1 10 83 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/80c8be9db079afc8ecb8e45a276231e2.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/8fff8dfcf81ec39147e14d57321b04c4.mp4 ee254d24554df184bb1be2e06395d4af 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_000001_A Title A name given to the resource Allen, William M. 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/03e1489c0ba4c99a315a1c6b1b33aeb1.pdf 91b1e6b7d667ac8d1df3236cd748b914 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_000001_T Title A name given to the resource Allen, William M. (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/8c8c4a412bf8c27fac5d2debed99c7c4.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/2498f16247b345ad66ef3465d6a27fbd.mp4 d711d0f9b7f953c5ada0969a1dc44935 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 Bauer, Harold E. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:29:19 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:02] Roger Bilstein: Okay, yeah, is there here something special with this illustration? [00:00:07] Harold Bauer: Earlier we had talked about progression from Thor to the S-IV and S-IVB stages. I think in context it's well to point out the technical progression from the S-IV to the S-IVB. That's what this chart really shows. We really learned practically all of the key technological steps in the S-IV. The insulation, the common dome, the structural features were all basic to the S-IV. The S-IV was more complicated by having six RL-10 engines instead of the single J-2. That was a very fine engine, worked quite well for us. I would say that the experience that we gained on the S-IV program was very important to us in being able to carry off the S-IVB program with the efficiency that I believe we did. In a sense, the S-IVB is a more simple configuration although it has greater demands on it. One of the things we learned as we progressed from S-IV to S-IVB was to simplify things, make things more likely to work, more effective. We ended up with a very efficient stage. In fact, when we later on we were pressed to think in terms of how to reduce costs, make the stage for less money, it became very difficult to find really basic techniques of configuration adjustment that would lead to a lesser cost stage. I think that is a tribute to the efficiency of the design. [00:02:38] RB: We heard some place or somebody mentioned it, the S-IVB was really a much different flight article because of the engines maybe, or because of the feed lines, etc., because of its diameter. Do you really see it that way? They're trying to say that the Thor is to the S-IV as the S-IVB is to the S-IV. Just a different vehicle. [00:03:12] HB: I don't really feel that way about it. Although I can see why a person could take that position. The geometry is different on the S-IVB than the S-IV, but the basic design principles are essentially the same. By that, let me be specific. Common bulkhead, internal insulation, structural concepts, valve actuation devices, pressurization systems were essentially the same. I consider them to be quite similar in nature and that the S-IV was the technical precursor to the S-IVB and directly applicable. The packaging was different, but that's a minor thing. [00:04:33] RB: The RL-10 came out of this Centaur program didn't it? [00:04:36] HB: Yes, it's a fine little engine. [00:04:40] RB: The J-2 gave you a higher specific impulse. [00:04:43] HB: Well, yes, but mostly the large thrust that was involved and a much more efficient packaging, single engine versus six or more small engines. It was a much more efficient device. [00:05:02] RB: Was that J-2 on the S-IVB, is that a gimbaled or is that [stationary?]? [00:05:06] HB: Yes, it's a gimbaled. The roll control is handled by the auxiliary propulsion systems that are attached to the skirts. [00:05:22] RB: Did you have any particular difficulties in achieving interfaces with the S-II stage and the IU unit? [00:05:29] HB: No, no, that was very straightforward. As a matter of fact, that was one of the simplest jobs we had. This chart sort of goes back to the main theme we've been talking about, which compares Thor to S-IV and to S-IVB. It notes that we launched our first Thor in September 1957. The first launch on S-IVB was January 1964, which was a considerable time period. The first launch of S-IVB was February ‘66, only two years after the first launch of the S-IV. The first launch of the Saturn V version of the S-IVB was November 1967. The common theme that goes through all of these stages, of course, is the liquid oxygen technology. The type of engine, although changing from oxygen/kerosene to oxygen/hydrogen, the fundamentals are essentially the same. Liquid hydrogen being introduced in 1964 was the big step, which led to the insulation and some structural adjustments to accommodate the very cold liquid hydrogen, and the pressurization system, which we introduced with cold helium internal to the liquid hydrogen tank as a concept of improving the efficiency and packaging—if you will—of the helium, which is the pressure it will run in the valves and actuating the pneumatic systems. [00:07:29] RB: The fuel pressurization then was kind of a new thing? [00:07:33] HB: Yes, that's right. This enables you to put very, very cold helium gas in the liquid hydrogen tank and keep it cold. As you draw on that gas, you then permit it to expand by warming up to the ambient conditions that exist, which permits a very efficient packaging and storage capability of the helium. [00:08:13] RB: Was anything like that used on the Centaur? They used a pump for the propellant utilization, didn't they? [00:08:21] HB: I think that's correct. I do not know that Centaur uses cold helium as we do. But that was a very clever approach and a very logical one. This particular slide shows the types of joints, types of fittings, and stringers, and tank walls that we have developed. This is very fascinating to a structural engineer. I'm not sure how fascinating it is to others. It really presents a picture of a rather efficient design concept that has led to a good, rugged design that has not given us any problems. [00:09:37] RB: On the skirt sections here, the stringers are external? [00:09:46] HB: Yes, that's right. [00:09:48] RB: In the S-II, there are some external stringers too? [Inaudible] they finally included that insulation with the cork material on the outside of those to reduce the aerodynamic heating. Do you have any problems with this? [00:10:08] HB: There is some aerodynamic heating, and we do coat these stringers with heat protection devices such as korotherm, which is a thick paste type of paint which permits the heat that is generated during exit to be contained, so that we don't increase the temperature of the stringers to the point where they lose their strength. [00:10:48] RB: It's contained in the paint base? [00:10:50] HB: Yes, paint becomes a thermal barrier in the same fashion as the insulation inside of the liquid hydrogen tank although it's working in the other extreme. [00:11:04] RB: What's this stuff called? Korotherm? [00:11:09] HB: Korotherm. K-O-R-O and “therm” like in thermal. [00:11:16] RB: Korotherm. [00:11:18] HB: It's just a thick paint, almost paste-like in nature, which applies quite readily to these structural devices. [00:11:32] RB: Was it just simpler to build a skirt with these external stringers rather than put them on the inside? [00:11:38] HB: Yes. [00:11:40] RB: [Inaudible] thinking that flash riveting has been around for quite a while. [00:11:44] HB: We don't need that. These stringers are all pretty much within the very thick boundary layer so drag-wise we're not contributing much more drag. [00:11:56] RB: Oh, I see. [00:11:57] HB: The design parameter is not drag, it's simply structural strength with lightness and then efficiency and ease of construction. It became more economical to put the simple half-stringers on the outside. The only design criteria that had to be met then was to provide the thermal protection during the brief moments of high heating during exit. [00:12:34] RB: Well, it always kind of bothered me, I guess, because we heard so much about getting in the structure, getting out of the atmosphere pretty fast, these aerodynamic features and qualities. It kind of bothered me to see these stringers out there. [00:12:50] HB: [It wasn’t necessary?] to have a smooth surface as you would on the wing of a transport. Now the reason for that is fairly simple. The amount of time that we were within the high drag atmosphere was reasonably short. If we were flying for literally hours like a DC-8 or a DC-10, then that drag experienced over a long period of time would be quite meaningful, and, of course, is the reason why we have gone to laminar flow type of wings and very smooth skin surfaces on the rutted areas of transport airplanes because that has a tremendous payoff in fuel consumption. It is not that sort of a thing in the only short period of time that we're going through the atmosphere on something like a Saturn V. It just is not necessary to have one of those techniques. [00:13:57] RB: Looking at it from this picture, it reminded me again of the Skylab configuration and the Apollo applications program. When you were designing, [inaudible] the S-IVB, were you kind of thinking of the Skylab at the same time, or any inputs that you were designing because of the possible Skylab configuration? [00:14:22] HB: Oh yes, as early as 1964. In 1964, we began to think in terms of the use of the liquid hydrogen tank as a work area or experiment area or activity area for the astronauts when something like the Saturn IB was in Earth orbit. The point there was that the S-IVB does remain in orbit for a considerable period of time—weeks, months, a year—depending on what orbital altitude is selected. The device is up there, it is a huge thing: twenty-one feet in diameter, and the hydrogen tank is probably some thirty to forty feet in length, if you include the dome. We had a large opening at the top of the hydrogen dome for manufacturing reasons. There came an occasion in 1964—I guess actually the latter part in 1963—when we had occasion to increase the diameter of that opening at the top of the hydrogen tank for ease of manufacturing and better loading characteristics. It was sized to permit workmen to enter or exit. We got with Dr. von Braun and agreed on a diameter for that new opening that would match an astronaut and his gear going through. He said, “Now if at any time we want to use the spent S-IVB stage as an activity area, it would be easy for us to permit ready access of the astronauts to the liquid hydrogen tank.” The original concept was that extra-vehicular activities could be performed in the confines of this tank without anybody being worried about drifting off and being lost in outer space, such as would be the case of [inaudible] departed for any reason during some of these spacewalks. There were some experiments being contemplated of maneuvering units, maneuvering aids, little handles, implanting jet gases that would assist astronauts in moving around in extra-vehicular activity. These could all have been tested inside the liquid hydrogen tank. From that concept in 1963-64, gradually developed the concept of the Skylab as we know it now. [00:18:25] RB: I see now because I remember seeing some other things about using just this empty tank and I couldn't figure out really…It didn't come through to me what you would be doing in there, just to test these EVA things [inaudible]... [00:18:36] HB: [Inaudible] doing all sorts of EVA type of activity in pressurized suits in that tank and not be concerned with being injured or being left in space. Then it became pretty clear that we could also repressurize that tank and think in terms of living in a [short sleeve?] environment. The original concept of the global workshop was to use a spent liquid hydrogen tank. [00:19:16] RB: So the things from the start though originally designed purely as a rocket, and you got into design ways and realized you could do something? [00:19:30] HB: [Inaudible] opportunity for other uses since it was up there and represented a considerable resource moving around in orbit, the question was let's get smart and see how much use we can put to it. [00:19:53] RB: Before you get on to that, were there certain times too when you designed this thing, sheer logistical problems closed certain avenues until you realized you couldn't carry it down a highway or under a bridge or maybe carry it in a certain mode and so you had to redesign it somehow? [00:20:11] HB: No. [laughs] It helped us select the location of this facility. [laughs] Quite seriously. [00:20:19] RB: Well, some place I read—it was in the trade journal, however—-that the S-IV something they began to think of logistics as a parameter of its original design. [00:20:34] HB: Yes. [00:20:37] RB: There's nothing in the location of the plant that was… [00:20:40] HB: We were [inaudible], if you will, compared to the S-II and the S-IC, we thought we could solve our problems quite readily. It did, in thinking in terms of future programs, the logistics consideration did have an important influence on the location of this facility. We are close to Seal Beach as a port and close to the Naval Air Station as a means of getting air transportation. Those two things had to be considered in the location of this facility. They had some [inaudible] in the location of the Seal Beach facility for North American for the same reasons. [00:21:27] RB: Excuse me, go on with the… [00:21:30] HB: Well, I have some photographs here of the several tankage and membrane joints. We can look a little bit more at the common bulkhead and how it is, the simplicity of its attachment to the liquid oxygen tank, and the attachment to the liquid hydrogen tank. I think the important thing that this chart shows is that the structural simplicity that came out of the design concepts is impressive. These are not difficult welds. They lend themselves to easy inspection and good quality control. The most complex part of this thing is the fitting of the aluminum surfaces to the fiberglass common bulkhead. That is probably the most difficult job we have and perhaps the most demanding one as far as workmanship is concerned. That was considered at one time to be the big worrisome feature of the design. In fact, in practice, it has turned out to be most routine. After the first few articles were manufactured, that settled down to a very routine process and has been no trouble whatsoever. [00:23:17] RB: Well, you had some special processes, didn't you, to shape the common bulkhead for this? [00:23:26] HB: That is a very elaborate process, and I would prefer to get an expert on that to discuss that with you [when you’re ready?] to talk about that. That has reduced itself to a very clever methodology of fitting and sizing the fiberglass center section, so that it matches very precisely to the two aluminum domes and lends itself to good adhesive characteristics and excellent quality control. I am very pleased with the outcome of that. [00:24:11] RB: Some of these welds, were these fairly common as far as aircraft construction or they were kind of unique for the space program and less straightforward? [00:24:22] HB: However really unique due to the application, it had not been common to use weldments of this nature for major structural joints in aircraft. The joints were all riveted or bolted. Here we had a situation where we departed from that and were depending entirely upon the integrity of the welds for both structural attachment and for sealing. We could not have any leakers, if you will. Leakers being passed for molecules of hydrogen to pass through, not boiling leaks. We don’t have to have anything but a path of migration of molecules of hydrogen into the common bulkhead and mix with molecules of oxygen from the liquid oxygen tank to have a very distasteful situation [both laugh] in the common bulkhead. [00:25:32] RB: Was the inert gas welding technique used anywhere in the aircraft industry? That was fairly common? [00:25:41] HB: Yes. The main reason for that is that you just cannot stand to have just common atmospheric gases around the arc. The oxygen and hydrogen, or the hydrogen I guess is the worst offender, tends to embrittle the welds. [00:26:06] RB: Okay, [you have to move?] [00:26:11] HB: Yes. I think the most impressive part of the early portion of the program was the design of the welding fixtures. What I have here are some of the large welding devices that were used to do these precision welds. In this case, we are welding the liquid oxygen tank to where I take to be the liquid oxygen tank. This is the dome of the liquid oxygen tank, which is the cylindrical section of the liquid hydrogen tank. [00:27:02] RB: They are inside the tank here? [00:27:04] HB: That's right. [00:27:05] RB: This will be coming down through that top opening, I suppose? [00:27:09] HB: That's correct. [Inaudible] travels now automatically and is doing the circumferential weld of the cylinder to the liquid oxygen tank extension. [00:27:23] RB: This whole beam coming down here and the two supports coming in forms kind of a triangular…? [00:27:28] HB: That's right. [00:27:29] RB: It rotates all around the inside of the tank. This is the problem with the shop area, but of course nothing was going on with the solid fixtures, and sometimes they didn't have a better idea of how they operated. [00:27:43] HB: For two-man operation that's pretty good. [00:27:47] RB: Does this just work on a geared track here sometime, and [inaudible] observe it and guide it? [00:27:54] HB: They are controlling the feeds, and one of them is watching the welding process. This is our Sacramento test facility where we did the acceptance firings on these two stands, Beta stands we call them. This is a facility that we at NASA developed for the conduct of the S-IV and the S-IVB activities. This is now for all practical purposes closed down. [00:28:42] RB: Beta I and Beta II test stands? Three? [00:28:45] HB: Beta III. [00:28:46] RB: Beta I and Beta III? [00:28:50] HB: There were going to be Beta I, Beta II and Beta III, but we only made Beta I and Beta III. I think we skipped Beta II for some reason. I think I'm right on that. [00:29:04] RB: Now on the test program there were a couple of explosions, weren't there? [00:29:08] HB: No. There was one on the S-IV program and there was one on the S-IVB program. [00:29:13] RB: Excuse me here… [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_000003_A Title A name given to the resource Bauer, Harold E. Description An account of the resource This Bauer oral history interview focuses on the technological evolution of Douglas Aircraft’s S-IV and S-IVB rocket stages, emphasizing how experience from the earlier S-IV program directly informed the simpler, more efficient S-IVB design. Harold Bauer explains that the two stages shared fundamental technologies, including common bulkheads, internal insulation, structural concepts, valve systems, and pressurization methods, while the S-IV used six RL-10 engines and the S-IVB employed a single, more powerful gimbaled J-2 engine. A major technological advance was the introduction of liquid hydrogen, which required new approaches to insulation, structural design, and the storage of very cold helium for efficient tank pressurization. Bauer also describes the stage’s lightweight structural design, including externally mounted stringers protected from aerodynamic heating by a thermal coating called Korotherm, noting that aerodynamic drag was less important during the brief atmospheric portion of a Saturn V flight than structural strength, weight, and ease of manufacturing. The interview highlights how the S-IVB’s design eventually contributed to the Skylab concept: engineers recognized that the large, empty liquid-hydrogen tank could serve as a valuable orbital workspace, initially providing a safe environment for practicing extravehicular activities and eventually inspiring the concept of a pressurized orbital workshop. Logistics also influenced the location of Douglas facilities near Seal Beach and air and sea transportation routes. Bauer discusses the importance of precision welding, particularly because the S-IVB depended on welded joints for both structural strength and leak prevention, unlike conventional aircraft construction, which relied more heavily on riveting and bolting. Elaborate welding fixtures and carefully controlled inert-gas welding processes were developed to ensure consistent, high-quality joints, while the fiberglass-aluminum common bulkhead represented one of the most demanding aspects of the manufacturing process but ultimately became routine. The interview also covers the Sacramento test facilities, including the Beta I and Beta III stands, where S-IV and S-IVB stages underwent acceptance testing. Overall, Bauer portrays the S-IVB as the product of accumulated engineering experience, emphasizing that its success resulted not from radical departure from the S-IV but from refining proven technologies, simplifying the design, improving manufacturing efficiency, and recognizing opportunities to extend the usefulness of the stage beyond its original role as a launch vehicle. 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/a1c093aa49fbafecbad1fd9844d5a450.pdf eacf41c1486693e27d78956419e50c95 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_000002_T Title A name given to the resource Bauer, Harold E. (Transcript) Description An account of the resource Transcript up to 0:06:02 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/7a2fb0cdc62219431a953e8a13ef7f6d.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/bf7f823f6faeb894beed5e67a2680be8.mp4 4f6cb4662d07c559bfbc30f67a8c60db 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 Bauer, Harold E. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:00:50 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:08] Roger Bilstein: There is an approved list of Douglas vendors, and some of the questions I had here: “What was the criteria for selection?”, “How was it revised?”, and “Was there a list of blacklisted vendors?” [00:00:26] Harold Bauer: Well, let me get to the last one first. There really wasn't a list of blacklisted vendors in the context of these people are not good suppliers. They may have been perfectly adequate suppliers, but they may not have been quite capable of meeting the very high standards for the Apollo program. Now let me go back to the first question. Yes, indeed, there was a list of approved suppliers. That approval was based on source selection, site surveys, and examination of the management, and technical capabilities of the vendor involved, and—quite importantly—the quality control capabilities of the vendor involved. For hardware components that were critical in several categories of criticality, it became very important that we issue our purchase orders to a vendor who was quite capable of demonstrating his ability to turn out the hardware we wanted to the standards that the program wanted, and that they would be repeatable. By that, I mean that the first few articles wouldn't be great, and the following articles would be perhaps less than great. The methodology of approving a source is very strict, very rigid, and goes through essentially technical management quality control type of evaluation. [00:02:24] RB: Did you have seminars out here in California? You would bring those people out and tell them about your quality control restrictions? [00:02:30] HB: Oh, yes. We would not only do that, we would tell them of our quality control requirements. We would have them present their quality control plan, and we would audit those plans. We even did other things. For example, we brought some 100-odd, 100-plus suppliers out here and told them exactly what their individual piece of hardware did for the stage, where it was located, how it operated, and what the consequences of a failure would be. We got them together in groups of twenty or thirty at a time. We gave them a complete rundown on the performance of the stage, the environment it had to go through. As a result of those meetings, there were at least two vendors who said, “I think you better take my piece of hardware and take another look at it and see if we're doing it right for you.” In one case, we did make some changes. That was worth the whole operation: exposed to one situation where all of the formal checks and balances hadn't quite gotten a message through. There was really nothing that badly wrong with the piece of hardware involved, but we did take an opportunity to make an examination. We did help him improve his day-by-day operating characteristics, and we did get a better piece of hardware out of it. [00:04:02] RB: You remember who that was? [00:04:03] HB: No, I don't. I could find out if it's important. [00:04:08] RB: No, not necessarily if we just had to. [00:04:10] HB: Do you happen to remember? I thought it was a potentiometer. [00:04:18] Adrian O’Neal: I don't remember. [00:04:22] RB: Yeah, those things sound like they were very helpful then. [00:04:26] HB: Well, the important thing was that the chief engineer or the chief executive of the company involved had a very clear understanding of what his piece of hardware was doing in the stage. He also knew where he would stand in the eyes of the world if his piece of hardware didn't function. He was quite knowledgeable of the consequences of the penalties of failure. [00:04:57] RB: We were talking about MIG welding and TIG welding. Did they go ahead with the MIG process? [00:05:07] AO: Yeah, I think when we first started the S-IV program, I guess, we were using MIG because we had developed that with the Thor. I don't remember whether it was the S-IV or the S-IVB program. [00:05:24] HB: We finally switched over to TIG. [00:05:26] RB: Oh, you did go to a TIG? [00:05:27] AO: Oh, yeah. We finally went TIG. I know we were TIG…I'm pretty sure we changed to TIG on the S-IVB program. We probably were MIG on the S-IV. [00:05:48] RB: Why would you go ahead with the change on that? [00:05:52] AO: The TIG offers some advantages that MIG doesn't if my memory serves me right. The main thing that the TIG did was give you a cleaner looking weld. By that, I mean one that when you take x-rays of, they don't look like they have inclusions and stuff in them. If I'm not mistaken, also a little bit better strength. But the main thing was that it was a more automatic control weld so that over like 100 feet of weld—like when you weld up tanks—you were more sure of getting the same quality weld at the end of the 100 foot run as you had when you started. The automaticness [sic] of it kept the setting so that you got good quality weld the whole way. [00:07:00] HB: Just one other feature [that TIG lends?] itself to recording of the data a bit easier doesn’t it? [00:07:08] AO: Yeah, that's part of the automatic control of the weld. The other thing too, going way back, but it seems to me the TIG also lent itself to repairs. You could go back and re-go over a weld, clean out the old weld, and re-weld without destroying as much of the parent metal property for the TIG as you did with the MIG weld. [00:07:44] RB: Okay, that's fine. And you were still using the same materials—2014-T6—on both stages—S-IV and S-IVB? And North American used the same materials—2014 or…? [00:07:56] AO: Yeah, it's my understanding North American S-II used the 2014 material. [00:08:02] RB: And you don't happen to remember what Boeing used, do you? We haven't gotten that. [00:08:06] AO: Yeah, Boeing on the S-IC went to 2219. [00:08:14] RB: But they're dealing with RP-1, which is not a cryogenic stuff? Is that their criteria there? [00:08:21] AO: I'm not sure. I think it's more in the line that 2219 aluminum was developed after 2014. [00:08:30] RB: I see. [00:08:31] AO: It was developed specifically by one of the aluminum companies to be a weldable aluminum. It exhibits an easier capability of being welded than, say, 2014. By easier, I mean, it doesn't have to have as tightly controlled parameters like wire feed and inert atmospheres and currents and all that stuff. It's not as strong. Strength-wise, it's not as good as 2014. But I think really what happened when Boeing came along, they had a first stage, which was payload trade-off care parameters are not as stringent as, say, a second or third stage. The weight wasn't quite as big a problem to them as, say, it was on our stage, which is third. They just chose to go through a material that was easier welded than to go to one to gain some weight and have the difficulties that they may have experienced. Of course, I don't think they had really been trying to weld 2014 before either. North American, some of my conversations were right at…They started trying to weld 2014-T6 before they got the S-II contract. [00:10:10] RB: I see. Okay, maybe we can…[tape cuts out and restarts] I think we’re off and running there…One of the things we're interested in is the origins of technology of this stuff. Did you work on the Thor program or anything like that? Do you have any reflections on what the Thor program did for the S-IV, S-IVB, if anything? [00:10:36] AO: Yeah, I think most of us that started out on the S-IV program had previously worked on the Thor. Some of the things that I remember are things like, well, the development of the 2014-T6 aluminum weldability came about on Thor, and we just applied that to the S-IV. Such things as the handling and use of liquid oxygen started with Thor and carried over into the S-IV and then the S-IVB. [00:11:20] RB: Did you use the MIG process then on the Thor welding? [00:11:24] AO: Yes. We started with MIG on the Thor. [00:11:29] RB: Was MIG used in aircraft manufacturing? [00:11:32] AO: No, no. [00:11:33] RB: It's kind of an aerospace thing? [00:11:35] AO: The welding of the 2014 began on Thor. It was not used in any of the aircraft programs. They do very little welding. They do mostly riveting and bolting. [00:11:57] RB: Was there kind of a difference of opinion between Douglas and Marshall over the use of the MIG process at the beginning? Did they prefer the Tungsten approach? You remember anything about that? [00:12:12] AO: I remember that we had a fair amount of conversation when we started on the S-IV program concerning the use of 2014. There were several guys at Marshall that felt like you really ought to be using something that's more readily welded. We had more than one meeting, and I can remember. Finally, mutually agreed that we'd stay with 2014. It wasn't a unilateral thing. It was just that after we got all our cards spread out on the table, we decided that we'd stay with the 2014. As I remember, one of the biggest trade-offs on that had to do with weight. Because the S-IV was like the IVB, a second stage, and the trade-off with weight to payload gets almost one to one. [00:13:16] RB: The 2014 is a lighter material? [00:13:18] AO: It's a stronger material. [00:13:20] RB: Stronger? [00:13:20] AO: Yeah. Its weight per unit volume is the same as, well, all aluminum is the same. But 2014, as I remember, room temperature is about a 60,000 psi allowable. Some of the other aluminums that are more easily welded have strengths like 40,000 and 50,000. Weight turns out to be almost a direct trade-off, the ratio or the strengths of the two materials. If you had a material that was, say, two-thirds as strong as 2014, you just turn that ratio around, it'd be about fifty percent more heavy for the same application. But on the MIG/TIG, I don't think we…I think on the S-IV program, there wasn't any conversation at all about whether we used MIG or TIG. That all came about as the IVB program was started. I think we talked down in Hal's office, as I remember, what the differences were. I don't think there's any question that the TIG welding will give you a more uniform quality joint than the MIG. [00:14:53] RB: Now, that's essentially a process, too, that has major use in aerospace engineering. Is that true to say? [00:14:59] AO: I think that's true. [00:15:03] RB: Were there any special problems that you saw? Were there any special problems that you had in introducing this thing? [00:15:10] AO: TIG? [00:15:10] RB: Yeah. At the beginning that later on you [learned off?]? [00:15:15] AO: I don't think we had any special problems. I think we went through the normal learning curve that you go through when you start changing the process. We found out some things just by putting your head in it and looking at it that you don't know until you actually try to do it. I don't remember any big problems. A series of…When you start to build something, once you start going into manufacturing, especially on the first few articles, you usually find out that engineering was late to the way you had intended to do it when you started out. For a multitude of reasons, but generally on almost every program, the engineering that finally gets released to the manufacturing people is late to the schedule that they said they could do it to. They start out behind schedule. Then, of course, any problem they have, even if it's a small problem in itself, it's magnified because they're behind schedule. Even if it holds them up for one day in solving it, then it's a big problem. So you say, “Did you have a big problem with TIG?” I'd say we did not have. If you talk with guys that were involved in putting it into operation and making the first few units, they'd probably tell you it was hard. [00:16:57] RB: Yeah. Well, a minute ago you were talking about relationship with Marshall people. Now, this is one of the things that I think maybe is more to do with this program, the fact that you're a technical people here, dealing with other people, as I understand, who have a very good technical background themselves. [00:17:17] AO: Yes. [00:17:18] RB: Did you have some real terrible hassles with them? Just what went on in some of these meetings? Again, see, we read the reports, but we don't…See, this is the official version. We'd like to know what really went on in some of those things. [00:17:31] AO: Well, I think that we had all the problems that any two groups of people would have that have essentially the same technical capability, but with different experience balance, if you understand what I mean. [00:17:57] RB: Yeah. [00:17:59] AO: See, we went into the S-IV program with…Our experience bank was stuffed with things like airplanes and Thors and Nikes and Sparrows and all the programs that we had been working on for the past ten or fifteen years. As we started first dealing with Marshall, their experience was naturally back to Redstone and Jupiter and V-2 before that, because quite a few of the top individuals in Marshall had worked with Dr. von Braun in Germany. Our experience banks were different. I think that's probably the biggest—not the biggest—but those were the places where we usually ended up in at least discussions, if not arguments sometimes. Just the fact that one guy had done it one way and had been successful, and the other guy had done it a different way and also been successful. It took a while for us to get to where we mutually trusted each other. [00:19:22] RB: It took a while…Does this mean over a period of months or it takes several years to really work out this relationship. [00:19:30] AO: I'd say it probably took years. It's like we've often said around here that if you start to design any product that if you really don't have a closely-knit design team on all the different technologies and so forth until those people have worked together probably three to five years. Until they've worked together long enough to find out the strengths and weaknesses of all the other members and also the boundaries of what's my part of it, you really don't have a real good team. You can get the job done, but you don't really have what I'd say is a finely oiled machine. It probably took us several years to get to where we worked that way with Marshall. [00:20:33] RB: Can you, as an example, can you recall a particular issue or problem where your technical people were saying one thing and Marshall was saying, you know, we ought to do it a different way? [00:20:52] AO: Well, I can remember a couple examples that probably say more I was right. [laughs] [00:21:03] RB: [laughs] Okay, that's fine. [00:21:12] AO: Just one, probably quite a few. In fact, I probably didn't even hear of all of them. One that I remember was that we spent a fair amount of time talking about had to do with on the S-IV, whether we used a common bulkhead to separate the LOX on the liquid hydrogen tank or whether we made two tanks out of it. We had mesmerized ourselves in the believing that a common bulkhead was the way to go. Some of their people had of course done the opposite. We spent a fair amount of time discussing it and talking back and forth. Finally, set up a test program to verify that what we were saying was really true. Of course, it did work out that time. There's probably hundreds of instances where that would come up. Just differences in opinions really. Hardly ever really differences in pure technical results because generally you get any two sets of engineers together, and once they've agreed on all the ground rules and the assumptions that go into any kind of a solution, they'll carry it from that point to the end the same way. They'll both get the same answer. The differences get into the assumptions and the ground rules and the experience banks. [00:23:12] RB: In these meetings then there was a thing you handled you hammered out a mutual agreement? It didn't come, say, to von Braun's desk, and it was up to him to say, “Well we'll do it either Douglas’ way or Marshall’s way.” [00:23:27] AO: No, I don't remember very many…That particular one I know as far as I know never got to Dr. von Braun. Maybe his people talked with him about it. I don't remember any like that that we ever ended up hammering tongs to where you had to make somebody make an arbitrary decision. [00:23:57] RB: What was your feeling about von Braun, you know, as the head of the space program? [00:24:07] AO: Well, I think the man is very intelligent. He has a real good engineering feel for what a solution should be. One of the best—I want to say conversationalists—but talker if you will that I've ever met. He almost mesmerizes you with the way, just his enthusiasm for his work. [00:24:58] RB: He used to make kind of I guess semi-annual inspection tours around. He used to come up to Douglas and North American [and Boeing?]. Did you find these to be an interruption in your work or were these kind of valuable chances to get together and talk things over? [00:25:18] AO: Usually they were pretty valuable because generally you know they've had people working here. They have a NASA office downstairs. [00:25:29] RB: Right. Steve Tyson, we’ve talked to him already. [00:25:32] AO: Of course, they are passing information or were passing—still are—information back to Huntsville all the time about things that are going on here that probably some of us didn't even know about. Usually when Wernher was coming out he had that to look for when he got here, and he usually brought a fair number of guys—half a dozen so people—with him and usually they were the lab chiefs at Huntsville. When they came in they had pretty high…The word escapes me…They had the top people from Huntsville with them when they came in so that when we sat down in meetings usually we gave them a status of the program and then just had an informal exchange, and some pretty important decisions could get made there. [00:26:37] RB: Again can you give an example off hand? I realize we’re covering ten years' time or something like that. [00:26:47] AO: I think probably in the Apollo program that the one point in time that were some some decisions and assessments were made that in my mind had the biggest impact toward toward making sure that the Apollo program did come off and that it meet the 1960 decade commitment and all was probably about the time that Sam Phillips came onto the program and went around to all the contractors and came here. I forget about when it was now but it must have been 1964-65 somewhere along in that period. [00:27:46] RB: We can verify. [00:27:49] AO: I remember when he came here he sent ahead a list of questions that he wanted answered, and we answered them. Of course, the fact that he was coming with all his people made us spend some extra time assessing really where we were on the S-IVB program. Out of that visit here and his visits to all the other contractors came a declared position that all of us were behind schedule and made us anyway reassess where we were schedule wise and get everything back on track. In fact if I remember right after we had gone through that exercise, and we stuck to the schedule it was laid out. [00:28:50] RB: I'm sure that some of the readers may ask, we talk about 2014-T6 aluminum and all this stuff. Where does your aluminum come from? Specialty plants or can you just call up an aluminum warehouse and say we want some 2014? [00:29:05] AO: It comes from just the aluminum suppliers in the country. I'm not sure who we buy it from, but it can be bought from either Alcoa or Reynolds or Kaiser aluminum companies. [00:29:24] RB: When you were you were working on the S-II dealing with J-2 or S-IVB dealing with J-2 engines and North American was doing work on the S-II with similar engines, was there much contact with North America did you exchange information about maybe mounting problems or gimbaling problems? Were there any mutual points of interest that you could scratch each other's back? [00:29:50] AO: Well, of course, probably the real meeting place was through the Huntsville Marshall Organization where back in those days we had what was called working groups. The working groups generally were between, say, us on the S-IVB and Marshall and also then between North American on the S-II and Marshall. There was that point that you should say formally you could exchange information. It turns out that a lot of the engineers working here were personal friends of engineers at Rocketdyne and on the S-II, so there's probably a more important informal exchange going on that route just by telephone calls and personal friendships. Toward the real frenzied part of the development of both the S-II and the S-IVB, Marshall did start kind of combining their working groups, so that they'd have say a mechanical working group. They'd have people not only from McDonnell Douglas but also North American, Boeing, and Marshall all in the same room. This way once the people sat around a table a few times and looked at each other they began to discuss more freely what some… [tape cuts out] [00:31:28] RB: Could you say you had an explosion on the S-IV and one on the S-IVB? [00:31:35] Harold Bauer: On the S-IV, we got ourselves into an irreversible process of freezing one of our valves, and we're unable to stop the pressurization of the tank in time to keep it from bursting. This was associated with blowing of super cold helium through a vent valve, and before we realized what was happening to us, the valve had frozen shut, and over-pressurization occurred. On the S-IVB program, we got into a very strange situation where the series of human errors had led to the use of an improper welding rod in the manufacture of helium bottles, which had the characteristic of being very, very strong and then suddenly weakening. This was called hydrogen embrittlement. In a sense that it's a much more complicated problem than I have noted here, and it's all well documented. The situation that we ran into was that a series of full helium or ambient helium spheres had been welded with the wrong weld rod. They would satisfy all burst test criteria, but after being pressurized for a large number of times their strength characteristics deteriorated, and one of the bottles did in fact burst on the Beta I stand. During a countdown, burst just prior to engine start and destroyed the stage. [00:34:11] RB: Did that rupture the LOX and hydrogen tanks then? You got a big detonation out of it or what? Well, just a helium detonation that destroyed it? [00:34:18] HB: Well, the helium tank is about thirty inches in diameter and was pressurized to 3000 tons per square inch. When it let go, it drove the two halves of the sphere apart at very high velocities. One half went down through the engine and down the bottom of the test stand. The other half went up through the liquid oxygen tank and into the liquid hydrogen tank permitting a mix of oxygen and hydrogen in combination of the high energy involved in the the passing of this large piece of the helium sphere, which provided the heat for initiating the fire and that led to an explosion. [00:35:28] RB: This was a thirty inch tank at 3000 psi? That's a fairly good size segment to go through. [00:35:35] HB: King sized bomb [00:35:37] RB: [Laughs] A king sized bomb, yeah. [00:35:40] HB: The stage was destroyed. The stand was pretty badly damaged although it was repaired. [00:35:54] RB: Which one of these are we talking about here? [00:35:56] HB: This one down... [00:35:57] RB: This one on the far end. But you were able to continue testing? [00:36:06] HB: We were operating on the other stand. It was not too difficult to repair the damaged stand. [00:36:14] RB: Did you have a lot of difficulty at the beginning in developing expertise in tanking a large amounts of cryogenic? [00:36:23] HB: The early days we found it very difficult to get any hydrogen out of a tank transported to the test stand. After a couple of days I guess we were looking at the outflow into the hose, and there was nothing coming out. It was all boiling off to hydrogen gas. What, of course, was the problem was getting to the point of being a little bit smarter on problems of insulation and chill down and that soon became solved. It's sort of fun to talk about it now, but at the time we wondered if we were going to be able to solve that problem. It turned out to be very simple. One of the other problems we had that is always kind of interesting to think about now, and that is the discipline that the computer introduced through our way of thinking. All of our countdowns are run by the computer. All the vital decisions on sequencing were established by inserting time gates into the computer, which of course thinks in terms of milliseconds and operates at the speed of electricity, which I guess is around microseconds. But let's not worry about the microseconds [laughs, inaudible]. The milliseconds were the things that caused us some difficulties. We wanted an event to take place between one and a half seconds, and we put in 1.500 seconds, and the event did not occur in 1.500 seconds, the computer shut us down. We were shut down quite often because we didn't really think too far ahead on the precision of the tolerances on any time gates we wanted. It turned out if you wanted 1.525 and anything after 1.525 was not proper, then that was all right. But if 1.526 was perfectly satisfactory for the running of the countdown, you'd better let the computer know. [both laugh] It was completely unforgiving of sloppiness in thinking. [00:39:06] RB: Some unnecessarily terminated tests then? [00:39:10] HB: Yes, we got over that one in a very short period of time. We only had to learn that lesson a couple of times to realize its importance. Now we have a picture here of inserting the stage in the Guppy. I guess that's only interesting in the sense of where it's at that I guess you can make almost anything fly. Although this is talking of spin-offs, we are transporting wing sections of the DC-10 by this type of transportation system. Commercial transportation and large things other than space. By that I mean commercial aircraft parts being done by this method of transportation. [00:40:05] RB: Well, now on the origin of the Guppy and Super Guppy, did you go out and say to some contractor, “We need a big airplane,” or how did this thing start? [00:40:15] HB: This chap decided that we in this business needed an air transport system and to my knowledge he conceived the idea and carried it out essentially by himself until he had proven the principle. Then it was used quite extensively by ourselves and others in the transport of large devices. We transported most of our hardware, our stages, by the Guppy. [00:40:57] RB: Did NASA come in and make some fairly strong inputs on the Guppy program or they just let you go ahead with it? [00:41:10] HB: Well, actually it was a combination. I think the way to look at it is here was an opportunity for the American ingenuity to go to work, and that is evidenced by the initiative that was taken by the operators of the Guppy. In our own case because we were familiar with air transport requirements and the aerodynamics of the situation, we were able to see that it was a practical situation, and one that could be handled very effectively by air transport techniques. NASA also became interested in that it would save two weeks out of this transportation loop. From Huntington Beach to Sacramento was three or four days by barge, and from Sacramento to the Cape going through the canal, it was about a two-week trip. So it became in the early days of the program it was very important to us to be able to gain that time. [00:42:29] RB: Was the Guppy…Were they completely pressurized? Were there problems with carrying a stage at high atmospheres like that? [00:42:43] HB: No, you had to vent the stage. You did not pressurize the cabin of the Guppy, and you had to make sure that there were ways of accommodating the change in pressure on the S-IVB stage for example to avoid collapsing one of the domes. But there was never a problem solving that part of it. [00:43:09] RB: Did you make flights into Huntsville here at all? [00:43:14] HB: No…I guess we made a couple of flights in come to think of it. I guess it was the dynamics vehicle, and the rest of them went from Sacramento to the Cape. [00:43:33] RB: Is this a one or non-stop flight or did you have to make a stop? [00:43:37] HB: They were refueled once or twice. It’s not non-stop. One of the things that we'd like to talk about is the ability that we have to impact the S-IVB on the moon. [00:44:20] RB: As a spent stage? [00:44:25] HB: Yes. This I find particularly interesting in that the ability to precisely navigate and guide the S-IVB in the early part of the translunar injection is sufficiently accurate enough to have had 100 percent so far on every intended impact. That we are able to put it into a circle of about 350 kilometers in diameter with good success I find is technically intriguing. [00:45:05] RB: Well, now in these other impact areas if something happens this is what you can do with your auxiliary propulsion systems. Is that what I read these things here? [00:45:17] HB: For example the most precise area is using auxiliary propulsion system burn air burn, which gets us down into a very tight ellipse. Then the size of the footprint grows if we are not able to get a burn air burn or we just get a single burn out of the auxiliary propulsion system. This is what I find is interesting is that even with no APS system: the precision of the translunar injection trajectory is such that you have a pretty good chance of impacting the moon even though it's off of the initial target position. You can still have some degree of success of hitting the moon whether it be on this side or the far side. [00:46:15] RB: Were some of those things sent into the sun originally? [00:46:23] HB: Yes, we used a maneuver called a slingshot maneuver which finally put it in a disposal trajectory if you will, which… [00:46:29] RB: That's nice. A slingshot orbit for disposal trajectory, yeah [laughs]? [00:46:35] HB: Take advantage of the gravitational field of the moon and orient the S-IVB in such a fashion that as it swings by the moon, the moon's gravity force will accelerate it and sling it into a very large orbit, which eventually will end up being captured by the sun. [00:47:06] RB: Do you remember which…507? Or must have been previous to that then? Which ones you went into the moon and which ones were lunar impact or solar impact? [00:47:21] HB: 508 and subs—508 and 509. We've only had two impacts. The rest of them have gone into the solar type of trajectory. [00:47:38] RB: Do you have any more pictures there? [00:47:41] HB: Well, I think that just about does it for my overview here. [00:47:55] RB: As I was doing research on this thing, I jotted down a lot of questions, and we covered a lot of them already I think. I wondered—here's one here we haven't gone into—I was wondering about as a contractor, if you could compare the Douglas experience with Marshall as opposed to Air Force. We've heard some things you know about the arsenal approach, which was characteristic of Marshall because of the Redstone Arsenal thing and the United States Air Force. Were there any differences or advantages or disadvantages that you experienced in that thing? [00:48:39] HB: Management techniques. The simplest way of characterizing two different approaches. Let me start by saying that I would characterize the recent Air Force management philosophy as one which started with the systems command techniques of system management that were perhaps best described in the 375 documentation. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this type of documentation, but it was essentially a method of breaking a major program or weapon system down into I think it was about six elements: system engineering, configuration management, accounting and control, program control vis-à-vis fiscal management, schedule management type of disciplines. There were two or three others, which I will probably remember surely. In a sense, a set of handbooks explaining the process of the Air Force, philosophies, ground rules, and in some detail the methodology of establishing a system approach, managing the system approach and accounting for the configuration adjustments was a major product of the Air Force systems command techniques. A fairly rigid character evolved, well documented, excellent concept that came out of the Air Force. [00:51:21] HB: Now these system management methodologies were implemented by a weapon system program office, which, in fact, was a collection of the key technical and business management directors of a program whether they be industry or Air Force, and organized them under a single decision-making body called the system program office wherein the system program director was the single individual who was charged with the ultimate responsibility of the successful conduct of the program. Now if you can boil that philosophy down into a few essential ingredients, it was that the personnel, the operating methods were well disciplined, well thought of, and were characterized by a decision-making process capability as documented. Now NASA in a sense did about the same thing, but without the rigors if you will of the formal documentation that was evidenced by the 375 documentation, which provided the organized protocol, near protocol, and operating methodologies that were described by the Air Force. But both parties fell into an operating mode that was essentially the same thing. [00:53:34] HB: Now the main difference with the NASA community was that the decision-making process in a formal sense was not quite as rigid as the Air Force operating methodology. In fact, many people think that some of the strengths that came out of the NASA approach was the ability for anyone to challenge a technical approach or request and get further validation or however you wish to put the terms, concurrence, justification of the technical approaches involved. The NASA approach literally put in several engineering communities examining same problems: contractor, Center A, Center B, Center D, C. The great strength I would say of the NASA approach was the exhaustive technical analysis of all aspects of the program, which led to the successful conduct of their program from a technical point of view. I think that is pretty hard to challenge. Now whether it is safe to say that a more efficient, less costly approach could emerge is a matter of pure debate in my mind because there is no other example of such a huge program being conducted within the time scale and within the declared limits that were going to be spent and with the success that was realized. [00:56:16] HB: You look to many of the Air Force programs, and you see them started out with this other methodology, and you find them characterized by termination. If you want to call a B-70 program one that was characterized by termination, Sky Wolf by termination, Dinosaur by termination, Mole by termination. But I may be emphasizing the wrong repeating characteristic. That may have nothing to do with the 375 type of methodology. That may be associated with a completely independent set of parameters, which should be examined separately, and thus you should not really contaminate the thinking process of those programs of the Air Force that were terminated for whatever the reasons may be with the management methodology. All I can say is that in response to your question, the two communities in fact in detail operated quite similarly. One with less rigid documentation but certainly more, I would have to say, more rigid technical, repetitive exposure of approach and procedures and techniques. I want to point out that the characterization of Air Force program terminations as it might affect the feelings of confidence in their system management methodology in my mind are two separate things. They should not be connected. [00:58:27] HB: I felt very strongly that the 375 methodologies offered excellent guidance and an organized thinking process for doing a good technical management job. When not carried to the extreme of emphasizing details rather than principles, the guidelines were excellent. I would also point out that in my experience the operating procedures in detail that occurred in NASA were similar in nature to what I found going on with the Air Force although much less rigid methodology, certainly much more freedom for technical challenge. I was very much impressed with both methods. Somewhere between the two systems, my guess is that it is an opportunity to take the best of each and use them and try to avoid the opportunities of spending an exorbitant amount of time on unessential details. It was so easy for both methods to get into unessential details and concentrate on details rather than the essential principles. If there was a weakness in either system, it was in that direction. Both systems produced excellent articles. It's pretty hard to challenge the success record of the Apollo program. Thus the operating methodology behind it should be very seriously considered for any other operation. My own judgment—again to summarize—there is a blending of the two technical management operating methods—Air Force and NASA—that could be well used for any large technical enterprise. [01:00:42] You didn't have much to do with Houston, I suppose. The question is... [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_000002_A Title A name given to the resource Bauer, Harold E. and O'Neal, Adrian P. Description An account of the resource Interview with Harold Bauer and Adrian O'Neal begins at 00:00:26. Interview with Adrian O'Neal alone begins at 00:10:10. Interview with Harold Bauer alone begins at 00:31:28. The interview with Harold Bauer and Adrian O’Neal explores the engineering, manufacturing, quality-control, and management practices behind Douglas Aircraft’s work on the S-IV and S-IVB stages of the Apollo program. Bauer explains the rigorous process for approving vendors, emphasizing technical capability, quality control, and repeatable production, while O’Neal discusses the transition from MIG to TIG welding, the advantages of 2014-T6 aluminum, and how experience from the Thor program informed Apollo development. They describe technical disagreements and gradually developing trust between Douglas and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, noting that differences often stemmed from contrasting engineering experiences rather than fundamental technical disagreements. The interview also covers major S-IV/S-IVB failures, including an overpressurization incident and a helium-bottle rupture caused by improper welding rod, as well as challenges with cryogenic hydrogen handling and computer-controlled countdowns. Bauer discusses the innovative use of the Guppy aircraft to transport large rocket stages, the precision of S-IVB lunar-impact trajectories, and the stage’s eventual disposal through lunar gravity-assist trajectories. Finally, Bauer compares Air Force and NASA management approaches, praising the Air Force’s structured systems-management methodology and NASA’s exhaustive technical review and flexibility, and concludes that combining the strengths of both approaches could provide an effective model for managing large, complex technical enterprises. 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/be20e05042c0ac4e999efdda59788d90.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/3fa5243119c87dd9543fc60ea718b83b.mp4 faf3123ce1f9dcd8c0418926713121e6 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 Belew, Leland Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:58:31 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:00] Tom Lewis: Essentially you got another engine, and you get another propellant [batch?] or whatever it is. Anytime you launch a solid, you're essentially launching a new engine. This is my own personal evaluation of it. I'm sure solid people could give you a... [00:00:23] Toon Ferrell: I'm not arguing about no rotating machinery. No cryogenics. [00:00:31] TL: No purge. [00:00:35] TF: That’s right. It's strictly the people in command at the time, what they preferred. [00:00:40] Roger Bilstein: Von Braun was a liquid man. [00:00:42] TF: Everything at Peenemuende was liquid, right? [00:00:45] RB: Yeah. They’ve finally gotten into some solids finally on the shuttle, at least the boosters in some way. [00:00:54] TL: But that wasn’t von Braun down there. [00:00:56] RB: Uh-huh, yeah. Wasn't there a barrier to—I've got it [down?] here—about 260 ISP barrier on solids for a long time. That's about as good as they could get. You got into whether J-2, 425, something like that? [00:01:11] TF: Yeah, we get up to 426 nominal as much back then. We've gone up to 429. Yes, they can't compete ISP-wise. [00:01:23] RB: That'd be another reason. At least one of the design considerations. [00:01:28] TF: Well, you don't take advantage of ISP until you get out of the gravitational range. You can still boost it to pretty high altitude with a solid and then come in with a liquid. [00:01:40] RB: So liquid is much better at altitude? Okay, I've got a question on the H-1. Maybe you can help me, maybe not. Why was there a difference in the turbine exhaust disposal? Those outboard engines had a special thing around them. [00:02:08] TL: Actually, LH2 is a little more exotic. You've got a lot more combustion problems. You've got more handling problems. You've got more of a disposal problem. But it sure does make it easier to cool the chamber. Like when they fired the J-2—probably the J-2 too—when they fired the RL-10, the longer they fired it, the cooler the outside of the engine got. It just coated up with frost. You can imagine 5,500 degrees inside this thing and frost on the outside, you know, [that far away?] [00:02:44] TF: The ecologists like it. The exhaust products are pure water. [00:02:48] RB: So no problem theoretically. [00:02:50] TL: No problem. And you ran into interesting problems, of course. When I first started working on the RL-10, LH2 was a new state of the art as far as [inaudible]. A lot of funny things happened. A lot of interesting occurrences. When they first started out, everybody was super cautious. No matter how cautious you are, things still happen. You find out you know that, gee whiz, that this thing's not quite as dangerous as we thought. You tend to relax a little bit, and then you get into a bad problem. [00:03:28] TL: They had a guy on one of the portable dewars that they brought fuel in from New Jersey up to the start the test facility. He was up on the carrier, and lightning struck [the vent?], and set it on fire. Here he is straddling this 4,000 gallon LH2, and damn thing's on fire. It didn't take him long to get off of there. But nothing happened because the thing was venting. It was just a little plume of flame coming out. The burning rate wasn't such that it went on down in there, so they just closed the vent. No problem. [00:04:13] TL: But they did have a serious problem one time with Pratt & Whitney while I was there. See, whenever they ran a turbopump, all they did was run their fuel through a [inaudible]. They dumped it in the burn pit. They weren't really getting anything out because all they were doing was turning the pump and then burning it. They thought, “Well, it sure is awfully wasteful. Maybe we could collect some of that LH2 and save it.” They thought, “Well, we'll give it a try.” They put up a little test rig there and had a great big tub like sitting on a scale. They were going to see how much they were going to catch. It was a very humid, overcast, cloudy day. They’re dumping this liquid hydrogen into this tank. Usually what happens whenever you have any vapors from liquid hydrogen, it immediately disperses. It goes flying off into the sky, you know, because it’s very light. It really spreads out. Well, this day, it was a little humid and overcast and everything. Instead of doing that, all these fumes just kind of flowed over this tank and along the ground. It flowed under the door into a motor room, electrical motors. They got a spark, and that whole damn thing ignited. There was guys blowing down the parking area. The asphalt aprons were driving around like bowling balls. One guy got burned quite badly. He was in the hospital for two or three months. [00:05:37] RB: Was this on Centaur operations or was it on the S-IV operations? [00:05:42] TL: I don't remember. It was just the RL-10 development program. I don't know what application it was on. [00:05:48] RB: The thing about the RL-10 that as a layman really kind of amazes me is the fact that they can get enough gas pressure just out of recirculation through the chamber to run the pump. Because on the J-2, it took a gas generator starting that thing by pressure. Yet on the RL-10, they were able to get enough pressure just by running it through the regenerative tube. Why couldn't they use that for the J-2? [00:06:15] TF: I imagine the size of the turbine to turn is massive that you've got to move. [00:06:23] RB: And also you've got to restart problem in space. I suppose that would affect the recirculation. [00:06:27] TF: Well, you need a start tank for space. [00:06:34] RB: Okay, well actually that kind of takes care of my questions. [00:06:36] TF: You have a couple of H-1s that weren't answered. [00:06:40] RB: There's a guy I can still get a hold of to do those. I think there’s a guy named Dave Christensen. I don't know if you know him or not. He did a lot of early work on the S-3D and H-1. I’m sure he can… [00:06:49] TF: D.W. Westrope is the equivalent of Dick Rogers on this engine. [00:06:56] RB: On the H-1? [00:06:58] TF: Yeah. [00:07:03] RB: Yeah. I was going to call [Catalgo?] then about the… [00:07:06] TF: About the brazing? [00:07:08] RB: Yeah. [00:07:11] TF: I haven't answered your question on this. I think I have. I think it's [inaudible] problems. [00:07:16] RB: Oh look, I'll just read this over I think then for my own information. [tape stops and restarts] [00:07:20] RB: Interview with Mr. Belew. I had a couple of questions. I don't mean to put it straight on your memory, but there's a couple of things I can't find readily. Back in the beginning of the RL-10, or the liquid hydrogen engine program, Pratt & Whitney was fooling around with the LR-119, which is the second generation. They finally wound up going back into the first generation LR-115 before they finally settled on the RL-10. I was wondering if you could remember why they gave up on the LR-119 and went back to the LR-115. Some sort of development problem, but I can't find any note, anything much more specific than that. [00:08:14] John Stuart Beltz: Do you suppose, Roger, where they couldn't get it to run full duration, it was shutting down? [00:08:20] RB: Well, it could be. I really haven't found it out. [00:08:24] JSB: This is when they were going to use four of them on the S-IV? [00:08:31] Lee Belew: We used four. [00:08:32] JSB: And then they had to go back to the six? [00:08:34] RB: And then they went back to six, but that was with the RL-10, I think. [00:08:37] LB: I don't know that those definitions—115, 119, RL-10—are that significant. I don't recall that we sacrificed any, I would say, advancements in the development of an RL series engine when we dropped the 119 and went to the RL-10. As I recall, the RL-10 was taking all the knowledge from the 115 plus the engineering studies and work on the advanced nineteen. Pulling those out and putting them into an RL-10 that had an application. RL-10 was built for a specific application, the Saturn family of launch vehicles. I think when you have an application that can be defined and specified, you can get right to work and build a product and do a damn good job. As I recall it, we didn't have any concerns about the RL series, per se, and we didn't have a direct application for what they called the RL-19 at the time because what we had an application for was specific. That was just redefined as RL-10. Of course, when we started the RL-10, it didn't have a complete update as far as performance and all that, that we finally wound up with as we flew it, and then as we now see it on the Centaur vehicle. It did become improved even after we first began the development of the RL-10. I don't believe that you'll find any major significance in that nomenclature because when you asked me, it didn't ring a bell at all on why not the RL-19. [00:10:40] RB: Well, this is in one of Akens' chronologies. I really haven't found anything else. It was just a comment made on there. I can't find anything. Rod Stewart, we talked to him, he couldn't remember anything about it either. Another thing, and one of the reports that he wrote, I think it must have been Stewart or somebody, made the comment that there was no use for the F-1 in 1959, and that this was not unusual in developing engines. I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on that, about the development of engines and that they are sometimes begun before stages actually come into being, etc. [00:11:22] JSB: [inaudible] the Air Force [inaudible] their original development. [00:11:26] LB: Well, the F-1 had its beginning as far as some work relative to the technology of large rocket engines. That was, I guess, in ‘59, early ‘59. And then, see, Sputnik went up…Let's see, when was that? [00:11:48] RB: Sputnik actually went up in ‘56. ‘57 [inaudible]. [00:11:51] LB: ‘56, ‘57. Then this whole business of space began to take hold as a new endeavor for this country and, of course, the Russians, and other interests. [00:12:05] JSB: You were the ABMA then, weren't you? [00:12:07] LB: Yes. There was a decision, I guess it was a final decision, at the presidential level, in the Congress, I guess it was a congressional decision, that we as a country should develop a very large rocket engine. That large rocket engine was defined as what became the F-1. It was that kind of decision that brought the F-1 into being. That program was transferred from whatever technology basic phase A, B, you know, study-type work, some very slight hardware work. It was transferred officially, I think that was in ‘60, to us. It was a Rocketdyne contracted for effort by, I guess that was the Air Force at the time. We picked it up a little, just a little before we became a part of the NASA organization. We picked it up as a rocket engine development program. That was complemented by…There were studies on launch vehicles, and those studies bracketed the size of this engine or complementary to the studies on large vehicles that were being made. [tape cuts out] [00:14:06] LB: It was a Saturn launch vehicle specified. The logic of doing that has a lot of history in that it's known that the rocket engine development cycle is the longest lead item in the development of a launch vehicle or in the development of an aircraft. Just take the engines that go into our airplanes. Those usually have some lead on the complete definition of an airplane. Usually you'll say, “Okay, I'll build an airplane based on having knowledge of an engine development that's going on.” That's often the case. But we didn't do this out of…We didn't start the Saturn engine development out of figuring as to what it took and the way of time and all. [00:15:01] LB: The other factor on, I would say, desensitizing engine development in the dark relative to the launch vehicle is the fact that it became evident that engines could be clustered and used in numbers rather than a single engine for a single stage. That sort of takes away from the sensitive sizing of an engine relative to a certain vehicle. Now there are certain limits on that. The facts are that the F-1 did become a clustered engine before we finally wound up with the Saturn V design and built it. We had several studies and had all kinds of numbers as far as clustering and certain lunar missions depending on how you conducted missions. [00:15:55] JSB: Was there some thought of using the F-1 on the Saturn I and IB [inaudible]? [00:16:01] LB: Well, those considerations, of course, were made in arriving at final decisions. You go through almost all of the possibilities. As you go through them, you begin to sort them out and come down to a final kind of configuration. When you do everything in series, like your flight as a single engine on a sort of an S-1B type stage, before you put it into a cluster, you can add enough time that you’ll never get your final product out. That ties back to having enough experience out of the ‘50s, you know, out of the development of large vehicles for the military, DOD and all, and then out of some of the uses of those kinds of components for space work. You begin to build the knowledge and confidence that says, “Okay, we take some bolder steps, like we go all up.” That was one of the contributions I would say that Dr. Miller had to the Apollo program: take a bold step and go all up. You launch it—a Saturn V—with everything on it. Instead of launching the first stage with nothing above it, except that means when you finally get to the first and second, there's nothing but damage above those and so on up. You shove the whole thing together, launch it all at one time, at least up to the point of the payload. [00:17:39.] RB: Do you think it would have been impossible to have made the manned lunar landing within a decade had you not gone all up, if you'd made it by going in the building block [inaudible]? [00:17:52] LB: We were within a year, weren't we? [00:17:55] RB: Yeah. [00:17:56] LB: Now that year isn't a lot of margin compared to when we began almost ten years earlier. [00:18:05] JSB: Would you say something about the initial opposition at MSFC to the all up concept, [inaudible]? [00:18:13] LB: Well, I think opposition is probably not the right word. I would say that we had to go through an inward process of, I'd say, which consisted primarily of systems engineering in our own minds of what that really meant. That does have a bearing on the kind of test program that is conducted on the ground, on your hardware. With all those factors thrown together where we did have a test program that then did give us the assurance that we were committed to that kind of a system now. For someone to come off, you know, to come into the system and say, “Okay, we're going to go all up,” that's one thing. But to say that and not allow a comprehensive test program to give you the kind of background you need, that would be one thing compared to structuring a test program that allows you to do more on the ground before you go all up. [00:19:28] LB: I think that we went through the logical sequence of engineering analyses before we said, “Okay, we will commit.” That's just the way you run a program. I think that, except those kinds of, I would say, rather dramatic changes in approach without thinking and engineering your way through it would be a rather dangerous thing to do. Now, compared to the beginning, early ‘50s on large launch vehicles for the DOD application, we accounted for a certain amount of our first launches as part of the development of the vehicle. We would expect that we would have some problems in the subsystems of the launch vehicle and maybe lose several flights in the series of developing that vehicle. Now, that completely changed in this Apollo thing, which really said we've got to do better on the use of our experience—which we did—and we have to put together a doggone well thought through program that’s systems engineered and then backed up with the right test to build that confidence. [00:20:49] RB: Is that because it was so expensive or because it was manned? [00:20:52] LB: Well, it's what you would want to do on anything, not exclusively tied to launch vehicles or space stuff. If you had to kind of back down the experience, it's just a logical thing to do with any kind of product. You want to do the most you can with the data. That’s engineering analysis, [inaudible] most useful tools that we have, and then the testing of the systems on the ground and where the biggest cost is, try to minimize that effort. The biggest cost in this would be building several of those just for proving the hardware by flight. We minimize that effort by doing a whole lot more with the knowledge we have. It requires a much higher level of engineering talent, especially oriented toward systems engineering talent, when you take those kinds of steps. It was the right kind of thing to do looking back even though we had some reservations in the beginning. [00:22:03] JSB: Were there technologies that came about in the ‘60s that made that possible, like automatic checkouts? [00:22:09] LB: Well, I think the technologies were basically there. I think the better use of that capability contributed an awful lot to that. Certainly the kind of check out gear that one has, that we had at that time, had a great deal to do with, yes. When you run a check out and everything is hard lined and everything has to do with man being completely, in every piece of data extracted, that begins to get rather undoable when you talk about Apollo type vehicle—the Saturn and Apollo spacecraft on top of it. You just have to exploit the automatic check out. At the beginning of the ‘60s, I think one would have to say that basic technology was all there. It just took a challenge like the Apollo-Saturn to put that to use. When you commit to Apollo-Saturn in a decade, you doggone well have to put that to use. There's no choice. You don't make it if you don't. So I guess the answer is yes to your question. [00:23:35] RB: What about the engine programs? Can you say that liquid hydrogen caused you more problems than the LOX/RP-1? Do you have to make a [inaudible] that there are two different kinds of engines and systems involved? [00:23:52] LB: Well, I would say that you can go all the way back on engine development. At one time, oxygen was called secret fuel. You can go that far probably because it was less understood than other propellants like kerosene or alcohol. It just has to do with one's understanding of what he's working with. Liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen is a combination which is the propellant in the RL-10 engine and also the J-2 engine. [00:24:35] LB: At the beginning, there were concerns, yes, because the combination is very combustible. When exposed to the normal atmosphere, it does evaporate. You don't see the run like you do the rest of the kerosene. To the average common guy that works these systems, the technicians and all, they're less known about that combination. I think that had a bit to do with it. The actual development of an engine has to consider lots of things like the flow and cooling characteristics, combustibility, and susceptibility of these various propellants as far as rough combustion, which is a very major part of the development on the engine on the side of the F-1. So all those were less known than the propellants we'd been dealing with. The propellants we were dealing with primarily at the time in our work were basically kerosene and oxygen. Of course, we'd use alcohol in the Redstone stuff. Then the acids, of course, were used in many of the other systems, but none up until the RL-10 had really used hydrogen and oxygen. So it was just a matter of dealing with something less known by the fact that we hadn't had the time and a number of different systems exposed to it. 00:26:21] LB: Looking at the way it came out, I would say that from my personal experience, hydrogen/oxygen is probably the best combination that we have in rocket engines today as far as ease of developing a system that performs well. The normal things one fears, that's rough combustion and cooling aspects of this type of hardware, does your high performance. It gives a bit of problem to containing it because of the relatively lightweight, pretty large tanks. That was certainly overcome very readily by the fact that something like the S-II stage developed a very large tank, which was very successful. Basically, hydrogen and oxygen engines have been very reliable in comparison to what we termed or categorized as conventional propellants up to that point. [00:27:31] RB: We were talking to Douglas engineers when we went out to Los Angeles about a year and a half ago. Of course, it was Douglas, but they kept emphasizing that the S-IV, for example, was just an awful lot different than the Centaur. One engineer commented that we had to fight to keep the S-IV from just being another Centaur. Do you see that there are that much differences in the systems, the Centaur and the S-IV? [00:28:01] LB: Well, the engines are essentially the same. In fact, we delivered engines to the two vehicles out of the same line at the time with some very slight modifications. The difference has to do with the system, the total system tankage and all. There are differences there. [00:28:21] RB: Internal insulation and so on? [00:28:23] LB: Well, I would say sensitivity to weight is more critical on a Centaur vehicle than on the S-IV. The S-IV was, in my own assessment, a more conservative approach, not so sensitive to weight as the Centaur. So from a vehicle point of view, yes, quite different. From the engine and what flows through it, basically no difference. [00:28:56] JSB: [inaudible] primarily the pressure stabilization in the Centaur as opposed to the fact that the S-IVB just stayed up there? [00:29:02] LB: Well, the booster on the Centaur is pressure stabilized. The Centaur stays pressure stabilized. I thought you were talking about the Centaur second stage, it had the RL-10 in it. It has less conservative design because of the sensitivity to weight than the S-IV. The S-IV, we just built it kind of conservatively. When you do that, you can come out with the test program that's more predictable, I would say more predictable. Hopefully… [tape cuts out] [00:29:47] LB: [repeated conversation about Centaur second stage] Hopefully, in the end, it will be cheaper than if you had pushed everything to the ultimate as far as sophistication. That's one thing we found in the area of our Skylab program. Where we can, we've been very conservative on design in order to minimize testing. You can test your test program down, that's the biggest part of your cost. [00:30:52] JSB: using the rule of thumb, the test program costs about a third of the overall program. [00:31:05] LB: Well, it depends on where you start if you build facilities and all as we've done in Apollo, that’s probably right. If you maximize the use of those that have been built, like we've done in Skylab, your test program will probably runs a little more than that. We don't have to build new facilities and all that. The test program is probably going to run a little more than that. That has passed as well as analysis and all that to go as a confident to the test program. [00:31:49] RB: Are there really big major differences between RL-10 and J-2? Is one essentially better or more efficient than the other? I realize that J-2 came out later so they were able to utilize the technology. [00:32:09] LB: Well, there are some different concepts that apply to the two as far as the basic principle of design. I think they're designed for applications that you can't compare too easily. I think the record's pretty comparable, one to the other. We really haven't had any major problems on either of these in flight. I'd say that they would compare pretty equal as far as a good, reliable piece of hardware. [00:33:04] RB: Did you develop any affections for a piece of hardware? You know, you like one better than the other. Does that ever happen? One engine seems to be a sweeter engine than the other? [00:33:15] LB: Well, I think that you probably develop more respect for some. The F-1, the early years of that development, certainly developed a healthy respect for its capability to act up in the area of rough combustion. We put a major effort into solving the rough combustion problem. As such, developed techniques that I feel have contributed greatly to that technology. We took steps in that development cycle that hadn't been done before and did it in such a way that we were able to develop models. Those models I feel have and will contribute to any similar kind of engine development in the future. [00:34:14] RB: As I recall there was some comment that when the F-1 combustion stability problem came up, there was a real problem because research on that area had stopped back in the ‘50s when it came up. It was never really solved. So when it came to the F-1, there was really a gap there. You almost had to really go into the basic R&D program. Do you recall that? [00:34:34] LB: Well, yes. Research on combustion has been something that's rather broadly studied by several universities like Purdue. There's one. Of course, that kind of effort is done basically on small-scale hardware. You get certain types of inputs that give you the basis to do basic engine or injector design. We found on going from the H-1 size to the F-1 size that scale factor doesn't always apply. There's a certain amount of the data from the research technology that just isn't available to you. You get into the scale that your hardware is built in, your actual scale. It just doesn't scale up. In the development of the F1, we did produce that kind of data. I think it's been done in a way that people now have the confidence to think about a new engine program that they can produce it. They can produce it to be a reliable system and not fear that you have random combustion phenomena that causes you to go rough in flight. If you look back at the history of engine development and see the results of flights, there was quite a bit of problem in flights, especially in the development of flights where rough combustion was a major factor. [00:36:29] RB: Prior to the Saturn? [00:36:30]] LB: That was in the ‘50s. This came about in the early 60s. It's the logical evolution of knowledge one accumulates. When you go through the kind of thing we went through in the ‘50s in the development of vehicles and engines as part of it. Much of that was done on a rather crash basis. You go about it in one way. You go about it in building [you cut and try?] a lot. When you get into an Apollo kind of vehicle, you don't allocate four, five, or six launches to just seeing that thing's going to run smooth. I get back to what I said initially: you're going to do the most you can on the ground. If you can't do that, you really don't progress to the point you can afford these kind of programs. [00:37:33] RB: Would you say that the F-1 combustion instability was really one of the key epochs in the development of the Apollo-Saturn launch vehicle? [00:37:46] LB: Well, it could have been one of the things that would have kept you from having a vehicle like this. It's not by chance that you get that kind of a system built by applying one heck of a lot of know-how that's been built up by having accumulated that through past experiences. It's your ability to bring that to bear on your present—present being the F-1 in this case—program. That really gets you down to what about the confidence that's been gained in that field if we continue to have such vehicles as Apollo. It's very, very difficult to come by. One thing that one has to always remember, we shouldn't lose that confidence. That confidence is vested in, I'd say, not a heck of a lot of people. It's documented, but sometimes there's more to it than just what's documented. [00:38:52] RB: Some guy out there that doesn't have to feel that way. [00:38:55] LB: Well, that's a part of it. There's less of that black magic stuff now than there was. There used to be a lot of it way back there. There's a heck of a lot less of it than before. I feel that most of us have been in that field. It's a fairly straightforward design development cycle now to build a high-performance system engine. [00:39:25] JSB: [Inaudible]. Would you say something about the E-1 program, which was originally thought up for the Saturn I, clustering four E-1s? [00:39:36] LB: That was another large hydrogen-oxygen engine development, or at least technology-sponsored program, that would have been an engine for a next series of launch vehicles if there had been a need for something larger than the Saturn series, or if we had found that it's better to use single engines instead of clustered engines. Of course, our success in clustering engines kind of took that one out as far as having to have to replace the clustered J-2 engine. However... [00:40:23] JSB: Are you talking about the M-1 now? [00:40:25] LB: Oh, I'm talking about the M-1. [00:40:27] JSB: Good, I wanted to hear about the M-1. [00:40:29] LB: The M-1 is the one I’m talking about. I'm sorry. So that thing began at the time before we launched the cluster of J-2s and before that cluster concept had been fully proven. Had large numbers of launch vehicles been in the national inventory of products, it may have been economical to substitute one engine in place of five. One doesn't know, it might have been. But that work took its place, you know, it went so far, and there are certain other factors that said, “Well, that one isn't one that's worthy of continuing,” so it was dropped. Again, you know the development cycle, you know the time it takes, and if you project that there may be in the decade some need, sometimes you have to put a certain investment into technology or into the very beginning of the development cycle if you ever want to exercise the option. [00:41:49] JSB: Well, can't you say the same thing as the reactor in flight programming and the NERVA engine? Many of the early studies, going back to about the ‘60s, you can see that the—well, the one to one—is designed for optimal nuclear upper stage. Then by about ‘62, the program is being continued, but not very much money has been put into it. It's obvious, it’s not going to be used on the Apollo program, and that probably drops out about [‘66?]. We do want to say something about it, that, you know... [00:42:22] LB: I'm not…I haven't been close really to the NERVA engine development. As you know that development has been conducted out of a different segment of NASA. I think anyone in this kind of business has followed it, they know that it's been carried on at a level that sort of says “Here's what can be done if there's ever a need.” There were a lot of people, associated studies that said “Okay, if there's ever a need, here's what can be done with Saturn type hardware, accommodating flight of that kind of system.” So yes, that's an investment in the case certain events that take place that says that's what we want to fly. I think NERVA was carried on probably—probably rightfully—because it is pushing the start of the art. It's something that's not so conventional as our liquid propulsion engines. It was carried on through a longer period of time to a certain point, what you could do if there was a need to do it. You also knew the things you had to design around and order for it. I really don't have any strong contribution to that I could make to the [inaudible] family of vehicles and its potential future. [00:44:15] RB: One of the things that John and I have been interested in is where some of the technology filters in. We've been talking to Dave Christensen a little bit about the origins and incorporation of Rigi-Mesh and RL-10 and the J-2 injectors. Do you remember from then how that came about, the sources of that technology? [00:44:38] LB: The sources are dictated by the problem that one finds when putting designs to hardware and testing hardware. In the design of an engine, one of the biggest problems we've had—have always had—is the burning of the face of an injector. It overheats, and you burn a hole, and you don't have an engine anymore. The skill and the design of injectors in that doggone of the injector is provided the kind of cooling that will disallow the heat of combustion from burning the face of it, which means burning holes in it, and then you have an explosion. Anyone knows you can do that if you brute force utilize your propellant for a film cooling, which also takes away from your performance. You know, you can cool the devil out of it by just brute force, but in all my experience, that always degraded or lowered your performance. You can't tolerate throwing your performance away, just to keep the injector cool. [00:46:02] JSB: Is this degrading in performance just called general cooling of the combustion chamber? [00:46:05] LB: Say if you have an injector plate, and you distribute your propellants through it and through orifices or there’s all kinds of systems used. If you're not careful, you'll have back flows, and you'll burn through it and have a problem, especially around the periphery. If you want, you can drill holes around the periphery to squirt right across that thing, throw a lot of liquid, so to speak, on it and cool it. Same in the middle. But that particular propellant—it would be probably your fuel instead of your oxidizer—would not burn efficiently. You don't get the performance, your [inaudible] specific out of it. It just lowers your performance. In turn, you’re washing through your nozzle unburned propellant. Really, that’s what happens. It's like the bid on ecology. Your automobile, as they say, put too many hydrocarbons out into the streets and the air. You want to burn it all. That’s the same thing. [00:47:18] LB: At any rate, through the development of the hydrogen-oxygen engine, they found that in order to get performance, they had to do something other than what we had conventionally been able to do on the oxygen-kerosene engine as far as cooling. The hydrogen and oxygen being as it flows much more readily through a mesh. You can't squirt kerosene through there very easily whereas you can put oxygen or hydrogen through it, hydrogen especially. It is cold. Temperature-wise it is favorable. Just by them getting into tests and trying things, they did come up with a Rigi-Mesh as a structural member and a flow passage for a certain percent of the propellant through it. It cooled it, and it distributed it in a way that they could work their design out where they had a satisfactory ratio of oxygen compared to the fuel. They were able to make a design that yielded a very high performance. They kept their performance. They got their cooling from it. They gained their structural strength also from that Rigi-Mesh. It's very…It’s metal, you know? It's a very good piece of structure for the injector if anchored right against posts and stuff like that. [00:49:06] RB: Was that a fairly significant breakthrough in terms of LOX/LH2 engines? [00:49:11] LB: Oh yeah. Yeah, that was [inaudible] J-2. [00:49:17] RB: Did you have a couple getting Rocketdyne to take Rigi-Mesh? Since it had been used on Pratt & Whitney engines? [00:49:24] LB: No. These companies tend to pretty well come in on similar things. It's not a closed environment. The producers and all that are there, they're pretty doggone dynamic environment that you find these companies in. There’s common denominator all across the face of this business: the government, the DODs, the NASA types and all that, and the suppliers and all. It doesn't serve anyone's purpose to let people find out everything in series. One year and five years later another might pick it up and at the same time you're having to throw money out the doggone window to let each guy do his complete thing. It's something that's extremely successful, who’s one to fight it? No, that really hasn't been a major factor in my experience in any of this engine development. The people, you know, transfer their own knowledge by moving around a little bit too. You find people that would work one place and then they’d work at another. [00:51:01] RB: When a lot of it was done under government contracts anyway, it becomes…It's not the proprietary thing, it’s a government [inaudible].... [00:51:07] LB: A lot of it is. [00:51:11] JSB: Presumably the supplier Rigi-Mesh, which is the Pall Company, would be visiting all these people anyway. [00:51:16] LB: They'll try to get their product in as much as they can. I guess I couldn’t sit here and say who thought about what first. Even with the research and the literature, you could have a hard time saying, “Now that's where it showed up first.” [00:51:33] JSB: That’s one of our biggest problems. [00:51:35] LB: I'd say that to do that would be…Well, you could do that and probably raise a lot of interest and debates. Things turn to a great extent if you write a history, say “This guy did that first and another guy did something else first.” That'd be hard to…Some guy, someone in the middle might say, “I thought about that too.” Who knows? [laughs] They wouldn't serve too much of a purpose in my mind. [00:52:12] RB: Well, John, do you have any more questions? [00:52:14] JSB: I’d like to ask one thing about the institution of the fifth engine between the C-4 and C-5 configurations. Is deciding to use the anchoring engine in the center to give the extra capability for whatever the [inaudible] or Houston might do for payload? [00:52:32] LB: On Saturn V? [00:52:35] JSB: Mm-hmm. Putting that one in the center. [00:52:37] LB: Your vehicle is sized by the payload, by the mission. Oftentimes you begin a development—a design for a development—based on what someone commits he can do on the top. He says, “I can do this kind of a design and come out with a certain weight and still conduct a certain mission.” You may start that way, but then a few months later you may come back and say, “Whoops, I got a little growth here.” If you want a weight reduction program that early in the cycle, you can pretty well say you can't make it with weight. My experience is there's no more expensive kind of development than a weight reduction program. That's about the most expensive thing you can get into because that just connotates [sic] that you're going to have to do a fairly sophisticated redesign, and one hell of a lot of proof testing, and then you're hanging on too marginal a safety factor. That's kind of not the way to go. If you can accommodate the problem by increasing performance of the booster, that's probably your best bet. Most conservative, most [inaudible] forward, cost effective thing you can do is increased performance of your boosters. [00:54:10] JSB: How much appears in the literature that Marshall anticipated the payload growth by the engineers? [00:54:16] LB: Yeah, well, of course, you don't get into a program blindly, build a vehicle without looking up what you're committed to do. When you look at what you're committed to do, you look at the other fellows' calculations and assumptions and all that, and you make your own assessment. You very well may build in a little more conservatism based on your own knowledge of what it takes. We didn't begin that in the dark. We've been through that payload growth thing since the early ‘50s. Always it's been a case of having increased performance. That wasn't unique to just Saturn. [00:55:09] JSB: The first S-IC, was it 7.5 million pounds, they uprated that somewhat now haven’t they, for wider missions to take care of the rover? [00:55:21] LB: I think that as you mature and as you understand by experience what you have, you can always commit more of what is reserved than you could to begin with as you don't understand the detail that you have for say ten or twelve months. You begin to know that thing doggone well, so you're able to commit a much, much more narrow margin between calculated and [rationals?]l. Anytime there's a need for additional payload and you have a mature vehicle, you can always go in there and see what you can increase in the way of additional capability. After you mature, you know whether it's there or not. A lot of the capability is based on safety factors of your system. By actual use and testing, you begin to know how good those safety factors are. They can be off one point, say, a tenth of a unit, and increase your payload significantly. The very first launch you probably can't commit to that. Maybe after ten or twelve, you say, “Well, that's an acceptable”—not risk but—”It's an acceptable situation based on all the facts.” No difference in performance of any vehicle, automobiles included. [00:57:12] JSB: What gave you your greatest thrill in the Saturn program as you look back on it? [00:57:23] LB: Well, I would say the fact that in the total Saturn-Apollo program, the fact that we were, in a period of about less than a decade, able to go from a certain approach to a rather complete, different approach on the whole development business cycle and operational cycle, and find that at the end we were able to uphold a national commitment. [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_000004_A Title A name given to the resource Belew, Leland 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. Description An account of the resource This interview also contains the end of the Ferrell/Lewis interview. Interview with Leland Belew begins at 00:07:20. The interview centers on the development of the Saturn rocket propulsion systems, with engineers and historians discussing the technical, managerial, and historical decisions that shaped the Apollo program. Early conversation compares liquid- and solid-fueled rockets, emphasizing the higher efficiency of liquid hydrogen engines despite their greater complexity and the safety challenges encountered during early RL-10 development. Lee Belew explains that the RL-10 evolved from earlier Pratt & Whitney engine concepts to meet specific Saturn requirements, while the F-1 engine was developed ahead of a finalized launch vehicle because engine development is the longest-lead element of any rocket program. He describes how clustering engines, adopting the "all-up" testing philosophy, extensive ground testing, and systems engineering enabled NASA to meet the lunar landing deadline. Belew also highlights breakthroughs in solving F-1 combustion instability, advances in hydrogen-oxygen propulsion, and innovations such as Rigi-Mesh injector cooling, arguing that these developments transformed rocket engine design from an uncertain art into a more predictable engineering discipline. The discussion concludes with reflections on payload growth, design conservatism, technology transfer among contractors, and Belew's pride that the Saturn-Apollo program successfully fulfilled the United States' commitment to land humans on the Moon within a decade. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/72c8e1709fba8a131766c21f269d351a.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/ad19190c91d496b1a116f1818e3f1035.mp4 379f13537305c483da1099c59bd016d6 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_000005_A Title A name given to the resource Bostwick, Leonard C. and Burns, Mike 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/de1f1337272e24d2ce017e426891c389.pdf 1018d2231737b8ab0324b71e988106eb 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_000005_T Title A name given to the resource Bostwick, Leonard C. and Burns, Mike (Transcript) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975-07-31 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/36ab70e8b426499776f0701ca253517d.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/55a663a87accd220d74f5577b9907d07.mp4 93a5d0da669c90f15cff15af89763a3c 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_000006_A Title A name given to the resource Bucher, George Description An account of the resource Project Highwater 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/b9bd47cee88ca65e5d90556cc3809ee3.pdf 709508c8dfa76f1cdc7f17ca68098557 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_000006_T Title A name given to the resource Bucher, George (Transcript) Description An account of the resource Project Highwater 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. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections.