1 10 83 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/0825996d51c906053e60bb95d8189675.pdf 59571a3ed2189117fefbc1812a3a2410 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000054_T Title A name given to the resource Wyatt, DeMarquis D. (Transcript) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Text Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/1629fbd8c146510caa5cbbc47d180536.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/af40061e31a3c333cfc061bd43075b92.mp4 6f6dfbd1a87de9a7bf131c682c22f079 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000054_A Title A name given to the resource Wyatt, DeMarquis D. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/f27bc7574d477bb3ec8c9c9b3c860b53.pdf de1ddd9cffef52efe6d7e3eb89550a9f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000053_T Title A name given to the resource Wuenscher, Hans (Transcript) Description An account of the resource Manufacturing problems and achievements with Satum, contractor and vendor relations. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-08-30 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Text Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. 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Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000053_A Title A name given to the resource Wuenscher, Hans Description An account of the resource Manufacturing problems and achievements with Satum, contractor and vendor relations. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-08-30 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. 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Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Wiggins, James W and Rossman, Kenneth Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:53:36 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:07] Roger Bilstein: ‘63 was the definite breaking point at least from the early era. [00:00:25] James Wiggins: When was the ARPA/NASA office formed, do you remember? That was established and Dr. Lange was made the director of ARPA NASA [00:00:35] Kenneth Rossman: That was prior to ABMA…I mean to NASA. [00:00:40] JW: That was before [inaudible] became NASA [00:00:43] KR: It was July ‘60. [00:00:45] RB: 1958 I think. [00:00:47] KR: Yeah, it was ARPA orders in ‘58. [00:00:51] JW: I talked to Rees a number of times back in those days about forming a project office for ARPA. Of course about that time NASA came into being. They finally established the ARPA/NASA office, and put Dr. Lange in there as the head of it. That was really the origin of the Saturn Systems Office. When we became part of NASA then they changed the name first to the NASA office and just a little bit later to the Saturn Systems Office. That was in ‘59, ‘60. After we became a part of NASA, and then they renamed the office to the Saturn Systems Office. That was about the time I joined the office. [00:01:49] JW: But prior to that about the time we were becoming a part of NASA down here a little bit before, remember, they sent a consulting firm down here to review our program operating procedures and ABMA and a recommendation of what we'd like to have as a part of NASA, what NASA should have. This guy that the consulting firm sent down here, his name was Jack Young. He was [possibly consulting firm’s name] associate administrator for business or management. [00:02:37] JW: So recalling all the trials and tribulations we had ABMA program control, I recommended to Jack Young at that time—and I spent most of the time with him for six weeks—that we get away from this system where we get one appropriation, and off the top of that, we have to take salaries and expenses off the top of that and the rest for R&D. [00:03:08] JW: Now going back over this to give somebody an idea of our programming structure away from the savvys of NASA. I recommended that we get away from the lump sum type funding for salaries, R&D, and equipment, and everything else. I actually wrote a hundred or so pages for Jack Young to take back home with him. [00:03:31] JW: Well, many of these things that we talked about then and discussed became a part of total NASA management in regards to programs and program approval and project approval documents that I had. [00:03:48] JW: After the establishment of the Saturn Systems Office, I joined that office when it was pretty young, fairly young, and had the resources management office. My job at that time was to pull together all the resources required to successfully execute a launch vehicle program that later turned out to be the Saturn 1, Saturn 1B, and Saturn V. [00:04:27] JW: Dr. Lange was head of the Saturn Systems Office. We were a small organization at that time. Later on we had Konrad Dannenberg as the deputy director. We had Bob Lindstrom as the Saturn 1 and 1B manager. In the beginning I guess Dr. Lange was acting Saturn V manager. A little bit later on, sometime maybe in ‘61 or ‘62, Jim Bramley became the Saturn V manager. [00:05:08] JW: Like I said before I had the program resources office. We were a small group of people. I think we were quite successful in those days in that the program that we proposed to headquarters, we went into quite some depth in establishing the technical requirements and balancing them against the funding and facility requirements. I'm not sure too much of that is done anymore to the depth we did it then. [00:05:39] JW: For example, I had the resources management office, and yet I was by profession, I was a scientist and an engineer. This was my first crack at resources management. I was in a pretty good position at that time to go out and hunt and go to the laboratories and find out what the technical requirements were, then convert those into dollars and facilities, both manufacturing and tests. I think that was the one thing that made the Saturn Systems Office as successful as it was in those days in managing these very complex programs. [00:06:30] RB: Because the people had the technical expertise in that office? [00:06:34] JW: Yeah, in the office, right and we were a small office. We weren't burdened with a lot of people, a lot of administrative problems, personnel problems and what have you. We had access in those days to the laboratories—quite free access, I would say—so we could get to the people out on the [bench?], the people that knew what the technical requirements were. [00:07:03] RB: Well, it seems to me too you had an advantage that the Saturn 1 was still pretty much an in-house operation. [00:07:08] JW: Saturn 1 was an in-house operation, right. In those days too, of course, we were keeping in mind the bigger launch we hit for. We might have called it the C4 or C5 in those days. We had a Nova on the drawing board, but in the early days, we were concentrating on the smaller Saturn vehicles that turned out to be the Saturn 1 and Saturn 1B. [00:07:39] JW: But the program management, as we exercised in those days, and I was successful for more than just this one reason I just explained to you. There were a number of reasons why it was considered a successful management program. First of all we had this we got into the technical depth of the program and balanced out against the funding and facilities requirements. Also we established a relationship with headquarters that I don't think is prevailing in any other program from my knowledge either before or since. [00:08:19] JW: We established a certain amount of confidence and trust with the people up there. In other words, I could go up and discuss the program with the people and the requirements and what they're going to take to do the job, and they would believe the story. At times, we would negotiate dollars and cents against some of the requirements. But by and large, we had the confidence of our headquarters counterparts. I'm not saying we didn't have our problems, we had those problems. We always managed to work out the problems that are lower level and present a unified consensus and program to Dr. Von Braun and myself to the Director of Manned Space Flight in Washington. We worked out the problems, whatever they might be, before we presented as a unified front to the Director Von Braun and the Director of Manned Space Flight in Washington. [00:09:29] RB: So when you get together with the headquarters guys and come to agreement and then you would go to Von Braun? [00:09:41] KR: One point on the informality that went on that I remember: Jim used to roll up — we used to have an easel, just like that thing right there, a flip chart with a magic marker — I've seen him make up presentations on a flip chart, take it off roll it up with a rubber band, and hit the road to Washington, and present it to T. Keith Glennan administrator of NASA. [00:10:08] JW: We had program control, too. I had quite an extensive method for accumulating the requirements for a program, and I called it my working papers. We always have them on file. We didn't have 1001 charts showing every little thing we were doing. We had our own [PERT {Program Evaluation and Review Technique}?] system, but the majority of my knowledge was in my working papers. After being with the program from day one, I had a lot of knowledge and things in my head that, you know, you just, there's no way to document it like gut feeling and intuition and what have you. There's no way to document that. I tried it several times, but it never came out. [00:11:14] JW: In the early days, in our discussions with Washington, it’s decided that we had better institute a formal procedure for submitting our program and for getting the resulting approval from the headquarters level. Ken Rossman was in my office, and we compiled all of our requirements—both technical and funding requirements and facility requirements—and put them into a booklet. We were looking for an acronym or something as sort of an eye-catcher. I think the first thing we came up with was Program Authorization Plan, which is PAP, P-A-P, and we decided to not submit that. [All laugh] You know why. Besides, we don't authorize anything from the center to the headquarters level. They authorize and return. Well, we finally came up with Program Operating Plan, P-O-P. [00:12:30] RB: This is still in SSO? [00:12:32] JW: Yeah. [00:12:33] KR: Yeah. [00:12:34] JW: Ken and myself and Chuck Williams and a few others put this Program Operating Plan together, and we called it program operating plan. I don't recall the number on it, like it might have been 61, 1961-1 or something like that, where we laid out the entire program, and what it was going to take to do it like the Saturn 1. [00:13:02] JW: I looked around for someone to sign this thing, and give it some sort of authority at the center, and I couldn't find anyone to sign it. I think most of the people didn't want to go on the record at that time. I finally signed the damn thing myself and sent it off to headquarters. It got approved. From that point on, we started submitting program operating plans, I believe on a quarterly basis. This was our method of operating until the Saturn Systems Office was dissolved in 1963. [00:13:45] JW: Here again, we had a small number of people in the Saturn Systems Office. We knew what we were talking about. We knew the program. We knew the technical requirements. We knew the facility requirements. We knew the launch facility requirements. We knew the people in headquarters. We knew our own people here at Marshall. We knew how to walk this line amongst all of those five situations. We always managed to get the program approved at the headquarters level. It was, I think, a very good management concept. It was quite informal, other than the program operating plan, which we went to later on. [00:14:45] RB: Could that system really have worked as you went further downstream when you got in a situation where you weren't doing it in-house anymore? [00:14:55] JW: We had the system, but we went on into the Saturn V program and laid it out in quite some detail in the Program Operating Plan with our working papers, if you want to call them that, back up the charts. At that time, we made preparations to put the Program Operating Plan on the computer, and the computer started talking about it. The last time it was a mechanical sort of operation — program control. It worked simply because of the people that were doing the program control. The management that had been in the program since the first day, we could see a need for going to a little bit more elaborate system than what we had for the following activities, especially when we got to the manned launches. But there's no reason why that system of management could not work today. I personally think we over-managed the Saturn V program. [00:16:08] RB: Was the reorganization in 1963 really necessary then? [00:16:17] JW: I don't think it was necessary for any successful execution of the Saturn V program. It was probably necessary for the center. I guess the main reason for the reorganization in 1963 was to establish a strong program management directorate. [00:16:45] RB: What was the rationale for that then? [00:16:54] KR: There was one way to get the engine management program, I guess encapsulated into the second operation. [00:17:04] JW: Yeah, you might say back in the early days up until that reorganization, the engine project office was located in a laboratory. [00:17:15] RB: Hans Paul was the same guy, wasn't he, all the way through? [00:17:20] JW: No. It was Lee Ballou. [00:17:21] RB:Oh, Lee? [00:17:22] KR: Skylab lab director. Hans Paul was the technical engineer. [00:17:26] JW: Technical engineer. He had a technical branch organization. [00:17:40] JW: And that was always the problem with us in the Saturn Systems Office was to take their program, their budget, and what have you, and work it into the total Saturn program requirements. I think one of the objectives of the reorganization in 1963 was to get the engine development program and the launch vehicle — the stage development program — together under one boss. [00:18:18] RB: Under Young and then Rudolph. [00:18:20] JW: Who was the program PM director in those days? [00:18:28] KR: Bob Young, wasn’t it? [00:18:29] RB: Bob Young. [00:18:30] JW: Bob Young. You had an engine development program office, and you had vehicle program development office. Rudolph had a Saturn V vehicle, and Lee Ballou still had an engine development program. You had them sort of under one big boss at that time. [00:18:55] JW: Another objective at that time was to place more emphasis on program management, which I think was needed. I think something with a little more power than the Saturn Systems Office had, but it wasn't required. I still think they overdid it, manpower-wise. [00:19:22] RB: In this period of the Saturn Systems Office, is it fair to say that the laboratories and the technical divisions had really more of the premier position within the center? [00:19:36] JW: At that time, yeah. [00:19:38] RB: They were Von Braun’s, I hate to say pets, but they were the ones that really wagged the tail. [00:19:46] KR: Von Braun managed with the board of directors, and they were the board of directors. [00:19:50] JW: The lab directors were the board of directors. That's the way things were, were managed, those days — by the board of directors, the board of staff, whatever you want to call it. [00:20:06] KR: A lot of these major decisions, by my understanding I didn't participate, was that they were brought up to actually voted on the board. That's true, isn't it, Jim? [00:20:17] JW: Yeah. But again, the reorganization of 1963, it not only brought the engine development program into the vehicle program or under the same boss, it also brought some other programs we had at the time like Light and Media and Vehicle Program. I guess the establishment of a program management directorate was in order at that time. I still think we overreacted and overstaffed the organization. [00:21:01] RB: What about difficulties between I.O. and R&D.O. after this? Because theoretically then I.O. was the one who was calling the shots. They were the ones who were setting up the configuration and establishing schedules and so on. It was no longer the board of directors doing that. Was there friction between I.O. and R&D.O. people after this? [00:21:26] JW: There was a certain amount of competitiveness. In the beginning, the laboratories looked at industrial operations as more or less the money changers and the schedule, the chart makers, you know, and things like that. [00:21:50.280] KR: To be perfectly candid, they had no feeling for the schedules. They couldn't care less about the schedules. Technical considerations first and then everything else fell into place. I had an idea that center management leaned that way too. Technical expertise. [00:22:12] RB: There was a problem with that, though, when you were coping with spacecraft being developed someplace else, and it had its own milestones, etc. and you’re trying to develop KSC then you’ve got to have more of a scheduled guideline. [00:22:26] KR: That’s like a little evolution. That’s kind of fast. Jim’s talking about 1963. That started getting in gear in ‘65 with spacecraft vehicle. There were a couple years there where the stages were more or less being built independently. Not more or less, but they were major developments in themselves. [00:22:57] JW: In the earlier days, we were working against really just the launch vehicle program in itself without any consideration to payload the spacecraft. [00:23:12] KR: Well, it was a good year and a half, two years, deciding whether it's an Earth orbit rendezvous or a straight to the moon. This dictated what kind of a spacecraft. [00:23:23] JW: We went ahead with a booster development. You gotta have a big booster, you're just going to have a big booster. We were well into the booster development before we ever knew what the spacecraft would look like with an Earth orbit or lunar orbit type of mission. As a matter of fact, we had worked for quite some time here at Marshall, ABMA and Marshall, before the lunar concept came into being. [00:23:53] JW: This lunar orbit concept was proposed by, I believe, John Houbolt at Langley, was eventually accepted as the mode to go. Up to that time, we'd been working on two modes, here at Marshall in planning phases, was the Earth orbit and the direct flight mode. I guess the Nova was the direct flight vehicle to the moon. You should have seen the monster that we were going to land on the moon and return on, it was ninety feet long. That's back in the direct flight days. [00:24:40] KR: Roger was asking earlier today, Jim, if you recall how the Saturn V booster grew in engines … Do you remember the C1, C2, C3? [laughter] Had two engines it seemed like. [00:24:55] JW: Yeah, I remember C2 or C3. I guess the Saturn V at one time had…Weren’t we going to use the M1 engine that was later on cancelled? [00:25:16] RB: Do you remember that much about the M1 engine that was an Air Force project, wasn't it? [00:25:22] JW: No, it was a NASA project. It could have been Air Force in the early beginning, but when I first recall M1 engine project, it was managed here at Marshall. It was later transferred to Lewis before it was canceled. It was a liquid hydrogen engine, one million pounds thrust. At one time, what we know as the Saturn V now, we had one configuration where we used M1 engines. [00:25:58] KR: I was telling Roger once they got up to three engines, it seemed like it all of a sudden jumped up to five. I always just figured it turned out, hell, might as well put five on. Roger mentioned that heat shield problem... [00:26:29] JW: I just don't remember. I can remember going through some exercises where we had maybe one great big engine. I remember that. I remember where we have maybe five or more M1 engines. Then I guess by that time the development of the F1 engine came into being. We decided to go with the kerosene and oxygen, RP and oxygen. [00:27:00] KR: You may recall there was an E1, 480,000 pounds of thrust… [00:27:05] JW: Yeah, that was going to be used on separate stages... [00:27:14] RB: Getting back to the management thing, something you said struck me, is that you had very good visibility and rapport with headquarters. I was wondering, though, I had the impression that because of the [jam boxes?] that existed in each of the program manager's offices, this easy exchange with headquarters still continued. [00:27:37] JW: Still continues when? Today? [00:27:39] RB: At least from ‘63 to ‘69 when that particular organization chart was in effect. [00:27:48] JW: Well, it did, but it became more bureaucratic.This exchange was by computer and charts and things like this. [00:28:00] KR: And the people changed, and you lost that personal contact. [00:28:10] JW: If you interview Bob Lindstrom he’s going to tell you this. He’s told everybody else. When everything else failed at Marshall, and they got in the corner and didn't know what was going to happen next, I would go up and sit down with some people I knew and work the program out and bring the money back. I mean, it was just sort of a thing. [00:28:32] RB: This is during SSO days? [00:28:33] JW: Yeah. [00:28:34] RB: Yeah. [00:28:35] KR: In fact, Jim coined the phrase, give or take a billion dollars. [Laughter] [00:28:40] JW: Give or take a billion. Don't get locked in, you know? You gotta always have room to negotiate. It was a matter of, with me and Washington, it was a matter of being able to take. I think the record will bear me out that I gave the little ones and took the big ones. You've got to play this game in management of any other program, you can't, a field center can't develop a real hard line and go forth to headquarters, to their own bosses, and demanding things. You've got to, you've got to go up with flexibility and room to sidestep and back up and what have you and negotiate the program that you had in mind in the first place. [00:29:31] KR: For what it's worth, you may recall, Jim, that we started this Lend-Lease program —employees from Saturn Systems Office went to Washington spent two weeks to get better acquainted with people. They sent people down here and did the same thing. [00:29:49] JW: Yeah, we traded people between SSO and headquarters, both sides. Each could find out the problems here and find out the problems up there. The personal relationship, of course, it was a professional type relationship. We would get to know people, and those people at headquarters getting to know you and know that they can trust you. And okay, they screwed me a little bit, but not a lot. We worked these compromises and then take them to our bosses for approval. We bummed around down here and the director of manned space flight up there. [00:30:39] RB: Would you say that the Saturn V Program Office then had trouble operating in terms of money? [00:30:46] JW: No. [00:30:49] RB: Would have the other program offices found themselves short? [30:52 - 31:17 ] silence due to issues with recording [00:31:17] JW: In some fiscal years we’d use more money, but we were always under constraint from the headquarters level. We would have an idea of what the market would bear, and we would tailor our program accordingly. I remember one fiscal year, we really got in a bind. Back in those days, we would program and get approval for something maybe like a five-quarter year. We would have enough money to take us over into, through [August?], for example, through the first month of the new fiscal year. One time, we got in a bind, and in order to reduce the budget to stay at the headquarters level, we just simply [lopped?] off the [month of August?] from our program operating plan, and we reduced our budget by 1/12th. [00:32:20] KR: No impact. [00:32:20] JW: No impact, in other words. There were a lot of ways for skin a cat. [00:32:25] RB: What, the one thing that struck me in analyzing the approach to management was the working groups. They originated with the Saturn Systems Office, isn't that correct? [00:32:36] JW: Yeah. Is that the thing? [00:32:] KR: It rings a bell, Jim, but I was not personally involved in them. It seemed like a lot of people with Saturn Office chaired those. Deputy chair, I think they had some arrangement where there was a lab guy and a Saturn guy… [00:32:54] JW: Yeah, the working groups did start. Now, where the idea originated in the Saturn Systems Office, I don't remember. But it did start in those days, and we had internal working groups, not only internal working groups, but about the same time we established working groups with Houston and Manned Space Flight Center. I don't recall really what these working groups were, but they came into being about 1962 or 1963. [00:33:30] RB: So, at least that early, you were trying to interface with Houston about the payload problems, etc.? [00:33:41] JW: But as a program evolved from the early ‘60s, on up through the mid ‘60s, you know, the program was evolving and growing all the time. I think the Saturn Systems Office was the way it started, and it was a successful management group. As the program got bigger and became more directly involved in Houston, I think going to the industrial operations concept in 1963 was in order. As the program got bigger and the launches and started putting men on the moon, all of us tended to formalize things to more of an extent than what we experienced in the early days. [00:34:44] RB: And that tends to slow you down? [00:34:46] JW: That tends to slow you down, because as you become more bureaucratic, it takes longer to get things done. [00:34:52] RB: Weren't there a lot of telephone calls between guys who said, “Okay, we'll do this, and I'll follow up with the documentation next week?” [00:34:58] JW: Yeah, there was a lot of that. [00:35:00] RB: That was the only way to get around it then, so the program still moved ahead? [00:35:04] JW: Well, in the early days, we could commit on the telephone like that. We could indeed follow up with the communications, correspondence. Today I'm not real sure you can do that. [00:35:14] KR: But when you get so many channels set up, you just don’t know whether you can or not. [00:35:23] RB: Yeah, okay. I can see that. [00:35:25] KR: Too many people approve it to know whether they’re going to get up on the right side of the bed that day. [00:35:32] RB: Were you in ABMA before? You were, okay. If you’d remember, going back to about 1958, was the ABMA group really working on kind of a Saturn 1 idea when the ARPA order came? Or did the ARPA order spark this as a brand new concept? [00:35:50] JW: No, I think some people at ABMA were thinking of a big booster prior to the ARPA order. I don't recall the point in time, at one time he called it “The Big B.” The Juno 5. There was a mountain top program. [00:36:14] KR: We go back to 1956, we got facilities approved, and one of them was the structured mechanics complex. I remember specifically the doors down there, making a last minute call to [Mr. Pellaro?] was saying what's the biggest thing you ever expect to have because we want to size these doors. Maybe twenty-two feet. Turned out that the Saturn 1b was twenty-two feet some inches [laughter] [00:36:46] JW: I recall planning on some big, big launch vehicles before the ARPA order. I don't know what, Juno 5? You remember Juno 5? [00:37:00] RB: Was that a single tank concept or were you thinking about the multiple tanks? The multiple tanks didn't come in until after the ARPA order then? [00:37:09] JW: Right. [00:37:11] KR: Well, you know, time gets hazy. [00:37:14] JW: But I know this. [00:37:15] KR: Remember the multiple tanks with those Redstones and then Jupiter was in there. [00:37:21] JW: Dick Canright, who was in headquarters at that time, was in ARPA, as a matter of fact, had a lot to do with the cluster tank concept. It was a convenient concept all around because one of the selling points was that we could use Redstone Jupiter tooling, those redstone tanks and the engines and so forth. We could proceed you know in the state of the art. [00:37:48] RB: Yeah, the S3D engine…I think so, yeah. [00:37:56] JW: But one of the selling points was we'd use existing Redstone Jupiter tooling in the cluster tank concept. I would imagine if you're trying to give credit to anybody for part of the cluster tank concept, it would probably be Dick Canright who was in ARPA at that time then later on NASA. [00:38:19] RB: Is he still in headquarters? [00:38:21] JW: He's in Pennsylvania someplace now. [00:38:24] KR: I remember telling Jim a while back, I saw him on television on why he's [quit his ship?]. He went to Douglas, and then he went to Douglas again. [00:38:38] JW: There were a number of reasons for the cluster tank concept, one of them being of course we could use the [Glenn Icing?] tooling facilities and what have you. Two were the common bulkhead problems at that time. It would’ve been a real advancement in the state of the art in the materials there, especially insulation in the common bulkhead route. [00:39:07] RB: Did NASA have a common bulkhead? [00:39:12] JW: Well, yeah but there was a bit of a sloshing problem. [00:39:19] RB: Because the tanks are so big. [00:39:19] JW: Yeah. [00:39:20] RB: Yeah, okay. [00:39:24] JW:That used to be a great concern back in the early days. [00:39:27] RB: Still had to put slosh baffles in the S1 as I recall. It was an addition that happened later on. Something else I understood too from this early period too is that when the order from ARPA came down just to do a static test, so it was just designed for static test only basically. [00:39:49] JW: Yeah. I recall it was a three or four million dollar order. Seems like it was four million dollars to demonstrate the cluster tank concept. A million and a half pounds thrust. I know it was later amended to ten million and then to sixteen million, but that first order would be the three or four million. Four million, and for that we were going to design and build the first stage, and that's one stage, and modify the Jupiter static test facility. [00:40:27] RB: But then, after you got into building and actually cutting hardware came down to fly the thing instead. So actually you were flying a thing that you hadn't really designed to fly in the first place. [00:40:42] JW: We probably always had in mind flying it eventually. [00:40:52] RB: So it wasn't that much different stuff? [00:40:56] JW: No. [00:40:57] RB: Those tanks were all basically flying hardware anyhow. It wasn't that much of a change over maybe. [00:41:09] JW: The clustered concept was new. Well, it wasn't new, but something besides it was new. I guess they had test flown some Nike Hercules. That's a cluster of four solid rocket motors. [00:41:27] RB: How does the Saturn clustered concept compare a historical breakthrough to the Russians, who were already using clustered vehicles to launch their stuff? [00:41:40] JW: Well, I don't know too much about the Russians, their cluster concept. I didn't know much about it, and I still don’t. I mean as much as anyone else. I think the only experience we had to go on here in this country was very limited, you know. I just pointed out, the Nike Hercules, and that was a cluster of four solid rockets. [00:42:14] RB: Yeah. [00:42:18] JW: Of course, you know, not man-rated, which makes a difference. I think the cluster concept was more of a straight engineering problem than it was a design problem. There are expansions of the tank in extreme temperatures and the thrust takeoff points and things like that. It was a complex engineering problem. I'd say more than a design problem. [00:43:05] RB: After the reorganization of ‘63, were you involved still in one of the program offices somewhere? Or where did you go after that? [00:43:16] JW: I went up as an assistant to Dr. Rees after the 1963 reorganization. The job I have presently became open in late ‘63 or early ‘64, and I asked for the job and was assigned to it. [00:43:42] RB: How would you comment on Rees’ association with Von Braun? How did that work? That's something that never really seemed to me come out, and I really don't have a handle on it. [00:43:54] JW: Well, I essentially worked for Rees all of the years in the Saturn program, even though I worked very closely with him... Generalized, you could say that Rees was the in-house operator and Von Braun was the outhouse operator [laughter]. If you just want to get very general about it. Von Braun got deeply involved in the in-house operations, too, but he relied heavily on Rees. Rees knew when to make decisions and when to let Von Braun make them. Rees seemed to have made the most decisions at that time in the total program operations like budgets and facilities. The requirements, they ran them by [inaudible] concentrating on the concepts and the philosophies of space operations. [00:45:02] RB: Was Rees kind of Von Braun's troubleshooter, too, as a [inaudible] man. He did a lot of traveling out to the contractors when they had problems. I heard him described as Von Braun’s hatchet man. [laughter] [00:45:14] JW: Well, I think troubleshooter probably is a better word for it. [00:45:22] RB: Yeah. But he carried a lot of authority then when he made his little parade to contractors usually to deliver a specific message or something else? [00:45:31] JW: In those days, as you recall back in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, Von Braun was spending a lot of time in Washington and other places, Congress, promoting space travel. And Rees was at home, running the shop, so to speak. [00:45:55] RB: Yeah. When the switch came from ABMA to Marshall Space Flight Center, the Von Braun team as such really operated as a research and development group, at a lower scale, kind of, in the organizational structure. All of a sudden, they found themselves, you know, managing an entire center. Were there any serious problems or difficulties really in this period? Did they slip right into it nicely and take over? Or did they have some problems with adjusting to this kind of overall concept now? [00:46:29] JW: Well, there were some problems in adjusting to the fact that we were now an agency, I mean, a center, a field center of a new agency. We had some people in Von Braun's organization, though, kind of the adhesive that kept things together. One of them was George Constan. I think Rees had a lot to do with it. [00:46:55] KR: There's one thing you must remember, there is, from 1945 to ‘60, 15 years of Von Braun completely relied on the Army for all the logistics and all the procurement, everything that goes to support an operation. Then, zap! One day, then, it's all different in those particular areas, to the best of my recollection. There were some growing pains just getting procedures and.. [00:47:27] JW: There were a lot of problems. [00:47:28] RB: Where did they get the expertise for that then? Hard knocks? [00:47:32] KR: Well, again, they had it. They were with ABMA, the Army people that weren't in DOD... [00:47:38] RB: Was Harry Gorman one of those? [00:47:40] JW: No, Harry Gorman came in later. [00:47:44] KR: He was the second deputy we had. [00:47:45] JW: Yeah. He came in as an assistant to [Del Morris?] Or he was one of those two deputies at that time. Well, there were a lot of problems when we became a field center rather than a division of ABMA. There were many of us that had been ABMA had an idea about how we would like to see things go. And it was a wonderful opportunity to... [00:48:21] KR: By the same token when we went to NASA, it was NASA here, NASA headquarters, and the president, so to speak, you know. Where in the Army you had all of the change of commands. We got out from under them. [00:48:35] JW: We have some real good people in NASA headquarters, like Bill Lilly, that we counseled with, and he gave us all sorts of good directions. I spoke some time ago about this fellow, Jack Young, that came down, and I spent about six weeks with him in the program operating procedures. [00:48:55] KR: Was he a colonel? [00:48:56] JW: No. [00:48:57] KR: No, it was a different Young was it? [00:48:59] JW: But he became one of the top men at NASA, shortly after he made the study. Most of the things that I recommended was made a part of procedure within NASA. The fact that we recommended them, and they were reviewed here at the center, I know all my stuff was reviewed on a daily basis almost with Rees. The fact that we had a major part to play in the total operating procedure as we know them today, the adjustment for us was probably a hell of a lot easier. [00:49:43] KR: And NASA wasn't all that old. They started in ‘58. They were just two years old, so it wasn’t a big bureaucratic conglomeration yet. [00:50:01] RB: What about the tenure that Bob Young spent here? Is there any way to characterize that? Was it just kind of waiting until O'Connor took over to really get hold of it, or did he really get it cranked up and down the road? [00:50:22] JW: I don't know. [00:50:24] KR: He was a different personality than what we're used to around here. When I say different, he was rough, and people didn’t know what to make of this guy coming in from the industry on a temporary basis. He went home to California every weekend and all that kind of stuff. I think there was a little mystique about him. Again this is hindsight. After a while he sort of got ineffective. [00:50:55] JW: I think under the new organizations of 1963, the industrial operations, you call it, when Bob Young came in, I think the program kept going based on the old Saturn Systems Office concept. It was mostly the same people. You’re always adding of course, but your main operators were essentially the same people. You just kept operating with headquarters… [00:51:24] KR: Jim, you may recall, before we went into I.O., the Saturn Systems Office had already broken up into stages, or programs within the Saturn like Lindstrom on Saturn Rocket 1B, and Bramley on Saturn 5, so the whole nucleus, the biggest portion of I.O. was already established as an organization… [00:51:49] JW: What they did was just come in and just man-load the staffing plan with the organization we had set up, and then bring the engine office in. I don’t know how to assess really what Bob Young contributed. I’m sure he contributed some. He was from industry. I don’t really know what he contributed. [00:52:22] KR: Yeah, I think he contributed something. [inaudible] before his tenure was gone he was completely ineffective because people knew he was a short-timer. He lost all interest best I recall in the program. [00:52:38] RB: Why did he come down in the first place? [00:52:41] JW: Mr. Webb. [00:52:44] RB: This is a superimposed decision from headquarters. [52:48] KR: [inaudible] potential contractor here [inaudible] [00:52:57] JW: Did he go back to Aerojet then? [52:58] KR; Yeah [inaudible] [00:53:07] RB: Well, we've covered a lot of ground, skip back and forth, but I really want, I think I've got a little bit better idea about how the Saturn Systems Office functions a little bit. Anything else you want to add? [00:53:20] JW: No. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000052_A Title A name given to the resource Wiggins, James W and Rossman, Kenneth Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/0a40cb479d188d534a53e9dadadbb721.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/3edb56129a944a08dd116ecde140dc8a.mp4 dbdbcac4a8c3252c540737bfa450d969 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Weidner, Hermann K Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:29:46 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:02] Roger Bilstein: It's an interview with Weidener at Marshall Space Flight Center. We want to talk to you a little bit about propulsion and liquid hydrogen technology. Were you involved in, for example, some of the early business with Centaur and the RL-10 engines and the problems with production, supply, and storage of LH2, its use in near-earth environment? [00:00:57] HW: The latter part, I personally had no involvement. Of course, we all have due to our, you might say, our positions and people working for you, there are people which have concern themselves with the storage and [inaudible] and so on. Personally, I am not too knowledgeable about that. [00:01:21] HW: Now, as far as the RL-10 engine is concerned, as you probably know, this was started under under the Air Force leadership, at one time then, a decision was made that this project was to be turned over to NASA, and Marshall was the selected place to do this. [00:01:40] HW: Yes, we were involved very deeply in this. At that time, I was in what is now the Astronautics Laboratory, or now Organizational Propulsion and Behavioral Engineering, PMBE, I think, was the name. I was a deputy of the laboratory at that time and was at the same time director of propulsion for the center. So I was deeply involved in that part. [00:02:09] HW: I know that, according to early plans, the engine…Let me put it this way: they were rather optimistic and ambitious plans to get this engine into production, and they had some fantastic schedules, how almost like pretzels, this was time these should come out for all sorts of NASA flight purposes. I think at that time, one was still hopeful that all these Mars and range missions and lunar missions, the unmanned ones, that they would all fly much faster and much earlier than originally planned. [00:02:51] HW: Now, this was, of course, for many reasons not the case. Availability of payloads and all these things are much costlier, maybe than the early days people were thinking and expecting, so the money didn't go as far as it did. Also, NASA's budget did not keep growing. Obviously, the lunar program was more expensive, more demanding than it was. These things were suffering in a way from that. [00:03:17] HW: But coming back to the engine, also the engine, I think, was not quite as ready as one was hoping, and there was more development work to be done. Our people here worked very closely with Pratt & Whitney during this period while this was a Marshall-assigned responsibility. The engine was brought to a maturity, which finally gave it a very fine flight record. For instance, on the early Saturn, the S-IV stage, on the upper stages, it has done marvelously well in ten flights or so. Not quite ten. I think the first ones didn't have upper stages, but at least five or six flights or something like that, it has done very well. [00:04:05] HW: Also, in the Centaur, I would say the engine has done well. And some of the early Centaur difficulties, one might not trace back to propulsion per se, but to all sorts of peripheral kind of problems, which an engine sees in a problem. [00:04:22] HW: I believe this RL-10 is a jewel of an engine. That was really the first one, as you know, to have hydrogen as one of the propellants, as a fuel. I think Pratt & Whitney has, by and large, done an excellent job of getting this engine going. We had good working relations between our technologists and engineers here on the government side who worked together with the Pratt & Whitney people in seeing the problems through and getting the engine to the status it finally assumed, while the whole thing was still with Marshall. It was later on turned over to others, as you probably know. [00:05:06] Interviewer : It was given to Lewis. [00:05:07] HW: It was given to Lewis. The reason… [00:05:08] Interviewer: Didn't start, didn't our liquid hydrogen technology kind of start with Lewis anyway? [00:05:12] HW: Yeah, maybe this is certainly true. And the reason for that is very simple. If you look at the family of NASA centers, and each and every center plays a certain typical role. Now, Lewis being one of the family of research centers together with Langley, Ames, and places like that, they are supposed to work the basic technologies by charter. One of the prime things, if not the prime thing for Lewis, of course, is propulsion. They have done a lot of work by either contract outside or by in-house work to lay the groundwork within NASA for this technology. There are quite a number of remarkable things, which Lewis people worked out which have been accepted and taken over into the RL-10 program, like the injector, for instance. The injector is something which the Lewis people basically developed, which was introduced into the RL–10 engine and later on the J-2 engine. The J-2 engine had the same injector. [00:06:12] HW: So it's only natural that the bits and pieces of technology work had to come out of Lewis at a time when the other part of NASA, namely the development centers like ours, were already taught to utilize those. There's a natural phasing kind of thing. The early work in areas which have promise for the future have to be carried by those fellows. People like ours are really system center. There are all these bits and pieces when they become available and ready and can be realized in real flight hardware or flight applications when they take over. Our place is really in this latter part of the NASA family. [00:06:51] HW: We are a development center, a system center. This is our strength. We are not so much the technology area. Now, one cannot draw a very hard line between a research center and a development center. There are certain overlap areas. If you want to have excellent people to participate and do development, you have to allow them a certain part of early works and genuine and original work of their own. [00:07:21] HW: It's in this overlap area where our discipline groups are allowed to do a certain part of work, which is close, of course, to the systems application thing. And what you say, the storage of hydrogen in space thing, is one of those areas where people around Charlie Wood and so on, Hans Paul's group have been active over the many years. In that sense, applying now, or providing for hydrogen in space applications since now we had an engine or a means of using it to our advantage, these are things which then the systems and development group like ours has to concern itself with. [00:08:02] HW: So this was a very, very heavy experience. The reason why the engine finally had to be, or the engine and the whole vehicle, Centaur vehicle had to be turned over to another center like Lewis was simply this: the Saturn program seemed to take on proportions of involvement and demands on our people that we just didn't feel we had the capacity of handle, of giving the Saturn the attention which we felt it deserved and doing these things at the same time. Now, looking back with hindsight, I think one can say there's no reason why we couldn't have done this, but be this as it may, that was a decision, therefore, at this time, that we told NASA we cannot do this anymore. The decision was made at the NASA top level that therefore this responsibility should be turned over to another center. [00:09:07] RB: Was there a period when Von Braun was not happy with liquid hydrogen propulsion in general? [00:09:14] HW: I'm not aware of any such unhappiness. As a matter of fact, I'm sure that this is a story. I have been all these years very close to Wernher and certainly in the propulsion area. He would be the last one to not be ready to pick up what is ready and to the advantage of vehicles, and therefore, new capabilities. [00:09:42] HW: No, not at all. If my recollection is right, there was, I think under Abe Silverstein, NASA set up some sort of a review team in the early Saturn or immediately pre-Saturn days where they were kind of reviewing. Maybe the question was very simple: what kind of propellants and therefore what kind of engines and stages, should a Saturn or a lunar vehicle, are we ready for this? Should we stay with the old JP type of propellants? Are we ready with our technology and the basis of knowledge to commit ourselves and the country to these upper stages? I think they did a hard look. [00:10:31] HW: I don't know whether Werner as a person was even a member of this group. I couldn't say that with certainty. But I know that they came out with a recommendation, “Yes, we are ready for a pilot.” By all means, this was a correct decision, and had, to my recollection, the whole-hearted support of this, yes. There were some efforts going at that time on a what-if basis: “What would we do if?” This would not be the case. [00:11:01] They were looking into Titan hardware, one cluster or build up something like that. What would it take to do this? This would have made for awkward type of vehicles, which would not have ever had the capability and capacity of this, of the Saturn V we had, the Saturn V especially. So I would say there is nothing to this question. [00:11:28] RB: I heard that story. Somewhere I came up with that story. We found many things like that. [00:11:32] HW: It might be all of these things. This makes good reading. The conflict somewhere has more [inaudible]. Exaggerated sells papers [inaudible] certainly interesting. [00:11:38] RB: Can you make some comments about the development of the RL-10 Centaur system, the development of the S-IV and S-IVB and even the S-II systems? Were there things that were useful on the Centaur and J2 that you were able to apply in the other ones? [00:12:04] HW: Things useful on the Centaur and the J-2…What do you mean useful on the Centaur, which could be translated into a 2…? [00:12:12] RB: Yeah, besides the injector, for example. [00:12:16] HW: You mean the engine, in the engine area, propulsion area? [00:12:19] RB: The engine area. [00:12:27] HW: Yeah, I would expect that all government-funded kind of things, like a development, we are talking about the center development, by way of reports and so on, the difficulties and the solutions for those difficulties are common knowledge. They become common knowledge. These other companies, like Rocketdyne or Aerojet, they, of course, were using these things for their own laying out of the engines and designing these things properly. [00:13:10] HW: But also, NASA was sponsoring bits of technology work. I think Adelbert Tischler—I don't know whether you've heard his name—at that time, he used to be with the Manned Space Flight family for propulsion when NASA was formed. He was originally a Lewis man, like George Low and many others. [00:13:35] HW: Abe Silverstein was called—I'm digressing a little bit from the question of bits of interest—Abe was called up to Washington in the early days of NASA. I think Abe did one great thing, among others, when he came to Washington, he realized that a good transfusion of excellent people into this new headquarters thing was something to help the agency to get going. He maybe personally convinced and twisted arms of X number of his more senior and better Lewis people, which had grown up in the old NECA Lewis environment, where he was the center director. He convinced them to go with him to headquarters in order to form a basis from which an agency like this one could operate. Quite a number of people like those which, which I mentioned, and many others at that time went to headquarters and stayed there. [00:14:37.740] HW: So Del Tischler was one of those fellows. His background then is specifically propulsion. He was one of the senior fellows. Later engine efforts like the F-1 engine, the J-2 engine, all this was started even though the assignment was given to Marshall, but he was our headquarters counterpart. For all the things, as you know, there is one headquarters office or headquarters guy or whatever it is, an organization in headquarters responsible. [00:15:13] Interviewer: Was Milt Rosen over him? Or was it just a separate office? [00:15:19] HW: Well, I think Milt Rosen you might see maybe in the pecking order was over him. I believe, if my recollection is right, the first guy, Mr. Manned Space Flight, who in the generation of subsequent guys is today admired was General Ostrander. Ostrander was the first Mr. Manned Space Flight. His idea was so that there should be in NASA, a launch vehicle center. He had picked Marshall for that, from the scout all the way up to whatever it is, should be in one center and that should be us. In that process, incidentally, the Centaur was ours since we were to be that center. As I say, we felt we couldn't do justice to all that, and still do the Saturn and our lunar commitment. So then, this is where this scheme started to make it hard. [00:16:15] HW: The next one was Holmes. Milt Rosen was, I think, kind of a second man to Holmes or, I forget, to [inaudible]. But anyhow, he was at that level. Then in one of these interim periods, Milt Rosen was running the shop and therefore was above Del Tischler and all these other fellows. He was for a while in his function, maybe as deputy or so, was tending the shop while the new man was not selected yet. So then I would guess that he was above him. Especially engine was Del Tischler’s assignment in the Manned Space Flight family. [00:17:06] HW: There was a lot of engine effort to be started, like with J-2. The RL-10 was with us at this time. Then the H-1 engine was with us at this time. So you see there was a sizable commitment and a sizable dollar volume which in this area would come via Huntsville. And Del Tischler was the program director, you might say, for that particular section and segment of Washington. [00:17:32] HW: Now, Del, in later years, when these engines were kind of a going concern, he moved away from the Manned Space Flight family and went back to the technology [OAR?] team. Up to maybe a year or two ago, has been Mr. Propulsion in the technology area for many years and has guided NASA's overall preparatory efforts. Maybe two years ago, he then got another assignment, like being Mr. Shuttle Technology, a very broad assignment. Now we've lost ourselves. What was the question? [00:18:11] RB: Yeah, I forgot my job. [00:18:12] HW: You were asking, did technology from the RL-10 find its way? So what I was kind of saying, out of these Del Tischler kind of things, there were also technology efforts which went into the centers. These were efforts which went to all eligible contractors. There were also partly hydrogen technology. [00:18:38] Interviewer: Was he the broker of these technologies? Did he get things from companies and pass them on to the centers and get studies from the centers and pass them on to contractors? [00:18:44] HW: No, I think this is too narrow a connotation. Look at it this way: there must be a guy in headquarters who says, “I'm responsible for laying the groundwork for tomorrow. I believe that such and such things are ready to be done and should be done in view of NASA's broad objectives.” Then this is a guy who has to help to go forward to Congress and defend this and say, “Mr. Congress,” in hearings, “NASA efforts are being discussed for the next fiscal year.” He'd say, “Look, for such and such a reason, I believe such and such things should be done, and it would cost that much money,” and has to try to convince the congressional members, at least in this committee, that this is justified and just and right. Let's assume this is accepted, then, and X million dollars for such broad efforts are being accepted, not a task-by-task thing, but on an objective basis. He would now be the one who is, together with the centers, argue with the center, and break this down into the next level of objectives and maybe finally into tasks. [00:19:59] HW: These tasks would then be very specific to work a better impeller or a better inducer on a pump or know something about bearings hydrogen-lubricated or about a better injector or cooling heat transfer questions or whatever it is. Things of identifiable tasks like that. Then one would basically go out on a competitive basis to industry and say, “Here is this task we want to be done,” and it's about these things we expect to come out on. It's a one-year or two-year kind of effort, and we are prepared to pay that much money for it, which is a level of effort. Then they come forward and offer what they would be thinking of doing. This is how they are determined. [00:20:46] HW: Now, industry, of course, is involved in planting ideas and talking to all sorts of guys like us, like the Tischlers, or anybody who wants to hear it and where they think he has some influence on these matters. They'll go and talk and say, “Look, what I know,” or “What I think, I have a good idea. For such and such reasons, I believe it would be useful for NASA applications since it has such and such advantages.” So they come forward and tell the story. And of course, in so doing plant ideas that something is ready to be done. There is this process, no doubt, taking place, but it's intermixed with ideas of our people and so on. You leave their story. Are they really ready? Are we really ready to do things? Is there an application? But it's a whole family of guys which are communicating and talking to each other. Out of this come things which are ready and therefore should be picked up and be done. [00:21:49] HW: The J-2 engine really was born about the time when it seemed to be—maybe we start one notch earlier—after this Sputnik kind of shock which the country and the entire aerospace family felt there was a field, one thing we can do immediately before we know what else we do, we need engines with larger thrusts. Since our three and a half pounds or so in orbit, this was something which wouldn't look well in the eyes of the rest of the world compared with statements of what the Russians were doing, so many thousand pounds. They had a dog up there. They did this and they did that. One thing became obvious that we needed something with more thrust, larger engines. [00:22:37] HW: I believe, as I see it, the reason why this country didn't at that time do or hadn't done work in larger engines was simply this: since all these propulsion means, the engines are something designed for defense purposes—maybe you could say the payloads, hydrogen bombs and so on. This country had advanced to a point that in a much smaller weight they could pack, I don't know how much energy, and therefore they could get away with much smaller vehicles. Whereas the Russians, they might not have had this advancement or that level of sophistication in the payload concerns. They needed much cruder, much larger vehicles, much larger engines, which at the point when our space flight became of interest was an advantage, and they [inaudible] this advantage to the ultimate. [00:23:34] HW: We went already with large thrust engines, and that was the point where it was said, “Let's build larger engines.” The F-1—one and a half million pounds of thrust—something unheard of. We had the 200, 250, or maybe a little less, 165, or whatever these figures, for the Atlas, for the Jupiter, for the Thor. This class of engines was all the country had at this time. Here we made a big step towards the one and a half million, which was by the factor of 10, or hydrogen from the, what was it, 15,000 of the RL10 to 150, 200,000 of the J-2 at that time. This was an unheard of step, which of course was right, since if you want to have man in space, or a large payload into space, we needed these engines. [00:24:24] HW: So this was one thing which everyone didn't have to ask what project, or what for, or so on. It was very obvious that this factor, 10 or so, was just needed. In these early space flight days, right after Sputnik, the country was ready to do this. As a matter of fact, these engines were started and formulated at a time when Kennedy's appeal, “Let's go to the moon,” was not really expressed. The thing was not said yet. It all came in handy when indeed these projects were formulated, and these efforts were going at this time. Now, the sizing was such that by the method of clustering, there was a lot of flexibility to take one, two, three, four, five, or whatever number of engines, and adapt it to the size of the final behavior. Exciting, exciting period. Quite different then than it is today. [00:25:27] HW: I know I was on the Source Evaluation Board—the SEB—which was a very interesting job at that time. I was on a similar board just a few weeks ago on this new engine. Somebody gave me that—hints of scandal. This is today where everybody is competing for the few dollars which every so often come by. This time there was a big space program maybe coming, so if you don't win this one, then we win the next one. But today there's only one to be won, and you can make one guy happy, and there will be X number of unhappy people. It's a different game these days. I don't know whether I'm telling you something that's just useful for your purposes or not. [00:26:15] RB: Well, I think so. I think one of the things that we were interested in is seeing the Saturn program as a rather deliberate series of steps of building block concept. As far as engines were concerned, we were interested in the technology that was developed in one system that was applicable to another system, how you went from there. So that's why I was interested in what you would have to say, maybe about the RL-10 leading to the J-2 in that respect. [00:26:43] HW: All the, let's say, all the things which were done in the RL-10 and were done in the Centaur and the stage application, they were no doubt useful to us and to the designers. It gives you the confidence that indeed these things can be mastered and can be used in a large scale in a field. Hydrogen being a rather novel kind of liquid in this application at least, and can one master and handle this in a field? Is it safe? Will the thing not burn up? Will we be able to master this? The leaks, hydrogen, you do not see it. If it burns, you don't see it somewhere. Of course you are playing with those very dangerous things in there. Can we insulate these large tanks? Can we pump it well and so on? Do we have know enough about the materials at these low temperatures about welding? How does material behave? How do welding seams behave in this environment? [00:27:54] HW: The Centaur had used one class of material, glass, hard kind of stainless steel. We needed to go to other materials, like aluminum and so on. There was a lot to be learned, and the work which was stimulated and done in the Centaur and in the engine, no doubt had a very healthy effect on our confidence and readiness to go the hydrogen route. The Saturn engine, obviously, we took even the engine, the RL-10, and clustered it by way of, what was it, six or so? [inaudible] and the S-IVB, since that was the most readily available solution. [00:28:41] Interviewer: Would you like to comment on the overall design philosophy? Roger mentioned the building block approach and off-the-shelf hardware, the whole seeming conservative nature of the design to fit within the required schedule and finances available? [00:28:58] HW: Well, I think you said a word like conservative, and maybe Marshall is a conservative outfit as far as design philosophy is concerned. [00:29:11] Interviewer: Do you feel that way? [00:29:12] HW: Well, I think we have a healthy conservatism, and I don't say this in a negative sense. [00:29:20] Interviewer: No, I'm not saying that. [00:29:21] HW: You can overdo things very much by being daring, by going very close to the limits and so on. But then there's a question of how well do you really know the conditions in the design? Can you describe it well so that your analysis holds and so on. I mean, we rather would like to like the…[recording ends] Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Roger Bilstein, Unknown other person Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000051_A Title A name given to the resource Weidner, Hermann K Description An account of the resource Propulsion studies, liquid hydrogen upper stages. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-08-30 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/b66e49ec62dd62241976dfc1a3692c2e.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/dc3ccb315989e73ebe20ffc08c43bc30.mp4 5374719cfd53d5d86af156a0a26325cf Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Weber, Fritz Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:56:19 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:00] Roger Bilstein: Interview with Mr. Weber. I've been working on the chapter on the instrument unit, and I think that's what we'd like to concentrate our discussions about. I'll just kind of work through the structure of the instrument unit to start with or maybe we should start with some basic design concepts? Can you tell me how the instrument unit came about as a separate stage from the canisters in the S-I in the spider beam area and the interstage area until it was made into a separate stage for the S-IV and then the S-IV-B common IU? [00:00:43] Fritz Weber: This is primarily a management decision, however, it has also considerable technical points involved. As you know, we had the three different Saturns: Saturn I, Saturn IB, and Saturn V. Of course, this is many years ago, and my memory may not get everything in the proper sequence. We started out with the canister type as you know, and I don't think we need to go into this one. One of the main reasons for this was that we could use designs of hardware and component which did not need to work in vacuum or in strange environments. We protected those by putting them into canisters and plug the canisters into the instrument unit. However, when we did find that we needed to design and develop most of the components directly for Saturn use, we applied the environmental requirements right to the component design, and therefore, did not need the canister anymore, which would make assembly and test of the instrument unit somewhat easier. [00:01:59] FW: Did I give you a good enough point there? The separation of instrument unit from the S-IV-B stage was primarily a management decision. Each stage was only working for a part of the flight, yeah? However, the instrument unit is required for the whole flight. If we would have given the instrument unit to the S-IV-B stage contractor, we would have assigned with that IU assignment also the coordination and integration of the stages, which according to headquarters decision should be a center function and not a contractor function at that time, yeah? [00:02:43] RB: So did the center coordinate these and then just let IBM do the fabrication? [inaudible…interfaces?] [00:02:49] FW: Yeah. Okay, right, I see your question. You wanted to know how Marshall and IBM shared responsibility. It is kind of a development. The development of the instrument unit was responsibility of Marshall, the production was responsibility of IBM. So with this we integrated the design during design period, yeah? We built the first instrument units right here in our own shop as you know. We developed at the same time the IBM capability here in Huntsville to take over this assignment and start producing and assembling instrument units. [00:03:32] RB: How did you go about developing this capability with IBM? Did you give them personnel to help them? [00:03:37] No, we did not give them personnel. We gave them a contract to develop such a capability. This was a specific contract. [00:03:47] RB: This is before the NASA 14,000? Before that contract? [00:03:52] FW: Yes, yes, yes. If you want to, let me pull out a little folder. This folder from which I take the information here is a personal folder which has to do with the first IBM contract to develop this capability. This specific item is the evaluation of the performance of IBM. It was the first contract at all which had an incentive award involved. Now if you have specific questions I think I can, in reference to that folder, find out what you want to know. [00:04:32] RB: Well, I am interested in the reason that IBM was selected as the contractor and why they were moved here to Huntsville to undertake this operation. I know they started doing the computer, the launch vehicle data adapter and the launch vehicle computer. That was their first contract. [00:04:51] FW: Yes, in fact they did. That first contract, the development of the southern computer, southern flight computer, we should say. By this effort, IBM automatically got involved very strong in—how shall I say?—in the overall vehicle aspects and gave them a very good advantage over any other contractor to get involved in the instrument unit, which again involves all aspects of the vehicle and its operation. Now, the actual reasoning I could not tell you, I do not know how the selection and when it was made, really. This was done pretty much on a higher management level. The one primarily involved was Mr. Weidner's, or Dr. Weidner's deputy, Jerry McCall. He had spearheaded that. He's now with IBM and I…maybe you can give…he's still in Huntsville, maybe you can give him a call and find out. He may be able to talk with you I do not know. [00:05:58] RB: Wasn't he with IBM before? Before the contract and then came with Marshall? [00:05:59] He was…Jerry McCall was at that time with...I do not know where he came from. I must admit, no. [00:06:13.] RB: And he was Weidner's deputy? [00:06:16] FW: Weidner's deputy, yes. And on a special assignment, handled these items, yeah? I was more involved to direct the first contract. Now, we had made a decision then, here within Marshall, that the development of the instrument unit would be an in-house project. The manufacturing, as I said before, IBM. It would be a production effort, would be managed by what we call now P.M., program management. At that time, we called it I.O., industrial operations. [00:06:56] FW: So, the first contract, which I referred to, to build up the capability during the development of the instrument unit in-house, was my responsibility. I had the assignment to coordinate in this all Marshall inputs. When the industrial contract started, P.M. or I.O., at that time, took over and managed the production contract. It would be good if you... I try to answer your questions, but I wait then and see which direction you want to follow. So, maybe that's it. [00:07:34] RB: Well, did Von Braun play any part that you know of with top management of IBM, trying to get IBM into Huntsville, or to support the space program in general? [00:07:46] FW: You know, I really do not know. I must admit, I was not involved in these type of operations at all, on these type of discussions. My role, as I say, was restricted to coordinate the development of the instrument unit, and see that IBM, during this period of time, supported us in that effort and same time build up their capability. So, I can tell you quite a bit of that period of time and the aspects there, how IBM started, and how they built it up, but I cannot tell you very much about the high-level decisions, management decisions, and why IBM was selected, and so, yeah…I do not know. I would tell you, but I don't know. [00:08:29] RB: Oh, yeah, yeah. Maybe we can switch over and talk about some of the technical aspects of the IU for a while. We have first a structure which is built in three parts of this bonded honeycomb. Why was bonded honeycomb selected rather than just skin and stringer construction? That was a decision that was made here at Marshall. [00:08:53] FW: Yes, decision was made primarily on what we call a trade-off study. We calculated, and we made preliminary design studies for either approach, and we found that the honeycomb was lower in weight. Weight is our problem because the IU weight is directly one-to-one to payload weight for most missions of the Saturn. It is based strictly on technical features, weight, strength, because it's a carrying member, the shell of the IU. Do you have one of these little brochures on the IU, which I..the yellow, the yellow-red one, the old one, we…it has a little description of the subsystems. [00:09:40] RB: I've seen some things. I'll talk about that later. I might, well, maybe ask you to see the booklet when we're through here. [I’d like to see that?] Then the system was built into three sections with those splices, and this was for transportability, but it was only to transport the sections, wasn't it? There was no thought of ever disassembling the IU as a get around? [00:10:03] FW: Yes, it was. It was. This was a very—how shall I say?—very unwanted situation. At that time, we did not have a good transportation means to the Cape. We could, we know we could use a barge, yeah? But the environment on the barge is not very favorable. We would have to build big protection containers or so, which is very bulky and expensive and time-consuming. We did not know then that the so-called guppy, or pregnant guppy, as it was called, this huge airplane would be available. So the sections of the IU, in the beginning, were thought we would disassemble the complete IU, disassemble it into three sections and transport those with different means. But later on, when the guppy became available, we kind of lost interest on this kind of a disassembly. [00:10:59.580] RB: Is the basic design for all the cable trays and all the environmental control system, everything, was that made to take apart? But then it was, then it changed to be a complete system? [00:11:06] FW: It was, it was in the beginning. Yeah…then it changed to be…Yeah, so these, these many, many interconnections or disconnections would be avoided, yeah? Which is a good feature, yeah? [00:11:21] RB: Those splices need not have been there originally. It could have been made some other way. [00:11:24] FW: No. Well, the main thing, one of the trade-off points was, again, transportation, yeah? [00:11:32] RB: Now, they weren't made here, those things, the ones that you fabric…the ones that you made here in-house. You got those honeycombs from Convair, Texas? [00:11:40] FW: That is right. Convair. However, the next low bidder, do I remember? [00:11:44] RB: North America. In Tulsa. [00:11:48] FW: North America, yeah. And I know a very strong contender for this contract was AVCO. They did not get the job. So there was a good capability available in this country already of honeycomb, very good honeycomb. This was one of the trade-off. We have the capability. We have the state-of-the-art developed to a point in this country that we could use that technology. [00:12:07] RB: Now, this technology was developed primarily for aircraft control surfaces prior to that? [00:12:13] FW: I wouldn't know. I doubt it for control surface. For structural members, yes. Control surface, I do not know. Construction… [00:12:20] RB: Like for a rudder where you need some strength, but you need also… [00:12:25] FW: But how about a wing? How about the basic wing structure or so, yeah? It's found quite, quite a few instances, yeah. [00:12:37] RB: Well, can we talk a little about the environmental control system? [00:12:39] FW: Yes. [00:12:40] RB: When the system was first designed, you estimated on each one of these cold plates you're gonna have so many watts, so much heat to dissipate, and you designed your systems for that. Then you also had an agreement with the McDonnell people that you would cool off their telemetry in the top of their stage with the same cooling system? But this is just the telemetry for their stage. It has nothing to do, it's not integral with the IU. Their own things that you're cooling, running off your cooling system. [00:13:04] FW: Yes. Mm-hmm. That is right. Let me make a few comments on this design of the cooling or environmental control system, temperature control system, whatever we want to call it. The design constraints were rather bad. They're rather hard to meet for this reason: in the very beginning of the development, we had considerably more electronics in the instrument unit and the S-IV-B stage. As we carried on later and we developed Saturn, where we dropped very many measurements, telemetry, and other gadgets we needed for either safety or for just to measure different phenomena in order to allow troubleshooting in case we had failures. [00:13:56] FW: Now, therefore, the environmental control system was probably over-designed in the beginning. We needed it. Now, we did not at this time anticipate how a huge, very complex guided rocket system would go on in development. We had to play it by ear and play it safe, kind of. So we possibly put too much in. In fact, later on, the S-IV-B stage engineering, they commented that they do not need any cooling of their hardware at all. Which again left us with a considerable cooling capacity without the use, yeah? Of course, we had to drop quite a few of our own. [00:14:39] RB: Well, didn't you have to put heaters in then to balance this cooling capability because it got so cold? [00:14:43] FW: In some cases. In some cases, heaters had to be…which is very undesirable. But I think by slight design changes, it is not necessary anymore if I…I'm not very familiar with the latest few years right now. I've been drifting out of it. [00:14:58] RB: Didn't also, in order for this cooling problem, didn't they paint the first couple of IUs white and then to warm it up a little bit to paint the last number of IUs black or [inaudible]? [00:15:10] This… this I couldn't…I…I do not…I doubt it. I do not know, but I doubt it, yeah? [00:15:15] RB: And then they covered it with a cork substance after that even. Cork and what's that? [00:15:19] FW: [inaudible] [00:15:20] RB: For even more heat absorption and damping for the guidance system. [00:15:21] FW: Radiation. [00:15:26] RB: And also they have this kind of epoxy and lead chip paste that they put over the outside around for damping for the guidance system, I believe. [00:15:37] FW: I, as I say, I couldn't comment. This is later changes, yeah? [00:15:40] RB: Yeah, they just did this a couple of months ago. [00:15:48] FW: Are you going through the different subsystems of the IUs? [00:15:52] RB: Yeah, would you like to do that? [00:15:53] FW: Could I get a copy of this little booklet…. was started... [00:15:55] RB: Yeah, sure. You put it out in Astrionics, I believe? [00:16:00] FW: Yeah, we put it out in Astrionics. [Flips pages of booklet] In fact, I triggered this thing and we had a good sale there. I shouldn't say sales. A demand. [00:16:10] RB: Do you have an extra one of these so I can demand one? [laughter] [00:16:12] FW: Yeah, this is one of the very few leftovers. I think I can give you this copy. [00:16:17] RB: Okay. [00:16:18] FW: The point at this time was that very few people understood why the instrument unit, what it is for, and what it does. For education of very many people, we had to deal with on specific issues, we provided this little booklet here, which goes through the major subsystems. [00:16:35] RB: Mm-hmm. [00:16:37] FW: [Flips pages of booklet] Yeah, so we just talked about the structural system as you see. Very…pictures, a few remarks, the environmental control system, how it works. [00:16:52] RB: Now, did AVCO have any trouble in making these plates that you know of? Any particular problem there? [00:16:58] FW: No, no basic problems. Problems first were encountered when these plates were mounted to the instrument unit structure. We needed to change the support or the bolts or inserts for bolts in the instrument unit. [00:17:19] RB: Mm-hmm. In the core density unit? [00:17:21] FW: Yeah. Right. And we had another problem, the mounting of the platform, which... [00:17:28] RB: That's heavy. [00:17:29] FW:...was quite sensitive because the mounting such plates [flips pages of booklet] or the platform was on a structure which is exposed to considerable loads, we would put stress into the structural members of either the cold plates or the platform, which is very sensitive to this amount, as you know, the IMU, as let’s call it. The design, therefore, of the structural connections between the instruments [flips pages of booklet] and the structure needed special attention and redesign. Of course, the guidance system, by the way, for your information, if you use this, there is a diagram of the instrument unit as it relates to the three stages and to the spacecraft. It shows the basic subsystems in different colors, so it's easy to detect. If we talk about the guidance system, [flips pages of booklet] it is red and black, stabilized platform and computer data, etc.. [00:18:39] RB: Mm-hmm. [00:18:40] FW: Platform. Shall I make a few comments to this? [00:18:43] RB: Yeah, would you kind of go into the history of the platform, back to the ST-80 and 90? [00:18:54] FW: The platform is based on two types of inertial components: gyro and accelerometer. The special features of those two components is that their bearings are practically frictionless, air bearings or gas bearing as we call them. This is very important because any friction or torque in such a bearing would be a direct failure or error in our guidance in our measurements. The air bearing has provided us very good service. Rocket can be easy manufactured. However, a great care must be put in making the bearing parts geometrically exact, very exact in that. However, since these are cylindrical parts, it's easy to make an accurate cylinders. It's hard to make a spherical member. [00:19:48] RB: Was this development particular here at Marshall, air bearings? [00:19:52] Air bearings was a Marshall development which started already in the early ‘50s. In fact, at that time I worked in laboratories where we developed the air bearings used for accelerometers. So air bearings, it started here very heavy early in the ‘50s. [00:20:10] RB: And they started with accelerometers and then moved into gyros? [00:20:13] FW: No, the air bearing was started for the gyro application. However, it showed so good features in accelerometers that it was adopted there too. It may have been misleading, what I just said before…I said I used to work with air bearings, especially developed for accelerometers because I was in a section which was responsive for accelerometers. The gyro development had been going on already for some time when I got involved in the air bearings, but I utilized their experience then, too. The air bearings were also used for the inertial components for the various army missiles before—that is the Redstone, the Jupiter, and later on, of course, the Pershing. [00:21:02] FW: The Pershing stabilized platform used practically the same design of gyros and accelerometers as the Saturn basic design. However, the mounting of the gimbals was in such a way that the gimbal angles were restricted to a few degrees because a ballistic missile doesn't need to have all the different features as the need for space launches. In the beginning, we wanted to have an option that allowed us 360-degree freedom around all three axes, which required four gimbals in order to avoid gimbal lock. If two of the gimbals would be parallel in certain cases, it would be gimbal lock. You needed four gimbals actually to overcome that possibility. So we had started the development of the ST-124 with a four gimbal layout. However, when the requirements of the spacecraft, and Apollo especially, were known better, we eliminated the fourth gimbal and used this as an additional option to ask for a fourth gimbal only when needed. We never needed one. [00:22:15] RB: Was this the so-called redundant gimbal system that they thought of that was redundant in the pitch axis? [00:22:22] FW: The redundant pitch axis, yes. That's it. What else can I say about the platform? [00:22:30] RB: Can you say a little bit more about air bearings? Were you ever in any arguments with Draper up at MIT and liquid bearings? Was that ever a thought? [00:22:39] FW: Yes, yes, there were very many arguments. However, the arguments were usually developed by the users and not by the developers. The developers saw the different advantages and disadvantages of different systems, and they used them accordingly. However, there was also a little bit preference given on personality basis, yeah? It is not a real competition anymore between these two types of bearings. One is that we reached the end of the rope for either one, and we are looking for different, new methods to measure in angles or in space or acceleration in space. [00:23:17] FW: Secondly, the developments have come to a point where each of the different methods has the features of the other. Let me very shortly describe a few of the major differences. In a liquid bearing—a fluid-supported, a floating bearing—you need to have a very precise gravity in a liquid, and you need to float in which has exactly, overall, this specific gravity of the liquid, which is very, very hard to do. [00:24:02] FW: You have two problems, the dynamic balance and the static balance, both. One is that the float is just floating and doesn't float up or down, but stays in the liquid where you put it. And the other one is that dynamically, that it would not turn or twist because one side of it is as heavy as the other. This is very difficult to do. Also difficult to do is to fill this liquid, which by, we need a very heavy liquid because the heavy liquid has a damping effect, and it is very difficult to fill a bearing with that type of liquid, bubbles or gases. [00:24:37] FW: And as I say, it's a very difficult procedure to do these things. The gas bearing does not have that disadvantage. It needs only a very good geometrical size, very good size and very close tolerances. But it does not need to be especially balanced at all. It can have any weight, yeah? Because if you need to carry a little bit more, you increase the pressure slightly. The errors are about the same for each one. If you do drift in both, it's about the same. [00:25:11] FW: If you put them on a comparative basis, you could compare two different ones and say they are very different. But when you look into it, you find that either the flywheel is heavier or the bearing is not comparable or the environment is different. So if you compare it on a comparative basis, they're almost the same. [00:25:27] FW: One is a little more difficult to make as the other. The air bearing has one disadvantage. You have to supply gas because the gas is used up. It flows out. It was at least the case in the earlier designs—yeah?—so you need it for long flights to provide a lot of gas. Now, that's the reason for Apollo, we did not use the gas bearing. We used a fluid bearing because the fluid is not used up. It stays there—yeah?—and the Apollo is used for many hours-–the Apollo gyros or IMU. Where the Saturn is only used for a few minutes. I think we upped it now, lately, to seven and a half hours, yeah? We have a seven and a half hours capacity. But the Apollo gyros have a day's capacity—yeah?—many days. You wanted to...? [00:26:14.420] RB: Is the air or the nitrogen that comes in here, isn't it recirculated? [00:26:20] FW: That is the very new design [flips pages of booklet]. This is the point I want to mention: later on, liquid bearings were improved to make them a little easier to manufacture, test, and so on. The gas bearings were developed to use a recirculating liquid, or gas, actually. So you do not need to carry tanks anymore. You see air bearing supply. It's a huge tank. You had to carry a lot. [00:26:50] RB: About 50 cubic inches. [00:26:51] FW: Yeah, and I think if you want to carry more for a longer operating period, you need several of those things. At this time, it was not laid out for seven and a half hours. I know this. I do not know how long this air supply would last. This is the platform. Well, this much is good. The platform has shown a very good reliability, yeah? [00:27:21] RB: I know you've had one on a breadboard. The gyros have run about 6,000 hours. [00:27:26] FW: Of course, there is one more disadvantage of the air bearing I should mention, at least the open loop bearing. The closed loop is different. But the open loop bearing, where you use up your air supply or gas supply, every dirt or dust or foreign particles in the supply may get stuck in the bearing and restrict the bearing itself and give you inaccuracy. So there are pros and cons to both methods. It is also much heavier, this platform, as the Apollo IMU, yeah? But it is accurate, and for the Saturn, it was the right decision, very right. [00:27:59] RB: About 120 pounds, something like that? [00:28:02] FW: Yeah, I think it was about that much. [Flips pages of booklet] I do not know if we have weights in here. [00:28:077] RB: That's all right. [tape cuts out] [00:28:18] RB: Was this designed for any particular serviceability too, so you can swap gyros out? All the gyros were the same. I mean, you could swap out X, Y, or Z gyro for any other, couldn't you? [00:28:30] FW: Yes, you could. You could. It is not very desirable to do it because of the precision. The removal or replacement of a gyro or accelerometer is a major effort. It requires that you adjust the angles very, very accurately to the angle measurement. It's a precision mechanical unit, and so you need to have a good laboratory to do that. [00:28:55] RB: Can you explain to me, and I'm not sure I'll understand it when you finish explaining it to me, how this is optically aligned to accurately pinpoint the vehicle's position on earth? Then what happens when it is released at, I think, T minus 17 seconds? And how are the gyros spun up in the first place? When are they spun up? [00:29:21] FW: The gyros need to be spun up before you start the alignment. The inner gimbal has a window, has an optical surface. [00:29:33] RB: Two mirrors. [00:29:33] FW: Or two mirrors in order to get this optical surface visible from the ground, yeah? Oh, my… [00:29:40] RB: That's what I said when I read about it, “Oh, my.” [00:29:42] FW: This is a, this is a, yeah…[chair moving] The reason it's hard to explain because it is built with a closed loop with torques within the platform, so that you…it is a self-alignment. Once you get the, by eye, the mirror up there. [00:30:00] RB: Then you can run the other one around with the servos. [00:30:01] FW: Then you, yeah. And you keep it, you keep it locked in. You keep the optical locked in, so every time the platform wants to turn away. To this scheme for aligning the platform. This is a fairly complicated scheme, which is done in a closed loop after a while. That means the platform is locked in. If it wants to drift away, it will develop some torque in one of the gimbal rings and turn the gimbal back to the position it should have. So it's a fairly accurate and good alignment scheme, automatic. But I think to explain it in all details, I would need a block diagram to go through it, which I do not have available right here. [gets up from chair, moves around] Of course, [inaudible] doesn't have much here. I don't know. [sits back down at table] Of course, there's a model of the ST-124. And you notice here the frame, which I, which I've all… It was actually, why, why doesn't it move? [00:31:12] RB: You have a tape here. [00:31:15] FW: This would be the fourth gimbal, yeah. Yeah, the blue one, as you can see. No, it's locked in somewhere. [00:31:19] RB: Gimbal, gimbal lock. [00:31:20] FW: Gimbal lock, that’s right. [Both laugh] Yeah. So, but eventually you end up with all the gimbals. Now, I do not know where the, where the surface is, which we see then from the ground. I believe, if you want to go in some more detail on any of the components, it may be good that you discuss it with the designers who were involved with the design. [00:31:44]: RB: I want to talk with Dr. Seltzer. [00:31:48] FW: Seltzer was involved in the operational aspects. That means the flight operational aspects, the flight dynamics, and these things. [00:31:57] RB: With Mendel's group? [00:31:58] FW: Mendel is in charge of the platform, and they have a considerable amount of information. Now, the Saturn is one of those projects which is documented in all aspects, management and technical, much better and much heavier and deeper as any other project I know of. You can follow practically any thought or any question down to the very, very detail. What we can discuss here and where I can help you is only in generalities and the overall general approach. [00:32:31] RB: Yeah, we want to get a feel for, you know, how the equipment works. [00:32:35] FW: This is, of course, the basic material for the structure, yeah? [00:32:43] RB: Is that honeycomb? [00:32:44] FW: This is honeycomb, yeah. [00:32:45] RB: And these are two different densities that you use? [00:32:47] FW: No, you just pull them apart. [00:32:49] RB: I wouldn’t do that. [00:32:50] FW: See, this material comes in a block which looks almost solid—yeah?—and it is cut then to pieces. This was actually a much heavier block, about two inches, the thickness of the instrument unit. It is cut by a saw, it's aluminum. Then, of course, it's by machines pulled apart and you get this honeycomb. [00:33:13] RB: And then for different densities you just run it back together? [00:33:15] FW: No, you don't run it back. Machines do it, pull it just in a way that it is exactly alike, that the density of these different holes or the size of the different holes you pull open is exactly the same, yeah? And then, of course, it is filled with certain plastic foam and a heavier layer of plastic outside foam. [00:33:34] RB: And that gives it the rigidity? [00:33:35] FW: It gives it rigidity and damping features too yeah? [00:33:37] RB: Damping, okay. Oh, yeah, damping would be a good reason for... [00:33:40] FW: Now, this is here a small cut of the instrument unit, of an actual instrument unit. This was done for testing. We had some problems indicated earlier in providing inserts. So these are inserts here, yeah? As you can see, they are cast into plastic, yeah? [00:34:05] RB: Now, these inserts go all the way through the wall? [00:34:07] FW: This is the wall, this instrument unit, they go all the way through, yeah. [00:34:12] RB: And this is the entire thickness of that wall? [00:34:13] FW: Yeah, it's the entire thickness of the wall, yeah. [00:34:15] RB: I didn't know these inserts...And then these are bolted on the outside and, of course, shaved off clean. [00:34:20] FW: Yeah, right. [00:34:21] RB: But they're bolted right through. And these hanging structures that we saw in here that the cooling racks are on, those things go all the way through and are bolted on the outside through these special aluminum fasteners. [00:34:33] FW: These are these fasteners here. What else we...Oh, yeah. If we go to the computer, we can discuss that a little later. Did we cover the platform? [00:34:46] RB: Yeah. Temporarily. [00:34:47] FW: Or shall we say a few more words to it? A few of the design features which were new at this time to put as much of the electronics on the gimbals as possible in order to have the minimum amount of wires going through the gimbal. The platform does not have full 360 degrees freedom, but it has this only with a fourth gimbal, which was never required. If you want to know some about the management and the costs, I have made a study some time ago, compared the Apollo with the Saturn. But I would have to dig it out. You could read it if you want to. [00:35:28] RB: Okay. I might drop by next week and answer for that. [00:35:31] FW: Okay. Of course, I can get you a copy. You read it some at your leisure and bring it back here. The reason for that, by the way, was primarily...Oh, there are two reports, I should say. One is based on the other. I was called in once to look into some problems developing in the production and assembly of the Apollo IMUs at Milwaukee AC Spark Plugs, or AC Electronics, as it's called now. I did this and prepared a report. Later on, the cost was questioned very seriously by our own management—the cost of a specific platform ST-124M as compared with an Apollo platform. And I was asked to look into this, so I compared the costs, and I have a report on that, yeah? [00:36:27] RB: You mean the AC unit was more or less than the... [00:36:31] FW: This I would have to answer a little different. If you buy a gyro or an IMU, you say, “I want one more,” yeah? You pay less for an Apollo as you pay for a Saturn. But if you look into the cost and say, “How much money do I invest total in the IMU for the Apollo?” and “How much do I apply, do I need total for the ST-124M?” and divide it by the number of actual flights to support, the Apollo platform is much more expensive. Did I make it clear? [00:37:13] FW: The reason for it is that—there are many reasons, yeah?—one is that you need to manufacture about 100 gyros before you get 20 good ones. See, the Apollo—and it's kind of unfair to compare them on that basis—the Apollo needs a longer lifetime. There is one life restricting item in each platform, in each gyro: that is the ball bearings of the flywheel. The flywheel is very heavy, and it has to work very, very high speed—yeah?—I do not remember, I think in the order of 20,000 RPM, which is extremely high. Heavy wheel, and you cannot afford much tolerance in there because you cannot afford to have this flywheel move at all. It has to stay in relation to the outer bearing where it is. [00:38:06] FW: Now, you have to put a pretty good preload on these bearings and, of course, little lubrication, so they do not last long. In Apollo, they have found that they make many bearings and then they run them for a long time and test them again and again and again. Those which make it through the first, let’s say, few hundred or a thousand hours—yeah?—they are very likely to last much longer, and the other ones drop out. [00:38:34] FW: Now, these type of things increase your cost. It is not the only effect, but I give this as an example to show what type of effects you have there. If you want to go in more detail than this, we can do it any time. I think on this I am pretty much at home because I made this study. Do we have enough on the platform or shall we…yeah…okay… [00:38:56] RB: We better do the computer. [00:38:58] FW: The computer. The actual computer was developed by IBM and it was a kind of a breakthrough or a change in technology as compared, for instance, with the Titan computer, which was produced by IBM at the time at the same plant when we started the Apollo computer. This little gadget here is not an Apollo printed circuit board, but it is one which they use in their commercial computer. [00:39:30] FW: The Apollo is, however, the same type of philosophy. A little chip, as they call it, a small printed circuit board, only the connections in our case were mounted differently. The connections, because we needed printed boards on both sides, not only on one like on this one—yeah?—we needed to have clips which reached around the corners for mounting and connecting the electrical connections. This gave us quite a few problems. These little springs were very, very hard. I am sorry I do not have an example here—yeah?—these little springs gave us a considerable problem. IBM had really to work hard and spend a considerable amount of money to make them perform properly. The point was to... [00:40:13] RB: They are like pages put in there, aren't they, these printed circuits? [00:40:16.] FW: Yeah, they are, they are. [Moves away from table, begins writing on chalkboard] But unlike this connection, we had printed circuits on both sides of the board. We needed to have clips which went around, let's say we solder them here to the board, and there's a clip. The clip in this case was the mounting facility. At the same time, it was the electrical connection. Of course, they had the whole board on two sides here. These clips [taps chalk emphatically on chalk board], they were a real headache, and the technology to develop these tiny little clips and work them was very difficult. Every time they soldered here [draws on chalkboard], the heat came in and gave them some problems here. They even developed different types of soldering points [comes back to table] an optical soldering by focusing a very high lamp through a…is it a...sold[er], a solder[er] optical system? And focus it to one point and solder this way not to get a mechanical contact to the printed circuit board. It's very tiny as you can see, and it's hard to work these. This was one of the bigger problems. I think the systematic problems were minor compared with this little clip problem we had for a long time. [00:41:35] FW: The other novelty together in technology is the small transistors. These little chips you see on each side are transistors. If you look close, you'll see that there three connections on these three little points. These three little points are connected in the board if you can see on the board this little square mirror type looking item—this is a transistor. The way it is put in, it’s just pressed down, and by the pressure, the electrical connection is good enough that it stays on. I believe there is one point where the chip fell off, and where, if I'm not mistaken on this one…No! It's still there. I thought there was one point where the chip fell off where you can see the three connections before here which are open. [00:42:26] RB: The pieces of the mounting piece there is what? About three quarters of an inch square? [00:42:31] FW: Approximately, yeah. [00:42:33] RB: And those transistors are about the size of a pencil point. They're square, yeah. [00:42:40] FW: [inaudible] They have three electrical connections each. You notice another thing, the black blocks, these are resistors. Now the resistors are painted on with a paint which contains small metal particles or carbon, yeah? Now the resistors are painted on, and after they are painted on, they are adjusted to the proper value by sandblasting part of it off, yeah? That was also a rather new manufacturing method. You see that parts of it is missing on either one of the resistors. They are sandblasted automatically. There is a resistor measuring bridge which in itself has an electrical contact to trigger and to start the sandblast, yeah? The same sandblast is of course moving along the transistor and when the proper amount is reached it's cut off by the resistor measuring bridge. [00:43:39] FW: The memory is a magnetic memory, and it is based on tiny little—how shall I say?—magnetic rings, yeah? It's then…wires are put through…you saw these memories, I think, yeah? Now, these are so small that they would not easily work by hand, yeah? It would take years for anybody to align them and put these wires through. The second one from the top—this must be Saturn sized, yeah? This is, I understand, for the Titan computer, but there's a different system. These here, the 1321, is the Saturn size, which is rather small now. The next smaller is the next generation. I do not know where they are used here. [00:44:33] RB: This is not talking about a pinhead; you're talking about the size of a pinpoint there. [00:44:36] FW: These are actually little rings of magnetic material. Now [inaudible] [00:44:41] RB: What kind of material is that? Just steel? [00:44:44] FW: No, it is not steel. It is a synthet [sic] material. It is very fine powder synthet [sic] together. Now, they are different binders, and I do not know which they are. The way these memories are done is quite interesting. There is a metal plate in which the worker—mostly they are women because obviously they can work much better with these—it's put on this plate, and the plate has a carved in very tiny little half round and grooves. Groves? Grooves? [00:45:26] RB: Grooves. [00:45:28] FW: Grooves. Then the vibrator starts to vibrate this metal board and these little memory rings, the magnetic rings they just fall in place. After a while, they are lined like soldiers on the board. Through a microscope the workers see if all holes are filled, and then they are ready to put by a machine very thin wires which are very straight right through the whole line of things, yeah? It's amazing. It works very good, yeah? The vibration makes it. I think it's a very high frequency vibration. [00:46:07] RB: Was this technique perfected at IBM? Over here? [00:46:10] FW: It was perfected at IBM. Not here, no. [00:46:12] RB: In Owego. [00:46:14] FW: In Owego. The computer was built in Owego, but this technique was not developed…oh yeah, this is Owego. These printed circuit chips or boards, they were developed in another plant in New York, I forgot the name. I was there. I saw it. [00:46:33] RB: Binghamton? [00:46:34] FW: Near Binghamton. Not directly Binghamton. Binghamton has a larger plant and has lots of [inaudible]. But there was still another plant about…oh…eight miles from Binghamton where these things are made. [00:46:47] FW: I mentioned before the computer itself did not provide any greater problem than its systematic development. But the hardware development—as I mentioned before—the computer has the option that you can add memories at will, yeah? You can have a larger or smaller capacity. The real issue, however, was the software. Now, I must say here that it was the first time that Marshall went into real digital, large digital system. The Pershing, which we worked on before, as you know, was an analog system, completely analog. It was built up on mechanical and electrical analog systems, yeah? I believe... [00:47:39] RB: Was that still using the ball-and-disc integrator? [00:47:43] FW: Yeah, that is one of the gadgets used, yes, but it [mustered?] a number of gear trains and potentiometers and various mechanical gadgets—yeah?—in the Pershing. The decision was hard to make at the Pershing time because at that time, it so happened that the digital technology just came up, and the risks to come up with a low-cost development was, with digital means, was very great. We would have to pay considerable effort to really develop the technology for a digital Pershing computer. [00:48:23] FW: For when we had to make decision on Saturn, there were already several digital systems available, not available, but tried, yeah, the Titan and I think the Atlas II. So we had already experienced available in industry. For Marshall, it was the first experience with digital systems, with a larger digital system. [Flips pages in booklet] So the software was more of a—how shall I say?—I shouldn't say a problem—was new to us even more than the mechanical or the design of the hardware. Design of the hardware, I think there was not a real difference in between analog and digital, small electronics in either case. But the software, that is, the digital programming, that was new, and we had to learn that. It worked quite satisfactorily, as you know. It helped a lot along that line—that is, in the development of the digital programming, as well as the systems—that we started rather early with a so-called breadboard, simulating a Saturn vehicle, including the ground hardware, and exercising it through the breadboard. I don't know if you saw it. It's in one of those field buildings. I think it's still there. [00:49:37] RB: I would like to go and see [inaudible]. [00:49:38] FW: Yes, I think you should. Of course, you should realize that what you see now is the end of the program—yeah?—in the beginning…It’s one of those steel buildings on the right, when, from the tower to the right, yeah? Realize that we started out with a tiny little setup, and we enlarged it as we went along, you know. This is Saturn 1B breadboard. The Saturn V breadboard is back in the quality laboratory building. . [00:50:12] FW: Platform server amplifier, I think there's nothing. These are straightforward electronic design servos, servo design. Power supply is new. This is based on a digital method, yeah? This was a kind of a breakthrough, too. Before, as you know, the power supply, that means conversion DC to AC, to 400 cycle AC, was done mechanically by motor generators. They were perfected to quite a good reliability. However, for new space systems, they were not sufficient anymore. So this is a digital system which converts from DC to AC. It's quite novel. If you are interested in details, you may want to talk with some people, yeah? It's a quite interesting, tricky system, yeah? [00:51:05] RB: Can you say a little more about it? [00:51:08] FW: The point here is that you have a very good power—how shall I say?—efficiency, input output. The digital system is a real interesting thing. I could, to say here on this item again, without a diagram here, I couldn't give you very much detail. The man who knows it very well is Kreider, Bill Kreider. He works over there in, in, uh… [00:51:38] RB: Can you spell that last name? [00:51:38] FW: K-r-e-i-d-e-r. E-i, E-i. [00:51:46] RB: Right, okay. [00:51:46] FW: Kredier, Bill Kreider, and he works in research laboratory, research branch of Astrionics. He's good at it. [00:52:00] FW: Data adapter. Oh. I should have mentioned this before. The data adapter is nothing but input-output facilities for the computer, yeah? So it is conversion when, whatever we needed, conversion analog to digital or digital to analog, whatever the inputs, outputs required, just to adapt the computer to the overall system. You would have to go through each of the channels and see what the input is and how you have to convert it to make it digestible by the computer. [Flips pages in booklet] [00:52:33] FW: Control system. Oh, this is the wrong picture, by the way. We never built this control computer this way. Oh, this, I'm sorry, this is a [rate?] gyro, yes. [Rate?] gyro. This is the first time we really adopted the redundant approach. We use three each gyros. Nine gyros in this one. Whereas in contrast to the main platform, there are only three gyros and three accelerometers. No redundancy. We considered the redundancy to this one to be available from... [00:53:17] RB: Skylab? [00:53:19] FW: No, not from Skylab, from the Apollo. The Apollo had two platforms. [00:53:22] RB: Oh, yeah, that's right. But this wasn't always hooked up with the Apollo platform, was it? [00:53:27] No, it was not. Let me see… [00:53:28] RB: When did that happen? I notice you have it here on this schematic that it's hooked up to the platform. [00:53:34] [Inaudible] command. So this must have been a very old decision—yeah?—if it is here. That was very early during the development of the IU. The decision must have been early. There were in between, at different times, various discussions on whether it is feasible to do it one way or another way, and the quests for changing the old concept came up again and again, but I do not believe that it ever changed. [00:54:01] FW: Not on here is the control computer. [Flips pages in booklet] The control computer which is developed by a firm in Tampa, Florida. ECI, I think. It was not a breakthrough at all. We needed quite good amplifiers, substantial amplifiers to run inputs to the various controls for the engine. But I believe there was nothing really breakthrough. The only point was design, features and design problems, mechanical and electrical design. The printed circuit boards were a little bit harder to handle. They were rather big, rather large for their—how shall I say?—for their normal electronic uses. If you have large printed circuit boards and environmental changes, let's say temperature or so, we didn't want to have too close tolerances put on, yeah? Then you have a few problems that the contacts would break or soldering spots or so. [00:55:19] FW: The control computer has one problem involved in...I have to go a little bit into the system here to make it clear. Practically each of our Saturn flights has a different payload or has a different flight program for it, yeah? If the bending moments, the payload and many other variables affect the control system, it may make it unstable if we have the bending mode filters in. We would break up the payload, we may have an unstable flight, yeah? So the control computer is one of the items which has to be changed for each configuration or each flight, which is not so for the other components, yeah? It applies to the control computer. So filter networks are put in rather late in these control computers. [tape ends] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000050_A Title A name given to the resource Weber, Fritz Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/6d11f1b912facb786c4b6bc96b9a01b3.pdf 767fa7a4e44976311f55ffc3f58d79f4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000049_T Title A name given to the resource Urlaub, Matthew (Transcript) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969-11-13 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Text Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/0524bf4e398998dae0c7c8353a3ecd22.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/61de1d69d6cb6c872e3775625fded5d5.mp4 d76921117935c43d60980c17ca7446ec Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000049_A Title A name given to the resource Urlaub, Matthew Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1969-11-13 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/3d47ba90a2b76b51f3cf37dc4df9ea93.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/21ccd561f7d3a8aed611b1f45ad7f0bd.mp4 6b94b574bac5d13a101ea6cf4915a00b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Thomson, Jerry Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Rodger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:56:40 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:07] Roger Bilstein: I wonder if you could, from your recollection, make some comments about where the porous injector face got started and how it got into Pratt & Whitney and how the transfer occurred from the RL-10 to J-2 and stuff like that. [00:00:21] Jerry Thomson: Oh, good. I might be able to make a few [thousand?] comments about that because I was involved in this area quite a bit back in the early days. The J-2 procurement—I'm sure you've already determined—took place in about 1960. That procurement—the specifications and so forth—were all prepared here in the lab at that time. When we prepared the procurement on the J-2, we visualized it as being somewhat advanced engine relative to the RL-10 because we had already been working with the RL-10. So when we made the solicitation—why, I can't remember now whether it was four or five contractors bid on that J-2 engine—but the winning contractor, who was Rocketdyne, did not offer an injector type like what we ended up with. As a matter of fact, they offered a self-impinging injector or it might have been an unlike pattern—you know?—where fuel was impinging on a LOX stream—I can’t remember exactly—but the man at Rocketdyne that was in charge of that effort then was a very good friend of mine that I’ve known since about 1952 was Bill Mower. Bill Mower… [00:02:23] RB: How do you spell that last name? [00:02:24] JT: W.W. Mower: M-O-W-E-R, and he is still there with the company. After Rocketdyne won the procurement, won the contract, then we began to interface with them to discuss in more detail what we liked and didn't like about their design. My discussions with Bill Mower there at Rocketdyne, we decided that we would go and investigate at Lewis Research Center work which had been done up there by Bill [Tomaszek?]. Bill [Tomaszek?] in the rocket propulsion division up there had for a number of years been experimenting with a coaxial injector pattern about fifteen thousand thrust size. He had investigated this particular injector configuration even prior to the design of the RL-10 engine. [00:03:44] JT: It was dated back a good ways, as I recall. But their design at Lewis was a flat-face injector with coaxial elements, then the LOX through the center with a fuel curtain around it. During the course of that experimental work up there the first basic information was derived that led then to the RL-10 engine design injector. And, you know, when the Pratt & Whitney people saw that data, they took it a few steps further, and they put a convex shape to the injector face and focused it so that the focal point of all of these elements then was right at the throat of the motor. They did that for reasons like that if you have a flat face, the LOX springs when they hit the converging section of the nozzle cause overheating problems in there, so by focusing it so that everything was aimed right at the throat they took a little bit of the load off the converging section of the motor. [00:05:20] RB: I'm glad you explained that because I noticed that on the injector, and I didn't know really what the reason was. Why didn't they use a similar thing then for the H-1 and F-1 injector cases? [00:05:30] JT: Well the H-1 injector preceded the work at Lewis, and the F-1 was based on the H-1. It wasn't really anything back in those days that we could use like experience on it, the RL-10 and so forth. But anyway, by converging those elements at the throat, they took some of the problem off of the—and these are improvements that Pratt & Whitney made to the concept—but the Pratt & Whitney injectors or their thrust chambers start tapering as soon as you leave the face. There's no straight section and then a converging section. They start tapering immediately. So they made some [very?] good improvements over the original work that we done at Lewis Research Center. This was a great deal of interest to us when we started the J-2 program because we said, “Well, gee, that thing has turned out so well.” I kind of pressed Rockedyne into taking a look at it. [00:06:42] JT: So then Bill Mower and I and another guy who worked out there named John Campbell who worked for Bill Mower, all three of us went up to Lewis Research Center to visit Bill [Tomaszek?]. That was about 1960 we went up there. We sat down and reviewed what the Lewis work had been and made some estimates of how this then could be translated into a J-2 injector. But initially the J-2 program started off with an unlike triplet injector or a doublet—I can't remember—but it was flat-faced and no rigid mesh. We entered the test program with that kind of a configuration. Bill Mower was a very practical sort of fellow. He said, “Jerry, we hadn't got people at Rocketdyne that we think can consistently build that high quality piece of equipment”—which is a rigid mesh concentric orifice injector. He says, “We don't think we can build that high quality equipment,” and so he says, “It would be a shame to go into that at Rocketdyne and spend a lot of money and then have two-thirds of them rejected during the course of the manufacturing.” So he still favored the flat-face, no-face cooling, multi-element pattern. Again, I can't remember whether it was like-on-like or whether it was unlike-doublets or something triplets or what, but I believe it was one stream of LOX with two fuel streams impinging on it. I think that was Rocketdyne's initial approach. But when we entered the test program at Rocketdyne, which I don't know, came about 1962 or something along like that, we had a lot of problems. We had face heating problems. [00:08:57] RB: Mower was right then. [00:08:59.] JT: What? [00:09:00] RB: Mower was right. They had a lot of problems, didn't they? [00:09:02] JT: Well, they had problems, but they were design problems or they were development problems. He was forecasting problems in fabrication of a high-quality injector like a coaxial. [00:09:18] RB: Oh, I see. [00:09:20] JT: But when they had these problems, they were both face heating problems, and some of these streams were getting out through the wall, causing wall overheating problems. We had some instability problems with that injector configuration that they initially chose. It was good that there had been a little bit of work started at Rocketdyne on this coaxial approach, that is, the rigid mesh faced coaxial approach. They had sort of taken that along as a backup, hoping that the solid-face injector would have been good enough. Since it didn't turn out that way in the course of the development testing, then they were forced to go back and take a look at the coaxial rigid mesh face, and we gave them a lot of money to give that a real…a lot more emphasis. As a result, then Rocketdyne began to have more success in the course of their injector development. It still had a lot of problems, you know, there were distortion problems—the rigid mesh face would expand and contract, and this caused a little problem as far as the LOX [posts?] are concerned. We'd get straight LOX springs into the wall. But Rocketdyne kept making improvements, and finally, did come out with a real high-class injector. [00:11:07] RB: Was Marshall at this time doing parallel injector studies here in Huntsville? Or was most of the actual hardware dirty hand work going on out at Canoga Park? [00:11:17] JT: It was going on at Canoga Park. We had a little bit of model injector element testing going on here in the center, but it was not on any kind of a scale to give valuable inputs into that Rocketdyne design. That Rocketdyne design was really a result of, first of all, having this Lewis research knowledge. We did make all that available to him. Then we turned over to Rocketdyne all this knowledge that had come out of the RL-10 program. Then Rocketdyne just simply took a couple of approaches and made it even better. [00:12:03] RB: Well, given Pratt & Whitney's experience with Centaurs, with liquid hydrogen technology, and given this injector face work they’d already done, why didn’t they get what became the J-2 engine? Why didn’t they get it, and why did Rocketdyne get it? [00:12:19] JT: Why didn’t Pratt & Whitney get the job? Because that isn’t the only criteria for contractor selection, you know? Injector design is just one of hundreds. The reasons Pratt & Whitney didn’t get the job are all in the evaluation files. [00:12:49] RB: Rocketdyne seems to be pretty successful at getting engine contracts. [00:12:52] JT: Yep. I think in the case of J-2, the biggest thing that drove Rocketdyne in was the fact that they offered a program for about thirty-eight million bucks. Their competition was quite a bit in excess of that. [00:13:10] RB: Did Rocketdyne's association earlier through the H-1 program, did that make it a little bit easier for them, you think, that they knew the people and knew Marshall's philosophy? [00:13:23] JT: No, I think that wasn't very significant there because the evaluation was a NASA thing. It wasn't limited to Marshall. The evaluation was done in Washington. The guy who headed that was Del Tischler. [00:13:42] RB: We tried to get to talk to him, but we couldn't. We talked to John [inaudible]. [00:13:45] JT: Yeah, Del ran the evaluation. I can't think of who the second man was on that. But there were a few of us at Marshall up before that. Of course, a great number from Lewis Research Center and various places. I think even the Air Force people were involved. [14:08] RB: Could you tell me a little bit more about this rigid mesh material? Its origins, where it came from? [00:14:15] JT: Porous Media is one of the companies that… [00:14:24] RB: Aircraft Porous Media Incorporated is the name I've got here. [00:14:27] JT: Yeah. I don't know how they ever came about that darn stuff, whether it was used as a filtering material in some of their other projects—you know?—and they just simply found out that, hey, maybe injectors, or maybe thrust chamber people would be interested in this product or just how it came about. The company did go through a number of development processes and finally coming to a real high quality product. I don't know whether it was just largely their own doings or whether the government sponsored them in this activity under some research contract or whether some other agency was interested in it or just how it came about. But by the time it got utilized in the RL-10, why, it was a pretty good high quality product. There may have been some further improvements in its application to the J-2. But if there were, they were minor because it had already reached the plateau as far as maturity is concerned. [00:16:04] RB: I'm realizing there are lots of parts and subsystems of J-2. I wonder if you could say that rigid mesh was really a significant part of the J-2 success or it didn't have anything to do with it. Just how important was the rigid mesh to the injector face, injector material? [00:16:26] JT: I'd say it was rather important, but it wasn't essential. The job could have been done without that rigid mesh material. You could have gone to a whole lot of drilled holes in the face for it, let the gaseous hydrogen come through it. There's a lot of other principles that could have been employed, but this stuff not only gave you a lot of small weep holes for the fluids to pass through but it provided a pretty good structure. All those tubes that came down to bring the LOX from the top of the injector dome, they were all fastened to the rigid mesh material. [third person talking Jerry Thomson, inaudible] [00:17:40] RB: There was something else that Dave was talking about. He said that he remembered or heard some story about the fact that when Von Braun was out at North American and was watching some of the experiments with J-2 injectors before they were using rigid mesh, and he was also talking about the RL-10, urging them to go into the rigid mesh that had been used by Pratt & Whitney. Do you remember or hear that or do you remember anything about it? [00:18:06] JT: No, I don't. That most likely did happen or something. I'm sure that those of us that were, you know, more intimately involved with that thing were considering the application of rigid mesh to the J-2 all along [laughs]. [00:18:32] RB: That’s what struck me as you were talking, it had to happen long before that. I know you've got to go to this meeting, but there's one other question here, and maybe you can't answer it. But early at one point where they're still talking about a propulsion system for the S-IV stage, they were considering using the LR-119 engines—Pratt & Whitney—and they ran into some kind of trouble, and so they decided to go to the LR-150. This was back in 1961. Do you recall what the difficulty was, and why they went from the LR-115 to the 119? [00:19:17] JT: It escapes me for a minute. [00:19:19] RB: They finally wound up with the RL-10. But I just came across this reference that they had some trouble, and I haven't found out yet what they were. [00:19:28] JT: Well, we had trouble with the development of the RL-10. We had very serious development problems in terms of starting the engine and one problem in terms of igniting the engine. We blew the test stand down a couple of times down in Florida. It was a horizontal light versus a vertical light. You light it horizontal, the oxygen accumulated in the motor and provided a nice, smooth ignition when you brought in hydrogen. When you turn the engine this way, why, all the way in the LOX ripped out. Therefore, when we started, we got no ignition until the diffuser filled with hydrogen, and then she lit. [00:20:20] RB: [laughs] And then she really lit? [00:20:21] JT: Yeah, then she went. Twice! Well, I don't know about that 119 thing, because it don't ring a bell. [00:20:35] RB:I’ll have to go back and find some documentation. We talked to Rod Stewart, and he's forgotten almost all about that. It's been so long ago now, twelve years practically. [00:20:42] Yeah. Well, I remember a little bit about the J-2 injector thing because injectors are what I trained in back when I was in the industry. [00:20:58] RB: Do you have any more comments to make about the J-2 injector development, and some of the problems that Rocketdyne had, and the Marshall inputs to that program? [00:21:12] JT: Nope…make some comments about the F-1 if you ever get interested in that. [00:21:18] RB: Ok, you got time? You want to do it? [00:21:21] JT: Well, if you ever really want to hear a good story, back about 1963 or 4 [sic], we ran into this F-1 combustion instability problem. We had such a terrible thing there on our hands until there was sort of a national ad hoc committee created to do nothing except to concentrate on the solution. [00:21:57] RB: How do you mean a national ad hoc? [Inaudible] people from Lewis and other NASA…? [00:22:02] JT: Yeah, and universities. I hated the thing, and it brought in people from all over the whole country consult and assist us in the solution to that problem. It took us about a year and a half, spent thirty something million bucks solving that problem. [00:22:22] RB: How would you summarize then the problem as it originated and how you worked it out? How would you… [00:22:32] JT: Well, we were going along fine in the F-1 engine testing, we all of a sudden began to destroy engines. We destroyed seven—or at least we blew up seven times—due to combustion instability. It was obvious that the injector system that we were using was not going to do the job. It was a flat face, unlike, doublet with a LOX ring and a fuel ring—copper ring—it was…After about a year and a half or two years of real intensive investigations and trying every kind of a concept you can think of, we finally converged on a solution that was basically the adaptation of baffles to the injector face. [00:23:35] JT: Still that wasn't good enough because the additional baffles caused performance degradation, caused baffle heating problems, local accumulations of fuel and even them themselves caused perturbations and instability. So it was just a laborious step-by-step fix this and fix that and fix something else and go back and refix what you had fixed using a lot of theoretical ideas and a lot of barnyard philosophy and whatever else we could. [00:24:19] JT: We finally got an injector system that was not only did it exceed the requirements that we had started the program with but it set the pace for all the future programs. All the future injector programs both the Air Force and NASA require a dynamically stable system—you know?—where you can bomb artificially and what you see how long it takes for the disturbance to quiet down. The Titan program adopted the procedures and the techniques that we worked out in F-1. [00:25:01] RB: Well, did this bombing begin though with the H-1? There was some instability with the H-1. Did it begin there or did it begin with the F-1? [00:25:10] JT: The experimental bombing and watching the recovery times did start in the H-1. [00:25:22] RB: Did the techniques differ very much from the H-1 to the F-1? [00:25:26] JT: Yeah, they advanced quite a bit from the H-1 to the F-1. [00:25:32] RB: And what were the differences then? [00:25:33] JT: Well, in the H-1 we did use black powder charges as the source of energy, but we didn't understand just what was going on in there when these charges would go off. During the course of the F-1, why, we built these two [inaudible] motors where you could photography see exactly what happened when we set a bomb off near the injector face. We soon learned that the bomb was like a detonator. It was just a…then the real energy came from the reaction of the kerosene that was accumulations in the injector face during the preparation process. [00:26:30] JT: Whereas the H-1 used seventy or hundred grain bombs, black powder bombs. The F-1 we only needed about a nine grain bomb. The location of the bomb we determined during the course of the F-1 was real important. In the H-1 program we set off the bomb at the center of the injector, it would cause the wave that went to the wall and then came back. We found in the course of the F-1 testing that that was the most favorable place to put the bomb. If you really want to create a disturbance that's difficult to damp, you need to put the bomb near the [engine?] wall. I think that all of our today's criteria and procedures for bomb testing engines really go back to what came out of that F-1 program. It's true that the H-1 had done some, but it wasn't near as significant. [00:27:41] RB: When you finally began to solve the F-1 problem, was it, I think you said, just a convergence of ideas and people? Was there anyone, though, that maybe took the lead, the university or Marshall or Rocketdyne? Was there somebody or someone, you yourself? [00:27:57] JT: I tell you there was about four or five guys that were really involved in that. One was [Dan Klute?], who is dead. [00:28:08] RB: I've seen the name, yeah. [00:28:10.] The other one was—he was at Rocketdyne—the other one was Paul Castenholz at Rocketdyne; and then another guy was Dave Harrje, who's H-A-R-R-J-E; at Princeton University; and Professor Luigi Crocco, at Princeton University. [00:28:33] RB: How do you spell his name? [00:28:34] JT: Luigi? How to spell Luigi? [00:28:41] RB: Yeah, I got Luigi. [00:28:42] JT: Crocco. C-R-O-C-O or C-R-O-C-C-O. And then I was one of the contributors. And the other one was Bob Richmond, here at Marshall. The other one was Dick Crane, at the Lewis Research Center. D-I… [tape cuts out] [00:29:26] JT: [inaudible] interesting…that J-2 rigid mesh injector was a kitten compared to that F-1. That was terrible. [00:29:49] RB: Well, what would you say then was the final fix? These injector baffles? [00:29:53] JT: That was just one step. It took about three or four major steps to solve the problem. First, we put on the baffles. The next step we did was we slowed down the burning rate in the first few inches of the injection process. We had a LOX like-on-like and a fuel like-on-like, and we went to a smaller inclusive angle so that we spread the fuel out. And, you know, if this is the combustion process down here, the fuel was on about, say, 93—I don't know if that's quite what it was, 97—but anyway, our barnyard philosophy told us that if were we to slow down the burning process, we might desensitize the injection process, so that when these [ratings?] came back, we weren't really in the critical process up near the injector face. We decreased that angle, spread out the burning time. That was the second major step. [00:31:28] JT: The third step was that we found that we wanted to change the response time between the LOX and the fuel system. We opened up the diameter of the fuel holes, so that when you, you know, perturbate the system, the LOX system would recover quickly. It was stiff. But the fuel system would recover at a slower rate because it was soft. That's what you want to do. You want to have them recover at different frequencies because if they are recovering at the same frequency, you're putting out a lot of energy. Whereas if they're recovering at different frequencies, you're damping the process. So that was the third step. [00:32:19] RB: So you opened the diameter of the fuel holes in the face of the injector? [00:32:34] That's right. And then the fourth step was that we went in around the edges of the baffles where we knew that there were accumulations of fuel, we modified the injection patterns to try and eliminate these fuel accumulations because if you've got a fuel accumulation there, then it's a source of explosion, you know, and perturbation source—triggering device if you want to call it that. That was the way that the thing went. [00:33:22] JT: I recall one time when Brainered Holmes was running the Saturn program, he called some of us up to Washington into his office, and he was so concerned about this problem that we weren't able to solve. He told us all that he was ready to go to Congress and tell them that we wanted to have a backup propulsion system for the S-I-C. He was prepared to go ask for a solid motor for the backup. He went around the room, and he asked those of us that were there what our own personal feelings were about whether or not we were going to solve this problem. It's pretty dramatic. He was the top man saying that he was ready to go ask Congress for a backup if we told him that we couldn't solve the problem or if we told him we might not solve the problem. He says, “I want you to tell me truthfully how you feel.” So everybody, I guess, expressed ourselves. He says, “Well, I'm going to take your advice and continue the program assuming that we can solve the problem.” Fortunately, we did. It was really something that always sticks in my memory. [00:34:41] RB: Was Von Braun involved in any of this? [00:34:43] JT: Nope, he sure wasn't. It was…Hermann Widener was up there with me. It was Herman Widener, myself, and a man who was the project manager at that time [for the F-1?] Sonny Morea. But I was the chairman of this ad hoc committee to solve this problem, and that was the reason that I was there. The other man was there from Rocketdyne—or two men were from there from Rocketdyne—it was Paul Castenholz and their vice-president Joe McNamara. [00:35:20] RB: Do you have any papers or reports, AIAA things that help summarize this? I've seen some documents we have, but I don't think of any really specific documents at this time that we've got. [00:35:37] JT: The only thing I have ever done is written minutes of all the meetings that were held with a small working group to solve a problem that I had. But I've never published any papers on it, and I don't think any of those that were key in the solution ever published any papers either. But I've seen a whole bunch of papers by people who were not directly involved, but expanded on what I was thinking to solve. Some of them are far from the way it actually was. [00:36:18] RB: Would it be possible to get a look at those minutes? [00:36:25] JT: [Inaudible] I think that they were classified at that time, but I’m sure desensitized [sic] now. Hey, Phil, don't we have the old ad hoc committee file on the F-1? In that red, red…? [00:36:43] RB: I'll tell you what I could do is—if you don't mind—I could take it over to the historical office over here—Akins' office in 4200—and work on them there and leave them there then when I'm done. When I'm finished with them all, I can bring them back to you. Would that be acceptable? [00:37:03] JT: That's the only record that exists as far as what took place. I saved it all these years. But what it is, I figured I’d write how it really was. [laughs] [00:37:14] RB: [laughs] Yeah, I wish you would. You got to do that. Well, I really feel guilty I'm keeping you from this meeting. [00:37:22] JT: I know they're not getting too far on solid motor materials. [both laugh] We don't know what it would look like yet. [00:37:34] RB: Do you have anything else you'd like to throw in here? [00:37:37] JT: Let me ask you, what are your objectives? Is to fish out maybe significant happenings during the course of the Saturn program? Or are you just going to simply cover the whole waterfront? [00:37:53] RB: Well, I'd have to say yes to both of those that way we're trying to, you know, cover as much as we can along the waterfront, and... [00:38:06] JT [speaking to third person, third person is inaudible]:I think it's a whole series of folders, aren't they? Yeah, how many is it? [00:38:16] RB: As time goes along though we find certain things. We've got an opportunity to do it, to dig down, you know, here and there. It just depends kind of on what we stumble across, even the documents in an interview like this one [inaudible] we can maybe go into it in more detail, but… [00:38:34] JT: The reason I was asking that, I do a little writing myself [inaudible] ASI line, the augmented spark igniter. [00:38:46] RB: I talked to Jerry Pease about that. [00:38:48] JT: Who? [00:38:49] RB: Jerry Pease. Or Bob Pease. Bob Pease. What really strikes me is that for all the vacuum tests, etc. that were supposedly done on the J-2 up to that time, why that, you know, still happens. As I understand it, it was because the environment of the vacuum chamber—I'd forgotten what he told me now—was different just enough so that it allowed some of this moisture to collect. When they finally purged the environmental chamber down to a really cold, hard vacuum, they found out what the problem really was. [00:39:26] JT: Yeah, that one was exciting. But you know that ASI line problem had to be not only did we have to understand what failed, we had to understand how it had failed and why it had failed. And then we had a [inaudible] requirement, and that was to reproduce the process here on the ground. In about a four month period, why, we went through all four of those things, and I happened to have been the chairman of that investigation. [00:40:17] RB: I didn't know that either. [00:40:19] JT: When you told me you had talked to Bob Pease, I was kind of wondering a little about that because... [00:40:23] RB: You know, some of this stuff, we're re-writing a lot of this stuff, and I've gotten off engines. Now, I'm into logistics recently. I've kind of forgotten really because I haven't written up that interview yet, what we really got into now. Because I think about it, I think that maybe he did, you know, mention your name in several others. Wasn't Sonny Morea in on that one too? Or was that the F1? Maybe it was... [00:40:46] JT: Sonny was the project manager of the J-2 at that time. [00:40:48] RB: Yeah. Or maybe that's…he just mentioned it in that context then. [00:40:54] JT: But we had about a two hundred man activity going in NASA and the industry combined. We had a test stand going on at Rocketdyne, firing engines trying to re-create the problem, testing components, and so…But Rex Bailey who works over in the propulsion division and I and Karl Heimberg set up a thrust chamber over here in Bill Grafton's test stand, and that's where we recreated the failure was over there. [00:41:28] RB: Okay, so right over here was really the critical discovery point then? Right here on this test stand? [00:41:34] JT: Yeah. Sure was. We recreated the failure. As a matter of fact, I had a thing on the wall, but that thing right there, we simulated the failure right over here. We fired at about eight o'clock one night. [00:42:00] RB: Now did you have a vacuum condition out there? [00:42:03] JT: No, because it wasn't necessary to have a vacuum to recreate the process that, you know, where the engine progressed to the point where it quit running. First of all, you had to create a vacuum here in the outside of this line so that there was no moisture condensation taking place. Then this line would fail due to convolution fatigue. These convolutions there, you know, failed in the [inaudible] due to fatigue, and a crack opened up, and the hydrogen shot out this way instead of going into the ignitor. When the hydrogen didn’t go into the ignitor, then the face of the injector was under-cooled [sic] and it got a hot spot on it. Then like blowtorch it started to consuming itself and the failure worked back until the injector face sort of caved in. Well, it's that part of the recreating of the series of circumstances that we've performed over here. It was Rocketdyne who, during the course of the investigation, stumbled across the fact that the environment was very important in terms of life of this convolution here. [00:43:36] RB: Okay, so let me try and get this straight then. Rocketdyne first discovered the environmental factor. [00:43:41] JT: That's right. [00:43:42] RB: Okay. And then you recreated the environmental factor out here? [00:43:46] JT: Well, we recreated the failure process. You know, to go back first, General Phillips says, “You gotta prove what happened.” So we showed him this happened: that line failed. He says, “How did it fail?” It failed due to fatigue. He says, “Why did it fail?” It failed because of the environment around there. It caused high frequency vibrations in it. Then he says, “Now you recreate the events like that engine saw in flight.” Well, it's that fourth thing that we did over here. Rocketdyne stumbled across the fact that the environment was critical to the fatigued life of those [bellows?]. That two hundred man operation was, like I say, active for about four months, and we got the solution. [00:44:54] RB: That was both Marshall and Rocketdyne, the two hundred man crew? [00:44:57] JT: Yeah, it was Marshall, Rocketdyne, North American, and Douglas—all four combined effort—was 200 men. [00:45:07] RB: Sounds like it was, you know, getting to the stage of another crunch like Brainerd Holmes might have called you back up again for another session. Of course, it was a little late then. [laughs] [00:45:18] JT: Well, we had something nearly like that because during the course of that four months, we had these things called [inaudible] what they do now, but the Boeing building down in the Research Park, they had a room that would go in and sit down, and TV shows all over the country to other groups. We'd have to go down there about once every three weeks or something and give a briefing on where we were in this investigation. That darn thing, I don't know, I mean, it must have been a thousand people on that hookup, because they had people at Boeing Seattle; people at out on the west coast of Los Angeles within that; people down at KSC; people in Houston; people in Washington. It was like a Walter Cronkite news broadcast. [00:46:18] RB: Why did they have such an extensive hookup? Was it just to let other people know in terms of their own scheduling or because of the inputs they could make from a technical standpoint? [00:46:26] JT: No, it was a management review, and all the management should know was, you know, was very concerned, because we were trying to, you know, go manned flight on 504. [00:46:43] RB: Yeah. 503, wasn't it? [00:46:46] JT: 504. [00:46:47] RB: Okay. [00:46:49] We were trying to go manned flight on 504—502 had messed up. They were kind of wondering whether to delay the flight of 503, until we had absolutely proven the solution. And if they delay 503, they delay 504, and then they delay the whole lunar program. So that's why all them people were interested. But it was on that same flight—if you recall— we had the first POGO problem on S-I-C. [00:47:20] RB: On 502, yeah. [00:47:22] JT: So we had Erich Goerner, who was in charge of the POGO investigation. He had a whole team, and all over the country and I had this ASI line [inaudible]. [00:47:36] RB: How do you spell…is it G-O-E-R-N-E-R, Goerner? [00:47:41] JT: G-O-E-R-N-E-R. Erich Goerner. [00:47:48] RB: Yeah, I think there was…503 was the first manned flight—that was Apollo 8. [00:47:53] JT: I didn't know it was. [00:47:54] RB: Yeah, 504 was the manned suborbital flight. 505 went back to the moon. 506 [inaudible]. [00:48:00] JT: Well, if it was, then the whole bet was, do we dare put men on the bird that lost three engines and had POGO on 502. That's why they were all sweatin’. [00:48:13] RB: Were you sweating when that man launch finally came then or were you pretty sure that it was going to go? [00:48:19] JT: I sweated every time it flew, hoping nothing happened with propulsion system. [both laugh] [00:48:28] RB: As far as the Saturn V missions, that was the only really big problem that you had that was on 502—as I recall—POGO and the ASI line. They both happened at the same time. [00:48:40] JT: That's right. And of course, those all fell heavily in the propulsion area, so we had plenty of activity. POGO problem, you know, goes back to what the F-1 compliances are the F-1 engine gains, and we had a program going on night and day to run the F-1 turbo pumps and engine [inaudible] factors and all that's going on here looking at the inside line phase parallel for it. It's really exciting. [00:49:18] RB: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. [00:49:20] JT: That's the part that really I think people would enjoy reading more about if I were looking into the Saturn...I mean it's great to read about how you land on the moon and all and the [chariots?] run around all over, but good lord they got miles and miles of film about that. The thing that isn't really documented is all of the daily excitements and things that went on during the course of getting there. [00:49:56] RB: That's what struck me about writing this history: it's that the manned part of the mission is so visible. It's easier to relate to maybe because there are men in it, but the development of the Saturn V and all the testing, static tests, dynamic tests, systems tests and so on, which is such a huge part of the program, is basically unknown. I mean, I take visitors out here to the Space Center and they didn't realize it was the Saturn I and I-B were a bunch of Redstone and Jupiter tanks, you know, hung together. A lot of people just really don't know that much about the Saturn story itself. So I agree with you. [laughs] I hope we can do a fairly good job with it. [00:50:39] JT: Another one that was really interesting too. One time we were concerned about the H-1 engine and its dynamic stability, perturbation, you know? We'd been running tests up at Joplin, Missouri... [00:50:55] RB: Neosho was that? [00:50:56] Neosho. Trying to bomb the H-1 engine and determine if it was truly dynamically stable and everything. And the engine wouldn't really damp in the time that we had laid down for ourselves that it should. So we began to wonder if the test stand up there may have contributed, you know, to lack of desired damp time. So we—Bob Richmond and myself—were working in the area there. We decided that, by golly, the only way you'll ever find out is to put the engine in a stage, then bomb the whole dang stage. We had an AM-11, [inaudible] be blown today—it’s an S-1 stage. We had it over there on the test stand. We had eight engines in it. It was ready for its acceptance test. I made the proposal that we put bombs in there, and then, of course, during the acceptance fire, we'd get data on the stability characteristics of the vehicle as well, and it'd be a real live flight vehicle, and it ought to be surely good. So we put bombs in four engines. We ran the stage one time, and we had said we wanted three tests, you know, three burns, and we'd bomb every time. Fired the first time, we bombed four engines and watched the damp characteristics. That was good. For the second time, we bombed four engines, and we blew one engine flat out of that stage over there, and it was on the day before George Washington's birthday. A year, I don't know, two, three, four years, five years ago. Boy, you're talking about a bunch of sick people. So the next day was George Washington's birthday, the holiday and all. But I was over there crawling around in that burned up back end where that engine had burned out. Dan Driscoll was in there, and Karl Heimberg was in there, and Lucas was in there, too. We were all four crawling around up there trying to see what the damage was, see how much delay, and how much expense and everything it was going to take. And it was that day, George Washington's birthday, that a congressional group was touring here. So naturally, when they hit town, they won't know what had blown up because you don't dare let a congressional group go through here having had an explosion without telling them we had one. So late afternoon, about three o'clock, why, we finally got a story well enough to give and explain to them what had happened and everything that would settle it all. So we began to clean up the mess, of course, we had to put in a new engine, replace all the hardware, and Chrysler was under contract with us. They fixed everything back pretty good. But we still had one more test to make, you know, because I wanted three. Somebody came to me and said, “Jerry, what about it? Are we going to get that third test?” [both laugh] Not on your life. [both laugh] I got all the experience and all the data that I need. [00:54:34] RB: What stage was this you were testing? It was an S-1 stage? [00:54:38] JT: No, it was an S-1. [00:54:40] RB: Oh, an S-1. Yeah, okay. An S-1 then. [00:54:44] JT: Yeah. With H-1 engines. [00:54:47] RB: Okay. [00:54:49] JT: But it was a funny thing, the explosion had not come though anything having to do with stability characteristics. What had happened is when you perturbate the thrust chamber, you know, causing a bomb explosion down there, the flow rates and everything change, and then they have to recover. The LOX pump on one of the engines had a carbon nose ring in it, and when you perturbate the engine, the [inaudible] naturally reacts. And of course it's going at—I think a H-1—around 5,000 or 6,000 RPMs. Carbon being a hard material with these shock loads like that, it cracked. When that cracked, the oxidizer shot through and came in contact with the fuel drain from the other pump. That's where the [explosion?] chain just popped right open. But we've got some good data from the stage from the combustion stability [panel?]. We proved without a doubt that the H-1 has required dynamic stability characteristics. But I never did get that third sample. [both laugh] [00:56:23] RB: Well, I still feel guilty about your meeting up here. I'm afraid I'm keeping you.. [00:56:26] [inaudible] what it’s like…this is these porch… [tape ends] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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