these air shows I was challenged by the Air Force flying demonstration group, called the Thunderbirds, and I can recall talking to one of the pilots, actually going to talk to one of the Thunderbird pilots, and I asked him how I could become a Thunderbird pilot. As I recall, though I may be in error, he went to the University of Colorado [Boulder, Colorado], or at least a university in Colorado, and he said that they were building a new Air Force Academy in Colorado, and he said if I wanted to become a Thunderbird, I should go there. This is before the school was completed and probably before groundbreaking in the site, in its present site north of Colorado Springs. So I think probably by the age of fifteen, fourteen or fifteen or something like that, I had decided that that’s where I wanted to go, was the Air Force Academy.\\n\\n But as all young kids’ dreams are not necessarily fulfilled immediately, I knew my parents would accept this trip to Colorado, but I also had what I believed were kind of family obligations, and there was a history in my family of attending Amherst College [Amherst, Massachusetts]. My grandfather, I believe, had graduated in 1898, and my uncle, Dr. Charles True, graduated in 1926, I believe. So I was kind of the appointed one, or anointed one, to go, and so I applied and was accepted to Amherst.\\n\\n I went to Amherst, and it was very clear once I got there that that was not going to satisfy my life’s dream to fly or to pursue a military career or to be an engineer of sorts. So I think my dad, realizing and recognizing this, began to search for a sponsor, a congressional sponsor, for his son. As I understand it, he walked the halls of Congress, going to all of the black congressmen, looking for a congressman who would nominate his son, me, for an appointment to the Air Force Academy.\\n\\n He found a congressman the first year, and I can’t recall the gentleman’s name. I think he was from Detroit [Michigan], but I can’t recall. But I was nominated as one of his alternates. The congressman could nominate a principal nominee and then designate ten alternates. So I was one of the alternates. If the principal qualified, then the principal was accepted at the Academy. If the principal did not qualify, then they went down the first alternate and second alternate and finally, if they finally, in the eleven total nominees, they would get at least one person who would qualify.\\n\\n So the principal did qualify, and that was Charles [V.] Bush, who was in the first class. He was one of the first three African Americans to attend the Academy in the class of ’63. I was the only alternate who also qualified, so eleven were nominated, the principal qualified and myself qualified. So that meant I would not go in the first year.\\n\\n So I transferred from Amherst to American University in D.C. for my second year as I awaited with great hope of getting that principal nomination the following year. Adam Clayton Powell, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell from New York, took me as his principal nominee the next year and so all I needed to do was qualify medically. I qualified medically and was accepted into the next class of 1964.\\n\\n During the four years there, since he was the congressman from New York City, my address, my legal address, as I understand it, was the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem for those four years, so that I could be a New York resident. And you would ask, well, why would I go off and search someplace else? Well, Washington, D.C., did not have a congressman or senator, as they still don’t. So there was no method for getting an appointment from a congressional source here in D.C. So that’s why my father went and looked for it. But he did a lot of work. My mom tells me that he spent a lot of time just knocking on people’s doors, but I think that kind of goes back to this if he had had an opportunity, he may have done this as a teenager. And again, I think that I may have been his replacement unit. [Laughs]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you share with us some of your experiences being at the Academy, especially since you were definitely in a minority? It was the early sixties and, as you mentioned, there weren’t many African Americans at the Academy at that time. Did you feel like you were at the place where you could start fulfilling your dream of mixing military education and aircraft all together?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, the intriguing thing is that when I watched these airplanes fly, I was always fascinated why fighters could maneuver very quickly and why passenger aircraft were very comfortable for passengers—they had different characteristics—and why helicopters flew. So I was intrigued not only from the freedom that you got from flying at high altitude and looking down, soaring, reaching out and touching, but I was also intrigued about what the different characteristics were of these aircraft and why some had different capabilities that others didn’t.\\n\\n So though I didn’t realize it at the time, I thought with the name Air Force Academy, there would be airplanes there. In fact, there were no airplanes at the Air Force Academy when I arrived. They had some airplanes that were identified with certain programs, such as navigator training, and during our first summer we had an orientation ride in a T-33, one of the first operational jet fighters or trainers. But I was interested in engineering, and from that, using that engineering and the math to understand the characteristics of airplanes. So though I went out there to be in the military, I went there specifically because the Air Force flew airplanes, and I knew that the courses there would immerse me in an understanding and an appreciation for aeronautics and the flight of aircraft.\\n\\n What I didn’t realize when I went there was that that was a little more than 50 percent of the course of study. I didn’t realize that I also would concentrate in English, economics, history, law, geology, human studies. I didn’t realize that. I don’t think I appreciated the importance of that almost 50-50 division between a liberal arts and an engineering degree, and I wondered why I had to take these other courses. In the course of my life, though, I have learned how important that really was, and that was a great engineer is only great in the environment if he or she is surrounded by engineers, but the world is not composed of just engineers. There are other kinds of people who have other interests, other areas of interest, and that if you are to be successful, you have to understand their language too. So you have to be able to talk. You have to take it from the advanced degree to almost—this is not meant as an insult—but take it back down to the fourth grade so that everybody can understand not only why it works, but why it’s important and why you are so passionate about it.\\n\\n In fact, I became so interested in some of the other courses, that though my major was engineering, my minor was English. I came out in a dilemma about what was more important, and I think it pretty much set me up for the rest of my career, because I realized that the background diversity was extremely important and that without it, you were only a piece of a person, and you really had to be the whole piece of pie. I mean, you had to be the whole pie; you couldn’t be just a slice of it.\\n\\n There were three African Americans in the class of ’63. The first class of the Academy graduated in ’59, and so this would have been five years later. It would have been Charles Bush who was from D.C., and, in fact, he and I had gone through school together. He was a year or so older than I was, but we were in the same junior high school, until he became a page, a congressional page, and then went to page school. But I knew Charles Bush very, very well.\\n\\n “Ike” Payne, Isaac [S.] Payne and Roger [B.] Sims were the other two in that class. Roger, unfortunately, just died in February. He had attended his fortieth reunion last June and was celebrated because of his achievement, but had very severe diabetes and then died, passed away in February of ’04.\\n\\n Ike Payne, I didn’t know him before, but after graduation, he also, as a pilot, was an engineering test pilot and went through Edwards Air Force Base [California], Edwards Test Pilot School, and so when I went through the Navy Test Pilot School [Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Maryland], the two of us were assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base [Ohio] in the test wing there and spent many, many years working together.\\n\\n These were high-quality people. These were not tokens. These were people you would be very proud to work with and would learn significantly from. So they weren’t brought in just to change the color of the Academy. They were brought in because they were absolutely equal to the other members of the class.\\n\\n I was in ‘64, and I was the only one in my class. If I back up again, that was not my first experience being in an integrated society of sorts. As a kid, I was in the first integrated Boy Scout troop in Washington, D.C., and my first exposure was in 1953, when this integrated Boy Scout troop traveled by train from Washington, D.C., to Irvine, California, to participate in a Boy Scout Jamboree, fifty thousand boys out there. So we traveled by train in a first integrated Boy Scout troop, and it was an experience that was almost a nonexperience, because what I found very early in my life—and at that time I was twelve—that if you have a very common interest, a set of drives, kind of a common goal, in the future, and if it’s shared, that discrimination seems somehow to disappear. People forget those kinds of weird things and they concentrate on all crossing the finish line.\\n\\n I had that experience in ’53 and then again in ’54 and ’55, when we traveled by bus to a Boy Scout camp in northern New Mexico [Cimarron], Philmont Scout Ranch. It was the same kind of a thing. Though the schools were not integrated in Washington and the society wasn’t integrated in Washington, these Boy Scout troops were, and we found that we had common interests. We all had hangups about this and that and the other, but we were all fascinated by the adventure that we were on.\\n\\n I can remember, as we traveled, we generally stayed at Air Force bases, spent the night there, and I’m sure that, as I learned later, that this was a very safe place to stay, because the military had integrated in the late forties. I didn’t realize at the time how important that was. But one evening, we spent the evening at Tulsa University [Tulsa, Oklahoma], and Tulsa was a very segregated city, I guess, because when we’d settled in and we were going to do a night activity, the night activity was to go to a movie theater to see a movie, and the several of us African Americans on the trip were told that we couldn’t go because the theater was segregated. The Boy Scout troop, the rest of the boys who were with us, upon hearing that, decided not to go at all. So I remember we spent the evening in the gym at Tulsa University, playing basketball and running on the track and just generally having a great time. And that was an important thing that I don’t think I realized at the time how important that really was to me.\\n\\n And that same experience I had in the Air Force. It was as though “If he can’t go, none of us are going to do it.” And at this point I began then to realize that the military and the Air Force had, much earlier than the Brown v. Board of Education, or any of those activities that began to talk about integration, the military had already done this, and I believe they had done that in 1947 and 1948. So what I was now living, I was benefiting from the sacrifices and the horrors that had occurred before the military integrated.\\n\\n So if I can just jump ahead a little bit, in 1976 or ’77, when I was considering applying for the astronaut program, Ben [Benjamin O.] Davis [Jr.], General Ben Davis, who I had known for a very long time, because he was one of the gentleman—he and his wife had always come to our house and who had been one of these gentlemen who talked about airplanes. He called me and he encouraged me to apply for the astronaut program, and he said he wanted me to do it [not] because of him, but because of the Tuskegee Airmen. I asked him who the Tuskegee Airmen were, and he told me the story of the experiment, and I began putting all these pieces together and realized that it was a person like Ben Davis, his father, General Davis, and the Tuskegee Airmen that had so demonstrated their capability to contribute, to make a contribution, that caused this military change in 1947, which then allowed me to go to the Air Force Academy and be as a classmate as opposed to kind of an oddball that is in there only because someone directed that it occur.\\n\\n A joke was told the day I arrived at the Academy, a racial joke. I’d heard jokes all my life like that. My parents told me just don’t pay any attention to them. Several hours later I was called to the officer in charge of the squadron that I had been assigned to. He apologized profusely for telling the joke and committed to me that I would never be exposed to anything like that in my life. He was Captain Carter. The gentleman’s name was Captain Carter. We called him Bobby Air Power, because first name was Robert and he was very fascinated with airplanes and flying, so we just called him Bobby Air Power. I knew him as he progressed up through his ranks, and he retired as a colonel.\\n\\n Several years ago, I went to his funeral and I walked up to his wife and I told her about this incident that had occurred forty-five years before—not quite forty-five years, maybe forty-two years before. She knew the story and knew me, though I had never met her. She told me how traumatized he was when he came home that evening. So we hugged. But this was many, many years later, but it was very similar to the experience that I had at Tulsa University and it was really a settling experience for me. Things such as that allowed me the opportunity to do anything that I wanted, because I knew that the stage had been set, and it was a great opportunity then to just do whatever I wanted. And I think that’s what my dad wanted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Soon after you left the Air Force Academy, you became involved with South Vietnam and being part of the missions. Tell us how that transition occurred." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When you go into the Air Force Academy, you become, if you had not been before, a patriot. [Laughs] Absolutely focused on not only the protection of what you knew as your United States, but you began to believe or you believe that what you would do would establish a kind of the baseline for your next generations.\\n\\n As soon as I finished flying school, I began volunteering for Vietnam, and, in fact, probably seven or eight months after I’d finished pilot training, I got orders to South Vietnam, specifically Danang Air Base at the northern part of the country, south of the DMZ [demilitarized zone] , but the northern part of South Vietnam, as a rescue helicopter pilot.\\n\\n I was absolutely—I was just overwhelmed by it. I had no anxiety at all, and just thought that was what I was supposed to do. In June 1966, I headed over. I had a very fulfilling year as a rescue pilot, saved quite a few lives, rescued a lot of folks, and came home in June ’67, with a feeling of satisfaction.\\n\\n I was still flying helicopters when I came back, and then I had the opportunity to transition to fixed-wing, so I chose fighters. So I moved from helicopters into fighters and was trained as an F-4, a Phantom pilot. They called them Phantoms. At the same time, however, I had applied to Test Pilot School, so I had one of these forks in the road. I was accepted to Test Pilot School, but I was also en route back to Vietnam as a fighter pilot, and I had to make a career choice and chose the Test Pilot School approach. So instead of going back to Vietnam in 1969 as a fighter pilot, I went to the Navy Test Pilot School at Patuxent River. But I was looking forward to the next tour also, because I would have been in a different kind of airplane, performing a different kind of a role. But as I look back, I think the choice that I made to go to Test Pilot School was probably the best one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was helicopter training your choice? Do you have a choice?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I had a choice. [Laughter] You may find this funny, but at the Academy you are able to select where you want to go to pilot training, or they assign you where you want to go to pilot training. But I was just prepared to get married to this young lady I’d taken to the air show years before, and I began to look at the cities where the pilot training was located. And the one that seemed, you know, if I were going to take somebody on a honeymoon, I’d want to take them to a nice place. So I looked at some of the cities, and the only one that looked like a nice place was San Antonio [Texas]. So I chose the city San Antonio, and San Antonio happened to have helicopter training there. So I went to helicopters because I was getting married; I wanted a nice location for our first home, and San Antonio seemed like the best place. That’s why I went to helicopter training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That liberal arts training got you in trouble, didn’t it? [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It could have been. It could have been. Actually, the training was divided. In the first year, we lived in two locations; the first six months in San Antonio, second six months in Reno [Nevada]. So this was not a hard decision from my point of view. Though I received quite a lot of “rotor-head” “chopper” kind of jokes in my first choice, that I mentioned a little earlier about the diversity background, that helicopter training and the operational helicopter flying that I did, and then the transition to fixed-wing fighters, and then going to the Test Pilot School, where I did as much of both courses as I could, rotary and fixed-wing, kind of set me up in my career, because my next assignment after Test Pilot School was to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the 49-50th Test Wing up there. I flew both fighters and helicopters, and I was then subsequently loaned to NASA in 1974, because NASA was looking for a research test pilot who was qualified in both rotary and fighters.\\n\\n So I look back and I say, well, did I make a wrong choice by going to helicopters first? If I had not done helicopters, I probably would not be where I am right now, because I would have been just like any other test pilot with a single capability. So that’s why I think this English minor/engineering major kind of set me up for the rest of my career, because it demonstrated the importance of the broad versus the very, very narrow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your wife, I’m sure, takes partial credit for all these wonderful decisions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, one day I will give her credit for that. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There you go. Well, it was just your care to make sure she was well taken care of. Maybe you’re a romantic at heart, that might be it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In fact, we had so much fun in San Antonio, and many of my classmates who were assigned to those other bases would actually come on the weekend and stay with us, because San Antonio was such a nice place." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And got nicer. When you went to the Navy’s Test Pilot School, you were up on the East Coast and then, as you mentioned, you were at Wright-Pat in Ohio. So you kind of saw a lot of the country as part of your training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did. I think as we look back, we regret that we were not in another career field, because we never had any overseas assignments and all my classmates did, Germany and England and places like that, and their kids were then exposed to different cultures and civilizations. But when you go into the test pilot business, you are in an acquisition organization. At that time it was called Air Force Systems Command, and all of that was located within the bounds of the continental United States. But we did travel a lot in the southern part of the country. We had a couple of assignments in Texas. We were in Oklahoma. We were in Arizona. As I said, we were in Reno, in Nevada. Pax River would have been the first East Coast trip we made, in Lexington Park, Maryland. Then up to Ohio at Wright-Patterson. My loan to NASA occurred at the Langley Research Center, so I was back in Virginia, down in the Hampton area.\\n\\n But we did have an exciting time. We had a lot of moves in our early career. It appeared as though we were moving every six or seven months, and so we were pretty much nomads. If it didn’t fit in a station wagon, it just didn’t go. But we had a lot of fun traveling, growing up with the kids as they were born. So the family consisted of my wife and I, at first, then my wife and I and a dog, and then our son, and then our daughter. We had a lot of fun in our early days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were at Langley on loan to NASA, were those specific tasks that you had there, were they leading up to a project or were you just there to do some training and testing as they needed it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had already been thoroughly trained as an engineering or research test pilot. I had spent three years at Wright-Patterson as a test pilot, and since I was kind of multi-qualified, I would fly a variety of projects in the different kind of platforms, rotary-wing, fighter-type platforms.\\n\\n When I went to Langley, I was loaned to Langley for two years, in ’74. When I first went down there, I looked in the hangar and they had—oh, they must have had twenty-five airplanes in there, and I was like a kid in a candy store. All subsonic, except for a couple of T-38s, and I said, “Well, which one am I going to fly?”\\n\\n And they said, “Any of them. All of them.” So what I did at Langley, I flew the majority of the airplanes that they had on specific projects that were assigned to me, myself, and a test engineer. So during that two years, which then became three years, which then became four years, I essentially flew anything that they had on any project that they had.\\n\\n It was a very fulfilling time, but after the three years at Wright-Patterson and the three to four years at Langley, it was very clear that the excitement of being a research test pilot was waning. So that’s why I was intrigued by the call for the astronauts. I believe I first saw it in probably ’76. I also saw a TV advertisement, a NASA-sponsored TV advertisement, where one of my—I was a Star Trek freak, and the communications officer, Lieutenant Uhuru, Nichelle Nichols, showed up on TV in a blue flight suit. As I recall, there was a 747 in NASA colors behind her; you could hear it. But she pointed at me and she said, “I want you to join the astronaut program.” So, shoot, if Lieutenant Uhuru looks at me and tells me that, that got me thinking about it.\\n\\n Then I had to go research and find out what this was, because there had not been any selections for astronauts as long as I can remember. Of course, when I went back, I found out that the last real selection was in ’6[7], though some of the MOL, Manned Orbiting Laboratory, folks from the military came into NASA in ’69 or so, but the last selection had been ’6[7], and this was ten or eleven years later. So I had to find out about it, and as I was researching, that’s when General Davis called me. So all of these things kind of came together in that late ’76, early ’77 time frame." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In your busy years in the sixties, had you kept up at all with the space race and the space program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I think I had not. I was an observer to it and so Neil [A.] Armstrong—well, when Frank Borman and Bill [William A.] Anders and the other gentleman on Apollo 8 [James A. Lovell], when they did the Bible read of Genesis, you know, that was one of the highlights of my life. And, of course, when Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” [Edwin E.] Aldrin stepped on the Moon in ’69, that also was a little closer connection because my parents had met Mike [Michael] Collins as he began the [Smithsonian National] Air & Space Museum [Washington, D.C.], so that was a kind of a personal connection. But other than that, I just kind of followed the program.\\n\\n I, though, realized very early in my life that humans were not to be constrained by gravity or the atmosphere, and the Air Force had a form that you filled out—we call it a dream sheet—and on it you would put down your short-term, your mid-term, your long-term desires, and I can recall every year putting down in the long-term desire block a very strong interest in participating in a joint activity that involved space. So I think I was very interested in space, but probably from the systems point of view. But since there was very little interest in or call for astronauts, I didn’t put that down. But I think I had an interest in leaving the atmosphere and working outside the atmosphere. But I think it all kind of came together in ‘76 and ‘77, when they started the call for the Shuttle pilot category of astronauts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were doing your research for this new class, did you involve the Air Force, because the Air Force had an opportunity to appoint you as well, or did you do this all on your own as an interested individual?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s a tough question, because I think I was aware that to be nominated to NASA, I needed to have a military backing for it, and I knew that there would be a board of some sort that would evaluate the records of the officers that they were considering. I knew that the Air Force would focus—that the selectors would primarily be test pilots or people with an engineering, with an aeronautical background of some sort. I also realized that you had to be a known entity, and so the package itself wouldn’t be adequate, that they would have to know you, that they would have to be able to say, “Yeah, I know such-and-such. Good guy. He worked for a buddy of mine. Buddy always said, ‘Great guy.’” Okay, so that I was aware of.\\n\\n But my career was such an unusual one, since I’d started in helicopters, I transitioned to fighters. I had a very limited fighter career, because I went then to Test Pilot School, not to the Air Force Test Pilot School [Edwards Air Force Base, California], but to the Navy Test Pilot School. So at least during the Test Pilot School days I was an unknown. Then instead of going from Pax River, the Navy Test Pilot School, to Edwards to be a test pilot at Edwards, I was sent to Wright-Patterson, and Wright-Patterson was not of the same ilk that the pilots who flew at the desert, at Edwards were. So I was not known at all by that community that I thought would be part of the selection, and so though I sent in my application through the military, because that was so directed, I knew that there would be no chance whatsoever that I would be selected by them.\\n\\n So I made a conscious decision to submit an application as a civilian, with a letter saying that if selected, I would resign from the Air Force. I sent that in, I sent the civilian application in on the last day of applications, which was the 30th of June 1977, and I mailed it from Wallops Island [Wallops Flight Center, Virginia], because I happened to be out there. And I got it in, it was postmarked in time, which was the last day.\\n\\n Then I heard nothing at all until—this would have been the end of June—in August I was at home and I was on my way to work, and I got a call from General Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford, who was the division commander or a title such as that out at Edwards, and he said, “Who are you?”\\n\\n And I said, “Sir, I am Major Fred Gregory.”\\n\\n “Yeah, I know that, but who are you?” He said, “I got a call from a friend of mine,” John [W.] Young at the Johnson Space Center, Chief of the Astronaut Office, and he said, “John said, ‘Who is this Air Force guy applying as a civilian?’ So he called me and he asked me that question, so I’m calling you. Who are you?” [Laughter] So I went through my career, and he says, “Oh, okay.” That was in August.\\n\\n So what had happened was that I guess my paperwork went down to Johnson as a civilian, with this little letter on it, so John Young—I don’t know what his interest was, but it was probably intriguing to him to get this application from a military officer as a civilian.\\n\\n Heard nothing else. In November of that year, at that time I was at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk [Virginia], in a three- or four-month kind of mid-level professional school. I got a call and said, “You’re invited to come down to interview for the astronaut program.” And I mean, I was absolutely shocked. I’d had a little hint of it, though, because I was beginning to get calls from friends from all over the world, informing me that there had been people there asking about me. In fact, at the Armed Forces Staff College I would have a person come up to me and say, “Well, this gentleman—where did he go—had just come to ask about you.” I never saw these people, but I was getting these calls, but I never knew what it was that they were—you know, I didn’t know what they were after. It was kind of a strange thing.\\n\\n So in November in ’77 I was called and said, “Come down for an interview.” I went down to interview for a week, which was a medical, a psychological, included also an interview, an hour-and-a-half or two-hour interview, and I mean, by this time I was thinking, “What’s going on here?”\\n\\n Then I finished the interview that week and came back, went back to Armed Forces Staff College. Then the week of graduation, which was, I believe, the week starting the 17th of January—I believe that’s correct—1978, I came into school that morning and in my little mailbox was a little buck slip saying “Call George [W. S.] Abbey at Johnson Space Center.” This was about seven-thirty in the morning, so the message had probably come in just before that. So I called Mr. Abbey, and he said, “You still interested in this job down here?” [Laughs]\\n\\n I said, “Yes.”\\n\\n He said, “Well, you have to keep it a secret until noon.”\\n\\n I said, “I can do it.” Well, I did for five minutes, I think.\\n\\n So that was the week of graduation at Staff College. So I know this was a Monday, graduation was on a Wednesday, and by that time the whole school knew about it. As we walked across the stage for graduation, the entire school got up and applauded. Fascinating. Fascinating day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What a nice moment. You at some point called your wife and said, “We’re moving again”?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Maybe I kept that secret till noon. [Laughs] I don’t know. It was an amazing day, because the report date wasn’t until June, and this was January, so I had to come up with a job, because after you go through a school like that, then they send you to—I had a job at the Pentagon. I had already received a job at the Pentagon, so our intent was to move from Pax River up to the Washington area someplace, which would have been the first time that we would have come back to our home, where we both grew up. Of course, that ended and instead of moving to—well, I had to get a job, so I called NASA again at Langley and told my old boss, Jim Patton, I said, “Can I stay another six months?”\\n\\n He said, “Well, what are you talking about?”\\n\\n I said, “I just got accepted.”\\n\\n “Oh yes. Come on back.” So we just stayed right at Langley for that next six months and then did not move to Houston [Texas] until June, would have been 1978, we moved from Hampton to Houston. It was a very exciting time, an extremely exciting time.\\n\\n I remember one of the questions during the interview was, “Do you feel comfortable giving speeches?” And all of us lied. [Laughter] “Of course.” Many of us, though, had never really done a lot of public speaking. After I was selected and it was announced, I had a lot of calls to give speeches in the Hampton area, in the Virginia area, and I remember the first one I went prepared with a script and read the script and it didn’t work at all. I did that probably one more time and then just began the ad-lib. Since then I have given 3,500 or so talks of some substance, meaning ten minutes or more, between ’78 and—I actually quit counting in ’92 or ’93. But I feel very, very comfortable giving talks on just about any subject. [Laughs]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess so. During that interview process, did you have an opportunity to tell Captain Young who you were, since he had called Stafford and asked?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "John Young knew who I was, but—oh, during the interview?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, during the interview. I don’t think I really had any time to interface with him during that day. He came in and gave briefings, but he was very busy in his office. Though I spent time with—I was kind of assigned to Dick [Richard H.] Truly, who was in the Astronaut Office, so as I would complete an activity, sometimes Richard Truly would carry me from one place to another. I remember he had this Corvette, and I was very impressed with that.\\n\\n I don’t think I really met John Young until we were selected, after we were selected, and we had our first kind of reception. It was the first time I met Tom Stafford, too. I walked up to him, and he kind of looked at me and grinned. Of course, we have become the best of friends. He and I worked together quite a lot. We have worked together and continue to work together even to this day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about those first few days in Houston, getting adjusted to not just a new job, but truly a brand-new career, because not only was it new for you, it was new for the world." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[Laughs] You know, that was like a dream. Let me go back to the sports car thing I had mentioned a little earlier. Many of the sports cars that raced at Andrews were Ferraris, so not only was I intrigued with airplanes, but I was also intrigued with this brand, Ferrari, and I began buying Ferraris and had a series of them. But at Langley, when I went to Langley, I got to a point and I said, “You know, I don’t need these cars anymore.” I don’t know whether it was a transition time or not, but I’d always had sports cars and I had this series of Ferraris, and one morning I just said, “I don’t need these cars anymore.” Actually, I’d sold my last Ferrari and I’d bought something called a Panterra, which is a very high-performance Italian body, but an American high-performance engine in it, a Ford engine in it.\\n\\n One day I just woke up and said, “I don’t need it.” And I sold it and bought a Honda Civic, a really small one, a ‘75 or ’73 or something, Honda Civic. I went through kind of a flip-flop. My wife didn’t believe it, so she encouraged me to go out and buy a Porsche. Well, I didn’t really like Porsches, but we bought it. It stayed in the garage for a year, and I may have put a thousand miles on it, because I was happy with my Honda.\\n\\n We were selected for the astronaut program, and we had a boat. The Porsche wouldn’t pull a boat, so I went to a Dodge dealer and traded this Porsche for a Dodge Ram Charger, an SUV [sport utility vehicle]. It was one for one. Probably lost a lot of money on it, but I just didn’t need the Porsche, and we bought this Ram Charger.\\n\\n So I was beginning to see these things. These were changes that were occurring in my life that, as I look back, I kind of laugh at them, but it was showing me that I was now moving into a different life, a different world, and I think the purchase of that Ram Charger was my first true hint.\\n\\n So we drove down there, and they were waiting for us. I mean, we went to a bank to get a loan on a house, and they had a very special rate for us. Everybody was extremely helpful in Clear Lake City [Texas]. We rented a house, initially, as we looked for a house to buy. A couple of months after we got there, we did buy a house. But we wandered around. The school system was terrific in that independent school district down there. The majority of the people who lived in Clear Lake City were people who were associated with the Space Center. All the services supported the Space Center. All the major aerospace industries were located down there. Many of the neighbors were. So it was like moving into utopia, and so the transition was great.\\n\\n Now, once you got into the neighborhood, then you were just part of the neighborhood. Our friends were friends because they were neighbor kid friends, and their kids went to the same school, or our kids went to the same school that they went to. So it was a wonderful place. It was a wonderful place.\\n\\n Now, the heat and humidity was something that we had not been used to. Houston is a lot different than San Antonio, and we’d never been in a coastal city. So I will be honest. It took a couple of years, really, to adapt to the temperature and humidity and lack of true seasons. But once we adapted—and we were there for fourteen or fifteen years—then it was just absolutely normal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now, you were adapting professionally from a test pilot environment to a—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To an astronaut environment, but it was the same kind of thing, and I could see why they wanted people who had had the formal training that you received, one, as an engineer, formal training in the academic world, but also in preparation to be a test pilot. Because basically that’s what we were looking at, was a test vehicle, a research test vehicle, unflown.\\n\\n The mission specialists who were selected were of that same type. They were very, very smart. They were all class Type A personalities. The majority of them had no ego whatsoever; they were very humble. Each said, you know, “If I sit and think, there were so many other people who were much more qualified than I was. I don’t know how I got selected. We’re very happy to be here.” A very compatible group, the thirty-five of us who showed up down there.\\n\\n But it was kind of the same kind of job that we had had before, except it was a much more complex vehicle that we were going to go fly, in a different environment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were able to keep your military connection?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, apparently I was. [Laughs] And the first hint of that was when the Air Force Times announced the Air Force astronauts who had been selected for the astronaut program and my name was there. [Laughs] So somehow—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Clip it out and keep that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I do. I have it. But I guess they decided not to allow me to resign, but put me in as an Air Force astronaut." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there a certain type of agreement that NASA and the Air Force makes?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, there is an agreement, and I’m not really sure what it is, but I think it is we are detailed to NASA, and I think the military paid our salaries and NASA paid for our travel and things of that nature. I don’t know if there was a reimbursement to the military for our services. But once we got there, military uniforms went off and we were just NASA employees." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You joined another group of astronauts, because there were some that were there, as you mentioned, ones that were from the MOL Program and then the class of 1966." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And earlier." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And earlier. Some of the veterans and certain legacies that they had already set down. Tell me how the reception was from these folks and how your new class became entwined with them as one large astronaut corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, were just kind of like the freshman, and they were the seniors. As such, we paid great respect to them. [Laughs] Al [Alan L.] Bean was assigned as our training official, and so Al Bean set up the training schedule and coordinated all of that. John Young was the chief of the office down there. [Fred W.] Haise [Jr.] was—our offices were all mixed together, and so Haise was in my office, and then I learned about Apollo 13 and what his role had been there. But there were many Skylab type—Owen [K.] Garriott. I mean, there were a lot of folks down there who had not only been Apollo, but they had been Skylab and obviously had come in from the MOL Program, like Richard Truly and [Donald H.] Peterson and Bob [Robert L.] Crippen and people like that. Then the scientists, really, who’d come in in ’6[7]. I think Story Musgrave was in that group.\\n\\n But, you know, they were just kind of all there, but us thirty-five, we were in kind of our own world, and they had us eight hours a day in academics or in some kind of orientation that went on for easily six months. Then after that initial orientation of NASA acronyms and locations and things, then we began some initial training in the single-system trainers that they have and into the Shuttle mission simulators, the SMS simulators down there. So we did not interface with these guys daily, though they were kind of our superdads down there to make sure that everything was prepared for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The simulators and the coursework that you took, how was it similar to that that you had taken as part of your military training to prepare for those aircrafts?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think they were very similar. Obviously, most of the folks who put the books together were not military, did not have an orientation in the military, but I think that the folks in the Astronaut Office who did have the military orientation edited. So I felt very comfortable when I got these books, specifically the training books for the simulators. I thought they were very well put together. The academic books were very much like I had experienced in colleges and universities. So I thought that they had done a very, very good job preparing the literature and in preparation for the lectures. I felt very comfortable in that environment. I was not surprised at all.\\n\\n I was surprised at how complex the Shuttle was. I had never been in any kind of an airplane that was that involved." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When did you first get to actually be close to the Orbiter in your training schedule?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Once we finished this kind of orientation, then we were given technical assignments, and one of my first technical assignments was to be assigned to the Kennedy Space Center [Florida] as an astronaut liaison. We had a name; we were called the Cape Crusaders, the C2s. Every Sunday evening or Monday morning, four of us would fly down to the Cape [Canaveral] and we would stay all week. We would attend meetings. We were always in our blue suit, and one of the privileges was that you would spend a lot of time sitting in the cockpit of Columbia. So I was exposed to the hardware in ’79 or probably a year, year and a half after I got there, and I stayed through the second launch of the Orbiter, STS-1 and –2. I was there for both of those.\\n\\n I was also there during the time when they removed all of the tile from Columbia and replaced it. I met these young kids who had chosen to remove themselves from—I think all of them had finished high school, but many of them had chosen to come work on the tile instead of going to college. So for a year, these young kids, these high school graduates, were there replacing tile. I stayed in touch with several of them after that, and most of those kids were extremely successful in their career, and each attributes that success to this time-out that they took working with the Shuttle Program down there.\\n\\n So ’79 would have been my first exposure, and I was a hardware guy and learned as much as I could about the Orbiter down there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One difference of flying the Shuttle, or training to fly the Shuttle and training to fly military aircraft is that you were going to be on a mission longer in your aircraft than you would be for your military. You were going to be in space for several days. What types of training activities do you recall that NASA supported or sponsored for you so that you could learn how to work and live together as a team in space?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, if you’re asking if we ever did seven- or eight- or nine-day simulations, no, we never did. The training, however, though, put together a group of people who would work together, whose life depended on the team, and the training that we had was of a nature that allowed you to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the members of your team, and allowed you then to figure out how to compensate, adjust, trust the team.\\n\\n The two visible groups of the team included the crew and then the training team, and the training team and the crew worked together and became one entity. We lived together; we breathed together; we ate together; we thought together; we prayed together. I mean, we were as one, except when we went into the simulator. We always joked about it. We always joked that the training team constantly tried to kill us and the crew tried to make them look ridiculous. So there was also competition between these two groups, but it brought the groups closer and closer together, such that when we were prepared to fly, we were both able to say, “We are prepared,” or, “They are prepared.” And there was great pride in a training crew’s successful training of that crew, and vicariously, they were on the mission with us and received the same credit, though not visible." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m sure you felt some of those feelings when you were down at the Cape for those first two launches. Could you share with us what it was like to be there for STS-1 and STS-2 and watched you getting a little bit closer to your dream come true?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a fantastic experience, because some of the training of John Young and Bob Crippen, and Truly and [Joe H.] Engle occurred in Columbia, and I would be their gofer. I was there to help them get in the seats. I was there to make sure they had all of their training documents. I was the kind of interface with the problem that they had with some of the procedures, back to Houston to see if we could get them corrected, or work out problems. I was the one who would configure the Orbiter with all the circuit breakers and switches in preparation for tests and specifically for their dynamic integrated test—I think that’s what it was called.\\n\\n We were also there because many times we would end up at midnight or one o’clock in the morning, we’d go with them when we’d have dinner or breakfast. There was one place called the Mousetrap down there. We would always go there because it was the only place you could eat after midnight. I remember we used to get these mouseburgers or mooseburgers or something down there. But we were just kind of available to support them as much as we could.\\n\\n For the first launch and the second launch, I configured the cockpits for them. I was not in the White Room when the crews actually came up, because I was something called the Contingency Operations Director, and as the COD leader, I was responsible for all of the rescue forces that had been assembled. It was a huge force of military, Air Force and Navy, underwater demolition, the rescue specialists, helicopters, boats, all standing by in case there would be an emergency.\\n\\n So for STS-1, I was on the taxiway near the Shuttle landing strip, sitting in a helicopter, waiting to be deployed in case of an emergency, and this was kind of a culmination of literally a year or so of training with these folks. So I was standing there as Columbia lifted off for its first time. I can recall I was watching it through binoculars and I saw it kind of lift like this [gestures] and I realized it looked just like television, so I put the binoculars down because I wanted to see what was going on everywhere, not just right there, and I never used binoculars since then. But I was so surprised, because I was used to an Atlas launch, long, slender, and this little short, stubby thing came up and I kept looking back down into the smoke, looking for the rest of it, because it just didn’t look like an Atlas.\\n\\n So I was there and then immediately flew out to Edwards, and I was there for the landing and then El [Ellison S.] Onizuka and I both went into the Orbiter after Columbia landed, and we’re the ones who cleaned it out after the crew had come out. I did the same on STS-2. We had the same kind of role, so there were a couple of us. Bo [Karol J.] Bobko was kind of the leader of this group. We had Dick [Francis R.] Scobee and El Onizuka and Loren [J.] Shriver and I, and Don [Donald E.] Williams, eventually. We were the Cape Crusaders down there. We just kind of lived down there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talk about an exciting hands-on experience for you to watch that happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was 1983, in February of 1983, when NASA announced that you would be assigned to a flight. Then it was STS-18 and then later renamed. Tell us how that happened and how you were able to be so patient from watching those first two flights to getting yours." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh wow. I think this had to do with whether we flew or not, it didn’t matter, because just the privilege of being there was enough for all of us. But, you know, the whole schedule was delayed by several years because of the tile replacement, so though we anticipated flying in ’78 or ’79, we didn’t fly until ’81, and then just a couple of flights, ’81, ’82 or so, then we began to spool up. Let’s see. I didn’t realize it had been—February ’83, you said?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. It was announced and then, of course, you flew in ’85." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I guess there was shifting of launch times, because we were on Spacelab 3 and I know we launched before Spacelab 2 and after Spacelab 1. I think they had some payloads that they wanted to deploy quickly, and so the laboratory missions were kind of put in a kind of a second category for priority.\\n\\n But, you know, the date wasn’t important at the time. To be assigned to a crew, though, with Bob [Robert F.] Overmyer as the commander, and I was going to be the pilot on it. We had Norm [Norman E.] Thagard on it and Don [L. Lind] and Taylor [G.] Wang and Lodewijk van den Berg. It sounded like it was going to be an exciting crew and an exciting time. Bob Overmyer in himself was, you know, quite an interesting Marine, and to be able to work with him was—I was privileged. So I guess I had not worried about or hadn’t even considered when it was. It was just we were going to be the best we could be when we flew." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you learn that you had been selected?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the scheme of things, it was probably George Abbey who called. George did most of that. But I don’t recall how I was told." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember the reaction of your family when you shared the news with them that you were going to be flying?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m sure they were excited, but I don’t recall. [Laughs]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s all right. Well, we had talked a few minutes ago about training, and I’d like to talk about the actual training of your mission. I’m going to stop the tape for just a minute and trade out the tape.\\n\\n [Tape change.]\n\nYou were sharing with us the names of the members of your crew. Tell us how you started training and became not individuals, but crewmembers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Spacelab was an interesting assignment, because it was a 24/7 assignment. We had two shifts. Bob Overmyer was the commander of a shift and I was the commander of the second shift, and while each shift worked, the other shift slept. We had enclosed bunks on the middeck of the Orbiter, and that’s where the off shift would sleep, so we never saw them really. There was a handover period, but once we began working, they were sleeping and we just wouldn’t see them.\\n\\n How did we train? Well, there was a common portion of the training and that was the ascent and the entry, so Norm Thagard, myself, and Bob Overmyer were always involved in the ascent and landing portion of the training, and that was—oh, I can’t come up with a number, but I’d say 75 percent to 80 percent of the training was ascent and entry.\\n\\n Now, at the same time, we had payload specialists and mission specialists, and they had very specific roles. Norm Thagard was also a mission specialist, but he was part of the ascent entry team. But Don Lind was the NASA mission specialist, and then Taylor Wang and Lodewijk van den Berg were both payload specialists. So the mission specialists were generalists. They were people who had a capability and a talent to do anything. The payload specialists were people who had a very specific project that they’d brought on board and that was their responsibility.\\n\\n So in our ascent and entry, though it was eight and a half minutes for the ascent and about an hour for the entry, and the mission was scheduled for seven or eight days, most of our concentration, and my concentration was on the ascent and entry portion. The intent there was to try to get these three people, the mission specialist number two, the pilot, and commander, in a kind of a mind set such that—well, it’s like a ballet, you know, without music, individual but coordinated activities that resulted in the successful accomplishments of each of these phases, regardless of the type failure or series of failures that this training team would impose on you. So that’s what we trained for.\\n\\n There were two thousand or so switches and gauges and circuit breakers, any number of which we would involve ourselves with during these two phases, ascent and entry. So the intent was for us to learn this so well, understand the system so well, that we could brush through a failure scenario and safe the Orbiter in the ascent such that we could get on orbit and then have time to discuss what the real problem was and then allow you to correct it.\\n\\n During the entry, the entry was a phase that prior to the Columbia accident would have been considered the easier part of the training. In any scenario that you were exposed to, the object was to get back on the ground and land. So though you would have a series of failures, all of those failures would then allow you, after you safed it, to come home and land. So that’s what primarily we did.\\n\\n On the on-orbit portion, the mission specialists and payload specialists spent a lot of time on their payload or payloads, and they were generally walk-throughs. They would have failure scenarios on their pieces of equipment and apparatus. There were on-orbit operations to maintain the Orbiter in the right configuration that would support those things that were going on in the Spacelab. But that was primarily a subset of the ascent and entry.\\n\\n So we must have trained for two, two and a half years, only because if it was February ’83 and we didn’t launch until March—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "April 29th." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "April ’85." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In fact, it was today in ’85. April 29th." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh really? Okay. In ’85, so that would have been two years and about three months or so. We spent a lot of time training for that. So when we flew, I thought we were pretty well prepared for that mission. But these kinds of delays and having missions inserted was not an unusual activity at the time. You kind of accepted it and you kind of ran with it. So I’m sure that when we were designated February ’83, our launch time was not April ’85. It was probably within the year or year and a half or so or something like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I mentioned to you about patience, but Don Lind had waited since 1966." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, he waited. He’d been waiting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you ever have an opportunity to talk about that with him, about his—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh sure. Yes, Don not only waited for those—he was a ’66 guy, so that’s nineteen years. He had not only waited those nineteen years patiently, but was at the same desk, as I understand it, that he had when he arrived in ’66. So he never changed desks in that time frame. Then he flew, he was satisfied, and then went back to the academic world." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. Well, share with us about the flight. Here it is, it has now come, the delays are over and you have an opportunity to be a part of this crew that’s going to go up. Can you tell us about those moments and about your first flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m sure I was very excited. I think I was probably anxious, but certainly not afraid. I had great confidence in the team and sub teams. I was not of a thorough understanding of all of the science that was being conducted, because we had other areas of concentration, and as the pilot, my responsibility was maintaining the Orbiter to assure that it provided the right environment for the science to take place.\\n\\n But we had worked as a crew for a long period of time and it was a happy and exciting crew. We were still flying in flying suits. The only thing that differed from our training was that we would now be wearing this helmet to provide oxygen for us in case of loss of integrity. But the assumption was that you could maintain the integrity of the atmosphere in the cabin long enough to get the Orbiter back on the ground.\\n\\n We got in the Orbiter. Of the three, I never had any delays once we got in the Orbiter. So this was just the first of the three. We got in, and with one little hiccup, but it was just a delay, just a moment delay, and then we launched. It was similar to the simulation, but they left out the 5 percent and that was the “Wow!” [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The wow factor?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. The wow factor. The wow factor was never in the—I think they intentionally left that out.\\n\\n I remember the feeling inside when the main engine started, how it was almost a nonevent. You could hear it; you were aware of it. It sounded like some kind of an electric motor at some distance, but you looked out the window and you saw the launch tower there and the launch tower moved back. At least that’s what you thought, but then you realized the Orbiter was moving forward and then back, and when it came back to vertical, that’s when those solids ignited and there was no doubt about it. You were going to go someplace really fast, and you just watched the tower kind of drop down below you.\\n\\n As I am normally, I was probably laughing during this time frame. Since we had trained constantly for failures, I anticipated failures and was somewhat disappointed that there were no failures, because I knew that any failure that occurred, I could handle. It was where I slipped back into an ego thing. I anticipated failures that I would correct and then the newspaper would say, “Gregory saves Shuttle,” but, heck, none of that happened. [Laughs] That was Challenger and it just went uphill, just as sweet as advertised. The eight minutes went through very quickly, because we knew everything—it was all the dynamics of the vehicle, so everything worked just like it should nominally.\\n\\n The first indication that this was not a simulation was when the main engines cut off and we went to zero-G, and though [Steven A.] Hawley, I think, had been attributed with this comment a lot later, or maybe earlier, it was a common comment, “Is this space? Is this it? Is this real?” And it was an amazing feeling. I’d never sensed anything like this before. I know this was Bob Overmyer’s first flight. It was all of our first flights. So we did not—oh, I guess this would have been Norm Thagard’s second flight, so Norm was the only truly experienced—well, this would be Overmyer’s second flight, too. So Overmyer and Thagard had both experienced that before, but the rest of us hadn’t. So this sensation of zero-G was like a moment on a roller coaster, when you go over the top and everything just floats.\\n\\n So once we got there, then we had to start business. So we’d done this eight and a half minutes. We were safely on orbit. Communication worked well. So it was now time to open up the Spacelab and begin to set up the Spacelab for the six or seven days remaining. So once we got there, it was just business as usual, just as we had practiced and performed on the ground.\\n\\n We did have to adapt to this microgravity environment. The adaptation varied with each of the individuals, but whatever the adaptation was, within days—I mean, not days, but within a day, everybody had adapted to it and so it was just a matter of working on all the programs and projects of the projects that you had. So it was a fascinating time.\\n\\n What I found, the Orbiter worked very well. I don’t recall any serious issues with it, and since that was the job that I had, was to maintain it, and it was working well, I spent a lot of time looking out the window. And you immediately realize that you are either a dirt person or a space person. I ended up being a space person, looking out in space. It was a high-inclination orbit, so we went very low in the southern hemisphere, and I saw a lot of star formations that I had only heard about before and never seen before. I also saw aurora australis, which is the Southern Lights. I was absolutely fascinated by that.\\n\\n But if you were an Earth person, or dirt person, you were amazed at how quickly you crossed the ground; how, with great regularity, every forty-five minutes you’d either have daylight or dark; how quickly that occurred, about seven miles per second; how quickly you crossed the Atlantic Ocean.\\n\\n The sensation that I got initially was that from space you can’t see discernable borders and you begin to question why people don’t like each other, because it looked like just one big neighborhood down there. The longer I was there, the greater my “a citizen of” changed. The first couple of days, D.C. was where I concentrated all my views, and I was a citizen of Washington, D.C. I was confused because I thought everybody loved D.C., but Overmyer was from Cleveland [Ohio], and Don Lind was Salt Lake [City, Utah], and Norm was Jacksonville, Florida, and Lodewijk was the Netherlands, and Taylor Wang was Shanghai [China], so each had their own little location for the first couple of days. After two days, I was from America, looked at America as our home. Taylor, China. Europe for Lodewijk. And after five or six days, the whole world became our home.\\n\\n You could see this kind of sense of ownership and awareness. We had noticed with interest the fires in Brazil and South Africa and the pollution that came from Eastern Europe, but it was only with interest. Then after five or six days, then it was of concern, because you could see how the particulates from the smokestacks in Eastern Europe, how that circled the Earth and how this localized activity had a great effect. When you looked down at South Africa and South America, you became very sensitized to deforestation and what the results of it was with the runoff, how it affected the ecology. Then you’d have to back up and say, well, this is not an intentional thing to destroy; this is something that they use coke as part of their process, and in order to get coke, you’ve got to burn.\\n\\n So you began to look at things from different points of view, and it was a fascinating experience. So that was the science that I was engaged in, but never anticipated it. And it was a discovery for me, so as each of these other great scientists who were with us discovered something that they had never anticipated, I also did, and I think the whole crew had.\\n\\n When I came home, I was intent to see my neighbors, and my neighbors now included every country in the world, and it was very clear that the space program wasn’t north of the equator, and that for us to be extremely successful, it would involve all citizens from this world. It was very apparent to me, when I looked down and saw how, one, there were no defined boundaries and borders, and, two, that for the success of our future programs, it was going to involve everybody, either with their support or their participation in some sort.\\n\\n I allegedly have an ancestor who came from Madagascar, and flew over Madagascar quite a few times on this orbit. On the western side of Madagascar there is a delta called Betsiboka, and because of the deforestation of the island of Madagascar, there has been a lot of runoff of the surface soil from Madagascar into the Strait of Mozambique, which is the water separating Africa from Madagascar, and it looked like the island was bleeding. That’s the way it looked. It was that red. It was an iron oxide of sorts, at least a red dye. So it was my intent to go to Madagascar. I then realized, after I landed, that Madagascar knew I was flying and so, in the papers, I was getting a lot of things from Madagascar, saying, “Madagascan in space.” So I have a lot of these articles written in Malagasi, and in 1990, I was privileged to head a delegation to Madagascar. How? I don’t know. Why? I don’t know. But I was privileged to lead a delegation that consisted of my wife to Madagascar as they celebrated their thirtieth anniversary of their independence from France." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How wonderful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Frederick D. Gregory", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I spent a week and a half there, traveling in and around the capital city. I was a special guest of the President, [Didier] Ratsiraka. My wife, though I spent all of my time at the right hand of the President, my wife was escorted by the Prime Minister.\\n\\n During that time, we visited what was called the Queen’s Palace, and on the wall there were pictures of the Madagascan royalty, and one of the gentleman’s pictures looked exactly like my uncle. Someone was telling me the story about a queen in the 1820s, in Madagascar, who was killing the pretenders to the throne and throwing them off a cliff, and about this one prince who had successfully escaped and had come to America. It’s interesting because the stories that we heard in America was that there was a prince from Madagascar who arrived in America in the 1820s, and this was the ancestor. So we got a different story over there that was the same story.\\n\\n The Queen’s Palace, by the way, burnt down, unfortunately, after 1990, and I would guess that those paintings were lost, but I think we have pictures of them. It was a fascinating experience for me. Ambassador Howard was the U.S. ambassador there. We just had a fantastic time. We had a fantastic time.\\n\\n We were the only westerners there. All the rest of them were Soviets and North Koreans and Libyans and, you know, you name “bad guys” at that time, that’s what it was. But this was the Madagascar’s first outreach at the western world, so my wife and I were the first entrée of western into Madagascar. So it was fascinating, but it was all kind of, “Yes, I need to go there,” because I’d seen it. It seems like a very essential part to the future. Even though it was a long trip, it was a fascinating trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds it. Unfortunately for me, our time is up for today, but I’m looking forward to picking this up where we left off and we can explore more fascinating adventures of your career." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00847", + "metadata": { + "category": "NASA Headquarters History Office Oral History Projects 1999 - 2021", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/Administrators/KennelCF/kennelcf.htm", + "original_file_name": "KennelCF_10-21-02.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/Administrators/KennelCF/KennelCF_10-21-02.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Headquarters Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Charles F. Kennel", + "location_date": "San Diego, California – 21 October 2002" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Sandra Johnson", + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Charles Kennel" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is October 21, 2002. This oral history interview with Dr. Charles Kennel is being conducted at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego for the NASA Headquarters History Office. The interviewer is Sandra Johnson, assisted by Rebecca Wright and Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.\\n\\n I want to thank you again for taking time out of your schedule to meet with us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My pleasure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "For the past thirty-five years or so you’ve worked with NASA in a number of capacities. Can you tell us about how you first became involved with NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. My first really good paper was to analyze NASA data on the Earth’s radiation belts, and this paper, which I wrote with Harry [E.] Petschek and was published in 1966, we used data from the early NASA satellites, and my and Harry’s theoretical understanding of plasma physics to show that plasma processes in space actually were limiting the number of electrically charged particles that could be trapped in the Earth’s radiation belt. So I was, from the beginning, a space plasma physicist.\\n\\n When I came to UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] in 1967, August 21 of ’67 I turned up, part of the recruitment deal was a one-day-a-week consulting job that I had with, I think it was called then, the Space Analysis Group at TRW Systems. At that point, I was working with a gentleman named Fred Scarf, who has passed on, died in 1988. Fred was a co-investigator measuring fluctuating electric fields in space on spacecraft. The one that I remember was OGO 5, which is a very pioneering spacecraft. I got an opportunity to look at the data and reduce it in the light of theory. It was very interesting. But Fred was deeply involved in all of the work that was required to put a spacecraft into orbit and to build the experiment. So from Fred I learned my first part about how space experiments get built, and I actually consulted. You know, I watched them put the stuff together.\\n\\n Then about three years later, in 1969 or ’70, one of my UCLA colleagues came to me. His name was [William M.] Bill Kaula. He’s also just recently passed on. Bill came to me and said that he was on something over at JPL [NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory] called the Science Advisory Group, and this group had been put together chaired by Jim [James A.] Van Allen, my hero. This group had been put together by NASA after [United States] Congress had voted down a program to go to the outer planets called the Grand Tour. The Grand Tour was supposed to go to all the outer planets. It was a single astronomical opportunity that we could do it, and they voted it down.\\n\\n So, the question was, what to do next, and we spent eighteen months working on a strategy. The strategy committee was staffed by somebody very competent, [Dr. Louis D.] Lou Friedman, who is now the president of The Planetary Society, and it was one of the best-run committees that I’ve ever been on. Then it was my first one, but then or later. Over that eighteen-month period, we basically arrived at the conception of the Voyager spacecraft, which I still think is NASA’s greatest science experiment.\\n\\n I can remember at the end of the discussion that we had, my job was to do the radiation belt physics for Jupiter. There was a great unknown. The Pioneers [spacecraft], actually, were going to fly into the Jovian radiation belts. Nobody knew the intensity of the radiation. Would they damage the spacecraft? How good were the models? Could you calculate what the risk was? And we did all of that as part of this study. But the real thing was to design the Voyagers.\\n\\n At the end of the time, we had designed something called Mariner Jupiter-Saturn, and there were to be two spacecraft. It was two big Mariners and they were to go to Jupiter and Saturn. One of the key moments came when people at the end of this said, “What about the Grand Tour? Can’t we go onto the other planets?” So, Van Allen asked Friedman, who was then staff director for this study, “Would you go back and tell us what it would cost to send these out to, let us say, Uranus and Neptune? Forget about Pluto.”\\n\\n So a month later—we met, I think, once a month—Friedman came back and said, “Well, sir, the answer to your question was [with the usual] 99 and 44/100ths percent NASA [reliability] standard, it will double the cost of the mission.”\\n\\n So Van Allen then went back and said, “Well, suppose we were to just put on enough consumables on the spacecraft? Suppose we were to do that? What would it cost just to preserve the option to go to these other planets?”\\n\\n And so a month later, Friedman comes back and he says, “Ten million dollars.”\\n\\n And Van Allen looks around the table and he says, “How many of you have been on a spacecraft that failed before its designed lifetime if it was launched?” And nobody raised his hand. “How many of you have been on a spacecraft that’s given useful data, if not 100 percent complete, at twice the lifetime?” Everybody raised his hand. He said, “That does it. We’re going to call this Mariner Jupiter-Saturn, and we’re going to put on the consumables, and if the spacecraft is still working as we get past Saturn, somebody’s going to argue for an extended mission.”\\n\\n And that’s exactly what happened, and it was the greatest experiment that I’ve ever been associated with. I went to three of the four encounters, and all working with Fred Scarf on his experiments. At that point, early on I began to understand from JPL how NASA worked.\\n\\n So then my next involvement with NASA was about five years later, and I was on the Space Studies Board—then the Space Science Board—and I was chairman of its Committee on Solar and Space Physics. We developed a strategy, and I did a lot of the sort of National Academy type of bureaucratic work for NASA and for the Academy. And that was fine, but the really interesting debate occurred because that was the Space Science Board that approved, on its part, that NASA should go ahead with what’s now the Hubble Space Telescope.\\n\\n There were lots of very big discussions about information policy. The CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] wanted NASA not to fly that experiment, because if they should turn it earthward, it would reveal what the spy-in-the-sky satellites could do. There was a big fight between the astronomy community and NASA over who would manage it, and that fight ended up with the Space Telescope Science Institute being designed as a compromise. And, once again, extremely interesting. And basically my whole research career at UCLA was pretty much involved with NASA space science, not earth science.\\n\\n I’m going to fast-forward a lot, because you want to know how I got to Mission to Planet Earth, too. So then the career went along on that way. When Fred Scarf died, I ended up taking his place as co-PI [Principal Investigator] on the Soviet Phobos Mars spacecraft, both of which failed. I didn’t know tiddly about how to build an instrument, but he had built it and my job was to see it through the experimental phase. And I got to know NASA again with that.\\n\\n I accompanied Noel Hinners in 1975; [he] took a group of people to Russia to discuss a Shuttle-Salyut mission that was a follow-on to Apollo-Soyuz, and I went on his team. So over the years I’ve done a lot of work for NASA, all in the National Academy, NASA committee advising sort of way. Never worked for NASA, worked with NASA.\\n\\n So in about 1990 or ’91, Stan Shawhan, who was then head of the Space Physics Division in the Office of Space Science, ran a major study on space physics in the 1990s, and I chaired that study for Stan. I got very rebellious, and I was very upset at that point by the trend towards gigantism in NASA experiments. They were getting huge and very difficult to manage, and the costs were running over. So we actually engineered a plan in which about one-third of all the spacecraft that would be flown would be small spacecraft. This is important, because about two years later I was in this very office here visiting my thesis advisor, who is [Dr. Edward A.] Ed Frieman, and Ed was then the director of Scripps, having moved from plasma physics. I was in this office just visiting him, student to thesis advisor, and he asked me, “What are you up to?”\\n\\n I said, “Well, you know, I worked on this study with Stan Shawhan.”\\n\\n Stan tragically died, by the way. He had died of a heart attack, but it was basically because he had diabetes. A great tragedy.\\n\\n So I was talking about that and how this opportunity to implant small spacecraft to NASA was lost. And Ed’s sitting there and I’m getting more and more impassioned about this, and he says, “You know, there’s a job opening up at NASA.”\\n\\n And I said, “Well, what do you mean?”\\n\\n And he said, “Well, I have it on good account that [Dr.] Shelby Tilford is on his way out at NASA, and his job is open or will be open shortly. Are you interested?”\\n\\n I said, “Well—.” I had been elected to the National Academy the year before and I was at loose ends. I didn’t know what to do with myself anymore, because I had achieved the research goal of my life ten years early or something. So I was looking for something new to do, and I was asking myself the question, “Well, how come all my friends are heads of—all my buddies are now heading up big Space Science institutions? What’s wrong with me?” So I said to Ed, “Yes, I guess I’m interested.”\\n\\n I don’t know, a month or so later I’m in my office and I’m working on this book, and I literally have finished this book on the word processor and typing in the dedication and all of that, and I get this phone call, and it was about four o’clock in the afternoon. It was seven o’clock in Washington. It was [Daniel S.] Dan Goldin, and he said, “Charlie, I’ve been talking to Ed Frieman. I want you to come to Washington.”\\n\\n I said, “Well, you mean to run Astrophysics or Space Science?” But eventually [that became] [Dr. Wesley T.] Wes Huntress’ [Jr.] job. We talked about that.\\n\\n He said, “No, no, no. I want you to run Earth Science.”\\n\\n “Earth Science?”\\n\\n “Yes.”\\n\\n I said, “We’re going to have to talk about this.” And I said, “I’m coming to [Washington] D.C. in about two weeks.”\\n\\n There was going to be a major National Academy symposium on the changing environment for physics, and I was actually chairing that symposium or chairing a big part of that, at least. In any case, I said I would slip out and go talk to him. It would have to be late-ish in the afternoon. And this was held out at that big conference center out in Virginia. I forget the name of it. It doesn’t really matter.\\n\\n So at four o’clock, the man that I came to know as Charles came in the black car and picked me up, and I walk out of this conference, full attention of everybody. Here’s this limousine picking me up, taking me off someplace. Well, it was to see Dan Goldin.\\n\\n Dan’s apartment then was in the Watergate apartment complex, and he wanted to meet me there. So he greets me there, and he’s got on blue jeans, a black shirt and cowboy boots, and he’s wearing dark glasses, inside. The dark glasses were because he was recovering from a detached retina, and he was at home because he couldn’t do anything at all, couldn’t even go to work. So there he was, going absolutely crazy, but he looked like a Hollywood producer and not the NASA Administrator. So this was my first true intimate discussion with Dan. We sat down and passed out Coke [Coca-Cola], and about five hours later we’d gone through everything: the need for small spacecraft, what was happening in the Space Science program, how you couple science to technology development, and so forth.\\n\\n Then at the end of that time, he said, “I want you to eventually be my Associate Administrator.”\\n\\n And I said, “You know, this is a radical step. I’m from outside the field. I’ve worked in a different field. I don’t know. I’ve been in the Institute for Geophysics at UCLA and I’ve been around these folks, but I’ve never worked in their field.”\\n\\n And he said two things. First, “You are going to have to make some very tough decisions about downsizing the Earth Observing System. It will be easier for you if you don’t have to do it for colleagues that you’ve known for thirty years.” And the second thing he said was, “This office deals with some of the most controversial issues that NASA has.” I think he mentioned global warming, ozone depletion, desertification. “And there is a whole group of people in the Congress who believe that the scientists have cooked up these problems and are crying wolf and they’re doing it to feather their own research nests.” I’m paraphrasing a little bit.\\n\\n And I said, “Well, why me?”\\n\\n And he said, “Well, you are a first-class scientist with an impeccable pedigree.” This I remember almost word for word, “I want the world to know that science is in charge of Mission to Planet Earth.”\\n\\n So with that kind of backing, and when the NASA Administrator says that to you, you say, “Yes, sir. I’ll do it.” [Laughs]\\n\\n So then it got very sticky, and the reason is that actually my predecessor was very competent, Shelby Tilford, and a very good administrator, but Dan didn’t trust him, and Shelby was resisting the downsizing of the EOS [Earth Observing System], which looked like it was budgetarily required. Dan and Shelby just did not get along. So Dan makes this announcement of me as Associate Administrator, and as it would happen, it came out on the same day that Shelby was being honored by his colleagues for his contributions to the Global Change Research Program, which were very great, actually, in sort of conceptualizing it.\\n\\n So you can imagine what happened. The reaction was profound and very fast, and a group of scientists from the field called [Vice President Albert] Al Gore [Jr.] and said, “Look, this guy that Goldin wants is not from the field, and this is too important to be left to an amateur.” So Gore then put a halt to the nomination, and I was in limbo for about a three-month period. I had just sort of burned some bridges at the university. The university would have taken me back and so forth. It was still not a good thing. So now the question was, what to do.\\n\\n So the first thing to do was to, on my part, call up all the leaders of the field and ask them what they thought should be done. And as I called the scientific leaders of the field, there was, in fact, a fair degree of agreement about downsizing the multiple small spacecraft approach and so forth. There was a fair amount of agreement about that, not 100 percent, but there was a lot.\\n\\n So then the other part of it was how could you assure the world that there was a competent scientist at the top of Mission to Planet Earth who knew the field. So I then suggested that we do something that the university would do, and that is put together a little search committee and search for the director of the Science Division, which was a job that was then open, and that we would do a national search, a national informal search, if you will. And then Goldin ran this through, I guess, OSTP [Office of Science and Technology Policy], and this was all agreed to. So then there were three people on the search committee: Dan Goldin; [Dr. D. James] Jim Baker, who was the NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] Administrator; and then there was [Robert T.] Bob Watson, who was the OSTP Director for Environmental Science, and former NASA person.\\n\\n So then we started considering—and I was working with them full time—we started considering the candidates, and it’s amazing when the White House calls and says, “Would you be interested in accepting this job?” It was the White House doing the calling. It would be surprising the number of people that said they would be kind of interested.\\n\\n And we ended up with two candidates. One was [Dr.] Mark [R.] Abbott, who’s now dean up at Oregon State. And we actually offered the job to Mark, but his life position was such that he couldn’t have spent full time at it, and it was going to be difficult. So it finally did not work out.\\n\\n But then we offered the job to [Dr. Robert C.] Bob Harriss, who did become the Director of the Science Division. Bob is now at NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research] in Colorado, and Bob was the card-carrying first-class scientist, you know, Grade-A earth scientist. So people then had the sense that it was okay. And by about November or December, this conversation having taken place in Dan’s apartment in late August of [19]’93, it looked like it was going to go through. They talked to Gore and whoever else needed to be talked to, and then the whole thing was confirmed.\\n\\n At that point, I started getting people from Hughes [Electronics Corporation] in Los Angeles calling me up. They wanted to talk to me right away, and I began to discover some of the difficulties with EOSDIS [Earth Observing System Data and Information System], which we never solved, not on my watch.\\n\\n So then I turned up in Washington [D. C.] on January 6th of 1994. The other part of it was, before that, there was a big EOS review that I was invited to as the Associate Administrator designee, and this was probably in December of ’93. While I was in Washington, Dan made sure that I did the right visits over at the White House. So first I talked to Watson, who had been part of this, and Bob Watson said, “Are you sure you want this job? You’re going to have to make a lot of tough decisions.”\\n\\n And I said, “Well, what do you mean?”\\n\\n He said, “Well, you have to cut the program’s budget.” You know, it was like $12 billion at that point. There’s no way that they were going to pay for that.\\n\\n So I said, “Well, okay.”\\n\\n And then I went on to [Lionel Skipwith] Skip Johns, who was another Associate Director for Science and Technology, the other part of OSTP, and Skip basically said the same message, “You’re going to have a very hard time here, and politically it’s going to be quite a difficult job.”\\n\\n Finally, I got to [Dr. John H.] Jack Gibbons, who was then the OSTP director, and Jack said something totally different. He said, “Is your wife coming with you?”\\n\\n And I said, “Well, no, actually she’s got a practice in Los Angeles. We’re going to commute.”\\n\\n He said, “You know, we’ve got a lot of people like that in OSTP, and it works for about two years. It’s kind of nice, you know, if your kids are grown and so forth. You can fly back and forth, romantic weekends, little vacations and so forth. You’ll make it work. But after about two years, there will be a crisis. And then if you can work your way through that, then you’re home free.” Two years came and the crisis came and we worked our way through it and we’re home free. So that was my introduction to NASA. I then took over at Mission to Planet Earth.\\n\\n The other thing that Dan did, which I thought was wonderful, was he understood that I was a fine scientist. I was not of the field. I had been on all sorts of Academy panels and stuff, but I had never managed a $1.6 billion program. They engineered an IPA [Intergovernmental Personnel Act] agreement for me, by the way, and for reasons that I don’t quite know how they did it, but I had all the executive authority to sign. So that even though I was an IPA, I was in charge of all the dollars in that division, and I don’t know how they engineered that.\\n\\n So there I was managing this thing with no experience at formal management. So what he did was he gave me two of the best damn deputies that anybody could want. One was [William F.] Bill Townsend, and Bill is now the deputy out at [NASA] Goddard [Space Flight Center], and Bill is a true blue NASA engineer. He went to Virginia Tech [Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University], stayed for thirty years at Goddard and finally at [NASA] Headquarters, and was as honest as the day is long and would give you a completely objective engineering view, that you have this option, you have that option, this is how the teams will work together, here are the risks. And he would do all his homework, and he was the main interface for Goddard Space Flight Center.\\n\\n The other one was [Michael B.] Mike Mann, and Mike was of a different type. He was a classic NASA management manager on the personnel side and on the institutional side.\\n\\n So I had an engineering manager and I had an institutional manager, and basically the three of us made the decisions, not just me. The decisions that were ours to make we made together. If it hadn’t been for this two-deputy system, I think I couldn’t have managed. And it worked, I thought, quite well, and my job clearly was to interface with the science community as we worked through all the issues about EOS.\\n\\n Of course, the first thing I had to do is learn the science, and there I was very lucky, because, you know, if you’re sitting on top of the world’s largest environmental science program in terms of dollars, you’d be surprised how many good scientists come and talk to you and how many of them have to disclose not only what they already know, but what they want to do, which is more important.\\n\\n And lots of people gave me tutorials. Wherever I went, they’d sit me down and give me special sessions on the science, and probably after three or four months I had enough to go on. After all, there were all those Academy committees and there were all the NASA interior committees, all of which had scientists on them, and my job was to interface with them and gradually figure out how to get the science done.\\n\\n The problem was a very big one. When the global warming emergency first appeared, in some sense the country overreacted, and the first thing they proposed was a series of six huge eighteen to twenty-four experiment spacecraft, each taking up the full weightlifting capacity of the Shuttle bay. And this was going to be the twelve to eighteen-billion-dollar program to the run-out. As it turned out, those eighteen to twenty-four experiments were proven to be very expensive to integrate. Each one of them was basically on the edge of the state of the art in terms of resolution, technology, a NASA special. But they couldn’t manage the engineering. It was too complicated and the costs were getting out of hand. And, in addition, we had an Administration that was committed to balancing the budget, so they weren’t going to look at that.\\n\\n So we had to figure out how to downsize those experiments, and I had to figure out, as we downsize, how much of the true science—I’ve got to be careful—how much of the science we could retrieve and get done at a lower cost. And part of the strategy was to go to much smaller spacecraft. A Shuttle launch is half a billion dollars, and so if you can go to smaller spacecraft, you go to a smaller launch vehicle, and everything scales down. In many ways it’s cheaper and more robust to have small launches than one giant one, more robust because if you lose one of the five, you’ve lost only 20 percent of your science, and cheaper because of the launch and other—the other aspect of it was that you could focus the missions’ goals more clearly and the engineering became less complicated because they didn’t have requirements conflict. That was a tremendous burden.\\n\\n But you had to get through all of that while convincing the science community that the project wasn’t going to hell in a handbasket, or the policy community, that we weren’t abandoning our commitment to key issues of global warming.\\n\\n The de-scoping took place in phases, and I can’t remember them all at the present time, how they actually unfolded, but we made first cuts to what are now the TERRA and Aqua spacecraft, and those were still the last big spacecraft that Office of Earth Sciences will ever build. They are billion-dollar craft each. But they were to be launched on an Atlas [rocket], and they are. Then we decided that we’d go to Delta-scale launches and go to missions in the two- to four-hundred-million-dollar range, and more of them. So at one point what had been six missions became twenty-four, but what had been twelve to eighteen billion became six in the run-out.\\n\\n During all of this de-scoping, which was kind of relentless, every few months there was another call to restructure the program, the question I had at all times was two things. The political question was, when would you arrive at a budget level that was sustainable? And the other question was, how do you know, in a given project, when you’ve cut enough? Because if you cut out too much, then you lose reliability, robustness, and all of that. As the Mars Program, the failures, subsequently indicated, that the faster, better, cheaper philosophy had gone too far. And I was very worried about that issue, even with Mission to Planet Earth. But I think at the end of the day, when I left the office, the budget for the program was stabilized and it’s remained about the same. So I think I achieved my primary goal, which is to stabilize the budget and give the world a comprehensive Earth Observing System of some form. I think I achieved that. I think people will say that a good deal of the science was kept.\\n\\n Some people will say, subsequent to that time, I left [Dr.] Ghassem [R.] Asrar, my successor, several serious problems. One of them was, I cut too much money out of—we cut too much out of the budget for EOSDIS, the data management system, and particularly the data acquisition system for the TERRA satellite. And Ghassem had to struggle with the fact that we had done it too much damage, and I’m not sure he’s appreciated all that I did, because he had to clean up. But he’s doing just fine now.\\n\\n The other thing that he did that disappointed me but may have been the right thing to do was that we were originally going to plan three cycles of missions to go for a nominal fifteen years, and basically he stopped it after the first cycle. But, of course, just like Van Allen said, these missions will stay up for much more than five years, their nominal lifetime, and they’ll continue to give some sort of data over a long period of time. They will gradually decline, and in the meantime, they’ll all be up and running.\\n\\n At the end of three years, my IPA was up. The university wanted me back, and I went back to UCLA. I didn’t want to be an ordinary professor anymore; didn’t seem like such a great job after I’d been dealing with generals and diplomats and the whole big wide world. And so I applied for and got the job as Executive Vice Chancellor at UCLA, which was the number two officer there. That’s a big operation. They’re about a three-billion-dollar-a-year university. It was a fine job for somebody, but I had fallen so much in love with the science that Mission to Planet Earth did and I felt so committed to working with issues like global warming, in particular, that when this job came up, this is a little jewel of an institution, but it is one of the world’s leading scientific institutions in these fields, I just took it, and I’ve never regretted it, budget crisis or not.\\n\\n I think I never would have done it without NASA. NASA changed everything. I was an ordinary professor, very self-centered, very focused on accomplishing—you know, “The goals of my field are my goals,” and I got to NASA, and suddenly within a few months I had to explain to the world why it was important to do this, convince them, that I had to think about how science is connected to society and how science is connected to the development of environmental policy. I had to think about how science is financed. I had to think about the politics of it. And it was kind of amazing. Here I was in middle age, and then suddenly all of this information and this new way of looking at things, all of it came in in the space of about a year. It’s just amazing and just a complete transformation.\\n\\n A good deal of it was Dan Goldin. Goldin had his fans and his detractors within NASA. I was one of his fans. He was very rough on people, and he was very impatient with people who resisted the direction in which he was going, and he was very rough on people that he didn’t think lived up to what he thought their potential was, and rough on institutions as well that weren’t performing. But since he picked me and I picked him, we didn’t have that problem.\\n\\n My wife, a psychologist, told me one way to handle Dan Goldin is when—he was constantly pushing for change and constantly pushing for innovation and constantly pushing me to reduce the budget and get more science out of it, and he would have these ideas, and a lot of people would immediately react. They would say, “Boss, we can’t do that.” And Ellen told me, she said, “Nuh-uh. Tell him that you’ll study it, you’ll look at it, and that you will look at every faster, better, cheaper idea that he has.”\\n\\n And so that’s what we did. I’d bring it to my loyal engineer and wonderful one, Bill Townsend. Townsend would call up Goddard Space Flight Center. Goddard reported to me. Townsend would call up Goddard Space Flight Center and say, “We’ve got another one.” So then they would study these ideas, and the answer would come back often—not always—“We can move in this direction. We can go this far, but beyond this, the risk is unacceptable to us.”\\n\\n So then my job was to take Bill to Dan Goldin and sit there and mediate, and so long as Dan saw you moving in the direction that he was interested in seeing you go, then he would relent if you said. “We can’t go any further.” That’s the way we dealt with it. Of course, that didn’t mean that three months later he still wasn’t on another idea about how to cut our budget. Many of these were very innovative and involved new technology and the assumption of risk, and I was always attracted to the creative part of this. So I was predisposed to hope that these ideas would work. This is my question about when would we cut enough. Whenever Goddard sucked it up and came back and said, “We can’t do this,” then I would back that and just say, “We can only go so far—this now.”\\n\\n So I think that for me, that was the key. Although I saw him do it to other people, he never once raised his voice with me. Never once. We always had a good—and we had long discussions. There were occasions in which we would get in the NASA plane and have to go someplace, and he’d want a four-hour discussion of where Mission to Planet Earth was going. So I’d get on the plane with him, fly with him once to New Mexico to give some report, fly with him back. We had eight hours. We’d discuss the whole future of the program, and always in a very philosophical, creative way.\\n\\n So I was very pleased to work for that man. I saw him devastate other people, saw it happen, and that was very unfortunate. But it never happened with me. I realize, now that I’m part of the NASA Advisory Council, that Goldin actually controlled it and was effective with about half of NASA, and that was the science side. And his greatest desire, I think, was to be known as a great enabler of science, and, in fact, an innovator in science or an innovator for NASA science, I guess the best way to say it. He’s not going to win the Nobel Prize, but he wanted everybody to know that his greatest thing was to make sure that good science happened at NASA. That’s what he told me he wanted from Mission to Planet Earth, and I actually believed him, and I had lots and lots of flexibility to put in little dollars into good science projects. Never a question on that.\\n\\n But he didn’t tame the Human Space Flight side. And to be quite frank, with all your—I know you’re from Texas, but Johnson [Space Center] beat him politically, and now the present Administrator is having to deal with that issue, and it’s a tough one. Even tougher. And there is the politics, high NASA politics and high government politics. And we can talk about his problematical relationship with George [W. S.] Abbey. I don’t want to say much about it, except that it was certainly there and obvious to all of us, and I didn’t participate very much in that.\\n\\n So I think Dan did a grand job. Office of Space Science did even better than Office of Earth Science under Goldin, added some very great programs. We did well. We stabilized our budget. We solved a major political problem in a very delicate area, and nobody questions that NASA should be doing work on climate any longer. And so we did our job, and he did a fine job with those two codes.\\n\\n The other thing he did, I thought, that was truly exciting, at one point when I became Associate Administrator I had a good friend who’s [at] the University of Maryland. His name is [Dr.] Roald Sagdeev, and Roald was the former Director of the Space Research Institute in Moscow, and a major figure in science and was an immigrant and had come to Maryland. When Roald heard I had this job, he came to me, he said, “You know how exciting it would be if the NASA Administrator were to hold science seminars at Headquarters? That would really tell something about what this agency is standing for, and you’d bring all sorts of people in from Washington to make a big difference.”\\n\\n So somewhere early in my job, Dan comes to me and France [A.] Cordova and Wes Huntress. France was Chief Scientist and Wes Huntress was A.A. [Associate Administrator] for [Office of] Space Science. And he says, “I’ve got to give a major talk before the American Geophysical Union, thousands of people, and I want to talk about an innovative program for NASA science. I want to find a theme that will knit together all of NASA science, the science that we do in Human Space Flight, earth science, astronomical science.”\\n\\n So we helped compose a speech for him, which he gave, a typical Goldin speech pushing the university community to do far more, to take far more chances with technology development and get far better data and not be so conservative, and he laid out a vision. But then he was still dissatisfied. He hadn’t found his theme. So I can remember—and he talked to France Cordova that we should actually plan. He wanted a theme.\\n\\n So France calls us in, Wes and myself and [Dr.] Harry [C.] Holloway, who was the A.A. for Code U [Office of Biological and Physical Research] then, and France calls us into her office about four o’clock in the afternoon and she says, “We’re not leaving this office till we have a plan to get that theme.” So about ten o’clock that evening, we had the following plan, that the Administrator would run a series of Administrator’s Seminars at Headquarters, that we would invite world leading scientists in from all over the world, and we’d ask them to talk about their field and what they thought NASA ought to do in this field.\\n\\n At the end of this time, maybe once every six weeks or so, a dozen of the seminars, at the end of this time we’d have a pretty good education and so would he. And he committed to going to every one. They were put on NASA TV. He actually moderated the discussions with the scientists on stage. These were Nobel laureates and other types of that rank, and Dan was sitting there asking them questions about their field and where it was going.\\n\\n Well, it was pretty clear that about three or four seminars in, that he had already converged on what he thought the theme was. That was astrobiology. We know NASA has an astrobiology program, and it is now considered one of the more innovative things that any government administrator’s ever done for science, which was to set up a new discipline. And he kind of just did it, and he used his power and the bully pulpit and the fact, actually, that France and Wes and I and Harry were all kind of behind it.\\n\\n Dan’s view was, you know, the search for life on other planets and the ability of life to live in space, the Human Space Flights, the preservation of life on Earth, which is Mission to Planet Earth, all of that tied everything together. And so it did, actually, and it was a very innovative program. This was one of the cases where his pushing everybody to be better and to be organizing to a different configuration actually worked. It put some money behind it, and it’s now a going program. They got a Nobel laureate to head it up, and it’s off and running.\\n\\n The next thing that happened was that he sent us to Texas Medical Center [Houston, Texas]. We actually thought that such an institute [Human Space Flight] would work very well in Texas because of the culture of Texas and its commitment to Human Space Flight and all that. We wanted a standalone institute, but working closely with Johnson. That was the thought that we had. Johnson said, “No, no, no. It’s going to be like the Lunar and Planetary Sciences [Institute] on us and we’ve got to control it.” This was not what we had in mind, and so that idea died.\\n\\n Then the next idea was—I had to recuse myself from this discussion. The next idea was to go to [NASA] Ames [Research Center], which had a first-class science group, and still runs the astrobiology program, that Ames should work with Stanford [University] and [University of California] Berkeley and build up a joint university-government center. This is an idea a few years ahead of its time. But the then-Director for Ames decided that he would kill this idea by overloading it and putting 500 NASA personnel on it, when probably the right number was about 60 from each, or 60 in total or 120, some much smaller number of just scientists in a standalone institute. And I was pretty sure—but I wasn’t part of the negotiation, pretty sure that that was to head off the idea of a separately governed science institute on Ames’ land.\\n\\n Goldin finally achieved that goal for Ames when [Henry] Harry McDonald came in, because now they have Carnegie-Mellon [University] on the Ames campus and they have a cooperative program with UC [University of California] Santa Cruz, and astrobiology now is being run as a distributive science program, a dozen university participants with its headquarters at Ames. So the issues of control got solved, not through any effort of mine. But I thought that was one of the most interesting things that we tried to do. That was sort of a service that I gave as a scientist rather than as Mission to Planet Earth. It was just helping NASA out altogether.\\n\\n I don’t know, I’ve wandered. Is there a question you want me to come back—you’ve got that list." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, we can start going through some of these. With Mission to Planet Earth, if you don’t mind, we can go back and just talk about the goals and the mission of the Mission to Planet Earth and some of the more global ramifications of the science, with the weather satellites and the agreements that you formed with other countries. Did you have a part in any of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s very interesting. NASA’s Earth-observing capacity from spacecraft, because the spacecraft observe the whole Earth at its surface, NASA is especially adapted to dealing with environmental issues of a global scale, of which the granddaddy of them all, of course, is global warming.\\n\\n Much earlier than that, NASA had built, and still builds, all the satellites for the NOAA weather system, and much of the thinking for the Earth Observing System was to do for climate what they had done for the weather system, which was to build a regular series of spacecraft that come out and monitor the climate, monitor the weather.\\n\\n But the Earth observing, for example, through Landsat got NASA into some sticky issues like the assessment from space of the depletion of the rainforest in the Amazon and in Indonesia and elsewhere. It was one thing to make the measurement; it was another thing to do the science and make the assessment; and it was a third thing to handle the political ramifications of something in as touchy an area where there were extreme statements going back and forth on either side of the issue, from the NGOs on one side and, shall we say, mostly the countries and the logging interests on the other, and how to steer a course. Headquarters’ job and my job was to steer a course that said what science says about this, in full awareness of all the political and policy conflicts, but stick to the science. So in any difficult times, the mantra that I use [is that] the best politics is “good science.”\\n\\n So we [NASA] did all the remote-sensing observation. There was a very innovative satellite, TOPEX/Poseidon, which measures the surface of the ocean to one-centimeter accuracy from an altitude of 1,300 kilometers. Now, with that kind of accuracy, when the water warms up, it expands a little bit, and so warm water makes a little hump on the surface of the ocean about a centimeter or two high that you can measure. So when the El Niño develops in the western Pacific off the coast of Indonesia, the water is high there, and then as the El Niño warm water propagates across the Pacific, the satellite tracks it and predicts and also sees when it’s going to hit North and South America, watches the warm water propagating. So there’s very innovative work.\\n\\n NASA did all the remote sensing for all the environmental problems that remote sensing can be applied to. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t one that they missed that was technologically within reach. I mean, there are things that they couldn’t do, but if they could do it, they were involved in it. So that gave us then a role to play in every single global environmental problem: ozone depletion, desertification, ocean circulation, global warming, atmospheric pollution. And so it was a very important job.\\n\\n But it was also the case that remote sensing alone and the provision of all this data typically didn’t solve scientific problems. It wasn’t an automatic solution. So that all of this data that was being generated by the spacecraft needed to be converted into scientific knowledge. Some of that NASA paid for. Mission to Planet Earth had a 250-million-dollar-a-year science program, which is half of the NSF [National Science Foundation] entire geoscience program, and this $250 million was spent building an interdisciplinary network of research called earth systems science, which NASA basically, and Shelby Tilford did this—NASA actually invented this concept of earth systems science, along with a few other people. But because of the perspective of the spacecraft, we could see how the pieces of the Earth fit together, and we were interested in studying the contemporary era; that is to say, as it was fifty years ago and as it will be fifty years from now and how all the systems interact with one another—the Earth, the air, oceans, land, ice. And we had satellites for each one.\\n\\n But we’re [i.e., NASA] only a piece of the problem and only a piece of the solution. There are other parts of the problem. You had to deliver the data to people. So that meant that we needed a very advanced system to deliver all this imagery to the users, and that was called the EOSDIS. That program was an albatross from the beginning. It was too ambitious. The idea of an end-to-end system that one contractor could build was a mistake. But nonetheless, NASA had the responsibility, which it’s gradually fulfilling, of delivering giant amounts of data into the hands of scientific and practical users. That was the second part of the story.\\n\\n The third part of the story was that the remote-sensing data alone and by itself, without being supplemented with data from the ground, wasn’t going to solve the scientific problem. It’s pretty obvious, for example, in the ocean that a satellite can see the surface, but it can’t see ten feet below, twenty feet below, and people who model the ocean need to know about the currents and other behavior, temperature and so on, at depth. So you needed other measurements. That was just to get a comprehensive picture of the science. And then finally, you needed all this data to be analyzed by multidisciplinary teams of scientists in general. That was an organizational problem. So that was the scientific goal.\\n\\n Now, you asked me about the international work. Clearly, the Earth Observing System, as NASA had conceived of it, was a partnership in which about one-third of all the data would be collected by either the Europeans or the Japanese, and it would all be integrated together and ideally made available to the research community and that they would guarantee to do a piece of the job and so would the Japanese. And all of this was coordinated through something called the Committee on Earth Observing Satellites, which had been formed about ten years earlier and was a group of, I think there are now eighteen countries that do Earth observing from space, and they coordinate and they try to make sure that they don’t both launch an identical satellite in the same time period. If you want to do it, fill in the data gap later. And so they originally had discussions like that, that were just the coordination of programs. Even that was hard.\\n\\n So then when I came into Mission to Planet Earth, they had got to the stage where they actually could list every country’s program and every instrument that would be flown, and the goals of every instrument and the specifications. So that a person wanted to know what would happen five or eight years from now in the field could look at this handbook that they developed and see that the French—“Oh, the French would be getting that data at that point,” or EOS will get it. And, in fact, EOS was a good part, maybe half or two-thirds, of that overall effort, if you include the foreign partners that we had made specific agreements with.\\n\\n I took a look at that, and I said to myself, you know, this is all very wonderful, but this is the space community talking to itself, and because I knew, and because we all knew from our EOS experience, that that data alone would not suffice to solve scientific problems. What was needed was an effort also to coordinate the collection of the needed supplementary data from ground-based or in-ocean instrumentation. And so the question was, how could you make this happen?\\n\\n So what I noticed was that as part of this CEOS, Committee on Earth Observing Satellites, planning process, the Japanese had put into place some very ambitious plans, where on each of several major spacecraft they had lots of space still open, and they were saying international collaboration goes here. So they were advertising that they had a ride available for major instruments for foreign partners. And this was a challenge, you know, for coordination.\\n\\n I used this challenge, and I went to Bob Watson, who was Director of the Environment at OSTP, and I said, “We’ve got to respond to this. The United States has to have a strategy for international collaboration that goes beyond EOS.” Bob was Chair of the Committee on the Environment and Natural Resources of the NSTC, and they made me chair of an observations sub-panel with a large interagency group on it from NOAA. NOAA, NASA, DOE [Department of Energy], NSF, and Navy were the big players, but there was also EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] and typical NSTC kind of production. We just said, “There’s going to be another CEOS meeting in six or eight month’s time, and we’ve got to have a white paper.”\\n\\n So basically, Pierre Morel, who was then consulting with us at NASA, and I, with some help from Lisa Shaffer, actually wrote this white paper and, of course, had it reviewed through the interagency process, and I delivered it on Bob Watson’s desk at OSTP, and about three or four days afterward, before I was to leave for this CEOS meeting, I got the approval.\\n\\n This was a White House policy document, and it called for an integrated global observing strategy in which the satellite agencies would work with the other international groupings to try to tie together the fairly well coordinated set of space observations with a far less well coordinated set of ground-based observing capacity and data management. And that now goes by the name IGOS [Integrated Global Observing Strategy]. It exists. It still exists. The various groupings from the World Meteorological Organization, they’re talking with the satellite people. It’s a burdensome and slow discussion because of the size of the global effort, but at least there’s a framework of discussion in which people from the space science, space part of the earth science world, talk to the people who are dealing at the international coordination level with the ground-based part.\\n\\n Even if they fail to achieve tangible coordination, the existence of this organization is an assertion of the breadth of the types of data that you will need to make credible predictions about global change in the future, and it’s put that broad understanding forth at the international level. So it’s still out there. They still have IGOS meetings, and there are IGOS partnerships. In ocean science, I know we’re part of one.\\n\\n There’s an experiment called the GODAE, the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment, in which NASA and French satellite data on altimetry of the ocean will be combined by data that, as it turns out, Scripps participates in collecting from little automated floats and probes that probe the inner ocean, so we’ll have it above and below the surface. We’ve combined the two together. And then there will be data management and modeling to tie them together. One day we all believe that the combination of satellites and floats will make an operational long-term system that will monitor the health and state of our oceans. And that’s probably the first tangible project that the IGOS partnership develops.\\n\\n It’s still to be carried out, but NOAA continues to fund the floats part of this. NASA continued with the TOPEX/Poseidon follow-on, the Jason spacecraft, and NASA and NOAA are talking about making altimetry a long-term operational program for NOAA so that this kind of data will be assured, and NOAA, at the same time, is funding the floats and have built a big international partnership in a number of countries to deploy these floats.\\n\\n So now we have an actual experiment that coordinates space and in situ data into the same data stream, tangible output. It all started with a little policy paper that Bob Watson signed off on. I mean, some of these ideas were there beforehand, but the actual political, big political, science political emphasis, I think, came because the White House pushed this idea." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You touched on, a minute ago or earlier, about the issue of global warming and some of the hot buttons that were going on that you had to deal with. Did you have to specifically deal with groups that were saying what Dan Goldin told you, that scientists were just making this up to get more money, more funding, or did you have to specifically deal with any of those type of issues?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think the more complex dealing, I had to deal with congressmen who listened to those groups, and they would also listen to me.\\n\\n But in a slightly different area I can explain a little bit how the sensitivity works out. The Chairman of the House Science Committee in those days was a very powerful gentleman named Robert [Smith] Walker, who in retirement is still prominent in Republican politics. He’s from Pennsylvania. One day NASA Goddard published a new result and there’s a press release, and the result said that one of their satellites had just completely reverified our understanding of ozone depletion, it was definitely due to human activity and that you could observe the ozone circulating and explain it with the measurements from the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, UARS.\\n\\n So Mr. Walker calls me in, and on the way down Dan says to me, or before I go he says, “Is that work peer-reviewed?”\\n\\n And I said, “Sure. And we didn’t do the press release until the actual paper came out in the AGU [American Geophysical Union] and the Journal of Geophysical Research.”\\n\\n He said, “Okay.”\\n\\n So I go to Mr. Walker, and he’s very nice. But then finally he says, “Tell me about that paper.” I tell him a little bit. And he wants to know, is it peer-reviewed.\\n\\n And I said, “Yes.”\\n\\n He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what my problem is. Every time you guys publish a paper on this topic and on global warming, about two weeks after you publish a paper I’ve got people in my office that want me to do things that I don’t want to do, and they’re telling me stuff and I don’t know what to say to them.”\\n\\n So the warning was unmistakable: make sure that you don’t go out on a limb on any of these issues that you talk about published data. And the other warning was: don’t go out making a big deal about it; just publish it. That’s the way I interpreted it. That didn’t stop us from writing press releases. My belief was that if you understand something and the world needs to know it and it’s, in your best judgment, correct, then it’s important to get it out there, because all sorts of people are concerned and need to know. But it did make me be very careful about being scientifically as honest as I could be and then try to make us as honest as we could be. And I think NASA did a pretty job, on balance.\\n\\n So in the global warming area, what we had was two kinds of problems. There was a growing consensus at that time, but not yet complete, that humans were, in fact, involved in the global warming that is preceding apace. At that time, I think the intergovernmental panel on climate change was saying that there is a discernable human influence on the climate. I think in their first report they said, you know, “Quite frankly, it’s a very plausible hypothesis. Every scientist will tell you that if you’re accumulating greenhouse gases, the Earth will warm up, on balance. But if you’re looking for specific smoking-gun data, we don’t see it.” That was their first report.\\n\\n Then the second report, which came out on my watch, during my watch at NASA—this is a U.N. [United Nations] panel and 500 scientists, they take two years to write these assessments—the panel came out and said there’s a discernable human impact on climate. And this slight change from, you know, “Quite frankly we don’t see the evidence, but it’s highly plausible,” to, “We’re beginning to see some evidence” created a major change in the attitudes in the international community, less so in the United States.\\n\\n Now, there were groups that were opposed to this view, and there were two kinds. One was something called, I believe, the Global Climate Coalition, which is the group that was funded by various industrial contributions, and there were about ten or so scientists who were a part of that group. Some of them were highly reputable. There was Fred Seitz, who’s still with us. He’s ninety-five years old, former President of the Academy. [Dr.] Ed David, a former Presidential Science Advisor. These people were skeptics. They didn’t believe in the scientific consensus.\\n\\n The Global Climate Coalition also had second-class scientists associated with it. Two of them stand out in my recollection: [Patrick J.] Pat Michaels and [Dr.] S. Fred Singer. These people were on point to counter with science, or have science arguments [against] the kinds of consensus statements that the U.N. panel was putting out. They got equal time in the media, and so the media, with their ethos of finding conflict, and illuminating the issue through conflict, had amplified the opinions of a small but vocal minority to the same level as a large but not very vocal majority. So there’s profound conflict, and a lot of people thought that it was junk science, and you would read this all the time, that the kind of scientific work that’s being done is junk.\\n\\n Then the other kind of problem—so we had to cope with that by just saying the science is not junk. And you get all sorts of people. “Why are we spending $6 billion or all these hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the Earth Observing System?” My answer would always be, “So as to remove all doubts about the science.”\\n\\n So then the other type of problem we had was just as tough to deal with. There was a reputable and highly active scientist, [Dr.] Richard [S.] Lindzen from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], who in his own personal approach to science is a contrarian. If somebody well known says something, he’s going to say the opposite and think that he’s got a good chance of being right big because of that. So he was challenging absolutely everything that the scientific community—he was challenging every consensus statement that would come out. And Richard was as tough to deal with as anybody else, but I had to respect everything he said, so I listened to him and had to balance things out internally.\\n\\n Then there was a third group of people that thought that NASA was spending far too much money on science trying to be objective about these political hot button questions, and they were perhaps overdoing it in that area and missing a whole lot of stuff that was much more innovative out there, because we were sitting there trying to be honest arbiters of this question: is there human imprint on the global climate? And they were saying, “We’re missing a whole hell of a lot. Besides, what does it matter? The argument is what does it matter if human beings are creating climate change or it’s just happening to ourselves? It’s just happening naturally. We’re living on a very crowded planet, and the climate change now matters a lot more to a lot more people than it did before, and it’s our job to understand it, whatever the sources are. And there’s all this other stuff out there that you’re neglecting.” So you had to balance all these points of view. And, of course, it’s a shifting colloquy, you know, it goes back and forth.\\n\\n But I think that in terms of the debate, the biggest problem I had was to work with congressmen who had read the newspaper and had seen article after article saying the science was junk. Clearly it was not, but clearly, if you made a lot of extreme statements or alarmist statements, you opened yourself up to going well beyond the evidence. So you had to be extremely careful in our public statements." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You talked about launching on smaller and less expensive ways instead of putting the satellites and that sort of thing on the Shuttle. But STS-66 launched during the time that you were with Mission to Planet Earth, and that Mission was dedicated—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. There was 59 and there was 47, and those missions were—the one that I think comes from me is SRTM [Shuttle Radar Topography Mission], which is the Shuttle mission that was launched well after the work that we did. But if I recall, I remember two missions that we did. One is with the Shuttle imaging radar, SIR-C [Spacebourne Imaging Radar], which I think was 47. And then there was 59 that we did, in which we tried out a light laser altimeter and we scattered off the atmosphere. Both of these used the capacity of the Shuttle either to lift the huge antenna into orbit, in the case of the radar, or to high power in the case of the laser. These were demonstration technology experiments, and they’re expensive.\\n\\n My objection was, the Shuttle only gives you seven days, in those days. So then later after SIR-C had flown, Charles Elachi came to us with a proposal for a reflight, another 250 million bucks to the United States Government, less to Mission to Planet Earth, to refly the same imaging radar with a few changes. And I said to him basically—I was nicer than this, but the basic message was, “Haven’t reduced all the data you’ve got yet. There’s only seven days’ worth of data. It was a technology demonstration, and if you claim success, then you will have done your demonstration. If you don’t claim success, then you’ve weakened your chance for reflight. So if there’s going to be a reflight, you’ve got to do something new.” So then I didn’t quite know what to do with that, since I’d been so rough on him. But I wasn’t going to forward a simple quarter-of-a-billion-dollar request for a reflight.\\n\\n So I toss it in the hands of the National Academy of Sciences, and they, in their wisdom, appointed [Dr.] John [H.] McElroy, a former NOAA NESDIS [National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service] Administrator and now head of the Space Studies Board. They appointed John to chair this committee, and we and they did one thing that was very smart, we put foreign collaborators on it, because I was hoping that we could get a foreign collaborator to help offset the cost of this thing.\\n\\n So then JPL was put on notice and they got very creative, and they understood that there was a big truss that was down at Johnson that they could stick on the Shuttle, and then at the end of that truss they could put an Italian radar transmitter. Then we had the big one that was already on the Shuttle, and you could use this as a three-dimensional mapper and get resolved altimetry, you know, scatter from the Earth and get height resolved images as well as across the surface. You get a three-dimensional image because of the binocular vision. That was a good idea.\\n\\n So then the question was how to pay for this, and it turns out that the military had been wanting to do one of these digital topography maps for a long time. There are obvious reasons for doing it. When we told them that we could go to plus or minus 55 degrees North and get most of the populated world with this, they joined the project. So then Bill Townsend loyally put together a deal with the military, with the Italians, and with JPL, and we flew that mission. But my objection was that the science per unit dollar on that Shuttle mission just as a reflight was not worth it. The demonstration that you could do it? Yes, because that then set the way for new science. But to just repeat it, no, sir. So we didn’t do it, and I’m sort of proud of SRTM [Shuttle Radar Topography Mission].\\n\\n In the turnout, the deal with the military proved to be problematical, because the scientists are objecting to their classification. I guess there have been problems with access to the data, but the data exists, and in seven days they got a map that they didn’t think they were going to get for another ten years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think the tape is about to run out, so let’s stop for a minute." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay.\\n\\n In all of these things, you know, you never know what your own role is. It’s a huge cooperative endeavor, and especially a spacecraft is the work of thousands of people. And so when you’re sitting there at the top the question is: what is your role? And part of it is certainly to express to the outside world the value of what you’re doing and what you think you’re doing, and if you’ve got problems, you’ve got to say that as well.\\n\\n Part of it, I think, is just to make sure that at least in the people that you talk to, that there’s been enough discussion, enough ideas assessed and evaluated that it crystallizes out and the decision finally becomes obvious; everybody kind of agrees that we should go in this direction. I used to wait a little bit until I got pushed to make the decision, and then if somebody started pushing me, “When are you going to make this decision?” that meant they were all ready to go and that they were all in agreement. So part of it was timing.\\n\\n Then I think the final part of it was—and it has nothing to do with what you actually sometimes say, but that people perceive what you stand for and they will, because they’re all interested, will propose to that. So actually what you stand for and what your values are ends up determining a huge amount, but it’s all very indirect and it’s not anything that you do; it’s the way people perceive you. Obviously you have to say things all the time, but your values shine through, ultimately, and they do get expressed in the program, and my values were to get more science for the dollar and always, if I had a choice, to favor the science, and they knew that. They could have guessed it from the beginning. Right? Just from reading the CV [Curriculum Vitae].\\n\\n Now, the interesting thing about technology was that Goldin’s values were new technology for new science, and I think I told you how I dealt with that. I was delighted when new technology would produce a new capability for science. But when Goddard told me that they couldn’t follow through or there was too much risk, I also went for getting the data.\\n\\n I think I took a middle road on the technology development, and I certainly understood that if it were the case, that—and I can give you another example. Take your Landsat satellites. When I got to NASA in 1994, NASA was busy disentangling itself from a disaster of a cooperative agreement that they had made with the Air Force to build the next Landsat satellite. The Air Force wanted to put on an extremely high resolution imager and NASA would put on a lower resolution standard Landsat imagery on the same spacecraft, and the Air Force was going to pay for a good deal of this. And they just bailed out. So then the [later] resulting mission [cost], which was called Landsat 7, is now Landsat 7, I remember, Landsat 7 was $700 million. I don’t know what it proved in the run-out, but that was the number I had in my mind. In those days, the Landsat program was outside the Earth Observing System. So suddenly NASA’s going to be asked to eat several hundred million dollars more in cost, and yet the Landsat user community was demanding that we continue this data stream, which had gone on since the mid 1970s.\\n\\n So Landsat 7 became a kind of albatross. It was very expensive. Landsat 5 had been run by NOAA, operated by NOAA, and Landsat 6, I believe, failed. So there we were with 7 and $700 million dollars, practical-user community, not a research-user community, by and large, and a great deal of expense. So the question was how to deal with that, and we decided to take it into the Earth Observing System and it would be part of the Earth Observing System. That was thing number one.\\n\\n Thing number two, I discovered that the technology for the Landsat instrument had not evolved much, and so it was a big instrument. And worse that than, it was on a gimbal that rocked back and forth like this [indicates rocking motion with hand], so they could focus it and frame it, and this required a big structure. Then the big structure required a big launch vehicle, and soon you were at 700 million bucks. And so Goldin was livid, “I’m not going to fly that damn Landsat 7. It’s too expensive.”\\n\\n And then he went to Congress and sort of talked to George [Edward] Brown [Jr.] and several other people in Congress, and he came back and said, “They won’t let me not fly it. The data is too valuable.” He was a very acute politician. He listened to every political voice and tried to balance it all out. So we had to do something, and I didn’t know how to deal with it.\\n\\n So he said, “Well, there are these people that have got very small short focal length—.” This other thing was the camera with long focal length. “Short focal-length cameras that will do the same thing and they’re electronically steered. So why don’t you look at those.” So we called in, I believe, the Mitre Corporation, who had been doing some of these instruments, I guess. They’d been working for the black community. So they came in and gave us a presentation on all the advantages, that we could go to a small spacecraft, etc., etc.\\n\\n Then we went to the user community and we sort of started talking about small spacecraft, Landsat replacement observations, and the user community got extremely nervous, “It’s unreliable. We don’t know how this works. You can’t prove that it’s the same data, and my business depends on having a continuity of data.” And it was quite clear that the user community wouldn’t have enough faith in the system if NASA had just announced that Landsat 8 or whatever was going to be new technology. It wasn’t going to work. They wouldn’t buy it, and half the people there were buying their data. So the other half now wanted to use it for science.\\n\\n So then there came along the New Millennium Program at JPL, and the New Millennium Program’s purpose, it solved part of this problem of technology demonstrations. These are specifically for technology demonstrations, proof to the world it would work before you flew it on a more expensive spacecraft. So the New Millennium Program came along, and our first proposal to that was for this modern Landsat replacement instrument. Then the idea was that the Landsat would fly and then this New Millennium instrument would fly at approximately the same time, and the world would compare the images. And if the user community gained enough confidence from this inter-comparison, then the next NASA spacecraft would be new technology.\\n\\n That’s the path, I believe, that the system was on, that they have built the Earth observing, EO-1 that’s up there, and I don’t know how it’s working out. But that’s how, in that particular case, we handled the “faster, better, cheaper” requirement. And if it should work, then you are talking instead of $700 million you’re talking $250 million to do the same job. So it’s quite clear that new technology sometimes does bring your cost down, but you have to get through this barrier of risk, both real and perceived." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the other programs, I think, under your tenure, you led the development of a coordinated educational program to increase students’ understanding of Earth’s environment. Can you share with us some of the details of that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know how successful it was. It was just sort of one of the things that we did somewhat towards the end of my time there. But, you know, no federal agency has enough budgetary clout, including the Department of Education, to affect K-12 education in the U.S. It’s an immense enterprise run by the localities. So everybody, Department of Education, NSF, NASA, are all adding at the margin and enriching perhaps, but it’s very difficult for them to change the fundamentals. So the question for every agency involved, especially just talking about science education, what can they do that adds or subtracts or will make a difference, given resources that are infinitesimal compared to what’s required.\\n\\n So when I got to NASA, I went out to a trip to Goddard Space Flight Center, and education’s one of our missions. So they showed me around. And at that point, there was an elderly, about to retire, Goddard scientist, who had a favorite high school in Maryland, and he installed a satellite downlink station and the kids were analyzing the data. I thought, “This is great. This is very impressive. They’re really learning a lot.” Then I asked the following question, “How much did we spend on this download station, and what is the annual operating budget of the school?” And when I discovered that NASA was showering on this school about the same amount per student as the school district was for a limited project, I realized that this was not sustainable. This was a very concentrated way of spending our money, but it wasn’t going to affect many people, and it’s a great demonstration and made an old guy feel good. He had all the enjoyment of all these wonderful students, and that’s all nice, but what was it accomplishing on a large scale?\\n\\n So I challenged the Education Division to change and to look at this, and they went through a strategic plan. As I recall, it was led at that time by a fellow named Mark [A.] Pine, who was one of the wonderful NASA employees, he’s just the truly NASA types. Mark came out to JPL, and he’s now left NASA. But at that point, he was in this, and they went through and they finally decided that the best thing they could do, and this is, I think, almost a universal conclusion, the best thing they can do is to teach teachers, and enrich their intellectual grasp and give them curriculum materials and then they would teach. And I think the other part of the story was that we could teach the teachers that live near the NASA Centers, for obvious reasons, that that could bring them in, summer programs or whatever. So I think they started on the path of developing materials that would concentrate on teachers, and I thought that was about the right thing to do.\\n\\n Now Mr. [Sean] O’Keefe wants to find a way to spread this to every school. “No child shall be left behind.” And the question is, can NASA leave no child behind with its limited resources. And I don’t know the answer to that, but that was how far we got then. As I recall, they were going to have teacher peer-review groups review what NASA did, which I thought was the right thing to do. I think that may have been an innovation, at least for us, in Mission to Planet Earth. I don’t recall all of it, but I thought the things that came out of that plan were good and they had an appropriate sense of humility about the difficulty of the task. And, you know, we spent what, 20, 30 million dollars a year on it in those days. It’s a lot of money. Small compared to a spacecraft, but still a lot of money, but still tiny compared to the challenge." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Currently you serve as the chair of the NASA Advisory Council. Can you tell us a little bit about your role there and some of the issues that you’re dealing with?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And how did that happen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did that happen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, right. I came to Scripps. I’d been the Executive Vice Chancellor of UCLA from ’96 to ’98. I came on at Scripps in—well, my first full-time day on the job was April Fool’s Day in 1998. So it had probably been here about a few months after that, and Dan calls me up and says, “Would you like to be on the NASA Advisory Council?”\\n\\n And I said, “Yes, sir.” The NASA Administrator calls, you do it. In fact, I had wanted to be on it. I thought I could play an interesting role.\\n\\n So [Dr.] Brad Parkinson was chair then at that point, and so I sat, was a loyal member, and went to a number of the meetings, as many as I could go to. And in the fullness of time, Parkinson stepped down. His term was over. And Goldin had already said to me earlier, “Maybe I’ll make you Chair of the NASA Advisory Council when Parkinson steps down.” But that was not to be, because there was actually a change of Administration, which I think was somewhat unexpected.\\n\\n So Parkinson has stepped down, and there they were with a new Administration coming in, and it was clear to everybody that Dan’s days were numbered, but that he would have some still. They weren’t going to get rid of a very competent NASA Administrator just like that. They were going to take their time about it, and they had other priorities and so forth. So there was this unspecified period of time in which he would be the Administrator still.\\n\\n Now, just before all that happened, [Dr. Daniel R.] Dan Mulville called me up and said, “A lot of the people on the NASA Advisory Council terms are ending and so is yours. A lot of them are rotating off, but you’ve only served one term and you’re a lot younger than they are. Do you want to serve another term?”\\n\\n And so I said, “Well, yeah, but, you know, I believe that there’s going to be this rotation of the NASA Administrator, and I believe every Administrator should have the ability to choose his or her own members of the Advisory Council.” I said, “So please go back and relay this answer. I’ll serve if asked, but don’t you want to just wait and bank these positions until the new Administrator comes in?”\\n\\n So about a month later, I got a phone call from Courtney Stadd, and Courtney said, “That was a very classy answer that you gave. I’ve checked around in the White House and so forth, and there’d be no objective to you being interim chair. Would you serve at least for a year till we figure out what to do with NASA?”\\n\\n So I went to Courtney, and I went and had another interview with him and I said, “You know, there’re two liabilities that I have for this Administration that are politically sensitive. One is the global warming issue. NASA is deeply involved in it, and I believe it has to continue to do that, and so is Scripps. And, secondly, Scripps is constructing your favorite spacecraft, Triana,” which was very politically sensitive because it was traceable to an idea that Al Gore had had, and they had called it presidential pork.\\n\\n So Courtney checked all this out and said, “Oh, okay. It’s still okay.”\\n\\n And so I said, “Okay, I’ll serve.”\\n\\n Then Dan Goldin came in and actually asked me, “Would you serve as interim chair?”\\n\\n I said, “Sure.” Especially since they all asked me now. The only thing I did different was I thought the people on the Advisory Council were so experienced, that we should have them talk more and have NASA talk less. So I didn’t want death by viewgraph to happen to the Advisory Council, and so I made sure there was plenty of dialogue on the Council. As it turned out, as a result of that and also as a result of [A. Thomas] Tom Young and the work that he did with Sean O’Keefe when they were at OMB [Office of Management and Budget], we had a profound influence, for good or ill, on the course of the program and particularly on the present course that NASA’s on with regard to completion of the [International Space] Station.\\n\\n Tom Young’s committee surfaced. Let me give you my interpretation of what happened. The Johnson Space Flight Center, under Goldin, had managed the Station to $2.1 billion budget. It’s a budget cap. They could get some extra money if they needed it by eating the lunch of the science program, but it wasn’t a very big lunch. So basically they had to manage the $2.1 billion program. If something went wrong, their contingency was “We’ll just delay, you know, we’ll do it when we can.” They never, from their view, compromised on quality; they’d just do it when they can. So their contingency was to delay.\\n\\n So somewhere towards the end of the [William Jefferson “Bill”] Clinton Administration, I gather that somebody was testifying before Congress, and they were asked, “How much money is there to completion?” This is something that I think the cost to complete had never really occurred as an instrumental management tool to Johnson. But that person got up and said, “We’ve got about four years to go, four times 2.1. It’s $8.4 billion.” So suddenly the number was out there, how much money there is to complete the Station.\\n\\n So, several things happened. The new President finally comes into power. It takes a little while, as you know. And within a while, a number is floated by somebody—we all have our suspicion who—the number is floated that actually the cost to complete is like $13 billion. And within a week or so of that number being floated, George Abbey is fired as director of Johnson.\\n\\n Two things happened. I think the present Administration treated that $8.4 billion estimate or any other estimate as an actual guarantee, a promise to the American people, whereas it wasn’t nearly that well thought out. So they began to feel that they were double-crossed, that NASA was pulling a fast one on this Administration, especially when the number went to 13.1 billion.\\n\\n So then I think at that point the NASA Advisory Council had this Station management team in place through Tom Young, who’s one of the most competent and loyal people that I’ve run across, and Tom Young was looking at the financing of Station, the management and so on and so forth, and Tom reached the conclusion that Johnson didn’t manage to cost. They didn’t know what it cost. So OMB could go and the Congress could go and one day one person would give one number, the next day another person would give another number, both were making back-of-the-envelope guesses based on their experience, and there never had been a formal cost control and cost assessment of the cost to complete the Station.\\n\\n In addition, there’s a second problem. Everybody knew that if this were a normal project, after you’d built most of your hardware, the cost would go down. So how come the Station costs weren’t going down? Why were we still at a $2.1 billion budget? Where is all that money going? Who’s got it? The problem had been that it was not managed as a closed-end project. People were badged to a Station project. They work for Johnson Space Center and were taken in and off the project as needed, on an as-needed basis. And, of course, for many years the Center had operated according to this entitlement. They expected still to get it. And the new OMB said, “No, you shouldn’t get it, because it’s project tailing off. It’s got a closed end, and you’ve got to tell us when it’s going to end.”\\n\\n “End? The Space Station is going to end?”\\n\\n So, “The project, I mean.”\\n\\n “And our phase in it will end? What do you mean?” I mean, this was the kind of response that we were first getting.\\n\\n So I think that Tom and the Administration and Sean O’Keefe, when he was at OMB, worked out this core complete probation period concept, which we’re now going through and it’s had some success. But then when I got in, this is about the time I got into the leadership role, I also realized that there was another thing that Johnson had not thought about. It had not thought about how to do operations, that its next responsibility was not to building it, but to operating it. And this required a whole different cast of mind. When you’re building something and you’re an engineer, you ought to be in complete control. No mistakes. Zero tolerance. And they did very well by that. But now you’re operating a hotel and you’re bringing in scientists and you’ve got thousands more constituents than you ever had before, who want to use this thing, who don’t know how to use it. And a completely different philosophy of management was required, openness and not the control, and they hadn’t thought about the transition.\\n\\n But one of the reasons they hadn’t thought about the transition was that NASA had been creatively unclear about what the goals of the Space Station are or should be. Are they exploration? Advancement of the human spirit? Preparing for the Mars trip? Doing good science? Which are they? International collaboration? That’s fine, when you advocate the problem in 1985, the reason we wanted to build a space station. But in 2002 Johnson should have had some sense we’ll put so many dollars on international, so many dollars on the educational mission, this is how we’re going to do it, and this is how we’re going to operate. No clear idea. And a good deal of that comes because we, NASA, the science community, all the stakeholders, the system chose not to define clear initial goals for the Station. If it lasts for fifty years, as I expect it will, we’ll accomplish all of them. But if it only lasts for the next five, what are the ones that you’re going to put your money into first?\\n\\n So the Young panel said science has got to be the primary goal. The science community is saying, “There’s no way that we’re going to get a $33 billion charge to our account. The science isn’t good enough for that.” That’s probably true, but it is also true that given that the Station exists, science could be a very good first use of it. And so we’ve gone through this remap exercise, which tried to define scientific goals, tossed out a lot of bad ones and left in about half the original program goals as being reasonable for Station, made the extreme point that if you can’t go beyond U.S. core complete, you might as well forget about the science.\\n\\n I think that is a generally held view on the NASA Advisory Council. Certainly Tom Young believes that if we stick with core complete, the program goes into a death spiral, because there isn’t enough capacity, astronaut capacity, to do the interesting things that would justify the continued expenditure on it. Even the 10 or 20 percent, if they’re going to spend 500 million a year keeping it up there, not the 2.1 to build it but the 500 million, 500 million dollars is a lot of money, and you’ve got to find a reason. People have to understand the reasons why you’re spending it. More than that, at some point it’s going to be up there and people are going to say, “Why did we build it?”\\n\\n There’s a whole bunch of reasons why we built it, but there isn’t one that’s sticking in the public mind. So, beyond the definition of the science goals, which could well define a good initial phase, the really truly inspirational reasons why you should do Station are not clearly articulated in a simple way and they are not held in the public mind. You don’t have a “faster, better, cheaper” mantra for the Station, something that simple that everybody says, “Oh, that’s why we’re doing it.” You know, it could be it’s for all the world. But they haven’t thought yet at that level, and it’s because we, they, haven’t got a clear idea of how the goals all work together, what the priorities are, and when we’ll accomplish them.\\n\\n So that’s where the NASA Advisory Council is right now, and the biggest threat of all, I believe, to NASA is the fact that we’ll have this wonderful achievement up there that nobody will understand why we built it. That would be terrible. So, somebody’s got to have a little courage. Somebody’s got to start talking about things. One of the main reasons of having it up there is it’s not entirely clear that astronauts can live a long time in space without running into serious problems. Should we actually be thinking of sending them out into space for five years at a time? Will they come back able to walk? Will they have any bones left? I mean, there are serious medical problems that emerge with long-term space flight that need to be looked at.\\n\\n In my view, the NASA macho is so strong that they do not want to admit that there might be a problem with achieving these wonderful goals of going to Mars or whatever they have set out there. So there’s a serious issue there. A research step, a biomedical step, a science step. How long can human beings carry out complex activity in space for a long period of time and what do they need to do it? It’s an issue.\\n\\n OMB, under the Clinton Administration, said, “Never talk to us about Mars. It’s too expensive. We’re never going to go there in your or my lifetime, and we do not want to see it as a precursory goal. We don’t want to see anything portrayed as leading to Mars exploration, because we are not committed to it.” And I think that right now the present story is like that. But on the other hand, fifty or a hundred years from now, we may be talking about mining the asteroids. We may be talking about a lot of things for sustainability reasons as well as just human exploration reasons.\\n\\n So I think it’s important for our culture now to answer the question, can you live a long time in space and what does it take? So that’s the main reason for doing it. Is it worth $33 billion when we’re fighting a war on terrorism, and when it only costs $2 billion to do the [Human] Genome Project and, and, and. There’s no answer to those questions. But if we could, over the next few years, clarify the goals of the Station, then it would help. It will require a major new attention by Johnson Space Center on philosophical things, its relationship with the broad global society on, you know, really understanding what it means to promote international collaboration beyond a group of a few thousand engineers, because soon that thing’s going to belong to the world. And if the NASA Advisory Council can play any role in making this change of viewpoint, then we will have done our job, at least done the job that one little council of twenty people or thirty people can do, if we can just push it a little bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I think we’ve kept you past the time we said we would." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, is there anything more that you’re dying to ask or are you just dying? [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, not at all. I thought I’d ask Rebecca and Jennifer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have one question, speaking of the Station. As a scientist, but now as Chair of the Advisory Council, how do you feel that the cancellation of the CRV [Crew Return Vehicle] to enable more residents on the Station will affect long-term science projects?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Obviously not well. You mean the CRV?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The crew rescue vehicle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the best solution, of course, would be to have a specific crew rescue vehicle. But this is another area where courage could be applied. I’d look at it this way. We don’t talk about the risks of being launched on the Shuttle. We don’t know what they are. We know that if you have a conventional launch vehicle, about one in fifty fails. And the Shuttle, being nonconventional, is much more reliable than that, and it could be one in a hundred, one in two hundred, one in three hundred per launch. Who knows? But it’s definitely highly risky. So just getting up there, the astronaut accepts a certain amount of risk.\\n\\n Now, if something goes wrong up there, the question is, are they willing—there are two questions. If they spend six months up there and you look at the failure rate and so forth of subsystems and whatever happens, how long does it take them in orbit to accumulate as much risk from the in-orbit occupation and de-orbit as they had on the launch? Okay? So that’s some number. Secondly, they’re all brave people. They’re willing. They’re going to do it. They’re like the original explorers. And they’re not like your average person on the street who’s very risk-averse.\\n\\n So the other thing is, are there other strategies? Can you have a safe haven? Should you perhaps keep a Shuttle ready to go to bring them down and accept the risk that there’s a couple of days’ delay while they’re up there, and, you know, accept the risk that there won’t be a completely immediate catastrophic failure?\\n\\n So I think that there’s a middle ground in there in which we look for solutions that don’t require five or six billion dollars, but mitigate the current situation and ask how much risk do you accumulate with that mitigation strategy. Do the absolute best you can and then just ask them to accept a risk comparable to what they’re already doing.\\n\\n I don’t know whether that all works out in an engineering sense, but I do think that the astronauts are very courageous people. I’ve never met one that isn’t. They will accept the risk. I think that our sense of risk is very different now than it was prior to 9/11 [September 11, 2001]. We wanted to fight an entire war without a casualty in 1998. But now we’ve got 3,000 of them. So that people’s acceptance of risk, perception of risk, may be different now.\\n\\n Again, it gets back to the inspiration of the goals. I think if society were to see that this was for some really higher goal of society, then, of course, society would accept the risk that the astronauts are willing already to accept. So I think there’s some room in there. Of course, technologically it would be better, much more secure, I think, to have your own vehicle. But I haven’t seen the alternate strategies for how to mitigate in the absence of the CRV." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have anything, Jennifer?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don’t think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Through your career, is there any one thing that stands out in your mind that you feel is your greatest accomplishment in dealing with NASA? Obviously your career with NASA isn’t quite over yet, or your dealings with NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I guess the thing that I point to is the first thing I got on, just the Science Advisory Group, the small role that as a young scientist I learned to play in the planning of the Voyager, that great experiment. That gave me the greatest pleasure as a scientist.\\n\\n And then I think later on it was just the incredible personal growth that occurred in about a one-year time. I had to learn how to deal with Congress and the Defense Department and the White House and a big bureaucracy, and learned how to manage. What I used to say to people was that I got a master’s in business administration from Dan Goldin and a master’s in public policy from the U.S. Congress all in one year.\\n\\n So it was the complete change in growth that I couldn’t run this, couldn’t take responsibility for a major scientific institution until I had done that, and I hadn’t realized until after the fact how well I was supported, and they understood exactly. It’s a good organization. They understood exactly, actually, what to do with me, and the two deputies were there for a very good reason, and it was just wonderful. Nobody else had two deputies. I was lucky. And that was because they understood what my shortcomings were, and they wanted to capture whatever scientific strengths I could bring." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Sandra Johnson", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We thank you for talking with us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Charles Kennel", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "returned-peace-corps-volunteers-00020", + "metadata": { + "original_file_name": "RPCV-ACC-2016-037-002.pdf", + "item_link_text": "Drewal, Henry (1964-1966): Oral history interview (Part 2, digital)", + "item_link": "https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/RPCV-ACC-2016-037-002", + "digital_identifier": "RPCV-ACC-2016-037-002", + "access_restriction_status": "Open", + "description": "(PART 2 OF 2) Henry John Drewal served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nigeria from 1964 to 1966. His training at Columbia University included study of the Yoruba language. In Nigeria, Drewal was assigned to teach French and English at the African Church Grammar School in Abeokuta, a city in the Yoruba-speaking western region. He was also assigned to be the school's sports master, and focused on volleyball and tennis. Among his accomplishments was the construction of the school's first tennis court. During school holidays, Drewal organized and ran vacation arts camps for the primary school children. In his spare time, he continued his study of Yoruba and apprenticed himself to a Yoruba sculptor, an experience which had a profound impact on the rest of his life. After the Peace Corps, Drewal returned to Columbia University graduate school in African art history and anthropology, earning a Ph.D. At the time of this interview, he continues to do research in the history of African art and the diaspora. He is active at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, and is on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin. Interviewed by Phyllis Noble, May 15, 2016 (3 digital files).", + "dates_of_materials": "15 May 2016", + "extent": "3 digital files (audio; stereo; 75 minutes)", + "deed_status": "Deeded", + "copyright_status": "Public Domain (Donated to the United States Government)", + "collection": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection", + "series": "066. Nigeria.", + "preferred_citation": "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection. Nigeria. Drewal, Henry (1964-1966): Oral history interview (Part 2, digital)", + "subjects": "Peace Corps", + "organizations": "United States. Peace Corps", + "places": "Nigeria", + "use_restriction_note": "Consult with archivist to determine copyright holder.", + "accession_number": "ACC-2016-037", + "transcript": "RPCV-ACC-2016-037-002-TR.pdf", + "page_last_updated": "August 12, 2024 11:30:07 AM EDT", + "pdf_download_url": "https://static.jfklibrary.org/04b1n544nj24hxkep86345o1wvo42216.pdf?odc=20231115174322-0500", + "audio_download_url": "https://house-fastly-signed-us-east-1-prod.brightcovecdn.com/media/v1/pmp4/static/clear/6057940510001/d94ee802-70c9-41b0-b921-20c4ad1a3d99/3b861ec0-6fec-4e21-95de-37be5c31937c/main.mp4?fastly_token=NjdhMzJkNTBfMTk2MTg0ZTk0NTAyN2JkZmM2ZTZmMTIyMDViMGY1MmZiZjdiYWI0ZDYzMThlYTEzYmQ1MmE1ODA1M2MxMTUzMl8vL2hvdXNlLWZhc3RseS1zaWduZWQtdXMtZWFzdC0xLXByb2QuYnJpZ2h0Y292ZWNkbi5jb20vbWVkaWEvdjEvcG1wNC9zdGF0aWMvY2xlYXIvNjA1Nzk0MDUxMDAwMS9kOTRlZTgwMi03MGM5LTQxYjAtYjkyMS0yMGM0YWQxYTNkOTkvM2I4NjFlYzAtNmZlYy00ZTIxLTk1ZGUtMzdiZTVjMzE5MzdjL21haW4ubXA0", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-04", + "location_of_interview": "Madison, Wisconsin", + "length": "34 pages", + "usage_restrictions": "According to the deed of gift signed July 18, 2016, copyright of these materials has been assigned to the United States Government. This interview is in the public domain." + }, + "broad_source": "jfk_library", + "collection": "returned_peace_corps_volunteers", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "Henry Drewal Oral History Interview (Part 2)", + "elicitors": [ + "Phyllis Noble" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Henry Drewal" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "00:00:03", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is Phyllis Noble again. I am continuing the interview with Dr. Henry Drewal. The interview, which we began a year and a half ago on September 11th, I think, 2014. I regret that we had technical difficulties, which probably were due to my own ineptitude." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "00:00:27", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I think what we'll do is we'll just check to make sure this is recording before we carry on. Ok?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "00:00:35", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We could, if you like." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "00:00:36", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, let's do it. Just to be sure, because this has happened to me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "00:00:45", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok. We're hoping for the best." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "00:00:48", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Hmm. Ok. Good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "00:00:50", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Um, you've arrived in Nigeria, you find yourself in Ibadan. Could you talk a little bit about Ibadan? What's Ibadan like?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "00:01:00", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Ibadan is a big city, so that's the first surprise. Well, no, it's the second surprise. The first surprise is getting out of the plane in Lagos and walking out of the plane and." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "00:01:22", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You would have come down the stairs, right into the tarmac." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "00:01:24", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, stairs, right, and thinking that, oh yeah, we need to get away from the plane because it's the heat of the jet engines that we're feeling. And I walked away from the plane and realized it was the heat of Nigeria. So that was the first sensory experience. And then we went up to Ibadan. I'm not sure. I don't remember how we got there. We must have done it by road. It must have been a bus. So I was seeing the Nigerian countryside for the first time. I think one of my most strong immediate impressions was the smell in the air of the wood that was used for cooking fires. Very distinctive smell. Whenever I smell it, I'm transported back to West Africa." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "00:02:25", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "00:02:26", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not just Nigeria, but other places as well. And we arrived, really warmly welcomed by the staff at the Peace Corps office, which I think was in the USIS, the U.S. Information Service offices or complex there. Ibadan is a big city. We were kind of shown around briefly and we were there just for a short time, just to give us our initial orientation. Alice O'Grady was in charge of the office, as I remember, and a wonderful person, a very supportive person for the whole time that I was there. And I think we met some of the other Americans on the staff of USIS and others in the Peace Corps office. George Sealy, I think, was our director. If that name is correct, an African-American man who had a distinguished career in education in the States, as I recall. He was a wonderful person, wonderful director. And I think he at that changed at some point during the two years that I was there.\n\nAnd then we were told where we were headed. I think I might have known already from orientation when I was, when we were still in New York, and I was assigned to the African Church Grammar School in Abeokuta. A-B-E-O-K-U-T-A. Abeokuta is a well-known educational center. Secondary schools, academic secondary schools, and a wonderful teacher training college. It was a refugee city established in the 19th century as a refuge during the period of the Yoruba civil wars of the 19th century. And it was one of the first places where returned Yorubas who had been liberated by the British, taken off of the ships that were enslaving them and carrying them to America and sent to and then deposited in Sierra Leone, where then missionaries were Christianizing, converting many of them Yoruba to Christianity, and the first Yoruba bishop, Samuel Crowther, was among that generation, late 19th century. So many of the schools had this connection to return the Yorubas, who came back from Sierra Leone to establish churches and missions back in their homeland, Lagos and Abeokuta, and some to Ibadan. So African Church Grammar School was the school that I was assigned. It was, um, the principal was Eluyemi, E-L-U-Y-E-M-I. Eluyemi. E-L-U- Yeah. Y-E-M-I. Eluyemi. God loves me is the translation. He was the pastor of an African church. African church combined Anglican elements, as well as indigenous Yoruba elements, in its religious practice. It was a small school, but it was a rigorous school for the students. Being a grammar school, it was training kids to be, uh, you know, people within the new Nigerian government after independence of 1960, so this was 1964." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "00:06:56", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And these students were mixed, boys and girls?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "00:06:59", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Boys and girls, mostly boys. But about a third, a third to half, were women. This was mostly boys, but a good, good percentage were also women." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "00:07:15", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And was it a boarding school?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "00:07:18", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was a boarding school. Some students came from the town, from their homes in the town of Abeokuta, the city of Abeokuta. But most of them lived on campus. And at this point it was a strict English medium school, and Eluyemi was very strict about that, that students, even though they were almost all Yoruba, must speak English on campus. Of course they did, and they didn't. But as all students were, would be. But it was strict because English was a compulsory subject for HSC." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "00:07:59", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm-hmm. HSC being?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "00:08:01", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Higher School Certificate, which would be the entrance into university at this time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "00:08:09", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And this is thought to be equivalent to what was happening in Britain." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "00:08:13", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "00:08:15", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On a par?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "00:08:16", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. On a par with it. Right. And Ibadan University was the primary university, but there were others. There was one in the east at Nsukka, which was on an American model. But Ibadan was on a British model and as well as Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, in the north, on a British model. So I lived on campus. I had a flat, an apartment, above one of the buildings that was the girls’ dormitory. They were on the ground floor and I was on a second floor and I had a separate, you know, entrance to my flat. There was another faculty flat that adjoined mine in the same building, and it was a relatively new building. So and the first, you know, my housing was quite comfortable. I had something like a one, two bedroom place with a dining room and a living room." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "00:09:23", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did you employ someone to help with the shopping and the cleaning?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "00:09:27", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did. I did. I wouldn't have survived two years on my own cooking, so I hired a cook. Most of the cooks who were working for either other Peace Corps volunteers or other Americans or other Brits or other Canadians who were teaching in the various schools, because there was the Canadian equivalent of CUSO. And there was the British equivalent of VSO and then us Peace Corps volunteers, and then there were other contract teachers and so on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "00:10:06", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. And in the faculty at your school, the African Church Grammar School, were there other expatriates?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "00:10:13", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Oh yes, there were. I was the only Peace Corps person in my school, but there was an Indian couple, Agarwal. And Patel, these were both, I think, Gujaratis one couple, a husband and wife and then a single man. And they were other, the other expat faculty members at this grammar school. All the others were Yorubas from Abeokuta or other parts of Yoruba land." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "00:10:47", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did the other expats live also, as you did, on the school compound?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "00:10:53", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes, they did, in a separate house. I think they were, if I remember correctly, I think they were in an extension or attachment of the principal's house, which was on campus as well, and they lived in one part of that house." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "00:11:11", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the principal was Yoruba." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "00:11:13", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "00:11:15", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And did most of the Yoruba faculty live on campus or in town?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "00:11:19", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They lived in town." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "00:11:20", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did they have a choice?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "00:11:22", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think they had a choice, but there wasn't any other housing for teachers on campus. It was the dormitory for the boys and for the girls. My apartment, one other apartment on the other side. And I'm not, I don't remember who stayed there. And then there's the other Indian colleagues who were on campus. Everybody else was off campus. So when I arrived, we got there, it was like late August and it was school break for two weeks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "00:11:59", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. That's good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "00:12:01", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was terrible." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "00:12:03", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It wasn't, really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "00:12:03", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was terrible. That was the worst period of my two years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "00:12:08", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What made it so bad?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "00:12:11", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because I was at a total loss. I felt totally alone. I was thrown into a culture that I was desperate to try to understand, comprehend, and become a part of. And I felt totally unable to do so. I had as a youngster growing up, I don't know if I mentioned this in the earlier part of our interview, but when I was a counselor in a summer camp during my years in high school, starting when I was a freshman or a sophomore in high school, I was a camp counselor and tennis instructor. I suffered very serious homesickness. And, you know, it was a physical and mental psychological state. And I battled that all through high school and even during the years of college, I always had trouble in those transitions leaving home. And this was the most extreme of those because it wasn't like I could get on a train or a, you know, a drive in my car back home to see my family. And I realized I was there for two years, and I just didn't know if I was going to be able to do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "00:13:46", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you didn't have a function to distract from this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "00:13:48", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I had no function. That was the, that's what made it so difficult because I was dumped. You know, I felt like I was dumped in a place where no one knew me. Nobody cared. And I was far from Ibadan and from the people who had welcomed me warmly and that had been fine. But once I was alone in my new home for the next two years, it was daunting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "00:14:17", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "00:14:17", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was daunting because there were still two weeks before classes began. My colleagues would return and life would come to that campus. I was essentially in an abandoned site." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "00:14:31", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's right, it was all empty. Everybody had cleared out, they're on vacation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "00:14:34", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Everybody had cleared out. The principal was away on travels. And I knew absolutely no one and I know I had little or no Yoruba. I had learned something during training, but it was, you know, it's just too rudimentary. And so it was a very strong cultural shock." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "00:14:57", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How far was your school from the center of Abeokuta?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "00:15:01", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were in the city, but on the edge of the city. We were in what is called Ibara quarter. I-B-A-R-A. It's the Igbado part of town and the Igbado are the original inhabitants of that area. It was the Egba who came later, the E-G-B-A peoples who came and Oyo people who came later to settle Abeokuta as a refugee center and city. So we were specifically the address of the school and the area was Eta Iyalode. E-T-A. I-Y-A-L-O-D- E, which means crossroads of the market. The women, the woman, who was the head of the marketplace. It was near market area. And much later on, when I returned to do research on Yoruba art, Eta Iyalode and Ibara quarter became an important site for my research on the arts. But I had none, I knew nothing about it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "00:16:16", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At that time. That's right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "00:16:16", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Nothing. Absolutely nothing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "00:16:18", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find yourself getting out of your, your apartment was furnished when you got there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "00:16:23", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, basically, I had to provide some things and I had to find somebody to help. And that took a little while. It wasn't immediate. So those first two weeks were the toughest. After that, everything, as soon as people started coming back to campus and I found somebody to help me with the cooking and Igbo chap because it was mostly the Igbo who were the domestic, so-called domestic, servants in the community, not Yoruba, but Igbo, I-G-B-O." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "00:16:57", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "00:16:57", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And once that life and activity started, I was OK, but I have to admit at certain points in those two weeks, I was ready to call the Peace Corps office and say, can't do it, have to go home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "00:17:18", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. I'm so glad you didn't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "00:17:20", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm so glad I didn't either. I stuck it out, as I had several other years before and in different situations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "00:17:28", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "00:17:29", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So and now it's ironic because I'm the one person. I'm the traveler in my family. I'm the one who's never at home. And yet in those early years, I was the one who was most affected by being away from home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "00:17:46", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. This says something about the strength of your family, though, and the close attachments, you know, which is a good thing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "00:17:53", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "00:17:55", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There were other Peace Corps volunteers in Abeokuta not connected with your school?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "00:18:01", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. There were, I think, it was one other woman who was in another school. And then there was somebody who was in a smaller town, not too far away, but it was their vacation time. So everybody had fled." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "00:18:20", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Even the Peace Corps volunteers, they're all gone?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "00:18:21", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yeah, everybody. They were all gone. Of course, there was a thriving community around me, but I had, I wasn't able to connect." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "00:18:32", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You're on the outside of it still, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "00:18:33", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "00:18:33", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And when you were at home in your apartment, up on the second floor there. Did you have electricity available to you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "00:18:42", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "00:18:42", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "00:18:42", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yep, I had running water and electricity. It was a newly constructed building, as a dormitory and as flats for faculty." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "00:18:53", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Concrete block?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "00:18:54", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, concrete block. And it was well constructed. It was a good school. You know, Eluyemi was, um, he was an impressive character, very strict and very firm and very accomplished in what he was trying to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "00:19:12", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So let's go into the classroom. Two weeks later, students start arriving." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "00:19:17", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "00:19:18", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Faculty pours in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "00:19:19", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. And I meet my colleagues and things start to improve. I like my colleagues. I'm learning to teach. I've developed a audio lingual method approach to teaching French, and I started making my own textbook of conversation so that it was a kind of call and response. It was mainly to have them learn by speaking first and then writing grammar were to come later. And it was basic, very elementary kind of French. And then I was also doing some English and English literature classes as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "00:20:02", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember what kind of English lit you were exposing the students to?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "00:20:07", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really. I don't. Those were not things that were attracting me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "00:20:14", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "00:20:15", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I, you know, I realized pretty early on that I didn't want to become a language teacher. I tried to do the best I could in the time that I had there, but other interests started pulling me in other directions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "00:20:35", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And we'll spend most of our time talking about those other interests. But I'm still curious about some things in your class." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "00:20:42", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "00:20:43", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You invented your own system?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "00:20:45", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "00:20:45", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "An audio lingual of conversation first and then grammar analysis. Were you provided with books, textbooks for French?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "00:20:54", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I had. I think I had something from the training program because we were doing student teaching. We had to organize some classes during the time we were at T.C. [Teachers College] and at Barnard, because we were housed at Barnard. And we had some classes on the, most of our classes where at Teachers College, but also at the university." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "00:21:20", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And that included some student teaching." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "00:21:22", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it did. Right. So that was our rudimentary training as secondary school teachers because most of us were not education majors as college students, we were in subjects of various kinds. But I enjoyed the teaching. One of the things that I may have said about my experience at Hamilton that I very much appreciated was their emphasis upon public speaking, on rhetoric and public speaking. This was a core element of the curriculum at Hamilton, and I became a good public speaker and that helped as a teacher, of course. So, so that was, the teaching was good. I enjoyed it. And despite the no speaking of Yoruba on campus, I encouraged my students to teach me Yoruba." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "00:22:18", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Outside of class?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "00:22:20", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Outside the class and out of hearing of the principal. And that's, of course, was giving me confidence to then enter the community that I was living in, and I made friends with a number of the Yoruba, my Yoruba colleagues. I remember, well, one of them invited me to a luncheon at the local sports club and this was a hangover from the British presence in Abeokuta." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "00:22:53", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But the Yoruba were welcome in it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "00:22:55", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They were, and it had become a Yoruba club, essentially. And I was also interested in it because it had a tennis court, you see, and I was a serious tennis player." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "00:23:08", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "00:23:10", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But this Yoruba colleague invited me to lunch. And this was soon after classes had started, maybe two or three weeks into the first session of teaching. And I ordered a dish called jollof rice because I wanted to become Yoruba, you see. So I didn't order the English menu. It was the Yoruba menu, okay?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "00:23:39", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "00:23:39", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And it was jollof rice. But it was seasoned as a Yoruba would season it, that is, with lots of pepper and which I thought was tomatoes. Well, I was in for a surprise and I started tearing and having to blow my nose and Yoruba friend, my new Yoruba colleague friend, he never said anything, but I'm sure he felt that I was crying for home, that I was sad and that, because, you know, pepper is pepper. You know, you don't cry unless you're sad about something. So anyway, so this was one of my early experiences of, you know, taking in Yoruba cuisine and making another kind of an adjustment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "00:24:38", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Did you have beer to go along with that jollof rice, wash it down?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "00:24:45", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I tried. But that just spread it around further so that it was affecting every part of my body. All of this goes into now my own research on sensiotics, you see." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "00:24:59", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "00:25:00", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "These are the things I think about now because they are actually some of the deepest, strongest memories of cultural experience and cultural, different cultural ways and how we adapt to them or don't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "00:25:15", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Your initial experience of encountering that wall of heat when you got off the plane." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "00:25:22", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "00:25:22", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then the smells of the marketplace and the wood fires. And now the taste and the bite of that extremely hot pepper." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "00:25:34", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes, right. And I'm sure the sounds of the city of Ibadan and of Abeokuta are also things that that I was having to process and think about and have them become part of me. And these initial challenges of adaptation to a new cultural milieu is one of the key lessons of sensiotics. That is, when I go to do research and study in a new place, I try to make extensive notes and document with film and photographs, all of the things that are so unusual, so different in those initial encounters because once they become naturalized, once they become ordinary, you don't notice them anymore. You don't think about them. And those are some of the key insights that sensiotics has brought me in subsequent experiences. So, so I started learning more Yoruba as a volunteer, that is, a Peace Corps volunteer. I was also expected to volunteer for other jobs at the college, and so I was appointed as games master, which in the British system is the athletic director, okay? So I was in charge of student sports." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "00:27:16", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And those sports were? Not baseball." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "00:27:17", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And the sports were not baseball. Well, soccer was the big sport in the school." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "00:27:23", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which they would have called football." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "00:27:24", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Which they called football, right, and which I knew nothing about. So I was the football coach. Luckily, they were great players and they knew all the rules. So I just kind of was there for the games and for practices and, you know, for, you know, preparations and so on. But I had a Yoruba colleague on the faculty who helped me with that. Because of my interest in tennis, there was an open space not too far from the dormitory and my flat, that looked like a likely spot for a tennis court. So I had it built. I had a tennis court built and I got my, I got Hamilton College to donate the tennis net, which they shipped over. And we." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "00:28:16", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you fund the construction of the court?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "00:28:20", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Um, the principal gave me some funds and they were doing some construction of another building. So there was a tractor available and I just had him level the space large enough and I put in the posts and sunk them in concrete. And we had a tennis court. However, and we were, I thought it would work fine because the soil in Abeokuta and much of Yoruba land is lateritic soil, it's clay-based iron rich soil." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "00:28:55", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Red." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "00:28:56", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Red. Looks like a clay tennis court. However, I didn't, it wasn't fine enough, even though I had a steamroller come and steamroll the thing down. The grains were still too large, so it was only a semi-functioning tennis court and we had no money to pave it with anything more permanent. But it was my attempt as games master to add another sport to the college. And I was also the coach of the volleyball team, a new volleyball team, and I knew something about volleyball. So I was able to do some coaching and in fact brought a couple of volleyball, American volleyball strategies, like spiking and stuff to the game that the other teams didn't know about. And so we had the winning team in the town during my two years. So those were my efforts at school besides the teaching. Early on, I think in the first three or four months, on a trip to Ibadan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "00:30:12", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which was how far away?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "00:30:14", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was about an hour and a half by road." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "00:30:18", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how would you get there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "00:30:20", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'd take public transportation or long distance, yeah, either long distance taxis or sometimes busses." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "00:30:29", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And a taxi, of course, was not our concept of a taxi here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "00:30:32", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, right. Well, these are communal taxis." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "00:30:35", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's right, you sit and wait until it fills up with enough passengers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "00:30:37", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. When it fills up, right. And it's, yeah, and it's over full, you know, because it's a four-seater car that takes maybe six or eight people. Yeah, yeah. So those, that's how I would get to Ibadan, but at a certain point, and I can't remember exactly when. But maybe after the first three or four months I bought myself a motorcycle. Wasn't supposed to have it, but I got it, and they were kind of flexible on that matter. But they were concerned about road accidents and safety and so on. But I had a small Honda 50 and I wouldn't, I would call it a motorbike. It's not any motorcycle. It's like a Harley person would say, this one's a joke." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "00:31:22", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I too had a Honda 50, top speed 21 miles an hour." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "00:31:24", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, exactly. And in fact, I took that all over Nigeria." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "00:31:29", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah, wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "00:31:30", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "By train, carried it on a train, and then used it the north on one of my long vacations. So, but the main travel was either south to Lagos or east to Ibadan. And when I went to Ibadan, folks in the Peace Corps office or USIS, who I had become friends with, told me about one of the most famous people to grow up from Abeokuta, become an outstanding international scholar of history. His name was Surabu, um. Soriabu Biobaku. I think I'm getting the first name wrong [Saburi], but Biobaku. B-I- O-B-A-K-U. Biobaku. That's a name given to a child who is Egba. This was a child who is said to be a child born to die, that is, die early. So the parents will give that child a name that says, if you are born, you must not die. That's what Biobaku is about. Well, in his case, he lived a long, fruitful and productive life. He's written quite a few books on the history of Abeokuta and the people. He was very interested and he was a faculty member at the University of Ibadan. So I went to meet him because I told him I was there and that I was interested in arts and so on. And he said, I want to try to establish a museum in Abeokuta." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "00:33:32", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He said that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "00:33:32", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He said that, and we think we have a building. So I started working with him to make this a reality. And we got a police station, a decommissioned police station in the town, in the city of Abeokuta, and we tried to then get funds to begin building a collection that would document the history and culture of Abeokuta because it has an illustrious and a very crucial history from mid-19th century onward that's linked to these return of Yorubas from Sierra Leone, as a refugee place that fought off the attacks of the Dahomey Kingdom at various points because it's a city that's built in the hills. Abeokuta means built under the rock of Olumo. Olumo is the sacred rock at Abeokuta. Olumo. So we tried working on that. And if it had happened, if it had been able to go forward, I might have not been doing teaching. I might not have continued teaching for the two years, but I might have joined the Nigerian Department of Antiquities, where a number of other Yoruba, I mean, sorry, Peace Corps volunteers were also working. People who later on, when I went back to graduate school, became my colleagues in African art studies." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "00:35:17", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, Perk Foss." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "00:35:19", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Foss was one and Phil Stevens, who taught somewhere in Yorubaland and then stopped his teaching and was shifted to the Department of Antiquities and did all the work that established the museum and the site of Esie where these sandstone carvings are. So and Phil Stevens is somebody that I corresponded with and have worked with ever since. He's retired now, but he taught for many years at SUNY Buffalo in the anthropology department." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "00:36:00", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what got you interested in this? Was Biobaku at the University of Ibadan? How did you find out about him? How did you somehow?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "00:36:11", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know. I don't know. Somebody, I think somebody in the Peace Corps office suggested that I should meet him, and he should know that I was teaching in Abeokuta. Because he, as a son of Abeokuta, he was very interested in promoting that as an academic center with many schools and to establishing its place in the history of Yoruba land. And so I was there and was interested and had lots of enthusiasm. And so we tried to put a project together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "00:36:53", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But it sounds like it didn't come to fruition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "00:36:55", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it didn't." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "00:36:56", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because you continued teaching instead." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "00:36:57", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I continued teaching. Right. But I would work on that during school breaks for, you know, for that first year that I was there. But by the end of the first year, it was clear that it wasn't going to happen. He maybe he went overseas or he was caught up in other projects that he was working on. And so it just never, it never took off. We got it to a proposal point and we submitted it to the government, but then no funding." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "00:37:30", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you say that you worked on that project during school breaks for that first year, what do you mean? What was your work in that regard?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "00:37:40", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was, um. It was going to meet him in Ibadan and talk about the project and what we wanted to have happen in the museum. And then it was my contacting government officials in Abeokuta to try to get them to move on this on this proposal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "00:38:02", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A lot of political layers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "00:38:03", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, and nothing came of it. That's all I can say." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "00:38:08", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But it planted a seed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "00:38:09", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Planted the seed, and I don't know if there is a museum in Abeokuta now. I don't know. But that's one of the things we tried." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "00:38:17", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So when you were up in Ibadan talking with Biobaku, I'm assuming you were talking with him in English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "00:38:26", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "00:38:28", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And when you were at the sports club in Abeokuta with your Yoruba colleagues, was the language of the club English, among the Yoruba there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "00:38:37", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, pretty much. Because they were all educated. They were either, you know, they were teachers in secondary school or the other members of the club were, you know, government officials and lawyers and doctors. You know, it was the male, and it was male. It was a men's club. And the British, you know, out of the British tradition, and they were the elite in the community. They were the professionals or the government officials because the club itself was in an area that was known as the GRA, the government reservation area, where colonial houses had been built for the colonial officials. And along with that, there was a swimming pool and, you know, a golf course and a tennis court." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "00:39:24", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All British?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "00:39:25", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. Right. Exactly. And then inherited by the Yoruba and the Nigerians who took over." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "00:39:34", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So your first year eventually comes to an end?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "00:39:38", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yeah, yeah. But also, I don't remember the timing of it because those are the things with about the museum come fairly early on, and it's by the latter part of my first year that I shift my vacation activities to setting up vacation arts camps for primary school kids in Abeokuta." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "00:40:06", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Primary school? So these are not the students that you're working with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "00:40:09", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no. These are younger kids in other schools, other primary schools. And I had a number of other volunteers. One of the other Peace Corps volunteers who was there. And VSO, one or two VSO volunteers, and other Yoruba colleagues, teacher colleagues who were interested in art to set up these art camps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "00:40:34", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is great. And this is your idea?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "00:40:36", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, this is my idea." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "00:40:38", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what did you do, when you say an arts camp?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "00:40:41", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we would bring the kids to one of the schools where the facilities were emptied or the kids had gone because they were coming to a secondary school campus. But they were the primary school kids in town. So they would come in the morning and we would do various kinds of arts and crafts projects and games for them during the day. That's what we ran." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "00:41:07", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And these children would be Yoruba speakers. This is all happening in Yoruba?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "00:41:11", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it's all happening in Yoruba. Yeah. Or and many of them were in schools again where they were trying to push English because that was the entrance into the academic secondary schools since English was still a compulsory subject at any stage, you see. So, yeah, so again, I was expressing my own interest in the arts and bringing that to my students or to younger Yoruba in the town." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "00:41:48", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you said at its height there were how many kids?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "00:41:50", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think we had three or four going in different primary schools." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "00:41:56", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, simultaneously?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "00:41:58", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Simultaneously for a two-week period." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "00:42:01", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. And these kids would go home at night? They weren't staying in the boarding facility?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "00:42:06", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "00:42:08", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what kind of arts things would you do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "00:42:15", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was basically painting and paper, you know, working with paper, constructing things with paper. We also we would make paper masks and then they would do some performances with those. Coloring. Coloring kinds of projects. There wasn't any kind of serious sculpture, it was all pretty much two-dimensional work that they were doing. And we also, I don't remember, I don't have much of a sense of the details of the curriculum, and I don't know if I saved any of the materials that we produced because I had, you know, had booklets, handbooks, you know, for the camps and that kind of thing. And but I haven't thought about it in a long time. So I don't remember the details very well. And then it was games, you know, it was arts and games of various kinds, sports for the younger kids, and we would have meals for them, one meal during the day, it was prepared for them as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "00:43:37", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You got funding for this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "00:43:41", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I got donations. People, you know, put in time. They volunteered to help me out a little bit. We had some funds. Not much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "00:43:50", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You'd need some funds to feed that one meal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "00:43:53", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah, and I think that was coming from our salaries." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "00:43:57", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "00:43:57", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "00:44:00", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you were also giving your own free time because if this was on school break, you could have gone off to Ibadan, Lagos." + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "00:44:09", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Well, I did that too. I did that on some of them. I didn't do this all of my, you know, two-week vacations during the two years. But I did it for I would estimate maybe about a, maybe three or four of the two week, the shorter vacations, and during that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "00:44:35", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So I'm recalling that somewhere around December, there was a bigger six week, six or seven week school break." + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "00:44:45", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, right. Well, there was one time when we went to Ibadan for a kind of refresher course in French." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "00:44:54", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were called in by Peace Corps to do that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "00:44:56", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And my colleague here at UW was one of the teachers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "00:45:04", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No kidding, and who was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "00:45:05", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This is Marquat, Idris. Idris Marquat, who's now retired, but who lives just down the street here. He was on the faculty at the University of Ibadan, teaching us French teachers, because he remembers me from then. So when I was recruited to come to UW, he was one of the first people to see me at my interview." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "00:45:30", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh wonderful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "00:45:31", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah. So that was a, you know, a kind of in-service training that Peace Corps organized for us as teachers. But that was only the only one. There are shorter vacations we had to ourselves, so I use them for the museum project, then the arts camps. And then I did some traveling. As I said, I had my Honda 50. So there was one vacation. It must have been the longer vacation, but I'm not sure, when I took the train north from Abeokuta up to Zaria, put the Honda on it. And then when I got into the north and I had my Honda and drove around to Zaria and to Kano, and, uh, I think it was just Zaria in Kano. I didn't get up to Sokoto, but I explored the north." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "00:46:34", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The north, of course, being a Muslim area. Quite a different culture." + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "00:46:37", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, very different. Very different. Yep. But I wanted to get a sense of the country. I never did make it to the east during my two years in the Peace Corps, but I did later on. I also, with another contract doctor who was working at the hospital, at Aro Hospital. He was African- American doctor from Seattle. I'm blanking on his name right now, but we decided we wanted to take a trip to Ouagadougou." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "00:47:11", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "00:47:11", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And because of the name." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "00:47:14", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah yes, in what was then called Upper Volta. Today, Burkina Faso." + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "00:47:18", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. So we had his car, he had a car." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "00:47:22", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And tell me again, what was his capacity?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "00:47:24", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was a doctor at Aro Hospital, A-R-O Hospital, which was a mental hospital on the outskirts of Abeokuta, very famous for its work on indigenous psychiatric treatments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "00:47:42", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "00:47:44", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And Tolani Asuni was one of the key Yoruba doctors there who went on to a distinguished career in the World Health Organization, and he was one of my tennis partners. Asuni is his name, Asuni Tolani, Asuni. And this was a hospital that had been founded by T.O. [Thomas Adeoye] Lambo, another Yoruba psychiatrist doctor trained in UK. Lambo. Lambo, yeah, that's it. Yeah, so we took this trip in my friend's car. His name might come to me if I think about this. And so we drove from Abeokuta down to Lagos and then across the coastal road through what was still called Dahomey. Got to Togo and to Lomé. And then headed north from Lomé." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "00:48:49", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah, up through Togo?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "00:48:51", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, up through Togo. The pavement ended at the city limits of Lomé. And after that, it was a dirt road, washboard road, all the way to Ouagadougou. By the time we got to Ouagadougou, the car takes finished. And one of our, one of the members of our trip, there were three of us. One was ill the whole time, so it was not. It was not a very pleasant trip when we make it to Ouagadougou." + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "00:49:19", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many days did it take you to get up there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "00:49:20", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It took us three days, three or four days of constant driving to make it up to Ouagadougou. And then we arrive in Ouagadougou and the pavement starts again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "00:49:32", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And this is now early 1965?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "00:49:35", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This is five, 1965. And the American ambassador was Elliott Skinner, famous anthropologist, African-American anthropologist from Columbia University. We got to meet him. We told him we had made it all the way there, but the car was not going to get us back. So he put us up in the embassy guesthouse, where we had access to the embassy swimming pool, and then tried to figure out how we were going to get back in time for our teaching and for his work. It just so happened that the day or two after we arrived and were there at the embassy, the plane that brings food and supplies to the American diplomatic corps had arrived from Lagos and it was a freight plane, so they unloaded all of their goodies that they were going to be living on for the next couple of months. And it was an empty plane. So they say, well, why don't we just put your car inside the plane, fly you back to Lagos." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "00:50:47", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Put the whole car inside?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "00:50:48", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They put us and the car inside the plane, flew us back to Lagos, and then we managed to get back up to Abeokuta. So that was our Ouagadougou adventure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "00:51:00", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did you see of Ouagadougou?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "00:51:03", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we saw the guesthouse, we saw the swimming pool. We saw some of the streets and some of the French restaurants in Ouagadougou. So that was it, because we only spent maybe about three or four days and then the plane was flying back. So we took it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "00:51:20", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it had taken you so long to get there. You ate up a lot of available time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "00:51:22", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Took about a week to get there. Yeah, that was an adventure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "00:51:28", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So then you got back. That must have been the long holiday, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "00:51:34", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because the weather. I remember the weather and that's the dry period and it was there was some harmattan, so that would have been January and December, January period. It's about this same time that I make friends with a Yoruba sculptor through the friendship of this Peace Corps woman who was teaching in a different school. She was collecting oral history. She was in literature and she was recording him on stories and songs in Yoruba." + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "00:52:15", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Recording the sculptor?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "00:52:16", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The sculptor, right. Yes, because he was a storyteller as well as a sculptor. I was interested in him as a sculptor. So she introduced me to him. We became friends. Then I, I asked him if I could become his apprentice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "00:52:31", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember his name?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "00:52:33", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Sanusi. Sanusi. S dot. Dot under the S. A-N-U-S-I. Sanusi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "00:52:46", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok. That must be a Youbra special where you have a dot under the S." + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "00:52:51", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, to make it the 'sh' sound. Yeah. Sanusi. And Sanusi came from the Adugbologe compound, one of the two most famous carving compounds in the city of Abeokuta. Adugbologe. And that's in Imere Quarter. I-M-E-R-E Quarter. And we made our agreement, he agreed to take me on and to teach me, but it had to be in my space, not at his family's compound, because he knew that his father would not approve. His father would have felt that he was giving away trade secrets by teaching me, a white person, a foreigner, carving techniques and secrets, and that I would then become competition to their compound of carvers because that's how they survived." + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "00:53:54", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure. And how far away was the Sanusi compound?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "00:53:58", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was in another part of town, so it was about three or four miles away. It was in a fairly remote area, up in the hills on the other side of the town. So it was not close to where I lived. So he would come to my flat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "00:54:17", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On a bicycle or?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "00:54:18", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, he would take public transportation, but mostly he would walk or three or four miles and with his tools or take his bike and come. And then we would work in one of my rooms, one of my front rooms that was empty in my flat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "00:54:33", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you'd start with a block of some kind of wood." + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "00:54:35", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, we started from the basics. He would bring the wood and we would keep it soaked in water to keep it soft. Because he was using fresh wood. It wasn't aged or dried wood." + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "00:54:49", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What kind of wood?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "00:54:51", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Omo. It was called Omo, O-M-O, wood. And I've written about this experience and it's in the catalog called African Artistry: Technique and Aesthetics in Yoruba Sculpture, that I did for an exhibition at the High Museum in Atlanta in 1980. So that's a publication, and that whole essay is about this apprenticeship." + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "00:55:16", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Uh huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "00:55:18", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And this was the start of my understanding the importance of bodily knowledge, sensory knowledge, because what that apprenticeship taught me was that I could never really understand Yoruba carving techniques and aesthetics choices in style and form until I embodied it myself. And that's what apprenticeship is about, imitating your master, your instructor. So he would, you know, carve a bit and then he would on his piece of wood and then give me mine, and I would try to replicate what he was doing. And it took a long time because in the beginning, you know, you use an adze. So it's a chopping motion in the wood and you're trying to chop with great accuracy and force and not knowing how to use the tool. In the beginning, I would grip it tighter and tighter, trying to make it more and more accurate. And of course, it would be less and less accurate. And I was exhausted after three or four minutes. Whereas a master Yoruba sculptor can work from dawn to dusk without stop because he knows how to use his tools." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "00:56:38", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He's got a lighter touch on the grip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "00:56:41", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. He has the bodily knowledge and wisdom of how to use his tool for carving his form. So that's an apprenticeship started, and we would work maybe two or three times a week. And I worked with him for about seven to eight months altogether." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "00:57:02", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And when you were working with him, your language was Yoruba." + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "00:57:06", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it was basic, rudimentary Yoruba because he spoke very little English. But you see, the apprenticeship is observe and imitate." + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "00:57:17", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, not so much talk." + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "00:57:18", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it's all by action. It's the gesture. It's the form. It's the rhythm, it's the pace, it's the sound. It's all of those things that I had to know and try to emulate. It wasn't verbal instruction, very little. And I would pay him a fee for the time that he came and to teach me. And in the seven or eight months that we worked, I did maybe a total of six or eight pieces and then I did some pieces of my own after the end of the apprenticeship. And I still have, I have three or four of them that I show to my students here at the university." + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "00:58:06", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you brought those home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "00:58:08", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I brought those home. A number of ones I gave us to friends, and I don't know where they are now. And two or three of them were stolen from my apartment when I lived and taught in Cleveland." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "00:58:24", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, I'm so sorry." + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "00:58:26", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'm not so sorry. I mean, they found nothing else in the apartment that was worth stealing. So I feel very complimented by the fact that they thought maybe they had some authentic and therefore very, very expensive African art to sell to somebody. Yeah. So I lost two pieces, two or three pieces." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "00:58:49", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of your own?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "00:58:50", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of my own work, yeah. So that apprenticeship that changed me. It changed my life. It changed my direction because it was just at about that time that we started receiving information from Columbia University and from Teachers College. For those of us who had gone through the training program to encourage us to consider coming back to Columbia through graduate school. So this fusion of interest in Yoruba culture and Yoruba art and Yoruba history with Biobaku, were all things that then started to inform my consideration of going back to graduate school after the Peace Corps, which I did. I applied and was given a fellowship and work and stuff. And that's, but that's later. So but it was also a transformation in my relationship to Yoruba people and Yoruba community that I was living in. Because by the end of that first year, I was spending in that first year in Nigeria, I was still dependent upon, in a sense, and drawn to the other ex-patriots in the community, other British or Canadian or American volunteers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "01:00:25", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The Western culture that is your own." + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "01:00:28", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Exactly. But the second year I made a transition and I got out of that expat scene, which I liked less and less, and I moved much closer physically, emotionally, psychologically to the Yoruba community that I was living in. And learning from, my students, this master sculptor, my other Yoruba colleagues and other Yoruba friends. And that was a very important shift for me. And I saw how some of my colleagues did it and many did not. Many of them stayed in the safe space of expatriate community. But it was the second year of my stay that was really the transformative one and the one that I value the most because that's the one that's given me grounding and direction and commitment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "01:01:32", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. It's pointed the direction of the rest of your life?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "01:01:36", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, exactly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "01:01:38", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While you were there, I'm remembering your first two weeks in homesickness and I'm remembering the closeness of your family. How were you able to stay in touch with your family to let them know how you were, what you were doing, what you were engaging in?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 237, + "timestamp": "01:01:56", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "By aerogram letters. The, you know, the thin paper blue paper ones that you then folded up and put glue on to seal and send on its way. Because I was doing that and along with my photographs, with slides that I was making, although" + }, + { + "turn_id": 238, + "timestamp": "01:02:17", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You sent them the slides?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 239, + "timestamp": "01:02:18", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, I also sent. To Kodak. I would send the film to Kodak for the processing, and then they would send the processed slides to my parents. So they were kind of being sent overseas in their packages." + }, + { + "turn_id": 240, + "timestamp": "01:02:34", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you do audio cassette tape, voice recordings?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 241, + "timestamp": "01:02:38", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I didn't. Well, yes, I think I might have done one or two, but not very many. It was mostly the letters." + }, + { + "turn_id": 242, + "timestamp": "01:02:45", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the letter would take more than two days to get there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 243, + "timestamp": "01:02:49", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it would take about take about two weeks to get and two weeks to come back from stage." + }, + { + "turn_id": 244, + "timestamp": "01:02:54", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To get their reply, right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 245, + "timestamp": "01:02:57", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 246, + "timestamp": "01:02:58", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So no iPhone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 247, + "timestamp": "01:03:01", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, no, no. It was long distance and slow communication. And that was OK. That was fine. Once I found my footing and started to position myself where I was physically." + }, + { + "turn_id": 248, + "timestamp": "01:03:21", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you still have those letters? Did your parents save them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 249, + "timestamp": "01:03:24", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They did, and I have them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 250, + "timestamp": "01:03:26", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You have them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 251, + "timestamp": "01:03:26", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I have them somewhere in the HJD archive, in my garage." + }, + { + "turn_id": 252, + "timestamp": "01:03:32", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good. We'll talk about what you might do with those letters after the interview." + }, + { + "turn_id": 253, + "timestamp": "01:03:37", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 254, + "timestamp": "01:03:39", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So and your health throughout these two years, how were you holding up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 255, + "timestamp": "01:03:42", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My health was good, I was good. I never had any malaria during the time. I don't remember any." + }, + { + "turn_id": 256, + "timestamp": "01:03:50", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you take Aralen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 257, + "timestamp": "01:03:52", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yep, I did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 258, + "timestamp": "01:03:53", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Once a week?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 259, + "timestamp": "01:03:54", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think, yeah, I think I did. I think I was pretty conscientious about that. But I was living in a, you know, I was up on the second floor. So I was above the ground and I had a mosquito net over my bed and I had good accommodations, very comfortable. So it was only when I was doing travels that I, you know, might have been subject to malaria, but never experienced it and never had any serious health problems. My health has always been good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 260, + "timestamp": "01:04:32", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's great. Did Peace Corps ever come to visit, Peace Corps staff, come to visit you on site in Abeokuta?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 261, + "timestamp": "01:04:40", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think once or twice in the two-year period, not often." + }, + { + "turn_id": 262, + "timestamp": "01:04:47", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Gamma globulin shots and so forth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 263, + "timestamp": "01:04:49", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yeah, I think so. Maybe, but that was an Ibadan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 264, + "timestamp": "01:04:55", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, you went into Ibadan?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 265, + "timestamp": "01:04:56", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think I had to go into Ibadan for that kind of thing. And it was in Ibadan that I also ate. I became close friends with a very famous Yoruba sculptor, Fakeye." + }, + { + "turn_id": 266, + "timestamp": "01:05:09", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ah yes, I was going to ask if you had met him. Lamidi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 267, + "timestamp": "01:05:12", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Lamidi. Yeah, because he had become friends with a number of the Americans in USIS, and they organized exhibitions of his work. And that's how his career really blossomed. And he took on apprentices. And one of those apprentices many years later, in 1970, when I was back doing my PhD research, was one of his apprentices was my co-carver when I was back at the University of Ife and we used to carve together. He had studied with Fakeye. Fakeye had always wanted me to come and apprentice under him when he found out that I was doing it in Abeokuta, he said you should come in and work with me. But Ibadan was too far away and it was, I didn't have any housing there. It wasn't convenient. And so it never happened. But we became close friends. And yeah, we'd go to his exhibitions and loved his work. And I've brought him here to Wisconsin to two times when he was coming to the States, he's now passed away. And we have one of his wonderful works in the permanent collection here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 268, + "timestamp": "01:06:29", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I've seen it. It's gorgeous." + }, + { + "turn_id": 269, + "timestamp": "01:06:30", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, it's a beautiful piece." + }, + { + "turn_id": 270, + "timestamp": "01:06:32", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He had a brother, Hakim, whose work is similar." + }, + { + "turn_id": 271, + "timestamp": "01:06:36", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very similar. Yeah, very similar." + }, + { + "turn_id": 272, + "timestamp": "01:06:39", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But Hakim didn't get the fame of his brother Lamidi." + }, + { + "turn_id": 273, + "timestamp": "01:06:41", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. Yeah, Lamidi, he was the master. Lots of imitators. But he was the master. And then it was in those years in the seventies when he got a position at the University of Ife as their resident artist, and he was teaching the wood sculpture section in the art department." + }, + { + "turn_id": 274, + "timestamp": "01:07:06", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And that was when you went back after Peace Corps." + }, + { + "turn_id": 275, + "timestamp": "01:07:09", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, this was after Peace Corps, right. Because I, you know, I was there in Nigeria until August of '66, then started graduate school soon after. And, you know, in September of '66, and it was in June of, May, June of '70 when I finished all my coursework and was ABD that I went back to Nigeria to do my field research for the PhD. And it was that time that I was at Ife, affiliated with Ife. So let's see. So, that's for the two years in Nigeria. When I was leaving to come back to the States, I decided that was my one opportunity to do my roots journey." + }, + { + "turn_id": 276, + "timestamp": "01:08:03", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On your way home?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 277, + "timestamp": "01:08:03", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "On my way home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 278, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ok, so let's hear it. Where did you go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 279, + "timestamp": "01:08:06", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, this was during the heat of the Cold War and therefore to go to Russia, because I wanted to go to Russia. I wanted to go to the USSR. You had to go through Intourist, which was the official government. And Americans were not free to travel anywhere in the USSR, but I was able to get a visa to go to Moscow thinking that maybe I could get down to the Ukraine where my grandfather had come from or Belarus. But in fact, it never happened. But I got my visa, so my first trip. From Nigeria, I flew to Egypt and I spent about a week in Egypt." + }, + { + "turn_id": 280, + "timestamp": "01:08:48", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "From Lagos?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 281, + "timestamp": "01:08:50", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To Cairo. Cairo. And I spent a week in Egypt and I went up the Nile to Luxor and explored some of those incredible sights. Got a sense, a little bit of a sense of Egypt. And then from Cairo, I flew to I think it was Lebanon and it was a one-day stopover. So I don't remember much about Beirut. And then from there I flew to Moscow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 282, + "timestamp": "01:09:21", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you had to procure your visa for Russia in Nigeria, in Lagos, somehow at the embassies?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 283, + "timestamp": "01:09:27", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "At the Russian Embassy in Lagos, yeah. That's how I got that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 284, + "timestamp": "01:09:32", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That must have taken some time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 285, + "timestamp": "01:09:33", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A little bit of time. Yeah, yeah. And it was very restrictive. And during that time when I landed in Moscow, you couldn't spend any money. You had to pay for these meal tickets. And you had to eat in the restaurants that were set aside for foreigners, tourists, visitors. So I was there in these places, these government run cafeterias for foreigners, and that's not what I had come for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 286, + "timestamp": "01:10:05", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, no, that's not what you wanted." + }, + { + "turn_id": 287, + "timestamp": "01:10:07", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "When I was at Hamilton, I studied Russian for two years. I didn't remember much of it, but it helped me start to have conversations and I found my way to some, to some Russian folks. But it was only in the last two or three days of my 10 day stay that I was able to converse. You know, enough of my Russian had come back. But then it was too late and I couldn't leave Moscow and there was no way to get to the Ukraine. So that was my roots journey. And then from Moscow, I flew to Berlin. What would have been, yeah, West Berlin. Met Peter Crone again and spent some time with him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 288, + "timestamp": "01:10:59", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is your third time now with Peter." + }, + { + "turn_id": 289, + "timestamp": "01:11:01", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, he yeah, third time, since he lived with us in Hempstead. And then when I went to see him in '61 and then '66. And I've seen him since then too. And then from West Berlin, I flew back to New York and met my family, met me at JFK. And in the exchange of greetings as I got off the plane, all they could do was laugh because I was speaking Nigerian English and I couldn't hear it. They said, is that you, Henry? And all they could do was laugh, and I didn't know what they were laughing at. So that was the return. The return experience, because my speech patterns had changed completely in order to make myself understandable to my students in Nigeria." + }, + { + "turn_id": 290, + "timestamp": "01:12:01", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you speak special English." + }, + { + "turn_id": 291, + "timestamp": "01:12:03", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And if I meet a Yoruba person, I fall back into it immediately." + }, + { + "turn_id": 292, + "timestamp": "01:12:08", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 293, + "timestamp": "01:12:10", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And then the other thing that they also marveled at was my sitting there at the first meal that we shared, putting piles of salt and pepper on my food because it was tasteless to me after." + }, + { + "turn_id": 294, + "timestamp": "01:12:26", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, after all the." + }, + { + "turn_id": 295, + "timestamp": "01:12:27", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The pepper of two years of Nigerian cuisine. So." + }, + { + "turn_id": 296, + "timestamp": "01:12:33", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Transitions happen in both directions" + }, + { + "turn_id": 297, + "timestamp": "01:12:38", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Both directions, yeah, and in fact, coming home, I think it's tougher than going away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 298, + "timestamp": "01:12:42", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Mm hmm. You look at, you begin to get a view of your own country. Did that change for you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 299, + "timestamp": "01:12:48", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh yeah, very much, very much. I strongly advocate that every American should have an experience outside, a serious cross-cultural experience, in order to understand their own country in the world system because we get a very different view. As I like to say, we think we have a free press. We don't, we have a bought press, we have a paid-for press, and we only hear what those payers want us to hear and see. So that was a real eye-opener, and every American should have that experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 300, + "timestamp": "01:13:30", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Anything else that you'd like to put on record about your two years in the Peace Corps?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 301, + "timestamp": "01:13:38", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'm sure many others have said this, but I'll repeat it as well. I think I contributed little to Nigeria in its formative years from '64 to '66. I may have touched and inspired some of my students. Maybe they learned a little bit of French so that they could visit their neighbors in other parts of West Africa. But in the end, it changed me, didn't change. I didn't help change Nigeria. But Nigeria changed me dramatically, and I hope in positive ways. So that I have some knowledge and some sensitivity to what they are experiencing and how they're finding their way in this world. And that it's helped me to share that with my students and the people that I live and know, live with and know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 302, + "timestamp": "01:14:51", + "speaker": "Phyllis Noble", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 303, + "timestamp": "01:14:53", + "speaker": "Henry Drewal", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00465", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/OchoaEL/ochoael.htm", + "original_file_name": "OchoaEL_8-22-17.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/OchoaEL/OchoaEL_8-22-17.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Ellen Ochoa", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 22 August 2017" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Ellen Ochoa" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is August 22nd, 2017. This interview with Dr. Ellen Ochoa is being conducted at the Johnson Space Center for the JSC Oral History Project. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal. Thanks again for taking some time. I know how busy you are." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wanted to start by asking you about the all-hands meeting that we had last week with [Acting NASA Administrator] Robert [M.] Lightfoot [Jr.]. You were talking about a couple of changes going on at the Center, one of which was the effort to combine a number of contracts. I think you even mentioned combining Orion and ISS [International Space Station contracts]. Would you talk about that effort, why that’s important, and what spurred that [decision]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "This was all part of JSC 2.0, and it was probably about three years ago now. Every year our senior staff has gotten together and said, “In addition to activities we have going on in each of our organizations, what should we focus on as a senior staff? What are things that require support from a variety of different organizations here and really need that top-level collaboration and focus?”\\n\\n So a few years ago one of those things was to change how we decide what contracts we’re going to have at the Center. At the time it was very decentralized, so an organization could say, “Well, I need certain services.” They could just go directly to procurement and say, “We need to start up a contract for this kind of service or goods.” Then you go through a pretty involved process where you put together an initial team to look at what kind of contract you might want. You end up putting together a source evaluation board. You have procurement people and resources people and legal people as well as the technical or functional people who are actually defining what services you need.\\n\\n Go through a whole process, end up selecting a contract, and then depending on what kind of contract it is, if it’s something that involves an award fee, you’re continuously monitoring and meeting and trying to determine what that award fee is. So the more contracts you have, the more people are involved in these kinds of processes at any one time, the more resources it takes.\\n\\n If you’re looking at how can you get the services and goods that you need with fewer resources invested in doing that, but still come out with what you need, one way to do it would be to have fewer overall contracts. We wanted to make sure we were doing a couple of things, that, of course, all the organizations were very involved in this process and, number two, other things that were important to the Agency and to the federal government, for example the dollars that we spend on small business, that we were preserving and considering that. We didn’t want to do something where you just end all the small business contracts because that adds to the total amount. That wouldn’t have been the goal.\\n\\n We had a group get together, and they literally reviewed every contract we have here, which was about 120 at the time, went through the statement of work to say what kinds of things is that contract able to provide. Then they came up with a plan over three or four years to say, “We can come down about 20 percent in the number of contracts that we have here.” They looked at when contracts were naturally going to end, how you could dovetail. Because we also didn’t want to do anything like just end a contract in the middle. We had no cause to do that. You needed to look at natural endings. Before you exercise an option, when is there a chance to do something with a contract. I should say everybody worked together. We brought that back to senior staff, and we had essentially all the senior leaders here at JSC agree to this plan, which was very specific in terms of what contracts were ending when and when we had the opportunity to combine or change things around.\\n\\n We’ve put that plan in place, and really we’re coming almost to the end of that, in which we really have consolidated. You can see how the number of contracts has tracked downward over the last few years. We’re very close to the point where we’re down about 20 percent.\\n\\n One organization, Flight Operations, when we started this three years ago they had 14 contracts. They looked very closely at how they could combine those somewhat differently and come out with eight contracts. We’re in the very end process of awarding those contracts now. I think the more important part is you didn’t want that to be just a one-time-only effort. You wanted to really going forward have a process, where before you put a new contract in place you’d asked yourself those important questions. Are there other contracts here at JSC that already have that content and that statement of work? You can just add money to that contract. You can avoid this whole process. Are there other contracts across NASA which have the ability to support JSC where you could get that work? Are there other mechanisms that already exist where we don’t need to start from scratch?\\n\\n For example, we’re just about done building a new combined heat and power plant here at Johnson Space Center. Rather than put a whole contract in place to do that, in fact it would have been almost impossible to do because you needed the chunk of money up front, we piggybacked onto a Department of Energy [DOE] construct that they had. They have these energy savings contracts where you don’t actually pay up front to build these plants. What you do is once it’s built you pay it back over time essentially from the savings in the utility bills that you have. DOE had set this up, and we were able to get it built under that.\\n\\n We want to be looking for these things that exist other places across the federal government. But the majority of the work was really looking specifically at our own contracts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Something else that Lightfoot had mentioned during the all-hands—a lot of people come to NASA and say, “But I didn’t want to do this,” which is monitor contracts. “I wanted to be the technical person.” Have you seen people moving into more technical positions as a result of this change?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What I would say is we have fewer people overall and fewer hours overall spent in doing contracting in terms of each contract. So yes, I think this has helped." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned one other thing that I thought was interesting, which was providing support for mission support people to become closer to the missions. Would you talk about why that’s so important here at JSC?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s something we have talked on and off for years, and we have done various things over the years, even before I was Center Director. For example, we developed the POWER of One award, where peers could nominate each other for something they had done that helped the Center or helped the Agency. You got to choose some experience here at JSC to be involved in, maybe getting to drive in the rover that we have or go onto the floor of Mission Control. That was done a few years ago.\\n\\n Last year as part of JSC 2.016 we were again trying to focus on connect to the mission. There were a variety of things that we did under that. One of them was to revamp our mission statement and explain our priorities more clearly and succinctly, because we want everybody to be able to know what they are, be able to say them, and understand how their own job fits into them.\\n\\n We also developed a Humans of JSC Website, which is on the 2.0 Website. It’s stories about different people who work here at Johnson Space Center, what their job is, why they enjoy doing that, and how that fits into the mission.\\n\\n I wanted to put again another focus on it this year for a couple of reasons. First of all, as I go around doing coffees, I still talk to people who have been here 20 years or more [and] they’ve never been to Mission Control. They’ve never been in the building where we have our spacecraft mockups. To me that’s just sad. That means we’re not doing our job here in terms of really taking advantage of what we have here at JSC and making sure that employees get some of those experiences that you should have the opportunity to get.\\n\\n The other reason I wanted to focus in particular on mission support people is, well, number one, they generally have less opportunity in their day-to-day job to get to do that, and number two, we’re in the midst of relooking at how we provide those services. Whenever you’re doing a change like that obviously it’s concerning for people, so it’s just an opportune time to make sure people do stay connected to the mission and do get the opportunities and see and do things here that you can only see and do here at Johnson Space Center." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s such a unique place really. That’s such a shame people haven’t seen those places." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They come in, and they’re working hard day to day, but they may be in an office environment or somewhere else." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you come in as an intern or co-op those things are always on your schedule, so you get to go see them. That’s a shame that the students see them but not everyone does." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not everybody gets to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned JSC 2.016. Then there was another iteration, 2.017. Can you talk about those iterations? You talked about the new mission statement. Can you elaborate on that a bit more?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After the first year and a half or so of JSC 2.0, I wanted to think about how do I maintain momentum in really trying to continuously get people to consider how can we do things differently here. I would generally have a retreat with the senior staff near the beginning of the calendar year, and we would try to set out a few goals, maybe around four or so, again that the senior staff would really focus on. I just mentioned what we called SAFE, which was the Strategic Acquisition Forecasting One, the one that talked about contracts.\\n\\n Every year we were setting out these goals at the beginning of the year. I guess it wasn’t until last year that we had the idea, I think maybe it was the External Relations Office, of branding it with the year. So instead of here’s this year’s 2.0 larger goals, we’ll call it 2.016—and this year we followed that with 2.017—and brand it a little bit more around it and be able to give a little bit more focus on it so people around the Center could know what it was that we were focused on as a senior staff and how we were working that, and hopefully a lot of people would be involved in that as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I thought it was kind of ingenious when I heard it. It definitely stuck in my mind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The external relations folks did a great job I think in particular last year of thinking about whether it’s a JSC Features story, where they tie it into that, or the Roundup or then they put the decals on the doors with the four goals that we had that year to just help keep it top of mind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I do see it quite frequently. I wonder if you can talk about some of your relationships with the other [NASA] Center Directors. I imagine that there’s close ties between all of you as you work together on different missions or just talk about different struggles that you may face on a day-to-day basis." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We meet periodically for Agency meetings, several different types of meetings. There’s Strategic Management Council meetings, or Robert Lightfoot has one that we call the NBA, which is Non-Budget Action meeting. It was really focused on Center Directors and mission directors being the key people who can implement changes to NASA’s operating model.\\n\\n All the work we did on TCAT, the Technical Capability Assessment Team, which led to capability leadership, and then the business services assessment, and now the mission support architecture. Where we did a lot of the discussion around that were at these NBA meetings, so that is a place where all the Center Directors get together periodically throughout the year, along with the mission directors who of course are the other key part of the Agency.\\n\\n We get to see each other reasonably frequently. Depending on what you’re working on, there are certain Centers that you’re working more closely. Obviously the human spaceflight centers have always been close and remain that. So I will see [NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Director] Todd [A.] May and [NASA Kennedy Space Center Director] Bob [Robert D.] Cabana much more frequently than I see some of the other Center Directors. Particularly over the last couple years we’ve tried to be more visible at any of the activities that are big milestones for the whole Exploration Systems Directorate: Orion, SLS [Space Launch System], ground systems. Another key Center for Orion is Glenn Research Center [Cleveland, Ohio] because they head up the partnership with the European Space Agency on a day-to-day basis. Obviously the Orion Program here is the overall owner of that but on a day-to-day basis Glenn does that. Of course Janet [L.] Kavandi is the Center Director now, and she is a former longtime JSC person and astronaut. So she’s a key person there that we’ve had closer ties with due to that partnership with Orion." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What are some of the technical issues that you’ve been involved in since you’ve been Center Director? I imagine that you talk about some of those issues when you come together. Are there any that stand out?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We’re in a period where there’s more development going on than at any time since maybe the height of the Apollo Program, and in terms of different spacecraft more than any time ever. We’re of course working the development of Orion. Marshall Space Flight Center [Huntsville, Alabama] is working on the SLS. Then along with Kennedy [Space Center, Florida] we co-manage the Commercial Crew Program. There’s two new spacecraft being developed under there, and they both have launch vehicles that have to be human-rated as well. There’s no shortage of technical issues as well as budget as well as schedule because any big development program like that you’re working all of those issues simultaneously day to day.\\n\\n For me the program managers of those programs are on my senior staff so I hear from them weekly. I also meet individually with all the program managers usually on a biweekly basis where we talk more specifically. It could be technical issues, could be schedule, budget; it’s usually some combination just based on what’s gone on in the last couple weeks or what’s coming up.\\n\\n I also meet weekly with the directors of all the technical organizations here, and so often there may be a particular technical issue with one of these programs that is the issue of the moment and we may use that meeting to discuss it and hear from Engineering, Safety, Flight Crew, and Human Health and Performance. White Sands [Test Facility, Las Cruces, New Mexico] may be involved in some of the testing. That’s another opportunity.\\n\\n There’s just so many, it’s hard to pick out just one, but it’s really a very very busy time for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I can imagine. I didn’t realize that this was such a busy time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it absolutely is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you talk with other people they think NASA is very quiet, we’re not launching, so therefore we’re not doing—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh my gosh. Nothing could be further from the truth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wondered if you would talk about politics. You mentioned when we were chatting before we turned on the recorder about going up to the Hill. Would you talk about your relationship with politicians, local, state, national, how all that works as Center Director?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure. Center Directors play a key role really in being a liaison to all the elected officials that are important to our region and to NASA in general. So I do that as do other Center Directors. We do have a legislative affairs person here who’s part of our External Relations Office. Usually we try to have a second person either part-time or full-time as well.\\n\\n I would say day to day they keep in contact with the offices of our elected officials, and particularly ones who have leadership roles on our key committees in Congress. We have four key committees, the authorization and appropriations committees for space on both the House and the Senate side. Three of those are led by Texas legislators, so clearly we want to stay in contact with them.\\n\\n Of course we’re not allowed to lobby. But we do want to make sure they stay informed, and they often are asking us questions as they are going through the work of their committee. There’s more constant interaction from our Legislative Affairs Office with their staffs, and then occasionally throughout the year more face-to-face meetings between me and the elected officials. There’s actually been quite a bit of interaction lately. Earlier in the year both House and Senate were working on the Transition Authorization Act, and both [JSC Deputy Director] Mark [S.] Geyer and I were up in Washington right at the time that they were working on and looking to pass them through their committees. We were actually up there for an Orion/SLS suppliers conference. There were about maybe 200 folks from around the country who work in or head companies that supply components to those programs making sure their elected officials know, “Hey, we support NASA. There may not be a NASA Center anywhere in our state or anywhere near us, [but] here’s how we support NASA.” Mark and I were also up there talking about Orion and SLS but also about NASA in general. It was right at the time they were working this authorization act, so we met with several elected officials at that point.\\n\\n We had some come out when James Webb Space Telescope arrived here, a little bit earlier, and we had the chance to view it before it actually went into our chamber where it is now being tested.\\n\\n Of course we had the big event in June where we announced and introduced to the world our 12 new astronaut candidates, and we had quite a lot of elected official support for that from the Vice President to senators. [United States] Senator [Ted] Cruz was here, other House officials. We had the governor of Texas, and we had some local elected officials as well.\\n\\n I was up on the Hill [again] last month for the ISS Research and Development Conference. It was in Washington, DC. It’s in different cities every year. This year it happened to be in Washington, DC, so we had members actually come over to the conference and speak, and then we had a reception on the Hill, another opportunity to talk to our elected officials and again keep them up to date on what we’re doing.\\n\\n Those are the kinds of activities that I do and that other Center Directors do as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you find that type of work challenging, working with politicians?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think you just have to understand what you can and cannot do. A lot of times we refer certain types of questions to our Headquarters Office of Legislative Affairs. But there’s quite a lot that we can make sure they’re up to speed on in terms of what we’re doing here at JSC or give them some information about impacts of certain things. It’s obviously very important. Congress authorizes our activities, and they actually appropriate the money. So it’s an important part of the job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that the governor was here. Would you talk about your relationship with state officials?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In terms of funding support, almost all of it comes from the federal government. We do have one particular education program which has been supported by our state legislature. That’s our Texas Aerospace Scholars Program, which funds a program where we reach out to high school juniors in Texas. They have an opportunity to sign up for and do online work during the school year. If they pass that successfully with a high enough grade, they can get high school credit for it, but then they are also invited here to Johnson Space Center for a week during the summer where they, of course, get to meet scientists and engineers here. They get to tour around, but they have some very specific activities about planning a mission to Mars during that week and then a report-out at the end. I get a chance to see some of those report-outs. That is something funded through the state of Texas. We do get funding other places, primarily from the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. So we combine those and support that activity.\\n\\n Every two years when the legislature is in session NASA goes up [to Austin]; we call it Space Week. There’s usually a particular day or two in the middle where again the Center Director goes up, and I’ll visit with several members of the state legislature, which I did this year.\\n\\n In general, we haven’t had a whole lot of interaction with the governors. Usually if possible, when we go up to visit the state legislature, we’ll visit with the governor. We didn’t this year, but I have in years past. This is really the first time I can recall that the governor has actually come to Johnson Space Center since I’ve been in management." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about the mayor of Houston? Do you have any contact with them or city council?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Our current mayor Sylvester Turner and our previous mayor Annise [D.] Parker have both been really great supporters of NASA. Previous to that I think it’s been a little bit hit-or-miss, but they have both been very interested in NASA. Sylvester Turner was down here for an event at Space Center Houston that involved me, and it was associated with the new display out there, Independence Plaza and the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. It was literally maybe three weeks after he took office, something very close to that. He’s been a strong strong supporter and has included NASA as he talks about the city and really, I would say, embraces JSC as a unique and important part of the city.\\n\\n Of course Houston was the focus of attention for the Super Bowl earlier this year, and we were a part of the host committee for that. We had a lot of opportunity during that 10 days where the focus was really on Houston to showcase what we’re doing here and to show up several places with the mayor and with other leaders of Houston. So that was a great opportunity to be part of that event which was so important to the Houston community here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There are other events that are so important here at JSC that are traditions like the chili cookoff and the Houston Livestock Show you mentioned and then there’s the trail riders that come through. Would you talk about some of those traditions and what value you see them producing for the Space Center and why they need to continue?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We’re fortunate to be in a city like Houston, where it’s the fourth largest city; I think we’re coming up to be the third before too long. It’s hugely important to the state, it’s hugely important to the nation, because of the industries that we have here with oil and gas, with the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical center in the country.\\n\\n We have a big petrochemical industry, we have the port, and we have NASA and the aerospace community. To me to make sure that whenever Houston is talked about as a community we’re one of those things in that list that I just mentioned of these important industries and activities. I just think we’re really fortunate to be in Houston and to be one of those. So being visible in the community I think is a large part of making sure we’re part of that communication.\\n\\n Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, anybody that lives in Houston knows how big that is within the Houston community, and so we do have a partnership on that. Trail riders generally come through here every year, and we support the longhorn viewing up there as well as, as I mentioned, they support us with some of their scholarship money for the Texas Aerospace Scholars. As well as there are people who come here as maybe college interns who have scholarship money from the rodeo as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One thing we haven’t talked about are Expedition missions, and I wanted to ask you about your involvement as Center Director. I know you travel a lot. Do you spend a lot of time going to Russia or working with some of our international partners elsewhere around the globe? If you could talk about some of those things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We definitely, from the Center Director Office, support every launch over there. Either I will go or Mark Geyer or Melanie [W. Saunders] as the Associate Director goes to every launch. Typically, I’ve been going once a year and then the other three are covered by Mark or Melanie. Of course it’s really Kazakhstan, not so much Russia. We stop in Russia in order to get on the charter flight that’s arranged for us there to go to Kazakhstan, but we actually spend most of the time in Kazakhstan at the launch.\\n\\n I think that’s incredibly important. It’s our people that are launching there, and of course we, [JSC], play the key role in coordinating all of the International Space Station activities. I think having that presence is important for the crew to know that we are paying attention and that this is a huge deal, and then just for the Program in general." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Any traditions that you participate in when you go over there? I’m sure that there’s quite a few." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We are present at the state commission that happens generally the day before launch. There’s usually some toasting that goes on after the commission, which is an important part of any Russian endeavor. Of course we participate in that. Then we’re out at the launch [viewing] site for the actual launch participating in that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you out there for the launch of [Scott J.] Kelly or Peggy [A. Whitson] on the recent flights?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was at Scott Kelly’s first Expedition launch but not the one that launched the beginning of the one-year mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Beginning of the one-year mission, yes. For Peggy were you there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wasn’t there for Peggy’s, no. I forget who went to that one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you talk about some of your relationships with our international partners?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In terms of really putting together the plans and meeting, the program managers meet, and of course [include] many layers under the programs. When I was head of Flight Crew Operations, I headed up the Multilateral Crew Operations Panel. That met periodically, and it was really the heads of all the crew offices of the five agencies that make up the partnership. We talked about upcoming crew assignments and how we were doing the increments. Any time there was any changes to the process or how that would happen we would talk about those. I would say it was really in that role that I had more of an in-line role where I actually needed to make decisions and get the group to come to consensus and bring that forward to the Program for approval.\\n\\n Now it’s really just staying on top of what the Program is deciding. The program managers around the world will meet and then bring their recommendations up to Bill [William H.] Gerstenmaier’s level [Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate] and then it actually goes up to the heads of Agency level as well. So [I’m] really kept informed. I asked questions. If there’s anything I felt like we needed to discuss I could either talk with [ISS Program Manager] Kirk [A.] Shireman or with Bill Gerstenmaier about that but I’m not right in the process of negotiating. That really happens up through the Program level." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things I wanted to ask about—we talked a little bit about this last time in terms of challenges that you face in terms of maintenance budgets—was the closure of the Arc Jet Facility that was a big concern for some of the folks who had worked out there for years. It’s my understanding that budget was a major concern. [I] wonder if you could talk about what role a Center Director might play in deciding what buildings have to get demoed and why they’re demoed, and then also your work with the congressional leadership about the decision to close it and why that decision was made and if there were any lessons learned you might share about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s timely that you’re talking today because today we’re hosting a visit from several folks at [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, DC] who are involved in approving our Center master plan. Every Center needs to have a master plan. We have to update it every five years. The one that we are working on right now I think is more specific than we’ve had in the past in terms of how much square footage we need to cut from our Center footprint.\\n\\n We need to do that in conjunction with the Agency as a whole, right? Because you have to look at what capabilities we have at this Center compared to what capabilities other Centers have, making sure that we maintain those capabilities that are unique to JSC and that the Agency has agreed need to move forward so that we still need to have them 20 years from now. These master plans are really 20-year looks into the future. That’s a very difficult thing to do, of course, because administrations change and things change in terms of what we need to provide. But we have to do the best job that we can in terms of looking forward and saying, “Based on where the Agency is headed and the overall Agency plans and the human spaceflight program in general, this is how we see NASA’s facilities.” We also obviously talk workforce and skills, but the master plan itself specifically has to do with the facilities that support it.\\n\\n So it looks at what should we be demolishing, what should be renovating or potentially changing into something different, and what should we be building. We are in the midst of moving into a beautiful new building, Human Health and Performance Building. Part of our master plan from a few years ago was getting the funding for building this building, and then that gives us the opportunity to demolish seven other buildings on site. One main one that’s been here since the ’60s which is really unfortunately in really terrible shape, as well as six smaller buildings that in some cases are the smaller metal shed buildings that we had the opportunity to build over the years, but none of them really ideal for the purpose that they were being used for. One new building, seven going away. One of the stipulations of building the new building is that it was going to have, if I remember right, 15 percent less square footage than the space that we were then going to be able to demolish. That’s part of the overall plan.\\n\\n This is really not just a NASA plan but an overall federal government plan of looking at the footprint of federal agencies across the country. You have to consider what are the actual capabilities we need, what kinds of facilities do we need to have them, what do we have now, what do other Centers have.\\n\\n In the case of the arc jet, there were two Centers that had arc jets. The capabilities didn’t exactly overlap, but in the end there really wasn’t the funding to keep both of them going. The Agency made the decision to keep the one at Ames Research Center [Moffett Field, California], to actually move some of our equipment from here at Johnson Space Center over there. Then our folks were asked to help set up and upgrade these new capabilities that they hadn’t had before at Ames based on our expertise and our equipment here.\\n\\n In fact, we just recently, maybe a month ago, finished the demolition of the building that we moved out of. Absolutely it’s hard when you have a capability to give it up. You really have to look at the larger picture of what’s going on across the whole Agency and just say, “In the name of really trying to support the overall goals of the Agency.” You get some things like a Human Health and Performance Building, and some things get moved.\\n\\n In some cases, things are just demolished. There have been wind tunnels at other Centers that have been demolished, and they didn’t build new ones at NASA. They looked to either other wind tunnels that exist, that corporations have, or changing the way in which we do certain kinds of research." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was Congress, once they heard the reasoning behind it, supportive of the idea? Or did you still get a lot of flak from the Texas delegation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had a number of different conversations about it but again really tried to put it in context. The decision was actually made when Mike [Michael L.] Coats was Center Director. He was really the one that was interfacing with them initially. I would say I just continued to get some questions after I became the Center Director and really tried to talk about the process that the Agency was going through at that time. I will say the arc jet decision was made a little bit ahead of the whole Technical Capability Assessment Team, but it was leading into that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are you getting any flak about tearing down the LRL [Lunar Receiving Lab, Building 37] given its historic qualities? I know that the building is in bad shape. My understanding is the foundation is splitting in two." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Whenever we do anything where there was something historic that happened there we do work with the State Historic Preservation Office. Usually you try to collect a bunch of information, whether it’s blueprints, photographs, and put together information before you do something like that.\\n\\n But we’ve got to move on. Believe me, if you saw the difference between the old and the new, you’d realize how excited people are. They’re moving in as we speak. Really really excited to be able to operate in the new building." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, no doubt." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It really supports what we’ve been trying to do under JSC 2.0 about collaborating more across divisions and organizations and not being as stovepiped with the way the labs are set up there. Here we have labs in seven different buildings. If you work in the one lab you may never see anybody that works in another lab. We have more of an open lab concept over there, and people who use certain kinds of equipment can actually share them instead of labs having separate ones, which just adds to the cost. You get more of that dialogue between the different scientists and researchers as well, which we think will really enhance our ability to produce good science." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, and it’s a beautiful building, it really is nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Last time we talked about partnerships. I wonder if you would talk about some of the more successful partnerships that have come about as a result of [JSC] 2.0 and why you think they’ve been so successful or why you’re so proud of those." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We have literally hundreds of different partnerships, and they span a wide range. Starting several years ago when I was Deputy and Mike Coats was Center Director Robotics and Engineering started working with General Motors [Company]. Again you often think of partnerships with aerospace companies. This was an automotive company, but they actually sent money and sent engineers out here who lived out here two or three years and worked in our labs. We were able to make progress on Robonaut, which is our humanoid robotics program, much quicker than we would have just on the resources that we had on our own. We were interested in that technology to support astronauts in space, and they were interested in humanoid robots who could work alongside humans in factories and prevent things like repetitive motion injuries. That was a very interesting partnership.\\n\\n Another partnership is in our Flight Ops Directorate. One of our main facilities is the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. That’s our big underwater pool. We have a contract that essentially helps operate it; Raytheon runs it. A few years ago when we competed that contract one of the things we really wanted to incentivize was can we find partners to use that facility.\\n\\n In this case again it was really a cost sharing activity, because once the Space Station was built, although we still need the facility, we use it all the time to learn how to do and to practice space walks, we didn’t need it nearly as much as when we were actually assembling the International Space Station. So we had the opportunity to time-share and cost-share that facility.\\n\\n We have found some very good partners, primarily in oil and gas, the offshore part of that industry, doing training for people. The first big training partnership that we had, a lot of it was actually in response to Deepwater Horizon where they wanted to make sure people had the appropriate training in case a helicopter ditched in the Gulf. It wasn’t just that we had water, but we had trained safety divers, we had test conductors, we had people who could put together scenarios and carry them out in a simulation environment. We had crane operators; we had doctors on call. All of that supports what we do and that’s exactly what you need to support some of that training. Put together that partnership with the help of our contractor partner Raytheon.\\n\\n Then we’ve done a variety of other things generally all supporting oil and gas people who are using remotely operated vehicles underwater either for some kind of construction or some kind of repair activity. They can try out those kinds of activities in our pool. So that was another kind of partnership that we had.\\n\\n Some of our technical folks have worked with all different kinds of industries. People at the Texas Medical Center, again oil and gas. I had a nice note [recently] that passed on thanks from the head of Shell UK because some of our folks helped develop an inspection device for some of their underwater tanks where they had to understand the situation inside of these tanks for part of environmental remediation.\\n\\n Then there’s more outreach kinds of partnerships. I would say the partnership with the Houston Super Bowl Host Committee is one of those, where it was a great opportunity for us to be part of that whole outreach effort. So those are just a smattering of partnerships.\\n\\n We also, of course, have either contracts or partnerships with just about every aerospace company imaginable, including all of the newer ones. Obviously a big one with SpaceX, [also a partnership] with Blue Origin. We’ve had partnerships with Virgin Galactic in the past. I think we still do, I’m not sure. Almost every company that you can think of we probably have some kind of Space Act agreement. Often with no exchange of funds but where we do some kind of technical review of something that they’re interested in having us review, where we get some of our experts together. Really just a wide variety.\\n\\n We have a partnership with the Houston Airport System regarding the spaceport at Ellington." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was hoping to talk about that, but I know we’re running close on time today. I wonder if this might be a good place for us to stop. You’ve got a lot of things to be proud of." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. All right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Ellen Ochoa", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00189", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FullertonCG/fullertoncg.htm", + "original_file_name": "FullertonCG_5-6-02.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/FullertonCG/FullertonCG_5-6-02.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "location_date": "NASA Dryden Flight Research Center – 6 May 2002" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "C. Gordon Fullerton" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is May 6, 2002. This oral history with Gordon Fullerton is being conducted by Rebecca Wright for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project at the Dryden Flight Research Center in California, where Colonel Fullerton serves as the Center’s chief pilot.\\n\\n We’re going to thank you again for taking time from your very busy schedule to discuss your career. You have spent the vast part of your life in aviation. Could you tell us how your interest began?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it began when I was in the first three years of grade school. I lived in Butler, Pennsylvania, and my father was off in the Army Air Corps. So we heard what he was up to, where he was being based, and what airplanes he was flying, so the interest was natural there. I remember specifically, for a Christmas present he sent me an aircraft instrument panel—“toy” is not the word—an educational kind of toy that you could set up on a table, that had cardboard rudder pedals and a stick to fly with and a book that said how to fly, and I devoured—I wore that thing out.\\n\\n So that’s about as early as I can remember, and remember also building with a peach basket and a two-by-four and some skate wheels and wagon wheels, an airplane I could roll on the sidewalk, with some help from my grandfather and uncle. Pretty cool little airplane, I thought. Still, I have a picture of it.\\n\\n So that interest in airplanes was pretty firmly established as I proceeded on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And this was in grade school. Your interest continued on, of course, through high school and then you went on into college." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We moved when the war, World War II, was over, and my father was discharged. We moved to Portland [Oregon] at the time, when I went into the fourth grade. So he never flew again, except he rented an airplane for my tenth birthday. He rented a little two-place Aeronca and took me for an airplane ride, which he was getting back in the swing of it himself, but it was exciting for both of us. And that’s the last time I really flew an airplane. My interests were clearly on the mathematics—scientific, technical, that’s where my interests and abilities were. The idea that I would be an engineer was formed real early in high school, and so that’s the kind of courses I took, and it led to going to engineering school after high school.\\n\\n I always wondered about would I be good as a pilot, would I like it, would I have any ability. There were no opportunities for me to actually go take flying lessons or fly anything, so that was all a question in my mind. I figured I can always get a job as an engineer from a good engineer, and so my first flying lesson really was when I went into the Air Force and went to pilot training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had finished your degrees at Caltech [California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California] before you went into the Air Force?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. I was in ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps], Air Force ROTC at Caltech. I knew that this idea, I’d like to fly, was there, and so that was certainly an obvious opportunity to take, and I did have a chance to get some flights with the instructors at Caltech. The ones who were rated and on flying status hauled me along when they would go out to Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino [California], and so I got a chance to ride in several airplanes. Very exciting. In fact, my first jet ride was one of those times, in a T-33, and all that convinced me, at least didn’t deter me from the idea that I ought to pursue that.\\n\\n The ROTC unit was very small; only seven of us graduated. It was optional in the upper grades. Seven of us were commissioned. I was the only one to go to flying school in my senior class. But as it turned out, that was the right choice, because I’d rather fly than do anything, and so I’ve had a tremendous chance to do a wide variety of it over many years and still am, way beyond the point where I have any right to be flying, probably." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you aspire to stay in the Air Force, make it a career?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The career probably was, again, another unknown. I didn’t know whether military life would be for me. I had a commitment to get accepted into flying school, where you had to sign a commitment to stay three years after flying school. It seemed like a long time. Now the commitments are ten years or more. But I thought that’s worth it to see, and, well, I enjoyed it very much, and so pursued staying in, and without a longstanding commitment to go military, I ended up thirty years in the Air Force." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right after your basic flight training, you trained on the [F-86L] Sabre Jet Interceptor and a Stratojet [B-47 Stratojet]. Were these your requests, to be part of those programs, or did the Air Force transfer to go to do those programs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes and no. Assignments out of flying school were based on your class rank. I had a high class rank and had my choice of any. The fighters were the ones desirable, and I picked the F-86 over the F-100, because at the time the guys who were going to the F-100 training school were getting shunted into bombers, and so, why, while the F-100 is a newer airplane than the 86, the 86 were pretty secure in getting fighter assignments. Well, wouldn’t you know, it reversed in the time I was there.\\n\\n So my whole class out of F-86s were sent to bombers and transports, and, in my case, I went to B-47s. In looking back, though, it was probably, while it seemed like a terrible thing at the time—some of my classmates almost wanted to slit their wrists, you know, or quit, but they were committed, I went on with it and decided to be the best B-47 pilot the Air Force had, and in the long term it paid off, because of having had both small-fighter-type and bomber multi-engine experience, I ended up probably getting the assignment that was a factor in me getting to fly the Approach and Landing Tests [ALT] on the Shuttle many years later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Between 1960 and ’64, you belonged to the 303rd Bomb Wing of the Strategic Air Command. These were incredibly tense times in terms of the cold war activity. What were your thoughts, and did you have many experiences during those times with these events?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, our wing had a nuclear mission and a big bomb in the bomb bay of every airplane on alert. We were on alert, ready to go to war, a large percentage of the time. Probably a third of your time, you were on alert. The other two-thirds you were either off or flying training flights. I was at Davis Monthan [Air Force Base, Arizona] for four years, and during that time we also pulled alert up in Alaska, both at Fairbanks and Elmendorf. Again, it was an everyday thing, so it wasn’t like, while we were target-studying targets in Russia and checking the weather in Russia in case the bell went off, again, it becomes a routine. So it wasn’t like you felt like you were on the verge of World War III every minute.\\n\\n The only period that approached that, though, was the Cuban Missile Crisis, when all of SAC [Strategic Air Command] went on the highest level of alert, and our airplanes were disbursed from Davis Monthan in Tucson to several bases. I went to Hill Air Force Base near Salt Lake [Utah]. I remember when we got there and landed and parked our airplane to get it ready to go to war, the quarters we were given to stay in had concertina wire all around them. So they started to look like, hey, this is more than just routine.\\n\\n Most of the time, though, it was doing your job, and the job involved training flights that simulated real close what you’d be doing going to war, but sitting on alert, kind of like being in jail, you’re restricted to a facility near the airplanes. No freedom to even rove around the base. And so in Alaska, we were in a hangar and stayed in that hangar day and night. It wasn’t particularly fun, but it wasn’t stressful either. But it was a war in the cold war sense, and we won it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At this time there was that threat of war, but also a war in Vietnam that was starting to pick up some escalation. Did you ever have a thought that you might be sent to war that direction?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I certainly would have been, except what intervened, I applied and was accepted to the test pilot school, and then graduation from test pilot school was in 1965. Space flight was just sort of becoming a possibility. The word “astronaut” I hadn’t heard of prior to this, until it started showing up in the papers.\\n\\n And so that sounded pretty cool, and I applied for, both with NASA and the Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory [MOL] Program, so that I’d take either one. There were selection boards convened for both. I happened to be in the Air Force ones and then after a lot of long involved process, selected for in the second group of crew members for Manned Orbiting Lab.\\n\\n What does that have to do with Vietnam? Well, it was a highly classified program, and once we got enmeshed in it, our classification level was high enough that we were not permitted to go out of the country. And so, in effect, that kind of saved me, you know. I have many friends who went to Vietnam, lost some there, and I feel slightly guilty about not doing my part, but also very lucky that I didn’t have people shooting at me. So Vietnam passed me by, even though I was active duty Air Force." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were becoming part of this aerospace research pilot school. How hard was that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To get into?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was hard for bomber pilots, because it built up a tradition here that the only people who could possibly be red-hot test pilots were those flying supersonic fighters, and since the selection board for people to get into that school was basically here at Edwards, their prejudice prevailed and SAC pilots didn’t get in. I never made the cut.\\n\\n I found that out later, the reasons, although I started applying to come here when I had the minimum number of hours. So I must have applied four or five times and gotten turned down each time, until all of a sudden one day I got accepted. It turns out the reason was that people with a broader view on things at Air Force headquarters realized they’re never getting any multi-engine test pilots because the only people that people here were selecting were fighter pilots. So they took over the selection from the base here, decided to make it half and half, and then that’s when I made the cut.\\n\\n So I was in a class with six fighter pilots and six bomber pilots. Interestingly, this power struggle was under way, and so the class came under more than usual scrutiny, and they washed out four of the six of us. In the first two weeks, they were gone. And the one other guy and I were the only two bomber pilots left in the twelve total, so we wondered when our cut was coming, but we made it through, and that really broke the ice. Now there’s an equitable distribution. From then on, there really were both, properly so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you stayed here a few years before you moved on to Wright-Patterson [Air Force Base, Ohio]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not a few years. The course was a calendar year. My assignment out of here was back to Wright-Pat and the Bomber Test Division there. Appropriate for my background. And so I went back there, and then it was during that time that I applied for the space program. So I stayed there, I think, fourteen months, a good fourteen months for a flyer. I mean, this was during the buildup, really, for Vietnam, where the Air Force had been a nuclear Air Force, really, to that point, and all of a sudden we’re in a more conventional war, needing a lot of weapons improvements, and the test beds to test these improvements were the bigger airplanes at Wright-Pat.\\n\\n And so I ended up flying a tremendous amount of flying hours. We had twenty-four airplanes, only twelve pilots. Each airplane took two pilots, and we had people coming from administrative jobs to help us be co-pilots. And so I flew all over the world and I was in a dream situation for a young pilot, to build flying time. I was always in the air." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s where you wanted to be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, right. I think in the fourteen months I was there, I got 1,200 hours, which is, half of that is a big year for normal flying time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Then you wanted to move on to be part of the aerospace research pilots on the Manned Orbiting Laboratory down in Houston. You applied to NASA and to the Air Force for the opportunity to go into space." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. The Air Force fielded a call from NASA for applications to compete for astronaut slots, and then the Manned Orbiting Laboratory Program also. So the Air Force took the applications and made a sort of a preliminary cut to crew people for NASA and for MOL. You couldn’t go both ways. Then you competed with the Navy people and whoever did, and if you made it, you made it. If not, you were back to your old job.\\n\\n So I ended up with that first split in the MOL group. I made it in that group, and so after just that fourteen-month period at Wright-Pat doing airplane flight tests, I’m now into the space business with MOL, which meant coming back here to Edwards at first for about three months. Then we moved down to Los Angeles [California]. El Segundo was where the program office, or down there in the big city." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were you told about the mission for the MOL?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, we were told everything about it. It was classified. I’m not sure I’ve been really released from some of the classification, so I’m not comfortable talking about the details of it. But it was going to be a two-man vehicle, and you rode into orbit in a Gemini capsule modified for MOL. It was mounted on top of a long cylindrical laboratory, which was all put into orbit on a Titan 3-M booster. So it was miniscule by even Apollo standards and certainly by current standards. You’re two guys really crammed into this little Gemini capsule to get and also to get back, and then even the laboratory itself was relatively small volume.\\n\\n It went along. We had several annual three-years-to-launch parties, because, again, we were fighting the war in Vietnam. That was using lots of the military’s discretionary funds to do anything else. So the program kept getting slipped to accommodate budget cuts, until about three years after my assignment, it was cut completely.\\n\\n I was up flying in one of the airplanes that we had to fly for proficiency out of Los Angeles International [Airport]. I was up here shooting approaches to Palmdale or somewhere and got this radio call, “Come back and land,” and then when I got back and landed, someone came out and said, “The program’s cancelled,” which is a real blow, although not a big surprise. I knew it was struggling, because we just weren’t getting closer for the last couple of years. And, like everything, you never know when there’s big changes in the route of your life, whether it’s going to be good or bad, just like going from F-86s to bombers seemed awful at the time.\\n\\n In this case, I was married by now, and we wondered. I found an assignment here at Edwards to test the C-5 transport airplane, work on the test force here, and was ready to come up here. It looked like an interesting, good job. But then all of a sudden, George [E.] Mueller at NASA Headquarters decided we have now fourteen semi-trained astronauts available. NASA should pick up at least some of them, and so they made an arbitrary cut in the middle and took the seven youngest, and that’s it. That’s how I became an astronaut, is by pure quirk of fate, rather than any intense competition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And that decision was a part of what you would like to continue on with. I guess you could tell them you didn’t want to do that, but you chose to stay around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, they didn’t want anybody who didn’t volunteer. All seven of us went right on down there without question, but without any fanfare. We just sort of slipped in down there, and at the time they had lots of astronauts. In fact, a lot of them, some of the guys that walked on the Moon, were contemporaries of mine at test pilot school, in fact, were more junior. But they had gone the NASA route and they ended up—guys like Charlie [Charles M.] Duke [Jr.] and Ken [Thomas Kenneth] Mattingly [II], ended up down there, and they were senior. We were the new guys, so we ended up, the seven of us who got there were really the new kids on the block, and it was many years, ten or more, before they picked any more astronauts. So we were the new guys for a long time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you feel an acceptance and a welcome there as far as the new guys to do some of the work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes and no. As far as anybody coming out and announcing to the press, no. Anybody saying, “Okay, glad to have you here. Here’s what we’re going to do to indoctrinate you,” no, that didn’t happen at all. They did find us a desk and an office, and there was absolutely no training program or indoctrination. They said, “Well, just find out what you want to do, or make suggestions,” because everybody was so busy with assigned Apollo flights that, really didn’t have time. So it was good news and bad news. The good news was that we really were free to find a niche and pursue it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what did you look for? What was your niche that you liked?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The first thing I wanted to do, because when we got there, it was between Apollo 11 and 12—11 had landed in July, the first flight to the Moon, 12 was just happening as we got there in October or November, right in there. And I said, “I’d like to work on that program. I don’t know zilch about it,” but I was assigned as a support crew member working for Al [Alan B.] Shepard [Jr.] on Apollo 14.\\n\\n So I couldn’t believe it. I’m right in the middle of it and getting in the command module simulator and the lunar module simulators, and learning the spacecraft and going down to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] and doing the tests in the spacecraft and helping write the checklists, and then when they flew, talking on the radio while they’re stomping around in the lunar soil. So it was without any real right to be, I was instantly in the middle of it, working with people who had been working it for years prior.\\n\\n So, it was exciting. It was terrific. It was just a stroke of great good fortune to be into the whole thing right away. Some of the others of the seven were put on Skylab, which was off beyond Apollo 17, kind of programmed, not even sure it was going to go. So they were doing a lot more dog work on this thing. None of us had any chance to fly, because we had so many people ahead of us seniority-wise, and the tradition had been fly everybody in a group before you take the first guy in the next group.\\n\\n So that was great. I enjoyed that. In fact, I became kind of the booster expert for launch phase. So I did the launch phase for Apollos 14, 15, and 16, and then on 17 I handed over, and then I went down and was the guy that closed the hatch for 17, the last one, because I wanted to see a launch. I was always back in Houston. So that kind of closed out the program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it was very symbolic for you, closing the hatch on the last mission of the Moon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, for [Eugene A.] Cernan and [Ronald B.] Evans and Evans and [Harrison H. “Jack”] Schmitt.\\n\\n Anyway, what next? Well, everyone’s wondering what next. It was going to be originally up through Apollo 21, but, again, the war was taking the funds. The excitement of lunar travel would die quickly. The public is fickle. The Congress is fickle. So that program was short-cut. Skylab was coming. The guys, while I was working Apollo, did have support roles for Skylab. They had no chance to fly it. That was the next thing.\\n\\n But the next long-term thing on the horizon was the Shuttle. So, after Apollo 17 flew, I worked on the Shuttle, and I worked cockpits and displays and controls. Always been of interest to me. Beside, I’d run across a lot of really crummy designs in learning to fly certain airplanes, and I thought I could do better. And so as it turned out, that was a real challenge to, with the Shuttle, rather than lying on your back on the end of a rocket riding into space, you had possibility of controlling it, both in the vertical mode and coming back as an airplane pilot at the end. The whole complexity of it is far more complex than the rockets, as far as what the man could do.\\n\\n So, putting all that together in a cockpit was really intriguing, and I enjoy working with stuff in an engineering sense, so it was perfect, and I became the cockpit design czar, sort of, to go to really organize and set up and go to all the reviews. I had a big foam core cardboard mockup of the entire cockpit built right there in the Astronaut Office, and I cycled all the other guys in there to say, “What can you see? What would you do if this was a checklist? Can you reach it?” So I did a human factor study on all that.\\n\\n What was great about the assignment was that as the Shuttle was built, the first one, the Enterprise, I could see here’s really what the drawings I signed off turned out to be." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Great feeling of accomplishment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The other advantage was that to do that, you’ve got to know all the subsystems very well, to make any kind of intelligent decision about what the meter would say or the light should say, the nomenclature on the switches, all of that. That probably gave me a leg up on getting selected for the early Enterprise flights." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When did you learn, or how did you learn that you were going to be selected to be part of those test flights?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I should remember it as a stellar moment. It’s probably George [W. S.] Abbey calling me up and saying, “Come over,” and said, “How would you like to?” Dumb question; of course I’d like to. Generally that’s how you found out about selections all through my time there. George Abbey was the head of the Flight Operations Directorate and the one who probably mostly decided and also told you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And how did you train for these tests? What was your training before you started actually working with the Enterprise? Could you tell us about those experiences?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, if I’d never flown the Enterprise, doing the training was challenging and intriguing in its own right. People say, “How do you train?” thinking, well, you go to a school and somebody tells you how to do it. It’s not that at all. Somebody’s got to write the checklist, so you end up writing the checklist, working with each subsystems person and trying to come up with a pre-launch checklist for the approach and landing tests.\\n\\n So you’re doing the work, that the learning comes from doing jobs that needed to be done. We worried about doing this dead-stick landing, so we had to train for that. I built a gadget to work on the T-38s that would allow you with any given weight to set the power with the speed brakes down to simulate what the data said the Orbiter would fly it at, so that we could go fly the pattern we intended to fly in T-38s, making steep descents, flaring, and touching down, and we did some of that right out here in the patterns that we flew the first tests.\\n\\n The Shuttle training airplane, a Gulfstream 2, was built as an airborne trainer, and so the four of us assigned to ALT served as the Shuttle pilots along with a Gulfstream pilot to do many, many dives at the ground to get the STA, the Shuttle Training Aircraft, built and working right. And then the Enterprise was being built over here in Palmdale, and so Fred [W.] Haise [Jr.] and I flew many, many trips. I didn’t even get out the chart to fly from Houston to El Paso, gas up, and go to Palmdale; I knew all the nav [navigation] aids and all the frequencies by heart. So we spent many hours in Palmdale in the Enterprise when they were running ground tests." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you feel that this was a role as an astronaut, or are you back to a role as a test pilot during these days?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The distinction is kind of blurred. Astronauts now, the Orbiter’s a pretty stable configuration, so they go to a school with ground school instructors that know the system, so they are astronauts in the—the pilots have got to learn the system, and the mission specialists have got to learn the payload and the flight plan. For ALT and then subsequently on the Columbia, we were clearly test pilots because we were doing stuff that there wasn’t a procedure for. We were writing the procedure and then flying it for the first time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And in this case, as you described it, you were partly a designer of helping to create those systems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, exactly. Very satisfying when you see really—I can go get in an Orbiter right now, you know, and look at the panels, “Oh, yeah, I remember all this.” It’s a real feeling of personal pride, and the fact that it’s still that way. They haven’t changed it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The simulator that, as you mentioned, the astronauts use to train with now, did you have an effect on how some of the simulations or some of the training equipment was set up for future astronauts as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Since we were the first ones through the STA, you know, those procedures got developed, how we did it, based on us flying and trying. Still, you know, there have been changes over the years, but they’re still doing that regularly. Now everybody, every crew that flies, flies a lot of STA flights in much the same way.\\n\\n I thought it’d be really interesting—in fact, I kind of have set that up, too—and let’s see, when I last flew it was 1985. So it’s been sixteen years now, seventeen years since I last make an Orbiter landing, and I’d like to just go get in the STA and grab the stick and try a landing, you know, simulating the interplanetary guy that’s been on a sixteen-year voyage to Pluto or somewhere and comes back and has got to land it. I have this feeling I could do it. Of course, it’s not like I’ve not flown a lot of airplanes since, but, you know, I’m going to try that sometime when they’re out here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, good. I’d like to hear the results of that. That sounds really interesting.\\n\\n You were going through all these processes and procedures and training and creating all this as you were doing it, but at some point you learned of the day that actual tests were going to be held. Also, the amount of testing was cut, reduced back to only five of the tests when there was supposed to be many. Tell me about the special landing tests. Tell us about how that affected you, when you thought there might be more testing. Was that a good news that there was going to be less, or did you feel like that was a good decision?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What we were into at that time, the Enterprise and the approach and landing, the Enterprise was uniquely built to just do the approach and landing test. The idea, it would be sent back to the factory and all the space necessary, the systems would be put in it. That went by the board, never made that way.\\n\\n But those initial tests, ALT was a program in itself, and there were a lot of people working on that, and money going into it that were holding up the Columbia coming along to do the first space flight. And so there was a constant debate about how many ALTs are enough, because this is holding up doing the real mission.\\n\\n And so the number of the possibilities—it turned out there were thirteen total flights. There were five captive, inert flights, they call it, where the Orbiter was bolted on, completely inert, nothing moving, nothing running other than some instrumentation, and those flights, Fitz [Fitzhugh L.] Fulton [Jr.] and Tom [Thomas C.] McMurtry and flight engineers flew those five to the point where they said, “Okay, the combination is clear, and we understand what we’ve got here.”\\n\\n So then they decided to have some x number of captive, active flights, where the crew got on board and powered up the APUs [auxiliary power unit] and the electronics and all the subsystems, and those were dress rehearsals up to launch point. They had an open number of those. Turns out after three, they thought they’d learned all they needed to know. The systems were working. Had a couple of failures on number two, a big APU propellant leak. I was chasing that one.\\n\\n Anyway, at three, they said, “Okay, it’s time to go do it,” and they were trying to get to the end as quick as possible, so they could get on with the Columbia. When we launched then, I flew on the first, third, and fifth of the tests. We did three with tail cone on, and Fred and I flew one and three, and then we took the tail cone off. It made a dramatic difference in the steepness of the glide slope. Joe [Joseph H.] Engle and Dick [Richard H.] Truly flew the first of those, landing out here on the lakebed.\\n\\n And then the push was, “Let’s have this—.” It’d all gone quite well, although we discovered some serious design errors, but they were quickly fixed. So the grand finale then turned out to be free-flight five. Fred Haise and I landed on runway four going toward the lake out here, and we had a kind of an exciting landing there. It pointed up a flaw, really, in the design of the flight control software that led the pilot into a pilot-induced oscillation, and we bounced around and shocked a lot of people, probably more than—it didn’t look that bad from inside the cockpit. But, again, that’s why you do tests. You find out.\\n\\n Then the debate was, should we fix that and test it some more. It was a strong feeling, like, that was a pretty exciting landing, which shouldn’t be that exciting, or do we cut it off, fix it by testing and simulators, both airborne and on the ground. Do we know enough to press on? And it turned out that was the decision. You’ve got to cut the ALT off so we can go on the Columbia and get into orbit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you share with us a few more details about what your roles were during those tests? I’m sure Fred Haise was the commander, and you were the pilot, for instance, on the landing or any of the other aspects. What exactly were you doing, and what were you having to be responsible for during those testing times?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. The commander in the left seat primarily had the job of flying the airplane, to take the stick and fly it. There was a stick both places, so on each of the three flights, I got some of the flying time. But the prime role of the co-pilot was to take action when any of the subsystems had problems, monitor the systems. The pilot is busy watching where he’s going and how he’s doing on the profile, and checking the navigation displays and keeping the airplane on the profile we wanted to fly.\\n\\n On the very first flight, the instant we pushed the button to blow the bolts and hop off the 747, the shock of that actually dislodged a little solder ball and a transistor on one of the computers, and we had the caution tone go off and the red light—I mean instantly. I’m looking, and we had three CRTs, [Cathode Ray Tubes] and one of those essentially went to halt, the one hooked to one of the four computers that monitored. This is pretty fundamental. All your control of the airplane is through fly-by wire and these computers.\\n\\n So I had a cue card with a procedure if that happened, that we’d practiced in the simulator, and I had to turn around and pull some circuit breakers and throw a couple of switches to reduce your susceptibility to the next failure. I did that, and by the time I looked around, I realized, hey, this is flying pretty good, you know, because I was really distracted from the fundamental evaluation of the airplane at first.\\n\\n That’s roughly how the Orbiter’s set up. The guidance and control and fly on the airplane on a space reentry is designed by the cockpit and what displays are there, given to the left seat. The right seat’s the co-pilot, and he’s got access to the reaction control jets, the main engine, computers for space flight, for the auxiliary power units, the power, the hydraulics. All those critical supporting systems are over on the right side. Some are in the middle where both guys can grab.\\n\\n So all the landings you see, it’s the commander’s going to land it. He’s not going to give that away, because you don’t get very many." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How soon after the completion of the fifth test did you learn that you were going to become part of the STS-3 mission?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, how soon was it? Now, the others were having a lot of trouble with the tile, the thermal protection system. They’d had fits and starts and failure of tests and delays. So it’s a long time. The ALT was ’77. The first launch was not till ’81, right, four years later.\\n\\n So what happened? During those four years, I picked some crews. The first crew that I was picked for was with Vance [D.] Brand. So I was his co-pilot, PLT, as we called it. I’m terrible for dates. I can’t tell you just exactly how long it was. But then there was a reshuffle of things. No, that’s not right. It was Fred Haise and I were on second flight, I think. Golly, I’d have to research this.\\n\\n For a while I was going to fly with Fred. Then Fred decided he wasn’t going to stick it out. He went off to management world with Grumman. So then I ended with Vance for a little while, and then finally with Jack [R.] Lousma, which was great. Jack’s a great guy, and he’d flown on Skylab. He’s not a test pilot, but very capable guy and a great guy to work with, and so I couldn’t have done better to have a partner to fly with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During that time period, were you training now in the simulators that you helped process originally?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Training, again, more engineering job than training job, because there were more details of the cockpit. The cockpit we had in ALT was just only the switches that applied. All the other systems now had to be put in. So I was back into that again. More reviews.\\n\\n There were lots of changes, and then the software became a huge—the biggest stumbling block. The software that in these central computers not only control where you fly and control the flight path, but almost every other subsystem. And so getting the software wrung out and simulators writing the checklists, writing especially the malfunction procedures, what do you do if this breaks, if this breaks, if this light comes on. It’s a book this thick of fine print, and amazingly, it’s wrong most—you can get a room of the smartest people and you think we’re going to get this right the first time, and then you go in the simulator and find out, whoops, that doesn’t work, because it’s a waterfall of interrelated effects every failure can be. And so we didn’t really have it nailed down by STS-1.\\n\\n There were lots of unknowns when STS-1 flew. There were lots of unknowns about the effect of a coolant loop failing and the cooling of the aft MDMs [multiplexer/demultiplexer], which was part of the data processing system. You know, a myriad of details. There were theories about what would happen, how the interaction would be, not really tested because there wasn’t time. You just finally have to set a launch date and say, “We’re going to go.” You cannot be 100 percent sure of everything. And just bugs in the software.\\n\\n When we flew STS-3, we had another book this big called Program Notes, which were known flaws in the software. There was one subsystem that when it was turned on, the feedback on the displays said “Off,” because they’d gotten the polarity wrong and the logic, which they knew and they knew how to fix it, but we didn’t fix it. We flew it that way, knowing that “Off” meant “On” for this subsystem. The crew had to train and keep all this in mind, because to fix it means you’d have to revalidate the whole software load again, and there wasn’t time to do that. They had to call a halt and live with some real things you wouldn’t live with if you’d bought a new car. That’s all part of the challenge and excitement and satisfaction that comes with being involved with something brand new." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was your confidence level in the Orbiter and the whole process when you got ready to launch on STS-3? Did you feel it was ready to go?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, but with this nagging thing, the thing that says “Off” when it’s on, with a lot of cases where if this widget failed, this procedure in the malfunction book doesn’t work in the simulator right. It doesn’t come out right, and so you’re flying knowing if this failed, there’s going to be a lot of real-time conversation. There’s not going to be a book answer, because it doesn’t work in a simulator. It might be because the simulator’s wrong. The simulator was a whole parallel development. We’d do an abort procedure and crash and burn, and we didn’t know—well, is that because the simulator doesn’t cope with this nor not? And the instructors didn’t know because they were just as new at it as we were. And so, we, “Well, I hope it’s a simulator problem.” And so we’d write it and document it, and they’d take it off, and somebody would research it, and sometimes you’d get the answer, and sometimes you’ just kind of go by the board because you’re just too busy.\\n\\n And so there’s always an element in anything this complex, and that’s the thing. It’s really a complex vehicle. It really is. Even now I’m sure there’s some question marks that exist there. When you’re going to the nth detail about failures, if everything works like normal, it’s all a piece of cake. It’s when something breaks that you worry about, and is the big challenge to get to a point where you feel like you’ve got a handle on it.\\n\\n So was I ready to not show up on the launch date? No, not at all. Was I quaking in my boots? No. Was I intense about the whole thing? Yes, mostly because I am worried about my part of this. Especially for pilots, it’s the launch phase, because while it’s short and concentrated, if anything goes wrong, the Orbiter only takes care of the first failure. The second failure is pretty much left to the crew, generally, and so you worry about being ready to recognize a problem and do the right thing. You feel like the whole world’s watching you when that failure occurs because of the manual action you’ve got to take to save the day. So it’s that kind of pressure, pressure of performance, rather than fear or anything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you had spent a few minutes up in an Orbiter, but yet you had never launched one. Would you like to share your experiences about the launch?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "From Enterprise to Columbia? Yes. Well, the launch is a whole different ball game. I remember the first time, even though I’d spent a lot of time in the simulator, the simulators we built were fixed, one, and had the upstairs and the downstairs arranged horizontally, and then we had a two-seat, just the pilots’ seats, in a motion base that would tip up and go up and down and shake around to simulate launch and entry. Those were the two Orbiter trainer simulators. But most of the time they were both horizontal.\\n\\n When I went to the Cape, I remember the first time when it’s on the pad, and crawled in the hatch after being in my old cardboard, all these, and I was just flabbergasted how when you just rotated ninety degrees, how it becomes an entirely different outlook. I was lost. Wait a minute. Where’s upstairs? Upstairs is this way. And so it’s a huge psychological, physiological difference when you get on the pad and that whole part of it. You get over it, of course. You find yourself, “Wait a minute. I’m standing on an instrument panel. I’m not supposed to be standing on it.” But that’s the way it is. We knew we were going to do that. We built the switches recessed so you could stand on it. But that’s a whole different thing.\\n\\n Then, of course, the launch phase is like nothing, but your landing test is the last part of entry. So there was a familiarity there from ALT that certainly helped. But the eight days prior to entry was just a whole different world." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And while you were in orbit, one of the tasks that you had was to test the Remote Manipulator System [RMS]. Did you have a lot of training in that as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was built by Spar Corporation, or whatever, Canadian firm. That was Canada’s contribution, was the manipulator arm. So I went a couple of times up to Toronto to work with them on and to basically train, see how it worked. And then we had a full-size mockup at Houston with a 1G-capable arm driven by hydraulics. We had an electronic version of the arm, looking at screens in the windows and the simulator.\\n\\n So there were a lot of tools to get the hang of working the arm. So that was pretty cool. I was prime on the STS-3. They had taken it out of the locks and waved it around a little on STS-2. Three, we actually grabbed something and picked it up and moved it around and put it back.\\n\\n Later, on [STS] 51-F, that same package we picked up and let go off of it and then went back and grabbed it. But Tony [Anthony W.] England did most of the arm work on 51-F." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you feel like the training and the actual tasks were close hand in hand?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we had good replication, so there were very few surprises. The nice thing about space flight, it’s pretty pure. Airplanes fly through the air, and you’ve got air that does funny things and goes around corners differently, depending on the speed and all that. So simulations of airplane characteristics are much harder to do than when you’re up there in a vacuum, where strictly Newton’s laws are pretty pure up here and the predictions are very good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "While you were on that mission, you experienced a loss of appetite and some difficulty sleeping. Had you expected to have that kind of adjustment, or what were your expectations, being able to live in space?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "On STS-3, that was, of course, my first look at it. STS-2, actually, they had some problems. They had a raw deal because they had a fuel cell—that was Engle and Truly—they had a fuel cell quit on them, and their planned five-day flight was axed to two and a half.\\n\\n Of course, everybody has their acclimation problems. That’s pretty consistent through the population. It takes about twenty-four hours to get to feel normal, at varying levels of discomfort. Most everybody can hang in there and do their stuff, even though they don’t feel good. A few are pretty well debilitated. But they had not time, you know, in a two-and-a-half-day flight, they were cut short. By the time they got on orbit and traced down the problem and the decision was made to come back early, they were getting ready to come back. So they had no time other than to kind of respond, do things, that the ground was coming up, and they had some dizziness and orientation problems on entry that we learned about, and Jack and I worried about it a lot.\\n\\n One thing that we did do, that I don’t think they did, is we had a G-suit, like they wear in the F-18, except that for entry you could pump up the G-suit and just keep it that way, and so that helped you keep your blood flow up near your head, or assisted that. So we decided we’re going to wear the G-suits. There was some controversy about whether you ought to pump them up or not, among individuals. We said, “We’re going to pump them up.”\\n\\n The other thing about the motion sickness, we’re not sure there’s a direct correlation to flying airplanes and sickness. I know if you go up and do a lot of aerobatics day after day, you get to be much more tolerant of it. So Jack and I, we scheduled T-38 every chance we got in the last couple of weeks before we went down there, and I flew literally hundreds of aileron rolls. I know that’s what would do it to me. If I did roll after roll after roll, I could make myself sick, and I did that, and I got to the point where it took hundreds of them to make me sick. But I did that figuring I don’t know if this helps, but I had the opportunity, I’ll do it, and the results were pretty much the same on both flights.\\n\\n For the first day or so, I didn’t ever throw up or anything. I never got disoriented, but I felt kind of fifty-fifty, you know. You’re pretty happy to just—a malaise—you’re happy to float around and relax rather than keep charging. And into the second day, this is really fun and great, and you feel 100 percent. That was my—so whether the aileron rolls helped or not, I’m not sure, but it was relatively easy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Where Engle and Truly’s flight got cut, you had an extra day added on to yours because of the weather." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right, so we had eight days, had seven scheduled and an extra one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your thoughts when you heard mission control said—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "“Wow!” We cheered. “Great!” Because we really had a busy time with just two people. This was an engineering test flight, and we had a flight plan full of stuff, and people fighting over, sticking in their stuff. So there was always something that you were watching the clock on. You had to do this coming up. We did have sleep periods, which we would use for window gazing, some part of it, because you don’t need as much sleep as they were scheduling. But when they said, “Wave off,” I remembered getting in the recycle book, going through the pages, shutting down some of the computers, opening the doors again, and I got all the way down, all of the sudden, I turned the page, and there was nothing on it, and there was this realization, hey, this is free time, and it was terrific.\\n\\n We got out of the suits, and then we got something to eat and watched the world, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way, if it had been my choice. In fact, we flew right over White Sands, where our landing site was. Just happened to be in the reentry attitude and we stayed in it. So we went half way around the world. The nose was pointing straight down, and as I looked up, I could see this monster dust storm going on there. It looked like it was all headed for Texas, the dust in the valley there. It was a clearly good decision. It looked really bad down there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, while you guys were having a, as you mentioned, free day, they were very busy down at White Sands preparing for your arrival." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, they were ready for us because we knew we were going there. This [Edwards AFB] was underwater out here. That’s why they gave up on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us about the landing? Was there anything different or any test procedures that you were working on with the landing that came in for STS-3? Anything different that you—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, where we planned to go, the main thing was this really fierce jet stream, fairly low altitude at 20,000 feet. The winds were over 100 knots out of the west, which is unusually high. John [W.] Young, I think, had flown some approaches in the STA ahead of time and decided if we made our normal left turn around to the southbound landing, coming from the west, we’d never make it back because of this wind blowing us away. So they changed to a single right turn, which put me on the inside of the turn, not Jack. It was clearly the right thing to do. So that was a wrinkle.\n\nI could see the turn. He was asking me, “How’s it look? How’s it look?” because he was flying blind over there. I was saying, “Oh, it looks good. Keep it coming.” So that was different. But we had lots of help figuring that out ahead of time.\\n\\n The entry was pretty cool because it was an early morning landing, meaning that the main part of the reentry is at night, so we could see this glow from the ionization really bright out there. In fact, we had lost a couple of tiles on launch. We knew that because we’d looked out and had seen the holes in front of the windshield, and we looked at it with an arm camera. They said, “Not to worry. It’s cool up on top there.” We didn’t know how many we’d lost from the bottom, but wasn’t any use worrying about that. And then to see all this glow right there where the missing tiles were, gave us pause to think about it. Again, there was no point in worrying about it, nothing you can do.\\n\\n The spectacular light show through entry. Then the sun came up, which washes all that out, as it’s dying out anyway. We went whistling by—and I spent four years at Davis Monthan [AFB] in Tucson—and as we did a roll reversal back to the right, I was looking down at Tucson going by and knew exactly what I was looking at. We were at about Mach 10. So it was a tour of the area of the country I knew. So, entry is really a great time for the pilots. You’re flying. You’re really flying. You’re seeing where you’re going. You’re not just along for the ride at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And then you touched down without a problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the only problem there was a kind of a wheelie that Jack did. Again, it pointed out another flaw or room for improvement in the software. The gains between the stick and the elevons, that were good for flying up in the air, are away, were not good when the main wheels were on the ground, and he thought he had ballooned. He kind of planted it down but then came back on the stick, and the nose came up. So what? It didn’t take off again, and we came down and rolled to a stop. A lot of people thought this is a terrible thing. I mean, we improved the software, and so people don’t do that anymore, but we discovered a susceptibility. But other than that, we rolled to a stop, and we’re out there surrounded by white gypsum.\\n\\n The family was there. It felt like I had been a long ways away. When I got down, we were on the ground, I’m feeling the gravity, it’s all feeling normal, and I remember remarking to Marie, my wife Marie, “You know, it was a terrific adventure. I’m here, but it feels like I’ve returned from somewhere a long way from here,” you know, compared to flying in on an airplane. I guess it’s true in a way, although you’re going over all the time. But it’s a great feeling, both space flights, too. I think it’s a combination of—it’s mostly a feeling not of relief that you’re back. In a way, it’s kind of crummy I’m down here slogging around in this gravity field, not nearly as much fun as floating. But the relief is that you got this huge team of people that are helping you through, and you’re back, and it was a success, and you didn’t screw up, do something to mess it up. That’s a combination of good feelings, I remember, right out here on Runway 23 on 51-F." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk about 51-F. Three years later you were scheduled to be a commander of a mission. Did you again find that out sometime soon after STS-3?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It must have been a year or so. Three years between, maybe a year and a half. There was some shuffling around on who would fly what and all that, all happening at levels above me. Somebody would write a book about crew selection some day, maybe. Not me, I want no part of it.\\n\\n But, anyway, the word came out, 51-F would be my flight, and the crew was seven people. We had two payload specialists, plus two others were backups to them, with Roy [D.] Bridges [Jr.], a great guy—he’s the director of KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] now. He was making his first flight, was the other pilot, and then we had Tony England, Karl [G.] Henize, and [F.] Story Musgrave, who’s a character in his right. I don’t know if you’ve interviewed him." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not yet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So it was a good team that was really good, and it was a great mission. It really was. Some of the missions were just going up and punching out a satellite, and then they had three days with nothing to do and came back. Ours was the first time we’ve flown around the clock. We had somebody up and working. We had a payload bay absolutely stuffed with telescopes, instruments. We had, again, the first two-shift operation to run all these things. We had the instrument-pointing system that had never been flown. We had the idea of letting a satellite go and then flying this precise orbit around it and then going back and getting it. So, all kinds of new things, which took a lot of work to write the checklists for, write the flight plan, and so we spent a year and a half doing that.\\n\\n Then it worked out to be we had a scare on the engine failure on launch. We were worried then, is this going to squarewave the whole flight plan and mess everything up? It did to some extent, but the ground worked overtime, because everything was sequenced by time because it’s an astronomy thing. Whether we’re on the dark side or the light side, all that had to be rewritten. And it all worked out great. We even made up for the fuel we’d had to dump on the way up because of the engine failure, and eked out an extra day on it. We were scheduled for seven and made it eight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you mentioned the team effort, part of being the commander, you could choose when you needed to work, because you really weren’t on each of those shifts. How did you decide when your duties were? Did you find yourself working—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well that was all working out with the flight plan. It was just pioneering, I guess, because nobody had done it in the Shuttle. So it basically had twelve-hour shifts. We had a red team and a blue team, with three guys, an MS [Mission Specialist], a PS [Payload Specialist], and between Story and Roy, they were the other crew member on each team. So, during your twelve hours on, you ran all these instruments. During the shifts twelve hours off, you had dinner, slept, had breakfast, and then went to work for twelve. So you sandwiched everything else you did, hygiene and whatever, in your twelve-hour-off period, and two weeks before launch we set that up.\\n\\n I anchored my schedule to overlap transitions, so if something came up on one shift, I could learn about it and carry it over to the next shift, hopefully. But I also had to stagger things so I got on the right shift for entry, so I was in some kind of reasonable shape at the end of the mission.\\n\\n At the beginning, too, I didn’t want to be—we had the red team sleeping right up till launch time so that once we got on orbit, the red team was the first one up, and they’d go for it for twelve hours. So it was all that kind of thing, juggling around so that the right people that had to be alert for launch and entry were. We got into that circadian cycle prior to launch. So the last week we didn’t see the other team, or I only saw part of one and part of the other myself." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Once again, you found yourself in a role of creating procedures and studying the cycle and doing something you hadn’t done before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not so much the Orbiter procedures, except for the manipulator arm and the unique stuff." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This time when you started the entry procedures, you were the commander. So when you got ready to land the Challenger, you were totally in control. So how was this landing different from your other for you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I knew that I was going to get the landing ahead of time. It was different because I had the commander-type systems on my side. Roy had the other system. But we also had a flight engineer with Story, which we didn’t have on—so it was really a three-man launch and entry crew, with Story as the flight engineer on both up and down, which made a lot of difference in how we could do a better job responding to emergencies and trained that way. The pressure is higher when you’re commander, the pressure of making sure that not only you, but somebody else doesn’t throw the wrong switch.\\n\\n With Jack and I, it was just the two of us. He only had to worry about me, and I him. We could double-check each other. With seven people, there are many opportunities for somebody to blow it, not to say instant disaster, but to use too much fuel or to overheat some system or not have the right ones on and blow the chance to get this data. All that, you’re dependent on other people checking, with seven people. That’s a lot of other people throwing switches, too.\\n\\n During the entry, there was the pressure, you know, it’s your fault if this doesn’t come out right. When you’re in the right seat, it’s not all your fault. The commander bears culpability even if you make a mistake. I’m dwelling on this pressure thing because that really is a strong part of the challenge. I mean, you’re really tired after space flight. I think you’re tired mostly because of the mental, you elevate yourself to this mental, high level of awareness that you’re maintaining. Even when you’re trying to sleep, you’re worried about this and that. So it’s not like you’re just lollygagging around and having a good time. You’re always thinking about what’s next and mostly clock-watching. Flying in orbit is watching a clock. Everything’s keyed to time, and so you’re worried about missing something, being late.\\n\\n We had 270 maneuvers or something like that. Every sunrise and every sunset we had to go to a different attitude to put the right telescopes at the right stars or sun or whatever, the sunny side we’re pointing at the sun. So those are all typing exercises, typing long strings of numbers into the computer and the time to start to maneuver so it goes to the right attitude. Well, you mess up one number and you’re going to go to wrong attitude. Then you’re going to miss that data. Every forty minutes, you’ve got a new one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Constantly something to do, wasn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, that’s what you’re paid for, though." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And getting the crew home on time. At least when you were going to do the landing, you were landing at some place where you felt was home. You were coming back to Edwards." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was definitely—and I was real familiar with White Sands, too, because we did most of our STA training there. So it wasn’t like a strange place at all. But we did more dives at the ground there than here or anywhere else.\\n\\n How are we doing on time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, let me just stop this for a second. [Tape recorder turned off.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—yes, I think pretty well I’ve talked about the great feeling when we got down, and we’d endured our engine loss and takeoff and wrapped it all up, came back here with a great feeling of accomplishment. We knew we’d also face challenges with getting the instrument-pointing system operating. It didn’t work worth a hoot to start. So the whole crew had a hand in recovering from what could have been a real bust, to a great flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The times before when you had been in the Orbiter landing, there had been a couple of issues that attributed to some needed-to-be adjustments to the software. When you landed, did you feel like everything was in place to have a smooth landing when you brought that Orbiter home?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I thought the Orbiter handled great, and it had some refinements since the Approach and Landing Tests. And so I made a landing I was proud of, very smooth and a nice touch-down, and right where I wanted it. We worried about the center of gravity [CG] was further forward than it had ever been because all of our gear was still in the payload bay. So we were heavy, forward CG, but we got the nose down smoothly and rolled to a stop out here. So I had no suggestions for flight control improvements." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow. Maybe somebody was surprised to hear that. [Laughs]\\n\\n After you landed, was there a difference of your adjustment back to Earth than it was for your first mission, or did you feel like your body and your physical being had adjusted well each time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it went well. I don’t remember a lot of differences. Two aspects to acclimation from a one-week flight. Different ball game than if you’ve up there for six months, I’m sure. One is this heavy feeling. It feels like you’ve got a big heavy pack on your back, and you’re kind of wooden-legged. That goes away relatively quickly, in a matter of hours. You’ve acclimated to your weight and moving it around.\\n\\n The part that takes longer is your equilibrium. Surprisingly, if you don’t have to balance yourself when you don’t have any weight in orbit. And so I found that when you’re walking down a hall and make an eighty-degree turn into a doorway, I would tip over and bump into the jamb or something, surprise yourself at how unstable you were, even after you felt normal from a strength standpoint. That maybe lasts—you can feel the effects the next day or so. But you’re pretty quickly over it, all of it, for a one-week stay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We talked just a moment about the Orbiter and how it handled. There had fifteen missions between the first time that you flew on STS-3 to the STS51-F, and, of course, there were two Orbiters, the Challenger and the Columbia. Were there a lot of differences, or did you see a lot of changes that had been made to improve how the Orbiter flew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably at the time I was aware of what changes—I remember flying simulation loads, and I think even in the Calspan TIFS airplane, Total In-Flight Simulator aircraft, I participated in studies on some of the recommended changes. Certainly I did that at least between ALT and STS-1.\\n\\n Again, between the two space flights, I can’t remember any major things that struck me as different. I didn’t fly too much on the STS-3 reentry. They were pushing at that time to go full auto land, and so that it was a bad decision, really, but even Jack Lousma was—we stayed in automatic all the way down through the pullout of the dive, and then he only got the feel of the airplane the last couple of seconds before touch-down, which, in retrospect, everybody agreed was dumb, and now people fly from the time they go to subsonic as a minimum to get the feel of the airplane all the way down. He only got the last second, and then we landed a bit fast and ended up doing that pitch maneuver on the wheels in large part to poorly planned, too much pressure to push toward automatic landing, which they’d really never done. Kind of gave up on that now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was five months after you landed on STS-51-F, that NASA and the nation experienced its tragedy with the Challenger [STS 51-L]. Where were you when you heard the news?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was flying a zero-G airplane. That’s one thing I did back before ALT and all that, because I had flown at Wright-Pat zero-G. I had kind of started the program at JSC. When we first got a KC-135, I was the initial pilot that checked out the other staff pilots. I had been up flying zero-G, came back. Trying to remember whether they told us to come back early or not. Anyway, when we got back in January, I walked back in the ops [operations] room, and everybody was down in the mouth, and I learned right away what had happened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What were your duties assigned during that period when all the crews were—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was working the Space Station. I came back after 51-F. They were in a period of trying to finalize requirements and design for Station. It hadn’t been built yet. It took some time after to build it. I was the Astronaut Office representative, so I was going to lots of meetings and helping write lots of thick requirements books and trying to go the users’ conferences and disagreeing with a lot of the concepts that were being embraced as far as what the Station would—how it would be built.\\n\\n That’s what led me to look for work elsewhere, not the Challenger disaster. I could see it being a long time. I could also see the cycle time to fly in space. It was going to be at least three years more of going to meetings and simulators.\\n\\n My first love still is flying regularly in airplanes, and I thought, well, I’m going to look for a flying job before I’m too old to get one, which I did, and I had offers with Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach and here. I’d actually looked into going back in the Air Force full-time, too. Didn’t take me too long to rule out. The possibility they offered was in a third sub-basement of the Pentagon, a good job by name, but by the duty—I went back there, dusted off my uniform, met the three-star I’d be working for, and that was not for me. Best decision I ever made was to not take that one.\\n\\n So, anyway, I had done a lot of airplane flying, much more than the average astronaut did. I flew the zero-G airplane regularly, all through the years I was working on Shuttle. I also then, after STS-3, checked out on the Shuttle carrier 747. So I was able to keep my hand in and managed to get the job here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you’re back as a test pilot." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. You have to fly a variety, which is a test pilot’s dream, fly a variety of airplanes, do new things, not radically new things. I’m not flying F-22s or anything, but I’m flying experiments that haven’t been done before. The challenge of organizing it, the same kind of thing we’ve been talking about—write the test card, write the checklist, fly it, and get the data or whatever the purpose is, and that’s a good feeling. It’s a challenge and one of real satisfaction when you do it right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wanted to take a few minutes before we end today and just mention a few of those aircraft that you have done and get your comments on your experiences with them, one of them being the CV-990 that you did some tests with, that eventually helped the Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was really interesting, truly in the realm of not having been done before. That modification we made to it was tremendously complex, big time, 60,000 pounds of hydraulic system in there to operate the apparatus that tested the Shuttle tire. I just saw that airplane this morning. It’s parked out at Mojave. We were over in the T-34 with another guy shooting landings at Mojave, and it’s sitting by the front gate over there now. Looks better from the air than it does close up. It’s full of birds’ nests and dust and dirt right now.\\n\\n But it was, again, challenging to get the thing built. So I spent a lot of time with the engineers designing the system. Challenging to fly, too, because we ended up making really high-speed landings to full stops, way beyond anything you ever do in a normal airplane, and speed, and we worked up to it, and we had procedures that would be as safe as it could be.\\n\\n For instance, at the Cape, when they decided the runway’s too rough down there and it was tearing up the tires and we were getting much less tire capability than had been assumed, we blew out lots of tires, big-time bang. A big Shuttle tire at 300, 400 psi inside letting go is a big bang. But then they decided that we needed to grind the runway off smoother so it wasn’t so tough on the tires, and they ground a strip off eight feet wide down the center of the runway, which now the challenge for the guy flying is to land very close to the end and at very high speed and stay on that eight-foot strip all the way so that the tire doesn’t see the rough part.\\n\\n That’s neat, fun to do, and I was reasonably successful in doing that. Again, it adds to self-satisfaction in being able to—not too often do you get a flight test that challenges your stick and rudder skills right to the limit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How was your flight in 1998 with the Russian supersonic transport? Tell us how you had an opportunity to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. We had a Headquarters high-speed aircraft program within Dryden and Langley and other Centers looking at technology that would lead to an economical, viable supersonic airliner. Part of that was sending money to the Russians to resurrect the last built Tu-144. We had some ten or twelve experiments on it, as I recall, of various kinds.\\n\\n And then toward the end, the idea came out, we ought to let some American fly it. So Rob Rivers at Langley and I went over it with some engineers from both places to get our chance to fly it. I flew two flights. He had one. We both went to Mach 2 in the airplane. It would take me a long time to describe the differences of that airplane, Russian design, compared with, say, the Concorde or a normal western design.\\n\\n Probably as interesting as the technical aspects and the flight aspects was the seeing how—well, frankly, how bad a shape their aerospace industry is in, but also just their philosophy and how they did business in designing, building, and flying airplanes. Really different than us. So here we have Xerox machines and computers and we overkill. We have lots of paper, reams of paper. So everything we do, we share with lots of people, communicate. In Russia, totally the opposite. The hydraulic system guy that taught us about the hydraulics—we were over there for two weeks going to ground school. This is before we were even allowed to get in the airplane and get aboard. But the hydraulic guy came in with a notebook that he had when he designed the thing in the first place, his own hand-drawn drawings, and that was it. We were never given a picture of the hydraulic system or anything else.\\n\\n We had to cry and whine to get a copy of the flight manual, which we had translated, and it didn’t say much anyway. It didn’t have checklist, how to start the engine. You’d think that would be in there, right? The engine-start checklist, not in there. Everybody has their own notes. The pilot we flew with for the flight test has a knee board with a five-by-eight card written in teensy, tiny print, every little aspect what he’s going to do. He writes it. He keeps it. Nobody else gets it. He does it. It’s just a whole different way of approaching things. Interesting to see, along with all the social, the vodka-drinking and everything else, it’s different, too. The culture that we learned was as significant as the airplane aspects." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find it ironic that thirty years before you had been preparing to your missions and your flights—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "To drop bombs on them? Well, they were, too, and on that line, Sergi Borisev was the man to pull off. He was the pilot for all the tests, flew all the flights. He flew with me when I flew.\\n\\n We invited him over here, and I gave him a ride in an F-18, and he was here for a week, which he was just jazzed about, naturally, and he’s a former fighter pilot. It turned out we were flying the SR-71 that day, and so I was able, when it was coming smoking back, he was out there by the Colorado River at Mach 2, coming back for a landing. We got him on radar and intercepted and pulled up alongside, let him fly it, you know, SR-71, as mysterious an airplane to the Russians. As a matter of fact, Borisev had been flying MiG-23s up near the Baltic [Sea], an interceptor aircraft, making passes at SRs flying by, trying to intercept it, which he didn’t succeed much because it was smoking at Mach 3 when it went by. And here he is now in an American airplane, we’re pulling up on the wing of it. So that’s kind of cool, really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Surreal for him, wasn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, both sides, and we talked about it that way. He’s a good guy, you know. It’s not surprising they’ve got all the same interests we do. We’re on opposite sides by a fluke, not by any basic inherent difference, just personally." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just people and pilots." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You also worked on the development of the propulsion-controlled aircraft systems. Would you like to talk with us about—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that was unique and different, not been done before. Bill Burcham is the guy that came up with pursuing this concept, of being able to fly an airplane that’s lost all its hydraulics and, therefore, its ability to move its flight controls, and by just nudging the thrust carefully, get the airplane back on the ground, which is what the crew of United 232 did in Sioux City [Iowa] with some success, although a lot of people were killed.\\n\\n We took it beyond that, making an autopilot basically, that uses the engines as control effectors, rather than the normal controls, and had tremendous success, really, with an F-15 and a MD-11, all the way to touch-down in both cases, without having moved the controls. Locked up the controls, not that I couldn’t have taken over, should it be necessary. But without cheating, got the airplanes on the ground. A great example of why working here is so much fun. You get to do something new and different." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, another thing that you did that was new and different was you launched a satellite into orbit with Pegasus [launch vehicle]. Tell us about that experience." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, flying 008 B-52, B model, which I’d read about that when I was in high school, launching lifting bodies. The X-15s were flying—the last few of them were flying when I was at test pilot school here. So I saw that airplane. When I got here, it was sitting right out there in the corner, been parked for four years. Then another program came up, and both guys that had been flying it both retired. So I became the B-52 pilot, and that’s how I got into it. A little of OJT [on-the-job training], self-taught there, though I’d flown B-47s earlier.\\n\\n Pegasus is big. It’s 45,000 pounds, a lot of weight to drop off the wing. We knew the airplane would carry it because it had dropped heavier things, not much heavier. Got in on that from the beginning. I remember going to a meeting in Denver where the Orbital Sciences guys were proposing it. So we got to work with them—good group—to make sure that we did this properly and safely, and we didn’t have a lot of last-minute changes to insist on. We were in there from the beginning of their design. So it worked well.\\n\\n We flew with it inert flights, that is, with an inert rocket. Then we put a live rocket on, a dress rehearsal, then finally we threw the switch and let her go, and the airplane responded as I had expected. The surprise was, I expected to see kind of like you see a missile shot, where the missile is zipping out in front of you, looking at the tailpipe. Instead, it looked like it was going straight up in front of us. It was only three-quarters of a mile in front of the cockpit, but it had rotated at a point where the visual image was of a Shuttle launch straight up in the air. Spectacular. So we did six of the six launches, first launches. Now they’re on ten, eleven." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you were working on these projects, was there a lot going on at one time, or are you able to concentrate and focus on one of these projects at a time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I had more than one, usually. They would phase along, and you’d just see how they came out. I got a chance to fly the F-111 that we had there, a cambering wing, automatic wing shaping internally, that was real interesting. That had been flown, so I got on for the last phase of that. I got a chance to fly the X-29. I’d have to look in my log book. We had an F-14 that I flew quite a bit. So these were all going along, not all at the same time. It’s a good job when you’re having trouble working in all these good assignments. There have been dead periods, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about your involvement with the X-38?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The involvement there is with basically as a mother ship pilot to get it in the air. I’ve worked with John Muratore on the initial figuring out how high we could get it and where they wanted to launch each successive, also planning how we chase it because some of the documentation’s done from video from the chase planes. So I’m sorry to see that sort of fizzling out on us here, because I think it’s a basically good concept and one that’s needed for the Station, but higher levels have decided we can’t afford it, I guess." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I know we have a time limit this afternoon. So before we close, I have a couple of other questions for you, and one being, what do you consider in your career to have been the most challenging time or the most challenging aspect that you have found?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, for a sustained challenge, it was 51-F, taking on the responsibility of making that flight work, through all the development of the procedures. We were working with Marshall Space Flight Center [(MSFC) Huntsville, Alabama]. It wasn’t just working with the guys I knew at JSC. Working with a couple of payload specialist slots for individuals that had never been in space, integrating them in. They just weren’t along for the ride, either; they were essential people. They were the people that had led and built the instruments, a lot of them. But they were not aviators at all, never been in a jet plane.\\n\\n Then the lead-up, we had a launch pad abort, when the engine started and quit, and we were left there. Karl Henize was pounding on his leg, really mad because he didn’t get to go. I turned around to Karl and said, “We don’t want to go, Karl. There’s something wrong out there, you know.”\\n\\n We then had engine failure on launch, and there were lots of things you could point to that said this wasn’t a piece of cake. We got up there, the IPS [Instrument Pointing System] wouldn’t work at all, and they had to completely reload, rebuild the software, real time. We had to redo the whole flight plan. Lots of challenges. So, spread over that entire period, as an event in itself, was certainly the most sustained challenge." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you feel is the greatest accomplishment that you’ve been able to have—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know if I’d—it’d be hard for me to write it, again, because that’s protracted over all that time and came out so good, and the war stories that go along with it, hard to beat that one. But I wouldn’t do the whole career any different. I’ve really been lucky to come here and at my advanced stage still fly in F-18s and other airplanes. It’s just like I’ve always dreamed of, and I’m still getting paid for it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So let’s end it on that one. I have heard several times in our conversations today, as well as read, that the thing you love to do most is fly planes. Do you have a favorite of all the ones that you fly?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’m often asked that. I’ve had favorites as they go along that have been impressive. If I had to go back and pick one, it’s hard. It’s hard to beat the F-18 for pure kick to fly, pilot-friendly airplane. But flying the bigger airplanes is more of a challenge, really. Fighters are easy to fly. Big ones are really different from one to the next, and flying them with engine failures and that sort of thing are a bigger challenges. So there’s some maybe more higher level of satisfaction of mastering such a beast, like a B-52. And so my favorite one is the one I happen to be in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The perfect answer.\\n\\n Is there anything else you’d like to add today before we close?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think not. With every incident I’ve described, in the back of my mind, there are six others I could talk about. I’d hate to be the person that has to listen to all this, or much less type it up, but I’m happy to share what I have and hope it’s of some use to somebody sometime somewhere." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It will be, and it was extremely interesting hearing all the things that we had time for you to share. So I thank you again for your time today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "C. Gordon Fullerton", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It’s all right. Well, you do a nice job of preparing and leading on with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, thank you. I appreciate that." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00665", + "metadata": { + "category": "Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office Oral History Project 2012 - 2013", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/C3PO/GriffinMD/griffinmd.htm", + "original_file_name": "GriffinMD_9-10-07.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NASA_HQ/NAF/GriffinMD/GriffinMD_9-10-07.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA at 50 Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Michael D. Griffin", + "location_date": "Washington, DC – 10 September 2007" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright", + "Steven J. Dick" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Michael D. Griffin" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is September 10th, 2007. We are in Washington, D.C., at NASA Headquarters to speak with NASA Administrator Dr. Michael Griffin for the NASA at 50 Oral History Project. The interviewer is Rebecca Wright, with Sandra Johnson and NASA Chief Historian Dr. Steve [Steven J.] Dick. In preparation for the space agency’s fiftieth anniversary, the NASA Headquarters History Office commissioned this oral history project to gather the thoughts, experiences, and reflections from NASA’s managers. The information recorded today will be transcribed and placed in the NASA archives located here in the Headquarters Building in Washington, D.C., where it will be accessed for future projects.\\n\\n We thank you again for taking time from your busy day to speak with us. We know that you became Administrator on April 14th, 2005, and prior to accepting this position you were head of the Space Department at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory [Laurel, Maryland]. Would you share with us the reasons why you chose to leave that post and return to NASA as its top manager?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, really there are specific reasons and more general ones. More generally, this was a position I had been aiming at to shape my career since I was really no more than a teenager, if that. I was interested in space from the time that I was five years old, which—I was born in ’49—which would tell you that was several years then before Sputnik.\\n\\n I became interested in space when I was in the first grade and my mother gave me—the first book I ever remember receiving from her was a book called A Child’s Book of Stars [by Sy Barlowe], which she retained for many, many years and actually the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery, the [2005] Return-to-Flight mission, STS-114, Eileen [M.] Collins and her crew flew that book for me, and it now hangs in my office. But I was so fascinated by the scientific material in that book, most of which is now known to be false, that, I really, at the age of five, became enamored with space and just didn’t ever want to do anything else.\\n\\n Then I remember when Sputnik [I, Russian satellite, October 4, 1957] launched a few years later being the only kid in my third-grade class who knew what it was and why it was important. I remember explaining it to my teacher.\\n\\n So at a later time when I was certainly nothing more than an early teenager, it occurred to me, I could see that —I saw things differently than other people. I saw bigger pictures. I saw how things connected and related, and I began to feel like a leadership position was something that I could aim for, and I used that goal to shape my career. I really did.\\n\\n Now, by the time I was actually selected to be Administrator, I would tell you honestly—I was 55 at the time and going on 56—I would tell you that I would not have just accepted the position of NASA Administrator merely because it was offered. I was at a prestigious university laboratory in a very comfortable situation and enjoyed it; something I enjoyed quite a lot.\\n\\n So if we had been following the plan that the agency was following prior to the loss of [Space Shuttle] Columbia [STS-107] and President [George W.] Bush’s announcement of the Vision for Space Exploration, I honestly don’t think I would have been interested, because it’s a substantial financial sacrifice and an enormous personal sacrifice. I see my family way less often than I want, and I pursue my hobbies with less vigor than I used to. You give up a lot to accept a senior position in public service.\\n\\n But I think and have thought for decades that the proper purpose of the United States civil space program is pretty much along the lines that President Bush announced in January of 2004. The President got it right, and given a chance to help bring that about, I would take it, and I did take it. So that’s the more general reason, but the very specific reason was that this was a place I wanted to be at this time and for that purpose." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What do you believe so far has been the most challenging aspect that you’ve encountered since moving into this role?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, probably the most challenging aspect of it is overcoming the loss of credibility that NASA encountered, frankly, following the [Space Shuttle] Challenger [STS 51-L accident] and throughout the Space Station era and then into the loss of Columbia, where, as you well know, the commission that investigated the loss of Columbia found disturbing similarities with regard to the management decision-making process that cost us Challenger. And the development of the Space Station and, as an agency, our inability to control cost and schedule and all that has not been our finest hour. So NASA’s credibility was, I would say, at an all-time low when I took over the agency.\\n\\n I have way more external advice than I need or want, most of which has to be paid significant attention. I have way more scrutiny by the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] than any prior Administrator. I have relatively junior staff exercising significant control over both budget and direction at NASA, because NASA is not trusted any longer in the upper reaches of the federal government. I have way more scrutiny from congressional staff than has ever been the practice in the past. With our most recent authorization bill, I think we owe the Congress something like 55 or so reports in any given year on various aspects of what we’re doing.\\n\\n We have organizations like the Government Accounting Office investigating our decisions on a launch architecture. When I was young, NASA’s word on what the launch architecture needed to be was the word. Others were not judged to have the appropriate credentials to be asking those questions, and yet now they are. Now, they’re no smarter than they were then, but NASA is viewed as being less smart. Getting us out of that hole to where we have the technical and managerial credibility to make those decisions and to be seen to be making those decisions is probably the biggest challenge we have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You are the eleventh Administrator at NASA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think counting Jim [James C.] Fletcher twice. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. How does your leadership style differ from the ones that have come before you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know that I can answer that one, Rebecca. You might need to ask other people that. I can’t self-assess. I don’t know how to give you a fair assessment of what I do or how I do it. I have my own innate characteristics, but I think you’d have to get others to compare and contrast me with prior Administrators." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I remember hearing that one of your most recommended books is one that was about Jim [James E.] Webb and his leadership style." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was nineteen when Webb left the agency in ’68, but even as a teenager I paid a lot of attention to Webb’s management style and tactics, and more so later on. I certainly am an admirer of Jim Webb’s. He did an awful lot of things right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you like to share some of those and how you’ve possibly put some of those in action here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Webb was a guy who very clearly, in the light of history—and Steve Dick can comment on this. But Webb was a guy who listened to an awful lot of different people, many of whom did not agree among themselves, but that was okay, and nor did they necessarily agree with Webb. Very clearly, he didn’t mind that. He was comfortable with argument and a certain amount of dissent, knowing that he had to make the final decision, because that was his job, but he seems, in light of history, to have been somebody who was comfortable hearing from a very wide range of people, whether they agreed with him or not, before making a decision, and that’s a characteristic I try to employ.\\n\\n Webb was someone who understood, and very explicitly understood in his makeup of the Administrator’s Office, that he himself did not bring all the necessary skills to the Administrator’s Office to do the job. The job is a very big job. It is technical. It is scientific. It is political. It is managerial. Webb brought several of those talents and brought them in abundance, but he didn’t bring them all.\\n\\n So he augmented himself with Hugh [L.] Dryden as his Deputy, a very esteemed aeronautical scientist from the early days of aircraft flight, and Bob [Robert C.] Seamans [Jr.] as his Associate Administrator. I’ve characterized that position at NASA as being like the Chief Operating Officer, which I think is accurate, and Bob was and remains a good manager." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So would you say you’ve modeled your top management after that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I’ve modeled the construct after that, because I believe that it works. Now, I bring a different set of specialties than Webb himself brought" + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He came from OMB [Office of Management and Budget]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, he did come from OMB, but more than that, he was the Washington political insider. My Deputy Administrator, Shana [L.] Dale, is as skilled politically, having served time on both the [Capitol] Hill and in the White House, as anyone I know. Shana knows how Washington works better than I will ever know it, and I’m nearly always guided by her advice on how to handle the Washington politics. Our Associate Administrator, first Rex [D.] Geveden and now Chris [Christopher J.] Scolese, are people with broad experience at the Centers and at Headquarters, but whose day-to-day skill is in institutional and project management. Those are strengths I have as well, but I don’t have the time to exercise them on a daily basis. My strong skill areas are technical. I like to think that I bring as much technical credibility to the Office of the Administrator as has been done.\\n\\n So I liked Webb’s style in explicitly recognizing that he himself didn’t bring all the skills necessary, but that he could construct a team which did, and I’ve tried to do that. The job is not all about me. It’s not all about the Administrator. It’s about getting good decisions out the front door, and that strikes me as a Webb characteristic. So there are some areas where I was very appreciative of his accomplishments. I thought he was a landmark Administrator." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, he was. As you were talking, you shared some of the decisions that he had made that certainly are still impacting the agency today. What decisions do you feel you’ve made so far that are going to help provide a successful management structure for NASA as it starts its next 50 years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think one of the crucial decisions I’ve made that actually returns us to an organizational pattern that one of Webb’s AAs [Associate Administrator], George [E.] Mueller, espoused during the Apollo era, and that is the matrix organization, where the responsibilities of the Project and Program Managers and the institutional managers, the Center Directors and mission support folks, are clearly separated. That separation between project and program, and institution, which comes together only in my office, is, I think, a crucial feature of a system with built-in checks and balances.\\n\\n The Columbia Accident Investigation Board cited us, NASA, for a lack of independent technical authority, and indeed they were correct, because basically all authority was vested in the line structure of programs. The Center Directors reported to the AAs. In that construct there is no path for independence.\\n\\n In the Apollo era George Mueller organized the Human Space Flight Program such that the Center Directors were his Board of Directors for the technical and managerial aspects of the program. But the Project Managers, Sam [Samuel C.] Phillips for Apollo and the Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager, first Joe [Joseph F.] Shea and then George [M.] Low, the key Program and Project Managers did not report through the Center Directors. They did not report through the Center chain of command, so there was an independence there between institutional imperatives and programmatic imperatives that I think is absolutely crucial, and I hope it’s not lost when I leave.\\n\\n Now, the Center Directors don’t like it. They didn’t like it in Mueller’s time, and they don’t like it today. The Center Directors would prefer to be handed a suite of programs and then to be the chief executive in charge of the implementation of those programs. But that leaves NASA Headquarters in the position of managing ten little NASAs, each with their own full and separate authority, and while that may be beneficial for a given Center Director, it’s not beneficial in terms of the conduct of the programs and projects that we do. It mitigates against a corporate NASA where we can take advantage of capabilities across the whole agency, and it completely mitigates against having any sort of independent technical authority.\\n\\n So that’s a change I have made that I hope will stick. Now, far be it from me to suggest that I invented matrix management. I did not. Even George Mueller, to whom I referred earlier, didn’t invent it. It was invented in the late forties and early fifties in conjunction with the task of trying to grapple with large aerospace programs, such as the B-29 development and early ballistic missile development. It was first published as a formal theory of organization in 1956 in a journal called Machine Design, of all things. So the approach has been around for decades.\\n\\n As I say, Mueller didn’t invent it. He merely applied it, and it was applied at NASA during our best years. After Mueller left the agency in 1969, that organizational structure survived for about a half an hour afterwards, at which point the Center Directors took over and restored things to the way they preferred them to be. That didn’t mean it was right, and I hope I’ve made enough of a big deal out of that that it survives me.\\n\\n Other key decisions I have made, I like to believe that I have restored technical credibility to the upper ranks at NASA. When John [F.]Yardley was the AA for space flight and when George Low was the Deputy Administrator, when Hans [M.] Mark was the Deputy Administrator, when—I could go on and on. When George Mueller was the head of human space flight, there was no doubt. When Len Fisk was the head of science at NASA, there was no doubt that, whether you agreed with them or disagreed with them, and I’ve disagreed with some of those individuals, there was no doubt that they had top-level technical credibility. No one doubted it. It was not even a question.\\n\\n So it was quite clear that when a George Low or a George Mueller spoke, that those in the field further down the hierarchy would follow. They might or might not agree, but they would follow. When those gentlemen spoke on the Hill or to the OMB, there was no doubt that the listeners were hearing the voice of authority.\\n\\n In the last 20 years we had gotten away from that, in my opinion. We had gotten to a point where many people were selected for top management positions at NASA because they had had a great military record, because they were friends of other top managers, because they had done esteemed public service elsewhere, but not because they had great technical credibility or knew anything about the space business.\\n\\n When I came on board, we had several people at NASA whose first job in the space business was at the top. I don’t know of any rationally managed organization where your first job in the business can be at the top. You don’t start life in the space business as a Center Director at NASA. You don’t start life in the space business as an Associate Administrator at NASA. That’s where you get to after a long and distinguished career in the space business.\\n\\n Now, notice that I don’t say “a long and distinguished career at NASA.” That’s good; that’s a good thing, but the space business is broader than NASA. There is a robust and thriving military space business, of which I have been a part personally. There’s a robust and thriving now commercial space business, of which I’ve been a part.\\n\\n So I think we, NASA, do ourselves a favor if we have some interchange with other parts of the space business in our personnel selection, but to bring someone to NASA because they were a great carrier pilot, or ran a great fighter wing for the Marines, or had an esteemed career of public service in another agency is foolhardy. Those people are then in a position of making, by the level of authority they’re given as very senior managers, they’re allowed to make decisions that they don’t have the background to be making.\\n\\n So I like to think that I’ve fixed that, and I hope that serves as a model for the future. I hope that it does. It needs to be.\\n\\n I’ve made certain choices about our post-Shuttle space flight architecture. I’ve returned us to a simpler design for getting people into low-Earth orbit. For 30 years NASA has made—35 years, since the decision to do the Shuttle—we have made getting into low-Earth orbit just about the most complex possible thing we could do, and it should be among the simplest possible things. Our future lies out beyond low-Earth orbit. I have seen to the crafting of the simplest possible system I could envision to get people back into orbit to replace the Shuttle.\\n\\n Now, I’ve been praised for that by some and criticized by others who think that it’s too retro. We’ve done that before. It could be more sophisticated. All those things are true. But to me those things are a virtue for their truth. We shouldn’t be spending all our money, all of our effort, all of our time, figuring out how to get people into low-Earth orbit. We should do it in the simplest way possible, because our future lies beyond, and we need to save our resources, people, money, and time, for those other things.\\n\\n So that was a conscious decision. Some may disagree with it, but it was a conscious decision." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So can you give us your opinion then of the Shuttle era? Sometimes you’ve said things about the Shuttle era that haven’t gone over very well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, and you don’t know me well enough, but you may gather a little bit that I really don’t care whether they’ve gone over well or not. [Laughter] But people have been a bit mistaken. It’s not about the Shuttle. My discontent is with the decisions that led to the Shuttle being an answer to a question which never should have been posed. The Shuttle answers the question of how do you get people and medium-weight cargo into low-Earth orbit when you’re not going anywhere else beyond.\\n\\n But that was a policy mistake. The decision to bring Apollo to a halt and beyond that, to dismantle the space flight transportation infrastructure that had been built in that era, that was a deeply flawed decision from the point of view of American strategic positioning in the world. We essentially ground-ruled out any space program that was going to involve flight beyond low-Earth orbit for humans. That was a mistake. Now, I’ve tried to be very clear about that. That was a mistake promulgated by the [Richard M.] Nixon Administration from nearly their first days in office. I mean, Neil [A.] Armstrong had not been back from the Moon for three weeks before the last couple of Apollo missions were canceled, and then the next year after that Apollo 18 was canceled." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course, you have to put it in the context of the times, too, the Vietnam War." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I have clearly demonstrated in a paper called “The Next Fifty Years in Space,” I have done a constant-dollar calculation. It’s actually a rather geeky paper, but you should have it. I’ve done a constant-dollar calculation of what the dollars of the time would have purchased in terms of a human space flight program, had we simply utilized the equipment that we had already bought.\\n\\n Now, it is true that we could not at the time carry out that space flight program and develop the Shuttle, and that’s what I mean when I say the wrong choice was made. We had the choice at the time to fly half a dozen human crews to low-Earth orbit per year to visit a Skylab-like Station, as well as conducting a couple of Apollo missions per year every year, as well as conducting a cargo-only Apollo mission to the Moon every year. So we could have been in a position, using only the budgets we had at the time, of beginning construction work on a lunar base while pursuing a Space Station Program, had we only utilized the equipment that we had.\\n\\n Now, again, I’ll leave you with a copy of that paper, if you would. But it’s carefully researched. The necessary stipulation is to believe that the OMB deflators that we are required to use are the correct deflators. But given that, the position that in constant dollars we could have had an alternate and very robust future is irrefutable." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But, of course, [Wernher] von Braun and others wanted to go to Mars. Was that too ambitious at the time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. We could have been on Mars by now easily, and the paper demonstrates that as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was born the same year you were, and they were saying that humans would be on Mars in 1984." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and they could have been. And they could have been. See, what needs to be understood is that we spent $25 billion building and flying Apollo, and of that 21 [billion] was in building it, and 4 billion was in flying it. So we spent 80 percent of the money of the Apollo era building a capability, which we used to go to the Moon half a dozen times and then threw it away." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So why was that bad decision made?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that I don’t know. You, Steve, are the historian. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I wanted your opinion." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I can’t get inside the mind of President Nixon and other policy makers at the time. I simply know that it is irrefutably true that even for the lower budgets of the time, because of the severe inflation that we encountered in the seventies, the Vietnam War, despite all of those things, in constant dollars we had enough money to conduct a very robust space program, had we chosen not to build the Shuttle. But the Shuttle was the logical outcome of a decision that was first made, which was we would cancel Apollo, and then the question was, well, then what, right?\\n\\n So we as a nation allowed a very poor set of policy choices to be made. I think you’d have to cast a wide net through history to find such an unproductive ratio of expenditures in developing any new capability. In developing any new capability, a given society must undergo the design, the development, the construction, and then transition into operations, and to spend 80 percent of the money that was spent on the effort in design, development, and construction, spend 20 percent of the money using it, and then throwing it away, I think you’d have to look hard to find a society making such a choice, and I think it was a poor choice.\\n\\n Now, I was saying so at the time, but I was, you know, in my young twenties." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nobody listened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course not. Of course not, and probably they shouldn’t have. There were many others also saying that this is a poor choice, and they weren’t listened to, either. As I’ve gotten older, received wisdom has tended to come more toward my position, but my position hasn’t changed. The public perception has changed, that looking back on it, people say, “That wasn’t the best choice.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So it sounds as if you think that knowledge of history and NASA history in particular can be useful for current policy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "There are two things which are really important when you’re deciding policy, making policy choices for an entity like NASA, and I might include that the Department of Energy or National Institute of Health, any technical agency. One is you absolutely must have or must have people you trust who know the technical domain, because even God can’t dictate that which is technically infeasible, and certainly no President can. Congress can vote what it wishes, but Mother Nature reigns supreme. So one must have a perception or have access to perceptions of technical truth.\\n\\n Secondarily, one must understand history. One must understand history. There cannot have been a NASA Administrator who has read more history than I have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Glad to hear it. [Laughter] I know you’re interested in The Secret of Apollo [Systems Management in American and European Space Programs, Stephen B. Johnson] and Seamans’ book [Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I’ve read all the books on space, I think, that have been published, but more importantly, I’ve read more widely in history. I often use these historical references in my speeches. People think that what we do today is unique. We talk about putting crew on [International Space] Station for six months at a time as arduous duty, and we talk about developing a lunar base with a six-month crew rotation or sending people on voyages to Mars that will last three years.\\n\\n Unless I point it out in a speech, who today understands that on Captain [James] Cook’s first voyage, wherein he discovered Australia, he and his people were gone for three years, with no communication home. By the time his crew complement was complete, he had 102 people on board and only lost 38 of them on that voyage, only lost 38 crew, and upon his return home was praised for his great economy in husbanding the lives of his crew. And we talk about a three-year voyage to Mars and making 99 percent certain that no one will die, I mean, who are we kidding? We’ve lost sight of history." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This gets into the whole area of risk in exploration, which maybe we can discuss at the end if we have time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s another issue. I’m sorry; I’m too long-winded for your questions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No. No, this is exactly what we’re looking for. But you talked about history, and let me ask you, though, a little about the future. You mentioned that you get a great deal of external advice on how to make decisions. We know that the Vision for Exploration gives you an agenda of what needs to be done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A template, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you get external advice from other folks. How do you determine what the priorities are going to be for NASA, and what factors do you think over the next few years will change those priorities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that’s actually a question which contains the seeds of its own error. The NASA Administrator doesn’t determine the priorities. I may get a voice, if lucky. I may get a voice in what those priorities ought to be. But the President wrote down what he wanted NASA to do. His OMB doesn’t always listen, but that’s the problem of top managers and staff everywhere. The Congress, of course, there’s an old saying, the President proposes and the Congress disposes. Congress thought about all that for a couple of years and then voted on it and voted generally in accord with what the President wants.\\n\\n Those are the priorities. The law of the land is that NASA shall manage its affairs in such a way as to return human beings to the Moon and establish a research base. That’s the law. NASA Administrators have at best a minor-vote voice in setting priorities.\\n\\n The relative balance between human exploration and science, or either of those two and aeronautics, and within science what will be done in science, is always a compromise, and largely a compromise between the various space community constituents who have opinions about what ought to be done and a budget which, of course, if the budget doesn’t start over every year, every budget is a continuation of the one the year before. So overall, policies and priorities change only very slowly.\\n\\n What I think the Administrator’s role is is more a matter of seeing to it that the agency does indeed execute in a way that accomplishes those priorities, as handed to us by the President and the Congress. There’s an old saying in career civil service that “Well, we believe in the hereafter. We believe we’ll be here after he’s gone.” [Laughter] I think the purpose of any agency head is to try to bend the organization to follow the priorities that Congress has voted and appropriated and that the President has stated.\\n\\n In that respect, government service is very different from private sector, where in a private sector organization there is never any doubt that the employees are following where the boss wants to go, because there’s not even time for that discussion. If somebody doesn’t want to go where the boss wants to go, they’re just not there anymore, and then we have the discussion about how well or how poorly they’re implementing the objectives. But there isn’t a question as to whether they are co-aligned with where the boss wants to go.\\n\\n Government service is almost nothing except a question about whether or not the employees are co-aligned with where the boss wants to go, and usually, or I would say often, they’re not. So that’s the Administrator’s challenge." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So can you give us an overview of the changes you’ve made to implement the vision, I mean, aside from the management ones you’ve already talked about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, those were the changes. The management changes that I’ve made are the things I’ve done to try to implement the vision. When you have technical credibility in a management team and when you have a sensible architecture, that is my contribution.\\n\\n I’ve changed how we do budgeting, as well. For a long time at NASA budgeting was done by the Comptroller, but the Comptroller is also the person who counts the money and moves it around. In the private sector the combining of the roles of keeping track of and moving the money with deciding where the money should go, or helping to decide where the money should go, would be considered a conflict of interest and it’s simply not allowed. It doesn’t pass fundamental accounting standards for separation of duties, separation of roles.\\n\\n I have separated them here at NASA. The people who now do the strategic budgeting for me and with me are not the people who are in charge of physically moving the money where it is supposed to be moved or keeping track of it. I think that has helped. There are any number of urban legends, and they may be not just urban legends, about people in the NASA Comptroller shop who made the decisions about what programs would be done and what programs wouldn’t be done, just by controlling the money. It’s always possible to do that, but it’s much more difficult now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Could you say a little more about how you came to some of the technical decisions you made?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, give me a decision, and I’ll tell you how I came to it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Ares, CEV [Crew Exploration Vehicle]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, a lot of these decisions nearly make themselves, if you start with the right premises. We’re going back to the Moon, and we’re unlikely in the extreme to be given enough money to have two different kinds of human space flight vehicles. We’re lucky to get one. So if primacy rests on we’re going back to the Moon, then the vehicle which carries people has to be capable of coming back from the Moon. That’s a difficult technical challenge. A vehicle like the Shuttle, a smaller vehicle but shaped like the Shuttle, can’t do it. The aerodynamic heating rates and heating loads are simply too high with anything other than an ablative material such as was used on Apollo. So Shuttle tiles won’t cut it.\\n\\n Also, the penalty of carrying wings all the way up to the Moon and all the way back doesn’t seem to justify itself. So without question, if we’re going to the Moon, then we’re going to be coming back home in what I’ll call technically a semi-ballistic, a blunt-body type of arrangement. That means it’s going to look something like Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo-Soyuz, one of that family of vehicles.\\n\\n So if it’s going to look something like that, then it was a reasonably logical choice—not the only choice—to model it after the vehicle where we have the most aerodynamic experience, and that was Apollo, the Apollo Command Module. So people say, “Well, gee, it looks a lot like Apollo.” Well, the economics of not spending money to refine a new aerodynamic shape, even though others would serve, combined with the fact that it must come home at lunar entry speeds, give you something that looks like Apollo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you don’t have to worry about foam falling onto the vehicle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that’s another thing. Okay, now, you could have an Apollo-like shape, and it could be on a Shuttle-C type arrangement, or it could be in a variety of other arrangements. But one of the first things that I didn’t like about the Shuttle when, as a young engineer in my twenties when I saw it, my reaction was immediately, “My god, they put the crew right down there amongst all the hardware. So they’re not in a safe place, and they didn’t give them a way to get off.”\\n\\n So I was going to have an escape system, and I was not going to have the crew in a position where if something happens to the other hardware, it would impact the crew module. It will be below them. Now, that’s not a guarantee, but it’s a lot better deal than being down in a place where, if a tank ruptures or if the stack blows up or if something falls on it—I actually never thought—as most people did not—never thought about the impact of foam coming off of a bipod strut on the Shuttle and impacting a wing. I’d be the first to admit that I missed that along with everybody else at NASA.\\n\\n But generically, the idea of not having the crew module where it’s in a place where if the hardware has a problem, that problem would impact the crew module, generically, that idea was one of the first things I noticed at the age of 23 when they rolled the design out. I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen. I just would not work on the Shuttle during the seventies and eighties; I just would not. I really did not like the design.?\\n\\n Now, the other technical decisions about Ares and Orion, the Ares design uses a device, the first stage of the Shuttle, solid rocket; the first stage is a solid rocket booster. Well, the United States has paid billions of dollars and seven human lives to figure out how to make that thing work nearly perfectly every time, and we’ve now had, I think, 186 successful uses of that in a row, as I sit here, maybe 188; I’m losing track. It is at this point the most reliable piece of space transportation hardware yet invented.\\n\\n So it seemed ludicrous to me not to use it in crafting the next system. So it’s the first stage of Ares 1. We needed a new upper stage, but even had we used the EELVs [Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles], Atlas 5 or Delta 4, we would have needed a new upper stage, because what comes with those vehicles wasn’t adequate. So a new upper stage on top of the most reliable piece of space transportation hardware yet invented seemed like to me to be a pretty good deal, as well as being economical. With our budgets, being economical in our designs was absolutely crucial. So if you follow those technical decisions to their logical conclusions, it’s really hard to say that you would come up with a different answer.\\n\\n Now, if you walk into it with a vested interest, such as “I need to sell more EELVs,” then you won’t reach the conclusion I reached. But I actually started out thinking the EELV would be the right path for getting crew into orbit and then decided that this other approach was better. So another feature is you need to be willing to change your mind.\\n\\n The Ares 5 architecture, well, if you go back to a study that I led in ’93 when I was the Chief Engineer at the agency—and I could furnish you with a copy of that as evidence—but I led a team that concluded that the proper way to deploy the Space Station was not on dozens of Shuttle launches but on half a dozen launches of something that looks exactly like what we call Ares 5 today, because you would have enough payload capability to put up several modules at a time, and you could put up approximately four to five Shuttle flights’ worth of hardware on that vehicle for each launch. Had we done that in the early nineties, we’d be finished with Space Station today and probably back on the Moon.\\n\\n So Ares 5 is a design I had carried around in my head for fifteen years. In order to go to the Moon, you need a vehicle, at a minimum, in the Saturn V class, 120 or more metric tons, equivalent to low-Earth orbit. Smaller than that and you get into the problem that you just can’t carry enough to make the trip worthwhile, or else you have to miniaturize the people. Well, that isn’t going to happen, so there’s a floor on how small a vehicle can be if you want to go to the Moon, unless you want to do an extensive set of rendezvous in Earth orbit; half a dozen launches and rendezvous in Earth orbit, which is really rather silly.\\n\\n So the Ares 5 is big enough to put about 130 or so metric tons in low-Earth orbit. It’s over the threshold. It gives us a great growth path for Mars. We can put together a Mars-sized payload over about a year with four or five launches.\\n\\n Rendezvousing with the Ares 1, it will allow us to go to the Moon with two launches, one for cargo and one for crew, and gives us a substantial capability over Apollo. It makes maximal use of Shuttle elements, the solid rocket boosters; the ability to craft large tanks that we use for the Shuttle, the Shuttle external tank technology. It makes maximal use of old Apollo heritage, the J-2, and also work being done by the Air force, the RS-68 engine.\\n\\n So in cobbling together the Ares 5 basically what we did was to use every single component we could find that already existed so that we weren’t wasting money that we don’t have. Again, I think those decisions are very logical, and one would have a hard time overturning them if efficiency was one’s goal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. That’s been a nice overview. Go ahead." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned Congress and about funding, and we read today an article in the newspaper that it looks like Congress is wanting to give a little more money to NASA than expected. But if you could direct an increase, what types of programs would you like to add to NASA’s strategic vision for the future?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think we have enough programs. We’re doing the programs we need to do. We do need more money than has been allocated to do those programs on a reasonable schedule. I think we’re fundamentally doing the right things. We’re not doing as many of the right things as I’d like to see us do. So, for example, in human space flight we’re doing in series a number of things that were done in parallel during Apollo. In our science programs we’re doing things sequentially that we would like to be doing together, and we would do if we had more money.\\n\\n But I really believe the agency is doing fundamentally the right things. Wrong things just don’t survive the scrutiny of the National Academy of Sciences. There’s the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, the OMB, congressional staff, the NASA Advisory Council. There are so many external groups who look at what we do that if we were doing something fundamentally wrong, it just wouldn’t survive.\\n\\n Well, you’ve got to ask what the definition of wrong is, and I would say something wrong is being done if it has no real constituency out there among the taxpaying public. The definition of right is what our elected representatives are willing to support and vote for, because in a democracy that is how we make the determination of what it is that government funding will be spent on. There’s nothing we’re doing that doesn’t have a very ample constituency behind it.\\n\\n Now, some of those different constituents don’t like each other. There are scientists who would happily end human space flight, and human space flight advocates who would happily reduce science to a trickle. But fortunately, neither of those extremes prevail.\\n\\n So, Steve, you were going to ask a question?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you may have answered this, but I was going to say how do you reconcile that with what you just said about the Shuttle? How did so many of these oversight groups let the Shuttle go forward when it was obviously the wrong thing to do, you say?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, but again, the Shuttle going forward was the second stage of a decision which said, first, let’s end Apollo. I can’t advocate that democracy is a perfect system; I’m not trying to do that. You and I were both young adults at the time, Steve. Clearly the democratically elected leadership of the nation thought it was okay to cease doing what the United States had spent an enormous amount of treasure developing a capability to do. That was okay with them.\\n\\n They didn’t see what I see as larger strategic implications of having the United States be the unquestioned preeminent leader in space. Now, that same democratically elected government understood that we needed to have strategically superior air power and a strategically superior Navy, and that we needed to have an industry which was the equal of any and superior to any other in the world. But they missed it with regard to space. They just missed it. So our systems are not perfect.\\n\\n But, I’m very forthright in saying this was a flawed decision, in my opinion. It was my opinion at the time and has remained so. I think there are now more who agree with me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Does that go for the [International] Space Station, too, the ISS?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, no. Having a Space Station is an excellent idea. Putting the Space Station up in dozens of chunks of 40,000 pounds or less each is rather silly. If we were going to put up a Space Station, the proper way to do it is first to develop the heavy-lift booster, and then put it up in more reasonable-sized chunks. Having a Space Station is not a flawed decision. I think that’s a very useful decision. We’ve made a lot harder work out of having a Space Station than it ever needed to be, in my opinion." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I want to switch the subject for a minute to robotics. Just recently Spirit and Opportunity woke up from their nap during a dust storm and are back traveling around Mars." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And they’re doing quite well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And definitely have surpassed their length of service by a grand amount and have added to NASA’s legacy of successful use of robotics. Tell us what you think the relative importance of robotic space flight is and how will this change the next years as part of the overall Vision for Exploration." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I don’t think it’s going to change anything. For a very long time to come the human frontier in space is going to be well behind that of the robotic frontier, and in many ways it always will be. Our tools, whether on Earth or in space, our tools can see farther, can see in different spectra, can see more deeply both large and small than we can unaided. What is it that humans do that doesn’t involve tool usage?\\n\\n So to me our robotic scientific spacecraft are just an extension of the human being as a tool-making animal. We can send our tools. Today we can deploy our tools well beyond our own personal reach, and that capability is in itself a tool. The ability to remotely control our tools is itself a tool, and we make extensive use of it here on the ground, in the air, and in space, and I hope we will continue to do so. So our science frontier is enormously beyond our human frontier, and always will be.\\n\\n In addition, we use robotic systems when—the bumper sticker version is when something is too dirty, dumb, or dangerous for human beings. We dislike to use human beings in applications which are kind of disgusting. We do it, but we don’t like it. We dislike to use human beings when a task is so repetitive that humans become bored with it; humans don’t usually do it well. And we dislike to use human beings when a task is so dangerous that many of them may not survive.\\n\\n Now, we do all of those things, and the history of human civilization is a history of trying to fix that. So for our dirty, dumb, and dangerous applications we use robots, and in the exploration of the solar system we’re going to continue to do that.\\n\\n So I see it as those two things. One is the area where we really dislike to involve humans, even though we could, and the other thing being simply that the science frontier is so much farther than the human frontier that we don’t want to miss out on those opportunities\\n\\n For example, the Hubble Space Telescope is helping us to understand how the universe works. The discovery of dark energy and dark matter is right at the feet of Hubble. What is the value—I can’t even begin to guess—but what is the value to human civilization a thousand years from now of having discovered that dark energy and dark matter exist, and how will they use that discovery? I only wish I could be around to find out. This is what we do here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you’ve made the case for robotic space exploration, and people say, “Well, why do you need the human then?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, because if I want to do human exploration, it needs humans. It’s self-justifying. It doesn’t need anything more than that. Humans like to go where they can take themselves. The entire history of human civilization is of expansion out of East Africa. In fact, the entire history of life is to expand into every niche and habitat that some mutated form of life can inhabit.\\n\\n I’ll never capture it better than Norm [Norman R.] Augustine put it when he was doing the 1990 study on the future of the U.S. human space flight program. In the introduction to that he made the remark that whether people—and I’m not quoting directly, but the essence of the quote is whether everyone can understand it or not, there is a difference between placing an instrumented package, at the top of Mount Everest, and climbing Mount Everest, and that he, at least, understood the difference.\\n\\n You know, I don’t think I need to say any more. Anyone who doesn’t get that difference, he and I can’t have a conversation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But there are a lot of people who don’t get that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Fortunately, wiser heads have prevailed. The fundamental purpose of NASA as a space agency is to explore the universe that we can reach with humans and robots. That’s the fundamental purpose, and it’s an and, not an or." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think you could argue, the premier agency for exploration of the world, couldn’t you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that as well, but the world is part of the universe. We look down, we look up, and we travel outward. And all those things are important, and it is to me very narrow thinking, narrow thinking in the extreme, for any constituency to say, “Well, my part is worth doing, but these other parts are not worth doing.” I could not more profoundly disapprove of that view." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You won’t get any argument from me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "NASA’s foundation was built on NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics], and NACA was so much a part of studies that affected aeronautical research. What is that role now for NASA, and what do you see for it in the future?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t see nearly as big a role as I wish I saw. There is still much to be learned about flight within the atmosphere, flight within atmospheres. We’re not going to do space exploration at any planet with an atmosphere, even a residual one like Mars, without a heavy investment in aeronautical research that has not yet been done. Right now we’re limited to the Viking entry envelope in terms of our thinking about aero entry at Mars. That’s silly. We should be well beyond that by now.\\n\\n There is an enormous amount to be learned about flight within our own atmosphere, to doing it more economically, safer, more efficiently, more quietly, and in a way that provides better service to more people. We’re not spending as a nation as much on aeronautics as I believe should be spent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you see that role changing at all for NASA in the future?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Only slowly. I’ll just give you some budgetary facts, and I won’t put any coloration of opinion on them. It is often said that human space flight “eats the lunch” is the phrase commonly used, of other enterprises within the agency. Well, during Apollo, to the nearest percent, during the epoch in which NASA basically pioneered human space flight, human space flight was using about, during our first decade, right around 63 percent of our budget. Today human space flight consumes 62 percent of our budget.\\n\\n During the Apollo era science consumed about 17 percent of our budget, and today it takes about 32 percent of our budget. During the Apollo era basic technology, space technology, learning how things work and making them, it consumed about 6 percent of our budget, and aeronautics consumed about another 6 percent of our budget. Today all of aeronautics and technology is 3.2, 3.3 percent of our budget. Then there was always an “other” category of cross-agency programs and things like that, that was about 4 percent of the budget.\\n\\n The only conclusion one can draw from that is that over the years political priorities have shifted out of basic technology and aeronautics and toward science, with 3 or 4 percent of “other” being about the same today as it was then, and human space flight being almost identical today to what it was then. So we have as a political process decided that our space science investigations are of more value than are aeronautics and space technology development.\\n\\n These things go in cycles, but they go in very long cycles, and I would not say that I see any immediate change coming in the near future. I don’t see the political imperative out there to make such a change. We’ve evolved to this position over decades; it’s been pretty continuous. I gave you the snapshot at the beginning and the snapshot at the end, and I didn’t take you through the evolution. It’s been pretty continuous to get there, and I don’t see something yet which is going to alter it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So speaking of budgets in a broader sense, during Apollo NASA had about 4 percent of the discretionary budget, I think—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Correct." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—and now it’s about 1 percent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "About six-tenths of a percent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So your point would be what?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What is your thought on that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I actually want to make a couple of observations before I give you a thought on that. In 1969 for the first time the budget of the United States topped $100 billion, if I recall correctly, and I’m pretty sure I do. The NASA budget in 1969 was a number, I don’t know, probably right around $4 billion. You can go look it up. So in that year we were 4 percent of the nation’s budget.\\n\\n But—and this is a crucial “but”—in 1969 almost none of the budget as a percentage and in comparison to today—almost none of the budget was anything other than what today we would call the domestic discretionary budget. That was defense, plus all of the other non-defense discretionary programs. Very little of the budget was entitlements—interest on the public debt, Social Security, other things like that—very little of it. There was some, but on a percentage basis it was small.\\n\\n Now, today our domestic discretionary budget, counting defense, is about 800 or so billion dollars, 800 billion and change, but our budget is 2.7 trillion. So—again, I’m rounding, and if you want to go back and get correct numbers and put a little asterisk in and say, “What the Administrator meant to say was—,” then that’s okay. But in round numbers our budget is 2.7 or so trillion, and in round numbers our domestic discretionary is just under 900 billion, 877 or some number like that billion dollars.\\n\\n So the proper comparison is of 870-some or $900 billion to $100 billion, because the 1.9 trillion in entitlements, interest on the public debt, and other non-discretionary things didn’t exist 40 years ago. Those categories didn’t exist in terms of occupying any size in the budget. So today NASA gets 16 billion and change out of a $900 billion budget. That’s a couple percent; it’s not 4 percent, but it’s a couple percent. We’re not doing terribly badly in terms of the budget fraction of the budget that would be apples to apples, okay? We’re doing very poorly in comparison to entitlements and interest on the public debt, which 40 years ago were nits.\\n\\n So what has happened to the country over 40 years is that political imperatives have shifted by an enormous factor. For every three dollars that are spent by the government, two of them are spent for entitlements and interest on the public debt, and only one of those three dollars is being used to buy things for people, as functions of government. So in that crowding out of budget which has occurred, NASA, along with other domestic non-defense discretionary functions, has been crowded out. But relative to, on an apples-to-apples comparison, the kinds of things we used to be up against 40 years ago in the budget, we’re really not doing too badly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The only thing I would say is that I believe the NASA budget peaked more like in ’65 or ’66 and had already started down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It had started down by ’69. As I said earlier, we made an enormous investment for about four or five years to purchase for Apollo things in parallel that today we are purchasing in series fashion, and so I chose for the moment to draw a comparison between now and the late sixties.\\n\\n Oh, by the way, I would also say that if you compare the inflation of the time, $100 billion in the late sixties is about $700 billion today, so the domestic discretionary portion of the budget in constant dollars is a little bit larger than it was back then, but not a lot. We’ve done a very economical job over the decades of controlling the growth of domestic discretionary funding. We’ve not done a good job over the decades of controlling the growth of entitlements and interest on the public debt. Those have mushroomed beyond any imagining from the time of our young adulthood." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As you know, global warming has become a topic of intense discussion over the last few years, and NASA scientists have been seen as a source of resource information and data regarding this topic. How do you feel, or how will NASA be involved with the discussion of global warming in the next years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I hope in the same way that we have been. Our job is to gather data, build climate models, try to understand the data, publish the results. We’re not a policy-making agency and shouldn’t be. That would be, in my view, a severe conflict of interest. If you are involved in the making of policy and in the development of the data and the models that contribute to that, there will inevitably be the question of are you coloring the results to match what you want the policy to be.\\n\\n So our job is that of scientific research; gather the information, understand it, interpret it, build theoretical models to explain it, and then publish those results. I think actually we do it rather well. All the controversy on global warming and climate change generally, the enormous fraction of that data which exists in the world comes from NASA.\\n\\n I personally think people have gone overboard in the discussion of climate change, to the point where it has become almost not legitimate to view it as a technical subject. It has almost acquired religious status, which I find deplorable. Science moves forward as the outcome of arguments. You develop your theories, publish your data, advance your concept, and others shoot it down, or try to. Scientific consensus evolves in that way.\\n\\n When it becomes not legitimate to question the data, question the models, when anybody who doesn’t believe as you believe is shouted down, then good-quality science suffers. We just had an incident where one of our researchers, Jim [James E.] Hansen, who is notable for his prominence in the media, but is also a good scientist, had to correct some of his data, his published data, on which years were the warmest years in the last century. It was a small correction in terms of the magnitude of the numbers, but a fairly large effect in determining which years were the warmest years. Jim has been criticized in some circles for doing that much more quietly than he published the original data.\\n\\n I don’t think anybody should be criticized for correcting their data. In the normal course of scientific work mistakes and misinterpretations are made. This is what is normal. When one determines that an error has been made, it should be fixed as rapidly as possible, but nobody should be criticized for doing so. It should be regarded as routine and should be treated routinely. That is what life is like on the scientific frontier or, for that matter, the engineering frontier. When we develop new designs, we should not be surprised that they break. We have to correct them and fix them and move on. That is what progress is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were speaking of how NASA doesn’t make policy. When Congress created NASA, [Congress said] the policy of the country regarding activities in space would be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind. Many times when elected officials talk about NASA and its worth or its value, they mention about how valuable it is for the efforts of national security. Do you find that NASA’s role may be changing as the role of global terrorism emerges through the world?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I don’t really. When people talk about the value of NASA for national security, I see that in two ways, and both, I think are extremely important.\\n\\n The first and most obvious way is that the technology we develop is part of the overall space business in these United States. NASA space technology is not colored differently than Air Force or NRO [National Reconnaissance Office] space technology or, for that matter, commercial space technology. It’s all part of our industrial base in space technology, and NASA is a major and has been a major contributor to that. Since our military space systems are part of our first line of defense and certainly part of our ability to know what’s going on worldwide, then in that sense NASA is a contributor and has always been, and I hope will always remain so.\\n\\n There is a more subtle aspect to national security, however, where NASA plays an enormous role and that I think is not widely appreciated. I’ve used this point in speeches and I’m going to use it again here, because I really think it matters. National security to me involves several different levels.\\n\\n The first level is having enough military firepower, if you will, that you can defeat a likely enemy, and we’ve always—not always; the nation has fallen into periods where that hasn’t been seen to, but we don’t live in such a period and haven’t since World War II. We were taken by surprise with World War II. We shouldn’t have been. We have maybe made mistakes, but we have tried to see to it that we have an adequate defense establishment since that time. That’s the first line of security. I’ve often said with tongue in cheek that the only thing more expensive than a good army is having the second-best army. So that’s the first line of defense.\\n\\n Now, the second thing is, and I’m drawn to a quote by our first President, George Washington, who said, “If you would have peace, prepare for war.” The thrust of that obviously being if you are clearly strong and seen to be strong by other nations who are potential adversaries, then they will be measured in their actions, because they will know that if it comes to an actual conflict, you will be well positioned to deal with them. So that’s the deterrence theory, which, as we’ve carried well in now to two centuries past Washington’s original advice, and I think it was well founded.\\n\\n Now, it seems to me that there’s a third step in national security, and that step is more subtle. That involves being the kind of nation, the kind of society doing the kinds of things that make other people want to be your ally. We did that with the Marshall Plan in Europe at the end of World War II. We could have behaved as a conquering power squashing everything in our path, very, very Roman Empire-like. We could have done that. We could have behaved as the Soviet Union did at the end of World War II, amalgamating all of Eastern Europe into its grasp.\\n\\n We didn’t do any of that. We didn’t do it in Europe, and we didn’t do it in Japan. We behaved, by and large, in ways—certainly not perfectly—but by and large in ways that made former adversaries want to be our ally, and today Germany and Japan are two of our strongest allies. That was a level of wisdom on the part of our grandparents’ generation that I think is not widely appreciated. In fact, I’m the only person I know who has said this is what we did, and it should be appreciated.\\n\\n Now, space activity, civilian space activity that NASA carries out, is emphatically in this vein. The kinds of things we do, both for robotic science and for human space flight, encourage and entice other countries to want to partner with us in the doing of them. They are frontier activities and always will be, and they excite the human spirit and challenge the human imagination and the human mind, and others want to do that, too. When we can be a leader in those activities, it makes them want to join us.\\n\\n There are many areas in which the United States has to do things that others don’t like, as part of our global policy agenda. We should proactively look for things that go the other way, that make others want to join with us. Space flight is one of those things, and in that sense, to me NASA exerts an enormous role in improving our national security." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you. That’s a great answer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I mean, do you follow that argument?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I wish more people did. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Or took it to heart." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On that same train of thought, we all know that NASA celebrates its fiftieth anniversary next year. Share with us what you believe to be NASA’s impact on society in the past and now and even in the future." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "NASA’s impact on society, American society especially, is to do things and bring home things that are larger than life. NASA makes us look toward our future. People want to have a future. They want to have a frontier. They want to see and learn and imagine new things.\\n\\n People want to feed their kids and have a roof over their heads and dress warmly against the cold and not be hungry and not worry about where their next car payment is coming from, and they want to have some leisure time. Yes, people want all those things. But they also want to look beyond that when they can, and NASA is the entity above all others in this country that brings that to them.\\n\\n It’s not for nothing that 40 years after we did it, television commercials are still showing Apollo Moon rockets. They’ve had 40 years of other stuff they could substitute since that time, and they don’t; or even going beyond Apollo Moon rockets, beyond Apollo Moon walkers. Television commercials today are showing Apollo Moon walkers as part of their spiel. That’s not an accident." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Steve, do you have more that you want to add?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I have a couple of questions just to wrap up, not following on what you just said, but anyway, I know you came to NASA at the tail end of the SEI, the Space Exploration Initiative. Do you have lessons learned from that experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I didn’t come at the tail; I came at the beginning of it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At the beginning? You must have even more lessons learned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I was the AA for Exploration until it got canceled by the [William J.] Clinton administration." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what year was that you came?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "’91." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "’91, okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was the Exploration Administrator who was hired as a result of the Augustine Committee’s recommendations. I guess the lessons that I would say are learned from that time are that you’ve got to have the President and the Congress both in support. At that time we had the President’s support; the Congress emphatically was not.\\n\\n Today that’s not so. The Congress has been hugely supportive of our program. You never get unanimity, but the Authorization Act, which passed in 2005, December of ’05, was enormously supportive of our agenda. I have now Democratic committee chairs in both the House and the Senate. They are as supportive as were the Republicans." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you’re hopeful that the Vision for Space Exploration will go forward, past this administration." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I am, because of the points that I think Admiral [Harold W.] Gehman [Jr.] made in the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and the report that came out of that. I’ve said this, too, in speeches, but I think it bears repeating. If you look at I think it’s Chapter—what—7 of that report, wherever the chapter is on rationale, the Gehman Commission—I’ll give you the bumper sticker version. They make the point that for the foreseeable future, space flight is expensive, difficult, and dangerous. But for the United States, it’s strategic, and it should continue. But if it is to continue, that the goals ought to be worthy of the cost and the risk and the difficulty of the enterprise, and that flying the Space Shuttle to and from the Space Station doesn’t constitute such a goal. They were pretty explicit about that. You don’t have to read between the lines to read those conclusions.\\n\\n Well, in what I can only regard as a miracle of Washington policy, the White House listened. They responded. They proposed a program which goes logically beyond the Station, back to the Moon, on to Mars. Those are the pieces of geography in the solar system that we can envision reaching over the next few generations. Now, our descendents will reach farther, but that’s what we can see. So they proposed that, okay, well, that’s what we should do. The Congress studied all that for damn near two years, from January of ’04 to December of ’05, and decided that, “You know, that’s right,” and they voted an Authorization Act, which basically tells us to go do those things.\\n\\n I’m hopeful. I’m not confident, but I’m hopeful that the lessons of the past this time will be learned. We’re not asking for more money. It would be nice, but for like 20 years the space program has been roughly fixed in constant dollars, and I don’t expect that to change. What we’re asking now is that we use these constant-dollar budgets to buy the right things. It will be more slowly than many of us would like, but at least let us spend the money in the right direction, and I believe that will be done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Speaking of confident and hopeful, we haven’t said much about commercial space. Are you confident or hopeful that commercial space in the future will have a greater role?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I hope so. We have to bring that about. The government can act to encourage commercial development or to discourage it. Now, at crucial periods in our history in aviation, the government took proactive steps to encourage the development of commercial aviation to satisfy government needs. All you’ve got to do is go back and look at the Air Mail Acts. Look at how we apportion cargo shipment of supplies into Iraq today. Much of it is done by contract carriers; operating at risk, but it’s done by commercial carriers. Some is done by military carriers.\\n\\n We grew aviation policy in the United States with the thought in mind that we are a capitalistic nation rooted in doing things that cause free enterprise to succeed. So rather than trying to suppress it, we tried to sponsor it. In space we didn’t do that. We emphatically didn’t do that. We made it the province of government employees, which was not in itself bad, but we missed the other part.\\n\\n We have a logistics market to the Space Station. What I’ve done with our Commercial Orbital Transportation Services agreements or COTS agreements, what I’ve done is to say that the Space Station logistics market is open to free enterprise, and oh, by the way, here is some seed money from NASA if you can get your venture started. But we’re not telling them how to do it. Of the two ventures we sponsored, one appears to be succeeding; one appears to be failing. We’re going to cancel the failing one and use the money to start a new one.\\n\\n I think that kind of activity on the part of government is essential if we want to have commercial space capability, and I think as a nation that we don’t want to have no government space activity, but we don’t want to have only government space activity, and we need to act in ways that bring about the commercial space development." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So what are the relative roles of government and commercial entities?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it changes with time. I don’t think a relevant role for a commercial entity can be to send a human being to the Moon today. But I think a relevant role for commercial space activity today can be send a human into orbit and can be sending supplies into orbit. I think that is well within the reach of the industrial space community today.\\n\\n So it’s not what are the roles. It’s what is the attitude. The attitude should be to make available the power of government to offer its markets to commercial enterprise in a hands-off way to stimulate the development of that commercial enterprise. As the technology moves forward, the role of commercial provider can always increase, but not unless the attitude is right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have nothing further. Do you have any more?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Steven J. Dick", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything you would like to add, Dr. Griffin? Anything at the end?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I would like to add that you should call me Mike. [Laughter] “Dr. Griffin,” I don’t like that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Is there anything else that you would like to add, Mike, before we close out this afternoon?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I don’t know. No, I answer questions. I don’t pontificate. I try to answer questions. I hope I’ve answered yours." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very well. We appreciate the time, and we’ll close for the day and let you get off to the rest of the business at hand." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Call me if you need me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We definitely will. Thank you very much." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Michael D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00429", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/OHaraDB/oharadb.htm", + "original_file_name": "OHaraDB_4-23-02.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/OHaraDB/OHaraDB_4-23-02.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Dee O'Hara", + "location_date": "Mountain View, California – 23 April 2002" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Dee O’Hara" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is April 23, 2002. This oral history interview, with Dee O'Hara, is being conducted at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Rebecca Wright, with Carol Butler.\\n\\n We’d like to thank you again for taking time out to do this. We'd like to begin by asking you, how did you enter the nursing profession?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I'm really not sure. I liked what the nursing school looked like, and I wanted to work with people. There was a Career Day at high school. I guess most high schools have Career Days, and a nurse from Providence Hospital came, and she looked very smart in her uniform, and I thought, well, why not try that. I did, and it was a good decision on my part. I became a nurse, and after I graduated, I worked as a surgical nurse at the University of Oregon Medical School.\\n\\n I had kind of a bad back, so standing at the operating table all day was kind of tough. So I decided, well, maybe I'd go try something else, and then I worked for three diagnosticians in Portland, Oregon, and learned how to do lab work and X-rays. Back then, you did everything as a nurse.\\n\\n Then I decided, well, I think I’ll go into the Air Force, and that’s how I originally became involved with the space program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was just a few years after you graduated that you were selected to be the first aerospace nurse, is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. My roommate came home one day and she said, \"Let's join the Air Force and see the world.\"\\n\\n I said, \"No, I don’t think so. Nice girls don't do that.\" We're talking several centuries ago, you see. Anyway, we mulled it over for a while and thought, well, why not? It's a way to travel and to do something different.\\n\\n So we went downtown Portland and walked into the recruiting office and said, \"Well, here we are. Where do we sign?\" Of course, the recruiter was a bit stunned at that point, because females just didn’t walk in off the street and ask to join the Air Force.\\n\\n We then went to officers' training at Maxwell Air Force Base [Alabama], and my classmate, Jackie, went off to Mobile, Alabama, and I went to Patrick Air Force Base [Cape Canaveral, Florida]. This was in May of [19]'59.\\n\\n The first seven astronauts were selected in April of [19]'59, and in November of [19]'59, I was working in the labor and delivery room at the hospital there at Patrick, working nights. I had a message the next morning that the “old man,” meaning the commander of the hospital, wanted to see me when I got off duty the next morning. Well, naturally, I was terrified, because I'd only been there six months and I knew that when you went to see Colonel [George M.] Knauf, it was for two reasons: one, you were in trouble; or, two, it was for a promotion. Well, I knew it was not for a promotion because I'd only been there six months. So I kept thinking, oh, boy, what have I done? I didn’t remember harming anybody or harming a baby.\\n\\n I gave morning report the next morning and went to his office, and here sat his exec officer, the chief nurse, and all these people. I really was terrified because I didn't know why exactly I was there. I literally sat on the edge of the seat. Anyway, he started talking about Mercury, and I thought, well, there's a planet Mercury and there's mercury in a thermometer, and then he mentioned astronauts. That, of course, didn't mean anything to me. I didn't know what they were. He mentioned NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration], and I thought he was saying Nassau, because of the island of Nassau. I had just been there, and I thought, \"How did the heck did he know I was down there?\" Anyway, I was quite confused.\\n\\n Anyway, he turned and said to me, \"Well, do you want the job?\" I kind of turned around, because I didn't think he was talking to me. He said, \"Well, you haven't heard a word I've said, have you?\"\\n\\n I said, \"No, sir.\"\\n\\n And he said, \"Well, do you want the job or not?\"\\n\\n I didn’t know what else to say, so I said, \"Well, I guess so,\" absolutely not knowing at all what I had committed myself to. Of course, the chief nurse, who was there, was furious with me afterwards, because she was losing me out of the hospital. Also, she thought NASA was crazy because they were to going to be putting a man on the top of a rocket.\\n\\n Anyway, that's how it started. So in January of 1960, I then went out to Cape Canaveral, as it was known then, and set up the aeromed lab. It was the beginning, and that’s how it happened." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Since you were in the Air Force, did you feel this was more of an order, or did you see this was an opportunity?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was really an opportunity. It was never an order, because the choice was certainly up to me. Colonel Knauf had been tasked by the agency, by NASA, to put together medical support teams from all of the military services—the Army, Navy, and the Air Force—and these support teams were to consist of surgeons and nurses and people of all disciplines, and they would go aboard recovery ships and be available and set up little hospitals aboard ships, should there be a problem upon landing. They were stationed all over the area, because in case there was a landing that was off-center or wherever, it wasn’t quite where it was supposed to be, what we had to do was to put together these medical kits and everything that people on board the ships would need to treat an injured astronaut.\\n\\n That's how I got involved. Colonel Knauf decided that he wanted a nurse, and NASA said, \"Well, we don't want a nurse.\"\\n\\n He said, \"Well, you're going to have a nurse.\"\\n\\n NASA said, \"Well, we didn’t want one, anyway.\"\\n\\n He wanted someone that would get to know the astronauts so well that she would certainly know if they were ill, because, as we all know, pilots and, let alone, astronauts are not about to tell a flight surgeon when they’re sick, and that’s understandable because, as you know, pilots are so afraid of being grounded, and the flight surgeon’s the only one that has that authority over them. So they’re not usually very friendly with their flight surgeons.\\n\\n Anyway, his whole idea and concept was to put someone out there out there at the Cape to be with them all the time and just to get to know them so well that she would certainly know if they were ill or not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you feel you were in the right place at the right time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, there's no question. People have said, well, you must be this, you must be very special, you must be whatever, and, no, it was luck of the Irish. I was in the right place at the right time. I did have a varied background, and my understanding was that when he decided to have a nurse out there, he had gone to Washington, D.C., to the Department of the Air Force and went into the Air Force Nurse Corps office and looked through files there, looking for someone, and apparently he did not find what he was looking for and thought, \"Well, why don't I go home and see what nurses I have back here at Patrick [Air Force Base].”\\n\\n He came back and apparently pulled my record after looking at all the other nurse records, and, again, since I had a varied background in surgery and lab work, apparently he said, \"Well, what about her?\" So, unbeknownst to me, he apparently observed me for two weeks and said, \"Okay, she's going to be the one.\" So I was in the right place at the right time. It was just as simple as that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You didn't have anybody to follow, no one’s footsteps that you could follow into. So this was a whole new role of history." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was a whole new everything because this hadn't been done before. I mean, putting a man on top of a rocket was a bit strange. No, there was no one. All of us, physicians, engineers, myself, and everybody associated, we were all kind of marching forward and not with a lot of guidance, just kind of making up the rules as we went along." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you do anything special to prepare yourself mentally or emotionally to take you through these unmarked paths?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I just went along with whatever was going on, and obviously, it was a great learning experience, but, again, didn't know quite what to anticipate. Of course, my involvement was only from the medical side of the house. I had set up the crew quarters and the aeromed lab there in Hangar S at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]. We had an exam area and a kind of a laboratory area and then my little office. Next door was a suit area where all the suits were checked out and tested, and then just past that was the crew quarters where the crew slept just before their launch or if they were down [at the Cape for] training. That’s where they would spend the night. It was a very small area, but everything certainly functioned very well.\\n\\n But back during the Mercury days, there wasn't a tremendous lot of people. It was a very small core group of people, mainly engineers, participating or supporting the Mercury project. The first seven were all stationed at Langley Air Force Base [Virginia], as were most of the engineers, and they would come to the Cape for their simulator training and their suit checkouts and whatever testing needed to be done in the spacecraft.\\n\\n We would do their pre-flight physicals, and that's where I got involved. Even though I was there every day, I just participated in the medical pre-flight exams.\\n\\n Then one of the fun things was going down to Grand Bahama Island, and this is where we set up a little fly-away hospital, so that if an astronaut, upon landing, was injured, it was a place to take them, particularly the first suborbitals, of Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.] and [Virgil I.] Gus Grissom's flights. That is also where we would take them for their post-flight examinations. I went down and helped set this up, and what we set up was a surgical suite and an exam area. This little hospital was collapsible, and it could be flown away anywhere it was needed. So that was kind of a fun thing to do. Fortunately, we never used it, except to see them after the flight for their post-flight exams." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What type of authority did you have when you were doing these functions? Did you have to go through lots of battles or lots of discussion with lots of higher-ups to get whatever you needed to set this up?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, surprisingly. Maybe it was because of the time, but back then, whatever those guys wanted, they got. I mean, the space program was new and it was much favored by everyone, and particularly all of the politicians. We had a wonderful NASA administrator, Mr. James [E.] Webb. He was just fabulous. He was very astute politically, and politicians were falling all over themselves to be a part of this wonderful, new adventure that this brand spanking new agency was doing.\\n\\n Basically all I had to do was go out and find the furniture and tell procurement that’s what I wanted. But I don't recall any hassles, certainly not like you have nowadays. As far as authority, I was out there by myself, and I kept Colonel Knauf informed, but I really worked independently. I've been extremely fortunate all my life to work independently, which is great. I've always had a boss, of course, and I've always kept them informed, but I didn't have someone hovering over me every day while at work. So I've been very, very fortunate from that standpoint." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Once the quarters and the room was set up, how did your tasks change? When did you actually start getting to know those first seven [astronauts: M. Scott Carpenter, L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., John H. Glenn, Jr., Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Alan B. Shepard, Jr., and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, in January of 1960, the first seven started coming down to the Cape to start their training for the first suborbital flight, and at that time, the astronaut that was going to fly had not been chosen, or at least it certainly hadn’t been announced. But that was pretty early on. They would come down, as I said, to do their simulator runs and work in the altitude chambers. The Mercury spacecraft had to go through all sorts of tests because it was a brand-new vehicle and certainly untested. Since I was there on a daily basis, more or less doing everything to support them, I just did whatever was necessary or whatever needed to be done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "These first seven astronauts, you began to know them as individuals. Did you find yourself in the role of a sister or a mother, a good friend? Did you feel you were their nurse or a combination of all of these?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the nurse part is kind of a misnomer, in a way. I mean, here were seven guys who were in top physical condition. They were all top fighter pilots. They were the cream of the crop, and being around them daily when in the area, we just became good friends.\\n\\n The first time I met them, I was terrified of them. I was very intimidated by them. But they were extremely nice to me, and they made me feel very comfortable and welcome in this all-male world, if you will. Obviously, it's like with anyone that you meet and you're around daily. You become more familiar with them, and you work it into a very nice friendship and relationship with them.\\n\\n Occasionally their wives would come down, so it was nice for me to get to meet them, although I didn't get to know any of the wives really well until we all moved to Houston [Texas]. Again, they came down just once in a while and then for only brief periods of time, and that’s because they all had small children and the kids were normally in school.\\n\\n But I think the friendships just grew as I think they would normally under normal circumstances, because I'd help out in the suit room or I'd do the lab work or I'd do some communication checks. I would do whatever was required. Like I said, back then you do whatever it takes to get the job done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Once Alan Shepard had been chosen for that first flight, did you see a change in your role? Now there was a type of order; they weren't just all seven. He now became the first one to go on a flight. So did your day-to-day routine change, anything that you could help him prepare for that flight, or anything that you had to do to make sure he was ready to go on that first flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it didn't change per se. It just became more medically oriented, if you will. Bill [William K.] Douglas[Astronaut Personal Physician] was their flight surgeon, and he was a wonderful, wonderful man. He was the kind that wouldn’t allow them to go on the centrifuge or do a chamber run or any test unless he did it first. We had twenty-four-hour urine samples to collect and a number of other medical tests. So just prior to flight, there was more emphasis on the medical exams, and I was sort of the one person that was there all the time that they could either call or contact, and I would go out and get whatever was needed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Speaking of the flight surgeon, did he rely on your instincts and your input whenever making determination for these astronauts and their health?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, he would ask, \"Is everything okay?\" or, \"Have you noticed anything?\" or, “Any problems that you’ve observed?” And I would certainly have a verbal input as to the status of the individual at that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Would you walk us through some of those days prior to Alan Shepard's flight? Tell us how you felt, knowing that this person you'd become friends with was now going to make this historic mission, and share with us how you felt about putting one of your friends through the procedures to get him ready for this flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was probably the most emotional, excruciating time for me. Since we had never put a man on top of a rocket or launched one, so to speak, it was very nerve-wracking, and I think it was nerve-wracking for everyone simply because we didn't know quite what was going to happen. As you know, they were always testing missiles, and they'd go up and explode, or they’d nose-dive into the ocean, and now we were going to put some guy on top of one of these rockets. So it was very scary.\\n\\n The night before the flight, I was out there all evening. One of my jobs was to call and wake the various support people and get them up well in advance of the launch. Then I would go and wake up the crew, and the crew would come in to the exam area, and we, of course, did his temperature, his blood pressure, heart rate, and got his weight. The weight was very important so that we could determine—you know, you always need a weight before and a weight after. Then we’d make sure that we checked his skin and his ears and particularly his chest area, the skin on his chest area, to be sure there was no irritation because of wearing headphones and electrodes and that sort of thing, so that this didn’t become an irritant for them during the flight.\\n\\n But I could feel the anxiety building up, particularly in myself. It was kind of a scary time, and I’m sure it was for a lot of people, and you could kind of feel the tension in the air.\\n\\n After the physical, he would then go have breakfast and then go back to crew quarters, which was about fifteen or twenty feet away, and get into the undergarments he would wear under his flight suit. He would then go into the suit room to be suited, and once that was done, he would walk down the hall and downstairs and off to the launch pad. Again, I hate to keep repeating this, but it was just a very apprehensive time for me.\\n\\n I would then go over to what was called the forward med [medical] station. This was an old Snark [Air Force missile] hangar that I did set up as a trauma room in case there was an on-the-pad abort or a launch disaster, and this would be where they would bring him. I had a med tech and myself. We were stationed there during the hours pre-flight, and that’s where we would watch the launch from. It was very emotional for me to watch.\\n\\n I remember John Glenn's flight. We would see a cloud, maybe over Orlando [Florida], coming this way, and, well, they would scrub the launch. The least little thing would cause a launch delay or a launch scrub, simply because we had not done it before. And this was the same with Alan’s and Gus’, and every time anything out of the abnormal would happen, why, everything come to a screeching halt. But the tension was very, very high." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess those moments in between must have seemed very long for you, waiting for the decisions to be made." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very long, very long, indeed. After Alan's flight, as soon as he was launched, I don't think I breathed for quite some time, and even then, his flight was, what, sixteen minutes. But those were very, very long minutes until we got the word that he was down-range and he had landed exactly where he was supposed to.\\n\\n Then I was taken over to the Cape air strip, and Dr. Douglas and I flew down to Grand Bahama Islands for the post-flight physical exams, and even though he had been recovered and was aboard the ship, he was going to be brought to GBI [Grand Bahama Islands] for his major physical exam. They were seen aboard a ship very briefly, but the more extensive medical exams were conducted there at GBI in that little fly-away hospital." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember any part of the conversation you had with Alan Shepard after you saw him?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, you know, I don't. I remember I was so relieved to see him. We all were. And there were so many people talking to him. I think I just smiled. I was just so glad to see him, I don't know that I said anything." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm sure your smile said all there was to say to him, too. I’m sure he was glad just to see you as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we were just so happy he was back, and it was a great accomplishment. Really, it was a great feat. I think we tend to forget that. With all the exotic technology we have now compared to what was done then, it was really an engineering feat that was unbelievable. The talent that NASA had back there, and really still has, but the talent back then was awesome. The best and the brightest wanted to work for NASA, and rightfully so, because it's a wonderful agency, and the opportunities were unlimited, just to be able to be a part of something as historic as these first flights or any of the flights, but particularly the first ones." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Then Gus Grissom went next. Was it easier for you to see the second one of your friends to launch, or was it as if you were living it all again?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it never really got easier. I think we all had just a titch more self-confidence, but not much, because, again, it was still all very new and very experimental. Again, the same type of launch preparations was done for Gus as was for Alan, and then, of course, Gus got into trouble upon landing. As you know, the hatch blew, and the valve on his suit opened, and water started pouring in, and the helicopter that was hovering over him, here Gus was frantically waving at them and trying to tell them that he was in trouble, and they thought he was just waving and being friendly, and so they started waving back at him.\\n\\n Gus was a very, very muscular guy and very strong, but he wasn’t a big man. So, thank God he was as strong as he was. Of course, we lost the Liberty Bell [the name of Grissom’s Mercury capsule]. It sunk right away, and we were just lucky that Gus didn't drown. The waters are very choppy that day, and with the helicopter hovering over him, that didn’t help the choppy waters, and, of course, again, there he was. He was waving frantically at them to come get him, and they just thought he was just being friendly, and that was a bit scary." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you have any idea that this was going on while it was going on, or was it sometime afterwards when you heard the details of his recovery?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it was afterwards when we heard the details. We were on GBI and didn’t have instant TV like they have now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When John Glenn went up, was there a longer time that you had to feel your anxiety, or did you feel a little bit more comfortable this time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes. He was being launched on an Atlas, and we had watched those blow up right and left, and there was tremendous anxiety, at least, again, on my part. But John's flight, I don't remember how many times John's flight was scrubbed because of the weather, which was usually one of the determining factors, and in Florida, as you know, the weather can change instantly. But, again, we'd see a cloud coming, and so they would reschedule the time, or they’d put it into a hold, and that was simply because they just weren’t going to take any chances." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Every time that it was put on hold, did you have to start your procedures all over again?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Well, we started some of the procedures all over again. We really didn’t do a lot of the in-depth exams on them. We just made sure that the heart, lung, and skin, and the ears were clear, and that sort of thing, before they left." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The others that followed, were all the procedures the same as you had done before, or were they changed as they went through?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the preparation before flight was very much the same, yes. I don't know that anything much changed except probably in their simulator training. When an astronaut returned from his flight and during the debriefing, you kind of learn what things need to be changed, and they would try to modify or either add or take away from, say, the flight plan. But there weren't a lot of drastic medical changes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did that same method work for you in your medical area? Did you learn from what they had to say and then try to adapt based on what they were telling you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, on the medical end of it, really didn’t, again, just didn’t change that much. Nowadays, of course, the medical exams are probably far more in depth than they were back then, and we have a lot more sophisticated equipment to work with than we did back there. We just didn't have much then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Everything you kept, all your records, everything was done by hand, is that correct? You didn’t have any type of computer-based equipment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Everything was handwritten. We didn't have computers. I'm sure there were some around, but we didn't have any, and I think they were kind of just first coming out. We had paper checklists, and you went and followed your routine, and you didn't vary much from that.\\n\\n The other thing, too, is that all through the programs I was involved in, we really didn't change a lot of the way we operated, and we did not usually allow anyone new, a new face, if you will, because it really upset the crewmen. I know that sounds silly. You wouldn't think it would bother them, but it really did. We were very careful that the same people were there each time so that when they came in for their physical or any sort of a medical test, it was a familiar environment to them, and there weren't a lot of strange faces or people that they didn't know. We really worked as a team. Of course, the team kept growing as the flights became longer and more sophisticated, but the same team assigned to a mission, and they usually stayed there. So that when the crew came in, they saw the same faces and were familiar with what we were going to do to them, and we tried never to change that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The follow-up was all under your responsibility as well, all the files and all the records?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, all of the files and the medical records. Whenever I would go down for a flight, I would take their medical records with me, and I was always terrified the plane would go down, and the medical records would be gone, and they’d never forgive me for that. But we would collect all of the data from the physicals and bring everything back to Houston, and it would be analyzed and filed. Then we soon started, of course, a computer database. One of the fellows there set up a wonderful system for collecting and storing all of the information and to archive all of the medical records." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "before that was done, that must have been some load that you carried physically back and forth. Wherever you had to go, you had boxes that were under your charge as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. I really just took their medical records on board with me in the aircraft, but we would ship a lot of the other stuff. The rolls of data and rolls of EKGs [electrocardiograms] and a lot of the other medical information was shipped back. I didn’t bother to bring that back. But I would certainly make sure that I got the medical records back. Again, the investigators that were doing certain medical tests on them, they were really responsible for their own data and to cart their own data back. I just took responsibility for the medical records, the pre- and the post-flight medical information." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Once the Mercury astronauts had finished the Mercury Program, you must have been transitioned into the Gemini Program, and now you had two to get ready for a flight instead of one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the workload did increase. They started selecting more astronauts, and I think the second group was selected in 1962, and I think there were nine, and then the next group was fourteen. They all started arriving, you see, with children and wives. Well, we had a couple of bachelors, but it was a pretty heavy workload. There was just myself and five flight surgeons, and I was very busy because I’d do all of the pre-flight stuff, and then I’d go to the Cape, and I’d stay there until the crew was recovered and brought back to the Cape, and we’d do the post-flight exams, and then we’d all fly back to Houston.\\n\\n So, in the meantime, everything that I normally did in the flight medicine clinic was still waiting for me. I did all their EKGs and eye exams and all of the administrative forms and the hearing tests and you name it and, of course, the immunizations on the families, plus the guys. So I was kept pretty busy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You must have not had much time for a personal life." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, no, not much of a one. What’s that saying? “I’m a girl that can’t say no.” It’s just the way it was. I think at one point I had a patient census of 500, if you will, and finally about the third year or so, we finally did get a secretary to at least answer the phone. But there was so much correspondence, and she took care of at least some of the administrative duties. But I maintained all the medical records and the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] records and typed up their physicals and histories, their FAA exams.\\n\\n In addition to taking care of the astronaut families, we took care of the NASA aircraft ops [operations] pilots and all the crew personnel, anyone that flew NASA aircraft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you certainly were involved with the NASA community, but I was curious to see if the outside world reached in and touched you. Were there people asking questions of you since you were the one that the astronauts knew as their nurse?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, there was a lot of fan mail, if you will, which always surprised me, at least particularly during the Mercury Program. Asked to speak to various groups all over the United States, and I hated it with a passion. I absolutely hated it. When I was an Air Force nurse, I did it because I was ordered to, and everybody always wanted to know things about them. Well, I don’t talk about them. So I was very uncomfortable doing this, because it just isn’t my right to talk about them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Even though you were friends with them and they were friends with you, you got to know each other as individuals, did you have to maintain a fine line between your medical role with them and your personal role?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I think what a lot of people don’t understand is that they allowed me to be close to them, and you just can’t betray that. I never could, and to this day I wouldn’t betray that. I took it as a sacred obligation, if you will, and that’s why I would never write a book about them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were so close with them through all their accomplishments, but you were also were there helping them through the tragedies, especially the Apollo 1 fire." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, there were the tragedies, and, no question, the Apollo fire was horrendous. I think one that hit me particularly hard was when [Clifton C.] C.C. Williams was killed in October of ’63. His wife was my best friend and still is, and she was two months pregnant with their second child when he was killed. Their first child, Catherine, was ten months old. And that was extremely difficult for me to deal with. The deaths were all very painful. So it’s not only losing the guy, but then you go through the tragedy with the family and the children. There was a lot of emotional—well, I don’t want to say turmoil, but there was a lot of emotional issues to deal with, and you can’t be that close to that many people and not expect it. They were doing very dangerous work. Spaceflight is certain not sissies. It’s like getting old is not for sissies either. Spaceflight is dangerous, and I think we lose sight of that because we’ve been so successful, very successful.\\n\\n Back to the fire, that really was horribly difficult, I think, for everyone, but a lot of lessons were learned that needed to be learned. So fortunately a lot of things obviously changed for the better. The Challenger was certainly a devastating blow to everyone. I only knew three of the crewmen on board. But I think for all of you who were there when it happened, that had to have been a very difficult time, because it affects so many people." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "On the other hand, you were also involved with NASA during the time that it had one of its greatest accomplishments, and that was landing on the Moon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, the Moon landing, now, that was a spectacular engineering feat. I think on occasion you would hear, “Oh, they were so lucky.” Well, it was not luck. It was hard work, and it was brilliant planning and engineering. Like Apollo 13, we were so lucky to get them back. Well, yes, we were lucky, but it took a lot of teamwork and brain power to figure out how to get them home, not only on the part of the crew, but the mission control people and all of the ground support people. The ground support people should never be sold short. I know the astronauts certainly don’t sell them short. They’re very complimentary about the people that have supported them throughout their missions. And, boy, if you want to see teamwork in action, the space program is the place to watch. It’s not any one individual. Nobody can do it by themselves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "All of those teams, as well as the world, was watching when Neil [A.] Armstrong walked on the Moon, but, of course, before he left, he walked down that hallway, and now you were sending more people up into space that you had become friends with. What were your thoughts, or how did you feel about knowing they were going to go some place that no one’s ever gone before? Did you have anxiety even more at that point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, a high level of anxiety on my part. Neil didn’t seem to be bothered by it at all. Of course, he’s a very laid-back guy, and even though I’d been to all the launches, this one was very different for me, and probably because of the fact that they were going to the Moon.\\n\\n A week or so before the launch, the crowds started arriving, and the Cape was just inundated with people. A couple of days before the launch, I remember walking across the breezeway with Neil there at the MSO [Mission Operations System] building, where our offices and the pre-flight exam was. I said to Neil, “You will not believe the number of people that have congregated down here. The causeways are jammed. They’ve been out there for a week. It’s just this mass of people.”\\n\\n Neil kind of laughed, and his comment was, “Well, yeah, I suppose people are going to make a big deal out of this.”\\n\\n I said, “Neil, do you realize what you’ve just said?”\\n\\n He said, “Yes, it’s no big deal.”\\n\\n I said, “Well, maybe not to you, but it’s certainly is to the rest of us.” But that was his attitude.\\n\\n I don’t remember particularly Buzz’s [Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr.] attitude or comments then. But Mike [Michael Collins] was very jovial and his usual witty self. Neil was just very laid back about all of this and said, “Well, I suppose they are going to make a big deal out of this.” I just thought it was the most bizarre statement. But that was Neil. It was his way of dealing with things, very cool.\\n\\n As I said, I’ve always been very, very grateful for the opportunities that I’ve had, particularly to be a tiny part of this great adventure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And your adventure never seemed to stop, did it? It kept going for you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, at times it seemed endless." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Because you watched these men and you watched them land on the Moon, but when they were on their way back, you were already getting the next crew ready. So your process just kept continuing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s true, and particularly during Gemini and Apollo, I really had no life of my own, because I was at the Cape for two months, I’d be home for two or three weeks, then I’d go back down to the Cape, and it was back and forth and back and forth. I have to confess that it really got old after a while because I was constantly living on the road. I had the same room at the Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach for nine years. I’ve often joked that we need to make a shrine out of it one of these days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you able to leave some of your things there, or did you have to start over?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, I would pack everything back up and then haul it right back down again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, at least you knew where you were going every time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Oh, it was wonderful. It really was like going home whenever I would go down there, and you knew the same people, and everything was very familiar. I had the pleasure of going back for John’s [John H. Glenn, Jr.] flight in October, and I couldn’t believe how much the Cape had grown and changed, and to see, well, Paul [C.] Donnelly and Walter [J.] Kapryan and so many of these engineering people that I had worked with in Hangar S, and it was just wonderful to see everybody. Everybody was having such a good time reminiscing and remembering, and, of course, I was very pleased we were all upright and still walking around. But it was wonderful. It was very heart-warming just to be at the Cape again and to go to Bernard’s Surf and to see the people you’ve worked years and years ago. It was fun, and it was just a very special time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And such a wonderful success." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, and it was so successful, yes, and that’s the other part, and I was so glad that John got to fly again. I know there was some criticism and criticism of NASA, but, come on, it didn't hurt anything, and he deserved to fly again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Have you had a chance to talk with him since he’s returned?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not since he's been back, no. But his son, David, and his wife and the grandkids live there in Berkeley [California], and I met his grandson, who’s just a darling youngster. He came down to interview me for one of his school projects. They're very nice kids, and, of course, very proud of Grandpa, and rightfully so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This mission that you were talking about, with John Glenn, had such a lasting impression on you. As you mentioned, all of them have. But was there one that you remember more than the others, or did they just mesh into each other?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, one would think that they would kind of mesh. But as far as the flights, each one was really very special because it was that particular guy’s flight, and you’re always so happy for them that they finally got to fly and do what they’d worked and trained for and wanted to do for so long." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It must have been special for you then to watch Deke Slayton finally get to go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Ah, that was wonderful. The crew had asked me to come back for the mission. I was here at Ames at the time, and, of course, the flight was in July of ’75. What a thrill to see Deke. I don’t think anyone begrudged him that flight. I mean, he finally got to fly, and, as you know, he wasn’t allowed his Mercury flight. So everyone was thrilled to death that he got to go on this ASTP [Apollo Soyuz Test Project] mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You got to know Deke Slayton as one of the seven, but his role changed when he became in charge of the astronaut corps. Were you still able to have a close relationship with him after he moved into that management position?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, because he was always at the Cape whenever the crews came down for their flight. There was a certain cadre of people, and Deke was definitely always there. He was in charge of the astronauts. He made the flight selections. He made the crew selections. That never changed. When I was in Houston, he always came for his physical exams. So I did see him then, and I would see him around the center. But the relationship never really changed at all." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And once you had these guys in your life, they just didn’t go away, did they?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I never let them get away. They tried, but they were never successful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I bet they knew where to find you, too." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[Laughs] Oh, yes, they did know where to find me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you came to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, there was some transition. Did you still have your authority as far as your management was concerned? Because you were changing locations, did you have to change roles? Could you share with us some of those changes that went on with that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I went from being an Air Force employee to a NASA employee, obviously another government employee. My duties certainly expanded because now we had wives and children, and that entailed other things, other than just flight-type activities or pre-flight medical activities. It became busier because the population kept growing and growing.\\n\\n Now we were dealing with the wives and with the children. It had been decided that the flight medicine clinic not only would see the astronauts, but the charter was for us was to see and care for the families, in addition to all the pilots that flew NASA aircraft that are based there at Ellington [Field, Houston, Texas]. But the medical care was, again, to be afforded to the families, and the reason we were designated as family physicians was that the astronauts were usually always on travel or gone and rarely ever home, and at least this way they knew that they could go away from home, knowing that if anything happened, we were there to take care of their families. If it was above what we could do in flight medicine, they were referred to a specialist. But the flight surgeons and myself became the family physicians for them, if you will." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That must have been a comfort to the families and to the astronauts, though, that they could go anywhere they needed to go and that their families were safe and kept private, the dealings with them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was, because many of them were military wives and used to military outpatient clinics. They would say, “Oh, you have no idea what a luxury it is to come here and be seen by friendly faces,” because as military wives with a sick child, they would go and sit in these outpatient clinics and wait and wait and wait and either never see the same doctor twice or they’d have such long waits. In flight medicine it was someone that they were familiar with and that they could call, and that gave not only astronauts assurance that their families were taken care of, but it was a place for the families to come that was familiar to them, and they were usually seen right away. We had great capability in the flight medicine clinic to do this. So it worked out very well. It became a family medical unit for them. In fact, I think it still is today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Through all those years, you had so much on-the-job training. Were you ever able to slip away and get some other types of training that would help you with your skills?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really never got to do much with that. There just was no time. The flights were so close together. If you look back at the launch dates, there really wasn’t time to be gone, or at least I felt I couldn’t be gone. It was probably some of that also. No, for me, it was just OJT [on-the-job training] most of the way, believe me, and after a while I could do it in my sleep practically. But, as with any job, when you become so familiar with it, that’s what happens. People are people. The problems are the same. Medical conditions are the same. Equipment changes, but the people don’t, and there’s obviously a lot of—\n\n—high-technical equipment used for diagnosing and monitoring and that sort of thing that we didn’t have back then. But basically everything is still pretty much the same. A cold is a cold, and an ear ache is an ear ache." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you ever remember a time that things slowed down long enough for you to figure out where you were, or was it just a constant nonstop movement in your program?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it seemed that it was a very busy time. I was there, what, ten years, and I think there was only one year out of the ten that I was able to take most of my annual leave. We’d have flights over Thanksgiving and Christmas. So holidays really weren’t a big issue. But nobody really seemed to mind, because your whole goal was to be there and to get the guy launched safely and recover it safely. So holidays became almost nonexistent much of the time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No day was routine, but yet, did you have many days, or can you remember a day that you had a surprise or incidents or a situation that came up that you felt that you had to deal with on a real-time basis that just hadn’t occurred before?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[Laughs] Well, a couple of times when the astronauts were out training in the lunar vehicle, in what we used to call the “flying bedstead” out there at Ellington’s, and a couple of them happened to land in chiggers. This one, particularly, came racing into the office, dropped his pants, and said, “My god, I’m dying. Do something.” Of course, that was a wonderful sight. [Laughter] I’d say, “God , the blinds are open. Don’t—.” Well, anyway, they’d finally end up closing the door, and we’d pull the blinds. But wonderful, fun things like that fortunately didn’t happen all that often." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess that expression \"You've seen everything\" must have come true at some point. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Nothing surprised me, believe me, or very little surprised me. You're right. The days weren't routine, and yet, in many ways, they were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sometimes the astronauts would play practical jokes, as many times that people get together, they do. Do you feel that that helped them bond with each other, or did they ever surprise you with any of those types of things?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the jokes were unbelievable, and they were quite naughty at times, yes, and they were always, of course, extremely funny. But I remember one year, what, in 1968, I think, I guess it was, at least for me, they had a Christmas party every year, and it wasn’t uncommon for them to invite me. So, anyway, we were down at my friend Beth Williams’s house, and Frank Borman got up and started into this spiel about what a great organization NASA was, and within that organization there was always great divisions and offices. Then he said, “But then there are those that are just a complete disaster.” Anyway, they gave me, that year, the most exquisite, one-of-a-kind, if you will, silver tray with all of their names inscribed on it, that had been in the making for, like, two years and had been on display in downtown Houston. Of course, I didn’t know about it. I was overwhelmed that they had gotten together and done this. Of course, I’ve always been kind of frightened of it, because I was afraid something would happen to that silver tray since it is kind of a one-of-a-kind. But, yes, they would do things like that, and, of course, the jokes and practical tricks and what-have-you, those went on all the time, and particularly when the crews got to the Cape. They’d come over and say, “Hey, we want to do such-and-such to so-and-so, and can you do this?” So we’d do it, and we had great fun. Then they would put these things on board so that the astronauts would find them sort of mid-flight somewhere, and, of course, that was always a surprise for them. So, yes, I got to be a part of a lot of that, and it was great. They were deadly serious about their work, but they also had tremendous senses of humor, and they were very, very clever." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Having a great sense of humor is an invaluable trait, isn’t it?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I think you have to, particularly in that kind of work. You have to have a great sense of humor, and, oh, boy, do they have one, because you deal with so many personalities and so many different kinds of people.\\n\\n But one of the things I probably should mention about the medical aspect is the business with the flight surgeons. I’d made an agreement with the astronauts, actually each group that came in, a long time ago that they could come to me with anything. It didn’t matter what it is, and that I would never betray them. But there is one condition. I said that “You have to understand that if, in my opinion, it would jeopardize you or the mission, then ethically I will go to a flight surgeon with this. So don’t come to me with anything you don’t want them to know,” and that was the understanding, and that’s the way it worked all these years. It was always that way, that I would never betray them, but they had to know that if it was serious, we had to tell someone." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did the flight surgeons know you had that deal with the astronauts?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t know. I never told them. I just never simply discussed it with them. It didn’t matter because it was my bond and my word with them, and it was my agreement with the guys, and that’s the way it was. On two or three occasions, they did come to me with situations, and we would check it out, and if it wasn’t serious, then nobody knew about it. I don’t know. That’s just the way I operated, and it worked very well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned earlier that when you first met the first seven, you were a little terrified of them, but then you also mentioned that they had accepted you. Was there a span in time that this happened, or was it an immediate acceptance with you right away?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, the acceptance, it wasn’t immediate. I think during the early Mercury days I remember opening the door to the conference room, which was between the suit room and the crew quarters, and there they were, and I just froze. I said, “Oh, excuse me,” and I slammed the door shut, and I remember racing back up to my office.\\n\\n John Glenn came up, and he got me, and he said, “Oh, come on back. Meet the guys.” He introduced me to all of them, and I was so nervous that I blurted, “Would you like something to drink?” and, of course, they all wanted something, which meant I had to go back and get it and then bring it back. I thought, why did they want something to drink? Fortunately I had enough soft drinks in the refrigerator in the lab area there, so I took them all back the soft drinks, and they said, “Oh, stay and talk.”\\n\\n I said, “No, that’s okay,” and, boy, I got out of there. So little by little, that went away. The first astronaut I ever saw, I hadn’t met him before, was Deke Slayton. He was standing with a group of people, and Colonel Knauf and I were down on the hangar floor, and he said, “Oh, there’s one of the astronauts, Deke Slayton,” and, man, I almost got a whiplash, whipping around to see what one of these guys looked like. I had no idea what they would look like, and I don’t know what I expected them to look like, but he was the first one I saw, and then when I inadvertently walked in on them down in their little conference room." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You didn’t find one. You found them all at once." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "All at once, and, yes, I was terrified. But that went away quickly. But I don’t think it was instant bonding. But then it’s like with anything. The more you’re exposed, either a friend or whatever, the better you get to know them, and that takes time. Friends take time, and friendships develop over time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you easily recognizable to them? Were you in a nurse uniform?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, I wore a white Air Force nurse’s uniform and wore an Air Force nurse’s cap. Well, I was the only female out there, so I sort of stood out like a sore thumb." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were easy to find in that crowd." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[Laughs] Well, yes, and I’m not very short either." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At the time, becoming a nurse was a comfortable position for a woman. People accepted that. But you definitely were in an environment filled with men." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Back then it was completely a man’s world. In fact, when I was growing up, you either became a nurse, a teacher, or a secretary. Those were people’s life ambition, and there was probably the odd female engineer, but women really weren’t encouraged to, as they say now, “be all that you can be,” and I’d always wanted to be a schoolteacher. But fortunately, I got over that.\\n\\n So at the Cape, it really was totally a man’s world. I was the only female in Hangar S, except for maybe there was probably a secretary here or there. It was all men, and never once was I ever discriminated against or never made to feel uncomfortable. It was a wonderful, absolutely wonderful environment. Of course, I wasn’t really the sensitive kind, if you will, or looking for every little nuance, that I think is prevalent today. But I was just treated beautifully by everyone and nicely and with respect, and we had a lot of fun. We joked and kidded around, but we were also very professional, and we each had our job to do. But I was never discriminated against. In fact, in my entire career, I’ve never felt that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Although you were the only female, you were the only nurse, and you began creating this position and this role that had never been thought of before, did you see yourself as the astronauts’ nurse or an aerospace nurse or a nurse filling a job? How did you see yourself?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was called and referred to by all sorts of titles, astronauts’ nurse, aerospace nurse, what have you, and I never called myself any of those. I was always embarrassed by that title. I was just lucky to have a very elite group of patients, if you will, and they really weren’t patients, of course, because they were certainly never ill. But I was always embarrassed by that title, astronaut nurse. Of course, I’m not really big into titles. You have a job to do, and the point is just do it, and it doesn’t matter what they call you as long as you do whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing. I just never called myself that. Other people have, and I guess it’s probably the proper term. I don’t know what else you would call it, but I don’t use the term, and I’ve certainly been afforded a wonderful life.\\n\\n Trips, I was invited everywhere, and I was treated like a celebrity and accorded so much. I know it wasn’t me per se. It was because of my association with them, and I have never really lost sight of that, because you can certainly become very self-important and go on and on about your so-called accomplishments. But, no, it was simply because of my association with them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were a person who created a field, where now there’s a lots of women and men going into medicine specifically designated for the aerospace field." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, for aerospace, definitely. But that whole field has grown over the years, and I don’t think through anything I’ve done. But the whole field of aerospace medicine has definitely grown because, again, there are more pilots and now there are more astronauts, and it’s a whole specialty field now. It’s like sports medicine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have something that you feel is the greatest accomplishment that you were able to do when you were in this part of your life?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not really. I don’t know of any one thing. I was probably the only consistent medical person in their life, if you will, from Mercury through the Skylab program all those years. I don’t know that you would consider that a great accomplishment, and I don’t know that I accomplished anything spectacular, that I did myself. Again, it was my association with them and what that brought, really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But you did keep going through all this one long continuous stay that ended up being your career. Did you find that to be one of your hardest parts, was just to keep going?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes, there were days when I wondered if I was going to make through the day. I got very tired. In fact, when I left to come here in ’73, I remember I was at the Cape, and it must have been the last Apollo flight, and I was walking down the hall, and I thought, “What are you doing here?” I was so tired. I didn’t have any help, and it just became overwhelming. So finally at that point I decided I just had to have a change, and at that time a lot of my favorite people were leaving and going on to other jobs. Well, obviously, I think it could be diagnosed as true job burnout. But I was very, very tired, and I was just worn out at that point." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about the change in duties and the change in responsibilities for NASA now that you have moved on to Ames." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I went from a very operational environmental, totally operational, into a research environment. Boy, that was not an easy transition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you find your pace slowed down?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "[Laughs] At first I couldn’t believe they operated like this. Nobody was running around and checking their watches, and I was constantly looking over my shoulder, thinking I had to be somewhere, do something. I was frantic. I just figured I was really losing out on a lot of things, and the management people here would say, boy, look at what we’ve done, taking on this woman. She’s become so neurotic.\\n\\n But I was used to a very, very tight schedule, and when you deal with the flight crews, you only have a finite amount of time that’s allotted to you, and you bloody well better get your act together and get your tests done because there were no repeats, and that’s the premise we operated under. Besides, they didn’t want to be doing these tests anyway, so you didn’t mess around or be late. Boy, I was never late, I’ll tell you, because if you were late, you didn’t get your data.\\n\\n Well, when I got out there, they put me in charge of the Human Research Facility [HRF], and my first research study, which I didn’t know how to conduct, and I had no one to show me the way, either. I remember they had a Ph.D. upstairs that sort of did it by remote control, if you will, and his idea of putting a study together was to point to a corner and say, “Well, you can put your stuff over there.” Well, that really doesn’t work. So I kind of came in and was stumbling around, not knowing what I was supposed to be doing. But I remember during that study, I thought, boy, if this is how they do things, this is not a good way to do it.\\n\\n So I started trying to get things organized. I was getting schedules out, and I was trying to organize people, because with flight crews you had to be organized, and I’m a bit of an organizer myself. Anyway, I was trying to run an experiment or these studies, much like we would run the pre-flight tests prior to a flight and adhering to the strictest sense of the protocol, and if lights are to go on at seven, they go on at seven. They don’t go on at ten after seven.\\n\\n One of the things I had to learn was to back off and calm down a bit and not be on everybody’s back so much about everything. I treated the subjects much like I would treat a flight crew. They deserved their respect and for us to be on time, because we certainly expected them to be on time. So when they would come in here to the facility to do a project or an experiment, it’s a job, and we treated it as a job. These studies are very expensive to do, and there’s very serious business. So out of respect for the subject, I felt we had to all have our act together before they got here.\\n\\n Well, that didn’t go over too well with everyone. Most scientists are used to going at their own pace and pretty well laid back. So I was not very popular when I got here, and that was understandable. But my thing was, hey, NASA’s paying for this, and NASA needs this information, so either do it right or we don’t do it at all. Maybe that’s been my driving force, is that you need to do it right the first time. Yes, mistakes can be made, but I didn’t want a lackadaisical attitude in here, because that sort of drives me crazy.\\n\\n The transition period was very difficult for me, again, because I was constantly looking over my shoulder, and I thought, boy, I’ve been here all this time, and I haven’t done anything. I was a nervous wreck for about the first two years, until I could learn to pace myself, and then it was a matter of learning a different pace, because it’s is more laid back here and it wasn’t earth-shattering if such-and-such didn’t get done right, right as scheduled or right at ten o’clock.\\n\\n It took me a long time to learn to back off and let up a bit on people. In 1975, I think it was, we remodeled the HRF, and by then I had a better feel for what needed to be done. Much to the relief of the investigators, I decided to take their protocol and their experiment, and what I would do is totally put it together for them, from getting the subjects to the daily schedule. Poor guys, they had more schedule than they knew what to do with. In fact, they were drowning in schedules. But I would take all the aspects of the experiment and laid everything out to the nth degree so that everybody knew what to do. I think the bottom line is that, again, this is another support role, which is the role I certainly had with the astronauts. I just simply supported all of the investigators here with their research experiment.\\n\\n Then later on I started doing the budgets and becoming much more familiar with how Ames operated and how we should operate in here. I was able to write the policies for how we should conduct experiments and the ethical side of human research and the medical side of it also. I set up and maintained the medical records and files on all the subjects. The research investigator was responsible for collecting his research data, but the rest we did in here.\\n\\n I had a wonderful nursing staff. They were so good with the subjects, and I think my greatest accomplishment or feeling of accomplishment was to see a study go off without a hitch, whether it be a forty-five-day study or a ninety-day study. As you know, the subjects would come and live here twenty-four hours a day during these experiments.\\n\\n Of course, I worked seven days a week during that period of time, and it was important that if we asked the subjects to be here every day that one of us had to be here also, and it was usually me, and that was fine, because as manager of the facility I was familiar with every aspect of the experiment and certainly knew where everything was.\\n\\n So every day I’d bring the newspapers in, first things, and I wanted them to have a newspaper as soon as their eyes were opened, because there were so few pleasant things that happened to them while they were here because of the various tests, that I wanted them to know we did care about them and for them to feel comfortable. Working here in the facility became a very pleasant experience for them as opposed to the lab rat or the guinea pig, that sort of thing. At least we tried to make it a very pleasant thing for them.\\n\\n So little by little I grew into the job here, and that sort of made it what it is today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The studies that you’ve done here at Ames, how do they affect NASA and the space agency as a whole?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the purpose here is that we use bed rest as a way of simulating weightlessness. As you know, you can experience brief periods of weightlessness during parabola flights, that they do there at Johnson Space Center in a KC-135. But here we put subjects to bed for twenty-four hours a day in a minus-six-degree head-down position. What this does is it causes the fluid to shift headward, much as it does when you go into orbit and become weightless, and we found that the results are very, very similar to what they have found at the end of space flight. So by using bed rest, you can study various systems, cardiovascular system, endocrine, bone, muscle, on a large group of people all at the same time for not near what it costs on a space flight.\\n\\n We started to look at problems that were anticipated once the Shuttle began to fly and astronauts would be staying for longer periods of time. What other problems are going to occur? What are the effects of cardiovascular deconditioning, and when do they recover?\\n\\n The first study I did looked at the rate of onset of deconditioning of the heart, and what we did was we put four subjects down for three days of bed rest and another four for seven days and fourteen and another four for twenty-one days of bed rest. What they found was that by seven days, the deconditioning of the heart has occurred, and it levels out at that point and really doesn’t decondition much more. So there was no sense in doing long-term bed rest studies when you could accomplish probably in ten days the effect of the deconditioning in the other systems.\\n\\n Then we’ve got one investigator here, who’s trying to find out countermeasures for space sickness and what will work and what won’t. She’s got a rotating chair, and the investigator, what she does is spin the subjects and tries to make them sick, and then she would give them Compazine or another drug that would be applicable for an astronaut to use. We’ve also looked at bone loss, and so the theme of the research would be something that definitely would benefit the astronauts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This job, of course, was different for you. So has the job benefited you? You could have probably worked somewhere at the Cape in an area that you were familiar to, but you chose a completely different adventure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes. Well, I’ve always loved the West Coast, and I’m from Oregon, and I’ve lived in Oregon many, many years. Of course, my mother lived in Oregon, and she was getting on in years, and I hadn’t been home, say, for holidays in about eighteen years. So that was part of the reason for wanting to come to the West Coast, and job burnout, of course, was the other, and I wanted to stay with NASA, so fortunately here at Ames, which was a NASA center right next door to Oregon. So it was extremely beneficial for me to come here, even though it was a new adventure.\\n\\n It also allowed me time for a life. I was able to buy a home, a townhouse, and able to have more time and freedom to do things, which I’ve certainly thoroughly enjoyed, having the free time, and I’ve certainly loved the excitement of the studies. They’ve been fun. Subjects are delightful.\\n\\n We’re very careful in who we select, because that’s the crux of your study. If you don’t have good subjects, you don’t have a good investigation. Some of our subjects have been in ten or twelve of our studies, and these were very difficult studies. We’re talking bone biopsies and muscle biopsies and, as I call them, they’re very tough-guy type of studies. So I figure, well, we’ve done something right in here. I believe we’ve made them feel very much a part of this study, as you have to, and I think any time you participate in any project, and you know that yourself, you want to be a member of the team. So it’s been very rewarding from that standpoint, of getting the studies together, and I’ve enjoyed the different aspects of it.\\n\\n It’s been a lot of hard work, mainly because you don’t always have cooperation among the investigators. You have their personality issues, but it’s been fun meeting a lot of the different and interesting people.\\n\\n In fact, the last one we did, just before I retired, was the LMS study, the flight that flew in June of [19]’96. We did the ground-based pilot study for that mission. All of the investigators, including the foreign investigators, came here, did their experiment to see if it was going to work in space. This is something that really should be done before all flights, but unfortunately it isn’t. That was a wonderful experience, meeting all of those foreign investigators, particularly.\\n\\n Four members of the crew came out towards the end to witness the muscle biopsies that we were doing, because they were going to have these muscle biopsies following their flight. Then they debriefed the subjects, and, well, of course, the subjects were just thrilled to death. But they told the astronauts what to watch out for, and “You’re not going to like this test,” and, “This experiment hurts.”\\n\\n But what came from that study is these investigators had never meshed their protocols together, and they found that some of the experiments interfered with others. So they were able to modify their experiment, get their data so that everything would mesh, so that when the experiment flew, these experiments went off like clock work, which really helped, and, of course, granted it’s a little different when you do it in space simply because of the weightless environment, but that was a very rewarding study to do, and it was fun.\\n\\n So that when that mission flew, we knew all the crew, and we knew the experiments when they mentioned them. But it was a real challenge putting that one together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So once more you were indirectly involved in a mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right. Of course, we had subjects that I’ve known and worked with for years. So those were the only ones I wanted in this study because I knew that it was a difficult project to do. I mean, muscle biopsies are not very easy. They’re not as bad as bone biopsies, but these subjects I knew would come through and give the best data that you’re ever going to get from a group of subjects. The staff had a good time. I think the investigators had a wonderful time, and the subjects had a good time here, and so there was a great sense of accomplishment when it was over. It went very well, and I could ride out of here on my Blue-Tail-Fly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, you didn’t fly very far because now you’re back again. Tell us, in what role are you here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I’m now what they called an Ames associate, which is nothing more than an unpaid volunteer. It’s also called a guest worker. I’ve been coming in and cleaning out the files here and stuff that should have been done before I retired, but I just didn’t have the time. I’ve labeled all of the research data and cataloged it all, so that it can easily be found. Now I’m trying to sort out the files and throw away twenty-some years of accumulation of stuff. There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be tossed out, but a lot needs to be saved, and, again, I’m about the only one that knows what probably should be saved and what is okay to toss out. I only come a couple of mornings a week.\\n\\n I also sit on the Human Research Institutional Review Board. This is the board that reviews all protocols. I’ve sat on the board for a number of years, but now that I’m retired, I now serve as the outside member. So I enjoy doing that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, before we close today, I was going to ask you about one area that we didn’t talk about that has to do with studies. It’s the long-duration studies of Skylab. Could you tell us how you were involved with any of the experiments or any of the materials related to the Skylab missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I wasn’t really involved in any of the experiments, the planning, or the execution of them. I only got involved in any, was when the crews would resist having to do an experiment or carry around a bottle of urine sort of thing. The investigator would then come to me and said, “Would you mind going over and taking these to the astronauts and cajoling them into doing it?” So I would do that. But I really certainly wasn’t involved in setting up any of the experiments. One of the things that I tried to make sure happen was that a lot of the times the astronauts would say, “Well, you didn’t tell me what you wanted.” These were bright guys, and if they knew what you really wanted and they had agreed to do it, they certainly would.\\n\\n So one of the things that I wanted to make sure happened was that they start a medical briefing for the crew and that the investigators go and explain exactly what is to happen. Then once they started doing that, then there was never a problem. If an astronaut or crewman agreed to do your test, whether it be urine, blood, or whatever, then they would do it. So, again, the only time I got involved is either to take things over to the crew or—and it was easier for the crew to yell and holler at me than it was to the investigator. But once again, once they started doing these medical briefings, then that eliminated a lot of the problems." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Another area that we didn’t talk about was Apollo 13. There were some medical concerns while the mission was being rescued. Were you at all involved in those discussions on how to help the astronauts getting back to Earth?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, not at that point, no. I got involved when they got back because Fred [W.] Haise, [Jr.] as you know, was desperately ill, but no involvement during the mission. Of course, they were so concerned on how to get them back, and at that point nothing medically had cropped up or at least that I knew about. Again, the major thrust of everybody’s concern was how the hell do we get them home and can we get them home.\\n\\n Then, give the circumstances of the water, well, thank god they hadn’t landed on the Moon, because, as you know, the LM [Lunar Module] became their life boat. But they were afraid to drink or do anything because they weren’t sure how much of the expendables they had left, and, as you know, Fred was quite ill when he returned with a kidney infection. Then I became involved at this point. I’d go over to his house because he was just too ill to come in to the clinic. I would go over to his house and give him antibiotic injections. Then, just for a change in pace, once he got to feeling better, he’d come to my house. But my involvement was all post-flight, if you will, and that was another terrible time and very scary, because he was so ill." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m sure that was. The whole episode must have been like one large, long, continual day for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. The whole thing was endless. I know the other astronauts were all in the simulators all night long, and I think that when the news came out that there was a problem, the flight controllers, who had just left, did a big turnaround and came back. I had heard that some of them, as they leaped out of their cars, had left their car doors open and their engines running. This is teamwork and dedication to the crew at its best. But I wasn’t involved. It was certainly way above me." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, Apollo 13 didn’t work out, and we’ve briefly talked about you watching the crew move out toward the capsule for Apollo 11. But where were you when you actually saw them land on the Moon?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I was with Joan [Ann Archer] Aldrin [wife of Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr.] that night. I had gone over that evening, and several of her friends and other wives were there, and it was probably the only time I’ve experienced a surreal moment. I don’t know quite to describe it, but it was truly unreal. I saw the TV flickering and the LM was there, and we were told it was the Moon, and the LM was on the surface of the Moon. Of course, we were so relieved that they had landed. But it just simply wasn’t real. Intellectually you know it is, and, of course, Joan, as was everyone, was terribly relieved that they had landed. I remember sitting there. I kept shaking my head. I thought, this can’t be real, it just can’t be. Here we are, on another planet. It was goose bumps all around. It really was just unreal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess there was a sense of relief for the families to see them leave there just as much as it was for them to land." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I think, it wasn’t like a dream sequence sort of thing. I just don’t know how to describe it. It was just simply unreal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They had a chance to watch this historic, and they were watching them land, but at the same time, then, once again, they had to go through the anxiety of watching leave the Moon. So you were there as well, with those families, or how did you feel when you saw your friends leave the Moon?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes. You see, this was another terribly scary part, was that liftoff, and this is where you have to think, again, of those engineers that came up with all of this planning and technology that was needed to get them off the surface, and it worked flawlessly. The capability is just mind-boggling, even today when I think about how far advanced we are in the medical, technical world, the cyberspace, etc. But when you think of the lunar landing and figuring out all the mechanics of getting there, lift-off, mating with the spacecraft, everything, it’s just overwhelming. Then to have them land right where they said they were going to land, I find it truly amazing. It’s kind of mind-boggling." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How soon after they landed back on Earth did you get to see the crew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, let’s see. They were in isolation for twenty-one days because, again, we didn’t know what they might be bringing back, which everybody was kind of fighting about. I think I saw them as soon as they got back and landed at Ellington but saw them through glass, as everyone else did. They went right into the lunar receiving lab, the “looney bin,” as we used to call it, followed by the rocks, in these big transport vans, and, oh, boy, the entourage, all police cars, the flashing blue lights. It was right out of a movie, believe me. But it was for real. Then once they were out of isolation, I saw them very soon after that. In fact, I was with their families the night they came out. But I don’t remember all the details of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, it could be because you might have been working on the next flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I probably was. Who knows where I was? [Laughs]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we’ve enjoyed talking with you today. We know that your life has changed, that you are, of course, still at Ames, and even though that you’re retired, you’re still doing more. Would you like to share with us what your next adventure is going to be, and if you plan to make the next adventure still part of space?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I’m certainly enjoying the luxury of time. I know that sounds kind of like a cliché, but I think I was ready to retire. Again, many of my favorite investigators that are here are gone. They were leaving, and the funding just wasn’t what it was. So I could see the work in here slowing down considerably, and I knew I could never come and just sit and accept a salary. So I thought it was probably, now’s the time to fix up my house and get a dog and enjoy some free time. So I am enjoying my free time, and I’m now working three mornings a week for the Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Ralph Pellegra. I work, again, for him three mornings a week, and that’s been fun. I work six-thirty to eleven-thirty, and I still have lots of free time, and it does keep my hand in things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think you’ll always be watching developments in space travel?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. I’m still fascinated and, of course, interested, and I continue to subscribe to Space News, which keeps me kind of informed. I’m getting so I don’t know half the people they mention anymore. But I do. I follow the flights, because I still know some of the astronauts, like Scott [E.] Parazynski , who flew as a mission specialist with John Glenn on STS-95, and, as you know, Scott was a medical student here, and he’s such a nice guy. I really, really like him. But, no, I do follow everything, and I think if they had another project in the HRF and invited me back, I would certainly do it, and I’m always ready for projects at JSC, well, at those two cool weeks in October. But, no, I’m enjoying things now. I do enjoy my free time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I hope that Houston is some place that you would like to come back to visit. I know that you still have some friends there and places and people to see while you’re there in Houston." + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes, I always enjoyed going out there. I don’t get to go out enough. But surprisingly, as much it may sound bizarre, but my heart is still in Houston. Even though I didn’t like the weather and I didn’t like living there, I loved the center and I loved the people and, again, I think my heart is definitely there. In fact, I was there not too ago. Well, no, it’s been two or three years ago, and John [W.] Young [Johnson Space Center Associate Director (Technical)] and his wife Susie [Feldman Young] had a lovely dinner party for me, which was so much fun. I gave them a guest list, and so it was a chance to see a lot of people, and it was kind of like when I walked in, it was as if I had never left. So that’s kind of, I think, a nice sign of true friendship. It’s interesting. Even though I’ve lived out here longer than I’d lived in Houston, again, as I said earlier, my heart is still there, and I find when I hear myself saying it, it’s really true because I’ve said it a number of times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We’re always hoping that you’ll come back, and if you do, you’ll need to come visit with us as well. We certainly enjoyed visiting with you this morning." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you for your time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Dee O’Hara", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thank you very much." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00378", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/LunneyGS/lunneygs.htm", + "original_file_name": "LunneyGS_1-28-99.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/LunneyGS/LunneyGS_1-28-99.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 28 January 1999" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Carol Butler", + "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "Summer Chick Bergen" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Glynn S. Lunney" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is January 28, 1999. This oral history is with Glynn Lunney at the offices of the Signal Corporation in Houston, Texas. The interview is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project by Carol Butler, assisted by Summer Chick Bergen and Kevin Rusnak.\\n\\n Thank you, Mr. Lunney for joining us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "To begin with, let's go back to when you first became involved with the space program and the Space Task Group. What were your initial duties?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, and the month that I got out of college, in June of '58, this drawing crossed my desk of what became the Mercury capsule. Caldwell [C.] Johnson made the drawing. I said, \"Wow! That looks like a lot of fun.\" The group that I was in was involved in doing kind of high-speed reentry research for different shapes of reentry vehicles and what kind of heat transfer, aerodynamics they would experience. It turned out the group at Langley that started the Mercury Project—it didn't have that name in the beginning—was in the same field. They did it a different way, but they were in kind of the same area of research. So we began to consult with them about all the aspects of it, but the people in our group started off—and I wasn't there long enough to have any real technical ability in the heat transfer and thermodynamics and so on, but a number of the people did. So they were involved in helping with the design of the vehicle so that it would survive reentry.\\n\\n I got involved in the trajectory aspects of it in terms of the launch phase and what that was like and how we could monitor the launch phase and how we could begin to control the landing points so that we didn't have recovery forces everywhere, so that we could begin to focus our recovery efforts in a few places. Then I worked on the orbital mechanics and the reentry dynamics.\\n\\n The only real maneuvering we had to do with the Mercury spacecraft was to fire the retro rockets to come back down. So I got involved in analyticals, computer-based studies of all that in a time when you didn't do it at your desk. You did in a way, but you submitted your data cards to a central computing system somewhere, and people punched them all up and ran the computer, and then you would get your results three or four or five days later, and then you'd have to remember what it is you were trying to figure out when you did that and so on.\\n\\n I got involved in, really, I guess I would say, the orbital mechanics and the launch phase and reentry aspects of the vehicle, and that evolved into what we needed to have in the Control Center in order to monitor those parts of the flight, in order to control the retrofire, the retrorockets, and to monitor both the entry and the launch phases." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In the Control Center, as you were moving into the actual missions—because I know in your earlier interview you did talk about some of the build-up to the missions, a couple of them, but what did you specifically do in the Control Center once the mission started, both unmanned and manned?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was actually in a couple of different Control Centers. Early on, I was at the Bermuda station. Bermuda is 800 miles or so out in the ocean away from Florida, where we launched them, and the place where the vehicle went into orbit was about halfway in between, and the situation was that the radar and the tracking were all sort of at the tail end from the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] but just beginning for Bermuda and just picking up. So we felt that Bermuda would be a good location to help with the confirmation that the vehicle was really in orbit.\\n\\n Being in orbit is a small difference in velocity from not being in orbit, probably 100 or so feet a second, say 60, 70, 80 miles an hour, perhaps, is the only difference between being in orbit and being shy of orbit and coming back in. And since this was at the very horizon from the Cape and going out of sight, there was some question about how well we could know whether the vehicle was in orbit or not. So I started off as a flight dynamics officer at the Control Center in Bermuda, and I was there for a number of the flights, both unmanned and manned.\\n\\n Then I moved into what was called the Mercury Control Center in Florida, where I was a flight dynamics officer, and I was a flight dynamics officer for three flights, I guess: MA-7, 8, and 9. And there we had, again, the situation with the launch phase monitoring, being sure that the vehicle kind of stayed in the nominal trajectory and didn't go out, and, if it did, what kind of an abort procedure should we have. We were involved in being sure that it was in orbit properly, calculating the orbits from the tracking all around the world, and then figuring out what our various retrofire times would be for our primary landing site but for a whole bunch of contingency landing sites. We had probably a de-orbit opportunity once or twice a revolution around the Earth. In those days, we were not all that sure that we were—you know, once up there, we didn't know how long we were going to stay up there. So there was a lot of planning for something going wrong and having to exercise a secondary abort or a recovery area, even from orbit. So we had to do all that kind of stuff during the orbit phases.\\n\\n Then, of course, we were involved in the calculation of the final de-orbit time and hopefully tried to predict the landing point as best we could, and we always had a race to see how close we could come to the carrier. Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn't. But those were the kind of things that we were working on, and the work was really similar for me in the Bermuda Control Center and then, of course, at the Mercury Control Center at the Cape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned all the calculations as they were in orbit and knowing all the details as to where and when, but you also mentioned earlier that for some of the trajectory calculations you were doing, you would have to send things out and wait for a couple of days to get results back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. That was in the office environment. Yes. It improved a lot when we got a Control Center. Then you could get things run in relatively real time and know where things stood and know what you had to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you could do it all right there where you guys were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This will be a little bit of a jump, but I don't want to, again, cover too much that was in your earlier interview. In the missions, as you began, you had talked about training in your earlier interviews and how a lot of what you had to do—you put together these tapes, and sometimes they matched what happened and sometimes didn't in the training." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What people did, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "With that training, could you go into a little more details on what you would do there, the control team, but also working with the astronauts and maybe even some of the engineering teams to try and help—did you work together to try and build those training, or—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Actually, the people in the training—and I was in that for a while, early on, before the Control Center really got to rolling—they tried to anticipate what difficult problems would be for the flight team, and, in general, the simulation people did not expose those ahead of time to the team. They were always a surprise. In other words, it was sort of classified of sorts, but we always tried to have cases run where the team that was going to then have to solve it did not have any idea of what the case was going to be, so that they would have to respond to it in all of its dimensions and think their way through it and then take whatever action was appropriate—sometimes none was—but whatever action was appropriate in order to come to the best outcome for the given set of circumstances that we put in front of people.\\n\\n So we didn't do a lot of consulting with people in the sense of revealing our hand or revealing what the case was going to be but, rather, back then and even through till today, the simulation people take great delight in trying to find cracks in the defenses, if you will, of what the team is planning to do and then try to test them in places where they perceive that perhaps the procedures or the way it's thought out is not as sound as it should be. In most cases it always is, but that's what you try to do, is probe weaknesses, if that's the right way to put it, and find a way to force the team to respond to a difficult set of circumstances.\\n\\n After I left it and even more so as an operator, either as a flight dynamics officer or as a flight director, the simulations became not so much one problem, but a multiplicity of problems thrown one on top of each other. We found by experience that one problem was generally a piece of cake. You know, this one problem we did this, did that, and out it went, and eventually simulations got to be multiple, sort of compounding of problems with various failures and various kinds of systems or people, and that turned out to be pretty good training for us for a lot of what we began to experience in Gemini and Apollo, certainly some of the very difficult—Apollo 13 is the best example of a lot of things that had to be dealt with in a short period of time. And the training we had for dealing with multiple problems all sort of simultaneously, not necessarily starting at the same time, but on top of each sort of sequentially, but all right there for you to deal with, turned out to be tremendously good training for all of the teams.\\n\\n I can't recall exactly how formalized it was, but we began to realize that the flight team could get a lot of benefit from the engineering teams that had built the vehicle, the design and the testing of the vehicle, because they would have information about various things that happened in the testing of it and so on and so on that the operations team did not have. We gradually formalized that more and more as we went along. Probably by the time we got to the Gemini Program, there was a very well-organized, well-greased system for having the engineering team follow the flight, in effect.\\n\\n The operations team had to be ready to do anything on a moment's notice, and that was our pride of sorts, being in that kind of position, but sometimes there was time to talk about things, or sometimes there was a situation where it would be helpful to get a lot more information or data from other things, other tests, and so on, and the engineering team kind of rode along in parallel with the flight team, and they usually were organized in a room or a series of rooms close by the Control Center, although in Apollo, for example, it was in a different building than the Control Center, where most of the people were, and they would be tied in by phone lines and data lines all the—not all, but to a lot of the factories that were involved, certainly the prime contractor factories and then other factories or places where things were produced. MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], for example, was involved because they made the software for Apollo. So they would have phone lines and have—it's almost like a web or a network of people following along in real time but who would be able to introduce any experience they had on any subject if it happened to come up, and hopefully use that to contribute to the solution of the problem.\\n\\n I can't remember how well organized that was during Mercury. I can't really recall when we really started to do that, but by the time we got to Gemini, we were doing that pretty well, and by the time we got to Apollo, it was a greased machine. The team followed along. They had their own disciplines. They had their own people in a building, and they were plugged into the communications loop so they knew what was going on, and they provided a lot of help on a lot of occasions based on their detailed knowledge or their knowledge of how something was done at the Cape or how something was built or what happened in some test two years ago and so on, and they could bring that kind of information into the flight team, and we often used it in solving problems, I think, and I think it worked very, very well.\\n\\n The teams didn't compete for their role, they were complementary roles, and it really worked very well. As a matter of fact, if you went over to the Control Center today during the Shuttle Program, you would find the same kind of arrangement still in operation. The number of people involved on the engineering team is probably down a little bit because the frequency of problems is nowhere near what it was early on, but, nevertheless, they have kind of a team of people who can be quickly augmented by specialists or experts on any subject that you can imagine, either locally here at the Johnson Space Center or tied into the plants where these things are produced all around the country. So it works well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like a great network." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It is. As a matter of fact, being on the flight team, it was always a great source of comfort to me to know that people were following along and that the best advice that you could get in America was available to you and you could tap it, and when there was time, that was a good thing to do. For example, if you had twenty-four hours to consider some solution to a problem, the engineering team was usually engaged, and they went through the options, brought them in, the flight team reviewed them, and out of that would come whatever course of action seemed appropriate. It was a real source of comfort. A real source of comfort." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "With this network, did the astronauts get involved? Were they support for you as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, in the following kind of way. It wasn't that they were so much involved in dragging up the engineering data to help with the problem, but, rather, there were a number of times when we wanted to try something in a simulator, and the astronauts, of course—there used to be a back-up crew for each one of the flights through Apollo, and, I think, some of the early Shuttle flights. But if we wanted to try something different and had time, we could either run it in the simulator or we could run it in a suit, if we wanted to try something in suits, and the astronauts, who were, of course, involved with all of the planning for the mission know the mission, knew the crews, would generally be involved in kind of running those cases off-line on a simulator or in a space suit or in an altitude chamber or something and, in that way, again, engage the best input that we could from the astronaut corps as we went along, and, of course, the astronauts were in the Control Center.\\n\\n There was a capcom [capsule communicator] position, but my experience was that whenever things really got hot and heavy, there were a lot more than just one single astronaut in the Control Center. When we had a problem, there would generally be a number of them, some of whom may have recently flown, some of whom were planning to fly, some of whom might have some special expertise on the problem that we're having, and they would be around the Control Center and available and often gave inputs off the loop—that is, not on the communications loop—but often gave us inputs and suggestions.\\n\\n The Control Center as a focus was a great way to bring all the people together, the astronauts, the operations people on the ground, the engineering teams, the doctors, and through that process we were able to usually get all the considerations that we had to weigh, and generally everybody supported the actions that we had to take, whatever they might be. Sometimes they happened real fast so there wasn't a lot of time to consult, but other times there would be time, and that just lent strength and a sense that when you finally arrived at the answer, that it was the right answer. It was, again, a real source of comfort during those flights to have that kind of support available, and sometimes it just wheeled along not doing very much, you know, sort of idling, I guess would be the way to put it, but whenever there's a problem, I mean, everything would click into gear and the phones would start humming, and people would get answers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like a real strong team to help make it all work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's a strong team, and it's still the way it works today. It's still the way it works today. I think the people who are in the Control Center would say the same thing. They feel pretty good about having the engineering team follow along, and whenever they get into something dicey, then there's some experts that they could call on and see their way through to the right answer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "With some of the problems that arose back in the early programs—I know in some of our research we've come across times where coming up with a fix was, I guess, a little easier than it might have been today, whereas if something was wrong, you could sometimes just run out to the hardware store or run out to the pad and fix things quickly, whereas now there's more details to it and more steps. Was there any of that in the control room that you remember, things being different in that respect?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I think this total team support that I've been talking about kind of evolved. I mean, it did not exist on Day One, that is, the total team including the astronauts and simulators and the engineering teams. It didn't exist right at the beginning, but we gradually felt the need for that, the whole system did, and put it in place, and before it was fully in place, people in the Control Center had to do what they had to do, so decisions were made on the basis of what had to be done.\\n\\n For example, when Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] was the flight director on John [H.] Glenn's [Jr.] first flight, this heat shield deploy thing came up. I wasn't there, I was in Bermuda, but my impression was there was a fairly small amount of time to consult with experts. I think Chris certainly consulted with Max [Maxime A.] Faget. But the idea of leaving the retropack on opened up a whole bunch of new questions like, what were the aerodynamics going to be like? Would the vehicle fly properly? How about all the heat differences that we now have with this retropack sticking in front instead of the nice flat, blunt shape that the heat shield was?\\n\\n I think they did not have a lot of time to evaluate that, and they probably didn't have, therefore, the time to do it a great deal of depth, and that kind of decision was made—it was something they felt in all prudence they had to do, but it was made probably with a not large amount of information or data behind it. It was, rather, done probably with the instincts and the experience of some handful of people who were involved in the design of the blunt body shape that the Mercury spacecraft really was.\\n\\n As we ran into event after event of that class, we began to build this larger network, and that's what you have today, and it works well. But we had to invent a lot of things. As a matter of fact, today in the Control Center and in my time in the Control Center, a lot of things got decided by the operations teams just because they had to be done immediately. You know, we did the best we could to arrive at those things, and we didn't have a lot of time to consult. It still happens today when things are rushed by whatever is rushing it, you know, we have to get something done by so and so, we have to decide this by a certain time, or we have to respond real quickly because something is not acting right. Today the ops teams, operations teams, know that they may be faced with that and they may have to deal with anything in a very short period of time, and that's the way they train, and that's the way they get ready, and that's the way they fly." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You just build on that experience, and then learn more as you go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Learn more as you go." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We talked a little bit about your training and the computers, how you would have to, in the office, run back and forth, but when you got in the control room things could go at a faster pace, looking at those computers that you were using in the Mercury Program and then through Gemini and Apollo and comparing them to what we have today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. I mean, the stuff we had, I can't rattle off the specifics of it, but the computing machines that we were using, IBM make at the time, were sort of centralized facilities, as mainframes were at that time, still are to some degree, but the power of those machines was probably less than what people have in their pentium processor PCs today. I mean, it was limited, and we had to program them and keep them stable for a while, so you couldn't change it very easily, it sort of had a certain way of being inputted to and a certain way of outputting, and that was it.\\n\\n Today the young people can rearrange their displays, their color displays and so on. In our time, we had to figure that out ahead of time, how we wanted to look at things, and program it all, and it was fairly rigid, because to change it would take months to get it changed through the software system and to get it tested and validated and verified and be sure enough that it was right so that we could use it in a flight. So we went pretty slow on making any changes in the computer system, and therefore we had to anticipate what we wanted and program it ahead of time, and sometimes, when we got there, it wasn't exactly in the form we needed, but that's the way it worked." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And it did work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It worked, but the machines were probably nowhere near as powerful as the average machine that people have on their desk today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We look at how history will look back at things, and kids nowadays are raised with pentium computers sitting on their desks." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I know. I know." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think they might look back at these early programs and say, \"Wow, how did they do that with what they had?\"" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they might. Certainly the kids who are real good at computers, which most of them are, would certainly, if they knew what we had in those days and were able to compare them with what they use today, they would probably laugh. But I think the thing that I sense in young people who want to look back and hear about it is, they respond more to the adventure of it than they do to the technical details of how good or bad or early the computing systems were. My conversations with young people, they just get fired up about how exciting that was and how exciting it will be again in the future some day when we go farther away from Earth orbit than we are able to do with the Shuttle and the Space Station.\\n\\n So we're in kind of a consolidation period of exploiting lower Earth orbit, and that has its own adventure, its own agenda for adventure, built into it. But the Apollo stuff, I think, triggers in people kind of a sense that something big and something unique and something first time in the annals of humankind was done, and it was done fairly early on with nowhere near the kind of technology available to people today, especially in the computing field. I think people recognize that. I don't know if they have exact bit-for-bit comparisons to the capability that we had, but I think it's the adventure that captures them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And what an adventure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was, a great adventure, a grand adventure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You moved from the Mercury Program to Gemini, and with that move, the Space Center moved to Houston. When did you hear that it was going to move to Houston, and what were your thoughts at that point?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let's see. I can't remember the month exactly, but we heard after Carla had hit the Houston area in Texas, Hurricane Carla, and apparently—I mean we weren't here at the time, but there was very high water around here, and as a matter of fact, we were all making contributions to the poor people in Texas who had just been through this terrible hurricane. Then not long afterwards, it seemed like a month or so afterwards, the announcement was made that we were going to be moving from Langley Field in Virginia down here to Houston.\\n\\n We moved here—let's see, I moved here in August of '62. I'm not sure of the dates. I think that was either after or before MA-8, Wally [Walter M.] Schirra's [Jr.] flight. I can't remember. We moved down here, and the place where the center is now was a cow pasture. I mean, the photographs of it are still kind of laughable. It was just populated by cows and probably some deer and a few other critters, and a little two-lane road out here that was—it wasn't called NASA Road 1 in those days, but a little two-lane road, and it was pretty unimproved, I would say. So we moved here, and we probably worked a year and a half or so in office buildings down on the Gulf Freeway, right around—Gulfgate, right above Gulfgate. I was in a couple of different buildings at various times.\\n\\n To get back to your question, we knew early on that the Space Task Group was going to move. Originally it was going to move to the Goddard [Space Flight Center] area right outside of Washington, D.C., in a place called Beltsville, Maryland, which is just outside the loop around Washington. That would have been fine with me, but once this thing got going, then there became a kind of a wider search. I think the solution of going to what became the Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland, that was the first idea that the people at NASA had, but then when people realized the magnitude or the significance of this thing, there was a wider search across the United States for locations.\\n\\n These are done in typical fashion with a lot of criteria and so on and so on, but the truth is the decision was made, I think, by the political system as to where we would locate this activity, and Texas was very strong in those days. It still is, but in those days it was especially strong, especially in the Congress. And here we are, and it's worked out fine. We've loved being here in Texas, loved it since we got here, and it was a great move. Great move.\\n\\n I remember when I was a young boy seeing football games in Texas, and up in Pennsylvania where I lived, it would be snowing and cold and terrible, terrible cold, and then they would show these football games with people in a wide open stadium, in shirtsleeves, beautiful sunshine, blue sky day, and I remember that image of Texas just sticking in my head as to what a wonderful place that could be compared to the cold, freezing weather that I was experiencing back in Pennsylvania and where I went to school out in Detroit, Michigan. I mean, it was cold winters out there. So it was like an image of going to Florida, almost, going to the beach that I had in my head about Texas, and to a large extent that's really turned out to be true." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That it has. Little did you know back then." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Little did I know. My dad was in the service in World War II. He got drafted late in the war. He had three children at the time, and he was working in a shipyard up in Philadelphia. He got drafted, and one of his stations was up here in Wichita Falls, up in Texas close to the Panhandle. And the only thing he said about Texas when he got back is, \"I don't ever want to hear any of you kids moving to Texas. There's nothing down there but sand and rattlesnakes.\" [Laughter] So that was 1945 that I heard that description of Texas, and, of course, it changed a lot, and things worked out well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What did he think when you ended up coming down here?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My mom and dad were always very, very proud of the fact that one of their children was involved in the space program. I mean, there was publicity associated with it, and that was something absolutely new to our family. As a matter of fact, Tom Brokaw has written this book, The Greatest Generation, about the Depression/World War II era parents, families, and my mom and dad, I guess, are typical of the people who were living at that time and trying to raise their family and then had to deal with the World War II events and all the disruptions that that brought.\\n\\n But out of that and the descriptions that I've read in the Brokaw book about people's attitudes certainly were very strong in my folks. They had a strong sense of patriotism about the country, and they had a strong sense that their kids needed to go to school and needed to do well. College was something that most people back in Pennsylvania at the time hardly talked about, but then by the time I got out of high school, or got in high school, that was becoming a real possibility. So the generation that I and my brothers and sister represent were really the first generation in our line that got out of the kind of work that was available back there, which wasn't much, I mean the coal mines and some other things, the coal mines my dad worked in a number of years, and they're awful. It was awful kind of work.\\n\\n Matter of fact, I'd tell the young people—I used to tell them when I was the general manager over here at Rockwell and Boeing for the work we did here, I said, \"You know, this stuff we do isn't work. Work is a four-letter word that my dad and perhaps some of your dads had to do to support their families, but what we get to do is fun.\" It's a lot of fun compared to going down in a coal mine or working on a farm. That's gotten better, but people really did some back-breaking things, and we were fortunate to be born in a time when things were changing enough and, to a large extent, as a result of the sacrifices that the generation represented by my mom and dad made for all of us. So it changed the world for me, my bothers, and sister, and I'm forever grateful for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely. They sound like a great family." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, and Brokaw's book is interesting. He has a bunch of different stories about people, both people who went off and then other people who stayed back, especially women, who then had to raise families, and men were in the service for the duration. They weren't in for a year or two years or something; they were in for the duration. It was tough times for people, but, boy, they sure responded in a wonderful way. I have been aware of this all my life, and as I get older, I sit with my mom and she tells me more stories about how things were when we were young and how they were struggling, and I think it's a nice tribute to a whole generation of people, even if individual stories aren't in the book, kind of the attitudes and the struggles that they had are there for everybody. They were all struggling with the same kind of things, and, God bless them, they did a wonderful job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We wouldn't be where we are today without them." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We would not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you did come down here to Texas, despite the earlier advice from your father, and the program was starting up, like you said, you were in the buildings off of [Interstate] 45 for a while, but the [Manned Spacecraft] Center was being built in the cow pasture, were you involved with the development of the new Mission Control at that time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Yes. Bill [Howard W.] Tindall [Jr.] was the first guy that I can remember. That may not be historically accurate, but he's the first guy I can remember who began to talk about the fact that we could change the way that we had the Control Center and all of the remote sites operated. During the Mercury days, we had remote sites at all kind of different places around the world under the ground track, and they would be in communications with the spacecraft when it went over four or five minutes, thereabouts, at max, and then they would engage the crew and do the business that they had to do, and then they would send back teletype faxes. We could listen to it most of the time, although the communications weren't always good.\\n\\n But when we moved to Texas, early on, Bill Tindall began to talk about the fact that communications was changing enough so that instead of sending people out to a remote site and being a local—in effect, I guess they're almost like PCs, right? They were all out there looking at the data on site, and then after the pass they would summarize it and send it back to the Control Center at the Cape in a fairly cryptic, simple way. So the people at the Control Center at the Cape didn't see all the data from the spacecraft when it was passing over a site, over in Africa or Australia.\\n\\n But Bill was identifying that communications was such that we could begin to send all that data back and have it available in the Control Center as quickly as it would be available at this remote site at which it was received, and that made a very fundamental difference to the Control Center and the operation that we then began to use. We continued to have remote site teams for a while, but gradually moved away from that when we found out that by getting all the information and the data back here in Houston, there wasn't that much need for anybody on site locally, and we found that managing the flight and managing any problems that occur in the flight were a lot easier if you did them consistently with the same group of people, rather than engaging ten or twelve different sites around the world and try to keep the ten or twelve different site completely synchronized with the thinking that was going on in the Control Center. So there was a lot of com and talking back and forth that had to go on for that to occur, and it wasn't as efficient as being able to do with a centralized group of people who didn't have to brief a new team every time we had a pass coming up, but that they were staying in the loop.\\n\\n We were still using stations around the world to collect the data and send it back to Houston, and we didn't get into the era of full-time communications in Earth orbit until we got to the Shuttle Program, when we have tracking and data relay satellites where the Shuttle can communicate back to the Control Center. So you have almost full-time com, full-time coverage. We didn't have anything approaching that through Gemini or the early Apollos, although we did have full-time com once the vehicles got going away from the Earth on the way to the moon. By that time the antennas that we had in the deep space net around the world could track the vehicle, and we could have the data available from the spacecraft immediately in the Control Center.\\n\\n But full-time coverage, full-time communications was a blessing for the operation that we didn't really arrive at until we got to the Apollo flights that left the Earth orbit and were out on the way to the moon. Even then, when they went behind the moon, we didn't have communications. Nowadays, with the tracking data relay satellite to Shuttle Program, has almost full-time coverage. I think they've got a seven- or eight-minute gap once a revolution, but basically they're dealing with full-time communications coverage, and they don't have the ups and downs of reestablishing communications and reestablishing an understanding every time you have a pass over a tracking station. It's a lot easier to have full-time com. It really is a lot easier." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I can certainly believe that. Certainly believe that. When you did move into the new Mission Control Center with the new methods of doing things, how did your training change for that as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We got to the point where the simulators that the astronauts trained in produced the telemetry tapes, and they did in the Mercury spacecraft, but here we were able to create a telemetry stream that was completely responsive to whatever the crews did on board, so that whatever they did on board was reflected in the data stream was brought back to the Control Center, and then the Control Center did whatever it was going to do with that kind of information and understanding, and as they went along and changed the mission, then the astronauts in the simulator and the people in the Control Center stayed on the same page, they didn't divert.\\n\\n We had to make these tapes that we talked about earlier in the early days because we had all these people at different sites around the world, so we made this tape, for example, that would be the telemetry tape that would come down at Australia or Africa or Mexico or California somewhere, and we had to anticipate what people were going to do to make a tape so that we could play it for the people there. When we got here, we were able to have the spacecraft do what it did, and then the telemetry would be completely responsive to that, that information would be available in the Control Center immediately, then whatever else happened and whatever the Control Center told the flight crews to do, then their actions would again be incorporated in the telemetry.\\n\\n So it was a closed-loop system, and we didn't have to send tapes out to remote sites and engage ten or twelve teams around the world with what in the early days were pre-canned guesses as to what people were going to do. Now we're able, because we had a central team not scattered all around the world and a simulator, we were able to keep that in a close-loop form, and the training became much more rigorous, much more realistic and good. I mean, it just became a lot better.\\n\\n Gemini was the first spacecraft where we had a digital computer and digital telemetry, and, of course, that lent itself to digital-based simulation systems and, of course, the Control Center, being a digital-based mainframe system. So all that was able, then, to be operated in a very realistic way, and the training became a lot better. Became a lot better." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A very important step to make it all happen." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was. Yes, it was. So, a number of things enabled the change in the operations of the way we conducted the flights. The very fact that we could get enough communications bandwidth and reliability to get the information back to a central place allowed us to concentrate on a central team without all the remote sites and all the overhead that went with keeping them up to speed and debriefing them after every pass and so on and so on, and getting a summary of the spacecraft data on a very low-speed teletype system, that was all supplanted and surpassed by almost—almost—instant access to the data. Even if the vehicle was over Australia, you'd have the information back here in the Control Center within a matter of just two, three, or four seconds.\\n\\n So it made a big difference in the Control Center engagement in the flight, and I think the operation with the astronauts became smoother because we only had one team of people doing that, not ten or twelve scattered around. So it was a big enhancement and one that served us well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely. Absolutely. As you moved into the Gemini Program, you are chief of the Flight Dynamics Branch by now. What specifically were your roles at this time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Flight Dynamics Branch was part of—I think we called it the Flight Control Division or some term. It might have been different than that early on, but it was the group of people that were the flight control team.\\n\\n As we moved into Gemini also, we began to recognize that in Mercury we had two positions, the flight dynamics officer [FIDO] and then the retrofire officer, retrocontroller [RETRO], I guess we called them. So there were two positions. When we were moving into Gemini, we recognized that we also needed a third one called the guidance officer [GUIDO], because we had this digital machine on board. We had the possibility of that digital machine in the spacecraft actually steering the vehicle into orbit, as opposed to the launch vehicle computers. We had to then interact and service the on-board machine with state-vector updates on the orbit that we ran and so on, because it didn't have its own orbit determination.\\n\\n So we evolved to three positions called the guidance officer, the flight dynamics officer, and retro-officer. The Flight Dynamics Branch was a representation of that. I was the branch chief, and then we had a section for each one of those disciplines. We had a wonderful collection of characters, I mean just wonderful, and different talent levels in the people, and yet they all seemed to respond to the work that we had to do, and we kind of worked at, I guess, enhancing the identity of people who worked in the Flight Dynamics Branch. We called the front row the \"trench.\" I don't know who came up with that early on or what it even came from, but we called the front row the \"trench,\" and the three console operators that were involved in that saw themselves as a team that was controlling all of the trajectory aspects, orbital mechanics aspects, of the flight, and then the use of the guidance computer on board to service those purposes and to keep it updated. We had to keep it updated with state vectors.\\n\\n So we had a high sense of, certainly, purpose, but we had a high sense of identity as a tight little team within the Control Center, and we worked very hard at keeping that that way. We had extremely talented people show up from all points of the country, and they all did a wonderful job, they really did.\\n\\n Some people were very, very talented, high-achievement people. Other people were a little bit more in the middle, and yet the mix of all that allowed us and caused us to figure things out and display them and deal with them and write the mission rules in such a way that you didn't have to be a genius to take care of it during a flight. We tried to normalize it so that the crews that we had, the ground crews that we had, could all do their job adequately. It was a wonderful time.\\n\\n I guess we had a couple of kids at that time. We had a lot of bachelors in the group, a lot of single guys who came here out of college, and my wife used to run Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's and other times, but those especially, when all the bachelors would come over. In those days, they would spend all day and all night sitting around talking about things, having another beer. There were times when my wife used to ask them whether they had any homes to go home to. [Laughter] But we had a great time with it. It was a fun time.\\n\\n There were probably about two dozen people or so in the branch, eight or ten in each group, and they each—also, even with the branch, struggled so that each one of them could be seen as being very, very good. There's always kind of a competition to be as good as you possibly could at your job, and the simulations, of course, and the training exercises were designed to expose any failures or lack of preparation. So people worked very hard at, one, getting ready for the flights and the things that they would have to do at their respective console, and, two, they had a great sense of not wanting to screw up in any way during the training exercises or the simulations, because there would be a tremendous amount of razz dumped on their heads. They worked very hard at being sure that they were ready so that they'd have the answers that they had to have when the time came. And it was a fun time. It was a fun time.\\n\\n It was a great group, a mixed bag of people from all over the country, very excited about what they doing, very competitive about who was going to get the console assignment for a given flight and a given phase of the flight, and they worked very hard at it. They were competitive and they were tough, and they struggled hard to do well at what they were doing, and, God bless them, they all did. They all did well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you tell us about some of them, who they were?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Let me see. I'm not going to do this very well because I haven't thought about it for a while, but in the flight dynamics business we Jerry [C.] Bostick, who had just got out of the Army. He was a civil engineer. Phil [Philip C.] Shaffer came to us from Dahlgren, Virginia, where he worked for the Navy. He was a mathematician of sorts. Grady Meyer [phonetic]—I don't even remember where Grady came from, but he was a real character, flew his own airplane, a free spirit kind of a guy. Dave [H. David] Reed came to us from Wyoming—I was going to say Montana—Wyoming. Willaim M. Stoval came to us from Wyoming. Charlie Parker was the leader of the guidance officer group. Will Presley [phonetic] was in that.\\n\\n Charlie was an amazing guy. He was very quiet and very thin—he's still around the Center—and he never said very much in getting ready for the flights. He got on console when we started doing these things, and he had to look at these strip charts that would say what was going on in the booster guidance system, the Titan rocket, and how well it was steering the vehicle. And Charlie—it was a complete surprise to me, I never realized he knew so much about how this thing was really working. I mean, he could interpret all kinds of things about how the launch vehicle was behaving, just from looking at these squiggly lines, as we used to call them, on his strip charts, and he was just amazing. He would get up there with his headset on his leg—wrapped around his leg, and he would just have this insight into what was going on on the launch vehicle, being able to call it very well.\\n\\n There were times in that system where it was designed where we could switch over to the guidance system in the spacecraft. We never did that in a real flight, but that was the problem that he had, whether to keep going with the launch vehicle system or switch over. Charlie just could read mountains of information out of these squiggly lines and know exactly what to do every time. He was wonderful.\\n\\n Then he trained a bunch of guys who came on with him—Will Presley, Will [William] Fenner. I can't remember who else was in that group. John Llewelyn was our retro officer, and I don't know if you've heard any John Llewelyn stories, but there hasn't been—only one person like him in all of history of mankind. John had a group of people that he fathered in his retro officer group, and they were quite a bunch of characters, they really were. Chuck [Charles] Dieterich used to work in that group. Who else was in there? John, Chuck, Bobby Spencer. Will Fenner—I talked about Will. He was in the guidance group.\\n\\n But anyway, it was very competitive. Dave [David V.] Massaro was in the retro group, and the retro group always felt like the rest of us were picking on them. They always had this kind of \"You guys are picking on us\" kind of a syndrome or paranoia, and the truth was, we were, as many times as we could get away with it. But John was a tremendous contributor to all of the programs, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, but an absolutely unique character, and they don't make them like John but once, period. If you were doing something other than this kind of a thing and had a group of people around telling John Llewelyn stories, it would go on all afternoon. Go on all afternoon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like a great group and a great camaraderie." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We had a great group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's what you need, definitely. During the missions, you said you were charge of this whole group, but then did you also work console during the missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. During the early Gemini missions—let's see. I actually ended up skipping a lot of those because I had been assigned as a flight director—when was it—about '64, so, before the Gemini Program really started to fly. I was managing this group of people who represented three consoles in the Control Center, and we were doing all that stuff getting ready for it and then how to do rendezvous and how to do guided entries and how to use the Agena to burn the engine and propel the Gemini spacecraft other places and other orbits.\\n\\n So we worked on all that kind of stuff and putting all that into requirements for displays and so on that ended up being what the Control Center used. I mean, we had never done any rendezvous before. We were just making it all up as we went along as to how you would do those things, and the Flight Dynamics Branch had to put all that in the computer so that we could then execute the things that we had to do during the Gemini Program.\\n\\n But along about '64, I was named as the fourth flight director. Chris was the first one, and John [D.] Hodge and Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz were named when we had to do—[L.] Gordon Cooper's [Jr.] mission was thirty-some hours long, so we had to have three teams. So those three were named. And then in the interim between that and really starting to fly Gemini, I was named as a flight director, and I was the fourth. Then later on, Cliff [Clifford C.] Charlesworth was named and Gerry [Gerald D.] Griffin.\\n\\n But I was also tasked to take care of some of the early unmanned Apollo testing. We were doing boilerplate testing of the Apollo spacecraft, abort testing of it out at White Sands. As a matter of fact, they have some versions of it over here in the rocket part, the Little Joe vehicle that was used. It was designed to take the Apollo spacecraft up to severe max dynamic pressure conditions that it would experience during the Apollo launch phase and then test the escape system, test the escape tower that pulled the spacecraft off it. I was involved in a number of those tests out in White Sands, kind of as a flight director. I had a couple of people who looked at it, and we actually had to send the command to blow up the vehicle and trigger the abort sequence when it got to the right conditions. So that was our job to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Interesting job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Then we had a couple of unmanned flights, Apollo-Saturn 201 and 202, that were unmanned vehicles, and then 501 was the first Saturn V. It was unmanned. So the team of people I had in the Flight Dynamics Branch I had worked with in getting ready for Gemini and so on, and they were all at their consoles doing this stuff, and I was still their branch chief for a while, and I was also then named as flight director. So I was also sitting, actually, on console for the flights that occurred out at White Sands and the first three unmanned Apollo missions that were flown—Apollo-Saturn 201, 202, and then 501 was the first Saturn V.\\n\\n By that time, I came back to the Gemini Program as a flight director on Gemini IX. So I was on for IX, X, XI, and XII, and Chris Kraft and John Hodge and some others moved over to start getting ready for Apollo. That, of course, slowed down and was interrupted by the fire that occurred in 1967, but—let's see, I guess it was '66 that we were flying the last of the Gemini Program—'66 or '65? The fire was in '67. I think it must have been in '66.\\n\\n So I came back, and several of us, Cliff and Gerry Griffin, I think, were the primary players, primary flight director team that operated on the last number of Gemini spacecraft when our senior leadership, represented by Chris, went over to start getting ready for the Apollo thing. So I was able to come back to Gemini. Of course, I followed all the Gemini flights by being in the Control Center, even though I wasn't sitting on console.\\n\\n Again, the Gemini Program has still yet to get credit for the contribution it made to the success of Apollo. I believe I talked about that before, but it can't be said too often, that the things that we got to do in Gemini really prepared the total operations team—the people in the Control Center, the astronauts, and then the engineering team that supported that—that whole team of people came together doing the Gemini Program, and we did almost everything you could do in Earth orbit.\\n\\n We had a digital computer on board, so we have these two ways to steer the launch vehicle. We had propulsion on board the spacecraft far beyond what we had in Mercury, which was just retrorockets, so that we could change the orbit, we could do rendezvous, we could open a hatch and do EVAs, we had two crew members and not one. We docked with the Agena stage. We then used its propulsion system to change orbit of the dock combination and go to other altitudes and so on. So we experienced all of that stuff that you could do in lower Earth orbit, including then guided entries down to specific landing points, and we got pretty good at getting very, very close to the carriers, the recovery carriers, with the Gemini system.\\n\\n It was a big step up from where we were in the Mercury program, but the experience that we got in dealing with problems—the Gemini spacecraft, we still had not yet incorporated all the knowledge and experience that we were getting, so it had numerous problems as we went along in flights, compared to what we then had by the time we got to Apollo. The industry had learned how to do a lot of things that ultimately got reflected in a somewhat more reliable Apollo machine compared to the machines that we flew in Gemini and earlier in Mercury.\\n\\n But the Gemini spacecraft was very sophisticated, and everybody that participated in it would tell you, I think, that we had a wonderful time and did all kind of things. And some things we just invented. You know, we'd invent them two weeks before the flight and figure out how to do it and scratch it on a paper, and then we'd go try it in flight and see how it would work. It was a great training ground for the total operations team. So that by the time Apollo came, this team was absolutely ready to take Apollo to the moon in as quick a time as you possibly could. And without that experience, I think Apollo would have gone a lot more slowly, a lot more slowly, than what it did.\\n\\n We went to the moon on the second Apollo manned flight, Apollo 8. We'd never have had the courage to do that if we didn't have the experience that we had in the Gemini Program, both the flight crews, the ground crews, planning teams, the engineering teams. We were ready, and as soon as we got the launch vehicle and the spacecraft that could go there, it was a very courageous and bold decision that became Apollo 8, but the teams of people were ready for it. They were ready for it, and it was a result of what we learned and what we matured through the Gemini experience. I mean, it was a real training ground for us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Gemini was a very crucial program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Very crucial, and it doesn't get full recognition, I don't think, for how significant it was. It enabled the Apollo Program to be successful in terms of schedule, to be successful and to get there within the decade, which was the original goal. I think we would have gotten there, but it would have taken longer. As a matter of fact, I've also observed that it probably would have taken us so long that we might have experienced Apollo 13 before we ever landed on the moon if we did not have the Gemini Program, and who knows how that might have changed the history and the dynamics of things.\\n\\n It was great, and it was great fun. I mean, we just had a wonderful time doing it. We just had a wonderful time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It wasn't all that hard work, like you said before." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, it's not work. My father did that. I didn't have to work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Gemini was crucial, and so I'd like to talk some about each of the missions and what involvement you did have with it. I know you said you didn't have a whole lot of involvement on the earlier programs, but you were in the Control Center?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Gemini III was the first manned flight, John [W.] Young and Gus [Virgil I.] Grissom. I think I had the sequence—I mean, I never can remember exactly what the sequence was, but we were just bringing this Control Center over here on line. So I think the first mission, the Gemini III—although I could be wrong about this and flip the locations—but I think the primary team went to the Cape, and we operated the Control Center back here as a test. So I was a flight director running the Control Center back here, following on to the thing at the Cape. And then on the next flight, Gemini IV, the primary flight team was back here running this Control Center, and I went down to the Cape in case something happened to this one because it was our first one. So I was involved in the first two flights in that way, and I saw it was Gemini III and IV, but—I think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think that's correct." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So I was involved in that way. Then I skipped a couple of flights, went off and did this Apollo unmanned testing out at White Sands in the desert and the three flights that I was involved in that we flew unmanned, and then I came back for Gemini IX, X, XI, and XII. My involvement in the intervening flights, or the interim flights, was not on console, but I was around and observing it, and of course the three console teams that we had represent the three console positions were involved in every one of those flights. But at that time I was thinking more along the lines of what I would have to know and do as a flight director. So I was watching over those guys, but they knew what they were doing, so I was really learning as much as I could about stepping up to being a flight director when the time came." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We'll start with Gemini III, then, a little bit. You mentioned that was Gus Grissom and John Young, and this was the first manned Gemini, and it really tested out the spacecraft. How was that different than the Mercury Program and the Mercury missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The spacecraft was—first off, there were two modules to it. It was a reentry module and then an adapter module. I can't remember what we called it, the thing in the back where we housed the propulsion. I think the fuel cells. The Gemini Program was the first time we used fuel cells as a powering device, electrical power for the spacecraft. We had to use cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen, which we'd never used before, which are the fuels or the supplies for the fuel cells. You mix them and you get electrical power and water out. We had a digital computer on board. We had two people. We had hatches that you could open. You could change the orbit.\\n\\n There was also this back-up way to take over from the launch vehicle if something went wrong with it. You could switch to the spacecraft computer, and it could guide the vehicle into orbit, could guide the launch the launch vehicle and take the whole stack into orbit. The guidance computer, of course, was used for entry, and it could steer the vehicle, modulate the lift so that it would steer right down to the right kind of place. Two people on board. EVA. I think they were the primary—the docking system, of course. It was capable of rendezvous and docking. We did that a number of times with the Agena stage.\\n\\n Compared to Mercury, I mean, it was a big step up. Mercury was batteries, so it was more limited in terms of duration and power. It was nondigital, so it was mostly an AM kind of a system. It was packed. Looking back on how we constructed it, I mean systems, subsystems were just sort of laid in the spacecraft, almost in sort of a stacked kind of a fashion, and if something went wrong and we had to repair it, it was a major job to get something out and put it back in and then put all the rest of the stuff back on top, all the boxes. And we used hydrogen peroxide, and it was kind of a fussy, delicate kind of a system in a way that took a lot of special care.\\n\\n In Gemini, we went to the hypergolic system where you just mix fuel and oxidizer in the combustion chamber under pressure, and you get the ignition that you want, a much more capable system than the attitude control system we had in the Mercury spacecraft.\\n\\n In a sense, although a lot of things that we did for Apollo got bigger, like the propulsion, it kind of was a step up to the digital kind of systems, the propulsion kind of systems, the fuel cell kind of systems, and the communications of all the above, that Apollo was to become, and that was represented by this Gemini vehicle. So, in principle, it had all of the innovations that we were going to employ when we went to the Apollo spacecraft, even though the Apollo spacecraft was bigger and so on, probably a little more complicated, but certainly all the systems were a little bit bigger, but mostly of the same type that we used in the Gemini program.\\n\\n So it was a big learning experience for the industry that had to build all that stuff and test it and get it flying. It was also a big learning experience for us, who had to learn how to operate it, because with all these more capabilities that we had, I mean, we just introduced more and more variables to mission content and variables to what could go wrong and variables to what are you going to do about it when it does, and on and on and on. So we began to step up to a lot of the complexity that was going to be built into the Apollo spacecraft. We were stepping up to all of that with the Gemini vehicle, and in kind of a principle way, the Gemini vehicle was much closer to the Apollo vehicle and a big step removed from what the Mercury spacecraft was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A big step in the right direction." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the right direction." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When Grissom and Young tested out this new spacecraft with all these different systems, and you said you were working in the mission control here as the back-up to the one in Florida, do you remember how the mission went, both from—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was very short. All I remember is it went fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And everything in the Mission Control, then, tested out fine as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The next mission, then, was a very big step, too, with the EVA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it was. Again, you know, the context—sometimes we lose track of the context of these things because we're so focused on what we're doing internally, but by that time the Russians had been off doing a number of things, and they'd already done at least one EVA and maybe more than that by the time we flew Gemini IV. So the idea of adding the EVA to Gemini IV was kind of a bold, big step to make at the time. It seemed like a bold, big step to make. It went fine, although I think we learned quite a bit about the fact that—there wasn't a lot of room in the spacecraft, and just getting a big person like Ed [Edward H. White II] back into the spacecraft and stuffed down into this hard balloon suit, because he was in a vacuum—get him stuffed back in enough to get that hatch closed and get it sealed up, I mean, was kind of a major thing.\\n\\n The other thing, I think, that misled us was that Ed's flight, he had this little almost a squirt gun kind of a maneuvering system that was probably just nitrogen gas, and Ed floated around, propelled himself with this little thing and got back in. In retrospect, it probably seemed to all of us easy, that is, the EVA seemed kind of easy except for the crunching-down part getting back in, but it turned out that later on, when we started to do the EVAs and put people out, they were having trouble keeping themselves in a position, so we didn't go out on Gemini V. We didn't go out on Gemini VI and VII. I don't remember us doing an EVA on VIII, because we cut the flight short, it came down. So Gemini X, when I returned to the Control Center as flight director for Gemini, was probably the first time we did, from Ed's flight. There might have been one in between. I just don't remember. I don't think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think you're correct on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "So Ed floated around. He was comfortable, and it didn't seem like any big deal, but then we started to want to have people go places on the spacecraft and do things, like work in certain places, and we hadn't thought about securing the astronaut to the place where he was going to work. So we found, really in the next three Gemini flights that I worked on, that crews were spending an ordinate amount of energy just to stay in one place, let alone do anything when they were there. The fact that they were struggling to stay in one place because we didn't have handholds and footholds and so on like we have today, and again, we didn't think we needed them because of how easy the Ed White thing was, we found if you want to keep somebody someplace and have them work on something, though, you really need to give him a way to secure himself in place or he just floats away. Every time he tried to do something he floats off.\\n\\n So they were spending a lot of energy to do that, and as a result of that, they were overloading their air-conditioning systems, the little chest pack that they wore, and their visors would fog up. They would be working like the devil, very strenuous, to complete any of the missions that we had, and we didn't complete some of the EVA mission objectives that we had early on, for that reason.\\n\\n We started to realize, hey, you know, we're a long way from having figured this thing out. By the time we got to Gemini XII, people had thought through it quite a bit more, and we'd installed the handholds and footholds and ways for people to move back and forth on the spacecraft with rails and so on. We finally, I think, began to figure out what it was going to take—we, the whole system including the flight crews. And by the time we got to Gemini XII, we figured we knew how to have somebody floating around on the vehicle and doing what we had to do.\\n\\n That, by the way, was a slightly different kind of EVA than we had when we had when we went, of course, to the moon, because there we had gravity to help. Even though it was one-sixth of what we had on the Earth, people could walk around on the moon and it was like being on the Earth except they could bounce higher and maybe hit a golf ball further than the Earth orbit experience or just free-floating. In the latter Apollos, we had some missions where we had cameras and stuff that were in one of the bays of the Apollo service module on 15, 16, and 17 Apollos, and we had to have an EVA for people to go out and get the film and retrieve it because we separated the service module for entry and lost it.\\n\\n So our Gemini experience helped us a great deal with that. The Gemini experience, I think, helped us think through a lot more as to what the lunar surface was going to be like, what we had to do in the way of having tools made that people could use and having equipment designed so people could handle it and so on. So the Gemini stuff contributed a lot to making the Apollo EVA work, spacewalk work, moonwalk work, as trouble-free as it really was. I mean, the Apollo moonwalks, those guys would rocket all over the place and jump up and down. I was always worried about those suits springing a leak, but the suits were good, and they got very confident, the crews were very confident in them. They just had a good time to the limit while they were there. As a matter of fact, then they got that little buggy, the little dune buggy [Lunar Rover], and, oh, my God, they'd drive that thing too fast. You know, they're all Corvette drivers, and it used to just make me nervous as the devil. They'd be hot-rodding that thing around the moon. I was thinking, \"Oh, can't you go a little slower, please?\" But they did fine with it. A lot of what we learned in Gemini on EVA and the suits and so on really turned out to pay off when we got to Apollo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely. Well, I think those astronauts had the kind of confidence in you that you had in your trench team." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. It was completely mutual. It was completely mutual. Really, almost this whole contingent of astronauts that went through the Gemini experience were the guys that were flying the Apollos. So we had a lot of time to work together and a lot of time to build confidence in each other and so on and build a good relationship between the flight crews and the Control Center and the way we interacted with each other. It was a nice, smooth operation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talking about the EVAs on Gemini, you mentioned how they would be working so hard and they would overheat their suits beyond the limits. What concerns for the astronauts did that raise for you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they're very real, because, you know, on the first one I was on, Gene [Eugene A.] Cernan was out on Gemini IX, and the way these two-man EVAs were organized is one guy would stay inside—in Gemini IX it was Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford, the commander, and Gene would go outside. Well, you know, his job was to go back to the back end of the Gemini spacecraft, and we had a maneuvering unit that he was going to try. But Gene was working so hard to keep himself from just floating off and to get back to where he was, by the time he got there he was overloaded in terms of heat, and his visor was fogging up. I felt it was dangerous, because he couldn't see where he was.\\n\\n As a matter of fact, Gene tore his suit to some extent, tore a couple of layers of his suit on Gemini IX on some antenna or other that was in the back end. We didn't know that until after the flight, but that was an example of how kind of dangerous it was to have people not be able to see what they were doing and not be able to secure themselves where they wanted to work. I guess in his moving around, Gene bumped into an antenna—I think it was an antenna—and tore a couple of layers. We didn't know that until afterwards. But then getting Gene back into the spacecraft, you know, he kind of had to work his way back up the umbilical and hang on best he could to places where we didn't really have handholds and then get back in and get the hatch closed, again with not being able to see too well because he worked so hard that he overloaded the air-conditioning system and got a lot of condensation inside the suit, all showing up on the visor. So he was not in a good seeing condition to help with Tom. I'm sure he could see some through it. But that was kind of scary for us and left us kind of spooked.\\n\\n Gemini X was more of a free-floating EVA where John Young stayed inside. Mike [Michael] Collins was trying to retrieve some things from the Agena stage, and he ended up losing them because I think he was having some of that same problem. I mean, it looks easy just to float around, but if you're trying to get somewhere and do something and get back, he ended up losing some of the samples that he was trying to retrieve from the Agena stage, stuff that had been up there for a while that people wanted to see what the effects were on, space effects on. So again, that kind of said, \"Hmm, you know, there's something going on here that we don't really know too much about and how to do very well.\"\\n\\n Then we flew Gemini XI, and Pete [Charles C.] Conrad [Jr.] was the commander, Dick [Richard F.] Gordon [Jr.] was outside, and Dick—we were doing something with a tether, where we were hooking this tether between the Gemini spacecraft and the Agena, we were going to sling them around once we got separated, which we did, kind of a hair-raising thing to do, but, nevertheless, Dick was having this terrible time staying somewhere. The front end of the Gemini spacecraft had probably, I don't know, three-foot diameter cylindrical section, and Dick, bless his heart, you know, was trying to climb on that and hold himself with his legs like you would in a saddle, and he was just struggling.\\n\\n I can still remember listening to him breathe. It sounded like he was running at high speed for hours and hours. It was a terrible noise and sound coming from him, obviously struggling like the devil to hold himself in place in order to secure the tether and some other things he was trying to do. Again, we were left with this, \"Oh, my God, this stuff is a lot harder than we though it was.\" His breathing still sticks with me thirty-some years later. I remember how hard he was working and how hard he was breathing just to keep himself in place to do the work that he had to do.\\n\\n In parallel with that, we began to recognize that we needed to do this thing with handholds and so on, so that by the time we got to Gemini XII—and somewhere in there, frankly, I don't remember where, maybe it was Gemini XII, we realized that using the swimming pool neutral-buoyancy thing, swimming pool with people in suits was a good approximation of what they were experiencing in flight. So that began to be used. I can't remember which flight crews used it first, but certainly we were using it by the time of Gemini XII, and it may have been just coming on line about the time of that flight or the preparations for that flight.\\n\\n So Buzz [Edwin E.] Aldrin [Jr.] got a chance to use the new swimming pool as a training device, and then, of course, a tremendous amount of augmentation for him in terms of station-keeping and keeping himself in one place with handholds, footholds, etc., and he was able to navigate the spacecraft, traverse it to the back because we had handholds, and then keep himself in place and do a set of tasks at the back end, making connectors and so on, disconnecting them, that people thought might be applicable to the lunar surface work. We understood enough by that time so that went reasonably smoothly, but the couple flights we had, Gemini IX, especially Gemini IX and Gemini XI, were scary from an EVA point of view because the crews were in some degree of jeopardy out there because they overloaded their systems and they couldn't see very well. It was pretty spooky.\\n\\n We used to have big arguments with the program managers, Charlesworth and I. Cliff was one of the flight directors at that time, and Chuck [Charles W. Mathews] was the program manager, and these guys had designed this little chest pack to do the oxygen and the air-conditioning job, or cooling job, for the crews, and they used to just insist that it was designed according to spec, and we said, \"Look, we don't care if this thing's designed according to spec. That damned thing's overloading, and we're having a hell of a problem with it.\" So we had ongoing fights and debates for some months about this chest pack and the capability of it to cool the people so they wouldn't overheat. The engineering team kept insisting that it was designed properly, and it was, you know, but it was designed assuming that the crews would not have to work so hard to do what they were doing. So, ultimately finding a way to not have the crews work so hard made the air-conditioning system and the cooling system appropriate for the task, but it took us a little while to figure out what we had to do to make it work right, and some of it was spooky. Some of it was spooky." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "With the Gemini missions and the EVAs, did you plan for or train for a situation where something went so wrong that maybe an astronaut couldn't come back?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not really, no. I don't remember doing that. I don't remember doing that. I remember Gemini IX was an interesting thing. We haven't talked about it, I don't think, on any of this, but the Agena had been launched, and the Agena had—it was called \"alligator jaws\" because the thing didn't open up all the way to expose the docking system. It opened up a little bit. There was this cover over the docking system, and it was supposed to come all the way off, and springs were going to push it. Well, it came partially open, and it was sitting up there like that, and I think we knew about that before we flew, I think. Boy, my memory is not what it used to be.\\n\\n Anyway, we flew up there, and we had a big argument about—\"we,\" a couple of us young flight directors—we did not want the crews to go out and mess with this thing, but the successes that we'd been having were making other people bullish about things, and they thought it would be a good idea to demonstrate that we could recover from this partially opened adapter cover that was over the docking system. They thought that would be a good demonstration, which it would. They were right. It would be a good demonstration if it worked. But Cliff and I were concerned that we had this thing half open, and we weren't entirely sure why it wasn't open all the way—there were a variety of theories—but there was a lot of energy left in those springs, and if they went like that, who knows what those panels would do if they hit anybody.\\n\\n So we argued a long time not to do that, and it turns out that the bullish opinion about demonstrating this won the day, and so there we were, going to do this, and it turned out that the rendezvous with the Agena stage sort of came towards the end of a day. By the time the crews got there, Tom and Gene, they called down that they were too tired to go ahead with the EVA, which was a giant relief. [Laughter] A giant relief for me and some of the other fellows in the Control Center who had argued against giving the crews this assignment or this task, to go try to make this thing right. I never have really asked them how tired they were. I don't think they wanted to mess with that thing either. [Laughter] Then we went on and tried the other EVA at the back end of the Gemini spacecraft with Gene later on.\\n\\n I can't remember when we became aware of the thing being half open. It might have actually been in flight or soon before the flight, because the Agena would be launched in close proximity of time to the launch of the Gemini. So we didn't have a lot of time ahead of time to talk about it, but somewhere very late in the sequence and in flight, Cliff and I were arguing that we should not do that. We felt kind of awkward, too, because here we were being sort of conservative, maybe even chicken, and all these smart guys were thinking that this was such a good thing to do. [Laughter]\\n\\n But in light of the way that flight went and in light of the experience that we got with EVA and the difficulties of being in one location, in retrospect, we were well advised not to mess around with that thing and let it pass. We'd have plenty of other opportunities to show that we could do things that weren't planned, and we did. So that was one that we avoided through a combination of circumstances that I'm glad we did. I'm glad we avoided it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely. I think it sounds—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Because Gene's experience in EVA was very difficult, and if we'd run into that with him out there with this spring-loaded thing about to pop, doing something to get it to pop, and had a problem holding himself or a problem with his air-conditioning system and smoking up his visor, steaming up his visor, who knows how that would have turned out? So that was one we missed. We missed that bullet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A good miss." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Dodged it, I should say. Dodged it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We've talked about the EVA, but another major part of Gemini was the rendezvous and the docking, and you had been involved with the trench and the trajectory. What can you tell us about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the rendezvous was a big challenge in terms of figuring out how to do them and then figuring out how to train for them and all that kind of stuff, because it was all new to us. People do it now, it's fairly routine, but at the time it was not, and we were actually—from a trajectory point of view, we knew how to figure out how to maneuver all these things to get them pretty close together, but we never really thought very much about the final stages of the approach to it, to the rendezvous, and what that would look like to the flight crews and what kind of cues they would have that things were either going well or not going well.\\n\\n In the middle of all that, Buzz Aldrin, prior to being selected as an astronaut, had worked on—let me call them terminal phase approaches, the very tail end of the rendezvous, and he had worked on the concept of how to approach the target vehicle from below and then in front so that if done at night, the target vehicle would look fixed against a star background so that as long as the crews kept the target vehicle fixed against a star background, which they could see very clearly at night, then they knew they were closing on the right line as long as the range and range rate were behaving themselves, then they would get there okay. And if the vehicle was moving with respect to the star background, then they knew they had to make some corrections back on.\\n\\n So, Buzz had studied, and I think he did his [doctoral] thesis on approach techniques at the tail end of the rendezvous, and so while we were struggling with all the other maneuvers and how best to arrange them, we then married all that with the idea that Buzz had about the best approach quadrant and the best lighting, that is, star background, for the crews to see and then use that as cues to help them with the final stages of the rendezvous. We were able to marry those two things together and then start experimenting with different, really, paces of approach. We used to call it \"[unclear] revolutions,\" but we sort of started the rendezvous and then it would take like four revolutions and a series of maneuvers to come in, ultimately getting to two orbits that were concentric. That is, the target vehicle would be at altitude, say, 150; the spacecraft would be at altitude 140; and that would allow the spacecraft to slowly close on the vehicle. Then we would do a terminal phase intercept, and then we would get into this quadrant of lighting that I talked about that Buzz Aldrin introduced.\\n\\n But we found ourselves doing rendezvous at various speeds. Some of them were very deliberate. If you allow yourself three or four revolutions for everything to null out so that you get there, that's one thing, but we even experimented with rendezvousing and docking within the first orbit on Gemini XI. We call it M equals 1. And everything had to go right or else it's kind of going away from you. If you're not getting it done right, it goes away from you, and then you have to reestablish. But we experimented with a variety of those kind of things in order to find out the various lighting conditions, the various conditions that the crews were facing as they came in, and the best approaches, and what was the best kind of pace for a rendezvous set of maneuvers to occur at so that it always felt comfortable and stayed under control.\\n\\n We also even experimented with what we at that time called the \"standoff rendezvous,\" where, instead of the orbits being concentric, maybe ten miles different in altitude, which results in closure, we talked about being in the same orbit ten miles apart so we're kind of fixed with respect to each other going around [unclear] and then we just do a little maneuver and kind of coast in. We experimented with that on Gemini XI. As a matter of fact, we invented it after the Gemini X experience, where we ended up using a lot propellants in the final phases of the approach, for reasons that I can't really remember. We ended up using a lot of propellant. But that sort of compelled us to ask if there was some even more slow or more deliberate way to approach the vehicle so that you didn't have to try to chase it, and that's what caused the expenditure of the propellant. If things get sort of outside of the normal, the crews would have to chase it, and more propellant could be used.\\n\\n So we used one of these standoff techniques, and we did one of those. We invented it after Gemini X and tried it on Gemini XI, and it worked pretty well, too, but we had all of our equipment working, the radar and so on. So it was easier. So we did rendezvous every way that you could imagine, coming at the target vehicle from different angles and different altitudes, different concentric altitude differences as to what was a nice terminal phase to arrange. We did this standoff, and we did a variety of things.\\n\\n Then on the last Gemini flight, the rendezvous radar failed. The rendezvous radar helps us know range and range rate to the target vehicle. It's very important to getting it all done right. And it just failed somewhere along the line. We didn't have it at all, so the final phase, which was mostly where you were dependent on the rendezvous radar data, we set it all up and put the crews in the final phase, and they were able to accomplish the terminal phase without the radar based on all the cues and information that would be available to them in this technique that Buzz Aldrin had brought to the program. As a matter of fact, Buzz was flying that time. So it just kind of tooled on in and worked fine, and there we were, and said, \"Gee, we know how to do that.\" Even if the rendezvous radar failed, we get into a certain point from the ground, vector them in, and then the last couple of miles, the crew was able to pull it off with the cues that were available to them. So that gave us a lot of confidence in the rendezvous and the docking.\\n\\n I didn't mention the word \"docking,\" but at the tail end of every one of these rendezvous we're docking with the Agena vehicle. So that gave us a lot of confidence that we kind of tried it a whole bunch of different ways, and sometimes—this one time at least we got into a place where we were spending a lot more fuel than we wanted to, but, by and large, we felt pretty comfortable that we could pull these rendezvous off. Of course, the Apollo mission was completely dependent on being able to rendezvous the lunar module back to the command ship in order to come back to Earth.\\n\\n So we kind of felt good about that, and the Apollo rendezvous went fairly smoothly and fairly routinely. Most of the crews that flew, of course, had flown in Gemini missions where we'd done a variety of that kind of stuff. So we were all kind of comfortable with setting up the rendezvous phase from any one of a number of different starting points and getting finally to a sort of specific set of standard conditions at the end where we could put them on an intercept and then the crews could monitor it very well and take over if they had to without rendezvous radar or whatever. We all felt pretty good that we knew how to do that, and we were comfortable that we could do that when we got to the moon, and they all went well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They did all go well, every one." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They all went well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Luckily, you didn't have as many learning steps as you did with the EVA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, Gemini was probably the learning experience. When we got to Apollo, we liked to keep it on track, nominal, kind of don't deviate. Once we got to the moon, we weren't into doing tests with how to do this, because we had to get them there to the command ship to get home. And they all turned out that way. As a matter of fact, Apollo 11, that was the shift I was on, the ascent from the moon and the rendezvous back to the command ship, and it just went by the book. Everything worked just fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And luckily it was all—not all, but a good portion, due to the success of Gemini." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Successes in Gemini, and, of course, the Apollo hardware worked greatly. It was great stuff, worked great most of the time, and, you know, everybody was ready for it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have a few more questions before we wind up for the day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were beginning to work as the flight director in these missions that we've talked about in some detail. I'd like to go back one step to talk about Gemini VIII briefly, if we could. Were you in mission control at the time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was around, yes. I was sitting around watching it, but I wasn't assigned a shift or anything. I was there, and when the vehicle started to spin up and when the crew separated, that was, I think, the first time we really landed in a contingency landing area. I may have my oceans wrong, but we were planning for the Atlantic, and we ended up landing in the Pacific, terminated the flight early, and so on. Yes, I was around watching all that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Comparing that to when you were around for Apollo 13, which was another big event, what was the seriousness of Gemini VIII?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Gemini VIII was very serious because if the crew—and I think basically Neil [A.] Armstrong responded to this problem on his own—if they hadn't gotten themselves separated from the Agena and back under control, had they stayed attached to the Agena, it just would have kept spinning up more and more. They thought it was the Agena stage that was causing the problem, and it was really the Gemini stage, and so did the ground. The ground thought there was something funny about the way the Agena was behaving, so they walked themselves into a mental trap thinking the problem was on the Agena.\\n\\n But the crew separated from the Agena, and then they found that they were continuing to spin up, coming to the conclusion that that was being caused by the Gemini spacecraft. So they shut down the primary system and they opened up the entry control system. We had a separate propulsion system just for entry, and the rules were, once opened up, we had to be looking for the first closest place to come home. But they got off the Agena, they recognized it was still spinning up, they stopped the spin by going to the entry control system and shutting the other one off, and they got it back under control. Had they not gotten it spun down, it would have spun up enough to cause them to be unconscious, and there would not have been any recovery from that if the crews had passed out, because there would be no way to get it to stop spinning. So that was pretty dangerous. Pretty dangerous.\\n\\n Probably the difference between that condition and the one we had on Apollo 13, it was sort of like a single problem, and the single problem could have had dire consequences, but the single problem got handled and then the worst result was we shortened the mission and came home at a contingency landing site, which, by the way, had recovery forces and so on. The difference between that and Apollo 13 is that Apollo 13 went on for a long time. We abandoned one ship and got in another and had to use it in a way that we hadn't really used before. So we had a tremendous number of various problems that had to be solved, as opposed to the one that Neil solved here, and it went on for a much longer period of time, during which time any screw-up could have undone the work that we had already performed and might have ended up again in the loss of the vehicle.\\n\\n So Gemini VIII happened very quickly, was resolved fairly quickly, the mission was terminated and it came home, but it was kind of like a single-problem sort of an event. Apollo 13 was a much more pervasive kind of a problem in terms of moving them to another ship, powering it up, and then having to conserve all the consumables to get all the way back to the Earth. So there was a lot more opportunity for us to screw it up than Gemini VIII. Gemini VIII, though, had to be solved, and Neil Armstrong separated the vehicles, found out what was going on, solved the problem. If he hadn't done that, we'd have lost the vehicle and the crew. So that's the difference in the two flights." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We've talked now about some of the flights, the EVA and the docking and rendezvous experience, but Gemini also had other experiments that you carried out on the various missions, and you mentioned briefly when you were talking about—I can't remember which one it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Gemini XI, the tether." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Gemini XI, the tether experiment, yes. Can you tell us about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, yes, that was interesting. I can't remember how that came about, but there was this idea floating around, or this concept floating around, that one way that we might keep vehicles together would be to put a tether between them and spin them up, and then if they didn't dock with each other, they could stay in close proximity that way. So, as bold as we were, we said, \"Well, okay. Why don't we try that.\"\\n\\n Of course, then there are other problems associated. You want to be sure you can unhook from this tether once you got going, and also, how do you even steer the vehicle? You know, the tether had a little give in it, so you've kind of got get the vehicles apart and get the thing a little bit taut, and then how do you use your thrusters to start swinging this thing around?\\n\\n At any rate, we did it, and there probably wasn't a whole heck of a lot of theoretical studies done about tethering and spinning up and so and so on, but a little bit of trial and error ahead of time and some studies, of course. And then in flight, the crews got it going, and the tether worked pretty well. We kept the two vehicles together until it came time to—there was a little post or something that the tether was looped around, and that was pyrotechnically released, as I recall. So that allowed the vehicles to separate and us go on our way.\\n\\n But for a while, I mean, it was really kind of funny. Pete Conrad is one of these ebullient guys where everything is funny to him and everything is a riot and just being around him is like that, but he got this tether going, he and Dick Gordon, and they just got to laughing and chuckling, talking about how it was going. Sometimes it would go in and out on them, and it would go around like this. So they had a lot of comments about how wild a ride it was on that tether, but it worked well. Then we never used the technique for anything. Maybe some day somebody will use it for something, and they'll go back there and look at the Gemini XI stuff we did. But it was kind of fun, and Pete was the perfect character to pull off something like that. He had a good time with it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm glad he had a good time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He did. He did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I know ideas are still being bandied about with the tether." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so, yes, and there will be applications for it. I don't know what they are yet, but there will be. But it was exciting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I guess at the time you were just trying everything you could think of that might apply to what you could need." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You've talked about Gemini being such a vital step between Mercury and Apollo and making it happen and achieving the goal of landing on the moon by the end of the decade. There was at one time, though, some talk to go straight from Mercury to Apollo. Had you heard of any of that at all?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it probably was discussed, the concept of the Gemini Program and then getting that introduced and approved and so on. I wasn't involved at that level in discussions in NASA. It came to me as kind of a given that we were going to do it, and probably in the beginning—probably in the beginning, I don't really remember exactly, but I could easily imagine that some reaction would be, \"Well, why are we even bothering with that? Why don't we just get on with the Apollo.\" And there probably were proponents for that point of view. I wasn't involved in any of the debates, and I'm not sure I would have been wise enough to know this going in, but in retrospect, it clearly was a tremendous boost to us to have been through that experience.\\n\\n I'm sure some people viewed it as a financial drain. They could have put all the money into Apollo rather than that, and also an attention drain because the focus of the astronaut corps and the flight ops people, a lot of them, anyway, was very strong in terms of focus on the Gemini Program. It turned out that within Chris Kraft's outfit we also had a bunch of people off doing this lunar landing planning, the planning for it, and a lot of them had and a lot of them had not been involved in the Gemini Program. So they had a nice mix of people and did a lot of the planning.\\n\\n So when the time came for us to consider something like Apollo 8, you know, out came another group of experts who had figured out and knew all this stuff about how to route the trajectories to the moon, how to get them back, and what the navigation around the moon was going to be like. It was almost as if the management had this set of people off doing this stuff on the side while we were doing all Gemini, and when the time came to need the information and the experience and the expertise, the whistle blew and out they come, and they were just great. They knew everything that you could know about that stuff, and they were ready to do it. So we added that complement of expertise to what we had built and learned in Gemini, and the sum of it all was plenty adequate for us to do the Apollo job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In my research I found that there was some question, also, or maybe only one or two voices suggesting that maybe Gemini could do an Apollo 8-type mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, yes, there was. There was a name for it. I've forgotten what it was, but there was a thought that maybe we could take one of the Gemini spacecraft all the way out around the moon and back. Again, I wasn't involved in the discussions of that and the pros and cons, but it did not come to pass. I am not aware of what all the tradeoffs were, and I'm sure you could have fixed this, but one obvious one that comes to mind is the Gemini heat shield was designed for reentry from Earth orbit. It would have taken a considerably different and better heat shield—I mean it's not just a little bit, it's a lot—to deal with the speeds that you would have if you came back from the moon and reentered. Now, I'm sure the people who were proposing knew that and had some solution to it. I just wasn't aware of it. But again, discussions I was not personally involved in, that didn't come to pass although I heard that it was being talked about and considered, and we then moved on to Apollo.\\n\\n It might have been—somebody could tell you this—it might have been that it would have cost considerable amount of money and probably taken some amount of schedule time, both of which by that point were getting close to bumping into the Apollo schedule. Because we finished the Gemini flying on XII in, what, fall of '66, and then the fire occurred in '67, but the fire occurred in a flow of what otherwise would have been a launch of that vehicle probably several months later. So the two programs, without the fire, would have been very close to being end to end of butted together, but it didn't come to pass that way.\\n\\n So, probably considerations like that led people to say, \"Well, let's skip that, and let's skip this extension of Gemini-out-to-the-moon idea and get on with the Apollo because it's at hand.\" Then when the fire occurred, everybody's attention was turned to getting the Apollo Program back on track. It probably would have been something of a diversion to still be carrying along a Gemini-to-the-moon idea. And that's all the Gemini-to-the-moon would have been able to do. It would have just been able to go around the moon probably. Maybe there was an idea of adding a stage to it and putting it into orbit or not, I don't know, but it wouldn't have gotten us to land on the moon. It wouldn't have gotten us to land on the moon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which was, of course, the ultimate goal." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "At this stage I'd like to ask Kevin and Summer if they have any questions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. I have two. They are kind of going way back to the beginning of your career at NASA. I believe you started as a co-op at Lewis. Would you describe that experience?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Boy, I went—I was eighteen years old, had two years of college by that time, and I was going to go to the University of Detroit and then three months and work three months for the last three years of my college. It would have been five years to get out. That's what it was. When I was eighteen, I went in probably, oh, August or September of '55, to work at the Lewis Center. I think my first period was not a go-to-school period, it was go-to-work period.\\n\\n So, after the summer of my second year of college, my first assignment was to go and spend three months at the Lewis Research Center. I remember it was August, about, because it was hot, and I was a newcomer to town, and I didn't know what the bus schedules were, and anyway, I had a ride or a bus drop me off at one end of the airport. Well, the Lewis Research Center was over at the other end, probably a two-mile walk. It was two miles' distance, so I ended up having no other way to get there, so I just walked over there. By the time I got there, I was kind of dripping wet. [Laughter]\\n\\n Cal Weiss was the name of the guy who ran—among other things, but he was sort of the godfather for the co-op students, and he took me in and laughed about it. He was fine. But I was very embarrassed because I was late. I mean, I thought I was going to be on a bus, and I had to walk all this way, and I was sweating, and first day at work. I was thinking, \"Boy, what an impression I made here.\"\\n\\n But being a co-op student was interesting because I had some kind of oddball shifts that I ran, and then I would—for example, on one assignment I was the engineer in charge of the ten-by-ten wind tunnel, ten-by-ten supersonic wind tunnel. It was a big, state-of-the-art kind of a thing at the time. So they would let me run the tests, or be the nominal engineer in charge, but there were two or three technicians that, of course, really knew what was going on, and they would get me through the night.\\n\\n But through all that, I got acquainted with a lot of the technicians that really actually run a lot of the laboratories or the test cells and so on at the Center, and I always had the feeling like I was seeing—I would know where the card games were on Friday night, payday night, which, of course, you're not supposed to do, but I would know where they were. I played on the softball teams, and it was just a fun time.\\n\\n It was like being in a place when you knew you were at the bottom rung of the ladder. I was at the bottom rung of the ladder, but I had a lot of interesting things, little interesting assignments, and they kind of put me in a number of different jobs around the Center over the three-year period when I came back every three months. Every six months, I guess, I'd go to a different job somewhere in the Center and work with a different group of people, and I had a chance to work in wind tunnels and engine test cells. Jet engines were not very reliable in those days. The cells were constantly being destroyed when the engines didn't work and blew up. Cooling devices. One guy that was there had some of the original designs for thrust reversers for jet engines, which, of course, every time I see one now I think of him, and they had various kind of nozzles that they put in the back end of engines to control the speed, and then they had all these studies for how you cool them and so on.\\n\\n Anyway, I got to do a lot of things—shock tubes, wind tunnels, and propulsion systems. I never did work in the rocket lab, but I worked on jet engines, compressors, turbines, and all that stuff. So it was a lot of fun. I got the chance to do a lot of different things and always kind of at the bottom rung of the ladder looking up.\\n\\n Then when I graduated, I went to work in a different unit than any of the ones that I'd been in before as an entry. The branch chief at that time in this branch was George [M.] Low, who was down here eventually as the deputy Center director, ran the Apollo Program after the fire, went to Washington, was the deputy administrator, a wonderful guy. But it was interesting, there I was the first month out of college working for George Low, who, as branch chief, was kind of remote to us on the floor, but that I had an association with him for so long over all those flights, and there were a lot of times when he was the program manager and I was the flight director. We were doing this or that or telling them why we were doing this or that. So it was kind of fun.\\n\\n But I loved being a co-op. I loved being a co-op student. I think it's a good thing, because it gives you a chance to see how this thing you're working on in school really gets applied, at least in this one area. And for me it was a motivator to get through school, get out, and get on with doing what I wanted to do, which at the time was work on airplanes. There was no such thing as space flight until the month I got out of college. There it showed up on my desk, this Mercury drawing, which I still have a copy of at my home. I guess you could say it changed my life, and it did. But it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed being a co-op student. They often ask me here at the Center, and we did this over where I worked at Rockwell, I often get a chance to talk to the co-op students. I guess I'm one of their examples of something or another. [Laughter] But I've enjoyed it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Also from that time period, what was your impression of the group of Canadians and Englishmen that came from Avro?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, yes. Did I talk about that in the last interview?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Listen, that's another untold story. Let me see. I don't remember what year that happened in exactly. Probably '59-ish. I was in Space Task Group, and we had a set of senior leaders, Bob [Robert R.] Gilruth, Chuck Mathews, Chris Kraft, Max [Faget], a bunch of senior leaders like this, and the rest of us were all kind of like entry-level upstarts, you know. In military terms we had a high command with generals, and then we had G.I.s, sort of, maybe corporals.\\n\\n There was a group of people in Canada working on a supersonic airplane called the Arrow, that was canceled. [Maurice] Harold Macmillan, I think, canceled it, the prime minister of England at the time canceled it. It was being built in Canada. Somehow or another, Bob Gilruth and people knew about that, and I don't how the connection was made, but they went up and interviewed a bunch of these folks, who, it turned out, a lot of them came down and worked for us, and what was wonderful about it is we had this set of generals—I'm exaggerating a little bit—sort of general staff and then us G.I.s, and they were experienced. They were ten years older than we G.I.s, and they filled in all the rest of the chain of command. They had experience. They were experienced airplane designers and builders. They knew their way around the technical subjects, the business of flight, and they were a great contribution to the—let's see. What's the right word? Sort of for the filling out of the Space Task Group team. The Space Task Group, really, was missing some ingredients, but they brought the expertise that just filled it out just so well.\\n\\n As a matter of fact, one of my bosses for many years, who has now died, was Tecwyn Roberts. Tec was from Wales, and it was first chance, you know, a lot of us young American kids had to work for somebody and to meet people—all the rest of them, too, from Canada and England, but Tec was marvelous. He had a wonderful knack for getting people to get along. He had a wonderful reasoning ability to take emotion out of it and to bring people back on track and keep them on track. He was so skillful that Chris Kraft had a tremendous amount of confidence in Tec, and Tec was our leader for a number of years, not very many because he ended up—he came down here, but I don't think he stayed very long. The weather was just not good for his health.\\n\\n So for a number of years, a couple of years, Tec was our direct leader and mentor and kind of a—not quite a father, but maybe an uncle figure to a lot of us young fellows in the Flight Dynamics Branch and so on, and he was a tremendous help to Chris in putting together the Control Center concept. Tec was the original flight dynamics officer at the Cape in the Control Center when they operated out of the Mercury Control Center at the Cape. But he was such a gentle and yet demanding kind of a guy—those two words don't go together, but he was that. He was kind of gentle with people and he was kind of demanding of their performance, and because of his talents he evoked a tremendous amount of confidence that people had in him, management had in him, and it was like he was a perfect match for us. We were a random group of young engineers that arrived from all over America and kind of a little brash and a little hasty at times and sometimes a little emotional, and he would kind of gather us along.\\n\\n As a matter of fact, after he died a couple of years ago, I wrote a note to Doris expressing my appreciation for all that Tec had meant to me personally, and I told her how much I and the rest of the men that worked for him had learned from him and how I felt that I used a lot of what I'd learned from him raising our family. So I wanted her to know that there was some of Tec Roberts floating around down here in Houston, Texas, in the next generation of Lunneys. But Tec was one, and I felt blessed because Tec was just a jewel and he got to be our boss, and we had a wonderful time learning from him, and he had a hell of a time dealing with us, I'm sure.\\n\\n But there are a number of other people. I don't remember how many exactly, but my impression was it was about two dozen people or so, twenty-five, so, pretty close. About two dozen people showed up, and they brought all kind of talent to it. As a matter of fact, Jim [James A.] Chamberlin came from Arrow, and I believe—I may not have this exactly right, but I believe that Jim Chamberlin was one of the champions for Gemini Program. As I have testified here, I think it turned out to be a great decision, but there were others—Dick [Richard R.] Carley, John Hodge—I'm going to forget people, but there was a bunch of people who came in and just filled in the ranks just tremendously, and the Space Task Group profited enormously from their talent and their experience. I don't think Canada or England or Wales, I don't think any of them really had a chance to know how much those people contributed.\\n\\n I had some visitors one time, friends of ours, their family background is from Wales, and people from Wales cam over to visit, and I had a chance to talk to them about Tec and the whole thing about the two dozen or so people from Canada that came down. They came from Canada, but some of them came originally from England and Wales and so on. John Hodge was from London, but he was in Canada at the time of the Arrow being canceled.\\n\\n It was interesting because they were there and they worked on this airplane, which was—you know, it's a work of love to do something like that. It was quite advanced for its time, and they were all there when they actually took cutting torches to it and cut it up because they didn't want it to be resurrected. The government wanted to make a point, so they took cutting torches and cut this thing up, and that would have to be the low point of one's technical career, to put your heart and soul into something like that. I mean, they had a flying machine. It was built, and then to see people torch it to nothing, to scrap, and then within probably a week or some short period of time, this whole other door opened up for them. I don't know how many were interviewed or had the opportunity, but the two dozen or so that came to the Space Task Group was a tremendous addition and a great success story that has never really gotten much publicity, hardly been told, I expect." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We've been in contact with a gentleman named Chris Gainor, who's been talking with a lot of the Avro folks and some others, and he's hoping to put out a book on it, from what we understand." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So I think in the next few years, hopefully." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's a story worth telling. And they brought a mix because, well, one, we were all American people, but most of them had a NASA-NACA—all our management all had an NACA background.\\n\\n By the way, as part of that background, Bob Gilruth, for example, actively cooperated from Langley Aeronautics to England, whatever the research organization was called over there, I've forgotten, with all the World War II stuff. So he was actively involved in helping to orchestrate the best of both of us in terms of aeronautic research and aeronautic applications. But those men had a different kind of experience and a different kind of background and so on, so they brought just another mix to the soup, or stew, that was becoming the Space Task Group. A tremendous addition. A tremendous addition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Kevin M. Rusnak", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I'm glad you brought it up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Summer, did you have any questions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Summer Chick Bergen", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I have a couple of questions. The first is, you mentioned that the Space Task Group mainly had a NACA state of mind, basically, which, from my understanding, is more pure research than—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Summer Chick Bergen", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So how difficult was it to make that transition from that research state of mind to a functioning program or work crew?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That's a good question. I don't know. I guess I'd have to say that it was made just because of the talents of the people involved. I don't know that there was anything, other than having to do it, that was forcing it, but probably the people at Langley thought Bob Gilruth might be crazy—really, I'm serious—for getting involved in this, because, looking back on it, it looks one way, but looking at it from the beginning's end, this could have just been a flier idea that wasn't going to go anywhere or could have ruined a lot of reputations in failing and so on. And probably a number of his colleagues thought Dr. Gilruth might have been putting it all at risk to do such a thing.\\n\\n Some of the other people who came, Chris Kraft and, I believe, Chuck Mathews—I'm not sure of Chuck, but I am of Chris—had been involved in flight test work at Langley. Chris was involved in flight control systems for the F-8 Crusader. As a matter of fact, the airplane that John Glenn few across country and made the talk show, whatever it was, was sort of one of John's opening rounds at being famous. But Chris had worked on the control system for that, and I believe had interacted with the people at Patuxent [Naval] Test Center up in Maryland, where the Navy tests airplanes. Chuck Mathews was, I think, involved in flight tests, too, although I'm not as sure of that.\\n\\n Max, of course, was always—Max Faget was always in the conceptual design kind of business, did some of the early work on entry vehicles that I believe affected the way the United States chose to design weapon reentry systems early on, and then, of course, had a big influence on the Mercury and Apollo spacecraft and the Shuttle system, too, for that matter.\\n\\n So they just had a unique mix of—I'm beginning to see this thing in terms like this, and this may be true of a lot of places in the world, but like in America, it's sort of like America has this problem and this need, and kind of the whistle gets blown, and out of somewhere come some people who turn out to be very nicely matched in terms of talent and skills to respond to this problem or need or call that the country has, and there they are. I mean, you look at them after a while and say, \"These guys are perfect for this job.\"\\n\\n I watched Dr. Gilruth, Chris, and George Low. I couldn't imagine anybody pulling off what was done here in this Center in that program in any better fashion than those guys did. I mean, I just can't imagine it. It perhaps could have been done better, I don't know, but I'll tell you, it was inspiring to me as a young fellow to watch all this go on, but we had the greatest leadership before leadership was even a consultant management guru kind of a word. We had it in spades. There it was, right in front of us every day. But America had a call and a need, and out came these folks, and they're absolutely perfect for the job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Summer Chick Bergen", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you got it done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Got it done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Summer Chick Bergen", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "My second question relates to Gemini. You talked about it being a learning phase, and it seemed like every mission accomplished so much more built on the mission before, but yet it took four missions at the end of Gemini for you to get a handle on EVA. Why do you think it took so long to grasp the complex things of EVA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I guess I haven't thought much about why it took so long, but it sure did. On the other hand, the problems we had on Gemini IX were like in May, and Gemini XII, when we think we had it figured out, was like in October or November. So it was a six-month period that the real trigger of the fact that we had a real problem response and then closure on a solution occurred over about a half a year. So, in those terms, that wasn't a long period of time, and the flights were coming six or eight weeks apart. So it was difficult to take a lot of lessons from one flight and get them in place.\\n\\n For example, the idea of the swimming pool, which, I believe, got really implemented fully on Gemini XII, I don't know where that came along, but just having an idea of it and then being able to get it in place and get the crews trained and take some advantage of it, etc., is just going to take some physical amount of time measured in at least weeks or perhaps a month or two or three. It did seem to take us a while in terms of the sequence of flights, the four flights. In terms of time, it wasn't that long a period of time as these things go. But why it took that long, I'm not sure I could tell you. I'm not sure I could tell you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As we wind up for the day, is there anything that you can think of from the early part of your career that we didn't cover?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you asked about the Avro contingent. And it's a good thing which we spent a lot of time on the Gemini Program. This is not the kind of forum where going over the stories of what various people did at various times is appropriate, but there's some wonderful characters involved in this whole thing who contributed in different kind of ways, but the force of their characters contributed to a lot of this in different ways, and sometimes it was funny. A lot of times it was work and solid and good, and sometimes it was funny, and sometimes we probably did dumb things. We were learning a lot.\\n\\n We assembled a group of people, at least on the ground, to do this that was not done the way we selected astronauts. When we selected astronauts, we went out and got the best pilots America had to offer, screened them all down through a million tests and got the bunches that we got. In the case of the people who did the work, for example, the people who did the work in the Control Center and the people who did other things, I mean, they showed up. There was this thing going on, and I was there very early, but after that, people showed up. They heard about this and it sounded exciting to them, and they showed up. So the only screening that was done was sort of like a sort of a self-screening thing where people almost volunteer, or they're motivated to come do something, the success of which was far from assured. At the beginning, nobody would have guessed—I don't think anybody would stand around projecting how this thing was going to turn out. I don't think we would have been able to do that. So people showed up, in effect, kind of volunteered. It sounded like a lot of fun, and I guess as a result of that, we got people who wanted to do this work.\\n\\n As I said about my branch, people came to it with different levels of skills and talents, but they all came to it with, I would say, about the same desire and the same attitude, and that turned out to be a pretty significant factor in how well they did their job; that is, attitude overcame in some cases not being as skillful as some people at other things. Attitude carried.\\n\\n But there are a zillion stories about the people involved that happened and antics of sorts that went into it, but it was a great team of people. It was a real pleasure, a real honor, to be part of it. A real honor to be part of it. As a matter of fact, it's interesting to do something like this and think about it thirty years later, reflect on it thirty years later. In some ways it reminds me of how long ago it was, and yet in other ways it was just yesterday. There's still a real comradeship amongst the people who recognize themselves as being contributors and players in that time frame, and there's a lot of satisfaction, a lot of reward in it. I feel good about it. I feel good about it. America called, and a lot of us answered, and mostly we got the answers right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It certainly turned out very well. I want to thank you for joining us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Glynn S. Lunney", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You're welcome." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00354", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/KnightJ/knightj.htm", + "original_file_name": "KnightJ_7-10-09.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/KnightJ/KnightJ_7-10-09.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Jack Knight", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 10 July 2009" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "Rebecca Wright" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Jack Knight" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is July 10, 2009. This interview with Jack Knight is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston, Texas. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Rebecca Wright. He begins by discussing a chapter he wrote for the publication\\n\\n Legacy of the Space Shuttle Program: Scientific and Engineering Accomplishments\\n\\n ." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The reason I wrote that the way I wrote it was based on the original story that Helen [W. Lane, editor] gave me as to what they were trying to do. Now it seems to have shifted some. What I experienced over many years with Operations was that all these outsiders come in, says, “Why does it cost so much?” They have some kind of notion that Operations ought to be real cheap, but it isn’t. Yet it’s only 6, 7% of the total Shuttle budget, but you always had these outsiders come in saying, “You guys.” It’s marching armies, and all this kind of thing. In fact, it wasn’t really so, but I was trying to somehow communicate the volume of the work.\\n\\n From time to time over the years, we had a couple of astronauts inserted in as deputy director or associate director. One of them, Tom [Thomas D.] Akers came in. After he was there a few months, he said he just never understood or knew what MOD [Mission Operations Directorate] did. Now, of course, it evolved over the years. When you started out in Apollo, there were different divisions. Then there were a lot of mergers over the many years. So it became somewhat bigger. In fact, I guess in Apollo a good bit of the flight data file and a lot of the training was in the Flight Crew Operations and not in FOD. It was called Flight Operations [Directorate] at that time. There’s been a lot of evolution over time, but where we started out in Shuttle is about where we are now, with the exception [that] George [W.S.] Abbey [added] the NBL [Neutral Buoyancy Lab] and some of that stuff in Building 9 (mockups) into MOD. It became somewhat bigger in that we merged with the people that built the control centers. That became part of MOD. It’s now somewhat bigger than it was in terms of facilities. The core flight control thing, there was some merger there over the years. So it became bigger than it was.\\n\\n Nevertheless, what I was trying to do was communicate the breadth of what MOD did. If you try to run it through just a single flight, you may not get that picture, because a good bit of the size of MOD has to do with the fact you have multiple flights in work simultaneously. If it takes you two or three years to build a trajectory, and what flows from that is part of the training trajectory and the training systems. Then you’ve got a flight a month or a flight every two months, so now you’ve got two years stack, stack, stack. You have to go down and see how many simultaneous flights in flow that you have. That tends to drive the budget. The picture people have is these guys that hop up on console and that’s it, and there’s a lot more to MOD. That’s what I was trying to convey.\\n\\n Whether you can do that or not focused on a single flight, I don’t know, because I haven’t read what you’re trying to do. But let’s go answer these questions here, and then I can come and I will verbalize, and then we’ll see if I want to go back. You asked for some specific examples. Memory fades." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When I was going through the chapter I had some questions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The last flight I worked, actually worked on personally as a flight controller, was STS-4. After that I was in management: technical assistant, a branch chief, and then eventually deputy division, division [chief], and then I moved to facilities. I can also give you some other names if you want to get some more detail. Why don’t we go through the questions or however you’d like to do this and then see where it goes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s perfectly fine. I’m just looking for information to flesh this out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let me see. Did you get to read what I wrote?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I did, I did, yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Did you have any questions on those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about the facility modifications themselves." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let’s see. I numbered. You mean typical changes instituted at MCC [Mission Control Center], that question?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, the typical changes instituted at the MCC for a new Space Shuttle mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let me give you some more as background. The Mission Control Center originally, of course, was built for Apollo. Then it was modified or evolved over time. Some of it was just pure replacement of hardware. IBM [International Business Machines], “Here’s a new machine; we got a new operating system.” So we incorporated those kind of things, and then we laid our apps [applications] on top of that. As technology evolved, when you could justify it, you’d bring it in. Apollo evolved to Skylab, and then Skylab evolved to Shuttle. The Mission Control Center originally for Shuttle, from the outside, looked pretty much like it did for Apollo and Skylab." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were using the same consoles for STS-1?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The console shells. Then what was internal to the consoles, there was evolution behind the scenes. Things that used to be done in separate hardware to drive event lights, for example, came into the Mission Operations Computer [and] were driven by software. The communications panels, for example, were originally all hardwired. If you wanted to change it you had wiring that went all the way down to the first floor and then back up to the second and third floor. We replaced that eventually with a system that was more software-oriented, so it was easier to change over time.\\n\\n We started out the Shuttle with the mainframe, the MOC [Mission Operations Computer] and so on, although it was different hardware than we had originally. Like I say there was a whole evolution on that, and there’s a document that discusses that. That’s how we started Shuttle out. We had the third floor and the second floor. Then as part of that Shuttle, remember, was sold and approved by the [Richard M.] Nixon administration to be the only launch system for the country. So it had Department of Defense [DoD] stuff in it. The third floor was modified to be secure. They had this thing called TEMPEST [Telecommunications Electronics Material Protected from Emanating Spurious Transmissions or Transient Electromagnetic Pulse Emanation Standard Requirements] for RFI [Radio Frequency Interference] emissions and things like that. A lot of work was done on the third floor. There were access changes made.\\n\\n The two floors became a little different. Until [STS]-51L [the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n accident], we flew the DoD flights off the third floor, and the second floor was generally other flights, although we could fly both on each. The modifications that were made were typically software, after that initial setup was done. [STS]-51L was in 1986. Then we were down for two and a half years. The country changed its priorities. DoD says, “We don’t like that Shuttle anyway, we want to go back and do our Titans,” etc. The country said, “We’re not going to launch satellites that can be launched off of unmanned launchers. We’re not going to risk crews,” etc. So we changed the whole mode.\\n\\n Station was coming along. The model and the theory was that the building that we had for Shuttle was not enough to fly Station, which was a continuous operation when it came into place. So Building 30 South was funded and was built. At that same time, the commercial technology for minicomputers was blooming and was available, and we embarked on a process to distribute the processing, get away from the mainframe, which we deemed to be more expensive and go to these things. That was an evolution that began in the ’90s. The [new] building [B30 South] was finished ’93ish or thereabouts. We said we were going to populate that out. We were going to do that with a distributed system.\\n\\n Now that took several years to do, and we had command, we had telemetry processing, we had trajectory processing. Telemetry processing was first to move to a distributed system. Command was later. So about 1995, I think, we started our first flight doing telemetry processing. We still had the MOC, the mainframe. Command went through there, and trajectory was done there. Then they distributed that data off of a local area network. Why am I telling you all this? This is all background. But what kind of things did we do? So we put all of that in place to make the change process mostly software, because hardware would take longer and was more expensive, depending on the kind of hardware. We tried to put as much in software as possible so that what you changed for a Shuttle flight is pretty much all software.\\n\\n Now, the thinking at the time was on Payload Operations Control Centers (POCCs). You asked a question along those lines. We put in hardware to account for what we considered to be the peak loading, so that [when] we’d have a Spacelab customer or something like that, and we said what’s the maximum that could be. We put that in place. When you have less requirements for that, they just use fewer of the hardware consoles. It was again a distributed system, so you could buy these DEC Alphas, which is what we used to begin with. When you needed them, you’d buy more. Then as they obsoleted, you wouldn’t replace them.\\n\\n Now while I was there in the 2000s, DEC went out of business. Their Alpha chip was not a bad chip, it was a good machine, but they just quit manufacturing. We went to a PC [Personal Computer] class machine, an Intel type processor. We went to a Linux operating system for most of it, not all of it. The main core processors and its distribution system are IBM. The [Cisco] switches, switching networks all internal, the Ethernet switches, those are commercial. We just use them as we need them.\\n\\n So what that means is that as change needs to come in, it’s pretty much all software. If a customer comes in, and he’s going to operate out of the MCC, what do you need? Well, we need three of these consoles, four of these consoles. Working through the Shuttle, if they have commands, command typically goes up to the vehicle, goes through the GPC [General-Purpose Computer], the SM (system management) computer and off to the payload. That means they have to go through the Shuttle process to define those commands. That’s all a well-defined process. It goes through the Shuttle Program. They take all those requirements, build a mass memory load that is the flight software.\\n\\n Also, that process of developing that software spins off Shuttle data tapes, which is what we use to build command and telemetry datasets that we can use in the control center. As the Internet expanded and became more reliable, some of these customers said, “We don’t even want to bother to come there. Just ship us the data.” Okay, well, we’ll do that. We have interface servers and stuff like that. Ship it to them. Command is a little more controlled. If they want to send commands, they come here or from Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama]. Marshall has a payload ops control center—POIC [Payload Operations Integration Center] for Station, but this is Shuttle. When we were running Spacelab operations, Marshall was responsible for Spacelab, even though the Germans built the first one. Marshall picked it up. So they had an operations control center there. They could send commands because we had those direct interfaces. They’d send commands through here, and then they’d go up to the vehicle.\\n\\n Again all this allows you to do software, and it is through a software process, some of which MOD controlled and some of which we are customers of the Shuttle Program, because Shuttle Program, today, owns and keeps their flight software development and production. Now, we house it in our buildings as a facility, but they own the process, if you understand the distinction. They pay the people that do the work. We house, we power, we have the people that maintain the functional system. But they own it. Now does that help you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It does. Let me just make sure that I understand it. When you’ve got a new mission, say, STS-28, primarily the only things that would change would be software. If you had a different Orbiter than the one you used last time, depending on the payloads. Is that correct?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s essentially correct. That’s where we tried to go. I think we were pretty darn successful at that. The software requirements that are for that new mission come out of the Shuttle Program. We take that, and then we modify, build, and test our software appropriately. Then we also build the training loads that go to the trainers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk to us about working with the various customers over the years? DoD, partners, other Centers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Working with DoD—they actually came here. We helped train them, they sent a lot of people here. They worked for us. They were intending to have their Blue Cube [operations center at Onizuka Air Force Base, California] out there and were going to control flights out of Vandenberg [Air Force Base, California]. All that collapsed. So that was the kind of interface. It was just flight controller to engineer. After 51L, our interface with DoD was search and rescue—that was a KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] interface with them. Our interface with them was for the debris avoidance and for certain use of their assets if we needed them for photography, taking pictures with some of their assets. So we worked with them on that kind of thing.\\n\\n We also worked with them for range safety at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]. We would send them our predicted launch trajectories. They would build their impact predictors, so they’d know when to do destruct if they had to. Then we worked with them a lot on the destruct issues. That was just people-to-people interfaces. Mostly it was trajectory and flight director, but in fact, there’s a little contingent of DoD people that live in the control center. Mostly I think for asset usage, and in case you have to dump a Shuttle or something like that.\\n\\n It’s a very select group of people. There’s what’s called a STU [Secure Telephone Unit]-III phone that the FDOs [Flight Dynamics Officers] have that is a secure phone. So you can talk to them using secure access." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What goes into that debris avoidance? How does that work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the Air Force for years has [had] a bunch of radars. I think their control center is Colorado Springs, but their radars are somewhere in various places. They’re there to track ballistic missiles. They also track other debris so you can distinguish good things from bad things. These pieces that occur because of parts come apart, explode, stuff like that, well, now there’s debris all over the place. Most of it is very small. They can track down to a certain level, but those debris trajectories meander around. They eventually can have intersecting trajectories between human stuff: the Station, the Shuttle, whatever, and we prefer that not to happen. The bigger it is, the more potential impact it would have.\\n\\n They track that stuff all the time, and those, because of solar activity, the atmosphere goes up, comes down, those trajectories change. Depending upon what your launch azimuth is, those can have potentially intersecting trajectories. Now, those are all statistical calculations. So you’ll have a big ovoid that says the Shuttle will be here, and this debris will be here within some probability. If those probabilities reach a certain level they call us and say, “You got a potential conjunction.” Depending upon that conjunction probability, the flight director and the FDOs will decide—and whatever else is going on in the mission—whether or not a maneuver is worthwhile. If it’s cheap to do, you got the consumables, maybe they’ll move, but it’s all a probability distribution. When you move, you’re always going to make a maneuver that’s going to reduce the potential for conjunction. That’s the debris avoidance stuff that the DoD and MOD does." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Does that happen on a regular basis? Are there any missions you can recall?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it’s all the time for Station, because the Station is up there all the time. Its trajectory is moving up and down. It decays. It gets lower and lower and lower over the months, and then you have to push it back up again. Now when we launch a Shuttle to the Station, you want it as low as possible because it takes less energy for the Shuttle to get there. So those plans are done over long periods of time. Then as soon as the Shuttle is gone—or sometimes if Shuttle has extra fuel, it’ll push it up a little bit. Then it can come down. Then usually one of the Russian FGBs [Functional Cargo Block] or one of their Protons or whatever—those have fuel, and they will run it up to a higher orbit. Then it decays again, but that’s Station.\\n\\n Now when the Shuttle launches, they have constraints, one of which is meteor showers. You don’t launch during that period of time in the year when you have the—is it the Perseids or something like that? I think it’s November. There’s a meteor shower that comes once a year. We typically avoid launching in there if we can, but it depends on the other circumstances as well.\\n\\n So that’s debris avoidance. Once the Shuttle is launched, and you know exactly what its trajectory is or what it’s projected to be, then the Air Force’ll run their conjunction analysis. Any time you make another maneuver, you run another conjunction analysis because now you’ve changed the conditions. That goes on as long as the Shuttle is in flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember any instances?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, there have been conjunctions, yes. There’ve been maneuvers. I don’t remember a specific one, but you could go back and ask if you are interested in specific ones, ask the Flight Director Office. Probably they can go back. All of them that were done on a flight, that’s been recorded in the logs." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about working with some of the other federal agencies or Centers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You tend to work with Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland] all the time, because Goddard has the network and the TDRSS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System] network, so we always work with them. Their network director comes down and is part of the Flight Readiness Review [FRR] process, says, “The network is ready.” Which includes the TDRSS and White Sands [Test Facility, Las Cruces, New Mexico] and MILA [Merritt Island Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network Stations] and a few other sites around that are still there and functioning. Marshall we work with all the time, because they own the ET [External Tank] and the SRBs [Solid Rocket Boosters] and the Main Engines and so those, the values that have to do with propellants and engine performance and SRB performance comes from Marshall. That’s done all the time.\\n\\n And they also did a lot of payload ops. So on a flight-by-flight basis, you work with Marshall a lot. On top of that, in case we have a hurricane here, you can go to Marshall and use some of their facilities. Mostly with Shuttle, though, you go to the Cape I think, if I remember. Now things have changed, it’s been three years since I’ve been there. So it depends on which of those two programs you’re talking about.\\n\\n I think the Marshall thing is mostly a Station thing for emergencies. I think we still go to the Cape if we have a hurricane here when the Shuttle is on orbit, and you’re going to enter. Shuttle can’t stay up—well, if it’s attached to Station, it’s got a long period of time. Hurricane will come and go, you hope the place doesn’t get wrecked up too bad. Once Shuttle is free, it doesn’t have enough—some of the onboard systems like IMUs [Inertial Measurement Units] degrade over time. They drift. Unless you have some independent means of tracking all that, they’ll get to the point where they can’t guarantee entry. Typically, if you don’t have that capability to do those drift tracking, which you typically don’t have in an emergency situation, we just take up a few laptops and go to the Cape.\\n\\n All this is documented in an emergency Mission Control Center plan, but you have to come back pretty soon. So for Shuttle it’s the Cape. Now other Centers, if they have payloads, like Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] will have a payload, then we’ll work with them on that particular payload. Other agencies of the government, Homeland Security now, FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]. If you have to land, there’s some east coast landing sites; you work with them on an off-and-on basis. Let them know that there might be a situation.\\n\\n It’s typically a black zone situation, very unusual, but it’s one where you can’t make a TAL [Transatlantic Abort Landing site] because an engine has quit or something like that. Now there’s some east coast landing sites that you could come screaming in as they say, and you’re gliding. There’s no go-around, so it’s one of those where you say, “Clear the runways, clear the runways, clear the runways,” to run everybody off and you hope you make it. Or you bail out.\\n\\n Let’s see. Goddard, Marshall. KSC you work with a lot for the range safety, and of course then they are responsible for the recovery. Once a vehicle has landed, they have to get it back, whether it’s Moron [Spain] or someplace like that. So you’re always working with KSC in the normal end of mission. Most of it is fairly standard stuff. Things have evolved over time. … It was intended to. Does that help?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes. One of the things that you mentioned in the chapter that I thought was interesting that I was hoping you could give some examples, you talked about payloads and resource conflict. Could you give some examples from some missions?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we flew a mission called SIR [Shuttle Imaging Radar], and that mission used some DoD stuff, but it was a radar mapping mission. That kind of mission, first of all they wanted to go to a higher launch azimuth so you’d get more of the United States. The most efficient launch out of KSC is to launch due east, because when you launch due east, you get maximum advantage of the Earth’s rotation. At the Equator it’s about 1,000 miles an hour. The higher up you go, it drops off generally. I think it’s by the cosine of the angle or something like that. Then the more northerly you launch, the less you have advantage of that velocity. You lose payload capability, launch mass capability, the more you launch north.\\n\\n Putting the Station up—the reason it’s at the launch azimuth and the angle that it is to the Equator is because of the Russians. Their due east launch site is much more northerly than our due east. It’s 51.7 degrees, and that’s where their launch site is. For them to get a maximum capability for their launch vehicles, they want to launch due east, but that means that you can’t have an angle of inclination to the Equator that is lower that would help us. So that’s why it’s where it is.\\n\\n Well, SIR was another one, and it wanted to look at a lot more of the US and a lot more of North America. It had to launch more northerly, because it was a radar scanning mission and it was in the payload bay. You had to have the payload bay to the Earth. If you had another payload that wanted to say look at the Sun, you were out of luck. That’s a trajectory conflict. Also it’s a mass properties conflict. Those are the kind of conflicts that you have. It means you can’t mix certain types of payloads, or you can’t mix them easily.\\n\\n I’ll go back to Skylab for a minute because it had similar types of conflicts. Skylab had biomedical [experiments]. It had about four major areas for science. Solar physics, which means you want to point at the Sun. That means you want to have a vehicle that when it’s not blocked by the Earth, it’s always pointing at the Sun, so it’s inertially Sun-oriented. You had a biomedical [investigator] which said, “I don’t care where I’m pointing, but I want time for the crew.” You had Earth resources, which meant you wanted to point at the Earth. That’s not an inertial thing. That means you’re constantly pointing along a vector to the Earth, which means the vehicle has to rotate all the time. That conflicts with the solar physics. It also conflicts with getting energy from the Sun, because on Skylab the solar arrays did not rotate like they do on Station. That meant that if you’re going to point to the Earth all the time, then the solar arrays don’t point to the Sun nearly as often. The batteries run down. Then the fourth thing was called corollaries, which is whatever else you can fit in.\\n\\n Skylab was a constant balancing of all these priorities, as well as you [have] got to keep the batteries charged. That’s the physics of keeping the vehicle going. Since you’re up there for a longer time [on Skylab], you could finally balance all these things out. Now you get to Shuttle. Shuttle is a little less time on orbit, but when you have payloads that are like that, you have the conflicts, and you can’t put certain payloads together.\\n\\n The other conflict is crew time. How much time you could have individual crewmen or crew people devoted to working your experiment. They have to sleep, they have to eat, they have to do their exercises. Then whatever eight hours or so is left over can be devoted to somebody’s experiment. How much is that? Some of those experiments, they want them to take pictures, they want them to narrate, they want them to react to given phenomena. That takes crew time. The more of those things you have, the more you have to split. Now the Spacelab missions were a lot like that. You pile a bunch of experiments in there, and then somebody has to integrate them so that everybody gets an appropriate amount of time, because it’s very expensive to launch a Shuttle, no matter how much you work on it.\\n\\n You’d like to get as much out of a flight as you can. You had contingencies, so that if this fails then you can move this in here. It was a constant replanning activity going on during a flight. If something failed, you had to do in-flight maintenance. You had one thing or another. You had to adjust things. Or the ground people said, “I can’t make it.” Or they had a failure or something like that. You could try to adjust these things. There’s a constant tweak of the plan going on just to maximize return.\\n\\n When you were building a mission from the beginning, then the program office—and I said in here—the program office mostly, because they were looking out way [beyond one flight]. The Shuttle Program funded some of these experiments. They were years in the making. University XYZ or commercial McDonnell Douglas or something like that says, “We want to do this kind of experiment. We think we can build the hardware, test it, and have it ready four five years down the road.” So they would put that tentatively on a flight. Then you would gather things up that would be more or less compatible with crew time and the trajectory requirements and whatever your major payloads were. Does that help?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That’s great. I think the example of Skylab is perfect." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In the Shuttle world it has to fit into those sets of Shuttle constraints. Generally you might have one or two driving payloads. These are the ones that force the trajectory. They needed solar, they needed lighting at this point in time, they needed this or that. That drove the trajectory. Then you had a lot of stuff that you could add into that. The Spacelab flights, the ones that Marshall had, where you had an internal Spacelab module, they typically were filled with a lot of biomedical stuff, stuff with animals, stuff with flame propagation, some chemical reactions. It didn’t matter what orbit you were in, you just wanted a weightless environment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talk to us about how the flight control team worked on trajectory planning for launch and for landing. How does that work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The trajectory flight control team did all of that. The systems flight control team, payload ops, EVA [Extravehicular Activity], Robotics had almost nothing to do with that. Over the years, the trajectory team evolved and had a very rigorous rigid process to go through, because if you screw up, you don’t have a chance to recover for a launch phase or entry phase. It’s just too late, if you make a big mistake. Typically early on they had what they called an engineering release, and then they had a final release in the early part of the program. That would be about three or four years’ worth of effort. It wasn’t necessarily a lot of people but once you got this you iterate on it, because there’s a lot of iteration. There was the control points of the Shuttle where you had to control the temperatures. There was the load numbers during the launch phase, because it’s an asymmetric launch vehicle.\\n\\n You have the winds in the year. Marshall ran a bunch of studies real early on to define what the upper atmosphere winds were. They’re seasonal winds. I don’t know if they were done on a monthly or a quarterly basis, but you have spring, summer, fall, winter environments, and you had a set of trajectory preliminary loads that were tailored to those environments. In the later part of the Shuttle Program what we have, and we have it today, is day of launch winds. You have a preliminary set of trajectory parameters, and then in order to maximize your margins you have a day of launch wind. So they release some balloons and track those balloons, and then that’ll tell you what those upper level winds are, and then you factor those into the last minute set of constants or I-loads that are put on the vehicle on the day of launch.\\n\\n There were people that ran ascents, people that ran orbit [analyses] and people that ran entry [analyses]. They would get a flight and define, “I got an Orbiter,” probably don’t have necessarily the engines you’re going to fly with, and you certainly don’t have the SRB datasets yet. You work a set of preliminary trajectories. They will include aborts to RTLS [Return to Launch Site] aborts. They’ll include Transatlantic Landing site aborts. They’ll include abort once around trajectories.\\n\\n They set them up, and then they do what they call a Monte Carlo analysis where they will have a bunch of variables. Then they will change the variables and make a bunch of runs and change the variables and make a bunch of runs. Those are trajectory runs that are against a set of criteria. Then what you’re looking for is what they call two or three sigma margins relative to hard lines that you do not violate: “Do not exceed this.” Those, you really probably talk to a trajectory guy if you really want to get more detail. I’m giving you the layman’s view.\\n\\n There’s also other things. They’re trying to maximize performance, which is get the most out of the propellant that you have, and get the maximum amount of payload or mass that you can launch. It’s a constant iterative process to maximize performance. That’s part of the reason that it’s expensive, because you don’t do it like commercial airliners. Commercial airliners, they’re driven by a different metric. Also the FAA defines margins. You just don’t go outside those margins. An airline says, “Okay, I’m going to take off from [William P.] Hobby [Airport, Houston, Texas] and I’m going to Dallas [Texas] or something. Or let’s say further way. I’m going to Indianapolis [Indiana].” Now, the FAA says you have to be able to go to Indianapolis and then have the ability to divert to another airport within a certain circle and have enough fuel to do that and loiter for so long. That’s to protect the public [and] the passengers. So that can define a minimum fuel load.\\n\\n Now then the economics of the situation will define for the airline, like Southwest, what else it wants to do, because okay, I want to go from Indianapolis to Detroit. Well, it may be better to load a little more here in Houston and load less there, because they only want to spend 15 minutes in Indianapolis. Then the economics takes over, but their structural margins and all that, those are defined by the FAA, “Do not exceed,” etc.\\n\\n We optimize every single Shuttle flight. You optimize it for performance, which is max payload to orbit. You optimize it for structural margins, three sigma variance of the variables that can happen like the winds and the errors, things that can happen because of the IMUs have potential errors in there, those kind of things.\\n\\n Once you’ve built the software, it’s going to do what it’s going to do. It has no errors. If you have a bug in it that’s inherent, then it’s there, but in and of itself it’s going to execute on whatever data comes in. The data that’s coming in from its rate gyros or its IMUs or whatever, that’s where errors might occur. There’s variation in those things. All that is done on a statistical basis. Those other errors and the unknowns from the outside, like winds that are different from what you thought, those introduce load errors and things like that. All that is part of this Monte Carlo analysis that’s done. Software is just going to execute and do what it’s told to do.\\n\\n If you screwed up, you put a bad load in, well, yes, you’re screwed—probably. In fact, that’s how some of the launch ascent training is done, they put bad errors into the actual flight software. Otherwise they can’t get anything to go off to the side one way or another. That’s the ascent case. They have all these aborts.\\n\\n The on orbit is typically [where] you’ll have rendezvous. So where is your rendezvous point? What if you had a bad burn, what if you had a failure of a jet, or an OMS [Orbital Maneuvering System] went out? You can rework trajectories for that. Then they constantly optimize to maximize fuel use, maximize margins in case something else goes wrong.\\n\\n Entry, you got a capability to enter almost any time. Not quite. So every day the FDO generates potential entry points in case some systems problem causes you to have to quit right now. You have a hole in the cabin, you have a debris impact, meteoroid, or whatever. So those are done. That’s not so much the prelaunch stuff, but that’s done every day. On the prelaunch planning, then the entry is a planned entry. The program office used to have objectives, like crosswind landing objectives. Sometimes you’ll have more crosswinds at a given time of the year than others. They’ll put that factor into the equation. They also will plan entries in case you had a deployable payload you could not deploy. You have to enter with more propulsion mass than you had planned on. Those are variables that go into the entry trajectory planning.\\n\\n You asked a question in here. After [the STS]-107 [accident], they decided in case we have another one of these things not [to] have all that debris that fell over Texas. They tend to try to plan the entry profile—it’s called an ascending node, which means that you come across Mexico. As you’re getting lower you’re coming across the Gulf, so the debris path now falls in the water, and then you land at KSC. That limits some of your options. You can go the other way, you can have a descending node, but that puts you across the entire US just like 107 was.\\n\\n Now 107 was not a flight to the Station, because that would have put you in a higher inclination. That was just a due east launch. So that’s why it followed the path it had. Had it been a Station flight, and they came across the US, it would have been quite a bit higher. Or if it was coming in from the bottom, it’d have been lower down. So after [107], they put that factor into the equation of entries so that you can avoid population areas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you want to talk about how the flight control team works on things like cargo operations, maneuver plans, consumables, any of those things?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Typically maneuver plans are a combination of the prelaunch trajectory work and the propulsion guys. Propulsion guys and their systems people, they track the consumables usage. You had a question in here: the preflight work, the trajectory work. There’s also other work, one of which is consumables. The consumables typically is water loads, cryogenic loads, propulsion loads. I think you said something about CO2. CO2 is something that is generated by the crew, and then lithium hydroxide is what takes it out, if you’re using the canisters. They had another thing called the regenerative CO2 removal system that we used a couple times. It adsorbs CO2 to a bed, and then you heat it and expose that bed to vacuum on a cycle, and it pushes the CO2 out. Then you put it back into the cabin, and it adsorbs CO2 again. So you had two beds working like that I think.\\n\\n There’s always a tradeoff on that kind of thing. The weight of that regenerable package was typically a little more than the weight of the canisters for a typical Orbiter flight, which was typically seven days. Now it’s gone longer. Those tradeoffs were made way back in the early part of the Shuttle Program. Those canisters are consumables. You load as many as you think you need plus spares. Let’s see. The water—for drinking and waste management; the cryo, for electricity. We don’t typically load too much of that, because you generate water with the cryogenics. What other?\\n\\n Propulsion. Got the forward RCS [Reaction Control] system, got the aft RCS system, the two OMS pods, and that’s a lot of propellant as it turns out. Then APU [Auxiliary Power Unit] fuel and APU water. Those sometimes were managed for mass properties considerations, and then there’s a CG [Center of Gravity] control, and you can load ballast in the aft compartment again depending upon the flight as to where that CG will vary. There’s a box, and it has to be in the box or you don’t have good control during entry. Not a launch problem typically, just mass you add or subtract.\\n\\n People know, “Here’s what the flight is, here’s the duration, here’s the users of electricity,” so you generate how much cryo you need. Then the mass properties guys are saying take it off. We’d say, “Well, EECOMs [Emergency, Environmental, and Consumables Operations Manager] want as large of them as you can have.” It’s a balancing act that’s done preflight. Then tell KSC what to load at the last month or so. Then they’ll load and go. Load up when it’s on the pad.\\n\\n They generate how much ET load. That’s loaded up of course day [of] launch, or the launch process. There’s also a payload safety process that MOD runs. There’s a whole set of safety criteria that is put on the payload providers. It would have to do with [something] as simple as sharp edges, anything, what are you doing that might be toxic, offgassing, shock, heat, temperature, those kind of things. They just go through that process and say what it is and evaluate what crew protections need to be in place.\\n\\n There’s also some integration, especially later in the Shuttle Program when you could have all these digital cameras and laptops. Everybody’s got to have a laptop, maybe multiple laptops. All those things require power, and so you got to find places to plug them in. So you’ll end up with conflicts there. There’s not enough plugs in the wall, so to speak, or downstairs or upstairs. So you put a plan together called a plug-in plan for that. Day one this way, day two it’s this way, day three. You like to minimize the plugs and unplugs if you can. You optimize that way as well. All that is done preflight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about planning for rendezvous and docking?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The thing we rendezvous with—if we’re going to retrieve something or go to Hubble [Space Telescope] or Station, you’ve got to know where they are. Somebody tells you, the Station guys, “We will be at this place at this point in time.” That helps define the launch time. The launch windows [are set up] to minimize rendezvous time and rendezvous propellant. See, if you had plenty of energy, plenty of propellant, plenty of delta-v, a lot of these problems go away, but you don’t. That’s why you optimize.\\n\\n That’s why we have a launch window of about five minutes. Five to eight minutes is your launch window, like tomorrow morning. If you don’t get launched, you could launch a little bit later than that, but it means it takes you four days to get there instead of two days or three days. You don’t want to spend that time. You don’t have enough propellant, you don’t want to use it to just burn.\\n\\n If you look in the early days, we could do one-day rendezvous if you had the propellant to do it. We just don’t. At the Moon when we did the Apollo, we launched off the Moon, we rendezvoused [in] one rev. Those are considerations that go into it. Now, when you try to do that, you don’t have much margin. One-day one-rev rendezvous, everything’s got to click. If something goes wrong and you’re off, you either got to have a lot of propellant to make up the difference, or you’re going to spend a lot of time catching up. You can do it, it’s just time and optimization of flight plan." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about docking?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The Apollo docking, the Skylab docking. Those were designed in, so they were always axial docking. The Russians are the same way. You’re docking along the axis that includes the center of gravity. That’s pretty much a piece of cake, [relatively speaking], or it reduces the variables. Now all you’re really concerned about is how much structural impact there is. That tells you what the impact velocity needs to be. Typically it’s low. You want it to be as low as possible, but you also want to hit strongly enough to engage the latches. It depends. Again, that’s a design issue. You can do it in different ways.\\n\\n If you did, say, very strong magnetic latches, you could come up extremely slow, but the slower you go, the more variation there is, because you’re going along in space. You’re going along at five miles a second in the low Earth orbit. Well, the further you go, the more these two vehicles are varying, because their orbits are always slightly different until they contact.\\n\\n The way the Russians have it, it’s along the axis of the CG. The Shuttle was never designed for this kind of work. So their CG is offset. The docking module is typically right behind—especially if you’ve got other payloads—the crew module. That means it’s offset from the CG by quite a bit, relatively speaking. Working off all the software and the maneuvers to do the actual docking took a while to do. [The Charles Stark] Draper Labs [Cambridge, Massachusetts] did the work for the digital autopilot. The actual maneuver, you come up and then you have to burn these jets in a certain order right at the last minute to clunk them together with the minimum offset loads. It was a tricky kind of a thing. It’s a result of trying to use something for what it was not really intended to do. There’s other constraints having to do with the jet plumes and the solar arrays [they] are impacting, all of which is a very complex kind of a thing.\\n\\n So it was trying to make two things do stuff together that were not optimized and designed to do them. We forced the use of Shuttle, so to speak, on this thing. The Shuttle is a unique beast in that. When Shuttle goes away, whatever you design thereafter can be optimized for that. The Orion is much more like the Apollo Command Module. It’s going to be docking along its CG axis pretty much. You can adjust the jets to account for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What about working on EVA plans? How far out does that happen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course they always want to know as soon as they can, because EVA is typically a choreographed activity. If you have to make any models and whatnot to put in the NBL, then you want some lead time on that, again for scheduling purposes, procuring equipment, and procuring materials. The longer you have, the more you can optimize for cost. So of course, where you are now, you know you’re going to Station. That’s the last part of Shuttle you’re doing. It’s all you’ve got left to do, and it’s been going on for years now. You know there’s going to be EVAs to install the stuff and connect it up and whatnot.\\n\\n A lot of that is canned now. You know where the handholds are, but when you’re doing something new that you hadn’t done before, what you do is you go look at the payload. What am I going to do with it? Where can I install handholds to make this easiest for the crew, give the most leverage? All those things are part of it. Now the other thing is you’re always dealing with different crewmen. You’re training new people in many cases. You were in the older days. That’s all part of it, why you want to know as soon as possible.\\n\\n Now there was resistance on the part of the Flight Crew [Operations Directorate] and especially George Abbey when he was running the show to name a crew. Because once you have named a crew, you’ve put things in place that you take them out of the PAO [Public Affairs Office] rotation, the PR [Public Relations] rotation. They’re now focused entirely on that flight. They are locked in, and other people know they’re not. So there’s a certain amount of things going. You’ve read the books on that. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but Abbey would delay as long as possible for those reasons.\\n\\n You’ve excluded a bunch of people, and you’ve also focused in on people. So they had an EVA cadre. Sometimes early on, a lot of it was just paper exercises. Once you get a named crew, then you can go through the actual practicing this. “We’ve got a paper choreography. Let’s now go through it in the NBL.”\\n\\n Robotics was somewhat similar, because they need to know if you’re going to take something out of the bay, or you’re going to capture something, where’s the CG. Has to do with what the arm can do and not do, what its restrictions are, what your margins are. Hubble was designed for capture and EVA. It was designed to be deployed with an arm. Early on they’d say, “Okay, put a grapple fixture here or here. Gives us our best CG capability, gives our maximum margin getting it out of the bay without banging around or anything. Capturing it. Putting it down. Getting crewmen available where the handholds [are], so you can open doors.” All that was optimized on Hubble, but you had to get started at the early design phases of Hubble. You have to define what your payload is and what you want to do with it, and then you can assign somebody to start working on it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk about training. Move from the planning to training. Talk about the flight certification that flight controllers had to participate in for the Shuttle Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Certification typically was not necessarily programmed. It was how does the operator operate, but you had to understand your systems. So that became Shuttle-oriented. Certification was a written evaluation that said, “This person understands their systems, they can communicate effectively, they can recognize and evaluate problems in telemetry signatures and perform in a way that gives us confidence they can do the job in a real situation.” So people over time defined problems they wanted [to see]. If you were a propulsion person, they wrote down [for example], “We want them to see an OMS failure.” They want them to see an RCS leak. They want to see a failure of this valve or a failure of that valve. So they defined a whole bunch of those. That became fodder for the training people to build scenarios.\\n\\n It was fairly expensive to do training with the best trainer, which was the SMS (Shuttle Mission Simulator). When you did team training, you couldn’t put too many failures in, because it blew the sim [simulation] out of the water. You did a few, and you’d optimize those for who you were particularly trying to get certified on this particular run. There were a lot of part task trainers. There was a lot of what’s called tribal knowledge extraction or on-the-job training. So you get a new person in the systems world or the trajectory world, and they were assigned to a discipline like EECOM or the EGILs [Electrical Generation and Illumination], the power guys, or the PROP [Propulsion] guys, or GNC [Guidance, Navigation, and Controls Systems] or somebody else or Robotics, EVA. They got in the group. Then they learned by doing and learned by watching and learned by participating.\\n\\n They would go in and they’d sit beside a certified flight controller during a flight, during a sim. Then they would go on their part task trainers and just work on their particular areas and learn how it looked from the crew’s perspective. What happened if you did this? What happened if you did that? They were assigned systems handbook drawings. They were assigned console handbooks procedures. It was a lot of learn by doing, learn by observing, learn by doing. Then they’d be given a little more responsibility. Write a flight rule for this. Then work with an expert person. Then they’d typically start out on orbit. There were three basic phases for Shuttle: launch, orbit, entry. Two critical ones were launch and entry, because once you were embarked on those there was no turning back. You couldn’t back out of it and you didn’t have a lot of time. So if something went wrong, you had to respond immediately or the system responded and you went from there.\\n\\n On orbit you can say, “Well, okay, we’ll turn it off and think about this.” The MER [Mission Evaluation Room] was there, and the MMT [Mission Management Team] wanted to have a say. You safe the system, but you had time often then to wait and bring in more expertise. Ascent and entry you did not. Once you were there, you were there. So you’d start off typically in the MPSR [Multipurpose Support Room], which is the back room position. You’d train. You’d be assigned to a flight. Well, sometimes you were assigned a flight before you were fully certified, but you’ve had some practice runs. You’ve sat in with some people. You’ve run on another mission a sim or two or something like that.\\n\\n Your supervisor says you’re okay. You’ve had evaluations by the sim people on your performance during a sim. You’ve demonstrated to your management that you have some modicum of knowledge of the flight rules and the procedures for your systems and the console procedures. So they’ll assign you to a sim. Then you go execute the sim. Then you’ll be evaluated. Then you go do another one, you go do another one. Then you’ll say, “I’m ready to be certified,” and you’ll tell the training people that. So-and-so, this is a cert [certification] run for him or her. Then they will tune that sim up to exercise these guys in a number of ways. So you might have one or two of those. Then if you get evaluated by your supervisor and your sim guy for the back room, and maybe somebody else, and they’ll write that down. They’ll certify you, and they’ll write a piece of paper, and you’re certified now for that phase and for that system.\\n\\n Then you move on and you move up. Sometimes you can move from a MPSR orbit to an orbit FCR [Flight Control Room]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What’s a MPSR?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Multipurpose support room. It’s called the back room. In the Apollo days, it was called the SSR, System Support Room. Now it’s called the Multipurpose Support Room. There’s some more history with that, but that’s not worked out the way it was thought it might work out. The FCR is the Flight Control Room, that so-called front room. So you can go from orbit MPSR to orbit FCR. Or you might go from orbit MPSR to ascent entry MPSR. Just depends on the circumstances.\\n\\n You typically start there, and then you’ll move out to the equivalent. Some people decide they don’t want to do that, or can’t do that, or they can’t take the pressure, or don’t need to, don’t want to. So they just stay orbit. That’s what they want to do.\\n\\n Payload, similar kind of a thing, except they typically don’t have an ascent or entry role. FDOs, the trajectory, similar kind of a thing. Back room to the front room. They’ll do back room certification, front room certification. When you’re certified for the FCR, the front room, you also have again sim supervisor and a flight director." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How long does it take normally to get certified?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It varies a lot. It varies for a lot of reasons. Some of it is just personal problems. Some of it is is there enough sim time around to get them. Because ascent entry sims, for those, because of the rapidity of response capability, you can’t just have sim and then wait a month, another sim and wait a month, and then have a cert. You just lose your proficiency. For an ascent entry certification, you usually need to have at least a sim a week for two or three weeks before you have your cert sim, or maybe two sims a week. Sometimes those are hard to come by, [depending on] what flights are running and how close they are. It can take a while. A really proficient guy, just bang bang bang you hit them, you might get it done in a year and a half from the time you started into the process and maybe you spent six months or more there, but that was real rare. John [P.] Shannon may have been one of the real fast ones.\\n\\n A lot of it is just due to circumstance. Rick [Richard N.] Fitts wrote up a presentation of that many years ago when Bonnie [J.] Dunbar was assigned to MOD, and we went through that with her because they said, “Why is it taking so long?” A lot of it was just circumstance, availability of slots, finding enough sims where you could do cert sims, because you were trying to use flight-specific sims to certify somebody for another flight. So it was awkward. We didn’t have a purely independent certification process. It was integrated in with flight support. There’s a template, but there’s not an absolute time. You could always force things if you wanted to, but then you had to give up something to make that happen or cause people to do more work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When did flight control teams start training for a mission? Was that well after the crew had been selected?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Pretty much. The crew had to be named, and then you could start into it. Usually the template would typically start with when’s launch day. Then you backed up from that. There was a lot of pressure over the years to reduce cost. Reducing cost meant you tried to make the template shorter, because remember, I was telling you about how these costs worked out. You had time going that way and so you had mission, mission, mission, mission. [Demonstrates] Then preparation for this mission might take this long.\\n\\n For this mission you started back here. Maybe the crew was named there, then flight controllers. I was running Systems Division. We tried to let people know what’s your life like. So for a couple years we’d like to name teams a couple years in advance. Didn’t mean that’s exactly how it was going to come out, because who knows? People might get hurt or die or go off to a career change or whatever. You could lose some people. Nevertheless, you had these things going on.\\n\\n If you take just a particular slice in time I might have one, two, three, four flights in flow. Simulations had to be account for that. Now I think my recollection is—again I’m three years out of date—you typically start integrated sims about six months prior to launch day or whatever you knew that launch day was at that time. That could slip, as we all know. Things slip for one reason or another.\\n\\n There’s constant iteration of these things. Typically a flight director said, “Who’s my prime team?” That’s his team. A lead flight director typically is an orbit guy, because that’s what I’m going to do on this flight. Then you have an ascent entry flight director. You have fewer of those. They might just do the ascent and the entry, and then you’ll have three other flight directors do the orbit stuff. If a flight was long enough, you might have four teams because we had these work limitations. So many days in a row. That was driven by incidents, like 51L was an incident. We had another incident where somebody put a bad vector up, caused the vehicle to start going out of control.\\n\\n We did those kind of things. Once a flight exceeded like 12 days, they would have a fourth team. That makes it awkward scheduling, because to me once I got on a shift, like if I had the dayshift or the mid-shift or the nightshift, I liked to stay there. Because your sleep cycles and your work—if you get off of that, try to come back, I don’t know, for me it was not very good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "… What aspects of the flight did you typically work most frequently? Ascent and entry, or orbit, EVAs?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Me personally or people?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Just the flight teams in general." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Typically ascent/entry is going to get more sims, both standalone crew and flight team, because they’re critical phases. The timing is critical, and you want to get those pretty well down pat. Orbit sims, what do you pick? Well, you pick a critical phase, so if there’s a deployable you probably pick the deploy, and that’s about all you do. If there’s a Spacelab, you want to integrate Marshall in there. You pick a day that had enough stuff in it to keep them all going. You do a rendezvous and the rendezvous docking. You do an EVA or two or three.\\n\\n You’d involve the NBL sometimes. For the trajectory guys, when you’re doing an EVA, what do they care? They’re just boring holes in the sky. They won’t have a lot of participation, or they’ll do emergency deorbit kind of playing around with, because they’ve got separate computers and they can go run those kind of things.\\n\\n Booster won’t participate in any of those. Robotics may or may not. Depends on whether they have anything going on that EVA. Usually the systems guys are all going to be there mostly thumb-twiddling. Payload maybe, maybe not. Flight activities, yes. So you have those focused. They were doing something. They would do FDO booster sims where only FDO and Booster was there for launches. Those maybe you’d have a crew, maybe not.\\n\\n So again, over the years we modified things to try to optimize training and minimize the amount of standing around that you had to do. It’s constantly going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any simulations done with Launch Control?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "With the Cape? I don’t have a lot of recollection of that. Apollo used to have a little more. There was a trainer at the Cape; the crew would go down to the Cape, and then we’d have some integrated sims, but generally it wasn’t with Launch Control. I think they do some paper sims, and they do a lot of talking. But it’s just too expensive. KSC has their own training capability. Early on I think they didn’t have much of that. They said, “Hey, we do enough work just with the vehicles itself. That’s all we need to do.”\\n\\n Over time they did institute some capability. In fact, it led to a couple problems. If you’re not careful what you’re doing, and it has to do with how you set things up. They have a thing called Shuttle Data Center. That’s where all their data is established. They’ll ship out their downloads that go to their computers in the Launch Control Center. They also do some sim stuff from there. They had four Launch Control Centers, and they have certain places where you can send commands out and it’s supposed to go over to the Shuttle Data Center, but it can also go to real stuff. If somebody is not paying attention to that, you can think you’re sending stuff here, but it’s going there. They had an incident down there one time. They were going to do a sim, then it got postponed, they were doing something else, shift change happened, and they came back on. They started to do the sim, but they hadn’t moved the command path. So these guys were doing the sim and they were sending out commands, and there was somebody walking over in the VAB [Vehicle Assembly Building] and they heard this click click click click click around one of the Solid [Rocket Boosters]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yikes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, that was ordnance. Fortunately, it was unhooked. “But what’s going on here?” They went back and traced it back, and they had not made the switch. There’s manual interventions that you do for convenience purposes to give you flexibility. If you’re not really careful with your procedures, and you do shift changes, and you’re not communicating, you can end up with a real bad situation when you have real stuff down there. We don’t have that so much here.\\n\\n Our system is connected. The sim guys can go in and log into the flight side. In fact, they use that for simulations sometimes where they can modify our calibration curves and force things to look like—they had cases where they have logged into the real flight thinking they were doing a sim, because we can do sims and flight simultaneously. I think this was probably on Station, but somebody went in and modified a cal situation on the Station with the real [time operations]. Fortunately a flight controller says, “Something’s funny here.” He knew something was wrong. They tracked that back down, too.\\n\\n With a real flexible system like that, you have to have well-trained people. So we tried to put in place some things that says, “You’re in the wrong place,” by color, something like that. We participate in countdown demonstration tests, sometimes do, sometimes don’t. That’s when the crew is on the vehicle. We’ll go through a countdown demo, send commands and do some [monitoring]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Let’s talk about the flying portion. How does MOD determine that it’s ready to go for flight?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We have a Flight Readiness Review about a month before flight. That’s our internal MOD Flight Readiness Review, and says either everything is already ready or there’s still a few things [yet to do]. Like remember the day of launch I-loads? That doesn’t happen until later in the game. So those don’t get put in. “We got these processes in place, and we got this work yet to do, and it’s scheduled,” and [etc]. Goddard guy comes down, “We’re ready to fly. TDRSS is going to be ready,” [etc]. We say, “We’re all ready, this work left to do.” That’s our readiness statement. “Flight controllers are certified or will be certified by this date.”\\n\\n The MOD flight directors take that [to the] FRR down at the Cape, go down there and say, “Okay, this has been done, this has been done, this is left to do, we’re ready to go.” Everybody comes forward and says, “All the things that we’re responsible for—the flight data file is ready, the ground procedures are ready, the software is ready, it’s locked up,” whatever they’re responsible for they say is ready right now or will be ready on launch day or a week before launch day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about the launch phase at the Mission Control Center in those eight and a half minutes as the crew goes from the pad into Earth orbit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Of course KSC is responsible until SRB ignition. So we’re monitoring and following, and flight director is talking to the launch director or is available. He’s polled and says, “Is MCC ready?” They have hold points. They have a something like—is it 20 minutes? I forget. Something like a 20-minute hold point. Then there’s another one at five minutes before they started the APUs. Once you’ve started the APUs, you’re using that fuel. Once you get down to that point, if you have to abort—you’ve got a window because the APU fuel only lasts so long, because it’s got to go through orbit, and it’s got to be there for entry. So you have a short thing there. You better be ready to go.\\n\\n I think when they come out of that 20-minute hold, the launch director is going around. “Is everybody ready?” He calls every position including MCC. Then the flight director polls his people. “Is everybody ready? Yes, yes, yes.” Then they say, “Go.” They come out of that 20-minute hold. Then the APUs get started at five minutes. So they click click click [through their processes] and there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that’s going on at the Cape. I’m not familiar with that, but they’re topping off the ET and doing whatever they do. The Orbiter goes on internal power before APUs start. It goes on internal cooling just after. [Actually], I’m a little fuzzy on whether it’s before or after APUs start. So you have this rising tension, I’ll put it that way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you want to take a break for a second?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I’m trying to remember here. Let’s see. The IMUs are freed up, and onboard GPCs get control, and there’s a launch sequencer. It’s a GPC thing. It just goes down and counts. It’s five minutes or so, and they have this other potential place to stop, and if no then the crew starts the APUs. The vent doors shut. It’s four and a half seconds or something like that. The Main Engines start. It’s all automatic. I think they come up to speed, and they have to pass a bunch of criteria internal to the Main Engine controllers.\\n\\n It passes all these automated criteria, and then the Solids ignite. Once the Solids ignite it’s moving. At that point, control is shifted to Houston in terms of abort calls and whatnot, but everybody’s still monitoring and watching. So it’s lifted off. Goes through a roll pretty much right off the pad.\\n\\n You asked about that. I’m not sure. Originally the way the US did it, it aligned the launch pads in a certain way. For whatever reason that’s lost to me, but I think having the launch pads aligned in a certain geographical thing has to do with—I’m guessing here—gravity vectors and alignments of IMUs. Because the way the axes of the IMUs are aligned they’re called [x, y, and z]. [One of them is pointing] north, one of them is pointing west, and one of them is pointing up. That allows you to calibrate things.\\n\\n Of course the pads were originally all built for Apollo. It was a symmetrical launch vehicle, going to launch due east. The Shuttle comes up here, and it’s an ungainly thing, and it can launch at multiple azimuths. When it comes off the pad it just goes up. Originally, I’m not sure we had a roll in it. It just went up, tilted, and went on into orbit. Much later in the Shuttle Program, they wanted to come off with the Orbiter on top, probably for lighting purposes. Because when you get up there, if you’re launching in the morning, and you want to launch in the morning at the Cape because the weather is better or less likely to have thunderstorms or whatnot, so when you come off the Sun is nice for photography. Also, the ET falls away down. If you come off on the bottom, you’ve got to now maneuver to do your burn. I think it was done to ease or optimize some of the later on activities.\\n\\n So you come up. They watch you do the roll. You’re just watching. The [ground trajectory] computer is taking in the velocities, and it’s taking in the Main Engine performance, and it’s got this thing called abort region determinator (ARD), which is a bunch of software that takes current velocities and current engine performance as best it knows it, and it’s predicting what if the engines fail here, where is it going to land. So it’s constantly, as this thing goes up, plotting potential aborts and telling you what kind of aborts you can do. That’s a big FDO thing. Most everybody else is watching. Of course, Booster is watching his engines. How are they performing? Solids, you’re watching them, but there’s not much you can do about the Solids. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. You’re sitting there watching. FDO is watching all that trajectory and his abort region determinator. Generally, if you have a Main Engine failure in the first four minutes or thereabouts, 3:58, four minutes, it’s a Return to Launch Site, but it’s velocity-driven.\\n\\n Coming off about a minute up, thereabouts, the engines throttle down. They throttle down because of these structural limitations that I mentioned to you before. Even though you’ve got nearly 6 million pounds of thrust on these two Solids combined, and you’ve got 1 million pounds of thrust on the Main Engines, they’ll throttle down the Main Engines from 100% down to 60% or something. I guess this is one of the variables on a given flight. It throttles down for a short period of time till they get through that max dynamic pressure, because there’s a limitation of like 800 pounds per square foot or something like that. They wanted to maximize the margin. So they throttle down, [and] then [they] throttle back up again.\\n\\n Now, if one of them doesn’t throttle up, and it just keeps on burning at 40%, well, you can still make it, but you’re probably going to be a little short or you have to burn a little longer. There is consideration for that. So you come up. Now then your big criteria is your two minutes or thereabouts where the Solids run out. They start slinging slag and whatnot, and the pressure drops off. They hopefully will come down at about the same—because if they came down at significantly differential thrusts, it would start to tilt, and it may be more than the gimbals can take care of, but they don’t.\\n\\n I’ll divert. They make Solids in pairs. These pairs need to be always kept together. They are segmented. Morton Thiokol will mix up a batch of propellant. Half of it is for this segment, and half of it goes in this segment: on the right solid, on the left solid. Then the next segment, they mix up another batch. Half of it goes in this segment, half of it goes in this segment. You have a matched pair. Hopefully all the burn time will be the same, and it’ll be very close to the same thrust.\\n\\n The Solids go off. Everybody says, “Yay!” Now you’re on your three Mains. They just keep on burning. Depending on the flight, there are sometimes during the real late parts of the ascent, I think they’ll burn some OMS propellant, which helps reach trajectory a little bit. It varies. Again that’s another optimization activity, but you just keep on running up. Just maybe 30 seconds or thereabouts before scheduled MECO [Main Engine Cutoff], they start to throttle down, because they don’t want to exceed three or 3.3 Gs or something like that. If you keep the engines at full thrust, because now you’re getting lighter and lighter and lighter, you would exceed the design G levels.\\n\\n So they throttle down. Then when you reach the velocity cutoff, the Engines shut off. Then the ground—they’re watching everything because there’s other things that could go wrong. An APU failure or a leak in the cabin or some fuel cell or something like that. They have defined procedures for each one of those. They’re watching for that kind of stuff. You reach MECO. They do a couple things on; closing off the Main Engine valves. I think they may move the engine bells in a certain position. Then they go through APU shutdown. Now you’re on orbit, more or less. If there’s any trim that needs to be done, FDO says, “Okay, trim, burn two tenths foot per second,” or something like that. Then they go through and [give a] go for orbit ops. Then [the crew]’ll go through and start doing things like take their helmets off. Then they go and open the payload bay doors. Then you’re [set up] for on-orbit ops. Then you can take off your suits. You go through a whole bunch of other crew things [in] preparation for orbit ops." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about communications with the flight crew and how that evolved over the years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It all really started back in Mercury. I wasn’t here for Mercury. Then we went to Gemini and Apollo. I guess probably early on, maybe it was flight director that talked to the guy, but you didn’t want to have too many people talking to somebody, because they’d step on each other. You could miscommunicate. Eventually we got to the point where in Gemini and Apollo, you liked to have preferably a flown crewman, but if you didn’t have one, somebody that trained with the flight crew to be the guy that communicated with them.\\n\\n We used to send these guys out to remote sites. So you had to have several. Well, let’s see. It wasn’t always a crewman at the remote sites. Once it became consolidated in the MCC, typically it was a crewman. It was a couple of reasons. One, they were familiar with the training. They were familiar with the cockpit. They had discussed with the actual flight crew things that were going on, in case they were the ones that flew. They had a real close relationship and familiarity with what the cockpit looked like and what the impact to a crewman was of asking him to do one thing or another. They could give a best communication.\\n\\n Now within the control team, the control team would say, “Flight, we need the crew to do this or that. Could you ask them to do this or that?” Then the CapCom [Capsule Communicator] was there, and he was listening. Then if the flight director wanted to slightly modify that, he’d hail CapCom. “Okay. Go ask them to do this or do that.”\\n\\n Early on it was minimized, because you only had short site passes. You might have a three-minute pass. You might have a maximum of a ten-minute pass. Everything had to be pretty concise. The CapCom would be the primary communicator. Now when the guys are talking back down, they’re talking to the whole world, but the guy they expect to answer is the CapCom.\\n\\n That has stayed with us for a very long time. It’s changing a little bit in Station, because the crews are just tired of being there all the time. They don’t want to be there 24 hours a day. “We haven’t got enough crew,” and that kind of thing. So we’ve got some other people that do that, but the Russians, for example, [I’ve heard] any position can talk to their crew. I don’t know how much that’s true or not, but that’s what I’ve been told. We have not done it that way. We’re a little bit more control freakish. It also minimizes the chance of getting stuff really garbled. A CapCom will garble things every once in a while, but there’s people that are listening say, “Oh, no, this, say this.”\\n\\n When the guys are talking down everybody’s listening. The expectation is that the responsible positions will hear a crew person say something. They say, “Oh, Flight, ask them that.” Or “No, that’s wrong.” Or “No, they got that wrong.” Or “Do this.” Or “Do that.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about the Mission Control and how it monitors the vehicle during flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, telemetry comes down through TDRSS to the White Sands Ground Station [Las Cruces, New Mexico] into the MCC. Calibrated, put up on displays that the people built. They are always monitoring. There’s a human intervention. Sometimes they will have built special computations that will calculate, sum up total quantities of this or do a rate calculation, so many pounds per minute or hour or something like that. They’ll have limits on those so that they get alerted. They have a lot of tools now that we didn’t have early in the game that monitor for events or combinations of events and will give you messages. That part of the job has got a lot easier now since we’ve got some of those tools and we learned how to use them.\\n\\n Also it can have a detrimental effect in the sense that if you come to count on them too much, you forgot what’s there, and you’ve lost sense of your own system. One guy told me some years ago, he says during sims, he turns off some of these tools every once in a while to force himself to pay attention and to learn what his scan patterns are. It’s like passwords in your computer, in the sense of if you keep your email online you can tell a computer, “Remember my password,” and it does, as long as you’re on that computer. If your computer dies and you haven’t used your passwords in months and months and months and it asks you, “What’s your password?” if you didn’t write it down you forgot what it was. Personally I don’t do that. I say, “Do not remember this password,” so I’m forced to put it in every time, which helps keep my memory.\\n\\n These tools have good effects and can have bad effects depending on the particular operator, but it’s monitored constantly. Since you have TDRSS, you’ve got pretty much constant communication. When we’re at lunar distances, you had constant communications, because there was one of the three deep space sites was always in view once you get far enough away. When you’re working just with ground sites, like real early Shuttle was before TDRSS was, you’ve got sporadic [coverage]. You have a three-minute pass here, an eight-minute pass here. Then you may have an hour with no passes at all. It varied depending upon where you were." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Can you talk about some of the support the MCC provided in terms of satellite deployment or retrieval, EVA, things like that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The crew is very limited in they have no sense of trajectory. You can keep a world map and say about where you are, but you don’t know precisely where you are. If a satellite needs to be deployed at exactly over this point rather than this time, the ground tracks all of that. If you want to delay it, anything goes wrong, you want to delay it, then the ground generally has to be involved in all that. The ground manages the com [communication]. The crew has no idea whether TDRSS is working or not unless they’ve got communications. If west TDRSS is good and east TDRSS has gone bad, the crew has no way of knowing that until they get there. The ground knows. All of that kind of stuff is what the ground does. The ground helps crew keep track of all the consumables. Crew has too many other things they need to worry about. So this business people talk about autonomy depends on how you define it, but especially with payloads, they’re interacting with the ground people, unless they have something that you just turn on in the mission, go back and turn it off." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about reentry in the Mission Control Center. How does that work?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The entry, they’re always planning for emergency entries. You prefer to land at KSC, so there’s weather considerations. You have a couple, two or three opportunities. The weather will be different on each one of them. Lighting will be slightly different. Your entry trajectory is mostly onboard-controlled. You could have a situation where first entry the crew makes a left-hand turn, whereas the last one it could be a right-hand turn, so it’s a different visual thing. (You need to take that with a grain of salt. I think that’s true, but I’m not absolutely sure.)\\n\\n They’re looking at the weather, they’re looking at the various opportunities. Because if the weather is bad, can I wave off? You have to make that decision before the deorbit burn. You’d like to make that decision before you close the payload bay doors, because once you’ve gone through the payload bay door closure, you’re now on internal water boiling to cool the thing rather than using the radiators. Then backing out of it takes longer.\\n\\n There’s a lot of decision making, especially in regards to weather and consumables planning, because you want to have as much water as possible. It’s an interactive kind of thing. Like this last one, you waved off a couple times. That’s the typical thing, is try to get your wave-off decisions done before payload bay door close, which means you delay payload bay door closing as long as you can. Then you can wave off again, if you have to, before the deorbit burn. But after you’ve done the deorbit burn, you’re in, and it’s all pretty much all automatic after that. You’ve done the deorbit burn. You’re pointing in the wrong direction. You pitch over, now so you’re headed nose first. Your vehicle will get the right angle of attack. Then you’ll hit entry interface about 30 minutes later.\\n\\n It’s all trajectory. The deorbit burn is about one hour from landing. Entry interface is about 30 minutes from landing. That was always my observation. Just before the deorbit burn you start one APU, two to three minutes before the deorbit burn. Let it keep burning. Just before entry interface, about five minutes, you start the other two APUs, assuming they’re good. After that you’re pretty well set.\\n\\n The crew doesn’t really do anything. John [W.] Young did. He flew the needles, because he either didn’t trust them or whatever, but they’re all auto. So the vehicle does its S-turn and dadada until you get down about 20,000 feet or thereabouts, just before you come around the heading alignment circle. At that point, they switch to crew sort of controlled. Crew is making stick inputs. You’re still flying the needles, but they always claim they want to get a feel for the vehicle. Because if you have to take over late and you don’t have a feel for the vehicle, it’s problematic. You’re more likely to make errors.\\n\\n So they take over about that [time], and then they fly it around the circle. It’ll fly auto, but that’s what they typically do. In fact, we never certified autoland, but it probably would. What you can’t predict is winds. That’s why we typically fly an STA [Shuttle Training Aircraft] up there just before the crew enters. [The STA pilots] say, “Upper level winds are this.” You tell that [to the] crew. When you come around the circle you can either go a little wide if the winds are pushing you this way, or you can go a little tight if the winds are pushing you that way. [Demonstrates] Then you come down. What you’re watching very closely is you’re watching your altitude rate of descent and your velocity. You want to maintain your energy margins until the last minute, because you have no engines. If you come in short, you’re screwed. If you come in hot, you’ve got brakes. You can just open your speed brake as wide as possible. You’ve got the drag chute. You prefer to come in hot, but on that landing site at KSC you’re in a swamp if you come in short. It’s going to wreck everything.\\n\\n He’s flying it, and he’s flying the needles. It’s got a head-up display. It’s telling you too high or too low. Just fly the needles. You’re looking out the window. So if the needles are taking you to the wrong place, you can adjust for it. I don’t think they ever have, but they could. You come down, and then you’ve got checkpoints, and you got a place that says, “Lower the gear.”\\n\\n When you lower the gear, you put drag out there. You typically wait [as long as practical]. You drop the gear. Then once you’re coming down at that high angle of attack, it’s drag anyway. You just set it down. Then you set the nose gear down, deploy the chute, and just before you stop rolling you blow the chute off so it falls off on the ground and doesn’t mess up the Main [Engines] any more than it might. That’s it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Following the end of the mission, you share lessons learned. How do you implement those for the next mission?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Anything that’s real obvious you can do. If it’s a flight rule change or procedure change, something like that, that’s typically not a problem, if it’s applicable to the next mission. It might not be applicable to the next mission. If it’s something you learned, say, dealing with Hubble, it’s probably not going to affect Space Station much at all, but if it’s something like cuts on the gloves of the EVA crewmen, now that may or may not have shown up. [It] depends on how fast somebody is inspected and says, “Hey, there’s a cut here,” but that’s maybe a sharp edge thing. It’s typically a procedural thing, because the next mission might be a month away. So you’ve set a lot of things in stone, but you can change rules and you can modify procedures.\\n\\n If it’s something that’s a flight software problem, wow, you just barely got away with this, you might have to delay, you might have to patch or something. That’s a different story. The crew typically will write up a report. They’ll have squawks, and they’ll have three or four things they think, “By God, you really need to change this.” Those are documented and shipped over, and MOD will respond, ”Yes we will” or “We won’t.” May or may not be the next mission. May be the next mission on that vehicle, which could be three missions down the road, but if it’s something that really needs to be done, it’ll be done. It’s effective on that next mission." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Does MOD do the same thing that the crews do? Do they come up with a lessons learned package?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh sure. Typically each discipline, like Systems Division will go have their postflight review of systems issues: what needs to be changed, what did we do, what could we do better, is there something that needs to be changed in the MCC, how long is it going to take to put in a statement of requirements for that. Trajectory does the same thing. Trajectory have a very formal, they call it a postmission reconstruction where they’ll go back and review the whole mission and codify or write down altitudes, attitudes, those kind of trajectory-oriented things for later reference in case somebody later on says, “What altitude were we at? How close—wow, there was a near conjunction there.”\\n\\n You have to have that postflight reconstruction to know exactly where it was. Whether where preflight it was supposed to be, because the burns didn’t happen right on time or there was more drag or whatever. There’s any number of reasons that they do that. Payload people, but again, if that payload is not on this next flight—maybe it’s never going to show up again. Not much to worry about there. Everybody looks at it. Of course, they’re doing some of it in real time too. Then program office has one, too, with their MER. Then anomalies, risk assessments, and anomaly reviews go on after the flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think you have answered all of my questions, but I wanted to ask Rebecca." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Rebecca Wright", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, boy, that’s a lot of good information." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You think there’s anything we haven’t talked about?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, let’s see. Did you go down through these? DoD, flight control trajectory, flight rules. Determining specific flight rules for a new mission. There’s a whole documentation tree on the flight rules. There’s a generic flight rules book. There’s some other flight-specific books, because the rationale is in the books. Typically generic rules are just what they do. They’re generic. They don’t change that much from flight to flight. Flight-specific rules are payload-specific. They will be unique to that flight. They may apply to later flights as well, but they might be unique to that flight, because there’s something unique on that flight. They’ll probably be used for the basis for the next flight, like EVA on Station.\\n\\n So those are reviewed. There’s a thing called the Flight Rules Control Board. That’s sanctioned by the Shuttle Program Office. MOD runs it. Then prior to a flight, we come up to the program office and say, “Okay, these are the flight rules that we have changed or modified for this flight.” We brief them on that. They say, “Okay. “ That authorizes them, so to speak. That’s how that’s done. It goes on all the time. Probably Flight Rules Control Board meets every month or as necessary.\\n\\n Certification, training evolved over the years. It’s become more formal over the years, I’ll put it that way. In terms of what did we write down that we needed to give the sim guys to do, it used to be they just listened at flight rules mission meetings, flight techniques meetings and decided what they needed to do.\\n\\n Fly. Launch phase. Launch windows. How are launch windows determined? It’s just mission requirements. Like the launch window for 107 was two or three hours, because it didn’t have to rendezvous with anybody. It just needed to get there. There are restraints on how long the crew can lie on their backs. Once they get in there, there’s a clock that starts. They’re closed out. Then it’s about maybe two or three hours. Then they either launch or get out. Even though trajectorywise, it doesn’t matter.\\n\\n Then the launch windows, when you have to rendezvous, is very precise, if you’re going to try to do it in a relatively efficient period of time. Ascent period. Communication. Did I get enough on that one? MCC support for EVA? We have specialists. EVA is a specialist position. So they’re only there if there’s an EVA. Robotics, same way. Booster is only there for launch. Sometimes they’ll come in for entry if there’s something that they’re looking for.\\n\\n Resources were monitored. Orbital debris we talked about. Entry data we talked about. How did [the]\\n\\n Columbia\\n\\n accident change reentry landing trajectories? As far as I know, that was adjusted to minimize the debris fallout in case there was another one of these incidents over land. It was population protection. It also may or may not have affected some of the launch aborts as well. The guys ran through a certain amount of—I don’t want to say it’s hocus-pocus, but you can’t totally predict where the debris is going to be. It depends on how the vehicle would break up as to where that debris is going to fall. Once it falls apart, typically they say once you start hitting atmospheric restrictions, instead of going like this it comes [straight down]. [Demonstrates]\\n\\n Somebody, I remember in the\\n\\n Columbia\\n\\n investigation, some guy said most of these things, once you get at about 50,000 feet, it’s just falling straight down at that point. If there was an explosion, things are going to go all over. Some of them will be slowed down, some of them will go forwards, speedier, some of them will go off to the side. So they’re going to keep going in that direction until they start running into atmospheric drag. Then after that, then they start to really slow down and fall off if they don’t burn up. That describes the debris field. You can only do that within so much margin of error.\\n\\n Okay. So I guess we did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think so, yes. Yes. I went through your chapter and things that I had questions about. Just wanted to clarify with you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, then I probably exhausted. Let’s see." + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I saw you came in with some notes. Did you want to refer to those?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I said mission ops. Planning procedures. Program office was a big part of that. The process evolved over time. There was a thing, an official release called an FIDP, Flight Integrated Data Pack, that the program office released. It’s mostly trajectory-oriented, but it said, “This is what the flight is about. This is the mission content. The mission objectives.” Those kinds of things. So that became a checkpoint, especially for USA [United Space Alliance] to do their trajectory work. We had a crew procedures management plan that defined how flight procedures were managed. There was a flight design process trajectory. EVA, the NBL was used. Robotics training. Crew alone. Team training we talked about.\\n\\n ISO [International Organization for Standardization] 9000 system procedures. When Abbey took over, we got into this period of time when ISO 9000 was the greatest thing since sliced bread. That was put on the Center, and then MOD is part of that, so we documented a number of things. That was probably a good thing in some sense. We have work instructions for most of these processes. Flight design in particular has an—I don’t know, 25-volume set of procedures and processes.\\n\\n Flight procedures. There’s a thing called a flight ops review where we had the preliminary set of procedures were sent out to all the players: payload people, customers and whatnot. We had a big review. They got to review the procedures, and we had a big thing called a flight ops review, and they got to comment on all the procedures. Then we took all those comments and updated procedures. That was part of that process." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When did that occur?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Gosh, I don’t know, a couple months, two, three months before. There’s a whole template of this stuff. Let’s see. The MCC ground facilities. Cargo payload unique formats. Customer service provisions. You had asked, I think, about POCCs. Building 30 South laid out all of that thing and put POCCs in place and the customer support room. It evolved. Then after [the]\\n\\n Columbia\\n\\n accident, we added a big whole new MER. MER had been in different places at different times. We built a whole new one for them over in the 30M section as it turns out.\\n\\n The interesting thing is Building 30 South was built as a Space Station Control Center. Space Station control is now in Building 30M. Shuttle is in the 30 South. The latest Space Station Control Center is the old FCR-2, which is where we flew Shuttle from originally, and Apollo. Kind of interesting.\\n\\n If you want real details about these things, now, Earl [W.] Thompson was big in planning. He’s retired now. He ran the ops early in the Shuttle Program. The people that are currently over there in place that might help you, Pete [Peter J.] Beauregard on training. Mike [Michael G.] Hess is running the EVA and Robotics, and his deputy Sue [Susan B.] Rainwater. Dan Lindner was big on [Robotics in] the early days. He’s running the MCC now, but he used to run Robotics. He’s the division chief. Sue Rainwater is deputy to Mike Hess. In trajectory world, Rick [Richard T. Gavin]. He’s the deputy chief of trajectory, of DM. The chief of DM used to be in training and is brand-new, relatively. So he wouldn’t have any history on trajectory, but his deputy would. Rick is deputy DM, deputy director, deputy division chief of DM. If you want a lot more detail or something fleshed out. What I’ve given you is my observations.\\n\\n I was always in systems. I can speak pretty authoritatively for that. Then the later parts of the MCC development, and the earlier parts, because I had a role in that. My knowledge of trajectory is observation of years of flight techniques and watching the guys operating the control center and occasionally talking to people and just general interest. Operations, the payload officers is more observation and then the flight activities officers. They take—what does the crew do or what’s their timeline? It’s observation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, I think based on what Helen told me she’d like to see, I think just a general overview is sufficient. So this is very helpful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jack Knight", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Good luck." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00194", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/GriffinGD/griffingd.htm", + "original_file_name": "GriffinGD_3-12-99.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/GriffinGD/GriffinGD_3-12-99.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "location_date": "Houston, Texas – 12 March 1999" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Doug Ward", + "Voice Off Camera" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Gerald D. Griffin" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This is an oral history interview with Gerry Griffin, a former flight director, flight controller, and former center director of the Johnson Space Center. The date is March 12, 1999. Gerry, you cut your teeth in Mission Control during the Gemini Program as a flight controller responsible for spacecraft guidance and navigation. How did you manage to get in on the ground floor of a program like this? And, what was your secret?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was not easy. I had actually tried to go to work for NASA in 1962, and the guy that interviewed me was [Eugene F.] Gene Kranz. And Kranz and I couldn’t get together on money. And so I said, “To heck with you,” and I went off and I did something else. I went—in fact I went to General Dynamics in Fort Worth. But I knew I wanted to get there so bad that, finally 2 years later, in 1964, I took a pay cut and I went to work for Kranz (actually with [Melvin F.] Mel Brooks) and started out as an Agena flight controller. And the reason that I did—and that Agena was what we were going to join up with Gemini with in the rendezvous. And I had worked on the Agena at the Satellite Test Center out in California right after I got out of the Air Force in 1960. And we flew those early flights from Vandenburg [Air Force Base], and I knew something about the Agena. And finally I swallowed my pride (and my wallet) and came to work in Houston.\\n\\n And—at that time we weren’t even at the center. We were all over—in offices all over Houston. And—the best step I ever made in my life was to do that. The interesting thing, too, was that I only worked the Agena for about a month and then moved immediately to Gemini as a guidance, navigation, and control officer. So I actually never worked on the Agena in flight at NASA. I started out actually as an Agena—or as a Gemini—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Even though the Agena was a real workhorse in Gemini." + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right. And—but other people came on, and actually in those days we were short of people. There was a shortage of flight controllers. And the fact that I did know something, I had been a part of a unmanned space operation, I think was the reason Kranz decided to move me over into the manned side fairly fast, because I did have some experience. I was a little bit older, albeit not much. I was a little—I was only 30. But I was a little bit older than some of the real youngsters that we had in the control center then. And—so it was an interesting time and the best step I ever made." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You kind of alluded to this, but there really was no preexisting cadre of flight directors. There was no curriculum for flight directors in college. So if you’re Gene Kranz and [Christopher C.] Chris Kraft [Jr.] trying to put together a cadre of people—a fairly large group—to fly all these missions, how do you do that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, I think—I give most of that credit to the two people you mentioned. Particularly to Kraft in the early days, and then later [to] Gene Kranz. I think they were both uncanny at picking out people that could respond to this kind of environment. It was very unique. Like you say, nobody had actually been in that pressure cooker, split-second, decision-making on the ground. Plenty of guys had been in airplanes doing that, but there was not many people that had done it from a ground standpoint, where it had to be an instantaneous kind of thing.\\n\\n I think Kraft was particularly adept at testing people in simulations and all of that sort of thing, and picking out the ones that he thought could cut it and those that he couldn’t—that might not. Gene, I think, got better at that as time went along. And in fact, we, as you (I shouldn’t say that but) as you know, we didn’t have too many washouts in Mission Control. By the time we got to a real mission, with all the simulations we had done and all the hours we had spent together, it was pretty obvious that the team we had on the floor for the actual flight were all performers.\\n\\n And I had flown in the Air Force. I had worked the unmanned side with Agena for the Air Force after I got out. And I think I took to it like a duck to water. I—it was a fairly easy transition for me to make, because I had been in that split-second, decision-making position before. And I think the other thing that comes to mind when I think about that is how fortunate I was to be a part of that organization. There were so few of us, and we were all kids. Young people, with life-and-death decision-making capability, probably much before we really had ever been tested with that. So, it was a very unique time in a unique setting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Even though a lot of it was just judging personality and abilities, there were also some criteria that went into the kinds of people they were looking for, weren’t there?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, there was a big criteria I think was the fact that we were all engineers or technical people. There were scientists involved, too. For the most part, most of us were engineers. So it had to—you had to have a very good technical grounding. The second thing I think is the personality trait. It was as close to being like a fighter pilot organization as I had ever seen. It took a bit of cockiness (measured) and confidence (measured). In both cases, if you didn’t have the confidence to speak up and get the job done, you wouldn’t last long. It just didn’t work.\\n\\n So, I really think that at the end of the day the confidence and the technical skill was what was the most important aspect. And then the other thing is that final thing: not being bothered by being out on the end of the diving board, fully exposed, so that all your errors showed up. I—you know I’ve often said that astronauts, flight controllers, and all of that kind of thing, you know, they really didn’t mind dying nearly as much as they minded screwing up in front of their peers. And you had many opportunities in that environment, both in simulations (thank God most of them happened in simulations) but sometimes in real missions where you were out—kind of out there by yourself and you had to make that call. And, the real fear was screwing up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’ve heard stories. I don’t know if they were apocryphal or true, that early on in Apollo and Gemini and Mercury, Kraft had a bulletin board where he had all of his flight controllers’ pictures on it. And if anybody screwed up badly enough, there would be a big black grease mark through their picture." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I never did see that. I heard that story. Chris was fast to scratch if he—In fact, on at least one or two occasions, and—at least one occasion I can remember we talked him out of it. We thought he scratched one too fast." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He had strong faith in his own intuition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. And I would say 99.9% of the time, he was exactly right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things (and you also alluded to this), but when visitors come through Mission Control even today, it was certainly true back then, the thing that they would tend to comment on is how youthful all these people were. And almost in no other field of endeavor will you find young people making those kinds of life-and-death, nationally significant decisions. And, it seems to have been something that happened almost without a great deal of forethought. Those were just the people that were available. They were given the responsibility and trusted with it. And, I wonder how that felt—as being a part of that kind of a cadre." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, two things come to mind. One is, when I—when it was happening in all of that era, I don’t think any of us really recognized how significant what we were doing—it—we knew it was significant. We didn’t realize, I don’t think at the time, how fortunate [we were] and what kind of capability did we have to have to ever even get into this position. In many cases, I think I go back again to the analogy of the fighter squadron. You go into a fighter squadron today, just like then, and one of the things that always shocks you is how young these people look. And they are young. I mean, those F-15s and F-16s and F-22s that are coming along now, these—they look like kids flying them.\\n\\n And I’m sure that the—that we looked that way. Because in many cases, and I’ve discussed this with Gene Kranz, he was looking for people with flying backgrounds because he thought that skill would transfer, and there was no other place to go find them. And he thought that skill would transfer. And so I really think it—we were young. But it was the—it was a young person’s business. Now the big difference I see today, which is of course a big improvement, is that we were all guys. All men. And of course, now we have men and women in Mission Control—and should have them. We just didn’t have the skill base at that time to do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The rest of the country hadn’t caught up either." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You didn’t have the people in the pipeline." + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were right along with the rest of the country." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So Kraft’s protégés is that first tier of flight directors—John [D.] Hodge, Gene Kranz, Glynn [S.] Lunney—were all people that you worked closely with. I’d be interested in your kind of thumbnail sketches of each of those. And what did they pick up uniquely from Kraft? What did they bring to it themselves?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, the guy that probably became more Kraft-like was Lunney. Glynn Lunney had many of the same traits as Kraft. He was quick to make a decision. He was a little blustery every once in a while. Confident as all get out. And I always thought that Glynn had a lot of Kraft look to him and feel to him. Kranz was—had some Kraft kind of features to him, but he was his own guy. As you know, he—we always called him the Prussian General. He—and he had that very military bearing, preciseness, the—that Kraft didn’t. Kraft, I think, went more on gut feel and emotion and—, where Gene was more of a do-it-by-the-numbers, by-the-book kind of [guy]. John Hodge, I don’t think, matched any of the others. He came from a different—he was a technical guy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hodge came out of the Canadian—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Avro—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—Avro group." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—group. And John brought a different set of skills to the table. He was a very strong technical guy. And I think operations was not his first choice or first love or anything like that. And I think that’s one reason he didn’t stay in it very long. I think he had other talents that went to work somewhere else. And, you know, he got—I think, as I recall, he went into advanced programs when he left. He was very good. He was a visionary almost. Flight operations didn’t have much room for visionary. You had to make the hardware work that you had in front of you at the time. So I think John did fine as a flight director, but he just didn’t stay in it very long because I don’t think it was his bag. But they were all very capable people, and all fun to work with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Which of the bunch, if you were working as a flight controller, a member of the team—which was the easiest for you to work with and to work for of that bunch?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh I think when I was a flight controller, the guy that I probably related to the fastest (and of course he was an icon to me, even though he probably shouldn’t have been but was) Kraft. I always felt honored to work with him when he was flight director. But, Gene Kranz was always easy, and so was Lunney. They were—none of them [were] difficult. They were all demanding to the point that they wanted you to be prepared. And that was not an issue in those days. We all worked so hard at what we were trying to do and, as I said earlier, nobody wanted to screw up in front of the peers. So it was—the best motivation we had was the peer pressure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Kranz’s organization always struck me as being helpful because he worried every little issue and problem and communicated them so thoroughly over the loop that everybody knew what was going on—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—and it got worked over and over and over again. So the problem and the approach that was being taken was so clear." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Gene was by far the most detailed guy and all that. But he—everybody knew what he was trying to do and where he was headed. Kraft and Lunney [were] more gut feel. Strong technically also, but [they] had that guy feel that could—most of the time they knew the answer already. So did Gene." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Even when I became a flight director, by the time you elevate to that point you pretty well know what’s going on. But you’ve got these great guys that—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I never had the pleasure of seeing Kraft operating as a flight director. But the one trait that I sensed all of you had, from him, was the tendency to make the flight controllers take the responsibility for the decision." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Amen. That is what we learned, all of us learned, from Kraft, watching him. He would never, ever try to do your job. I recall on Apollo (I think it was Apollo 12), after we got hit by lightning, I was—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I was going to ask you about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Okay. Maybe I should wait—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, go ahead. That’s fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I was just going to say: I can remember, we got hit by lightning right after liftoff, and it tumbled the spacecraft’s platform, and thank God the Saturn V continued to work just fine. And I was the flight director, and it was my first job as a launch flight director. And I thought we were going to have to abort. I never will forget that feeling. My heart was in my throat. I could—but the training came through. We are—I’ve gone back and listened to that voice tape a lot of times. And nobody was ever hurried. Nobody was panicked. First thing I did was I looked at the plot and asked the FIDO (the flight dynamics officer), were we still okay? And we were gaining altitude. And I remember, flashing through my mind very fast, that, “Well, if we’re going to abort, let’s don’t abort early. Let’s get some more altitude and we’ll just punch off this thing if we have to.”\\n\\n To make a long story short: We got everything back under control. But the platform was still rolling. The inertial platform that measured your attitude in—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was in the spacecraft?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was in the spacecraft. It was tumbling. It was in a gyro, gimbaled system. And it was tumbling, and I knew that could damage it, particularly when you got under high gravity (at high g forces), that you could damage the platform if you—if it continued to do that. So I asked the GNC (the guidance and navigation control officer) what he wanted to do. I knew what needed to be done. There was a circuit breaker [pauses; clears his throat] (Excuse me—) There was a circuit breaker you could pull, called the IMU—breaker. You could pull that and it would automatically cage the platform. Stop it where it was. And he said, “Stand by.” And if you listen to the voice tape, you can hear my impatience.\\n\\n I knew what to do. I knew—I wanted to tell the Capcom, “Tell him to pull the IMU circuit breaker.” But because of Kraft’s leadership and training, and what I had seen him do in similar situations before, I just let the situation go on. I figured we were not going to hurt it too bad, even if it kept going and that. So I asked the GNC—I asked him about three or four times, “What do you want to do about this IMU? The tumbling IMU?” And he kept giving me the “Stand by. Stand by. I’m checking with my back room. Blah blah.” Finally he said—well, I said, “You’d best hurry.” I knew—because I knew—we were getting up to the point we were going to be under very high g’s. And he came back to me in a minute and said, “Have him pull the IMU circuit breaker.” And then I told the Capcom, I said, “Tell him to pull the IMU breaker.” And I was standing up by that time, and I was ready to—just about to scream. But I let him make the call, because I knew that was the way it was supposed to work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How quickly did you realize that the vehicle had been hit by lightning?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We didn’t get the first hint of it until [Charles C.] Pete Conrad [Jr.] said it. He said –and this was after we had at least gotten the power restored back in the—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you were either on orbit or close to it by that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Well, no. Because actually, this thing happened about (as I recall)—about 50 seconds or so after liftoff. And in only about 2 minutes we had the fuel cells back on line that provided the power to the spacecraft. Incidentally, made on a call by a young flight controller named John Aaron, who I think at the time was 23 years old. So we had it didn’t take us long to get the power restored. We did have systems that were still off line, but we had—at least had lights again and all that. And so, it didn’t take too long. And then, kind of in a quiet part there, Pete said something like, “I don’t know what happened. I’m not sure we didn’t get hit by lightning.” And later we found out, even after they got on orbit, that he saw a flash. You know there was a boost protective cover over the windows while the launch escape tower was still on there, so he couldn’t see out real well until—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was to protect the windows from getting covered up with soot?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. That’s right. And so he—but he thought under all of that he saw a flash. And so that’s what started us thinking that it may have been a lightning strike, and it’s what worried us. Because at the point that we got into orbit, we weren’t sure if we’d fried something back in the back end in the service module. Because we didn’t know where it had hit—and—the lightning, if it was lightning.\\n\\n We got some quick pictures out of the Cape. I think that we might’ve already even started on our way to the Moon by then. They got some pictures out of the Cape that showed some lightning discharges back down. We probably created our own lightning, is what we finally figured out months later. A week later.\\n\\n But we were afraid we may have fried something so badly that we jeopardized the mission. We checked out everything we could in the rear end on the service module. And that proved to be a good call. We went on to the Moon. We had a worry about the heatshield. And the reason that we did is because we didn’t know if it had done any—if the lightning had hit right back in that area, it might’ve cracked it or damaged it or something. Of course that played out later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, it wouldn’t have made it any worse if you’d gone on to the Moon before coming back around anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right. And once we got into orbit, I mean, we had that that trip to make anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had to come back sooner or later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don’t know how many vehicles have been struck by lightning in launch, but I know of at least two Atlases that were struck by lightning that that were lost." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Really?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of them a couple of years after—well, several years after. In fact, it was fairly close to the Challenger [51-L]. They were after the Challenger accident when an Atlas was launched in very similar circumstances at the Cape [Cape Canaveral, Florida], hit by lightning, and it tumbled—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Tumbled it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—the guidance system, and it was lost." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, we were so fortunate in Apollo 12. I—you know we had the separate guidance system for the launch vehicle (the Saturn), and then we had the spacecraft guidance system. And during the launch phase, the spacecraft guidance system was just along for the ride. And somehow that lightning, when it hit, got this guidance system, but it did nothing to the Saturn’s guidance system. And if it had been the other way around, that could’ve been a—it could’ve been a real disaster. A real tragedy. And, so we were very—we were extremely lucky." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, in fact a couple of people were in a position (the commander, Pete Conrad, and you and the flight controllers) to have made an abort call on the information you had—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—if you had reacted immediately, wouldn’t you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know we did. The thing, as I alluded to earlier, the thing that made that—and this all happened—it was happening very fast. And—but I remember I had two displays on my own console, and one of them was a display that had five circles. It was the five Saturn engine representation. And in the middle of each one, it had a chamber pressure that was read out digitally, so that you could see what the chamber pressure was. And as soon as the first hint of something—when he said, “Got a main—”—he started reading off the caution warning panel which had just—Pete did. I think it was just going crazy. I looked—I remember looking down at those five engines, and they were all still right on the money pressure wise. So, I knew the engines were burning. And I glanced up and looked at the front board, and we were gaining altitude right up the flight dynamics officer’s preplanned plot. And immediately I said, “We don’t have to do any of this.” I was thinking to myself, “I don’t have to do anything right now. We’re gaining altitude. We’re okay.”\\n\\n And you know it seemed like it took forever for John Aaron to get that call back up to say, “Have him reset the fuel cells.” Oh the first thing was “SCE [signal condition equipment] to aux [auxiliary].” There was a little switch. SCE was signal conditioning equipment. And there was a little switch in there that you had two positions—normal and alternate—and it was in the normal position. And he had seen a similar thing happen during a pad test on Apollo where he had lost all the telemetry, all the data. And they had gone—the Cape did it. He was just watching. The Cape went to the aux position and it restored it, because it put a new line of signal conditioning equipment into the loop. And so he said, “Have him go SCE to aux.”\\n\\n And when we—and this was a funny time because—and a lot of this happened on the air path. We weren’t talking on radios. He said, “SCE to aux,” and I yelled over the top of the console, “What?” I’d never heard of the switch. We’d never touched it. Never used it, out of all those hundreds of switches. He said, “SCE to aux.” So I turned and I said, “SCE,” to the Capcom, “have him turn the SCE to aux.” I said that on the radio. And he yelled back at me, “What?” The same thing I had said. “SCE to aux.” That was [Gerald P.] Jerry Carr, I think. And so he yelled—he radioed that up, “SCE to aux,” and [Alan L.] Bean knew where that switch was. He—thank goodness, because—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Bean didn’t say “What?”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No, he didn’t say “What?” He had remembered it, and he—as soon as he did it, it restored our data. And then we could see—he—John could see that the fuel cells had been kicked off line and the reentry batteries were the only thing holding up any voltages at all. And—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The crew was in the dark for part of that, weren’t they?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, they—almost the dark. They—the lights—the main cabin lights were out. But he still had the caution and warning lights, and there were some other minor lights. They never did go completely dark, but it was a touch-and-go situation. When I listen to that on tape now, from the time the thing started till the time we had power restored, I think is something a little less than 2 minutes. At the time it seemed like it was forever. But all that time we were gaining altitude, and so I figured, “Let’s don’t do anything here until we—.” It was obvious that the Saturn was steering okay. So—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As I recall, you got the tape from the internal crew conversations in the cockpit at that time. With downlink, very quickly we had those in Mission Control." + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That was a pretty lively tape." + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I’ve still got a copy of those. And they’re very funny. It was a little bit—those three guys were a little bit like—you know sometime in a car accident or a near car accident when you have a close call and then you talk about it and everybody gets kind of giddy and “Whoo boy, that was close!” “Yeah, yeah, that was—.” These guys, between themselves, Pete had that giggly laugh anyway, and he started laughing. He said, “Good Lord!” he said, “I had no idea what was happening there. Yeah.” They were—they sounded like three kids. But it was because of the giddiness of damn near buying it and getting by it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They were also, in a very methodical way, however, amidst all that going step by step—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Step by step." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—responding to the ground and putting stuff back on line." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Getting stuff back on line. And when you listen to the air-to-ground voice tape, it was very disciplined. Click click. It—I have to say, every time I hear it and I listen—I had reason to listen to it several times. It kind of makes you proud of the way the whole thing got carried off and was responded to. It was a lot like the Apollo 11 landing. You listen to that and it will make those team members should have a lot of pride over that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things that the—, of course, the press pointed out at that time was that President [Richard M.] Nixon was in the viewing stands. And there was a suggestion that if the President had not been there, NASA might have been a little more conservative about launching into a solid overcast with lightning potential." + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I didn’t buy that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That had no bearing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. In fact, I think that day we learned so much that it—we had launched in conditions not—maybe not quite that bad. But, in the clouds. We had never worried about that too much. The – [Walter J.] Walt Kapryan was the launch director (“Kappy”), and it was his first time as launch director. It was my first time as flight director. And he and I have laughed about it on several occasions, that we were—our start in those new jobs was—was a little bit dubious about our ability. I think we would have made that call any time. I didn’t—the fact that—I didn’t—never thought about Nixon being there. And I’m sure he didn’t either.\\n\\n We just didn’t know that a vehicle that big, with that ionization capability of all that heat and fire out the rear end, could actually trigger—could actually make lightning happen. And I think that’s what happened. I think we actually created a lightning strike. And from that day forward, as you know, we’ve never launched again into clouds, and particularly if there’s any lightning anywhere near, it’s a no go. And we learned that, that day, the hard way." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It was a real tribute, as you pointed out, to the Saturn instrument unit, the IBM-built instrument unit, that it withstood that and it didn’t tumble." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. And I will not forget, I—calling the people at Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama] after we got on orbit, and telling them how glad I was that that IU had—the instrument unit had held up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. Before we get too far beyond it, I wanted to talk to you a little bit also about Apollo 8 and get your reaction to what to a lot of people seems like an audacious decision at that point, when we had never flown the Saturn V with a crew on it. The Apollo command module, we had flown only once since it had been very extensively redesigned after the Apollo fire. And yet on Apollo 8, the second flight of the spacecraft with a crew on it (the first flight of the Saturn V with a crew on it), we said, “We’re going to the Moon.” Not only are we going to the Moon, “We’re going to go on orbit around the Moon.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Not just to fly there, but—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. How did that happen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I get—ever since the Apollo Program ended, in public and forums and in private, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what I thought was—which mission stands out in Apollo to me the most. And I know everybody thinks I’ll say Apollo 11, because it was the first landing. But it doesn’t. It was Apollo 8, to me, was the biggest step we took. And when we—to leave the Earth’s influence and to come under the influence of another heavenly body was a big step.\\n\\n And I don’t—I can remember, it was almost (later we got a little better about this) but on Apollo 8, when we did the translunar injection burn, you could have heard—(that was the burn that sent us toward the Moon), you could have heard a pin drop in that control center. I mean, there was nobody even breathing hardly; and it was almost like a religious experience. And then when cutoff—and the engine cutoff and the trajectory—we did a quick check on the trajectory and it was good, we were headed out, we all kind of looked at each other and said, “Well, we’ve done it now.”\\n\\n It’s a little bit like the solo you do in an airplane the first time when you get off the ground. You’re really happy, and then all of a sudden you say, “Good gosh, I got to get this thing back on the ground again.” But it was—you know, it was a very quiet period going out there. And then right after, oh shortly after TLI, Borman got sick. Our first thought was that there’s something we don’t understand about going toward the Moon or something. It’s going to—it’s going to make them all sick. And we got a disaster on our hands. Of course that proved not to be true. But it was just a—it was a—kind of a gut check time.\\n\\n And then I remember when they went behind the Moon. When we lost signal, as they went behind the Moon. They were going to do a maneuver back there to slow themselves down so they would go into lunar orbit. I never will forget how quiet that whole room was for that entire—I think the backside took about 50 minutes, as I recall (45 or 50 minutes). And nobody—hardly nobody—hardly anyone moved that entire time. And when they came around the corner on the other side and started saying—reading out what they had done: “Everything’s right on.” “The Moon looks like this, this, this.” “It’s brown.” “It’s gray.” “It’s—.” A great relief. A great relief.\\n\\n And then—but then we stayed that way. It got a little lighter until they were going to do the transearth injection burn. And when they went around that corner the last time to do that maneuver that was going to bring them back home, again it got very quiet and almost churchlike in the control center.\\n\\n I don’t think there’s any doubt that Apollo 8, it did accelerate the program. I think it allowed us to get the program going. It clearly stuck a knife in the Russians. And, let’s face it, we were in a race with them. Getting men in orbit around the Moon at the same time that they were trying to, and then later, with their Luna and Zond, later trying to land on the Moon. It was all in that same timeframe. We weren’t eaten up with that in the control center. We weren’t eaten with the Cold War or anything like that. But it made us all proud. And we knew we had taken a step that was going to get us to the Moon, and land on the Moon, faster.\\n\\n But I was not a part of the decision-making process at that time. That happened at Headquarters and at the director level and the flight—director level at Johnson Space Center. It was—it probably took place with, I’d say, 3 to 10 people. I don’t even know how many were on that. But, boy, it took guts to make that call and get us there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think—I never, except for one occasion, remember Kraft looking visibly nervous and agitated." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And that was when he was waiting for the spacecraft to come out from behind the Moon after they had supposedly fired their engine to start them back to Earth." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And of course, that was on his shoulders." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So he was—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that was a single engine had to work. And, of course, we did that every mission after that, that went to the Moon. But that was one engine. One engine bell. A lot of redundancy in the piping and all that. But there was only one rocket chamber, and only one set of fuel tanks, and it had to work. And it did. Thank goodness." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well the crew must’ve had an awful lot of confidence in Mission Control by that time to trust those sets of numbers that would put them into an orbit that was just 60 miles—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "60 miles." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—above the surface instead of 60 miles into it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. In fact Al [Alan L. Bean, or Alan B. Shepard, Jr.] said, you know, every one of them said it. The impression they had when they got a look at the Moon up close, before they went into—that they were going to hit it, because they had watched this little bitty circle get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then all of a sudden they were right up against it, and they couldn’t see the horizons even. And they all had the feeling they were going to hit it. So, yeah, 60 miles is not very far." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did they ask you to double-check the numbers?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. They never asked us to double check. I can recall, and I think it was Apollo 14 and I think it was [Edgar D.] Ed Mitchell that said something about, “You guys, you sure you’re right with those numbers?” or something like that. He meant it as a joke. But I think the message was there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As I recall from the questions at the time, the crew didn’t really get a good visual look at the Moon until they got very close to it because of the—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—attitude of the spacecraft." + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s exactly right. They didn’t see—they saw it fairly far out. And then once they started getting closer and they got into position with the injection burn and all that, they didn’t see much of it. And so it was a leap of faith that we had any—.\\n\\n You know, a lot of people don’t understand. I’ve explained this to folks that this problem was a little bit like a shooting a shotgun, shooting a clay pigeon moving across in front of him. That the Moon was in orbit, and our vehicle, we actually had to aim out this way and let the two collide. Rendezvous, if you will. And it just—intuitively you think there could be a lot of room for error. And it turns out that we had learned early on in Ranger and some of those Voyagers and things like that—Well, Voyager came later, but—some of the Ranger stuff they had done. We’d figured out pretty early that we could navigate to the Moon. And—but it—I’m sure some of them thought that we were going to hit it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It’s no longer precise, but once you were in orbit it was a little different question. Because you didn’t understand the lunar gravity that well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right. The lunar gravity is not consistent, caused by these concentrations of masses [mascons]. And we did see some early indications that we didn’t understand the Moon’s gravitational pull as well as we thought we had. But we learned what those were later and refined it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Before we get completely away from Gemini, that program seemed to have a tremendous bearing on the success of Apollo. And I’d like to get your thoughts on what you and the flight control team and the astronauts, the operations team, got out of Gemini that made Apollo successful." + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know I actually heard, and I suppose somebody thought it out this way. But, when I look back at Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, I think we could have just as easily called them all Apollo. It was actually one program. The Mercury capsule—and it really was a capsule—all it—about all it did, it says that you can put a man in orbit; you could put a person in a pressurized volume; he can eat, sleep; and that was about all Mercury did. It was getting through the atmosphere and landing.\\n\\n Gemini was just kind of a slightly bigger version of that same thing except we learned not only how to stay in orbit longer, but we learned how to rendezvous. And we learned how to do an EVA, an extravehicular activity. You could go outside a spacecraft and do work. So, when you think of Mercury, Gemini—it was really then this precursor to a real command module of different—a real working environment.\\n\\n By that time, we had done the major task it was going to take to go to the Moon. We had done EVA. We had done rendezvous. And we had stayed in space long enough that we knew the 10-day mission told us we were okay. So Gemini, I think, was a—and Mercury ended just about the time I got here. I think they had—I can’t remember when MA-9 [Mercury-Atlas No. 9, Faith 7] flew, but it had flown not too long before I got here. And Gemini was a superb program and a great spacecraft, and it worked well. We had a little—some thruster problems throughout the program, and it was always on my systems that I was dealing with. But other than that, the thing worked fine.\\n\\n And it—Mercury had worked so well, and Gemini had worked so well, and they were both built by a contractor that was not building the Apollo command module and service module. And I can recall one of the interesting transitions from Gemini into Apollo was wondering whether we had a contractor that knew how to build spacecraft. Because the only one that had ever flown had been built by McDonnell Douglas and—McDonnell at that time. And so—and—but that proved to be—gosh I can remember on Apollo 7, when we finally flew the first mission, it was clear that that was a fine piece of machinery and it worked extremely well.\\n\\n The fire had obviously set us back. That was no fault of that module. It could’ve happened in Gemini. Or it could’ve happened in Mercury even, because we were flying the same kind of pressurized system, 100% oxygen. And we got kind of faked out, I think, in those two early programs. And we were going right on with Apollo, just like we had always done.\\n\\n I think the flight hardware that we went to the Moon with was just outstanding. The lunar module, [an] outstanding piece of hardware. And it really came to its fore not only when it landed, but when it pulled us out of the fire on Apollo 13. Had it not been for the lunar module, we would’ve lost that crew.\\n\\n And, so, I think all those programs fit together in a nice integrated kind of fashion. And I—like I say, I assume somebody sat down and thought through all of that before we did it. We—at the time we were pulling it off, it all felt kind of like we were just doing the next step and the next step. And I’m sure somebody was back there saying, “Yeah, this is going to all fit this big puzzle before it’s over.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It certainly all fit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It did." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I don’t know if somebody planned it that way or not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A couple of the things that Gemini advanced, of course, was the rendezvous (as you mentioned) and the spacewalking, EVA." + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But both of those were not without their difficulties in Gemini and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—those repairs that were called for, rendezvous was almost counter to it—what needed to be done." + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And there—once people understood what was going on they said, “Well, of course” and [Sir Isaac] Newton—cited Newton’s Laws of Motion to explain that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But it wasn’t apparent to the fighter pilots who were flying those spacecraft at first." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. In fact in Gemini IV, [James A.] McDivitt was trying to—you recall, was trying to chase the booster. And he kept thrusting toward it, and—which is the worse thing he could have done at the time, because of the dynamics of the setup. That—but when we actually got to doing a real, you know, co-elliptic rendezvous, they all worked just fine." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But it had to be set up correctly. And the training paid off finally that you can’t just start thrusting and manhandle your way into a—to a rendezvous. It’s got to be done just a very delicate maneuver.\\n\\n And I’m amazed even today when we’ve had zillions of Shuttle flights with all the rendezvous with the—and never one has been blown. It just—it works." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Now EVA was a bit problematic. The early missions—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—the EVAs didn’t go well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And, you know, there was a reason for that. Gemini wasn’t really designed to be an EVA vehicle. But when [Aleksei A.] Leonov did his thing (the first Russian that did the spacewalk), we kind of, I think, said, “Well, we can do one of those, too.” And Leonov didn’t do anything much except get out, and that’s essentially what [Edward H.] Ed White [II] did on Gemini IV.\\n\\n And in later missions, you know, they did do a little better work. Better hand rails; better foot restraints; actually tried some tools and that sort of thing. And so we learned a lot. I think by the time we got to Apollo, the Gemini rendezvous or the EVA work had been very helpful. But I—you know, we didn’t start Gemini with a big EVA thing in mind. It was more of a rendezvous, long-duration—longer duration kind of purpose. But we added that EVA stuff in there, and it worked okay. It was just not easy. It wasn’t designed to work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well wouldn’t Apollo have been a much more difficult enterprise if you hadn’t had the rendezvous—the EVA experience in Gemini?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I think the thing we learned is that you had to have proper foot restraint, if you don’t do any work. You had to have the proper foot restraint, and you had to have the proper handholds, and you also had to have the right kind of tools that were easily accessible and easy to use. So, yeah, I think Gemini made a foot—had we not known done the EVA work in Gemini, we would have been way behind in Apollo. And likely, you know, the first real EVA work we did was Apollo 9, where we put the lunar module and the command module in orbit—Earth orbit—and separated and then re-rendezvoused and did an EVA and all that. That went extremely well.\\n\\n I never will forget that day. [David R.] Scott in his red helmet, standing up and doing all that work out of the command module hatch. And it was a piece of cake for him. So, yeah, Gemini paid off in lots of ways." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, by the end of Gemini, they also discovered the training tools of the zero-g aircraft and the water tank to simulate partially at least zero gravity." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Right. Everybody says that the zero-g airplane, you know, was worth its weight in gold many times over in terms of a successful EVA endeavor. And the water tank, you know, we had one here. We also had one in Marshall. And they made big use of those. And it’s one of the best training tools still." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How are we doing on tape?\\n\\n [Voices off camera]\n\nOh, okay. Okay. We’ll keep going till we’re at the end of it. I think the next subject I’d like to spend a little time on is Apollo 13. And we may have dodged a bullet on 12 with the launch and getting through the lightning strike. Things had gone very well with the Apollo 11, Apollo 8." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And suddenly I think perhaps the accidents that we had been braced for in Mercury, Gemini, and early Apollo jumped up and almost bit us on Apollo 13." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. You know the thing that—about 13 that I didn’t think about it at the time. I thought about this in the later years, is how fortunate we were that that accident happened where it did. If it had happened after the lunar module had started down for the descent, we’d either have to have landed, if it had just been—after it undocked and started down to land, we would have bought it because we needed the LM to get home. We needed the oxygen in it. We needed the water in it. And we needed its propulsion. Now we never checked out the service propulsion system again after the oxygen tank exploded, and it might have worked. But we weren’t sure, because we knew something had let go back in the back.\\n\\n So, we were so—we were 200,000 miles from home, about 50,000 from the Moon, when this thing happened. But thank goodness we still had the lunar module with us. When that accident happened, I don’t think anybody at first recognized the severity of it. You can read—you can hear it in the voice tapes if you listen to much of it again, which I’ve had to do—mainly to review what I was doing in the movie Apollo 13 as a technical advisor. People were still talking about what we did—the landing.\\n\\n After the—you know, in the early stages, the few—the first few minutes after the—they knew something had happened. People were still saying, “Well, we can’t land if we don’t do so and so and so and so.” So even—the first reality check came when they saw the second oxygen tank losing its oxygen. They could see the first one losing it, and the second one started losing it. And—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "This was (what?) the second of three?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The second of three. And so at this point it was clear that the program—the problem wasn’t trying to get to a landing on the Moon. It was to try to get home. And so I think I’ve heard it said, we—it was used in the movie, even that, this was NASA’s finest hour. Certainly from the standpoint of Mission Control and the astronauts and the contractors and all of that working together as a team. I think it was NASA’s finest hour. Because it was a reaction to something that had not been planned.\\n\\n I mean, we really never had looked at that. We had looked at using the LM as a lifeboat, but it was a very low probably so we didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it. And we never thought we’d (a) have to do it and (b) we never thought we’d have to do it in a—in the situation where we knew it was going to be close. You know, when we first looked, we thought—at the consumables, we thought that oxygen was going to be the shortest supply and that that would be what we were going to have to conserve. It turned out that water was our most critical consumable. And we used water to cool things. We used water to drink and to eat and so forth.\\n\\n But it turned out that, as a—I recall, I think we had about 6 hours of water left when we landed back on Earth. So if we had flied to the Moon about 6 hours longer, we would have run out of water. And then the thing would have really started to deteriorate.\\n\\n I think it’s a—not only a tribute to the people but to the hardware. The command module, even though the fact that the service module had its problems, the command module worked fine the whole time. And the lunar module came through. And then the people and the systems all came through.\\n\\n So I really look at Apollo 13 as a damn close call, but we learned a lot from it. And it—and again it was a—as I mentioned earlier, a little bit of the—this may be a little bit of this measured cockiness I’m talking about. People have asked me several times, “Were you—?” In fact, before the people made the movie, “Weren’t you guys scared? Weren’t you guys in Mission Control scared?” I said, “No. We all—.” In fact, they were asking a group of us at the time. And we kind of looked at each other and said, “No, we were never scared. We had been trained that as long as there are options remaining, just to keep plugging and you’d be okay.” And we never ran out of options. We used up a lot of them. But we didn’t run out.\\n\\n And I don’t think any of us—And I’ve also been asked, “Did you think you were going to lose them or any—?” “No.” And that’s an honest answer. I really didn’t. I thought we could get them back. But I thought we could do anything. And that was kind of our makeup, is that we thought, “There’s nothing can be thrown at us that we can’t figure a way out.”\\n\\n You know, obviously, there—we knew under powered flight, like the Challenger, if something happened there, that was a different story. But if you’d given us a stable condition in orbit or in translunar travel or whatever, we figured there was a way we could work our way out of it. That may have been a little bit of bravado. But it was honest. We really did think we could get them back.\\n\\n And so that’s what we set about to do. And I never will forget the—it is—again, Gene Kranz, the Prussian General, coming through with, you know, click, click, click. He actually took his team off line, you know, and let them develop all those power-up procedures and all of the reentry procedures and all that. And when they came back in, it just click, click, click. Right down the line. In the meantime, the other three teams were trying to cut power, cut power, cut power to save water and everything else. And of course, the astronauts almost froze to death. But we got them home. And so at the end of the day, it turned out to be a great—it was an experience that I’d just as soon not to have had. But was a great experience in telling us that, yeah, we could handle some very, very tough moments." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You had—are we ready to change [tape]?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Voice Off Camera", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Okay. Go ahead." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay, Gerry. We were talking about Apollo 13. There was one aspect of that mission that also was a first for NASA. And that was, it was the first time that NASA management had agreed to let reporters in Mission Control where they could listen to the flight director and could hear all the deciding—decisions and discussions that were going on. And the decision was made before the mission launched." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What, in your view, did that contribute to the fact that this mission, which in many respects was a disaster, ended up being perceived as one of our greatest moments?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don’t think there’s any doubt that having the press in there was a big plus. And I have to admit that early in the—earlier in the program, I wasn’t sure having the press in was a good idea, because I was always a little bit skittish that they would take a—take away the wrong message. I learned, and this was when—way back even in Gemini is when I was thinking that way. After I became a flight director and dealt with the press a lot, I dealt with them some when I was a flight controller. But when I was a flight director, and the press in those days, of course, we had our tough guys that took us to task all the time. But they were a very fair bunch. And I think they reported very factually what they saw, what they heard. And I grew—in fact, I’ve got some of them have been lifelong friends, the guys I dealt with in the press, that I still am very close to.\\n\\n And I don’t know who made that decision. And I don’t know how all it got made. I remember, I think “Gee whiz, I don’t know whether this is the best thing or not, to have these guys in here.” But Apollo 13 showed to me it was. And I think the later missions, where they were in there and when we got to those really—those “J” missions, where we were taking a rover around on the surface of the Moon and doing some excellent science and all, having the press right there in no—with nobody filtering what they were hearing or doing and all that, I think it was great. They could listen to all of our conversations. They knew what was happening and so I think they—having them in there was a big plus." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course the argument against doing it, earlier in the program, was that you guys who had the responsibility for making the decisions might not make good decisions if you knew you were being second-guessed. You might not have a full and frank discussion of something." + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know what? You know what happened, though? And it was very much—you may remember—well, I know you remember:\\n\\n We always had photographers in the control center. We always had movie—a guy with a movie camera in the control center. And after about probably Gemini V, we flew the first—Gemini IV was when we had the control center up here for the first time in parallel with the Cape. And then on [Gemini] V, we went to this control center full time. We forgot about the NASA photographers and the movie guys even being there. You never saw them. I never saw [Andrew] Patnesky once while I was doing the thing.\\n\\n Same thing happened with the press. The first time that they were there, you said, “Gee whiz, you know, there’s Roy Neal” (or whoever) “up in there.” And it took about probably a day or two and you forgot about them even being there. So, it was—they were never intrusive. They never bothered us a bit. I didn’t say one thing different than I would have said if—had they been there or had they not been there. And so, I don’t think it had an effect at all. And it opened up what we were doing to the people I call “the shareholders of the space program,” that’s the public. The American public. And so I think it was a good thing to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Brian Duff was the public affairs director at the center at the time, and he recalled some years later that when he went over with one of the flight directors for a press conference after the accident had occurred that this individual in starting off the press conference said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you know everything we know. The only thing you don’t know is what we’re going to do about it. And that’s what I’m here to tell you.” And I’d like to find that in a transcript somewhere, but it illustrates—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. It—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—the confidence that the media had that NASA was telling the truth because they were there seeing it. They knew that nothing was being covered up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 145, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 146, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I think that may have had a lot to do with the credibility." + }, + { + "turn_id": 147, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. That was the big plus out of it. But I do add the footnote: That maybe it was the time, and maybe it was the people. I think we had perhaps the best group of press that had ever covered any major activity of any kind in this country. They—and even the foreign press; the foreign press was very fair to us. They caught us when we were wrong, and they lauded us when we were right. So I think we had a very unique time.\\n\\n And maybe that period from—I’ve often said that Apollo in some ways got lost in the Vietnam War and in some of the social change going on in this country. And there was a lot of kind of bad things happening. Unpleasant things happening. And the space program were at least these little glimpses of something very positive happening. And something that the whole world could understand and get behind. And I think the press, in their accurate reporting, caught those good parts. Yeah, they caught us in the bad parts, too. But they really emphasized the good and the space program kept kind of poking up out of the mud that was going on in the rest of the world with Vietnam and social change and all of that that was happening so fast. And so I think our press corps deserves a lot of—some of that credit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 148, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Going on to Apollo 15. Paul Gast, who was the chief scientist at this center at the time, said after that mission that he firmly believed that if Apollo 15 had been flown before the decision was made, under pressure from the scientific community, to remove Joe [H.] Engle, because he was not a scientist, from the final Apollo flight crew, Apollo 17, and replace him with a scientist, [Harrison H.] Jack Schmitt, if they had had the experience of seeing how well this team of non-scientists performed on 15, they would not have pushed for that decision on 17." + }, + { + "turn_id": 149, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. I’m glad we did get a scientist flown, you know, and I’m glad Jack Schmitt got that opportunity. It was a hell of a hit to Joe Engle. And—but you know, our crewmen, our astronauts, worked very hard at that science angle. And I think it showed. It paid off. Apollo 15 that’s—Dave Scott was the commander. I was the lead flight director for Apollo 17. And I actually went out into the field with—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 150, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "15 or 17?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 151, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "15. On 15, I went out into the field on the field geology trips with Dave and his—and [James B.] Jim Irwin and the geologist and all that. And this was months before we flew. And the reason I make that point is, is that it, to me, from Apollo 15 on (15, 16, and 17), the purpose of the mission was science, where before our purpose had been primarily to get there, get a little bit of science, and then get back. But by the time we got to 15, we felt confident enough in what we were trying to do that we knew we could get them out and back with a pretty fair assurance. So now let’s turn the focus and really turn the heat up on the science.\\n\\n So those last three crews worked their buns off trying to make sure that they made use of every minute that they had on that lunar surface. And getting the rover involved, we knew we were going to be able to go great distances from the lunar module for the first time. And sure enough, it paid off. I mean, some of the finds that they had—the finds that they had there in the—in those last three missions were extraordinary. And—but it was done with a purpose. And I think the astronauts responded to it. I know—I think I was the first flight director to ever go out on a geology field trip with the guys that were going to go on the Moon. And that was Dave Scott’s idea.\\n\\n He said, “Why don’t you come along because—” And he got [Joseph P.] Joe Allen [IV], who was the capcom [Capsule Communicator], and so we had the flight director and the capcom and the two crewmen along with all these geologists. I learned more geology in a period, probably, 3 or 4 months before the launch of Apollo 15 than I’d ever cared to know about! But it—and I still remember it. Lee Silver, a great teacher, [William R.] Bill Muehlberger, Gordon Swann, those geologists were just outstanding people, and they were a delight to work with. And it paid off." + }, + { + "turn_id": 152, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We had a tremendous amount, as you pointed out, of geology training for the crews. And yet the—on occasion they were, particularly early in the program, very hard-pressed to get the flight training that they needed done, particularly on Apollo 11." + }, + { + "turn_id": 153, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 154, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "But I think because of the late arrival of the simulators and the software. That ended up smoothing out some in the later program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 155, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It did. In fact the Shuttle mission simulator really got down to be a—I say “Shuttle.” Apollo—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 156, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Apollo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 157, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—mission simulator. (I’ll get it straight in a minute.) The Apollo mission simulator really became a factory operation about the Apollo 11 timeframe. It took us a while to get that thing to where it was going to—we could turn it around fast enough. So the training elements really did—in all those guys, even the later crews—the Apollo’s 15, 16, 17—started training pretty early in the Shuttle—(why do I keep saying “Shuttle”) Apollo mission simulator. What that did is, they started—those later crews were able to start their training cycle earlier than some of those earlier guys had. And that left them more time later in their training cycle to spend on the science side. So, yeah, there was a big difference in the training cycle; and it was much heavier toward the science in those later missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 158, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I think it’s incredible, if you look at the amount of weight of scientific instruments that were carried on the first mission versus—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 159, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 160, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—what it wrapped up to on the later “J” missions—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 161, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah, the J missions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 162, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—the 15, 16, 17." + }, + { + "turn_id": 163, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Yeah. You had that—Not only did you have the rover and all of the stuff that went with that—all of the tools and all—but you also had—remember, you had that SIM bay (S-I-M bay) in the—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 164, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Command module." + }, + { + "turn_id": 165, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—in the command—in the service module—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 166, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Service module." + }, + { + "turn_id": 167, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—where they were mapping the Moon from orbit. And that was a fairly—that was a big outfit. There was a big camera and it had a lot of weight to that, too. So those later missions were probably getting very, very close to the max that we could push with the Saturn." + }, + { + "turn_id": 168, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As we began to reach the conclusion of the program in Apollo 17, it was by that time clearly going to be the last Apollo flight, had you and the flight operations team reached the feeling that we had really accomplished about all we were going to get out of Apollo and that to fly it beyond that was risk that was probably greater than the return?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 169, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, in that day, you didn’t—at our grade levels, you didn’t think quite as much that way. You didn’t think on the global, although we were actually in space. But you didn’t think on that big basis. We would have—I think all of us would have liked to have flown some more missions. In retrospect, when I look at it, I think that we probably had done about all we could do with that flight hardware.\\n\\n You know, there was people that wanted to go to the Tycho area, because Tycho was a very fresh, fresh bright, big crater and all that and it would probably be a very interesting geological mission. And it would. It definitely would have been. But we’d have shoved that hardware to the limit in order to do that. And maybe a little bit beyond the limit. But I think in retrospect, when I look back on it, at the time I thought we had dodged enough bullets. But I really now think that if, all things being equal, we probably pushed that hardware as far as we could. And it would have been fun to fly some more.\\n\\n On the other hand, I was a little tired. I’d been in the control center for 8 years at that point. From ’64 to ’72. And it had taken a toll. We were all a lot older at the end of that. At the end of Apollo 17, I think we were all pretty tired. We had—it was a hard—we all were young and we had young families, and we were pushing hard to get it done. We were working tremendous hours. And it was probably time to have a break from a personal standpoint. And I went off and did other things for NASA, you know, right after that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 170, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well Apollo certainly had its close calls. As you mentioned we had, of course, the disastrous fire at the start of the program—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 171, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 172, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—we lost three crewmembers. Then the lightning strike on 12, which could have been a disaster. We lost, what? A parachute landing on 15." + }, + { + "turn_id": 173, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. Right. 13. We had 13." + }, + { + "turn_id": 174, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And 13, which was a near disaster." + }, + { + "turn_id": 175, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And you know we—it wasn’t a disaster. We almost didn’t get docked up with 14. Remember, to extract the LM from the S-IVB? And we tried and tried and tried, and finally got it. But we could have lost that mission easily. Not—maybe not a life-threatening thing, but we could have lost that mission fairly easily if we had not been able to extract the LM.\\n\\n Every one of them had their—you know, enough close calls that—you felt— But, in the end—at the end of the day, it kind of told you how good that design, you know, all of those designs were. Because we had a lot of redundancy. And we had a lot of ways to work around things.\\n\\n And, man, we called it all into play on Apollo 13. I mean, every trick in the book. And, you know, we ran that umbilical—a wiring umbilical from one module through the tunnel to the other one and hooked it up to get battery power to flow. So it was—the hardware was really well done.\\n\\n And you know, a reflection I have about all that sometime is that, I wonder if 20 years from now, or maybe 50—let’s say 50 years from now, people are going to look back and—we did all of that roughly in the mid-1900s, say. Just to make it for the sake of argument. They’re going to look back and say, “You know, those people created that great hardware. They did all of those neat missions to the Moon back in the mid-1900s or so! And then they did—they stopped.” And they’ll wonder why.\\n\\n I think that’s going to be an interesting question to ask. There was this little snippet of time when we went to another place, left this planet. Went to another place. It took place over a little short period of time, and then it just goes on and on. “Why did they do that? I mean, was it just a Cold War thing? Was it—?” I don’t think so. I think, you know, I’ll ramble here a second.\\n\\n But – Neil [A.] Armstrong, when we finished the Apollo Program, Jack Schmitt had a fellowship at CalTech [California Institute of Technology]. He had a little money left in it that he had actually spent most of it. But he had a little left. And we had—he pulled together about, as I recall, 25 or 30 people that had all worked on Apollo. We went out to CalTech and spent about 3 days contemplating our navels. Basically what it was, was to discuss what we had done, why we had done it, how did we do it, how were we able to have this little point in history where we could do—this was right after the flight of Apollo 17, so it was all fresh in our minds. But none of us had thought about anything majestic like that. We’d all been—had our heads down. And Kraft was there. And Armstrong, and Conrad, and Schmitt. And the geologist. And I was there. I think I may have been the only flight controller there, I can’t remember. There were some people from Headquarters.\\n\\n And it was a great experience, because we—you know, none of us had been into anything touchy-feely yet. We’d been too busy with—and this was kind of one of those touchy-feely kind of things. What did we do, and why did we do it, and how did we do it? And we all had our ideas, and the Cold War was obviously a big piece of that. But Armstrong did something very interesting.\\n\\n And—by that time he was up in Cincinnati, I think, teaching engineering. And he got up at a blackboard and he drew four curves. They looked kind of like mountain peaks. And he had them out all like this. And he had one of them titled “Leadership.” He had one titled “Threat.” He had one of them titled “Good Economy.” And he had one of them, I think was the last one, was “Peace” or “World Peace,” something like that. He said, “My theory is that when you get all of those curves in conjunction, when they all line up together, you can do something like Apollo. Apollo, or something like it, will happen. And we happened to be ready for that when all of those curves lined up.” And, he kind of stole the show of this whole 3-day get-together. And he was right on.\\n\\n I’ve used that several times with younger people in NASA who sometimes get a little discouraged. You know, “How long are we going to stay in low-Earth orbit?” And, “When are we going to break out?” And I use that story to tell them that, “You’ve got to be ready so that when those curves do line up again, that we as a nation can take it on and do it.”\\n\\n So to me, that’s what Apollo was—it’s kind of becoming more meaningful to me now that’s what allowed us to have that little point in history. It didn’t last too long, if you stop and think about it. It’s kind of almost a blip. And—but what a great program and what a great result in the American and even worldwide spirit that it caused. I know I sound like I’m preaching a little bit here but I really do believe that was the—that was the worth of Apollo." + }, + { + "turn_id": 176, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A good summation. Following Apollo you moved on to a top management job at NASA Headquarters." + }, + { + "turn_id": 177, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Interesting time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 178, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And NASA moved on to the Skylab Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 179, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 180, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As I recall, you were in Legislative Affairs initially, up there working with Congress." + }, + { + "turn_id": 181, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right. I ran—I went up and ran that Office of Legislative Affairs at NASA Headquarters. And it was interesting because I was the first non-lawyer to do that. I was—also knew so little about Washington. I knew the Senate was on the left and the House was on the right if you were standing on the Mall side of the Capitol, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. I literally got a civics textbook called How Laws Are Made and studied it so that I could figure out how—you know—brush up on all of that business. And actually my job there in the early going was not Skylab was already well along its way—but was to get the Shuttle pinned down and make it stick.\\n\\n This was 1973, and it had received its first funding in ’71. But [Senator Walter] Mondale [D-Minnesota] had almost killed it the year before. It came within one vote of killing it in the Senate. And they wanted somebody that understood the technical side of the equation to deal with the Congress. And that’s why I went there. And I did it for 4 years, and I was ready to get out. But it was a fun 4 years. And it kind of broke me—the thing it did more than anything, is it broke me out of the pack. I was no longer just a flight director. I was somebody, then, that had been to Washington. And that led on to other things that came later." + }, + { + "turn_id": 182, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were probably a good case study of the—let’s see, what was the guy’s name? Rufus Miles. Miles’ Maxima." + }, + { + "turn_id": 183, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Uh-huh." + }, + { + "turn_id": 184, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "“Where you stand depends on where you sit.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 185, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "That’s right. That’s right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 186, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I suspect your perspective of going from a field center to Headquarters into that kind of job changed quite a bit." + }, + { + "turn_id": 187, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know, it changed my—it changed a lot. But where it really changed was my view of JSC [Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center]. You know, we, and rightly so—JSC is a very cocky kind of organization. It had always been kind of a I think our feeling was, we were—amongst all these other equal centers, we were better than they are. And that’s not a totally bad assessment. But I also figured out that there were other centers in NASA that also had some very special skills, and some extremely capable people. And it changed my view, therefore, not only of JSC, but it changed my view of the Agency. And I—it was an eye-opener, that, yeah, I had worked with [Wernher] von Braun and his troops over in Huntsville, and I’d worked with [Kurt] Debus and his guys at the Cape, but they were kind of—you know, they weren’t like [Dr. Robert R.] Gilruth. And—so it changed my perspective of the Agency.\\n\\n And then I went on to be the deputy director at—in the desert at Dryden, and then the deputy director at the Cape. And I think was really fortunate to have those experiences before I came back here to be a center director, because then I really did have—I felt like I had—and I still feel like I’ve got a good feel for the Agency and what they do at different centers. And it was just educational." + }, + { + "turn_id": 188, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How would you characterize the centers and Headquarters that you had direct dealings with as far as their personality or their culture?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 189, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "By far the most (what word do I use here?) kind of snooty—JSC came across as a pretty snooty bunch. And of course I knew all the people, and I could—I was able to soften some of that a little bit. But we—you know, the—we were kind of like the Yankees. We had—we’d won a bunch of pennants in a row. I think the other centers chafed a bit because JSC quite often got the ink, got the coverage, and quite often it was the Cape or Marshall that was maybe strongly behind something that had worked very well. But JSC was where the press really came and camped out. Now they camped out at the Cape, too. But that became pretty much of a launch system thing, and then it was done, and then they all came over here and were here for the duration of the mission. This was where the astronauts lived and trained and blah blah blah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 190, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 191, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But I found the other centers—and JSC wasn’t bad, I probably overstated that a little bit—but the other centers did resent (and I suspect there’s still of that there)—did resent JSC’s stature amongst the Agency waterfall, if you will. It always seemed like JSC was up here and the others were kind of catching the dribbles. But I really do think that at the end of the day, what I learned is that all of the NASA centers had these unique skills.\\n\\n I mean, I went to JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California] for the first time after I had gotten up there, and I was—you know, they got control centers and they go to places like Saturn and those—places like that we hadn’t been at JSC. I went to Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] and looked at some of the simulation capability they had there with big airplane stuff and spacecraft. They do the Shuttle now. Every center had its – Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia], my gosh! You know the capability those guys had back at Langley was just—I’d never seen it. I’d never been there.\\n\\n And—so I think all of them were—the center directors were an interesting group, as you know. Most of them are—got fairly big egos. And some of them are easy to work with and some of them aren’t. And I’ve worked with some that were almost impossible, and I won’t name them all. But—and then some that were pretty easy. I had a real easy connection, obviously, to JSC when I was up there because this was where I grew up. So—and I—it took me a little while to get into the Huntsville crowd and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 192, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you came back in ’82 as center director, did you have any plan in mind? Or did you consciously try to change the center’s culture?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 193, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. I knew that would not be anything that could take place overnight, and I knew it was not something that in the time that I had, which I didn’t know how long I would have, but I knew I could not change it entirely. But I did try to do some things that—to try to soften some of that reaction that I had seen when I was away from the center.\\n\\n And I did that in a couple—tried to do it in a couple of ways. One is putting the right kind of people in the right positions that were savvy and I could talk to; and then the other thing was just to—I got���I had gotten to know a lot of people at the other NASA facilities. And I spent quite a bit of shuttle diplomacy trying to make sure that they understood that JSC wasn’t trying to dominate all of NASA. In fact, we couldn’t.\\n\\n That came to the foreground, mainly, in the Space Station arena. And then this is—and I’ll tell the story right now. But one of the things that happened is, of course, NASA had not had a new big start for a long time. And here came this—down the Pike this idea of a Space Station. And [James M.] Beggs was the—Jim Beggs was the administrator. Hans Mark was the deputy. And then we had some very strong center directors at the other centers.\\n\\n And when this thing started to take form, that we were going to have another big start, every center wanted its piece of the action. If you ran out the numbers that we were talking about, the program wasn’t as big as Apollo, I mean, and—where we’d had a lead center to run the thing. And I guess because of my experience, Beggs and Mark turned to me and said, “Gerry, we want you to be our team leader and work with all the center directors to create these work packages, so that we could break the work up into pieces and give some to Marshall and some to Langley and some”—“so forth.” My first push on that was, “Let’s don’t do that. Let’s—why don’t we give it to one center? It’s not that big a program. It’s—it’s big, but it’s not any bigger than any single center could handle.” And I even—and I said, “That ought to be JSC. We know how to do this. We’ve done it in Apollo,” and so on.\\n\\n And that kind of immediately got read as I was trying to—back to the old—And then finally, I even made the appeal, “If you don’t give it to us, give it to Marshall. If you don’t give it to Marshall, give it to Langley.” Don Hearth, who was their center director, said, “I don’t want it.” But I really felt that it was not a good idea to break this thing up into so many little pieces, and then have a terrible nightmare trying to pull it all together.\\n\\n But I did get on old NASA 1 or NASA 2, I guess it was, and flew all over the country to different field centers. And I really did feel—I felt a little bit like Henry Kissinger: shuttle diplomacy back in the days he was Secretary of State. Because I had meetings. Sometimes I would have a meeting in Washington, Huntsville, the Cape, in the same day. Or Huntsville, Langley, Lewis [Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio. Now known as John H. Glenn Jr. Research Center at Lewis Field] in the same day. And trying to say, “Look, why don’t—” In this little pie we were trying to divvy up, it didn’t make any sense at all.\\n\\n You know the history of that, probably. But it turned out it was a very tough management arrangement. And I think it’s—probably still is. Although it’s better." + }, + { + "turn_id": 194, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah, I was going to say: I don’t think the Agency at that time really ever did come to grips with that issue." + }, + { + "turn_id": 195, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 196, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And the Station did end up fractionated and split up along too many—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 197, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I really think one center could have handled it. And politically, it may not have been possible to do that. Maybe too many people in the Congress by that time had gotten their piece of the pie that they—but I really think the job could have been done faster and easier if it came in for one center and say, “Get it done, and use the rest of the centers—or the other centers’ resources where it makes sense.” Power maybe at Lewis. And Propulsion at Huntsville. And so forth. Science at JPL and Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland]. And Ames for, I don’t know. But, I think a center could have done that better.\\n\\n I’ve always had the feeling that Headquarters is not the place to try to run a program. It’s too distant. It’s not far—it’s not close enough to where the action is. It’s too far removed from the contractors. I really think the field center—and I’ve said this a lot. NASA has great, great strengths. And where those strengths are is in the field centers. It’s not inside the Beltway.\\n\\n I could go hire almost anybody to do the job that was required—and that won’t—not be a popular statement. But I could almost go to any agency in the Federal Government and get the Headquarters job done. What I can’t get done is—anywhere else is the job the field centers do. And that’s where NASA’s talent is. And I’ve been to Headquarters twice. Because I went back there as a Head of External Relations. And it’s a very essential piece of the puzzle, but it ain’t nearly what it takes to run one of these field centers or to do the job these field centers do.\\n\\n So I didn’t leave because of that. I left because I got bought out by somebody that made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. So I took early retirement and did it. But it—I don’t—I still think there is too much emphasis in the Headquarters function. It’s a necessary function. And it’s an important one. But—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 198, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, [NASA Administrator Daniel S.] Dan Goldin has cut Headquarters significantly from what it was." + }, + { + "turn_id": 199, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 200, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of your Headquarters’ duties in that last tour was the transition from the [President James E.] Carter Administration to the [President Ronald W.] Reagan Administration." + }, + { + "turn_id": 201, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Gosh, I didn’t think anybody would remember that. It sure was. Yeah. That was an interesting time. That was probably as political as I ever had to get. I learned how to get political fairly fast in Washington, but, you know, NASA still had kind of an apolitical grounding. And it and NASA didn’t have to live in the politics like a lot of the other agencies did. It was in it, but not like—nearly like (the U.S. Department of) Labor or HUD (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) or some one of those outfits. But when I worked the transition team from Carter to Reagan, that was the first time I really—I felt caught in a vise a couple of times. Although it worked well, because Hans Mark was coming in and Jim Beggs, I didn’t know at the time, but he was really liked—eventually. It was an interesting time. And I figured—and I also considered it a great honor to be a part of that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 202, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What changes, if any, did it make in the Agency? Could you note any fundamental shift in policy or—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 203, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not so much in—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 204, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—direction." + }, + { + "turn_id": 205, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You know what I think what I noticed first: [NASA Administrator Robert A.] Bob Frosch and then after Bill [William R. Graham, Associate Administrator] (the guy that succeeded?—we’ll get that for the record)—Bill—a very short time before we got Beggs in. Anyway, he was a guy that succeeded Bob Frosch. Well—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 206, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well Alan Lovelace filled the gap. And then—after Frosch resigned." + }, + { + "turn_id": 207, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well now this was even—Okay. This was before Lovelace. Anyway." + }, + { + "turn_id": 208, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. It’s not coming to me either." + }, + { + "turn_id": 209, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Frosch and then later this Bill [Graham] and Lovelace were all three different [people]. And Frosch, you know,—Frosch was a very bright guy. Very brilliant sort of guy. Not a very much of a hands-on kind of guy. Lovelace was exactly the opposite in that respect. He was very much a hands-on—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 210, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He was the deputy administrator?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 211, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was the deputy administrator. And he—but he was a very much hands-on guy. Beggs came in, and the difference I saw was that Beggs came in and didn’t really know NASA very well. He’d been with General Dynamics off in other—not the space side of it. So, Beggs was an open mind and an open book to some degree, although he—Joe had some ideas that he wanted, and he kind of tried to cram them down our throat. He finally backed off of that a little bit. But we had Hans Mark, who had been a NASA center director.\\n\\n And I think Hans really understood the field center role in the—and that’s what I saw different in that—in this changeover was the fact that, here was a guy—and you know the deputy administrator has always been kind of the general manager of the Agency. He’s the guy that’s out there all the time with his hands on the pulse. And we had a guy that really did understand the NASA field centers and what their strengths and weaknesses were. And make no mistake, one of the reasons I got selected is—to be the next director here is that Hans, I think, particularly, wanted somebody here that had had some experiences outside of JSC to kind of take that edge off of what I was talking about earlier. So Hans was really responsible for me coming here as the center director. And I enjoyed working with Hans. He was a good guy to work for." + }, + { + "turn_id": 212, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What of your—in your experiences as center director, from about ’82 to ’85, what kinds of things were the most rewarding? And what were the most challenging from your point of view in that period?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 213, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know, the thing that was probably the most rewarding was the performance of the Shuttle. And in fact, I got here—STS-4 had just—I guess it had just flown. Yeah. And—but we ripped off those next several missions, and the Shuttle was just, you know we were bringing in new vehicles, new Orbiters. And the process was going extremely well. That was very gratifying. The other thing we did here is that I thought was a—kind of a milestone is that we started a change in getting away from what I’d call the final end of kind of the old style of doing business, like budgets and all of that. We got to a more modern approach.\\n\\n And I never will forget, when I first got here, and I sat through a budget session over here in the headquarters building. The first one. And it took all day! And when it was all through, I might have understood a tenth of it. It was in such detail and in such laborious line item detail. And I stopped that. I said, “Hey, no mas. I cannot listen to this anymore. We’ve got to get something that’s better so we can understand it.” And it was all a fragment or a part of the fact that the way we had reported to Headquarters. I said, “I don’t know how—care how you report it to Headquarters, but make sure I can understand it.” So I think it was a change in that regard.\\n\\n But the other big thing was getting Station off the ground. I didn’t—although I didn’t agree with the work package thing, we got it started." + }, + { + "turn_id": 214, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 215, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And again, remember the old Program Office and the A’s and the B’s and—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 216, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 217, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—and so forth, and the C’s. We got that all and I spent a—I probably spent the last 2 years I was here, I probably spent half my time on that. I was flying to every center, like I was saying earlier, and spending a lot of time on that kind of stuff. And, of course, I left—actually I left on January 14th of ’86—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 218, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Okay. Just after the first of the year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 219, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—and it was only 2 weeks later that the Challenger accident had occurred. And so I started off this thing, I was so proud of the way the Shuttle had operated. It had done superbly up till then. Then of course, right after I left, I’d been gone 2 weeks when the Challenger accident happened. It kind of took a lot of the fun, I guess, out of what I would say is the number one thing that sticks in my mind that we got done. In terms of problems, you know, interestingly enough, one of the things that I had (and I never would have thought it)—that I would have had to spend as much time at it as I did: And that’s with disgruntled astronauts. Astronauts who thought they should fly before the other guy.\\n\\n And they would run their traps as far as they could with all of their own management, and I would always be at the end of the final appeal, if you will. And, every time I’d go in, in the morning if I—, “Betsy, what have we got on the calendar today?” And if she’d tell me that “Astronaut So-and-so,” (whoever that is) “wants to see if he can set up a time to come see you,” I knew what it was about before he ever came in. And I always had my pat answer, which was: “I don’t make crew assignments.” But I’d have to listen and cajole and commiserate with them, and so, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.” But I spent a lot of the time with astronauts." + }, + { + "turn_id": 220, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Chris—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 221, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I also had some of my best remembrances—There’s some astronaut friends that—and one of them that comes to mind is [Judith A.] Judy Resnik who, as you know, was killed on Challenger. Judy was single and so my wife and I would occasionally have her at the holiday time or something like that. And [Kathryn D.] Kathy Sullivan. And there was just some really neat people that I recall being astronauts that were fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 222, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the things that Chris Kraft mentioned was that, when he took over as center director from Bob Gilruth, he said he felt that the astronaut function was really being managed with too little input from the center director. And that was one of the things he tried to and felt he had changed, is to insert the center director into some of those crew decisions." + }, + { + "turn_id": 223, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 224, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And I would expect that in your case, your close association with most of those astronauts in the flight operations realm made that transition a little easier." + }, + { + "turn_id": 225, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It helped. And there’s no doubt, too, that one of the things that—and I think we’re—and I’m not sure what Chris meant by that, but I think—I did—I was heavily involved in the policy that said this is how crew assignments should be done. And—but even at that, you would always—you’d get to come up with all the criteria you could come up with, who flew last and there would always be two or three that you could probably flip a coin, and they probably ought to be the guy that would go or the gal that would go next. And it was those kind of things where—when it happened that they would want the final appeal. But I had—I never did undo any crew assignment or anything. Because I knew—I was always briefed on them and why and so forth. So I knew what they were doing. But it was—I never would have thought it. I just wouldn’t have thought it.\\n\\n Let me say something about Chris that’s important here that—one of the things that made my transition into here as easy as it was: I was one of Chris’s guys. When Chris decided to step down, it was really, I think, a very unique hand-over. I had followed him most of his career as—, particularly since he—or when he came to MSC and then JSC. So I knew how he thought. I knew what he had done. And there were so many things that were done exactly the way I would have done them anyway. I—and I—but I changed a few things.\\n\\n One of the things I changed was the organization. I thought Chris had too many direct reports, too many people. As I recall there were 17, I think, or 17 or 18. And, I just thought that was too broad a span of control. I didn’t change any of the people’s functions, but if you’ll recall I don’t know whether you remember that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 226, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 227, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I did some things where—in trying to group some things with some leaders that had some muscle so that I didn’t have to try to integrate 17 different inputs. Now some people liked that. And I think Chris is a little more aimed that way. He likes to be that final integrator and keep all the people guessing.\\n\\n But Chris was so (let me say) kind and open and helpful when I first came in here and I came back. And I’d been gone almost 10 years, so I left in ’72 and came back—I left in late ’72 and came back in the early—well, spring of ’82. So it had been 9½ years I had been gone. So there was a lot of water under the bridge and a lot of things had changed. And—but Chris really did make it easy for me to get my feet in the stirrups and start riding the horse pretty quick. And I was very grateful for that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 228, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned that the Challenger accident had occurred a couple of weeks after you had left, although you were very closely involved with the Shuttle Program up till that and I’m sure had some insights and observations as that process was unfolding, do you think that the Rogers Commission that conducted the hearings on the Challenger accident pretty well got the right sequence of events and causes of that accident identified?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 229, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so, although I—and this is based strictly on a gut feel. I think the temperature aspects were probably overdone. I have a feeling we would have lost that vehicle on a summer day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 230, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So you don’t really think that the decision to launch in the cold was as crucial as it might have appeared?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 231, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think there was a bad seal. We knew the design was close. It was marginal, and we were working on an improved interface between the segments. But we had flown lots of things and, gosh, clear back to—in my timeframe, Gemini and Apollo, Skylab, we had flown things that we knew design was—you know, we wish it was beefier—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 232, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 233, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—we wished it was—but we thought it was okay. And so I really think, you know, they had trouble making that seal at the Cape. They went through quite a lot of detail. How many times they had to make it and unmake it. And the design wasn’t real easy to—you could make a mistake with it. You had to be careful. And then there was no way to really test it once you got the design—and then, you know, they added the second O ring and a pressure port, the easy—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 234, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 235, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—solution to make sure that you had a seal. And I think they—that it was a bad joint. And I just have the feel—I have the feeling that we could’ve launched it in July and it would have still failed. So I think the temperature thing was probably overblown a bit. But that—again, that’s my personal opinion and it’s not based on any great fact." + }, + { + "turn_id": 236, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 237, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I just think it was a bad situation." + }, + { + "turn_id": 238, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well the solid rocket motor, in retrospect, is one of those things that a lot of people said they wish we had never had to add to the Shuttle. And that was one of those compromises that came about—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 239, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 240, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—while you were in Washington—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 241, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yep." + }, + { + "turn_id": 242, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—to keep cost down or cut cost. And I’m wondering how much of a factor that was, and how much did we really understand those solids until—prior to the accident?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 243, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, you know interestingly enough, though, the solids had had—have always had a good safety—I’m just talking about solid rockets in general—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 244, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 245, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—have had an excellent safety record. They’ve been very reliable. And when we went to the solids, I didn’t think that was all such a bad deal. I thought that was probably okay. I didn’t know a lot about them because we had never flown anything with them on there. And by that time, I’m up in Washington worrying about things other than propellants. But I remember thinking that, “Well, that sounds like a—probably a pretty good tradeoff.” And—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 246, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you think, in retrospect, that that—the sense of security or confidence that people had in the solids was due to the fact that they were looking at them in a—from the standpoint of an unmanned system as opposed to a manned system?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 247, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably. There may’ve been some of that. There’s also, I think, it’s a little bit analogous, I think, to the 100% oxygen environment in a cabin. You get lulled by success into thinking that something is good because it’s been okay in the past. And we might’ve taken our eye off the ball a little bit. However, I think at the time that joint design and the guys that were assembling it were probably the best we could do. It just wasn’t good enough. And it was that simple. That’s why I think we would’ve lost it even on a hot day." + }, + { + "turn_id": 248, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. [Robert L.] Bob Crippen made the observation, I think, before the Rogers Commission that from his perspective one of the things that had happened leading up to that accident was that NASA had quit asking the question “Prove to me that this vehicle is safe to fly” and it started asking it, “Prove to me that it is not safe.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 249, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Is not. Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 250, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you agree with that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 251, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And I’d—you know, I was not involved in that decision, particularly on that flight. But—to go. But I can see how I think that could happen. We were trying to make the Shuttle more operational. We were trying to make it more of a “check it out and go” without this exhaustive set of things that we had done ever since Mercury. And I think we learned. It—and we weren’t doing that to cut corners. We were trying to do it to make the system more like a real operational system. And I think we learned out of that process that you can’t—with these kind of systems, with these kind of energies, stored energy involved and releasing it so fast, that you really can’t be that kind.\\n\\n Now, if we can ever get to a horizontal takeoff and landing and some kind of engine that burns liquids all the time, you know, maybe we can get to a more operational kind of spaceflight. But with the technology that we’ve got in the Shuttle—which is, you know, it’s early ’70s stuff primarily with the boosters—we’re—we can’t make it any more operational than it is probably today. Which is not real operational." + }, + { + "turn_id": 252, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were do you suspect the technology will go in the next 20 to 30 years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 253, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Twenty to 30 years, I think we’re going to see some sort of X-33/34 kind of vehicle. Horizontal takeoff, landing. Twenty or 30 years may be a little short. It may take longer to get there than what I’m thinking for an operation—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 254, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "So that would say the Shuttle really is likely to be the primary—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 255, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "For another 20 years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 256, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—manned vehicle for another 20 years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 257, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think so." + }, + { + "turn_id": 258, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How do you think history’s going to judge the Shuttle as a—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 259, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it’s going to judge it extremely well. It’s—If I’m not mistaken, I think it has just passed recently the record for any launch system in terms of success rate. I may be wrong on that but I—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 260, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "No, I think you’re right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 261, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "—I think read somewhere that it had—it passed the Delta and it passed something else. And I think now it is the most successful of any vehicle ever—that’s ever been launched. It’s got the most—it’s got the highest success rate. And I don’t know how you can get any better than that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 262, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think the criticism that will probably continue to be leveled against it is that it didn’t meet its promise. NASA at one point was saying, “It will fly 60 times a year and reduce the cost by an order of magnitude.” And we just didn’t do that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 263, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Let me—I’ve got a theory on that. Because I was in the middle of that. And I remember when those claims were being made and it was mostly in Washington. And I remember kind of, “Whoa!” You know. “I wonder if they really think that’s right?” Because I—by the time I got in there, ’71 is when they got the first funding, I got there in April of ’73, and I had not been—I had been flying Apollo, so I hadn’t been worrying too much about the Shuttle. But I thought, “Boy that is a big leap!” You know, “I wonder—” I remember thinking to myself, “Can we do that?”\\n\\n But I even—you know, I listened to all those guys come in up there and say they—yeah, they could—But it really was, I believe, a primarily Headquarters-driven political message that—And not that they did it—they thought they really could do it. But you didn’t hear the—you didn’t hear the guys in the field centers standing before the American public saying we were going to fly this thing, you know, as many times and as easy as we could. But I think everybody just assumed that we could make it a lot easier.\\n\\n And it was not trying to mislead anybody that they—this system should be able to be better than the old Saturn. And, indeed, it is. But it never could—from the get-go, it was never going to get to where the people were claiming it would do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 264, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well the Shuttle was designed by the Apollo team, really, at the peak of that team’s capabilities and accomplishments. Do you think that maybe that contributed to a sense of overconfidence in what they could do?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 265, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably. I think it probably did. And in the thing that is kind of the—at the footnote to that is, is that there wasn’t anybody else in the country that could’ve done it. Those were the people that had the skill to do it. And so, I don’t really fault—I think they thought they could change this thing an order of magnitude. And what they did is changed it, you know, about 10 to 20 or maybe even 50%. But they couldn’t get the order of magnitude that they thought they could. And, I mean, I got eaten up with the same story. I heck, I was up there telling people on the [Capitol] Hill, “Oh yeah, we can fly the—” you know, “I guess we can. So let’s do it.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 266, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, there were also political and legislative tradeoffs that were made that changed the ability to do that. And I’m not sure those ever got factored in." + }, + { + "turn_id": 267, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. That’s right. And—but if—and I wasn’t—in the—as I said earlier, right in the middle of that fray in Washington. I don’t think anybody was trying to intentionally mislead anybody. We really thought we could do it. And it turned out—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 268, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "One of the reporters that you’ll remember well, Bill Hines, wrote an article at about that time pointing out that the numbers that NASA was using were “bogus,” as he put it. He compared it to the supersonic transport. He said, “The supersonic transport looks great. But only if you build enough of them and fly enough flights did it get—you get the cost down.” And he predicted the same thing would happen with the Shuttle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 269, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 270, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And unfortunately, I think he was right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 271, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 272, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I’ve got one other thought along those lines: Gilruth and Kraft really in a way had a kind of a paradoxical concept of returning to the Moon, as I remember it. Gilruth said that “People will never realize how difficult it was to do it the first time until they try to do it again.”" + }, + { + "turn_id": 273, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 274, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Kraft has said repeatedly that “We won’t do it again until it’s easy.” And in a way, you know, I wonder if both of those could be right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 275, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They—I—that was my—going to be my reaction. I think, you know, in a way they’re both right. I can see the point. But, it—you stop and think about what it takes to get to the Moon, and it is kind of mind-boggling. It—how much energy you have to add. If you take any—of anything of any size out there it—there’s a lot of energy that has to be added in a fairly short period of time, which is always dangerous. And then so many things can go wrong. And you’re out there 250,000 miles from Earth, and what you’ve got is all you’ve got with you at the time.\\n\\n And—on the other hand, I do think there are some—the technology today would probably make it no harder to do than what we did in Apollo. And it would probably make it easier. I think we can make some things lighter. We can make some things a little more capable of fault-tolerance and that sort of thing. So, I think we’re going—we will go back to the Moon. And—when those curves get in the right perspective again. But it’s—I don’t see what’s going to drive us to do it right now. That’s the thing that’s—I think, there’s nothing to make it happen. There’s nothing to push it.\\n\\n And maybe we shouldn’t go back. Maybe we ought to go on to Mars. Now you talk about a tough mission. I mean that’s a really tough one. But if we would undertake that one and with the resolve to get it done, I’m sure we could do it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 276, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned earlier on the psychological impact of making a fairly short burn in Earth orbit that commits you to going to the Moon." + }, + { + "turn_id": 277, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 278, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was that about a 4-minute burn?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 279, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah. As I recall, I think it was about 4 minutes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 280, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How much longer of a burn would you have to have to commit you to a 2-year trip to Mars? Not much?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 281, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Not a lot. Not a lot more energy. It just takes you longer." + }, + { + "turn_id": 282, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 283, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 284, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "The trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 285, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The trip." + }, + { + "turn_id": 286, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 287, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And, the last numbers I’ve seen, they’ve got that down to about a 10-month transit time each direction, with certain assumptions. And, so who knows? Maybe that—maybe that’s what we’ll do next." + }, + { + "turn_id": 288, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It would be a psychological—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 289, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It would." + }, + { + "turn_id": 290, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "—effect to see the Earth diminish to a point of light." + }, + { + "turn_id": 291, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 292, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah." + }, + { + "turn_id": 293, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It would take 20 minutes just to get a conversation out there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 294, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yeah. I think that that’s enough." + }, + { + "turn_id": 295, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, this is excellent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 296, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Did you—?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 297, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I appreciate your inviting me to be a part of this." + }, + { + "turn_id": 298, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Doug Ward", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Well, we may want to get you back. We’ll look over the transcripts and think of what we should have asked and didn’t." + }, + { + "turn_id": 299, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Gerald D. Griffin", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Be glad. Be glad to do that." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00323", + "metadata": { + "category": "JSC Oral History Project", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/KohrsRH/kohrsrh.htm", + "original_file_name": "KohrsRH_1-20-99.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/KohrsRH/KohrsRH_1-20-99.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "location_date": "Kirkland, Washington – 20 January 1999" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Carol Butler", + "Summer Chick Bergen" + ], + "respondents": [ + "Richard H. Kohrs" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is January 20, 1999. This is an oral history with Richard Kohrs in the Kistler Aerospace Corporation offices in Kirkland, Washington. The interview is being conducted by Carol Butler, assisted by Summer Chick Bergen, for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.\\n\\n Thank you for joining us today and taking time to talk with us." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Fine. It will be a pleasure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thank you. To begin with, let's start back when you first became involved with aerospace. What sparked your interest in going into aviation?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I started back in 1953, working at McDonnell Aircraft [Corporation] in St. Louis [Missouri]. I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis. My three summers in college, I worked in a summer job. When I got out of college in '56, I went back to McDonnell, primarily working on airplanes—the Phantom. After about four years of that, they moved me into an advanced design group, which worked on proposals. McDonnell had the Mercury Program, had the Gemini Program. We were bidding on the Apollo Program, and we worked on that proposal.\\n\\n McDonnell lost, and North American won, which then became Rockwell, now became Boeing. Then the Manned Spacecraft Center [Houston, Texas], as it was called then, was looking to build up, and they got a lot of their employees from the losing contractors. If you go back to people like Aaron Cohen, etc., you'll find that they were at General Dynamics and had worked on the Apollo proposal. A number of us at McDonnell had worked on the proposal. When those companies lost, people who were really interested in going into the space program took the opportunity to join NASA, because NASA had a big recruiting program going to staff the Johnson Space Center, which was then called the Manned Spacecraft Center.\\n\\n So that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to get into aerospace and out of the aircraft side of the house, so it was a great opportunity. They were hiring. There were some niches. My background had been what we called system engineering and integration, which I was working on the proposal, so I went down into the Apollo Program Office, into their—I think they called it system engineering back then. One of the guys I worked with at McDonnell, Bob [Robert] Battey, we had worked together at McDonnell, he went before I did to Houston, and he kind of recruited me to come down in January of '63.\\n\\n So I worked in the Apollo office for ten years, till '73, primarily in system engineering. Primarily what I…did, they had something called a Spacecraft Operational Data Book, which was the document that the program office provided to the mission operations people, that reflected all of the capabilities of the subsystems—propulsion system, environmental control. So I started doing that and worked my way up after a couple of years to what they called a section chief, then a branch chief, up through the Apollo Program. Then I got into what they called weight and performance, providing the weight and performance of the vehicle, which was critical to all space programs, keeping the weight down to meet the performance.\\n\\n So I spent—I can't even remember the dates, but probably, before we flew, '67, '68, concentrating on that. We had a bunch of weight-reduction programs with the lunar module contractor, which was Grumman, North American then of the command module. This was after the fire. Worked on that…almost daily, around the clock, to get the weight and things defined, primarily working—at that time George [W. S.] Abbey was George [M.] Low's configuration and control chairman, I guess, secretary to the configuration and control chairman. Worked that.\\n\\n Apollo Program, we went through Apollo 11 through 17. At that time the Shuttle Program was starting up. It was overlapping. The proposals were overlapping. So when this Apollo Program was over—I have a hard time remembering all this. When the Apollo Program was over, they reorganized the Johnson Space Center. Some of the people went over into Skylab because it was just starting to fly. Other of us went into the Shuttle Program. I wound up in the system engineering in the Shuttle Program. At that time, Bob [Robert F.] Thompson was program manager and Owen [G.] Morris was head of system engineering, and I was branch chief under Owen. Here again, I primarily worked systems integration, weight and performance. We built a Shuttle operational data book just like…for Apollo, and then I had a branch, I guess, maybe a division.\\n\\n Then about—let's see. '79. You probably have this in your history, but a number of the key people in management had retired and then rehired as rehired annuitants, because they were in the Senior Executive Service. There was a deal there for a while that says—I was not in the Senior Executive Service—…\"If you retire, we'll hire you back to be a rehired annuitant, and you make the same amount of money, but you've got your retirement already.\" And they paid you the difference between your retirement and what you were making. So that went on, and I think even Dr. [Christopher C.] Kraft, my boss Owen Morris, was in that, Bob Thompson was in it.\\n\\n We got through the first—was up to the first Shuttle flight, about 1980, my boss Owen Morris retired and then I moved into his job, which was head of system engineering for the Shuttle Program in the program office under Bob Thompson, to start with. Then we did the first flight. Then Glynn [S.] Lunney moved in. He had just finished up on the ASTP [Apollo-Soyuz Test Project] Program with the Russians, which had been another post-Apollo thing we did with the Russians. Then we did Skylab. Then I was working for Glynn Lunney. Then I became Glynn Lunney's deputy. Then he left to go to Rockwell, and Arnie [Arnold D.] Aldrich became the manager and I became Arnie Aldrich's deputy. Got through that into the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n [STS 51-L] accident.\\n\\n Then we reorganized. Aldrich moved to Washington [D.C] to run the Shuttle Program and they split the two deputies. I was the deputy in Houston for the program, and then Bob [Robert L.] Crippen was the deputy in Kennedy [Space Center, Florida] for operations, so we did that through about four flights. We got back to flying.\\n\\n Then in '89, when we had about a six-month lull there between flights, [Admiral Richard H.] Truly became administrator, or it was announced he was going to become administrator. Brought in Bill [William B.] Lenoir, who was a retired astronaut who had gone to Booze-Allen, and Truly brought him back to run both the station and the Shuttle in Washington. So Admiral Truly asked me to come to Washington, initially to run the Shuttle Program.\\n\\n I can talk about this later, but when I made my trip to Washington, they decided that they wanted me to work on the Space Station Program. So I naturally agreed, and in '89 I moved to Washington and became the director of the Space Station Freedom Program. Then did that until '93. Dan [Daniel S.] Goldin came in as administrator, Bill [William J.] Clinton came in as President, and, to me, they changed the direction of the Space Station Program to have more involvement with international partners, primarily the Russians. So, a new organization was developed and that was a good time for me to leave. So I left in November of '93.\\n\\n Took off for a year, maybe, did some consulting work, went to work for a company called ANSER [Analytical Services], which John [M.] Fabian, ex-astronaut, was CEO. It's about a 500-person company in Arlington, Virginia. Primarily I had an office that dealt with the Russian interface. We did a little bit of work for Arnold Nicogossian out of Code U in Washington. Involved with that. Since we have a bunch of ex-NASA people out here, Dr. Cohen was an advisor. They asked me to come out here [to Kistler] and kind of look at what they were doing as an employee of ANSER.\\n\\n I came out here [to Kistler] a couple of times, and they finally asked me to come to work full time, so I quit ANSER and came out here about two years ago…, so I've been here since '97, April of '97. It's a lot of fun, a lot of bright people here, old-timers, young people, and we're having a good time. All we need is dollars to keep going.\\n\\n So, that's kind of my career. I guess I worked at McDonnell Aircraft for seven years, then thirty-one for NASA, and been doing this. So it's good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sounds like a pretty good career." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I live here and I also still live in Virginia, so I go back and forth. My family's still back in Virginia. Just my wife. The kids are all grown." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's quite a commute." + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It's not bad…" + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's a great overview. Thank you. Let's jump back and go over some things in a little more detail, if you don't mind." + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Sure." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You were working at McDonnell, and you mentioned that you were working on their proposal [for Apollo]. What can you tell us about that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, proposal work, any proposal work is very intense. In layman's terms, I was a grunt back in McDonnell. I was making viewgraphs, running copies, doing some engineering work, and I really think, my personal view is McDonnell Aircraft thought they had a good shot to win the Apollo because they had been on the Mercury and the Gemini, and they brought in the same team to bid the Apollo Program. It was intense work, you know, working on a proposal night and day, kind of around-the-clock-type stuff like all proposals are. My view is that McDonnell management thought they had a good shot to win, and what the deciding factors are at my level then, I had no idea whether it was cost or technical. I really don't know. I was in a little niche.\\n\\n But I remember one thing. Originally the Apollo was going to land on land, and one of the concepts was where should it land. So we did a lot of studies about landing out at Holloman Air Force Base or landing out in Texas. Did a lot of land surveys and things like that. Somewhere along the line, they said, \"Hey, a better place to land, like Mercury and Gemini, is land on water.\" Primarily part of that was due to the structural loads and the systems you had to provide. Of course, the Russians land on land. They have retrorockets that fire. But in NASA's thinking through this—and it probably was due to weight considerations, because, like I said earlier, weight was a critical factor.\\n\\n So I think when that was all over and you found out that your company lost, and you still want to be involved, the natural instinct was to—you kind of had a couple of options, either try to go to work for North American or go to work for the government. At that time the government was just starting up the Manned Spacecraft Center, was moving from Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia], and I forget how many people they hired in that time frame, but they probably hired a couple thousand civil servants. Maybe not that many. But they also brought in a lot of contractor support. So you had your choice. You could go with a contractor or go with the government. I decided to try the government route. I was going to go somewhere to stay on the aerospace side, but it just was an opportunity that was there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Seemed like it worked out pretty well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it's been exciting and it's been a real learning process. A lot of different people. I chose to stay in the systems engineering, systems integration, rather than get into a discipline like structures or thermal or environmental control. In my view, being in systems integration, you get a broader view of what's going on and what has to happen and how things play together.\\n\\n And it just kind of happened, in those days, in '63, I remember the processing line for new applicants, you almost had to stand in line because every Monday they were probably bringing in probably twenty, fifty people from the outside. So I remember standing in line, waiting to get processed into the human resources, which back then we were not at the Johnson Space Center, we were at these thirteen buildings scattered around the Gulfgate area. The Apollo office was right across from the Gulfgate, in a couple of those buildings, I forget what they call them, but [we] basically were in one building. Support contractor back then was General Electric, and they were in the building next to us. But NASA itself, JSC, Manned Spacecraft Center itself was scattered, I think, in eleven or thirteen buildings. That was in '63. I can't remember, was it February of '64 or something, we moved down to the Clear Lake area." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "About that time." + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it was like January or February of '64, if I remember." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you did come to move down there and to make the choice, how was it moving down to Houston?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, I was in St. Louis area. When I moved, it was snowing. I drove down from St. Louis to Houston. You always remember how flat the country is. A joke then used to be, the highest point in Houston was the freeway overpass. It probably still is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It still is. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Still is the joke. But the people in the community were really friendly. It was easy to go in and buy a house, to get a loan. I remember my first house was $20,000, right there by the Hobby Airport. Nothing down. \"Just move in and start paying us low-interest rate.\" So, people in the community, I thought, were really friendly, bringing people in. I stayed up in the Hobby Airport area even after [NASA] moved down there. Finally I moved down to a little town called Dickinson in '75, just south of Clear Lake. But it was good. I mean, everybody was excited about the space program coming to Houston back then.\\n\\n Back then they had private clubs. If you wanted to get a mixed drink, you had to either bring your own bottle into a tavern or you'd belong to a club. A lot of these clubs would pass out free passes to NASA employees, that type of thing. It was fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good. When you did move down, you then worked in the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. What were your responsibilities there, your duties?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we started out—here again, I was still down at the grunt level. The first job I had, somebody said we needed to write a systems description of the program down to the detailed level of all of the subsystems on the command module and on the lunar module, mission description. So two or three of us in that office worked on that. A couple of us concentrated on the lunar module at Grumman-Bethpage [New York]. The other couple of guys, people concentrated on the command module at North American.\\n\\n Then we brought in the mission description stuff from the people over at MOD [Mission Operations Directorate], and we built this—probably three or four inches thick, that described the vehicle and the subsystems that was kind of used as something that went outside of the agency, that said, \"Here, if you want to know what the command module's about.\" The service module was part of the command service module, the lunar module.\\n\\n At the same time, Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama], who had the booster, the Saturn V, put out a similar book that said, \"Here's what the Saturn V—Saturn I-C and the Saturn V are all about.\" So we had a pretty good what we called a systems description.\\n\\n Probably did that my first year, and then we got into the details of performance, what things weigh, how we're going to improve performance. We used the terminology, what's your electrical budget, profile budget, because that was a battery thing and you worried about having enough battery power. So, systems integration. Worked those things across the program.\\n\\n We worked…ground support equipment, what do you need at the launch facility to service the vehicle. I worked for a person by the name of Owen [E.] Maynard back then, who was a division chief. I'm not sure Owen's still around." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "He is." + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Is he still in Canada or is he still in Clear Lake area?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Canada." + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was a Canadian. There was about a dozen or so Canadians that came from [AVRO], I think, into Langley, and then when they moved the program down to the Manned Spacecraft Center, about a dozen of those people came down. Owen Maynard was in the program office, running the system engineering. I pretty much worked for him almost all the way through the Apollo Program until he left. I think he left—I guess he was there through the first mission. I think he left shortly after the first mission. I can't remember.\\n\\n They went through a series of program managers. When I was there, a guy named [Charles W.] Frick, I think, was the program manager, and then before the fire, Joe [Joseph F.] Shea came down to run it. He had another guy that came with him by the name of Bill [William A.] Lee. When I became a branch chief, I was working for Bill Lee. Then we had the 204 fire, and after all the investigation, Dr. Shea went back to NASA Headquarters or maybe he went to Raytheon, and then George Low came down to run the program.\\n\\n In my view, George Low probably had the most influence on my way of doing business, because he was a real disciplined person, treated everybody fair, used to come to work probably six o'clock every morning, would probably leave about nine or ten every night. Ran a pretty disciplined program in getting NASA back on track after the fire. I was in systems engineering, and then I got involved working pretty closely on the performance, the weight and performance, making changes, working with the contractors, working with North American, working with Grumman.\\n\\n Back then in '68, if I recall, we were spending something like—to get that weight out of the lunar module, we were spending like up to $35,000 a pound, at [19]69 dollars. So if you take that today, that's probably over $100,000 a pound. Weight out of the lunar module was really critical because every—I remember these numbers. Every 17 pounds that you took out of the lunar module weight, down to the surface, you receive one more second of what we call hover time. So when the astronauts came in, we tried to have, when they got—this is probably not exactly right, I can't remember—when we got about 100 feet off the ground, ready to land, we wanted to have 60 minutes of hover time where they could look for the right smooth spot to land. So, critical was trying to give them as much margin as possible. So, worked that pretty intensely for all of probably '67, '68, up until the time we flew.\\n\\n So I spent a lot of time working on that and, as I said earlier, working on the—back there we called it the Apollo Spacecraft Operational Data Book. That involved getting signatures. Dr. Kraft, who was…[head of Mission Operations] then, and George Low, who was running the program, insisted that when we documented these data, we had to get the subsystem manager, who was in the Engineering Directorate, had to sign off on this piece of paper that that was good and valid data, because the operational people were using it to judge when they had an anomaly or they had an exceedance of a temperature or something, they wanted to have the best data on how the equipment really performed. The tendency back then was for the contractor to say, \"Read the spec.\" I mean to spec. But in reality, when they went through their test programs and stuff, they found out that, like a black box wouldn't fail at 100 degrees temperature, it might fail at 120 or higher, and that was key to the operations people having that kind of data to do the better planning.\\n\\n So, doing that, we got a lot of interfaces. I had a group of probably four or five civil servants. Back then our contractor that was supporting us was TRW [Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge], both for weight, performance, and doing these data book, running around trying to get people to agree on the right set of real performance criteria. Put in a lot of time, it was a lot of fun, learned a lot, met a lot of different people throughout the Center, the contractors. So it was a good experience. So I did that.\\n\\n Then once we started flying, the group I was in got into the lunar landing, where we were going to land the different missions. I don't know if you've talked to Jack [John R.] Sevier or not. Jack Sevier, back in those days…did all the planning with the geologists and looking at lunar mapping from previous missions, trying to decide where we should go in each subsequent mission. Jack and I were office mates. He was critical to making that happen, and I supported Jack Sevier in that. I think Jack Sevier still works in Houston, works for USRA [Universities Space Research Association], I think, in Houston. He was working over as kind of the number-two person over at that building out there where the Lunar [and Planetary] Institute used to—the old building. Then they moved to a new building. I think they moved over somewhere. I think he's still part of that. He'd be an interesting person to talk to. He's got a lot of interfaces with the science side of the house, of choosing which landing sites to go to. I supported Jack in that.\\n\\n Another interesting thing I did which was kind of a lark—and I still have some pictures, but they're back in Virginia—the first Apollo 11 did not have a lunar rover vehicle, it was just get on the moon and stay there a day and come back. Then we built something called a lunar rover, which was built at Marshall and, of course, driven by the astronauts. So, somewhere along the line they said, \"The thing we need to do is we need to build a simulator, a ground simulator, not an electronic simulator, where we can drive the rover around over rocks and things.\"\\n\\n So we decided to do that at Kennedy Space Center behind what then was the old crew quarters building. What we wound up doing, we went to—I think it's North Carolina or South Carolina, and we got one type of rock, and we loaded up about ten railroad cars full of rock. Then we went to Flagstaff in Arizona, I think, somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico, and brought about another ten carloads of rock down to the Kennedy Space Center. I remember it was the July Fourth weekend, probably in '64 or '65, and we were down there at Kennedy unloading this rock. The geologists came down and they distributed it around this area we carved out of the underbrush, and actually brought down a lunar rover trainer. They would go out and simulate driving up to a rock formation, jumping out, doing their thing like they were on the moon, and getting on with it.\\n\\n Well, about five years after the Apollo Program was over, I was down at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], and I said, \"I'm going to go find this.\" Well, it turned out it had all been overgrown with underbrush. Nobody took care of it, probably for no reason. And now when they built the new process facility at the Cape, the Space Station process facility, that's where they built it. But there are very few pictures of that around. I've still got some pictures back in my boxes in Virginia that show that.\\n\\n But Jack Sevier was key to doing that, and I worked with Jack setting it up, and the geologists from—I forget. I guess the U.S. Geological Survey [USGS]. There were a couple of geologists that were working on that, which Jack knows who they are. I can't remember their names. But that was an interesting side. It took us about—we did it pretty quick, because once they decided they wanted to do this, we kind of said, \"Well, where's the best place to get rock?\" Granite rock came out of South or North Carolina, and the more porous rock, shale-type rock, came out of the Flagstaff area somewhere, I think. It was an interesting side to not working engineering details, but working some real simulation-type work. So it was one of the things I remember that was interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very interesting and important. They need to be able to practice those. Every little bit. You mentioned the rover and you mentioned the systems engineering. While the missions were going on, were you involved in any way in operations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, back then, started out for the first lunar mission—I guess they still do this even today, but the program office had a room over in Building 45 called the MER, Mission Evaluation Room, which had the subsystem managers in it, headed by—at that time it was Don [Donald D.] Arabian headed it up, and program office people would sit in there.\\n\\n Then over in the Control Center, they had a room called—I can't remember the name, but what the room consisted of is when the people in the Control Center wanted to talk to the people over in Building 45, they wanted to make sure that any questions and stuff that filtered through would go through management of the program office. So they had a back room over there… In that room were some senior mission operations people, MOD people, and then program office people. Aaron Cohen, who was head of the command module, that's where he spent his time during the mission. Owen Morris was head of the lunar module then. He would spend his time there. They had the contractor reps from Grumman in that room… If you saw Apollo 13, they kind of depicted that room a little bit.\\n\\n The first mission, I worked in the MER. The subsequent missions, I was in that room over in Mission Control Center. It was a backup support room where the interface between MOD and the program office. We worked shifts. It varied. Sometimes we worked twelve-hour shifts. I think we basically got down to three shifts, the guys kind of synching up with the missions operations team. So, during the missions we would serve a shift over there. Primarily the kind of questions you got related back to this operational data book, or if there was some anomaly that happened or some failure, then the subsystem managers and people were trying to work—not trying—were working workarounds, how to solve problems.\\n\\n We did that same through the Shuttle Program. Up until the time I left in '89, we were still doing—I think they still do that. I think they still have, every morning at eight o'clock, they have these management team meetings to review what happened and tie that all together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Seems like a good system." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it worked, and I think some highly competition between the MOD people, the E&D [Engineering and Development] people, and program office people, I used the word, were arbitrators in some cases, and sometimes emotions got high and people got excited, but it worked. So I think that was what was key. That's also the room, like if George Low wasn't sitting out in the control room, he'd be sitting back there as a place to listen to the com going on between the air and ground, and working any issues that were out there. Of course, when we had Apollo 13, it was hectic back in all the rooms. Apollo 12 had the lightening strike. Joe [Joseph W. Cuzzupoli] probably talked about that. That was an exciting time, the strike during ascent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were you called upon with the data book for—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "What we were doing, I worked a shift that varies each mission, kind of rotated first, second, or third shift, primarily dealing with questions and answers going back, trying to filter them out, trying to make sure they were getting worked. That was probably the right place to be, because back in your office over there, you probably weren't paying attention to work anyhow. You wanted to know what was going on in the mission. But in Apollo, we had another mission coming every—from July of '69 to, I guess we quit flying in '71, I think, or something, six missions in sixteen months, something like that, so it was pretty ambitious." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very ambitious schedule." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A lot of people back there didn't really take vacations, that I can remember. People were pretty devoted to keeping things going, doing their job. It was good times. Good times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when Apollo 11 landed on the moon?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I had just worked a shift over in the MER and had gone home about eleven o'clock at night. As I remember now, my kids were pretty young. They had been in bed. But I think we landed on the moon about eight o'clock at night or something like that, but we didn't go out—I may not have this right, but we didn't go out until about two or three o'clock in the morning Houston time. So I'd gone to bed, set the alarm, got up, put my little camera at the TV, and recorded it on my—then it wasn't a videocamera, it was just an 8-millimeter camera. Somewhere I've still got that. There's a lot better pictures around, but it's something we just did. And woke the kids up so they could watch it.\\n\\n So I went back, went to work the next day, we were working shift. Exciting times. Exciting times." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Very. You mentioned Apollo 12, the lightening strike, and Apollo 13. Apollo 12, of course, was worked on pretty quickly and pulled together, but Apollo 13 took many days of hard work. Can you tell us about the atmosphere at the time and how everyone was doing and what they were doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, here again, I think everybody jumped in and wanted to solve, wanted to get the crew back. Lots of stories about who did what. I at that time was in this backup room over there and was working issues and trying to make sure we had the right people doing the right thing. So I think the people in the Mission Evaluation Room, led by Don Arabian, in terms of fixes and the E&D team, of how you route the plumbing and get the cooling and trying to stabilize the vehicle, did an outstanding job. The Gene [Eugene F.] Kranzes, the Glynn Lunneys in mission operation, their team, just unbelievable. Everybody just jumped in and wanted the right thing to happen, so it was great." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Everybody just pulled together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "People probably worked twenty hours a day back then, even they overlapped and had shifts. And…it was orchestrated by the flight directors. I can't remember the third flight director, but Gene Kranz was, I think, the lead, and Lunney was also in there as a lead. I can't remember if the third one was Pete [M. P.] Frank [III] or—I just can't remember. Two guys. Of course, I went to work for Lunney a few years after that. He was head of the Shuttle Program Office after the first flight." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Luckily it all worked out and they got back safely, thanks to everyone's hard work. As the Apollo Program came to a close, you then moved into working on the Space Shuttle Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Were there any thoughts at that time, with the transition, seeing the end of the era of landing on the moon, and then moving into the new with the Space Shuttle, any thoughts that really struck you at the time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think the thing that disappointed a number of people, including myself, is we were going to go Apollo 18. We had three more lunar modules and three more command modules. So we landed, what, five times, and Apollo 17 had the geologist, Jack [Harrison H.] Schmitt, on. I think they had appointed crews for the next mission, but the budget crunch really got to the system. The reason you see Saturn V vehicles at Johnson and at Marshall is because we didn't fly them. I guess it's unfortunate, because a lot of money was spent to build those vehicles, and I think there was a lot of good science that could have been learned. But I think the financial crunch, you know, NASA had spent 21 billion or something like that on the Apollo Program, and at one time there was probably 100,000 employees around the country working on it. I think the Congress was looking to spend their monies on other things—Vietnam [War]. Is Vietnam right?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Probably right. So I think the people working in the trenches and working day to day, I didn't like getting off Apollo and going into Shuttle, but it was something you had to do because you had to work.\\n\\n The Shuttle Program then was being run by Aaron Cohen, and then Owen Morris, who I had worked for earlier, was Aaron's deputy, so when the—that's right, yes. Owen Morris was lunar module manager. Then he moved out just before the last flight. He moved down in the Shuttle because they were doing the proposal evaluation, and the bidders were—McDonnell bid it, North American-Rockwell bid it, Lockheed probably bid it.\\n\\n When [Rockwell] won, there was a lot, again, about how we are we going to organize. So a lot of the people came into the Shuttle Program, some stayed with the Skylab Program. At the Skylab Program, NASA went from like '73 to '81 before they had a launch, so there was a lot of—six, seven years there of no [Americans] in space. I think the interest in NASA, from a political standpoint, was going down. The budgets were coming down. So it was a tough time.\\n\\n Some big decisions were made early in the Shuttle Program, which is kind of interesting, which are now coming back. The early Shuttle Program had flyback boosters. You've probably talked to Dr. [George E.] Mueller here. He was kind of the father, I think, of the Shuttle Program. He wanted to have flyback boosters, completely reusable vehicle, and financially the government couldn't afford it, so somewhere about [the late] '60[’s]—maybe it was later than that, probably about '72 or '73, when they were just forming the program, they had to make a decision to go to the throwaway external tank and recover the solid rock motors, but rebuild them. The cost tradeback then, that was what you had to do to make the program work.\\n\\n Now there's proposals out there [today], to go back to a flyback booster on the Shuttle, and that's what I called a Phase A process. Lockheed's got one version, Boeing's got another version of how to do that, and it's not going to be cheap. It's going to be very expensive. And whether NASA can afford it, I really don't know, but it's kind of interesting. It's kind of come back to a full cycle." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That is interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. But I haven't been very close to NASA for the last four or five years. I still know a bunch of people and talk to them, but I haven't been active in anything they're doing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Talking about the Shuttle now, when you did first come in to the Shuttle Program, you worked in the Integration Division?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They called it System Engineering and Integration Division, and Owen Morris headed it. I was [a] branch chief. People I had—we worked on the weights and performance, we worked on what we called then the interface control documents, which is the interface between the Shuttle and the external tank, between the external tank and the booster, between the vehicle and the ground. We had a rigor where you'd develop a drawing and you got all the parties signed off that that's the way we're going to have the interfaces work. The engines in the orbiter were built by Rocketdyne, so even though it was Rocketdyne, it was a Rockwell company, and orbiter was a Rockwell company. Sometimes, if you talk to Dr. Joe [Cuzzupoli] next door, sometimes they needed a NASA person between them to help resolve differences because money was involved if one side had a change or another. So we worked those interfaces, the group I had.\\n\\n We also worked back then the basic spec for the design requirements, what was back then called the systems spec, with the system level requirements, so many pounds of payload to orbit, so much mission duration, so much power requirement, that type of thing. The group I had worked that type of stuff.\\n\\n Then as we started to build, as nature would have it, in all programs, even this program, you always have a weight and performance issue. That group went in and looked at Shuttle weight reductions and performance improvements. It cut across the orbiter and it cut across the external tank and the solid rocket motors. So we had a team set up with the contractors and with NASA that worked that, and we took out about 12,000 pounds of weight, improved performance by about 12,000 pounds. We took about 7 or 8,000 pounds out of the external tank, about 4,000 pounds out of the orbiter. Spent a lot of money doing it, but we had to do it to meet the performance requirements.\\n\\n Back early in the program, the Department of Defense [DoD] was involved to a great extent and were pushing NASA for a certain amount of performance out of Vandenberg [Air Force Base, California]. They were the driving requirement. We never quite met their requirements, so we had a lot of interaction with them and they had a lot of interaction with our Headquarters people in D.C., and spent a lot of time going back and forth, telling people what we were doing and what we weren't doing. But here again, it was interesting and something you learned, and it kept you busy, so it was good.\\n\\n Then we had three divisions in that systems integration, and somehow I think I became the deputy to Owen Morris. Then when Owen Morris retired, I took over that division just before the first launch. Then after the first launch, Bob Thompson, program manager, retired. Then the Skylab Program was over and the ASTP Program was over, so Dr. Lunney moved down to run the Shuttle Program. After a while, I can't remember exactly, I became his deputy, probably after the first launch." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned the first launch. What was it like to finally be putting men back in space?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, it was great. There was a lot of testing. In fact, we were talking about it here yesterday, the amount of testing we did to get ready for the Shuttle launch. Shuttle had a full-scale what they call ground vibration test article. I think it was the\\n\\n Enterprise\\n\\n that was the orbiter vehicle. Then Marshall built the full-scale tank and solid rocket motors. Took it over to the big facility over in Huntsville and they did what they call the \"shake, rattle, and roll.\" They simulated the loads. Didn't actually fire the engines, but they simulated the loads as you go up through Max-Q.\\n\\n Then we also built a quarter-scale version of that, where Rockwell did the same type of thing of the complete vehicle down in Downey [California]. That would be an interesting thing to try to research and where is that quarter-scale model, because it would be interesting to find out what happened to that, because it's probably something that ought to wind up in a an exhibit somewhere. Maybe it is. I don't know.\\n\\n Then for the three main engines, we did a series of tests. Rockwell built what was called a strongback, which simulated the inside of the orbiter's aft thrust structure. We took an external tank, put it down at the [John C.] Stennis [Space] Center [Mississippi], and went through a series of thirteen test [firings]. I remember we launched in April of '[8]1, and our requirements were, we had to finish the thirteen firings before we launched. The thirteenth firing, I think, was done on the last day of January in '[8]1, and it was critical to being able to go fly in April. That hardware got moved to the Huntsville Exhibit Center, that external tank. I think the orbiter part of it got moved to the Huntsville Exhibit Center, I think. So it was interesting to go through all what we call the major systems test, and, of course, there were all kinds of what you call subsystems tests going on.\\n\\n Up until the time we flew, people were still waiting to get that last set of test data that says this component was right and that component was right. We went through a series of two or three days of what they called a Flight Readiness Review—I guess they still do—at the Cape.\\n\\n Went through the first countdown. I think the first countdown we didn't launch the first day for some reason. I don't remember why. Then we went back and came back, I think, two days later…and we did launch. It was a great thrill. John [W.] Young and Bob Crippen did an outstanding—all the people did an outstanding job on that at Marshall, Kennedy, people at Johnson. I can't remember when it was named Johnson Space Center. Somewhere along the line it was Johnson. Somewhere in the sixties, probably." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I think it was either the late sixties or early seventies, but definitely by the time the first Shuttle went up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, sure, yes. But anyhow, that was exciting times. We launched in April. I think the next flight was in August, something like that. Then just starting out, we had some problems on the second flight. I remember I was at Kennedy in the launch control room for the thirty-something flights I was involved with during the launch countdown. The early flights, we didn't launch the first time, and then the second flight, I think we got down to the very terminal count and we had a failure with the auxiliary propulsion unit. There was a little bit of \"Who's in charge here?\" and \"Who's calling the shots?\" But it all worked out. It was also a learning process between the centers working together. Although all this had happened on the Apollo. It was seven years later, some different players. So it was interesting, but it worked out. People get excited and rant and rave, but I think, overall, it worked out great.\\n\\n So we went through twenty-something flights before the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n accident. I think then after we got through the first two or three flights, people moved around. I think Dr. Lunney left after the second or third flight, and some of the other managers left Johnson, left Marshall, even Headquarters. So there was some people turnover. Getting to know each other and knowing how people worked was always interesting. Different views of how people do things. I think a lot of the people at Johnson, especially the Mission Operations and the Engineering Directorates, I was on there, I was on there for sixteen years. A lot of people that worked that were in longer than that, were familiar with the systems.\\n\\n In fact, I was down at Michoud [Louisiana] where they built the external tank, and I ran into a Marshall guy by the name of Mike Pessin [phonetic], who started the original program office in 1975 at Marshall, on the Shuttle external tank, and he retired January first. So he's probably one of the longest guys that worked on one program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's quite a feat." + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Now I think he works for USA [United Space Alliance] on the external tank out of Huntsville, I think is where he's at. But I ran into him down at the assembly facility for the tanks a couple of months ago, before Christmas." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When we were talking to Mr. Cuzzupoli yesterday, he mentioned that software on the Shuttle was one of the challenges, not necessarily a problem, but just a challenge. If I'm correct, you dealt with that to some extent." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In system integration, we dealt with the requirements for the software and then we got involved with the Engineering Directorate, who was developing the software. Of course, IBM was the contractor. Always hassling requirements, trying to make sure we had the right set of requirements, always working on anomalies with the software.\\n\\n If I recall, as we were coming up to the first launch, people used to say the software is going to be the schedule driver, and it probably was for a while, but then we had this tile problem, with the tiles staying on the orbiter. So back then the comment was that the software made it because the tile provided what we called the umbrella. So we shipped the first orbiter to Kennedy in '79, I think, and then spent a lot of time working on tile, taking it off, putting it back on. Lots of analysis around the country. Langley had their group of experts, Ames [Research Center, Mountain View, California] had their group of tile experts, and Johnson had their group of tile experts. A lot of speculation on what was going to happen on the first flight on the tile, both on ascent and entry. Probably if you were a judge you'd say that JSC probably called it right. Probably everybody called it right, but, here again, when you get three different centers, three different groups of experts, you're always going to have disagreements or not total agreement. So those were interesting times, too. Spent a lot of time at the Cape talking about what's going to happen to the tile." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Was there a lot of discussion with the first launch when they did see that they had lost a few?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 59, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Lots of discussions about that. Here again, the people back in Houston in the Mission Evaluation Room, the subsystem managers, along with the mission operations people, did a tremendous job of analyzing what they thought was going to happen on entry, where was some damage. Some people will say we've got a conservative design, which was good. Our vehicle thermally was designed to fly the mission out of Vandenberg, and then to come in and do a big cross range, it was a once-around orbit. To come back in, it required you to fly a big cross range, which drives up the heat on the vehicle, the heat load, heat rate. We never flew that mission. So, in retrospect, having that kind of a margin for a mission we didn't fly helped some of these anomalous issues we had, although we did some [damage on a few missions].\\n\\n Debris from the external tank was always a problem. We used to have a Program Manager Review once a month, where all the Center program managers and the Center directors—it was called a management council. So you'd get the Center director from Marshall, Center director from Kennedy, and from Johnson, and you'd bring up a chart that says the orbiter was damaged. Of course, people would say the solid rocket motor did it, or people would say the external tank tiles coming off, and people would say the Shuttle tiles coming off. You had these constant discussions about who's causing the debris hits on the orbiter. Some of it was caused by landing on the runway at Edwards [Air Force Base, California].\\n\\n We formed a team called the Debris Team, that was headed up by Mark Craig. Mark Craig was a JSC person. I think Mark Craig is now the deputy director at Stennis. He formed a group of about six or seven people. They called them the Debris Team for a while, and then we had an issue about ice on the launch pad as we were tanking the vehicle, how much ice formed between the orbiter and the external tank, and when you lifted off, was it going to damage the orbiter. So we developed, through Mark Craig's team, ice criteria, what says you can only have so much ice here, because if you lift off, it's going to damage the orbiter.\\n\\n I don't know if they still do this or not. Back then, we formed what we called an Ice Red Team, that after you loaded the vehicle out on the pad and the ice had formed, Mark Craig and three or four other guys, which are, in retrospect, walking out around a fully fueled vehicle, had a little bit of danger to it, these six or seven people would go out there and do what they called an ice inspection, walk out there with their binoculars and look for ice and cracks. I think we scrubbed probably one or two launches because of excessive ice, when the temperature was cold. In retrospect, we shouldn't have launched the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n on the 51-L mission, because that was a very cold, very cold day. In fact, it's just about the anniversary of that, 26th or something like that. But a lot of that went on that you forget about, but a lot of dedicated people making it work." + }, + { + "turn_id": 60, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 61, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Now I don't know where they all are now, because a lot of the people back from the seventies at Johnson have now retired, Marshall, retired. We have a few of them working for us out here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 62, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You became deputy manager of the Space Shuttle Program after the first few launches. How then did your responsibilities change?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 63, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, when I was in systems integration, I was kind of worried about the integration, didn't worry too much about the details of the day-to-day hardware activity. What we had back then is we were processing orbiters. We had one, then we got two. The Orbiter Program Office would want to do one thing down at the Cape, the Kennedy guys would want to do something else, the Marshall external tank guys would want to do something. The Shuttle Program Office kind of integrated the project offices.\\n\\n So what we wound up doing is trying to get the communications going. We started up what was called a noon board. Every noon, at twelve o'clock Houston time, we would get on the telecon and get all of the parties on, and we'd discuss what work we were going to do the next day at the Cape that involved the interfaces between the other projects. We would have these debates about how long it took and whether they should do it or not. Of course, the program office had to make a decision, we were going to do it this way or that, and either I ran those boards or Glynn Lunney ran those boards at noon, at lunch every day.\\n\\n Then I got more involved with working the detailed processing flow at the Cape, because the name of the game was to get this vehicle launched on time and beat the schedule. So it was one of setting up the communication lines. They were already set up, but it was kind of helping the communication lines. So I would get to work every day about six o'clock in the morning, because it was seven at the Cape. If you're familiar with the Kennedy Space Center, they had a meeting with the Center director like at eight, so then the division chiefs would say, \"I want to know what you're going to say to the Center director at eight, so let's have a meeting at 7:30.\" Then the other guys would say, \"Well, I want to know what you're going to say, so let's have a meeting at 6:30.\"\\n\\n So you had these series of meetings at the Cape, and they wanted to know what we were doing, so I had a standard telecon, I think every morning at 6:30 Houston time. Then we had the noon board that would deal with the vehicle that was in flow. Then on every Friday we had what we called a configuration control board, but we went through changes and things that affected other vehicles that were not in the flow of the day. So the things at noon dealt with the vehicle in flow. Just about every Friday we'd have like an eight to eight, sometimes later.\\n\\n George Low used to run these meetings on Apollo that would start at eight and go to midnight, eight in the morning and go to midnight, on changes and things. On Fridays, always, too. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 64, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course. [Laughter]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 65, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Then he'd expect minutes on Monday morning when he came to work, so we'd work on that over the weekend to get what had happened.\\n\\n Anyhow, I got into this, like I said earlier, I learned a lot from George Low of how he ran a program office, so when I got into it—and it wasn't just me. The other guys had been in George Low's ways of doing business, so it kind of built up. Mission operations had their way of doing business. They had their staff meetings and things at the program office, and we'd have ours. It pretty much came together.\\n\\n On Friday, in this configuration control board, we had reps from every division or every office of JSC, plus the Astronaut Office, plus Marshall, plus Kennedy, to deal with the system. We wouldn't get into the nitty-gritty of what the orbiter was doing, but we'd deal with the systems-level interface problems. So it kept you busy.\\n\\n I was talking to my wife, the sixteen years—well, actually thirty-one years I worked at NASA, I only took eleven sick days." + }, + { + "turn_id": 66, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow!" + }, + { + "turn_id": 67, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And when I left, I had over a year of annual leave, because I became Senior Executive Service, and then you could carry over your leave." + }, + { + "turn_id": 68, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Oh, that's nice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 69, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I just didn't have time to do it. And when I was a GS-14 or 15, I just lost it, because you lost it then. Now they've changed the rules. I think you can only accumulate something like 700 hours if you're Senior Executive Service. But you're just engrossed with keeping busy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 70, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A lot to do. A lot to do." + }, + { + "turn_id": 71, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A lot of fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 72, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There were, as you've mentioned, some parts that weren't quite as fun. You talked about ice and you talked about\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n . After\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n , you worked on the Shuttle Management Structure Team to review and revamp. What can you tell us about what you did with that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 73, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, after the Rogers Commission Report came out, I think it was in June of '86, they had a number of recommendations. Admiral Truly had moved in to head up the Office of Manned Space Flight in NASA Headquarters. Of course, his goal was to get us back to flying safely. One thing he wanted to do was make sure that we responded to all of the Rogers recommendations. Formed a couple of groups, and one of them he formed was this Management Team Group, which Bob Crippen headed up. Bob Crippen and myself and Walt [Walter C.] Williams, who worked for NASA back in the Mercury, Gemini days. I think he was even launch director or something back in Mercury, Gemini days. Walt's passed away. And George Page, who was still at the Cape, retired. George Page was the launch director on a number of Kennedy missions, but he also was the launch director at the Cape the first two or three Shuttle missions. He had retired. Walt Williams retired. So it was Crippen leading it, [and] myself.\\n\\n What we did is we went around the country, first talking to all the NASA Centers, interviewing people, getting their comments about how we should reorganize, the organization we had, what was wrong with it, what should we do differently. We did that first with the civil servants. Then we went around to the contractors. Went back to some retired NASA people and got their opinions. We built a set of recommendations, and, to my knowledge, there are no copies of that briefing that we gave, that I know of, because we gave the briefing to Admiral Truly and his staff, all the Center directors, with a set of recommendations, and really said that—I don't think there's a copy around. If there is, I don't have one.\\n\\n But basically what we recommended was really approved in how we would set up. We basically said, \"Let's set up the guy and the person in Washington,\" which became Arnie Aldrich, and then have a lead person for development in Houston, and that's where I went. And then a lead ops person in Florida, and that's where Bob Crippen went. Then we had some other changes within that, how we did things at Marshall and the Cape, and how we set up these daily telecons and made sure we were communicating, because one of the issues was we weren't communicating. Day to day, I really thought we were, but when we got down to the day of the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n launch, there was some lack of communication going on.\\n\\n So we set this up, and Admiral Truly announced the organization, and then what happened is these daily noon meetings that we were doing before the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n accident, essentially, Bob Crippen and I would co-chair them. If we had a change that dealt with the vehicle in flow, Bob Crippen was the deciding authority. If we had a change on a vehicle that was coming down the line, I was…the authority. But we always never disagreed with each other. [Laughter] That would be the wrong message to send, so we were always synched up. It worked very well. I don't know if you've talked to Bob Crippen or not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 74, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not yet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 75, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He would be a good person to talk to." + }, + { + "turn_id": 76, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Definitely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 77, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was key to making this whole thing work, both in his team he worked for management and then his activity at Kennedy. Of course, then if I recall what happened, Bill Lenoir came back, and Arnie Aldrich and myself were working for Lenoir. I was director of—no, this is after that. This is getting way ahead. Crippen eventually went to Headquarters to take Arnie Aldrich's job, and then he went back to become Kennedy Center director, and he moved from Houston to Kennedy, Kennedy to Headquarters, Headquarters back to the Cape, in a different role as Center director, and then he left. He's now CEO, or president, of Thiokol, the people who build the solid rocket motors for Shuttle in Odgen, Utah. Got a lot of history of what went on back there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 78, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "In our research, we found that Arnie Aldrich gave you great praise for your role in bringing the Shuttle back." + }, + { + "turn_id": 79, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Have you talked to Arnie?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 80, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We haven't talked to him yet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 81, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We're good friends." + }, + { + "turn_id": 82, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 83, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Have you talked to Jay Honeycutt?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 84, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Not yet." + }, + { + "turn_id": 85, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Honeycutt, back then, was my deputy, and then he moved down to the Cape when [McCartney was] Center director. I can't remember exactly, but he moved down to the Cape. Now he's heading up Lockheed [Martin] in Houston. We had some good times. We spent a lot of time on the road. I think the three years after the accident, the highest one, I averaged 100 nights a year away from home." + }, + { + "turn_id": 86, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Wow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 87, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Mostly at Headquarters or Kennedy or Marshall, mainly that's where I spent time, which was a lot, but, here again, it was worth it. It's something you had to do to make things work.\\n\\n Arnie and I talk to each other. We're friends. Our wives are friends. He'd be a great guy to talk to. He's in Virginia. He's at Lockheed-Martin in Bethesda, but he lives in Virginia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 88, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Our list of people that we'd like to talk to keeps growing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 89, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He'd be a key person." + }, + { + "turn_id": 90, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 91, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "He was one of the key guys that went back after the accident to run the Shuttle Program." + }, + { + "turn_id": 92, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 93, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Lots of hours together." + }, + { + "turn_id": 94, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I'm sure lots of stories to share, too. As the Shuttle Program did come back to flight status, came back on line, along in this time frame the National Space Transportation System Office moved from JSC up to Washington. Was this part of the changes that you—" + }, + { + "turn_id": 95, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, recommended changes that came out of Bob Crippen's team. I forget the Rogers Commission, but they wanted to have a stronger influence out of NASA Headquarters. When the first Shuttle launch went off, John [F.] Yardley was head of the Office of Space Flight. John Yardley is probably the most technically capable person I've ever met in terms of knowing what was going on technically and making decisions that were technical as well as monetary. He was key strength at NASA Headquarters, and he, I guess, was ill right around the time of the first flight. He made it through the first flight, but shortly thereafter he retired. John Yardley was the lead guy at McDonnell Aircraft for Mercury and Gemini. He ran the Mercury and Gemini Programs for McDonnell, and in '76 they talked him into coming to NASA to run the Office of Space Flight, and he was key to getting the Shuttle flying. But he had some health problems, and after the first flight he retired.\\n\\n [After Yardley left] I think the strength of Headquarters was not as great, and I think what the Rogers Commission saw is that we should…[go back to a stronger headquarters]. So Admiral Truly brought up Arnie Aldrich to run it, and we set up this organization to run it the way we had recommended. So we got a lot of trips back and forth to Washington, but a lot of good communications going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 96, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking back over the Shuttle Program, it's now about to enter the end of the 1900s." + }, + { + "turn_id": 97, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Thirty years." + }, + { + "turn_id": 98, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Thirty years. The technology on the Shuttle still going strong, but it is older. From all your experience working with it, do you foresee it maintaining and continuing for many more years?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 99, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think with the improvements they're making, they can keep going probably another twenty years. It's designed for 100 missions. I don't know, we probably haven't flown it more than 30 missions on any one vehicle. A lot of upgrades have happened. Even when I was there, the new computers, new inertial measurement units, they've added the GPS, which is the Global Positioning System. I was just looking at a report yesterday that they're talking about going to a GPS INS system, which we're using in our vehicle, which will replace the IMUs and upgrade them—inertial measurement units. They've done weight savings.\\n\\n They're looking at—Brian O'Connor just headed up a National Research Council study about Shuttle upgrades, and things like going to electrical mechanical actuators instead of hydraulic, so all that's going on. So I think they'll be flying another twenty years, with upgrades. With upgrades." + }, + { + "turn_id": 100, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "As long as it's maintained. It seems to be a pretty stable vehicle now. From working on the Space Shuttle Program, you then moved into the Space Station Freedom Office." + }, + { + "turn_id": 101, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We made it through return to flight, which was September of '88. Then we flew four flights, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, I guess, and my last flight was 30, which I think may have been the Magellan flight. I can't remember. And if you look at the manifest, there was a lull between that flight and the next flight, [unclear] six months, and also at that time Dr. [James C.] Fletcher, who was [NASA] Administrator, and Dale [D.] Myers—I don't know if you've talked to Dale, Deputy Administrator—they both decided to retire.\\n\\n So Truly had just brought the Shuttle back and he was nominated to be Administrator. So he called me one day, one Sunday, and says, \"Hey, I'd like you to come work in Washington.\" So he asked me to fly up on Monday, so I went up and talked to him. Obviously I was going to do anything he wanted me to do, so I moved up. I thought I was going up to run the Space Shuttle Program, but when we got into discussions of who should run what, they asked me to take over the Space Station Freedom Program back there, and it had its own set of changes and things like that that were going on. I, in all honestly, had not paid any attention to the Space Station Program. I was too engrossed with the Shuttle Program and things we were doing, although I was, after we finished the Rogers Commission response, I was put on a Space Station management team by Gerry [Gerald D.] Griffin, who was [Johnson Space] Center Director then, and spent about three weeks at Headquarters doing that. But that was about my only exposure. That's when they were setting up.\\n\\n You've probably been through this if you've talked to some people. There was a conflict about Johnson was the lead Center for Space Station and the people in Washington coming out of the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n accident said, \"Hey, we've got [direction] from Washington, so let's move the lead Center up to Headquarters and put it in Reston [Virginia].\" A lot of turmoil went on between Headquarters people on the Space Station side and the Center directors, and who's going to have what system and who's going to build what. I wasn't involved in any of that. I was on the outside. But when I went into it, it was already—all the contractors had been selected and Headquarters had moved the lead Center back up to Headquarters to a lead integration activity up there. So that was my only exposure.\\n\\n So I did that for about four years, I guess, almost five years, I guess, from '89 to '93." + }, + { + "turn_id": 102, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "During that time you faced a lot of challenges, especially in the budgetary areas. What can you tell us about how you dealt with budget cuts and how you kept the program going?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 103, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it was interesting. I think I got there in about May of '89, and then Congress decided, about the end of May, that they wanted to cut the Space Station budget. It was—I can't remember this. We went through three or four budget cuts. In May of '89, it was like 400 million in the next year budget. I was brand new to the program, so what we did is—Bill Lenoir was also brand new, so we formed a team of people who were put down at Langley for about two months, trying to say, \"How are we going to save this money? What are we going to do?\"\\n\\n The first thing we did, we messed up, is we decided that we didn't need our international partners to participate; we would do it all on the NASA side. International partners were not happy. There were a lot of things going on.\\n\\n The other thing that was interesting, when I went to Washington on Space Station, I was never aware, but back then there was a local weekly paper named Space Station News, with a couple of reporters whose sole job was to write about Space Station every week, which I thought was kind of interesting. They merged into Space News, but there was a separate paper by one of the publishing companies. They had a lot to do with influencing, what they wrote about these NASA people not being nice to our international partners and stuff. So we went through that for about a month and a half.\\n\\n Went back to Congress…and said, \"Here's what we've got to do,\" and they agreed to that. So we went on through '89, and then we submitted a budget, always around the first of the year, back to Congress for the next year's budget, and Congress came back and says, \"Okay, now we want to cut you 6 billion out of your five-year budget,\" which was a lot of money.\\n\\n So then we went into another big review cycle about what we could cut out and what we shouldn't do. As a result of that, one of our contractors at Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland] was General Electric, who was building a module. They called it a hangar. We had to just cut that program out completely, and a couple of other things. We had reduced the power from 75 kilowatts to 56 kilowatts, get rid of one of our power modules.\\n\\n But we came back and said, \"Okay, if you take out 6 billion, this is what we have to do and the program going to slip,\" because we couldn't deliver. So that's when the program was slipping. When I got there, we were launching in '93, went through these two exercises. We moved it to like '96.\\n\\n Then the next year they came back and says, \"We're going to cut you 250 million in the next year.\" So we had another exercise where we went through that. Then got that all through. But then the next two years, they didn't touch us, didn't touch Space Station. In my view, we made a lot of progress, because we had two years where we had the funding we asked for, and that took us into the '93. Then that's when it was decided to change the Freedom Program into the International Space Station, bring the Russians in. So everything kind of stopped and everybody regrouped as to what the budget was going to be and what the relationships were going to be.\\n\\n In the Shuttle Program, we had gone through budget cuts, budget reductions that Congress wanted, Headquarters wanted, but they were kind of at the 100 million level when they came in and said, \"You're going to have to take out 6 billion in five years\" out of our planned budget. It was pretty chaotic, but we went through it, had a team. The contractors were great. Everybody realized that if we didn't do this, we'd probably get cut to zero and there wouldn't be a program. So, a lot of decisions to make. Went through all kinds of reviews internally and then with Center directors, the Management Council, which consisted of the Center directors involved with the program. So we did that. It kept you busy, again." + }, + { + "turn_id": 104, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It seems that redesign costs money, and yet they're cutting budget. So you even had a challenge there as to, \"We have to redesign it because we don't have as much money, but we have to spend the money to redesign it,\" so that takes more of your money." + }, + { + "turn_id": 105, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, the result is that you wind up slipping the schedule." + }, + { + "turn_id": 106, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How did you decide what to cut or what to change?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 107, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we did it, as we liked to say back then, we do everything by consensus, meaning everybody would agree. I always considered that you could never get everything done by consensus. Somebody had to make a decision. But we would throw straw men on the table. We'd say, \"If we do this, this, and this, here's what it means,\" and we'd integrate them through the Centers, then through the contractors, and kind of get down to the point that says, \"Got to make a decision.\" Try to go the right way. Not everybody liked it.\\n\\n Anyhow, those were not good times. A lot of people would get angry with each other because they thought you were cutting—a typical thing, Marshall would say, \"Well, you're cutting me more than you're cutting Johnson,\" or, \"You're cutting Johnson more than you're cutting Goddard,\" or, \"You're messing up Kennedy.\" You'd work it with the program people, and the Center directors would get their influence in and would talk to each other. But that's the name of the game. You just had to work it. I guess it worked out. We went back and said, \"Here's what we did.\" I think Congress, the last couple of years, finally agreed that enough was enough, and then it [Freedom] was upset by the decision to put in International Space Station." + }, + { + "turn_id": 108, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "You mentioned your work with the Space Station Freedom and mentioned that you retired in '93 as there was going to be a turnover into the International Space Station. At the time, and even now, that actually modules are being placed in orbit and it's actually being constructed, what are your thoughts on the configuration and the operations?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 109, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it's great. I think what the country needs, or the world needs, is, I've always said, a laboratory in space. It will probably help bring the world together, at least the partners that we have. So I think it's great. I think it's a major accomplishment to have something up there orbiting, actually have some hardware. It's got its set of problems just like every other program, and money is probably one of their big problems. I'm sure it is. From what you read, they have the Russian problems with delivering hardware. But I think it's great.\\n\\n I always said, back when we had the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n accident, people came out and said, \"We're going to fly in six months.\" Then they said, \"We're going to fly in nine months.\" Back then the papers would say, \"NASA missed their schedule. NASA missed their schedule.\" I was on Space Station, and we were slipping schedule, and I would always say to a group of sometimes reporters, I said, \"How many in this room can remember when we flew, that we returned to flight on Shuttle?\" Not many of them could. I mean, the fact that we had said we'd fly in six months, then nine months, then a year, then we said we'd fly in fourteen months. It was twenty-two months, I think, before we flew.\\n\\n But in the heat of the day, you know, people worry about that, but three or four years from now, if the Space Station is up and is successful, people will forget that they were three or four years behind schedule and that type of thing, as long as there's something useful happening. You spend money, but I think the benefits will outweigh that. It's going to be a tremendous effort to put it all together, the complexity of bringing in additional partners and for good reason. It just adds complexity to it.\\n\\n In this Freedom Program, we tried to keep our international partners out of what I call the critical bath. In other words, if they didn't show up, the U.S. part of it could continue and we'd have a lab up and we'd have a module up to do science. Getting in with the Russians has put them into the critical path, and that's some of the problems they've got, but will probably be overcome. It's a decision that was made, that that's what we've got to do to make the [ISS] probably work. That's fine. No, I think it's great . I think it's great that all the people that have worked on the station have done a great job." + }, + { + "turn_id": 110, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you retired from NASA, you went to work for ANSER." + }, + { + "turn_id": 111, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I took off for about nine months, almost a year." + }, + { + "turn_id": 112, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Took some of that vacation time?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 113, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I just took off." + }, + { + "turn_id": 114, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you did go back to work then, you mentioned that you worked with Moscow and with aerospace operations. Did this involve anything along the lines of the Space Station, or was this different?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 115, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Primarily ANSER was run by John Fabian, ex-astronaut who actually flew with Dan [Daniel C.] Brandenstein. ANSER is primarily a military support contractor working for the Pentagon. John Fabian had his vision of setting up an office in Moscow, trying to work with the Russians and promote their activity. When I first went to ANSER, that was not what I was going over there for; I was going over there to help them work on bidding on a NASA contract, on something else.\\n\\n As we got into it, I got involved in the Russian operation, and so we got about a dozen people. Three or four of them rotated through Moscow. But most of our support was related to the science side, interfacing with the Russian science community and NASA Headquarters, not really into the Space Station activity or into the Shuttle activity or into the Mir. It was primarily working the science interface, and then we did some other things for some other commercial companies. But small group, eight, ten people. It was the only part of that company that did any commercial work. All the rest of their work was tied to the government, and most of mine, other than NASA, was tied to doing work for commercial companies.\\n\\n So I came out here to do some work for this commercial company, and I knew most of the old-timers out here, and after a couple of trips I decided I might as well come out here and work, because it's more exciting and something I wanted to do, getting back closer to what I call closer to the hardware. The previous company was more of a paper product company as opposed to building something, not for profit, analysis and research. It was interesting, I enjoyed it, but this is a lot more interesting, a lot more fun." + }, + { + "turn_id": 116, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Tell us about what you do here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 117, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, it really gets back to be systems engineering, systems integration. Kistler's building a reusable launch vehicle. We wound up at Kistler becoming the systems integrator. We have two or three prime contractors, principal contractors. Here again, the job is to take a propulsion system and make sure it goes into the—which is a propulsion contractor—making sure their stuff is integrated into the structures contractor, and all the systems analysis and integration work is done by Kistler.\\n\\n So we have a group of probably fifteen full-time engineers, probably twenty full-time consultants. Consultants are old-timers like myself who have worked for Rockwell, worked for NASA at the Cape, worked for Rockwell, and we have a bunch of—not a bunch, a number of young engineers that are out of college two or three years, that are just incredible, I mean really sharp. So the old-timers and the young people are mixing, and we're all learning from each other. They've got the computer skills and stamina.\\n\\n But the job is pretty much what it was in the early days of Apollo and Shuttle. It's an integrations job, and here you're communicating, getting people to talk to each other, and working out the issues. And it's a lot closer. We're fifteen or so technical people here. There's not a lot of bureaucracy. Although we have a lot of paper floating around, there's not a lot of bureaucracy here. We can make decisions on which contractor is going to do what, without going through a lot of formal paperwork and proposals and that type of thing. So that part is unique. It's fun. All we need is some additional funding and we'll be moving pretty quick." + }, + { + "turn_id": 118, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That age-old problem." + }, + { + "turn_id": 119, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 120, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking back over your career as a whole, especially with working with NASA, what would you say was both your biggest challenge and your most significant accomplishment?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 121, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I think probably some of the biggest challenges were keeping the people motivated, coming out of some of the—I don't know, \"disaster\" is probably the wrong word, but the 204 fire, that was a big setback. Everybody rallied together. Apollo 13, the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n accident, getting through all that, the emotion and getting people back up.\\n\\n The people I'll remember is George Low, who really brought back the Apollo after the fire, at least from a Johnson Center perspective, and probably for the agency. The Center directors, [Robert R.] Gilruth, Kraft were very instrumental in all that, influencing what I did and how I worked.\\n\\n Probably the biggest accomplishment was getting back to return to flight, personally from the\\n\\n Challenger\\n\\n accident. I mean, it was an incredible amount of teamwork, overcoming hurdles and that type of thing. We had to go back and redo everything, just hours and hours and hours of reviewing things and asking questions and making sure. But that was probably the biggest accomplishment.\\n\\n I've been to a couple of these things, they say, \"Who's influenced you most in your career?\" Probably George Low, Dr. Kraft, Admiral Truly. Arnie Aldrich has had a lot of influence. We've worked together for, gosh, probably fifteen years, something like that. So it's the people you've worked with. And there's interesting people all through this thing. General [Forrest S.] McCartney, who was a Center director at Kennedy, is one of the most interesting guys to talk to, a four-star general, has got all the rigor and is a pretty interesting guy. He's still around. He's down at—I think he runs Lockheed. He's still at the Cape. He runs Lockheed's expendable launch vehicles, I think, out at the Cape. He came back in to run the Kennedy Center after the accident, and he was there until four or five years. Bob Crippen replaced him. Interesting people. Bill Lucas at Marshall Space Flight Center, interesting person. He's retired, too. I think he's a minister. John Yardley, in the early days of Shuttle, was key to making it all happen out at NASA Headquarters, pulling it all together.\\n\\n Administrators. I was never too much in direct involvement with the administrators, except when Admiral Truly was administrator. Then I was at NASA Headquarters. A lot of times the people at the Centers don't know or don't really care what's going on in the Headquarters arena unless you're at the Center director level or program manager level. I think they're more concentrating on getting the day-to-day job done, which is good, which is the right concentration. There's a lot of war stories and things like that, that's probably not worth talking about. There's one time [unclear].\\n\\n I think Space Station was interesting because when we got into Space Station, at Johnson Space Center I primarily interfaced with the manned part of the program, Marshall, Kennedy, and Johnson. When we got into the Space Station, we got involved with the Lewis Research Center [Cleveland, Ohio], involved with Goddard, and a little bit with JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California] and a little bit with Ames. But in that respect, when you went into those type of meetings, it's kind of a cultural thing. If you're in the human side of it, those people all seem to work one way. Then you get into the unmanned side at Goddard and it's a different set of people, and you learn from them. It was a good experience, the last four or five years. We were really working across all the centers.\\n\\n In retrospect, that may not have been the right thing to do for NASA, because one of the things they did to sell Space Station was to try to get everybody involved, to have a piece of the action, and my personal view, that was done to get the political support from all of the Center directors and the local congressmen and politicians. And it worked. They got the program approved. What happened to us as we got into these budget cuts, we had to just trim back.\\n\\n I think it really wound up that Goddard got completely out of the Space Station Program. They had two contractors. They had General Electric that was building this house that was going to be an on-orbit assembly-type facility, and then Martin Marietta out of Denver [Colorado] was building a robotic device. When it came down to cutting budgets, we had the Canadians building their robotic device and they were supplying their own money to build it. You had to make a choice that says, \"Do we really need to do this?\" And so we wound up on one of those budget exercises, we actually took Goddard out of the Space Station Program, and the two contractors essentially canceled their contracts. Lewis stayed in and Marshall and Kennedy and Johnson, and most of the stuff at Ames was analytical work that Ames and JPL was doing. JPL had some support contractors on the Headquarters Reston office. They had about twenty guys, twenty people up here supporting them. It was interesting, because you got to learn different parts of how Centers worked around NASA. Didn't always agree with them. They didn't always agree with you, but that's okay. It was good experience.\\n\\n Probably the thing that I would recommend to younger people, and I know it's always tough, when I went to Headquarters—I'd been up there a number of times, but never really worked there, and when I went up in '89, after about six months I said, \"Man, if I'd come up here when I was about twenty years younger and spent about a year just to learn about the Washington environment, I'd have been a heck of a lot better off going back when I did,\" because I was fifty-something years old. So it took about six months to nine months to figure out how the system works. In my days back there, we were really driven from the outside, from the staffers, from the Congress cutting our budget, that type of thing. But here again, it's interesting because you get to meet a lot of different people and staff people and congressmen. Congressmen are kind of interesting when you go talk to them.\\n\\n My advice is, the problem is, when you're sitting there and you've got kids in school and someone says, \"You want to go to Washington for a year?\" you say, \"Why the heck would I want to do this?\" In retrospect, people who do that, I think, if they ever want to go back and work in the Washington environment, they'd be a lot better off. But it's not necessary, but in my view it sure would have helped me. Just making a day trip or a two-day trip, you don't even learn how to drive in the city, much less know what's going on." + }, + { + "turn_id": 122, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Definitely a different environment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 123, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "But being there four years, five years, was another good experience. In fact, I still live there. My wife lives there. I live here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 124, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "When you think back to when you began in aviation and in aerospace, would you ever have imagined where it would lead you?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 125, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "No. We were a family of five boys, one girl, and my oldest brother was an engineer, went to Washington University in St. Louis. I grew up in St. Louis. He went to Washington U. in St. Louis, became an electrical engineer. He was the oldest. I was the second youngest. The other two older brothers went off and did things, and I was the only one who really followed him. My older brother and I were probably pretty close together, so I went to engineering school, went to the same school. He worked at McDonnell, I went to work at McDonnell. I had a very influential uncle who worked at McDonnell. So that's how I got involved… And having my brother and my uncle there helped me get a job. So as you work that three or four months, you kind of get your engineering thoughts going down the—really, then it was in the aircraft line. But then you start going down—you're a mechanical engineer, you could do a lot of things, go build bridges, build roads, but when you get into that aircraft side, you kind of just keep thinking that way. That's how I got into it. I never had any idea that's where it would lead to. Like somebody says, \"I want to be an astronaut and that's what I'm going to go work on.\" I just went along with the flow." + }, + { + "turn_id": 126, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It seemed to work out pretty well for you." + }, + { + "turn_id": 127, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I don't know if a lot of people do that or not, but that's just the way most of the people you talk to, I think, never imagined they'd wind up." + }, + { + "turn_id": 128, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Keeps life interesting." + }, + { + "turn_id": 129, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Keeps you busy. I think the biggest thing is being happy with what you're doing. If you're not, you might as well try something else." + }, + { + "turn_id": 130, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Absolutely." + }, + { + "turn_id": 131, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You may not be able to afford it if you've got house payments and kids and things like that, but that's what you do. When I went to work for NASA, I thought I'd be there three or four years and I'd wind back up with a contractor. But when you got down there and got working on the Apollo Program and got into the day-to-day routine of making this thing work, it really gets you excited, so I spent thirty-one years there." + }, + { + "turn_id": 132, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Hopefully those were happy." + }, + { + "turn_id": 133, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "It was good." + }, + { + "turn_id": 134, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Do you have any questions? [Addressing Summer Bergen.]" + }, + { + "turn_id": 135, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Summer Chick Bergen", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have a couple. You mentioned briefly about 1993, after Clinton had come into office, he initiated the redesign procedure. I was wondering if you could go a little bit more in depth about the impact that had on you, what you thought about the time, and how that affected the people you worked with." + }, + { + "turn_id": 136, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, we had gone through on the Space Station Freedom with a real good team of people both at the Centers and at Reston and NASA Headquarters, and had really been successful in restructuring the program. We were going along, had two years of funding where they didn't cut our budget. We had gone through what we called a critical design review, and we really thought we were making progress. So when the system comes in and says, \"Hey, we want to change what you're doing,\" there was a lot of \"What are we doing to ourselves\" type of thing. It aggravated a lot of people. I was amazed that we were doing this, but I think we were driven to do it—I'll use the word \"political reasons\"—to go down the path we went.\\n\\n I'm not against it. I think the thing that was probably the most disturbing to me is a lot of the good people who had worked on the program were told they couldn't work on it anymore. In retrospect, that happened to some of the higher people, but today if you go look at the Space Station Program, a lot of those people are working on it today. There was turmoil where this group at Reston of 100-and-something people had to move to Houston or do something, and the families had to go through that. Some of those people quit… That was five or six years ago. Most of the people are probably as happy as they could be where they are.\\n\\n See, I was always one that said that the strength of NASA is at the Centers, and that's where we ought to put the technical people. Space Station was kind of counter to that. They tried to say that the strength of the Space Station is Reston or NASA Headquarters. In my view, that wasn't right and never will be right, and I think the way NASA is reorganized now, the way Johnson and Kennedy are, the technical strength of NASA is at the Centers, and I think that's the right thing to do.\\n\\n The Rogers Commission argued against that, but I think if you plot the history of NASA, you can almost see it's kind of like NASA Headquarters is strong, then it gets weaker, then it gets stronger, then it gets weaker, and right now I'd say it's kind of in the weaker side as opposed to the stronger side. That's the way it's been set up. Some people will say it ought to be the other way, but I personally believe that the technical strength should be at the Centers. And I think it is today.\\n\\n But to answer your question, back then there were some things said that probably shouldn't have been said about the way we were doing business, but a lot of it was emotional. That's why I decided the best thing for me to do is to leave, so I just left." + }, + { + "turn_id": 137, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Summer Chick Bergen", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Looking back, since you've had experience working with the Russians, how do you feel about the international partners, especially the Russians?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 138, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I think it's fine. I never interfaced with the Russians too much at NASA, but we did interface with the Europeans and the Japanese and the Canadians, because they were part of the original Freedom team. Here again, a great group of people. Some of them are still there. Some of them are retired. But when historians write about the Space Station, they'll say this is what the government probably had to do to make it successful, to keep it going. I don't know if that's right or wrong, but that's where we are, so everybody ought to support it. I think they've got a couple of modules up. I just hope they're successful the next two or three years, because there's a lot of things that have to happen right. In the Space Station Freedom, everything had to happen right, too, as well." + }, + { + "turn_id": 139, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Summer Chick Bergen", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "That's all the questions I have." + }, + { + "turn_id": 140, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I have one last question for you. Talking briefly about the international partnership, you mentioned that may be what needed to be done to make it happen. Do you think the future space programs are going to have more international cooperation to help make them happen?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 141, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, I think so. It's already happening. If you look at what's going on at Johnson, which is called the X-38 vehicle, or called the ACV, [all] crew rescue vehicle, built for station, one of the next programs that Johnson's going to come forward with, it has the Germans building part of the heat shield, it's got the French doing part of the guidance system. I think it's natural to get more and more of the international flavor into these programs.\\n\\n I think that the big—not problem, but the thing you've got to really watch out is how the money flows and how you set up these what I call offsets, because no foreign country like the U.S. wants to send money—I use the word \"across the water\" if they're looking for offsets. So if they contribute a thermal protection system from France, what's our payback? Our payback could be flying one of their astronauts, it could be giving them some payload space on Space Station. But they really don't want any money to go back and forth. It's another job that someone's got to manage to keep it all straight.\\n\\n On Space Station Freedom we had a set of criteria that was agreed to and signed by the administrator and all the heads of the European, Canadian, and Gemini Space Agency that says, \"Here's the way we're going to divide up the pie.\" Well, when they brought in the Russians, all that had to change again. But it happened and they got it straightened out. From a technical standpoint, those type of things—if somebody's trying to build a vehicle, you'd say, \"God, I didn't have to worry about this. If I could worry about building a vehicle… But the nature of the game is, you've got to work them all. And I think what's happened is that NASA's developed some talented people to work those type of things, working with the different international partners.\\n\\n But to answer your question, I think it will be more and more international, probably. Probably competition as well, but probably involved more in competition." + }, + { + "turn_id": 142, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you're even having some international involvement yourself. You're planning to launch from Australia." + }, + { + "turn_id": 143, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Richard H. Kohrs", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We're using Russian engines that Aerojet has bought through their contacts with the Russians. Our contract is with Aerojet. Our first launches will be out of Australia, a government interface. We don't have any technical partners, if you will, building our hardware; it's all U.S. companies. And here again, it's easier for the government to deal with international partners than it is for commercial companies, because you have kind of a little different set of regulations, of getting through the government treaty agreements and that type of thing. Ours is one of \"build what we've got,\" if you will, and get on with it. There's no really new technology that we're doing. It's pretty much what we call off-the-shelf technology." + }, + { + "turn_id": 144, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Carol Butler", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We want to wish you luck with that, and thank you for talking with us today and sharing your experiences." + } + ] + }, + { + "dialogue_id": "jsc-oral-history-00721", + "metadata": { + "category": "Shuttle Carrier Aircraft", + "collection_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/STS-R/RobertsWJ/robertswj.htm", + "original_file_name": "RobertsWJ_4-15-12.htm", + "document_link": "https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/STS-R/RobertsWJ/RobertsWJ_4-15-12.htm", + "collection": "NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project", + "retrieved_date": "2025-02-12", + "subcollection": "NASA STS Recordation Oral History Project", + "subtitle": "Edited Oral History Transcript", + "subtitle_interviewee": "William J. Roberts", + "location_date": "Cocoa Beach, Florida – 15 April 2012" + }, + "broad_source": "jsc_oral_history", + "collection": "jsc_oral_history", + "domain": "oral_history", + "title": "", + "elicitors": [ + "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal" + ], + "respondents": [ + "William J. Roberts" + ], + "languages": [ + "en" + ], + "turns": [ + { + "turn_id": 0, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Today is April 15, 2012. This interview with Bill Roberts is being conducted for the NASA STS Recordation Oral History Project in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Rebecca Wright.\\n\\n Thanks again for taking time out of your schedule to meet with us today." + }, + { + "turn_id": 1, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome." + }, + { + "turn_id": 2, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "We certainly appreciate it. The last time we spoke was about a year and a half ago?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 3, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I think so. I think it was August of 2010, if I remember right." + }, + { + "turn_id": 4, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I believe so, yes, because the [Space Shuttle] program was still flying, and you were talking to us about two documents that you had been working on with your team of former subsystem managers." + }, + { + "turn_id": 5, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, one being the Orbiter Fleet Safing Document, which was written to establish the criteria on how to safe a vehicle. It was the criteria that established what were the hazardous commodities in the vehicle and then what should be the mitigation steps to either eliminate or minimize those hazards to achieve that goal of getting the vehicle safed for public viewing.\\n\\n The Orbiter Fleet Safing Document, which we refer to as the OFSD, was completed, and then the group, the former subsystem managers and myself, started writing the End State Subsystem Safing Requirements Document, the ESSRD. That took the criteria documented in the OSFD and turned those into requirements, by subsystem, on addressing those hazardous commodities that were identified in the OSFD. Those requirements noted in the ESSRD established what had to be done to eliminate those hazards, or minimize those hazards.\\n\\n Another thing in the ESSRD, we put in the ferry flight requirements for a safed vehicle. Normally when we were flying in the operational mode, all of our ferry flight requirements were documented in our ferry flight drawings and tech [technical] orders and such. It was agreed before we got into the transition and retirement timeframe that we were not going to release any new drawings during this period of time, for a variety of reasons. Part of transitioning out of the program was to eliminate a lot of the processes that were in place during operations, and one of those processes was engineering release and configuration management.\\n\\n Since we were not going to have the ability to update and modify the ferry flight drawings, because the release system wasn’t going to be in place, we took all those ferry flight requirements previously documented in the ferry flight drawings and documented them into the ESSRD that were applicable to a safed vehicle. There’s a lot of ferry flight requirements in the drawings that are only applicable when you have a fully operational vehicle. The difference was a fully operational vehicle has hypers [hyperolic fuels], pyros [pyrotechnics], and a safed vehicle does not. That’s how we filtered out the requirements associated with hypers, pyros, fluids. We left them out of the ESSRD and brought all the other requirements into the ESSRD that were applicable out of the ferry flight drawings.\\n\\n That all got documented and reviewed. We had multiple reviews, not only through our group, but also the Space Shuttle program folks that were in the operational area of the program. After that series of reviews, the following October after I met with you in August, we brought them to the PRCB [Program Requirements Control Board] and had those two documents, the Fleet Safing Document and the ESSRD, baselined. They became NSTS [National Space Transportation System] documents, so they are official NASA documents now.\\n\\n After they got baselined, the ESSRD requirements were then taken by the KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] ground ops [operations] folks and Work Authorization Documentation was generated to safe the vehicles. Those WADs (Work Authorization Documents) were put through the system, reviewed, and approved. By the time [Orbiter Vehicle (OV)]-103 [Discovery] flew the last flight in February last year, all of the safing documentation was already released and ready to go. When 103 landed from that flight, they had a period of time—I believe it was 30 days or 45 days—post-wheel stop to do their normal down-mission processing, and then from that point on they got into the ESSRD safing requirements, and those WADs directed that work.\\n\\n The ESSRD is a document that is not vehicle-specific, but the WADs associated that were written for 103 were vehicle-specific. Each vehicle, 103, [OV]-104 [Atlantis], and [OV]-105 [Endeavour], all had vehicle-specific Work Authorized Documentation generated from the ESSRD requirements." + }, + { + "turn_id": 6, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Why is that?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 7, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "In writing that ESSRD document, it would have been much more difficult writing a vehicle-specific document that is a baseline NASA document, rather than having the ground ops guys write their WADs vehicle-specific. There’s slight differences because certain vehicles have certain design changes. Some requirements that were in the ESSRD may be applicable to 103, but may not be applicable to 104, so we allowed them that latitude to change their work documents and make note that this requirement doesn’t apply to 104 but it did apply to 103. There were slight changes in their documentation.\\n\\n As you know, 103 is fully safed and ready to go. 104 and 105 are going through their safing right now. 105 should finish up with all of its safing in July, and 104 should finish up with all of that vehicle’s safing, I believe, in August. Then that’s it with all those requirements. Never to be used again, because there won’t be another one of these vehicles to be safed." + }, + { + "turn_id": 8, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "What was your role as they were processing Discovery and then started working on Endeavour and Atlantis?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 9, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well, as the work got started on Discovery, the ground ops folks had suggestions at times to change the requirement, do something a little different. Maybe instead of removing an LRU, a Line Replacement Unit, they may want to disassemble it partially and remove only the parts that were affected by the hazardous commodity. We had weekly meetings with ground ops, and whenever there was an issue associated with changing the ESSRD we had to discuss it and try to value their input. The problem with changing the ESSRD—every time there is a change to it, we have to go back to PRCB, which is a large process, and get those changes baselined into the document. So we tried to minimize the amount of changes to the ESSRD as much as possible, and we tried to keep any deviations or any modifications to safing requirements limited to the WADs that were being generated down here. We gave the ground ops folks options of either they could take a waiver against that requirement or an exception, rather than change the parent document—the requirements document.\\n\\n We had a lot of discussions with them early on during the 103 safing period and it resulted in multiple changes. Since the baseline version was released of the ESSRD, I think we have two revs [revisions] out of that document, and each rev had 10 or 15 requirement changes." + }, + { + "turn_id": 10, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "There had also been a decision to have the SLS [Space Launch System] take some of the equipment out of the orbiters. Did that have an impact on what you guys were doing?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 11, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "My team, my group that I was working with, obviously we were heavily involved and were the lead in establishing the safing requirements. We were also involved in the design issues of the vehicle associated with weight and CG [center of gravity], structural altercations, that kind of stuff. SLS requested to remove significant hardware out of the aft fuselage and the mid- [fuselage].\\n\\n We were asked by our customers, USA [United Space Alliance] and NASA, that anytime there’s any significant configuration change to the vehicle, such as the SLS removal requests, to evaluate the issues associated with removing those, see if it would impact ferry flight, weight, and CG. Most of the stuff wouldn’t impact any kind of outer mold line, but most definitely if it was significant enough, we’d have to look at load path capability impacts associated with a ferry flight. Our loads in an ascent or a descent in an operational mode are much greater than in a ferry flight, but we had to evaluate what a ferry flight load impact would be, meaning if they removed a structural beam to gain access to a main propulsion system valve, did they have to put it back in or could they leave it out, those kind of things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 12, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "I understand, too, that some of the museums wanted items from inside the orbiter, like the galley or the potty [Waste Collection System]. Did that also impact the team?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 13, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We were all involved in this, our Boeing [Company] group along with our USA customers and NASA customers. Like I said, we had weekly meetings. We were in discussions with some of the display sites; we had a display site acquisition list. There was a list of hardware that was evaluated. We all knew that we had to take out the potty, because it had to be cleaned and serviced, then did it have to go back in the vehicle? Not really. There was no hard requirement to put it back in because it wasn’t going to be used, but if the display site wanted it back in, then we all had to agree on it and track that configuration. The weight would be an impact to ferry flight, so all of that had to be recalculated back in.\\n\\n 103 has an airlock and a galley and lockers and lots of flight crew equipment hardware in the crew module, as a result of requests by the Smithsonian folks. 105 and 104 will not, because their final display configuration won’t have visitors in the crew module, so there’s no need to have that hardware back in there. There’s three distinct display request lists of hardware that we’re working, and the main reason why we are involved in that is because our Boeing mass properties folks are the engineering group that’s responsible for the weight and CG calculations for ferry flight.\\n\\n Everything that comes off the vehicle for safing was noted. We knew what the weight was, we knew the X, Y, Z location on the vehicle, so that all fell into the final calculations. Things that got put back on the vehicle were also put into those final calculations." + }, + { + "turn_id": 14, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How many people are working on your team, and how many people at Boeing are working this?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 15, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Between Huntington Beach [California], Houston, and Florida we have about 18 folks. Of the 18 folks, there’s about 8 that are full-time on T&R [transition and retirement], and the other 10 are part-time, meaning they’re working other projects like CCDev [commercial crew development]. Our weight and CG analyst, Bob [Robert J.] Hundl, is working CCDev out of Houston. He works all of our calculations on these ferry flights.\\n\\n There’s other things that get involved. With 103 going to the Smithsonian [National Air and Space Museum, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Chantilly, Virginia] this week, it’s pretty much done, packaged up, and the only thing that’s remaining is getting it up there. We have a ferry flight review tomorrow at 11 a.m. that is the final stamp on all of the elements—the NASA orbiter, the USA ground ops, the Boeing Company—and we all have to sign on the dotted line that that vehicle’s ready to be ferried. That will be the final official documentation on 103. Except I think there’s a DD-1149 that has to be signed when we hand it over up there in Washington.\\n\\n 105 is going to the California Science Center [CSC, Los Angeles], and we as an integrated group, NASA, USA, and Boeing, are involved in several tasks that are authorized by NASA associated with safing and ferry flight preplanning, display configuration. A lot of the same things we did on 103. That’s been going on in parallel while we finish 103 and will continue on through August timeframe.\\n\\n At the same time, Boeing has a separate MOA [memorandum of agreement] that the Boeing Company is working directly with the California Science Center, supporting them in certain display configurations. Our loads analysts have two separate display configurations planned for OV-105. The California Science Center is building a horizontal display facility, which is a “temporary” facility that will be used for two to three years while they build a new extension on their building there at Exposition Park, which will be a vertical display facility.\\n\\n Their plan is to basically build a launch pad environment there and place 105 vertically on an ET [external tank] with SRBs [solid rocket boosters] and a tower next to it and an access arm. That’s the end result, but before we even get there, when 105 gets ferried out to LAX [Los Angeles International Airport], it’s going to be removed from the SCA [Shuttle Carrier Aircraft]. It’s not going to be put on its landing gear. It’s going to be put on the Rockwell [International] or Boeing-built overland transporter that we had back in the ‘70s that we used when we delivered the vehicles from Palmdale [California] up to Edwards Air Force Base [California].\\n\\n That transporter’s been parked out in the desert for 45 years, next to the mate-demate facility there at Dryden [Flight Research Center, Edwards, California]. The California Science Center got their hands on that, and they disassembled it and brought it to one of their contractors in Santa Fe Springs [California]. The company’s named Sarens Riggings. They’re a major construction company that moves things and an international business company. Sarens got this transporter, and they delivered it to their yard in Santa Fe Springs. The California Science Center, along with Sarens, requested us to get involved to do an evaluation of that overland transporter, which was a Rockwell-built GSE [ground-support equipment] article.\\n\\n The evaluation was to inspect welds, inspect the general overall condition, inspect the bolts, all this kind of thing. They plan to use the overland transporter in a different way than it was originally used back in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. The overland transporter has, just like the SCA, two ball attaches for the aft attach and then the forward yolk assembly, but instead of using the wheels that were built for the overland transporter, because of the route from LAX to Exposition Park where the California Science Center is, they will have to straddle concrete center medians in the route.\\n\\n You couldn’t do that with the original wheels, so they have these large devices called SPMTs, which are self-propelled motorized transports. They are a large [vehicles] with 24 wheels, 12 on one side and 12 on the other per vehicle. So you have four times 24, that’s close to a hundred wheels. Each SPMT has a diesel engine on it. They wire them all together to a central control module. Then there’s a person that has a wireless remote control, and he steers this thing and walks along with it. So you’ve got these four SPMTs with the overland transporter bolted to it and then the orbiter on top of that.\\n\\n They’re going to have two [SPMT] configurations [for the transport from LAX to CSC]. They’re going to have a narrow configuration that gets them out of LAX, through certain gates and then crossing a narrow bridge. They’re going to be on Manchester crossing the [Interstate] 405 freeway right by LAX. Once they get past that, then they’re going to stop the vehicle, jack it up, and move these SPMTs outboard so that now you can drive right over the center median of Manchester and make a left and go up Crenshaw and then make a right on Martin Luther [King Jr. Blvd.] and go down to [the museum]. That’s the reason they want to do that. That route—I want to call it a tow route, but it’s not a tow route; it’s a drive route—is 13 miles. So it’s going to be a long day that day. The maximum velocity they’re going to be going is one mile an hour. More often than not, they’re going to be a lot less than that, and they’re going to have to zigzag around trees and those kind of things." + }, + { + "turn_id": 16, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are you going to be in charge of the remote control, or are you leaving that to someone else?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 17, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Oh, no. [Driving that transporter with the SPMT’s is work for a trained specialist from Sarens Rigging.] I have been on the route with them and looked at what they have to do, and there’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of light poles and traffic lights. The way their traffic engineers have described it, they’re going to have an army of people out in front of the vehicle that are going to be dropping these light poles and traffic lights down, because they’re mechanically attached. Then as the orbiter goes by, they’re going to have another army behind them bringing them back up. They’re going to have to cut down some trees along the route. They’ve identified every tree that has to be trimmed or cut down." + }, + { + "turn_id": 18, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, and manage the crowds, because I’m guessing tons of people are going to come out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 19, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, it’s going to be crazy. L.A. [Los Angeles] had two things recently on the news that impacted traffic and large crowds. One was Mulholland Bridge over the 405 up by UCLA [University of California Los Angeles]. They were doing a partial demolition of it, and they had to close the 405 freeway for a weekend." + }, + { + "turn_id": 20, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I remember hearing about that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 21, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "The news was all, “Don’t go near there.” Then just a few weeks ago they had this big rock that they were moving from Riverside [California] to the La Brea Tar Pits area. They had multiple nights where they would go three or four miles and stop. They wouldn’t do any moving during the day. It was all in the dark of the night, whereas this move they’re going to start at two o’clock in the morning at LAX. They said it’s going to be two to three hours to get off the property of LAX and then from there it’ll be another 13, 14 hours." + }, + { + "turn_id": 22, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "They’re doing this on the weekends I’m guessing, not on a Monday morning?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 23, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s the plan. The vehicle is supposed to get out there in late September. The move date hasn’t been released yet, but it’ll be probably 7 to 10 days after the vehicle arrives at LAX." + }, + { + "turn_id": 24, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And you’ll be helping them?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 25, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, that’s one of the authorized [Boeing] tasks that [we will be] working directly with California Science Center, to make sure on the move day that our GSE, which is sandwiched in between an orbiter and those SPMTs, is not only configured right, but will operate right. So we’re going to have our engineers out there that day and work alongside with them.\\n\\n In preparation for their horizontal display facility, we’re working with their civil engineers and their architects and helping them understand, first of all, what the weight of the orbiter and the transporter together will be. When they get it in the horizontal facility, they’re going to drive it into this large Quonset hut facility that kind of looks like that facility out at the KSC SLF [Shuttle Landing Facility], but not as big. They’re going to drive it in and then jack it up and remove those SPMTs, and then they’re going to jack it down and put it on permanent jack stands on the concrete floor. They’re going to leave the overland transporter on the orbiter. They’re not going to lower the landing gear or anything, they’re just going to leave it like that for two, two and a half years, until that other facility is designed and built.\\n\\n They understand that there’s never been an orbiter left on the attach points for more than 60 days, so we’ve been involved in doing an engineering assessment. Given the weight of the orbiter, given the materials of the transporter, the ball joints, is it okay to leave it on there for two, two and a half years? Also we’ve been involved with where would you want to jack onto the transporter for that length of time, and how much attenuation would you get if there’s an earthquake event coming through the concrete floor, through the jack stands into the transporter on the orbiter.\\n\\n We are working with them to make sure that their design-to-seismic requirements for a structure in the L.A. area, that the accelerations going through the transporter into the orbiter and the aft fuselage and the forward yoke assembly will be fine and it won’t break. Our guys have already taken a look at it, and it’s looking favorable. We looked at a number that we’re sure they don’t design to, because when you consider the accelerations and the vibrations loads and aero loads on those three attach points during a launch environment, that’s a hell of a lot more than you will get out of an earthquake. That’s our initial assessment." + }, + { + "turn_id": 26, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are you helping with the vertical configuration as well?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 27, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We are. Right now it’s not into the detail level; we’re doing conceptual ideas. The California Science Center, obviously they have to design that display configuration to meet the seismic requirements in L.A. That’s much more challenging. They’ve come up with some ideas for us to look at, and these ideas require a lot of steel beams and heavy metal. It looks feasible, but we are just now getting involved in that discussion. That discussion’s going to be a long discussion, because they just want us to understand what they are proposing and make sure that whatever they are proposing is inside the envelope of what the orbiter’s capable of. There’s no weight-saving requirements when it comes to designing this facility like we have when we fly this vehicle, so I’m sure we’ll be able to work it out." + }, + { + "turn_id": 28, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Last time we talked, you were also working with the Smithsonian on [OV-101] Enterprise. One of the things you had mentioned was there was some concern about corrosion on the vehicle, and you were doing some analysis on that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 29, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, we finished all that up, and we put out some specific areas of concern to the ground ops folks and the NASA quality engineers. We sent some Boeing guys from here up there. Our lead structural analyst, Bill Novak, went out to do a detailed inspection and wrote up his requests on how to clean that out.\\n\\n It actually resulted in three trips: one to do the detailed inspection, another one to go back and do some of the cleanup in the forward fuselage. The lower forward fuselage was the area of the largest amount of corrosion. That’s because when Enterprise was first delivered up there, it was parked outside for close to three years and not covered, so it got snowed on and rained on. When the vehicle’s parked, the nose is down a little bit, so when all that snow melted, or the rain, it all collected in the lower fuselage underneath the crew module.\\n\\n Enterprise was built differently than Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. The insulation blankets that are in between the crew module and the lower forward fuselage were gold foil blankets. When the gold comes in contact with the aluminum skin, especially with water on it, you get this galvanic reaction, and that’s what really accelerated the corrosion in certain areas. The lower forward fuselage is also a lot of ribs and webs down there, and the water collected there for many years. It puddled, and it corroded in this area.\\n\\n Bill Novak and our loads and stress engineers did an evaluation; we did some tests, and we blessed Enterprise that it’s fine to ferry. We did put a caveat in there that it will ferry from point A to point B and not go on a tour of the United States. Just go to point A, point B and that’s it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 30, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "A short trip [to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 31, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "A short trip, right. We did all of that 101 work, and there was a lot of other work on 101. There were some configuration issues. When the Smithsonian had it up there, they changed some bolts that weren’t flight bolts. We actually did some tests on 101 during the program, like the wing leading edge impact test. We popped off some of the panels there and shot some foam at it and then put them back on. There were some cracks in one of the panels that got repaired.\\n\\n We did the vent system around the windows in the crew module. One of the vent systems, I think it was window six, was blocked by some debris, so they had to drill a hole in the window frame so that the vent system would work. They did all this work last January/February, cycled the gear, checked the air pressure, and it’s ready to go.\\n\\n That’s another interesting operation when 101 gets up to New York. It’s scheduled to ferry from Washington to New York a week from tomorrow on Monday. It arrives at JFK [John F. Kennedy International Airport], and it’ll be parked underneath a [de-icing] hangar [where hundreds of gas powered heaters are mounted on the underside of the hanger roof]. Obviously they’re not going to need it in May. Because it’s very large, it’s designed to have regular airline jets go right through it; they’re going to park the SCA and 101 underneath this de-icing hangar.\\n\\n They’re going to leave it there for a month because they have to remove the wind suppression system that’s been put into the apron out at [Washington] Dulles [International Airport] to assist in 103’s de-mate from the SCA and then 101’s mate to the SCA. There’s only one set of that wind suppression system, which is a series of poles and cables that surround the whole SCA orbiter area. That all has to be disassembled at Dulles, put in the trucks, motored up to New York, and then put into the concrete up there at JFK airport.\\n\\n The de-mate of 101 from SCA is scheduled for mid-May. Then I believe we (NASA) [will be putting it on a transporter supplied by Intrepid] and [then] they’re rolling it over to an area adjacent to the Hudson River. Then they’re going to lift it off of the [transporter] and put it onto a barge on the Hudson River, a small barge, then go under some bridges and park it in a marina area. I’ve seen it on the map, but I haven’t really been involved with the New York folks like I’ve been involved with the California folks.\\n\\n Then they’re going to transfer it from one barge to another barge, which has a huge single crane on it. That barge is going to be the barge that goes up to the Intrepid aircraft carrier, and they’re going to use that single crane to lift 101 up off that barge and put it on the aircraft carrier deck." + }, + { + "turn_id": 32, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Amazing." + }, + { + "turn_id": 33, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "And that’s all next month. I was talking to some of the NASA folks out there today, and they feel the same way I do. The folks up in New York really haven’t asked for any help whatsoever, and they’ve never done this kind of operation before. We were surprised they weren’t down here today watching the 103 mate operation since our ground ops folks are not doing that work up in New York. The New York folks are doing that work on their own [except the de-mate from the SCA operations]. So that’s the 103, 101 story, and the 105 story is September/October.\\n\\n Then 104 will continue to be safed through the summer into August, and then its plan is to roll out and go to the visitors’ center [Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex] October/ November timeframe. We are [anticipating] receiving direction to work with Delaware North [Companies], who runs the visitors’ center here, to help them out with their structural analysis on their proposed display. They want to elevate 104 up and attach to the aft attach points and the forward attach points and then have it in a rolled configuration, a 45-degree roll, with the payload bay doors open. That would look great, but the payload bay doors are designed for zero-G [gravity], so that’s going to be a little bit challenging." + }, + { + "turn_id": 34, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Are they going to have those supports? Is that something they’re going to get from NASA?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 35, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "I haven’t seen any detailed drawings [because we haven’t received the direction to give them support]. The drawing I’ve seen, it looks like columns coming out of the concrete floor that go right into the aft attach and up to the yoke, so you’ve got three columns coming up and the orbiter sitting on top. We’ll see. Obviously they don’t have earthquakes here, but that display configuration would be impossible in southern California." + }, + { + "turn_id": 36, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "How are they displaying Enterprise?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 37, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Just parking it on its landing gear on the carrier deck, and then they’re going to inflate a structure around it, one of those high-pressurized structures. I’ve seen some graphics on it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 38, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And Discovery is just going to look just like Enterprise, they’re just wheeling her into the hangar?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 39, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. That’s the easiest one out of all of them, really." + }, + { + "turn_id": 40, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Rebecca, do you have any questions for Bill?\\n\\n WRIGHT: You were talking about California, can you give more details on the trees? Apparently that’s a quite a bit of construction, protecting the trees, and how they determined the trees they’re going to [remove]." + }, + { + "turn_id": 41, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "They have a subcontractor out there that they hired to identify all the trees on the route and then categorize those trees in certain categories that would either allow them to cut them down, or trim them, or not to be touched at all and would require the vehicle to have to be maneuvered around that tree. That’s a big task, and they’re still hoping that the state of California won’t require an environmental impact report on these trees. If they require that, I don’t know if they’re going to meet September/October [deadlines].\\n\\n WRIGHT: This morning out at the mate-de-mate, what was your role?\n\nI was there representing the Boeing Company with my Ground Support Equipment Engineer, Norm Ring. We were there just in case some of our GSE didn’t work and if there were some mechanical issues.\\n\\n The rest of our team, those 18 folks, most of them are here in the Florida region, and they were all on call. If there were certain subsystem areas that were having problems during this mate, then we were to call them in and start spinning up the engineering support for them. Even when we’re flying the vehicles we had a lot of folks on call. But there were no issues, really. As you know, what was completed today was scheduled for yesterday. The winds didn’t allow it to happen yesterday, but they’re back on schedule." + }, + { + "turn_id": 42, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, good. And weather looks good to deliver Discovery to go out on Tuesday?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 43, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, though you can never definitely tell the future. There will be some weather in the area, but not solid weather, so there’s ways to get around it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 44, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Of course NASA never wanted to fly the orbiter through weather, but this time you’re delivering to a museum. Is that much of an issue?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 45, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "We’re ferrying with the same requirements. Do not fly through rain or clouds. The forecast is for scattered clouds and no rain or lightning. There is rain in the area, but it’s miles away, at least being forecasted. The concern is winds again, because when you’re on the dual crane de-mating operation, your wind requirements are much lower than when you’re on this mate/de-mate device. The general rule of thumb out here is 20 knots. The general rule of thumb at a remote site like Dulles using the dual cranes is 10 knots. The forecast is for higher than 10 knots for the week up there, so we’ll see. It’s going to be loud, too, because the work area is right in between two runways. You saw how quiet it was out there today, but it’s not going to be quiet in Washington." + }, + { + "turn_id": 46, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, it’s a busy airport. Are you staying for all the celebrations? We understand there’s a big event happening." + }, + { + "turn_id": 47, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes, I’ll stay there. Right now I’m scheduled to leave next weekend, so if things get delayed I’ll see if I have to delay my return to California or not." + }, + { + "turn_id": 48, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Then you’re headed up to New York in May?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 49, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Yes. Then in September everybody comes to [California], so this might be one of my last trips. Every time I came here in the last two or three years, I make sure to look around and enjoy it, because I don’t know how much longer I’ll be coming down here." + }, + { + "turn_id": 50, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "It sounds like you might have a connection with the Visitor Complex here now." + }, + { + "turn_id": 51, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Well yes, but it’s not a career. So who knows, my career might end up in the mountains of Idaho." + }, + { + "turn_id": 52, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Nice place to retire. Well, thanks for catching us up. This is all interesting, and I’m glad we’re able to record it." + }, + { + "turn_id": 53, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "You’re welcome. It will be fun to watch over the next week and through this fall. It’s neat for me because I’ve been working on this project for four or five years. It’s kind of like when you’re on a football team, all that practice and all that preparation and the game finally is there, and the game goes by like that [snaps fingers] after weeks of practice." + }, + { + "turn_id": 54, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "And T&R is officially over in November?" + }, + { + "turn_id": 55, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "After the handover of 104 to the visitors’ center, yes. I’m sure there’ll be some residual work that we have to do to close out our records and bookkeeping, but not any technical work. It’s going to be interesting to watch this week and then those couple weeks out in California." + }, + { + "turn_id": 56, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Yes, I’d like to see that." + }, + { + "turn_id": 57, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "William J. Roberts", + "role": "respondent", + "utterance": "Like I said, we’ve been meeting with those folks regularly now. Stephanie [Stilson] and her crew come out [every few months] and meet with [the CSC folks], LAX officials and the city of Los Angeles, the county of Los Angeles, the mayor’s office. There’s a lot of people getting involved in this. You’ll see tomorrow how many people are going to be out there. I’m sure when 105 arrives in L.A.—I mean, there’s going to be a lot of people in Washington, but I think everybody in Los Angeles and New York are going to be watching this show here when it leaves and the show in Dulles when it arrives, and they’re going to learn from that and say, “We want to do more.” I was surprised the folks at California Science Center weren’t coming out to Washington this week. I actually met with them Monday and I said, “You really should, just to learn. Not necessarily to learn how to do it, but to learn on crowd control and that kind of thing.” But they’re an office that is part of the State of California government, they have limited resources." + }, + { + "turn_id": 58, + "timestamp": "", + "speaker": "Jennifer Ross-Nazzal", + "role": "elicitor", + "utterance": "Sure, understandable. Thanks again." + } + ] + } +] \ No newline at end of file